First Light used a large two-stage hyper-velocity gas gun to launch a projectile at a target, containing the fusion fuel and achieved fusion. The projectile reached a speed of 6.5 km per second before impact. First Light’s highly sophisticated target focuses this impact, with the fuel accelerated to over 70 km per second (151,000 mph) …
Ontario Power Generation [OPG] plans to fill a predicted supply gap in the 2030s with new nuclear capacity and the utility is collaborating with Saskatchewan on the potential for a Pan-Canadian fleet of Small Modular Reactors, Nicolle Butcher, OPG’s Vice President of Strategy and Acquisitions, said. OPG, the province’s largest power generator, replaced coal-fired generation …
The UK Ministry of Defence has officially awarded a £30m (US$38 million) contract to produce a prototype laser weapon. The aim is to see whether “directed energy” technology could benefit the armed forces, and is to culminate in a demonstration of the system in 2019. If the demonstration is successful, the first laser weapons could …
Arxiv – The role of electron-vibron interaction and local pairing in conductivity and superconductivity of alkali-doped fullerides. The route to a room-temperature superconductor Researchers investigate the competition between the electron-vibron interaction (interaction with the Jahn- Teller phonons) and the Coulomb repulsion in a system with local pairing of electrons on the triply degenerate lowest unoccupied …
A guest article by Joseph Friedlander Nigel B. Cook’s Glasstone.Blogspot Blog has beautiful coverage of the Orion and Thunderwell projects. But it is lost in a huge blog page here. http://glasstone.blogspot.co.uk/2006/04/ten-largest-nuclear-tests.html Cook is a master researcher who digs up incredible piles of research on all topics nuclear and that long page is no exception. The following …
1. Coulumb Drag Devices: Electric Solar Wind Sail Propulsion and Ionospeheric Deorbiting * Plasma brake thrust is 16 times larger in pure oxygen plasma than in pure proton plasma * There is an altitude dependence. Below 700 km the thrust would continue to increase until 400-500 km (provided there is the right hardware design) Abstract …