Superconducting Magnet Reduces the Cost for a Fusion Reactor by a Factor of 40

A new 20 Tesla Superconducting magnet reduces the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40. MIT worked with Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a startup with over $2 billion in funding. The funders of CFS include Temasek Holdings (Singpore), the U.S. Department of Energy, Tiger Global Management, Bill Gates, Google and …

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Rocketstar Aneutronic Fusion-enhanced Electric Pulsed Plasma Propulsion Will Be Tested in Orbit

RocketStar, a US based startup, has successfully demonstrated an electric propulsion unit for spacecraft that uses nuclear fusion-enhanced pulsed plasma. During ground tests the process did create ionizing radiation and improved the base propulsion unit’s thrust by 50%. FireStar Drive markedly improves performance, utilizing high-speed protons from ionized water vapor. When protons interact with boron …

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How Can a Future SpaceX Starship Travel to Other Star Systems

Elon Musk tweeted that SpaceX Starship will travel across the solar system and to the cloud of objects around us. The cloud of objects around us are either referring to the Kuiper Belt (35-80AU and possibly larger) and the Oort Comet Cloud (0.03 to 3.2 light-years). Nextbigfuture has covered recent research findings that the Kuiper …

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Kairos Power Makes First Non-Nuclear Molten Salt System Prototype

Kairos Power has successfully completed 1,000 hours of pumped salt operations with its non-nuclear Engineering Testing Unit (ETU) at the company’s testing and manufacturing facility in Albuquerque, N.M. This achievement arrives on the heels of operators loading 12 metric tons of a molten fluoride salt coolant known as “Flibe” into ETU, making it the largest …

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2 Megawatt Nuclear Reactors That Can Fit In a Truck

NANO Nuclear is a startup that has raised over $8 million to develop micro nuclear fission reactors with up to 2 megawatts of power. They will be transported by Semi Trucks. They plan to sell 1,000 microreactors on a yearly basis for a trillion-dollar industry. Nuclear currently supplies some 18% of US power needs off …

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Rumors About Russian Space Based Nuclear Anti-Satellite Weapon

The White House’s national security adviser said Wednesday that he had already scheduled a classified meeting with congressional leadership before a top House Republican requested that President Joe Biden declassify all information that relates to serious national security threat. An anti-satellite nuclear weapon would likely be something that would generate an electromagnetic pulse. In 2018, …

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Zuckerberg is Making a Bunker But Bomb Resistant UHPC Buildings Could Become Common

Ultra-high performance concrete (UHPC) is an enhanced fibrous and cementitious concrete with high compressive strength (120–250 MPa) particle packing density (0.825–0.855, tensile strength (15–20 MPa) and extraordinary durability. UHPC has 300 times the ductility and energy absorption of high performance concrete (HPC) and three to sixteen times the compressive strength of regular concrete. A $100+ …

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Can Utility Scale Nuclear Batteries Be Economical?

Shell Oil and Southern Electric utility company had a 2021 research paper that explored if nuclear batteries could be economical for generating power. (Above – (a) MIT’s conceptualization of a nuclear battery (NB) with integrated gas turbine; (b) LANL’s Megapower; (c) NASA and LANL’s KRUSTY/Kilopower reactor using Stirling engine technology for space applications; (d) Westinghouse’s …

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50 Year Nuclear Pacemaker Battery Now and Maybe a Multi-year Nuclear Phone Battery Next Year

Jan 8, 2024, China Startup Betavolt New Energy Technology announced the successful development of a miniature atomic energy battery. It uses nickel-63 nuclear isotope decay and China’s first diamond semiconductor (4th generation semiconductor) module to successfully realize the miniaturization of atomic energy batteries. It has modularization and low cost. The battery can provide power for …

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Thin Film Isotope Nuclear Rocket for Over Seven Times the Speed of Chemical Rockets

A 2024 phase 1 NASA Advanced Innovations concept study will look at thin film isoptope nuclear rockets. This will enable faster probes with years of thrust capability. The years of thrust using nuclear isotopes will provide energy for course changes beyond Saturn and even in interstellar space far from the solar energy of the sun. …

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