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A British team has reported hitting a major milestone...heating a nuclear reactor to the "magic figure" of 100 million degrees Celsius...The British company achieved the milestone using a "spherical tokamak" called ST40...Due to its design, the ST40 is "compact" – less than three feet across – and reaches around 13 feet in height.

Waste fibers from hemp crops out-perform graphene for a thousandth of the cost, according to new researchIs there anything hemp can’t do? A year after hemp became legal to grow in the United States, we’ve seen its power to make better clothing, better buildings and better medicine. Now, there’s something else hemp appears to be better at – making batteries. Most auto batteries today are made from lithium-ion, an expensive, quickly disappearing material. A team of American and Canadian researchers have developed a battery that could be used in cars and power tools using hemp bast fiber – the inner...

Korea's 'artificial Sun' reactor has made headlines this week by officially sustaining plasma at a temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius for more than 20 seconds. The team at the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) device reached an ion temperature of above 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit).According to New Scientist, the reaction was only stopped after 30 seconds because of hardware limitations. KSTAR uses magnetic fields to generate and stabilize ultra-hot plasma, with the ultimate aim of making nuclear fusion power a reality. You can see the footage below showing the reactor run over 24 seconds,...

OPEC+ and its allies agreed Thursday to increase oil production more than expected, opening the door for Saudi Arabia to ramp up its own output if wartime sanctions force Russia to pump less... The OPEC+ decision comes after sources told the Financial Times that Saudi Arabia is prepared to pump more. Concern over a more dire supply squeeze for crude oil has emerged since the European Union announced its partial Russian oil embargo on Tuesday, as well as a ban on insurance for Russian cargoes that could limit Moscow's exports to markets outside the EU.

Ukraine’s military successes against Russia have transformed calculations in Washington and other Western capitals, leading to a sharp increase in military help for Kyiv as a war that started with Western efforts at damage control has become one that offers a strategic opportunity to constrain Russia’s expansionist ambitions. The U.S. and its allies are now shipping large volumes of heavy weaponry to Ukraine, including more advanced Western systems to supplement the light weapons and Soviet-era arms that were funneled into Ukraine since before the invasion started. Those shipments are aimed at supporting Kyiv in the next decisive phase of the...

Poland has been preparing to give up Russian gas fuel for a long time, so Gazprom's decision to turn off the tap did not surprise her. Rather, the inevitable has accelerated. Poland's energy security should not be jeopardized, but the gas turmoil may again have an impact on Poles' bills in a few months. The former president of PGNiG draws attention to one important element of the entire gas puzzle. On Wednesday at 8.00, Gazprom will officially suspend gas supplies to Poland under the Yamal contract . The day before, journalists reported that gas fuel transmission from the east fell...

Russian forces have failed to make any major gains over the last 24 hours in their offensive in Ukraine as counterattacks by the defenders have hampered their efforts, according to UK intelligence and U.S. analysts.British intelligence said in an April 23 operational update that Ukraine’s airspace and its Black Sea waters remain contested as Russian air and maritime forces have been unable to establish control in either domain “owing to the effectiveness of Ukraine’s air and sea defense.”“Despite increased activity, Russian forces have made no major gains in the last 24 hours as Ukrainian counterattacks continue to hinder their efforts,”...

“The old joke is that nuclear fusion is 30 years away and always will be,” quips Greg De Temmerman, managing director of Paris-based energy think tank Zenon Research. In fact, the joke has become so hackneyed over the decades it has been banned by editors at the Economist. “But more seriously, many things are happening right now in the field,” De Temmerman adds. Jokes aside, they are. Earlier this month, China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) reactor eclipsed previous records by sustaining a high plasma temperature for minutes (1,056 seconds). It reached two milestones: a one-million-ampere current and a 1,000-second...

Artist's concept of the Radian One spaceplaneRadian Aerospace VIEW 7 IMAGES A new company has entered the commercial space race. Startup Radian Aerospace has emerged from stealth to announce it has secured US$27.5 million in seed funding to develop a single-stage to orbit (SSTO) spaceplane called Radian One, which is designed to lift and land horizontally. The commercial space field has been growing steadily in recent years, with contractors taking over ferrying crews to the International Space Station, launching huge constellations of satellites into orbit, and even sending private missions and tourists into space. In addition, there are plans to...

This illustration provided by the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory depicts a target pellet inside a hohlraum capsule with laser beams entering through openings on either end. The beams compress and heat the target to the necessary conditions for nuclear fusion to occur. Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory via AP ============================================================================== With 192 lasers and temperatures more than three times hotter than the center of the sun, scientists hit—at least for a fraction of a second—a key milestone on the long road toward nearly pollution-free fusion energy. Researchers at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence...

Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, working with Japanese researchers, made the observation on the Large Helical Device (LHD) in Japan, a twisty magnetic facility that the Japanese call a "heliotron." The results demonstrated for the first time a novel regime for confining heat in facilities known as stellarators, similar to the heliotron. The findings could advance the twisty design as a blueprint for future fusion power plants Researchers produced the higher confinement regime by injecting tiny grains of boron powder into the LHD plasma that fuels fusion reactions. The injection through a PPPL-installed dropper...

Physicists working on a type of fusion reactor called a stellarator are getting closer to actually harnessing the power of nuclear fusion. According to a new paper, the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator in Germany is now capable of containing heat that reaches temperatures twice as high as those found in the core of the Sun. This means physicists have been able to reduce heat loss - a major step forward in stellarator technology. "It's really exciting news for fusion that this design has been successful," said physicist Novimir Pablant of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). "It clearly shows that this...

TAE Technologies, the world’s largest private fusion company, has announced it will have a commercially viable nuclear fusion power plant by 2030, which puts it years—or even decades—ahead of other fusion technology companies. The California-based company has raised $880 million in funding for its hydrogen-boron reactor. This reactor isn’t a traditional tokamak or stellarator; instead, it uses a confined particle acceleration mechanism that produces and confines plasma. All fusion technology has plasma, which mimics the extreme reactions that power all the stars—it’s what we’re emulating when we make fusion energy experiments. “Plasma is an oozy substance; the challenge of containing...

Yes, the ends justify the means. Nothing but the ends can justify the means. Perhaps better put, the ends justify means proportioned to certain ends.Being born in equality, we are all equally obliged to defend the rights given to us by God. It is for this purpose, the defense of rights, that men form government. Security in our rights is the end. Government is the means. Our Founders drew the following conclusion when government becomes disconnected from, or hostile to, its designed end.“That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the Right of the People...

NASA Funds Study of Lattice Confinement Fusion Posted on October 1, 2020 NASA returns to LENR as a fuel of the future or as they call it “lattice confinement” referring to the lattice structure formed by the atoms making up a piece of solid metal. The NASA group used samples of erbium and titanium for their experiments. Under high pressure, a sample was “loaded” with deuterium gas, an isotope of hydrogen with one proton and one neutron. The metal confines the deuterium nuclei, called deuterons, and excess energy is released via a fusion process. More can be read here: https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/nuclear/nuclear-fusiontokamak-not-included...

U.S. Attorney John Durham is expected to wrap up his investigation into the origins of the Russia probe by the end of the summer, sources confirmed to Fox News. One source suggested the investigation could end as soon as July, while another said it could be closer to September, based on Durham's progress, which could be hindered by the coronavirus pandemic rocking the nation and the globe. TOP GOP REP SUGGESTS DURHAM PROBE WILL LEAD TO CHARGES Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, relayed the same timeline during a House Rules Committee meeting focused on reform of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act...

The push for a space elevator took a step forward this week when a team of researchers from Shizuoka University in Japan announced that they will launch an experiment to the International Space Station next week. In the experiment, which will be the first of its kind in space, two ultrasmall cubic satellites, or "cubesats," will be released into space from the station. They will be connected by a steel cable, where a small container — acting like an elevator car — will move along the cable using its own motor. A camera attached to the satellites will record the...

The people who are best described as members of a renewable energy cult are lately promoting the idea that we should run the country on 100% renewable energy, whatever that is. I say "whatever that is" because different branches of the cult have different definitions of renewable energy. It seems to be a matter of fashion and prejudice. One definition of renewable energy is that it is naturally replenished on a human timescale. Solar energy and wind energy fit in nicely with that definition. Most fans of renewable energy explicitly reject renewable hydroelectricity if it involves damming a river. Most...

It took me years to figure out that markets work better than government. I started out as a typical Ralph Nader-influenced consumer reporter, convinced that companies constantly rip us off. To me and most of my fellow left-leaning reporters, the answer was always: more regulation. Gradually, I figured out that regulation causes many more problems than the occasional rip-off artist does. Companies that served customers well prospered, while market competition meant cheaters seldom got away with cheating for long. Regulation, by contrast, lasted forever. It punished innovation, making it harder for good people to offer better alternatives. How do I...

Near term Commercial Fusion Power Possible - Laser induced fusion of ultra-dense deuterium with double net energy gain has been produced and gain of 20 times is within reach energy, fusion, laser, materials, nuclear, physics, science Facebook Twitter linkedin google Reddit Researchers at the University of Gothenburg and the University of Iceland are researching a new type of nuclear fusion process. This produces almost no neutrons but instead fast, heavy electrons (muons), since it is based on nuclear reactions in ultra-dense heavy hydrogen (deuterium). The new fusion process can take place in relatively small laser-fired fusion reactors fuelled by heavy...