A trio of UT engineers is preparing for the worst: nuclear disaster. This August, Derek Haas, mechanical engineering assistant professor, started a research collaboration with the U.S. Air Force and two first-year nuclear engineering graduate students, Brandon De Luna and Marji Pasman. Their research will allow the U.S. government to better detect radioactive material and prevent the use of nuclear weapons, Haas said. Dailytexanonline.com

French Environment Minister Nicolas Hulot reiterated on Wednesday that France will need to close several nuclear reactors in order to meet a target to cut the share of atomic energy in power generation to 50 percent by 2025. Reuters.com

Bulgaria started on Tuesday (29 August) construction of a radioactive waste depot for its sole nuclear plant, with the facility expected to become operational in 2021, the energy ministry said. euractiv.com

Alleging that SCE&G unfairly charged customers up to $1 billion for a failed nuclear expansion project, a lawsuit filed Monday in Fairfield County seeks to recover money for virtually all of the company’s ratepayers in the Columbia and Charleston areas. Thestate.com

       I mostly write about fission power reactors because there are four hundred operational fission reactors in the world. I do talk about fusion reactors occasionally although there are no commercial nuclear fusion power reactors on Earth. Scientists have been chasing fusion power for decades but it always seemed to be forty years in the future. Recently, national governments have banded together to research fusion technology. At least half a dozen private firms are working on their own fusion reactor designs so now it appears that fusion power may be only a decade away. Recently, Nature magazine published an article about a breakthrough in fusion research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

       MIT conducts fusion research with its Alcator C-Mod tokamak. This device holds the record for the highest pressure and highest magnetic field strength ever recorded in a tokamak. MIT has been working with scientists in Belgium and the U.K. Tests with the MIT Alcator C-Mod ended in 2016 but the results are still being analyzed. Researchers have found that a new type of fuel that they tested released ten times as much energy as they had previously achieved with other fuels. The experimental setup and new fuel were also tested on the Joint European Torus in Oxfordshire, U.K. and the results were verified.

       Previous experiments with the Alcator C-Mod had burned a fuel that consisted of hydrogen and deuterium which is a stable isotope of hydrogen that contains a neutron in the nucleus. The most recent run of experiments used a fuel that was ninety five percent deuterium with the rest being hydrogen and helium-3 which is a stable isotope of helium that only has one neutron in the nucleus rather than two which is much more common.

        In the Alcator C-Mod, a plasma of charged ions is held in magnetic confinement. Radio frequencies of electromagnetic energy from antennas outside the plasma chamber are used to heat the plasma. The frequency of the EM energy is tuned to affect the hydrogen in the mix which had represented five percent of the mixture of ions. This results in extremely high energies for the hydrogen ions. The hydrogen ions collide with the deuterium ions and this produces heat and electricity.

        In the new run of experiments, helium-3 constitutes one percent of the mixture of ions. The radio frequency excitation has been retuned to heat the helium-3. This resulted in achieving higher energies for the ions than had ever been achieved with the hydrogen heating. The new energies were ten times the previous energies.

         The Alcator C-Mod and the JET are able to reach temperatures and pressures that would be necessary in a fusion power generator but they are smaller than a fusion reactor that could produce more energy that is put into it. Research with the Alcator C-Mod and the JET will allow the scientists to fine tune the different parameters they are working with to find the best configurations to use when they scale up to full size functional reactors.

        An MIT fusion scientist said, “These higher energy ranges are in the same range as activated fusion products. To be able to create such energetic ions in a non-activated device—not doing a huge amount of fusion—is beneficial, because we can study how ions with energies comparable to fusion reaction products behave, how well they would be confined.”

MIT Alcator C-Mod fusion reactor:

North Korea is about to detonate a nuclear weapon at any moment after satellite images confirmed the hermit state has completed its last preparations.  Express.co.uk

Spare nuclear power can be tapped to ensure a stable power supply in the event of an emergency, Premier Lin Chuan (林全) said in an interview published yesterday as he reaffirmed the government’s energy transition goals. Taipeitimes.com

The U.S. nuclear power industry is beset with another wait-and-see week, as thousands of construction workers on site, hundreds of thousands of ratepayers and constituents across the state of Georgia anticipate the decision this week on whether or not the Plant Vogtle expansion project will continue. Nuclearstreet.com

North Korea keeps saying it might give up its nuclear weapons — but most news outlets won’t tell you that. Theintercept.com

 

 

 

 

A new nuclear safety law in China is ready to be passed, state media said on Monday, adding that the legislation will help prevent and deal with accidents and promote development of the industry. Safety in China’s nuclear industry has become increasingly important as it seeks to increase exports of its nuclear technologies. China has already signed agreements to build reactors in Argentina, Romania, Egypt and Kenya. Indiaexpress.com

Saudi Arabia and China are to cooperate on nuclear energy projects following discussions between the two countries this week on ways to support the kingdom’s nuclear energy programme, state news agency SPA reported. Reuters.com

There’s a mad scramble underway to come up with new reasons for why Georgians should continue to pay billions of dollars to expand nuclear power in the state. Myajc.com

A candidate backed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling party was elected Sunday as governor of Japan’s Ibaraki prefecture, potentially boosting the premier’s push to revive the nation’s atomic plants after the Fukushima disaster six years ago. Bloomberg.com

 A nuclear power facility located 10 miles off the Texas Gulf Coast will not shut down as Hurricane Harvey prepares to make landfall near Corpus Christi. Chou.com

The scientist in charge of Europe’s drive to harness a revolutionary new form of energy has accused Theresa May of risking its development by putting up a “new political wall” between researchers. Independent.co.uk

On Dec. 17, 1959, a military band played “The River Kwai” as 91 Alameda County inmates and eight deputies, doctors and scientists, many with prickly beards, walked out of a hole in the ground at the mysterious Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory. Mercurynews.com

As the government’s search for reliable, safe and affordable power continues, the Department of Energy (DOE) has taken a technology-neutral stand on possible solutions to the country’s growing demand for energy and 100 percent electrification in line with the Duterte administration’s “Ambisyon 2040” vision of a fully-developed Philippines. Manilatimes.net

 

       Some nations test nuclear devices and try to deny it. Other nations may claim to have conducted a nuclear test but there is no proof. Nuclear warheads have been detonated in the open air, under water and underground. Science has developed different ways to detect the detonation of a nuclear device depending on the medium in which it was detonated.

        When a nuclear device is detonated in the open air, it creates multiple frequencies of sound. Some of these are below the threshold of human hearing and are referred to as “infra” sound. The low frequency waves created by a nuclear explosion are so powerful that detectors all over the world can be triggered regardless of where the detonation took place. Volcanoes and powerful storms also generate extremely powerful sonic waves but there are differences between their “sonic signature” and that of nuclear explosions.

        When a nuclear device is detonated in water, the sound waves travel faster than they do in the open air. They also dissipate more rapidly with the distance from the explosion than they do in the air. Still, the pressure waves are so intense that they can be detected by hydroacoustic devices that are possessed by many countries. There are no natural underwater phenomena that generate powerful sonic waves that could be confused with nuclear explosions.

      When a nuclear device is detonated underground, powerful seismic waves are generated. Earthquakes also generate such waves. One way to tell the difference between a nuclear detonation and an earthquake is to use triangulation to precisely determine the location and depth of the source of the seismic waves. Earthquakes are usually below three hundred feet while nuclear tests are very shallow. Countries participating in the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty have established a network of three hundred and thirty seven seismic wave detectors all over the world to watch for underground nuclear tests.

       In addition to depth, there are differences between nuclear explosions and earthquakes with respect to the type of seismic waves each generates. First, there are primary seismic waves known as P-waves. Then there are secondary or shear waves known as S-waves. Nuclear explosions generate much stronger P-waves than S-waves. Earthquakes generate much stronger S-waves than P-waves.

        The North Korean government claims that it carried out an underground test of a hydrogen bomb in January of 2016. The world network of seismic detectors reported a 5.1 magnitude seismic event in N.K. on the 6^th of January in 2016. The depth of the event was less than three hundred feet. There were more P-waves than S-waves so an earthquake is ruled out and N.K. did in fact detonate an underground nuclear device.

       The next question that needed to be answered is whether or not the device was an atomic bomb which is a fission explosion or a hydrogen bomb which is a fusion explosion. The explosion of a fusion bomb is much more powerful than the explosion of a fission bomb.

       A fission explosion is the release of energy when heavy elements such as uranium or plutonium are bombarded with neutrons causing them to create new unstable isotopes. When these isotopes decay, milligrams of matter are converted into pure energy according to the E=MC² equation.

       A fusion explosion is the release of energy when very light elements such as hydrogen fuse into heavier elements such as helium when subjected to enormous temperature and pressure caused by a fission explosion. When this occurs, up to a kilogram of matter can be converted to pure energy via E=MC².

       The energy released by the N.K. event is equivalent to the detonation of a ten kiloton fission bomb. The seismic record of the 2016 explosion is about the same as the detonation of a fission bomb by N.K. in 2013. So, in the final analysis, either the N.K. test was just another fission bomb or they were trying to detonate a fusion bomb but the test failed and only the trigger fission part of the bomb detonated.