Large Hardon Collider

[Kryssan]

South Korea :: We have nukes for sell too~


Crossposted:

South Korea Seeks To Export 80 Nuclear Reactors By 2030

The government said that along with private entities, it would invest a total of 400 billion won ($355.7 million) in research and development, between 2011 and 2017, to improve domestic nuclear reactor technology
- By April Murelio -

The South Korean government has said that it is targeting a 20 percent share of the global nuclear reactor market by 2030 through exports of 80 nuclear reactors. The announcement comes hard on the heels of a landmark $40 billion nuclear power deal secured by South Korea's state-run Korea Electric Power Corp (KEPCO) to the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

In a statement, the government said that along with private entities, it would invest a total of 400 billion won ($355.7 million) in research and development, between 2011 and 2017, to improve domestic nuclear reactor technology.

It also said that it also planned to acquire stakes in overseas mines that would provide materials related to nuclear power, including uranium, to 25 per cent by 2016 and 50 per cent by 2030. This would compare to 6.7 per cent this year.

KEPCO recently secured orders for four APR1400 nuclear power plants in the UAE as part of a $20 billion agreement with the oil-rich Middle East country. The agreement, which is the biggest ever contracted either by South Korea or the UAE, is also South Korea's first nuclear power plant export deal. The contract is expected to generate an additional $20 billion in contracts for South Korean companies.

Currently South Korea is Asia's fourth-largest economy. In December 2009 a South Korea-led consortium won the Middle East's biggest ever energy contract to build and operate four 1,400 MW light water nuclear reactors by 2020 in Sila, some 330 Km (205 miles) west of the UAE capital.

The consortium apparently stole a march over the French nuclear group Areva SA and another consortium, composed of the US firm General Electric Co and the Japanese firm Hitachi Ltd, in its bid for the contract.

Sorry, my link is not the actual title of the article as you can see. I found it amusing, though I know my humor isn't really funny to others.

[Pirian]

The announcement comes hard on the heels of a landmark $40 billion nuclear power deal secured by South Korea's state-run Korea Electric Power Corp (KEPCO) to the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Silly Koreans, UAE is broke lulz

[Kryssan]

Motorcycles are not the only thing this girl is parading around on. I say that because most of you will remember her most probably from that.


Going Nuclear For the Election


Crossposted:

As Ukraine's presidential election approaches, hopeful candidate Yulia Tymoshenko has embarked on a remarkable pro-nuclear campaigning spree.

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/up..._Tyhryulya.jpg
One of Yulia Tymoshenko's
campaign posters. This white
tiger cub, dubbed Tyhrulya,
has become her mascot

Earlier this week Tymoshenko, who is the current prime minister, paid a visit to the nuclear-industrial complex in the Zaporizhzh oblast, which contains a six-reactor nuclear power plant and a store for used nuclear fuel. Addressing locals she promised a 30% payrise for power sector workers - as well as bonuses for highly qualified personnel with special skills.

And in case that hadn't won over nuclear workers to her side, she followed up on infrastructure. One pledge was to complete the Khmelnitsky 3 and 4 reactors by 2015, one and two years early with respect to schedules announced in September 2008.

Another promise was to create a domestic nuclear fuel production complex, a 'complete closed complex' including subsidiaries responsible for raw materials such as uranium. This should be done by 2012, Tymoshenko said, at a cost of $200 million. The country has created a reserve of nuclear fuel sufficient to cover one year's need, she added, putting a value of 2 billion hryvnias ($250 million) on the stockpile.

While new build projects and increased security of supply are longstanding goals of Ukrainian energy policy, and most politicians become highly optimistic when seeking votes, it is notable that Ukraine is one of the rare places where they can draw favour from pro-nuclear sentiment.

Nuclear power enjoys wide support in Ukraine, where it supplies about half of electricity. Some 15 reactors are in operation at four sites, while three shut down at Chernobyl after the destruction of unit 4 there.

Despite being the only country ever to suffer a civil nuclear accident of that scale, Ukraine went on to replace the lost Chernobyl capacity by completing stalled reactor projects at Khmelnitsky and Rovno. Six new large reactors are proposed to begin construction in this decade and long-term plans see new reactors coming online every year or two into the 2030s.

Tymoshenko is one of the most favoured candidates, together with previous presidential runner-up Viktor Yanukovyvh. Current President Viktor Yuschenko is expected only to gather a few percent in the 17 January poll.

[Kryssan]

Alternate path? for Fusion



We haven't even gotten first generation down yet and MIT is talking second generation. Still, whatever works, I'm down.

Crossposted:

A new experiment that reproduces the magnetic fields of the Earth and other planets has yielded its first significant results. The findings confirm that its unique approach has some potential to be developed as a new way of creating a power-producing plant based on nuclear fusion — the process that generates the sun’s prodigious output of energy.

Fusion has been a cherished goal of physicists and energy researchers for more than 50 years. That’s because it offers the possibility of nearly endless supplies of energy with no carbon emissions and far less radioactive waste than that produced by today’s nuclear plants, which are based on fission, the splitting of atoms (the opposite of fusion, which involves fusing two atoms together). But developing a fusion reactor that produces a net output of energy has proved to be more challenging than initially thought.

The new results come from an experimental fusion reactor at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center on the MIT campus, inspired by observations from space made by satellites. Called the Levitated Dipole Experiment, or LDX, a joint project of MIT and Columbia University, it uses a half-ton donut-shaped magnet about the size and shape of a large truck tire, made of superconducting wire coiled inside a stainless steel vessel. This magnet is suspended by a powerful electromagnetic field, and is used to control the motion of the 10-million-degree-hot electrically charged gas, or plasma, contained within its 16-foot-diameter outer chamber.

The results, published this week in the journal Nature Physics, confirm the counter-intuitive prediction that inside the device’s magnetic chamber, random turbulence causes the plasma to become more densely concentrated — a crucial step to getting atoms to fuse together — instead of becoming more spread out, as usually happens with turbulence. This “turbulent pinching” of the plasma has been observed in the way plasmas in space interact with the Earth’s and Jupiter’s magnetic fields, but has never before been recreated in the laboratory.

Most experiments in fusion around the world use one of two methods: tokamaks, which use a collection of coiled magnets surrounding a donut-shaped chamber to confine the plasma, or inertial fusion, using high-powered lasers to blast a tiny pellet of fuel at the device’s center. But LDX takes a different approach. “It’s the first experiment of its kind,” says MIT senior scientist Jay Kesner, MIT’s physics research group leader for LDX, who co-directs the project with Michael E. Mauel, professor of applied physics at Columbia University's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science.

The results of the experiment show that this approach “could produce an alternative path to fusion,” Kesner says, though more research will be needed to determine whether it would be practical. For example, though the researchers have measured the plasma’s high density, new equipment still needs to be installed to measure its temperature, and ultimately a much larger version would have to be built and tested.

A new approach to a tough problem

Kesner cautions that the kind of fuel cycle planned for other types of fusion reactors such as tokamaks, which use a mixture of two forms of “heavy” hydrogen called deuterium and tritium, should be easier to achieve and will likely be the first to go into operation. The deuterium-deuterium fusion planned for devices based on the LDX design, if they ever become practical, would likely make this “a second-generation approach,” he says.

When operating, the huge LDX magnet is supported by the magnetic field from an electromagnet overhead, which is controlled continuously by a computer based on precision monitoring of its position using eight laser beams and detectors. The position of the half-ton magnet, which carries a current of one million amperes (compared to a typical home’s total capacity of 200 amperes) can be maintained this way to within half a millimeter. A cone-shaped support with springs is positioned under the magnet to catch it safely if anything goes wrong with the control system.

Levitation is crucial because the magnetic field used to confine the plasma would be disturbed by any objects in its way, such as any supports used to hold the magnet in place. In the experimental runs, they recreated the same conditions with and without the support system in place, and confirmed that the confinement of the plasma was dramatically increased in the levitated mode, with the supports removed. With the magnet levitated, the central peak of plasma density developed within a few hundredths of a second, and closely resembled those observed in planetary magnetospheres (such as the magnetic fields surrounding Earth and Jupiter).

Summarizing the difference between the two approaches, Kesner explains that in a tokamak, the hot plasma is confined inside a huge magnet, but in the LDX the magnet is inside the plasma. The whole concept, he says, was inspired by observations of planetary magnetospheres made by interplanetary spacecraft. In turn, he says, for planetary research the experiments in LDX can yield “a lot more subtle detail than you can get by launching satellites, and more cheaply.”

The work ahead

The MIT and Columbia scientists say that if the turbulence-induced density enhancement exhibited by the LDX could be scaled up to larger devices, it might enable them to recreate the conditions necessary to sustain fusion reactions, and thus may point the way toward abundant and sustainable production of fusion energy.

“Fusion energy could provide a long-term solution to the planet’s energy needs without contributing to global warming,” says Columbia’s Mauel.

The LDX project, led by Mauel and Kesner and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, has been through more than 10 years of design, construction and testing, and produced its first experimental results in its levitated configuration last year, which are being reported in the analysis published this week. A newly installed microwave interferometer array, developed by MIT graduate student Alex Boxer PhD ‘09, was used to make the precision measurements of the plasma concentrations that were used to observe the turbulent pinch.

“LDX is one of the most novel fusion plasma physics experiments underway today,” says Stewart Prager, director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Because of the unique geometry of the system, he says, “theoretical predictions indicate that the confinement of energy might be very favorable” for producing practical fusion power, but the theory needs to be confirmed in practice. “For these benefits to be realized, the somewhat bold theoretical predictions must be realized experimentally,” he says.

[Eliseos]

Bumping this to put the awesome xkcd comic up, and to also apologize to Kryssan for bumping the thread twice and me not being able to read what he posted. I'll try to do that this weekend, both articles sounded interesting on the skim through.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/spirit.png

[Kryssan]

Comics like that make you laugh for a moment then feel sad for 10 minutes.

[zoobernut]

I can't believe I feel sorry for the robot now...

[Eliseos]

The alt text is even more depressing:

On January 26th, 2274 Mars days into the mission, NASA declared Spirit a 'stationary research station', expected to stay operational for several more months until the dust buildup on its solar panels forces a final shutdown.

[Ragnus]

That pic deserves a spot in the "You Baww, You Lose" posts in Random Images....

But yea it feels weird to feel bad for the probe but I do...

[Kryssan]

Y'know, it wasn't until I thought of the rover as unit JSN, Fourth Battalion, Dinochrome Brigade that the sad really hit. The situation between the story and this are similar.

Yeah, yeah, shameless Bolo! story recall.

[Woozie]

I can't believe I feel sorry for the robot now...

Yeah, same here lol. I actually feel bad for him/her/it/whatever.

[Kryssan]

We could use one of these ourselves:


Europe launches Nuclear Academy



Crossposted:

The European Nuclear Energy Leadership Academy (Enela) has been launched. The academy aims to attract university graduates to the nuclear energy sector and to train future leaders in this field.

The founding treaty establishing the academy has been signed by six nuclear energy-related companies: Areva, Axpo, EnBW, EOn Kernkraft, Urenco and Vattenfall. The partners also held their first shareholders meeting at the same time as signing the treaty, which covers the essential strategic, legal and financial aspects of the academy.

Enela was initiated by the industrial stakeholders in the European Nuclear Energy Forum (Enef), set up by the European Commission in 2007 as a platform for a broad stakeholder discussion on opportunities, risks and transparency issues of nuclear energy.

In a joint statement, the founding partners said: "In the wake of Europe's nuclear energy renaissance, the purpose of the academy is to train young graduates and high potential employees with different backgrounds to become leaders or to prepare them to take broader responsibilities in European nuclear energy corporations and institutions."

Enela will be located in Germany at the Garching campus of the Technical University Munich. Jean-Claude Gauthier, senior vice president of Areva NP is designated to be the first director of Enela. The academy's program - which will begin in 2011 - will offer both a comprehensive nuclear energy management program and a leadership cycle based on a theoretical and practical approach focusing on specific European requirements and specifications, with regards to economics, politics, technology, legislation, safety standards and certifications. The academy will also serve as a think-tank, bringing together members of the international nuclear community, comprising employers, prospective employees, as well as political and social opinion leaders.

"This is a very important and unique signal," said Stephan Döhler, executive vice president of Axpo. "The academy addresses the strong need for joining our efforts in attracting and training on an international level the best heads for the European nuclear energy community." Walter Hohlefelder of EOn Kernkraft added: "Today marks the birth of what could become in the future the one European institution in the field of nuclear energy management and leadership training. Enela welcomes further organizations and institutions to support or join the initiative."

EU energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs welcomed Enela's establishment, saying: "The nuclear sector faces a serious challenge: it needs to keep and develop knowledge on nuclear at an appropriate level. This is a matter of concern not only to the industry, but also for researchers, regulators and the health sector." He added, "Enela, by focussing on leadership skills, can help to close the gap in existing training programs."

[Eliseos]

I'd definitely apply if the US offered something like that.

[Dantrag]

off topic: Krysaan, i miss wing commander

[Kryssan]

So do I. WC5, TtF, and FS2 are still some of my favourite games. FS2 Open makes playing it still possible, but TtF really doesn't like the new OSes (I got it to work like once on Vista). Haven't tried WC5 since I broke a disc on a move a few years back, but I recently acquired another copy, just waiting for it to arrive.

Spoiler: show

http://www.aethernavale.net/Media/im...nal-midway.jpg


Have another picture of the TCS Midway. I can still remember having to do the scramble missions and always feeling bad whenever the Midway took massive damage because I'd get too focused on raising my kill count and forgot about protecting it.

[Woozie]

favourite

We are no longer friends.

[Kryssan]

I can't help it, I was corrupted by some Britons. I put us in everything, like favourite, honour, etc. I even say bloody hell. Its not wrong for it to have a u, its just not Americanized.


Which of course makes you a racist. Pfft.

[Kryssan]

Helium sell-off risks future supply


Crossposted:

The US must stop selling off its helium reserves so that the country has enough of the gas to meet the needs of researchers and medical programmes. That is the conclusion of a new report, Selling the Nation's Helium Reserve, published by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). It says that failure to halt the sale of helium could lead to a drop in supply for the gas, which is vital for research into magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques and low-temperature physics.

Helium is mostly produced by extracting it from natural gas fields, which contain up to 7% helium. There is estimated to be about 8.6 million tonnes of helium in the world, with the US having the biggest fraction of reserves at 35% followed by Qatar with 20%. About 32,000 tonnes of helium were produced around the world in 2008, three-quarters of which came from the US alone.

The US began building a huge stockpile of helium in 1925 as a strategic supply of gas for airships, and the reserve later became an important source of coolant for rockets during the Cold War. In 1996, however, the Helium Privatization Act came into law allowing US companies to recover and sell the helium, which is mainly stored in Amarillo, Texas, in a natural geological gas storage rock formation. The act was deliberately designed to exhaust the US stockpile by 2015 so that the government could recoup the cost of setting up the facility.

However, the report says that selling off the helium stockpile "has adversely affected critical users of helium and is not in the best interest of the US taxpayers or the country." One problem posed by the selling off the stockpile, which the report says accounts for up to a third of global demand, is that the price for helium is low, being "not set by current market conditions but by the terms of the 1996 Act". The fear is that once the supplies run out, the price will shoot up.

The NAS report, written by an 18-strong panel led by geologist Charles Groat from the University of Texas, recommends opening the price of federally owned helium to the market. It also warns that the US will become a net importer of helium in the next 10–15 years if it does not stop selling its reserves and will have to get its helium from new sources such as from the Middle East or Russia.

"US government sales are assumed to end by 2015, with future supplies coming from new extraction plants both in the US and elsewhere," says William Nuttall, from the Cambridge Judge Business School, who, in collaboration with the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire and the gas-supplying firm BOC developed a model for the future of helium supply and use. "Supplies in the US are steadying while those in Europe, the Middle East and Asia are increasing."

MRI uses the biggest chunk of the world's helium, requiring 7000 tonnes (22% of the total) every year to cool the superconducting magnets that lie at the heart of these devices. However, large-scale research facilities also use lots of helium, with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN requiring 150 tonnes of liquid helium last year to cool the 27 km ring and the ITER fusion project that is being built in France planning to use 50 tonnes once it is up and running in 2018.

One option to relieve the demand for helium is to develop new technologies that do not need the gas. "Intermittent shortages and price rises have now become an unwelcome feature of helium use and this encourages high-tech users, particularly those using cryogenics, to substitute technologies," says Richard Clarke at the Culham centre. He adds that investment in new helium production facilities is also necessary.

Not something you'd really think about. Another one of those things I think people just take for granted currently.

[Takedown3]

i was at the hospital doing a breathing test for my allergies and noticed they had a canister of helium which is required to pipe in to the test machine to keep my input air normal (since im connected to a machine and not breathing in the air around us).

obviously not a major use of the gas. pretty interesting, before that post i didnt really know, or care, how helium was produced. quite neat that they store the gas in a natural rock formation.

[Eliseos]

Maybe this will spur more motivation to find a room-temperature superconductor. Or if the Constellation program is any indication, the government will instead spend Helium research on climate change.