- Number 295 |
- September 14, 2009
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Electron demolition derby
The heart of a nuclear reactor. The coldest reaches of space. To harness one and study the other, we need to understand how materials are changed by radiation. Previous studies said that radiation turns a material’s atoms into ions that smash around like cars in a demolition derby, with each ion car being a hard particle with electrons firmly attached. -
Hydrogen-rich material promises energy solutions
Researchers at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Science, a joint institute of DOE's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University, have produced a hydrogen-rich alloy that could provide insight into the properties of metallic hydrogen. The work is a step toward materials with revolutionary implications for energy science, enabling lossless power transmission, next-generation particle accelerators and even magnetic levitation. -
Sandia team developing right-sized reactor
A smaller-scale nuclear reactor that could supply 100 to 300 megawatts of power—enough for a medium-size city—has been designed by Sandia National Laboratories. Advantages of the “right-sized reactor” include the ability to mass-assemble them in factories and to integrate a monitoring system into the design for assuring the safe, secure, and legitimate use of nuclear technology, potentially allowing them to be safely exported to developing countries.
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PPPL plasma turbulence simulation creates award-winning movie
Scientists at the DOE Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have developed a simulation code that accurately models global turbulent transport of plasma using the full geometry of the tokamak device. Plasma is a hot ionized gas that is the fuel for fusion energy production; a tokamak is a type of fusion machine. The large-scale simulation is of microturbulence driven by changes in the electron temperature across the plasma in PPPL's National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX).
