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Jun. 16, 2021 , 7:35 PM
A Canadian company, one of several betting on alternative approaches to fusion energy, announced today it will begin to build a pilot power plant next year in the United Kingdom. The plant, financially backed by the U.K. government and 70% of the size needed for a commercial power plant, will not generate energy, but rather will demonstrate the viability of the company’s fusion approach after it fires up in 2025, says Christofer Mowry, CEO of Vancouver-based General Fusion. “This is the first substantial public-private partnership in fusion,” Mowry says.
The pilot plant will cost several hundred million dollars and will be built at the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s campus outside Oxford, also home to the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, which operates the Joint European Torus the world’s largest working fusion reactor and the United Kingdom’s Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak Upgrade reactor.
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Supernovae like the Crab nebula forged the heavy elements found on Earth. But neutron star mergers also play a role. NASA; ESA; NRAO/AUI/NSF; G. Dubner/University of Buenos Aires
Trace seabed plutonium points to stellar forges of heavy elements
May. 13, 2021 , 2:00 PM
With the discovery of just a few hundred radioactive atoms in seabed deposits, researchers have confirmed that blast debris from a pair of stellar explosions swept across Earth within the past 10 million years while hominids walked the planet. From this unlikely source material, the researchers have also found an important clue to the r-process, the nuclear reactions in stellar blasts that forge much of the heavier elements that make up Earth. The proportion of different atoms in the sediments suggests heavy elements were not solely forged in supernovae, the last-gasp explosions of dying stars as astrophysicists have long thought. Instead, they hint that some heavy elements come from much rarer cosmic