In 2018, the International Astronomical Union voted to rename Hubble's law as the Hubble–Lemaître law to share credit between Edwin Hubble and Georges Lemaître.
America stands on the verge of a new Roaring Twenties. A hundred years ago, automobiles, aircraft, radio and motion pictures remade the world; similarly, in the coming decade, we will see the continued adoption of bleeding-edge technologies, which are poised to redefine our society, our general welfare and our security. Just as progress in the 1920s led to a revolution in military affairs in the 1930s when warfare became faster, fiercer and more fatal this decade’s technological leaps will have considerable national security implications in the years to come.
I am here today to explain why we must dedicate resources to quantum computing, developing new public policy solutions and committing additional federal investment to protect U.S. homeland security.
ITER is a huge, internationally enmeshed nuclear fusion project. After spending billions of dollars over decades, the reactor is scheduled to switch on for its first productive (“ignited”) fusion in 2035. Until then, teams will work around the clock on construction and testing. That means assembling the gigantic, donut-shaped tokamak reactor, where nuclear fuel will be turned into sun-hot plasma and circulated in a magnetic field.
The magic fuel mix combines tritium and deuterium. There are just 20 kilograms of tritium, a fragile isotope of hydrogen with an extremely short half life, in the entire world. Deuterium, meanwhile, is stable and the secondmost abundant stable isotope of hydrogen because there are only two stable isotopes. ITER plans to use a 50/50 mix of both fuels beginning in 2035, which means the reactor must be able to withstand a special beating from swirling tritium neutrons that will bombard the exterior of the fusion chamber.