Posts Tagged ‘radium’
“A lot of people were opposed to it. A lot of people were for it. I myself think about it as little as possible.”
As AI, clean tech, climate response, and other uses grow, concerns are rising that the U.S. and the world are going to run out of electricity (and here). As John Ellis reports, there’s a controversial potential answer closer to hand than many had thought…
Commercial nuclear fusion has gone from science fiction to science fact in less than a decade.
Britain’s First Light Fusion announced last week that it had broken the world record for pressure at the Sandia National Laboratories in the US, pushing the boundary to 1.85 terapascal, five times the pressure at the core of the Earth.
Days earlier, a clutch of peer-reviewed papers confirmed that Commonwealth Fusion Systems near Boston had broken the world record for a large-scale magnet with a field strength of 20 tesla using the latest high-temperature super-conducting technology. This exceeds the threshold necessary for producing net energy, or a “Q factor”, above 1.0.
“Overnight, it basically changed the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40,” said Professor Dennis Whyte, plasma doyen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The March edition of the IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity published six papers ratifying different aspects of the technology.
A poll at the International Atomic Energy Agency’s forum in London found that 65 percent of insiders think fusion will generate electricity for the grid at viable cost by 2035, and 90 percent by 2040.
The Washington-based Fusion Industry Association says four of its members think they can do it by 2030. If the industry is anywhere close to being right, we need to rethink all our energy assumptions…
firstlightfusion.com, cfs.energy, telegraph.co.uk, web.mit.edu, ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp
From New Items (@EllisItems)
For a series of less-optimistic takes on the prospect of power from fusion: “Why are nuclear fusion reactors difficult?
* Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
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As we ponder power, we might spare a thought for Irène Joliot-Curie; she died on this date in 1956. A chemist and physicist, she followed in the footsteps of her mother (Marie Curie), sharing the Nobel prize in Chemistry (in 1935, with her husband Frédéric Joliot-Curie) for their discovery of induced radioactivity, making them the second-ever married couple (after her parents) to win the Nobel Prize, and making her and her mother the first (and so far only) mother–daughter pair to have won Nobels.
Sadly, Irène also shared her mother’s fate: she died of leukemia resulting from radiation exposure during research.
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”*…
Your correspondent is old enough to remember the Cold War and the Civil Defense efforts (booklets, films, duck-and-cover drills) aimed at “preparing” us for atomic conflict. It’s a sad sign of our times that they’re re-emerging: “Where to Hide If a Nuclear Bomb Goes Off In Your Area.”
(If there’s a silver lining in this fallout-laced cloud, it’s that it’s re-directing attention to a problem– a threat– that never actually went away; c.f., Ploughshares.)
* J. Robert Oppenheimer
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As we enter the Twilight Zone, we might recall that it was on this date in 1903 that The Times (London) newspaper reported that Marie and Pierre Curie communicated to the Academy of Sciences that the recently discovered Radium…
… possesses the extraordinary property of continuously emitting heat, without combustion, without chemical change of any kind, and without any change to its molecular structure, which remains spectroscopically identical after many months of continuous emission of heat … such that the pure Radium salt would melt more than its own weight of ice every hour … A small tube containing Radium, if kept in contact with the skin for some hours … produces an open sore, by destroying the epidermis and the true skin beneath … and cause the death of living things whose nerve centres do not lie deep enough to be shielded from their influence.
That same year the Curies (and Antoine Henri Becquerel) were awarded the Noble Prize in Physics for their work on radioactivity and radiation.
Marie and Pierre Curie
In lieu of a graduation address…
… from xkcd:
As we avoid looking too closely at the faces of our watches, we might recall that it was on this date in 1921 at the White House that President Warren G. Harding presented Marie Curie with a gram of radium (worth $100,000 at the time). Curie died in 1934 of aplastic anemia contracted from exposure to radiation. Her laboratory is preserved at the Musée Curie. But because of their levels of radioactivity, her papers are considered too dangerous to handle, and are kept in lead-lined boxes; those who wish to consult them must wear protective clothing.
Curie, with Harding at the White House (source)
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