Collaborate Disseminate
With a seemingly endless list of shortages of basic items trotted across newsfeeds on a daily basis, you’d be pardoned for not noticing any one shortage in particular. But in …read more Continue reading Mining and Refining: Helium
A team of researchers is using state-of-the-art forensic techniques to solve the riddle of the origin of uranium cubes that were used as part of the Nazi effort to develop nuclear weapons during the Second World War.Continue ReadingCategory: ScienceTag… Continue reading Modern forensics seeks origin of uranium cubes from Nazi A-bomb project
Is there anything graphene can’t do? Researchers at MIT have found yet another use for the over-achieving wonder material, by making a reusable filter out of graphene oxide foam that acts like a magnet for uranium, effectively pulling the radioactive e… Continue reading Charged graphene foam acts as “uranium magnet” for water purification
To reduce high-level radioactive waste and make nuclear reactors more economical, researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are working on ways to use real-time spectroscopic monitoring to improve the recycling of spent nuclear fu… Continue reading Spectroscopic sensors speed up recycling of spent nuclear fuel
A nuclear power plant is large and complex, and one of the biggest reasons is safety. Splitting radioactive atoms is inherently dangerous, but the energy unleashed by the chain reaction that ensues is the entire point. It’s a delicate balance to stay in the sweet spot, and it requires constant …read more
Continue reading No-Melt Nuclear ‘Power Balls’ Might Win a Few Hearts and Minds
When was the first nuclear reactor created? You probably think it was Enrico Fermi’s CP-1 pile built under the bleachers at the University of Chicago in 1942. However, you’d be off by — oh — about 2 billion years.
The first reactors formed naturally about 2 billion years ago in …read more
Continue reading The Oldest Nuclear Reactor? Nature’s 2 Billion Year Old Experiment
Hackaday editors Elliot WIlliams and Mike Szczys kick off the first podcast of the new year. Elliot just got home from Chaos Communications Congress (36c3) with a ton of great stories, and he showed off his electric cargo carrier build while he was there. We recount some of the most …read more
We’re suckers for the Fallout aesthetic, so anything with a post-apocalyptic vibe is sure to get our attention. With a mid-century look, Nixie tubes, a brushed metal faceplate, and just a touch of radioactivity, this quantum random number generator pushes a lot of design buttons, and it pushes them hard. …read more
The discovery of nuclear fission in the 1930s brought with it first the threat of nuclear annihilation by nuclear weapons in the 1940s, followed by the promise of clean, plentiful power in the 1950s courtesy of nuclear power plants. These would replace other types of thermal plants with one that …read more
Continue reading The Long History Of Fast Reactors And The Promise Of A Closed Fuel Cycle
The Chicago Pile led to the Manhattan Project, which led to the atomic bomb. In Germany, there were similar efforts with less success, and now we have physical evidence from the first attempted nuclear reactor in Germany. In Physics Today, there’s a lovely historical retrospective of one of the …read more