France will build a new, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to replace its Charles de Gaulle carrier by 2038, French President Emmanuel Macron announced Tuesday. The Associated Press reports: Macron framed the decision to use nuclear reactors to propel the future warship as part of France’s climate strategy, stressing its lower emissions compared to diesel fuel. Speaking at a nuclear facility in the…
Tag: atomic energy
UK Seeks Site For World’s First Fusion Power Station
sciencehabit writes: The U.K. government today invited communities around the country to volunteer a site for a prototype fusion reactor, which would be the first — it is hoped — to put electricity into the grid. The project, called Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production (STEP), began last year with an initial 222 million pounds over 5 years to develop a design….
Uncovering the hidden side of storms: France’s Taranis satellite to launch in November
Sprites, elves, jets… few people know that scientists habitually use such other-worldly words to describe transient luminous events or TLEs, light flashes that occur during active storms just a few tens of kilometers over our heads. Few people also know that storms can act as particle accelerators generating very brief bursts of X-rays and gamma rays. But what are the physical…
Mysterious Explosion and Fire Damage Iranian Nuclear Enrichment Facility
A fire ripped through a building at Iran’s main nuclear-fuel production site early Thursday, causing extensive damage to what appeared to be a factory where the country has boasted of producing a new generation of centrifuges. The United States has repeatedly warned that such machinery could speed Tehran’s path to building nuclear weapons. schwit1 shares a report: The Atomic Energy Agency…
Nuclear Scientists Developing Faster, Cheaper Covid-19 Test
Nuclear scientists in Austria are closing in on new coronavirus testing kits that could dramatically lower the cost and time it takes to diagnose people for the disease. From a report: With Covid-19 tests in short supply in many places, some individuals have turned to private laboratories that can genetically detect the pathogen. That process, called reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction, or…
Discovering exoplanets with gravitational waves
In a recent paper in Nature Astronomy, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute/AEI) in Potsdam and from the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) in Saclay, Paris suggest how the planned space-based gravitational-wave observatory LISA can detect exoplanets orbiting white dwarf binaries everywhere in the Milky Way and in the nearby Magellanic Clouds….