nuclear

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Nuclear fusion suffers from an image of being too good to be true. But researchers here say they are already doing nuclear fusion on a small scale and it's just a matter of time--decades, realistically--before it becomes practical.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology houses an active research lab for nuclear fusion, which many consider the answer to weaning the world from its costly dependence on fossil fuels. A tour of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center last week, organized by the TEDx Boston conference, offered a crash course on nuclear fusion, a field of research which continues … Read more

Germany plans to shut all nuclear reactors by 2022, Chancellor Angela Merkel's ruling coalition announced today in a policy reversal drawn up in a rush after the Fukushima disaster in Japan.

The coalition, sensitive to accusations it may increase dependence on highly polluting brown coal, said it planned to cut power use by 10 percent by 2020 and further expand the use of renewables such as wind and solar power.

Merkel's bid to outflank the opposition smacks of opportunism to many Germans but could ease an alliance with the anti-nuclear Greens that may be her best bet to … Read more

Prime Minister Naoto Kan said today that renewable energy will be a key pillar of Japan's energy policy after the world's worst nuclear crisis in 25 years and that its nuclear policy must be reviewed from scratch.

The massive earthquake and tsunami on March 11 knocked out cooling systems at the Fukushima plant in northeast Japan, and the prolonged crisis could hamper Japan's efforts to reduce its use of fossil fuels. The plant is still leaking radiation.

"The current basic energy policy envisages that over 50 percent of total electricity supply will come from nuclear power … Read more

It was only a matter of time until we had a decent app to track radiation from Fukushima.

Almost from the moment problems started at the Japanese nuclear power plant, the crowd was in on the action. At first it was just Webcams trained on geiger counters somewhere in Tokyo with the continuous image fed to UStream.

Then some dude from Portland got on Kickstarter and raised more than 35 grand to send more geiger counters to the country and aggregate their readings online with measurements from governments, nonprofits, and the crowd.

That last project also integrates with something called Pachube, an impressive global and crowdsourced platform for sharing real-time environmental and energy data. London-based Pachube also offers up an API and other tools for tinkerers and developers like Japan's Seigo Ishino, who created "Wind From Fukushima."

The free Android app is basically a mashup of radiation sensor readings, Google Maps, and wind data from across Japan--the result is a real-time display of not only where the radiation is right now, but also which way it's heading.… Read more

A new open and crowdsourced initiative to deploy more geiger counters all over Japan looks to be a go. Safecast, formerly RDTN.org, recently met and exceeded its $33,000 fund-raising goal on Kickstarter, which should help Safecast send between 100 and 600 geiger counters to the catastrophe-struck country.

The data captured from the geiger counters will be fed into Safecast.org, which aggregates radiation readings from government, nonprofit, and other sources, as well as into Pachube, a global open-source network of sensors. Safecast is one of the larger crowdsourced monitoring efforts, not unlike a similar effort in the United States that predated the Japanese disaster.… Read more

When it comes to energy technology, nuclear fusion is the ultimate "swing for the fences." Now at least one fusion venture is getting serious attention from start-up investors.

British Columbia-based General Fusion said today that it received US$19.5 million in a series B funding from venture capital and Canadian government funds. Among them was Bezos Expeditions, the personal investment fund of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

The funding, spotted by Toronto-based journalist Tyler Hamilton, will give General Fusion the money to complete the first phase of its planned development program. The company's target is to commercialize its "magnetized target fusion" technology within the decade, CEO Doug Richardson said in a statement.

Today's nuclear power plants use nuclear fission, or splitting atoms to release energy in the form of heat. Nuclear fusion, which occurs on the sun, is when two hydrogen atoms are heated to the point where they can fuse to form helium, a process which releases huge amounts of energy. In theory, that energy can be converted into electricity.

Research on nuclear fusion has been going on for decades and many people consider any practical use of fusion decades away. General Fusion's approach is a combination of existing methods, which it says will allow it to create a generator that will harness the heat from fusion to make electricity as power plants do today using cheaper methods than existing fusion research efforts.

According to a technical description on the company's Web site, General Fusion's process creates plasma, a state of matter where electrons move freely from the rest of atoms, of certain forms of hydrogen. That plasma, which is similar to a gas, is then heated in a magnetic field to 1 million degrees using a bank of capacitors, which produces a form of plasma in the shape of a doughnut.

That plasma is then compressed from a shock wave using pneumatic pistons surrounding a central sphere, causing the fusion reaction. The company also has a process for capturing the heat from the reaction. Given a significant amount of energy is needed to run the operation, General Fusion's Web site notes that one of the main technical challenges of nuclear fusion in general, once a reaction can be repeated, is creating a net output of energy. … Read more

Regardless of whether spent fuel from today's nuclear reactors is treated as waste or reused as fuel in the future, an expert commission says the U.S. should create a centralized storage system, an issue drawn into sharp focus because of Japan's current nuclear crisis.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology today released a report called the "Future of the Nuclear Fuel Cycle," where a panel argued that U.S. policy needs to make spent-fuel treatment an integral part of nuclear plant operations, rather than an "afterthought." Today is the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl … Read more

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission exists to police, not promote, the domestic nuclear industry--but diplomatic cables show that it is sometimes used as a sales tool to help push American technology to foreign governments.

The cables, obtained by WikiLeaks and provided to Reuters by a third party, shed light on the way in which U.S. embassies have pulled in the NRC when lobbying for the purchase of equipment made by Westinghouse and other domestic manufacturers.

While the use of diplomats to further American commercial interests is nothing new, it is far less common for regulators to be acting in even … Read more

The news out of Japan has not been good this week. Officials there raised the severity rating of the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant to the highest level, while the plant continues to dump radiation into the air and water and radiation is found in milk and drinking water in U.S. cities and elsewhere. What does this mean for you and me?

To help make sense of the health and environmental consequences of this crisis, CNET spoke to two experts in the nuclear field. My colleague Martin LaMonica spoke with David Brenner from Columbia University's … Read more