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With global interest in nuclear power rising, Toshiba said on Monday that it will construct a new nuclear power engineering facility for designing and testing technology for nuclear plants at the Isogo Nuclear Engineering Center (IEC) in Yokohama, Japan.

After the new facility is built, Toshiba will employ around 3,000 people at IEC.

Construction will start in February 2008, and the facility is scheduled to be complete by March 2009 or earlier. The facility will be able to withstand a 6.8 quake. The builders will also insert anti-liquefaction measures to keep the facility from sinking during a quake.

While it remains controversial, nuclear power seems to be gaining greater acceptance with the advent of global warming. Nuclear plants do not emit greenhouse gases. On the other hand, you have nuclear disposal issues. Scientists, however, are looking at ways to get rid of it, other than stuffing it into the ground. One idea: bind the spent fuel to other chemicals or recycle nuclear material to extract more energy.

In the United States, 17 organizations are expected to file permits to build and operate nuclear plants in the next few years. The first were recently filed. At this rate, a new nuclear plant may appear in the U.S. by 2015, according to Frank Bowman, CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute.

The government will spend $26 million on high-end computers to cut costs and standardize systems among the three U.S. labs charged with ensuring the safety and reliability of the nation's aging nuclear stockpile.

The Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) awarded the multimillion-dollar contract to Milpitas, Calif.-based Appro to supply Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories with 438 teraflop high-performance computing clusters based on the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor. To date, each of these labs had used its own combination of computer systems, which were not always compatible with the others.

(Credit: Appro)

"This is the first time NNSA has awarded a single contract for all three laboratories," agency official Martin Schoenbauer in a press release. "Combining the contract for each of the three laboratories not only saves money, but continues to move NNSA towards a smaller more efficient nuclear weapons complex."

The new equipment will provide crunch power to NNSA's Stockpile Stewardship program, under which the labs perform advanced nuclear weapons simulations meant to replace underground testing and extend the life of existing weapons. The computers are expected to be deployed in eight Linux clusters across the "tri-Lab" sites starting later this year.

The Appro systems are composed of modular, scalable units that can be rapidly configured "Lego-style" into clusters of varying sizes and computing power, according to NNSA. Each unit represents about 20 trillion floating-point operations per second (teraflops) of computing power and feature the latest Mellanox Technologies ConnectX IB 20 GB/s dual-port InfiniBand adapters and ConnectX EN dual port 10 Gigabit Ethernet NICs for storage connectivity.

The government relies increasingly on science and technology to extend the life of existing warheads, given the untenability of continuing the Cold War practice of replacing weapons every 15 to 20 years, NNSA's Thomas P. D'Agostino told the House Armed Services Committee (PDF). This was the genesis of the science-based Stockpile Stewardship program whose major focus is predicting the effect of changes in an aging stockpile, he said.

There has been no mention of hooking up the other sites that constitute the nation's nuclear weapons research and production base, namely the Nevada Test Site, Savannah River Site, Pantex Plant and Kansas City Plant. The video below shows what an underground test looks like.

Canada's General Fusion has received $1.2 million in venture funding to conduct further research on its fusion reactors, according to VentureWire.

The company's ultimate plan is to build small fusion reactors that can produce around 100 megawatts of power. The plants would cost around $50 million. That could allow the company to generate electricity at about 4 cents per kilowatt hour, relatively low. (By contrast, roughly $250 million was spent on a 64-megawatt solar thermal plant in Las Vegas recently.)

General Fusion has adopted the Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) model. In this scenario, an electric current is generated in a conductive cavity containing lithium and a plasma. The electric current produces a magnetic field and the cavity is collapsed, which results in a massive temperature spike.

The lithium breaks down into helium and tritium. Tritium, an unstable form of hydrogen, is separated and then mixed with deuterium, another form of hydrogen. The two fuse and make helium, a reaction that releases energy that can be harvested. So in short, lithium, a fairly inexpensive and plentiful metal, gets converted to helium in a reaction that generates lots of power and leaves only a harmless gas as a byproduct.

In theory. Conducting those reactions isn't easy. MTF has an advantage over other fusion techniques in that the plasma only has to stay at thermonuclear temperatures (150 million degrees Celsius) for a microsecond for a reaction to occur, according to the General Fusion's Web site.

But research is still ongoing. Los Alamos National Labs is currently conducting research.

Millions have been invested in fusion and nuclear projects over the last decade. Recently, Tri-Alpha Energy, out of the University of California Irvine, landed $40 million in VC funds.

The explosion in clean tech investing has been a boon to material scientists and engineers from the semiconductor industry. Sources at Intel tell me that many of them have seen co-workers depart for solar start-ups or companies working on new types of batteries.

But software experts shouldn't feel left out, notes Warren Weiss, a general partner at venture capital firm Foundation Partners in a stopover at the firm's offices last week (They are right next to Sunset Magazine in Menlo Park, Calif.). In clean tech, one of the bigger opportunities, he says, is with companies that want to better manage the electrical grid, i.e. the people creating technology for curbing power automatically during peak times or detecting outages.

The products from these companies will look familiar to anyone who's spent a lot of time at Oracle, IBM or even Cisco. Energy efficiency companies sell middleware and network management technology. In other words, it's a lot of software. The CEO at SilverSpring Networks, which manages networks for water and gas utilities, comes from Perot Systems.

"This is an industry that hasn't had a lot of innovation since World War II," he said.

Foundation spends most of its time in clean tech on energy efficiency. Besides investing in Silver Spring, it also had a piece of EnerNoc, which went public earlier this year (as did competitor Comverge). These two IPOs have been some of the most notable clean exits this year.

Weiss is now looking at a company with software for taking "corrective action" when potential problems occur at nuclear power plants. It was founded by a person who's already founded a few successful software companies.

Maybe they'll call it China Syndrome Software.

Other notes:

--Don't expect to see Foundation invest in a lot of biofuel companies. These companies require huge amounts of capital--think $50 million or more--to build facilities, which can be risky. The recent credit crunch has begun to change how these companies are valued.

--The same goes for solar and clean coal. These companies need lots of capital and the technology needs to be improved. "All of these technologies are 10 years away from being cost competitive," he said. "Energy efficiency is something you can do today."

--That said, the firm has placed some bets on companies specializing in green building materials, which also need huge amounts of capital to build factories. It invested in Serious Materials, which has a more eco-friendly drywall, and a green cement company in stealth mode. Consistency isn't everything.

--Water is a big problem. "The world's greatest crisis is probably water, not carbon," he said. Unfortunately, most of the customers for water technology are municipalities, and they move slowly. Foundation has looked at close to 50 water deals and not invested. The closest water company it has is Novazone, which makes an ozone purification system for bottled water and food.

Americans don't exactly like nuclear power, but they like oil even less.

Concerns about global warming, high oil prices and worldwide political turmoil have made oil the least popular fuel in the U.S., according to a survey from MIT and Knowledge Networks. In the survey, 74 percent of respondents said that they want to see decreased use of oil, up from 56 percent in 2002.

In the previous 2002 survey, nuclear was the least popular fuel. The 2007 survey polled 1,200 adults nationwide.

Nuclear, in fact, has gained a little bit of acceptance. The 2007 survey found that 35 percent of those polled said they wanted to see an increase in nuclear power, a rise from 28 percent in 2002. The rise was attributed to concerns about global warming, according to professor Stephen Ansolabehere, who oversaw the project.

Still, nearly 40 percent oppose the proposed storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, and only 28 percent said they agreed with the proposition that nuclear waste can be stored for long periods of time safely.

The survey further asked people how much they would pay--in the form of higher utility bills--to counteract global warming. The average answer is $10 a month. In reality, the answer needs to be closer to $25 a month, according to Ansolabehere.

A researcher for the Federation of American Scientists on Tuesday said he's spotted what appears to be China's new nuclear submarine using Google Earth's publicly available satellite imagery.

Google Earth shows what appears to be China's new nuclear submarine.

(Credit: Federation of American Scientists)

The Quickbird satellite photographed the docked submarine at the Xiaopingdao Submarine Base in late 2006, said FAS's Hans Kristensen.

The new Jin-class or Type 094 submarines are expected to replace the Xia-class, Type 092 submarines built in the 1980s, Kristensen said. The new model appears to be 35 feet longer because of a longer missile compartment and possibly a larger nuclear reactor compartment, he said.

The image doesn't have enough detail to indicate whether the submarine will have 12 missile launch tubes, as the Xia-class models do and as the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence said in 2004 the Jia-class would also, or 16 tubes, as "nongovernmental sources frequently claim," Kristensen said.

(Via World Tribune)

Tri Alpha Energy, which hopes to commercialize nuclear fusion technology, has raised $40 million from Venrock Associates and others, according to VentureWire. (Subscription required)

The company, which grew out of the University of California at Irvine, says its advanced plasma fusion technologies could be used to generate electricity as well as eliminate waste from nuclear power plants. A plant based on its technology would cost less than a conventional nuclear plant. Tri Alpha was founded in 1998 and has raised funds in the past.

Tri Alpha is working on a generator in which hydrogen chases boron, according to literature from UC Irvine. These atoms then form a helium atom, which is placed in a particle accelerator. Slowing down the helium generates electricity.

In the U.S., nuclear energy has been a nuclear topic for decades. The accident at Three Mile Island put the kibosh on further nuclear power plants based on fission techniques, and fusion has always been viewed skeptically.

But it hasn't stopped exploration. Venrock partner (and former nuclear engineer) Ray Rothrock, in an interview last month, said that close to $100 million in Silicon Valley has been invested in fusion concepts over the past several years.