Tag: nuclear power

NATO’s Nuclear Bases Have Poisoned Water and Fish

Nuclear armed air bases at Kleine Brogel in Belgium, Büchel in Germany, Aviano and Ghedi in Italy, and Volkel in the Netherlands have poisoned the environment with PFAS.

Massive fires were intentionally lit in large fire pits at these bases and extinguished with cancer-causing fire-fighting foams during routine training exercises dating back 40 years or longer.  Afterward, the foam residue was typically allowed to run off or drain into the soil. The “forever chemicals” pollute the soil, sewers, sediment, surface water, groundwater, and the air. NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) bases regularly tested sprinkler systems in hangars to create a carcinogenic foam layer to coat the expensive aircraft. The sprinkler systems often malfunctioned. The foams were sent to sewers or deposited in groundwater or surface water.

The PFAS-laden foams work miraculously well in putting out super-hot petroleum-based fires, but remarkable technologies may escape our control and imperil humanity.

Two astonishing inventions in 1938 are like Daedalus’ fastening of wings to wax: the splitting of the uranium atom by German scientists and the discovery of per – and poly fluoroalkyl substances, (PFAS) by Dupont chemists in New Jersey.  It’s not a stretch. Both nuclear weaponry and PFAS chemicals are existential threats to humanity. Their development and use are inextricably linked.

Wherever nuclear weapons are found, huge quantities of PFAS foams are ready to be used to snuff out a fire that may cause unimaginable destruction.

Like Pandora’s nightmare, once PFAS is let loose we can’t get it back in the box. We can’t get rid of it. We can’t bury it. We can’t incinerate it. We don’t know what to do with it. Notions of ”cleaning up” PFAS from these practices are largely misguided, propagandistic ploys promulgated by the U.S. military.

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Third Of Nuclear-Plant Owners In Talks With Tech Firms To Power Up AI Data Centers

Big tech firms like Amazon are actively speaking with utility companies to build artificial intelligence data centers powered by clean, reliable nuclear energy. This move aligns with the ‘Next AI Trade’ investing theme, which was introduced to pro-subs in early April. 

“The owners of roughly a third of US nuclear power plants are in talks with tech companies to provide electricity to new data centers needed to meet the demands of an artificial-intelligence boom,” the Wall Street Journal says. 

In particular, WSJ sources say Amazon Web Services is securing a deal with Constellation Energy, the largest owner of US nuclear power plants, to supply clean, reliable atomic power to a data center on the East Coast. 

This is not the first time Amazon has negotiated with utilities about nuclear power.

In March, AWS purchased power provider Talen Energy’s 1,200-acre data center campus, which is directly adjacent to its 2.5 gigawatt (GW) nuclear power at the Salem Township site in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. 

WSJ pointed out that tech companies demanding nuclear power for AI data centers “would be effectively diverting existing electricity resources” and “could raise prices for other customers and hold back emission-cutting goals.” 

The nuclear-tech marriage has forced many Wall Street analysts in recent months to jump on the powering up America theme. Greater load demands are projected in the coming years due to AI data centers, electrification of the economy, and reshoring efforts. 

Recent estimates from North American Electric Reliability Corporation forecast that electricity growth over the next five years will increase from 2.6% to 4.7%, driven by major utilities revising up their estimates.

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Bill Gates Is Investing “Billions” In The New Wave Of Nuclear Power

It isn’t often Bill “Mr. I Know What’s Best For The Entire World” Gates comes up with an idea that we aren’t immediately skeptical of, but his recent pledge to promote next generation nuclear power sounds to us to be a common sense solution to multiple problems we’ll be facing in coming years. 

Gates is pledging billions of dollars to promote nuclear through startup TerraPower LLC, OilPrice.com wrote this week. And it looks like that number could grow. 

Gates recently told Bloomberg: “I put in over a billion, and I’ll put in billions more.”

OilPrice.com notes that nuclear power is gaining global traction as a key player in decarbonization strategies. In addition to TerraPower, companies like Sam Altman-led Oklo are also focused on modernizing nuclear with small modular reactors. 

Advocates emphasize its immense clean energy potential, proven technology, and existing infrastructure. Although not renewable, nuclear energy emits zero carbon and could help meet global emissions targets.

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DARPA’s planned nuclear rocket would use enough fuel to build a bomb

High-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) has been touted as the go-to fuel for powering next-gen nuclear reactors, which include the sodium-cooled TerraPower or the space-borne system powering Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO). That’s because it was supposed to offer higher efficiency while keeping uranium enrichment “well below the threshold needed for weapons-grade material,” according to the US Department of Energy.

This justified huge government investments in HALEU production in the US and UK, as well as relaxed security requirements for facilities using it as fuel. But now, a team of scientists has published an article in Science that argues that you can make a nuclear bomb using HALEU.

“I looked it up and DRACO space reactor will use around 300 kg of HALEU. This is marginal, but I would say you could make one a weapon with that much,” says Edwin Lyman, the director of Nuclear Power Safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists and co-author of the paper.

Forgotten threats

“When uranium is mined out of the ground, it’s mostly a mixture of two isotopes: uranium-238 and uranium-235. Uranium 235 concentrations are below one percent,” says Lyman. This is sent through an enrichment process, usually in gas centrifuges, where it is turned into gaseous form and centrifuged till the two isotopes are separated from each other due to their slight difference in their atomic weights. This can produce uranium with various levels of enrichment. Material that’s under 10 percent uranium-235 is called low-enriched uranium (LEU) and is used in power reactors working today. Moving the enrichment level up to between 10 and 20 percent, we get HALEU; above 20 percent, we start talking about highly enriched uranium, which can reach over 90 percent enrichment for uses like nuclear weapons.

“Historically, 20 percent has been considered a threshold between highly enriched uranium and low enriched uranium and, over time, that’s been associated with the limit of what is usable in nuclear weapons and what isn’t. But the truth is that threshold is not really a limit of weapons usability,” says Lyman. And we knew that since long time ago.

A study assessing the weaponization potential of uranium with different enrichment levels was done by the Los Alamos National Laboratory back in 1954. The findings were clear: Uranium enriched up to 10 percent was no good for weapons, regardless of how much of it you had. HALEU, though, was found to be of “weapons significance,” provided a sufficient amount was available. “My sense is that once they established 20 percent is somewhat acceptable, and given the material is weapons-usable only when you have enough of it, they just thought we’d need to limit the quantities and we’d be okay. That sort of got baked into the international security framework for uranium because there was not that much HALEU,” says Lyman. The Los Alamos study recommended releasing 100 kg of uranium enriched to up to 20 percent for research purposes in other countries, as they didn’t think 100 kg could lead to any nuclear threats.

The question that wasn’t answered at the time was how much was too much.

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ROCKETSTAR SUCCESSFULLY DEMONSTRATES FIRESTAR™ NUCLEAR FUSION-ENHANCED PULSED PLASMA PROPULSION DRIVE

RocketStar Inc. has announced the first successful demonstration of their nuclear fusion-enhanced pulsed plasma FireStar™ Drive. The potentially groundbreaking device upgrades the company’s base water-fueled pulsed plasma thruster by injecting particles into the drive’s exhaust plume, resulting in a fusion reaction that dramatically increases the base drive’s power output.

“This is the first productive use of nuclear fusion that doesn’t annihilate humanity,” quipped RocketStar’s CEO Chris Craddock and Chief Technology Officer Wes Fayler in a joint email to The Debrief.

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Israel ‘preparing to strike Iranian NUCLEAR facilities’ amid tense wait for revenge attack and soaring WW3 fears

ISRAEL is preparing to strike Iranian nuclear plants if faced with a revenge attack for the death of a top Tehran commander last week.

Netanyahu‘s war cabinet has been locked in crunch meetings over fears that Iran will launch an assault as Middle East tensions threaten to boil over into all-out war.

Now a Western security official has revealed that Israel will respond to any attacks by striking Iran‘s nuclear targets directly.

Israeli forces have been conducting secret air force drills in preparation for the dangerous escalation, Elaph News reports.

Iran is home to several nuclear sites – including power plants, uranium mines and research reactors.

A targeted attack against one of them could mark an unprecedented escalation in the melting pot of Middle East conflict.

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Zelensky Tries to Go Nuclear: Ukrainian Drone Strikes Russian-Controlled Nuke Site

Ukraine was Criticized by the International Atomic Energy Agency after carrying out a drone attack on the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant – striking a dome on top of a reactor that has been shut down.

Rafael Mariano Grossi, the IAEA director general, said in a statement that such a “detonation is consistent with IAEA observations.”

“I urge to refrain from actions that … jeopardize nuclear safety,” he said.

The power plant is the largest nuclear facility in Europe.

Grossi has been an outspoken critic of the fighting that has been occurring near the facility and has warned that “something very, very catastrophic could take place” if there is not some kind of “security protection zone.”

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Mystery of America’s first fatal nuclear disaster – with rumors still rife over 60 years later that explosion in remote Idaho town was triggered by one man’s murderous rage amid LOVE TRIANGLE

The SL-1 accident is the only fatal nuclear reactor event to ever occur on US soil.

An earth-shattering explosion at the Stationary Low-Power Plant Number 1 (SL-1) in January 1961 saw all three technicians on staff killed during what was meant to be routine maintenance of the government lab’s nuclear reactor.

Following a painstaking operation, the men’s bodies were retrieved – at the cost of 790 others being exposed to radiation out in Idaho‘s Lost River desert.

The three men were then wrapped in hundred pounds of lead, interned in steel coffins and buried under a slab of concrete to prevent any further spread. The lab was also considered lost and was buried a few hundred yards away.

But rumors surrounding the incident still swirl today, with some speculating the disaster was in fact a murder-suicide triggered by a sordid squabble after one of the crew members engaged in an affair with another’s wife. 

Indeed, one report claims that the man responsible for the explosion had received a phone call from his wife asking for a divorce just minutes earlier – while the co-worker accused of sleeping with his wife was later found pinned to the ceiling directly above the blown reactor.

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Fukushima Area Overrun by Radioactive Wild Boars

Japanese farmers living near the Fukushima nuclear power plant are struggling to overcome an unexpected outcome from the disaster: a surge in radioactive wild boars!

In the last five years, the population of contaminated creatures has been inadvertently left to flourish in the area near the power plant that the Japanese government deemed to be an ‘exclusion zone.’

As such, experts say that their numbers have grown from a mere 3,000 to a whopping 13,000 wild boars.

And, as their numbers swell, the boars have begun expanding beyond the exclusion zone and into nearby farms, leading to devastation as the insatiable animals feast on the food found there.

The cruel irony of the problem is that the boars would normally be a fantastic food source, but the radioactivity of the area has rendered them completely inedible and, thus, an enormous nuisance.

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Korean Fusion Reactor Breaks Record, Staying 7 Times Hotter Than The Sun’s Core

Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research, or KSTAR, is one of the most advanced test fusion reactors on the planet. Nicknamed the Korean artificial sun, it has now demonstrated sustained fusion temperature for almost a minute and the ability to contain extremely hot plasma for over 100 seconds.

Fusion is what powers stars, but in stars, it happens at lower temperatures than we need to do it here on Earth. That’s because gravity is keeping everything packed together so fusion is more likely to happen. So the temperature required on Earth for a Tokamak system – which is a donut-shaped reactor – is about seven times the temperature at the core of the Sun: 100 million °C (180 million °F).

KSTAR first reached this threshold in 2018 but only for 1.5 seconds. A year later, they were able to keep the plasma that hot for 8 seconds, increasing it to 20 seconds in 2020. The last record was in 2021, when the plasma was kept that hot for half a minute. Since then, the team at the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KFE) has upgraded the device by building a new tungsten divertor environment and they have pushed the temperature for longer.

Now, KSTAR can sustain 100 million °C for 48 seconds – and it can keep hot plasma in the high-confinement mode (also known as H-mode) for 102 seconds. The goal is to achieve 300 seconds of burning plasma by the end of 2026. 

“Despite being the first experiment run in the environment of the new tungsten divertors, thorough hardware testing and campaign preparation enabled us to achieve results surpassing those of previous KSTAR records in a short period,” Dr Si-Woo Yoon, Director of the KSTAR Research Center, said in a statement.

“To achieve the ultimate goal of KSTAR operation, we plan to sequentially enhance the performance of heating and current drive devices and also secure the core technologies required for long-pulse high performance plasma operations.”

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