US government works to 'cocoon' old nuclear reactors
Costs to clean up a massive nuclear weapons complex in Washington state are usually expressed in the hundreds of billions of dollars and involve decades of work.
Nov 4, 2021
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Energy & Green Tech
Costs to clean up a massive nuclear weapons complex in Washington state are usually expressed in the hundreds of billions of dollars and involve decades of work.
Nov 4, 2021
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Engineering
Engineers at Lancaster University have led research that discovers a way to generate renewable biofuel additives, using radiation that could be derived from nuclear waste.
Sep 22, 2021
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Energy & Green Tech
Bioenergy from crops is a sustainable alternative to fossil fuels. New crops such as energycane can produce several times more fuel per acre than soybeans. Yet, challenges remain in processing the crops to extract fuel efficiently.
Jul 7, 2021
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Engineering
We may be on the brink of a new paradigm for nuclear power, a group of nuclear specialists suggested recently in The Bridge, the journal of the National Academy of Engineering. Much as large, expensive, and centralized computers ...
Jun 25, 2021
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Engineering
The big holes in Swiss cheese help make it a tasty treat. Now, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) are adding tiny, Swiss-cheese-type holes to components to improve ...
Jun 18, 2021
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Energy & Green Tech
When one of the largest modern earthquakes struck Japan on March 11, 2011, the nuclear reactors at Fukushima-Daiichi automatically shut down, as designed. The emergency systems, which would have helped maintain the necessary ...
May 21, 2021
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Robotics
Deep underground in eastern France, a four-legged bundle of energy named Scar steps gingerly through vast caverns, loaded with sensors for taking measures in places where humans might fear to tread.
May 12, 2021
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Energy & Green Tech
It's seen as the missing link in the race for carbon-neutrality: "green" hydrogen produced without fossil fuel energy is a popular buzzword in competing press releases and investment plans across the globe.
Mar 31, 2021
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Energy & Green Tech
Reaching zero net emissions of carbon dioxide from energy and industry by 2050 can be accomplished by rebuilding U.S. energy infrastructure to run primarily on renewable energy, at a net cost of about $1 per person per day, ...
Jan 27, 2021
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Engineering
Nuclear energy provides more carbon-free electricity in the United States than solar and wind combined, making it a key player in the fight against climate change. But the U.S. nuclear fleet is aging, and operators are under ...
Dec 18, 2020
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A nuclear weapon is an explosive device that derives its destructive force from nuclear reactions, either fission or a combination of fission and fusion. Both reactions release vast quantities of energy from relatively small amounts of matter; a modern thermonuclear weapon weighing little more than a thousand kilograms can produce an explosion comparable to the detonation of more than a billion kilograms of conventional high explosive. Even small nuclear devices can devastate a city. Nuclear weapons are considered weapons of mass destruction, and their use and control has been a major aspect of international policy since their debut.
In the history of warfare, only two nuclear weapons have been detonated offensively, both near the end of World War II. The first was detonated on the morning of 6 August 1945, when the United States dropped a uranium gun-type device code-named "Little Boy" on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The second was detonated three days later when the United States dropped a plutonium implosion-type device code-named "Fat Man" on the city of Nagasaki, Japan. These bombings resulted in the immediate deaths of around 120,000 people (mostly civilians) from injuries sustained from the explosion and acute radiation sickness, and even more deaths from long-term effects of ionizing radiation. The use of these weapons was and remains controversial. (See atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for a full discussion.)
Since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, nuclear weapons have been detonated on over two thousand occasions for testing purposes and demonstration purposes. The only countries known to have detonated nuclear weapons—and that acknowledge possessing such weapons—are (chronologically) the United States, the Soviet Union (succeeded as a nuclear power by Russia), the United Kingdom, France, the People's Republic of China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea. Israel is also widely believed to possess nuclear weapons, though it does not acknowledge having them. (For more information on these states' nuclear programs, as well as other states that formerly possessed nuclear weapons or are suspected of seeking nuclear weapons, see list of states with nuclear weapons.)
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA