Nuclear Fusion-Fission Hybrid Saves The Future

Physicists at The University of Texas at Austin have designed a new system that, when fully developed, would use fusion to eliminate most of the transuranic waste produced by nuclear power plants.

Toxic nuclear waste is stored at sites around the U.S. Debate surrounds the construction of a large-scale geological storage site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which many maintain is costly and dangerous. The storage capacity of Yucca Mountain, which is not expected to open until 2020, is set at 77,000 tons. The amount of nuclear waste generated by the U.S. will exceed this amount by 2010.

The scientists propose destroying the waste using a fusion-fission hybrid reactor, the centerpiece of which is a high power Compact Fusion Neutron Source (CFNS). The CFNS would provide abundant neutrons through fusion to a surrounding fission blanket that uses transuranic waste as nuclear fuel. The fusion-produced neutrons augment the fission reaction, imparting efficiency and stability to the waste incineration process.

The CFNS is based on a tokamak, which is a machine with a "magnetic bottle" that is highly successful in confining high temperature (more than 100 million°C) fusion plasmas for sufficiently long times.

The process would ultimately reduce the transuranic waste from the original fission reactors by up to 99 percent. Burning that waste also produces energy. link

Ref.: Fusion–Fission Transmutation Scheme—Efficient destruction of nuclear waste. 2009. M. Kotschenreuther, et al. Fusion Engineering and Design 84: 83-88.

Roky Erickson - Creature with the Atom Brain (1980)


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House of Mystery #129 (Dec. 1962) © DC Comics

The Life Battery

Strange Tales #78 (March, 1957) © DC Comics
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Suppressed for decades, the shocking truth about the extinction of the dinosaurs can now be revealed! Read on!

Story: Gardner Fox, pencils: Gil Kane, inks: Joe Giella

Cosmic Ray Decay Reveals Secrets of the Stratosphere

Not Brand Echh! © Marvel Comics

The number of high-energy cosmic-rays reaching a detector deep underground, closely matches temperature measurements in the stratosphere. For the first time, scientists have shown how this relationship can be used to identify weather events that occur very suddenly in the stratosphere during the Northern Hemisphere winter.

Cosmic-rays known as muons are produced following the decay of other cosmic rays known as mesons. Increasing the temperature of the atmosphere expands the atmosphere so that fewer mesons are destroyed on impact with air, leaving more to decay naturally to muons. Consequently, if temperature increases so does the number of muons detected.

What surprised the scientists was the intermittent and sudden increases observed in the levels of muons during the winter months. These jumps in the data occurred over just a few days. On investigation, they found these changes coincided with very sudden increases in the temperature of the stratosphere (by up to 40 oC in places!). Looking more closely at supporting meteorological data, they realised they were observing a major weather event, known as a Sudden Stratospheric Warming. On average, these occur every other year and are notoriously unpredictable.

This study has shown, for the first time, that cosmic-ray data can be used effectively to identify these events. link

Ref.: Sudden stratospheric warmings seen in MINOS deep underground muon data. S.M. Osprey et al., Geophys. Res. Lett. in press.

Launched This Day: 1st Atomic Submarine

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One this day in 1954, the first atomic submarine, the U.S.S. Nautilus, was launched at Groton, Connecticut. All vessels previously known as "submarines" were in fact only submersible craft. Because of the nuclear power plant, the Nautilus could stay submerged for months at a time, unlike diesel-fueled subs, whose engines required vast amounts of oxygen.

Nautilus demonstrated her capabilities in 1958 when she sailed beneath the Arctic icepack to the North Pole. Scores of nuclear submarines followed Nautilus, replacing the United States' diesel boat fleet. After patrolling the seas until 1980, the Nautilus is back home at Groton. link

Arctic Submarine Timeline

Atomic Submarine has been released by Criterion(!) in a nice, new boxed set called "Monsters & Madmen" along with The First Man Into Space, The Haunted Strangler, & Corridors of Blood all under a beautiful cover by Darwyn Cooke (we highlighted another of his Criterion covers HERE).

The DVD Journal reviewed the set and had this to say:

"The Atomic Submarine (72 minutes, Criterion no. 366) is to James Cameron's The Abyss what It! The Terror from Beyond Space is to Ridley Scott's Alien. When a nuclear-powered submarine, the Tiger Shark, sets out to investigate a series of mysterious disappearances near the Arctic Circle, its fearless crew finds itself besieged by electrical storms, an Unidentified Floating Saucer, and lots of hairy tentacles."

"There's something sublime in the hairy eyeball's "telepathic" baritone introduction to Arthur Franz: "So, Commander Holloway, as you Earth inhabitants would express it, we meet ... face to face!" Let's not forget the bombastic narrator ("Adapt a complicated guidance system to a huge ballistic rocket, convert it to a water-to-air intercept missile? It was foolish, it was insane, it was fantastic! But it was their only hope. And the Earth's only hope!"). And the Theremin-heavy musical score adds to the cheese factor with "electro-sonic" gusto."

Tomorrow’s Fear Becomes Today’s Nightmare!:

I Battled The Evolution Beasts

My Greatest Adventure # 54 (April 1961) © DC Comics
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Resolving A Quantum Paradox with The Atomic Knights

"For nearly a century, the widespread interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests that everything is uncertain until it is observed, and that observation inevitably alters reality," says Professor Steinberg. "However, in the 1990s, a technique known as 'interaction-free measurement' seemed to promise the ability to 'see without looking’. But when Lucien Hardy proposed that one could never reliably make inferences about past events which hadn't been directly observed, a paradox emerged which suggested that whenever one attempted to reason about the past in this way they would be led into error.

Scientists have now combined Hardy's Paradox with a new theory known as weak measurement showing that in one sense, one can indeed talk about the past, resolving the paradox. Weak measurement is a tool whereby the presence of a detector is less than the level of uncertainty around what is being measured, so that there is an imperceptible impact on the experiment.

"We found that all of the seemingly paradoxical conclusions in Hardy's Paradox can, in fact, be experimentally verified," says Steinberg, "but that the use of weak measurement removes the contradiction."

"Until recently, it seemed impossible to carry out Hardy's proposal in practice, let alone to confirm or resolve the paradox," he says. "We have finally been able to do so, and to apply Aharonov's methods to the problem, showing that there is a way, even in quantum mechanics, in which one can quite consistently discuss past events even after they are over and done. Weak measurement finds what is there without disturbing it." link

Ref: Experimental Joint Weak Measurement on a Photon Pair as a Probe of Hardy's Paradox. 2009. J. S. Lundeen and A. M. Steinberg. Phys. Rev. Lett. 102, 020404 (2009)

Strange Adventures #141 (June, 1962). Atomic Knights © DC Comics
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Worn This Day (1797): First Top Hat

Art by Art Adams

In 1797, the top hat was first worn in England by James Heatherington, a Strand haberdasher in London. An issue of the Times of that period records that when he left his shop with his extraordinary headwear, a crowd of onlookers assembled, which degenerated into a shoving match. Heatherington was summoned to appear in court before the Lord Mayor and fined £50 for going about in a manner "calculated to frighten timid people."

Within a month, he was overwhelmed with orders for the new top hats. link

Zatanna © DC Comics

Professor Eureka

© DC Comics

Solved: The Mystery of The Walking Martian Rocks

Rocks on Mars are on the move, rolling into the wind and forming organized patterns, according to new research.

Images taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit show small rocks regularly spaced about 5 to 7 cm apart on the intercrater plains between Lahontan Crater and the Columbia Hills.

The new finding counters the previous explanation of the evenly spaced arrangement of small rocks on Mars. That explanation suggested the rocks were picked up and carried downwind by extreme high-speed winds thought to occur on Mars in the past.

Pelletier and his colleagues suggest that wind blows sand away from the front of the rock, creating a pit, and then deposits that sand behind the rock, creating a hill. The rock then rolls forward into the pit, moving into the wind, he said. As long as the wind continues to blow, the process is repeated and the rocks move forward.

These Spirit Rover camera images of the intercrater plain between Mars' Lahontan Crater show uniformly-spaced small rocks, known as clasts. Credit: GSA

The process is nearly the same with a cluster of rocks. However, with a cluster of rocks, those in the front of the group shield those in the middle or on the edges from the wind. Because the middle and outer rocks are not directly hit by the wind, the wind creates pits to the sides of those rocks. Therefore, they roll to the side, not directly into the wind, and the cluster begins to spread out.

Pelletier plans to apply the same models to larger features on Mars such as sand dunes and wind-sculpted valleys and ridges called "yardangs." press release

Ref.: Wind-Driven Reorganization of Coarse Clasts on the Surface of Mars. 2008. Geology

NASA Mars Exploration Rover Mission

Aquaman, Microbe Hunter!

Adventure Comics #200 (May 1954). Aquaman © DC Comics

Announced This Day: Discovery of X-Rays

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In 1896, German scientist, Wilhelm Röntgen announced his discovery of x-rays. He sent copies of his manuscript and some of his x-ray photographs to several renowned physicists and friends, including Lord Kelvin in Glasgow and Henre Poincare in Paris. Four days later, on 5 Jan 1896, Die Presse published the news in a front-page article which described the discovery and suggested new methods of medical diagnoses might be made with this new kind of radiation. link

'X'-The Man With X-Ray Eyes