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Originally posted by YALE
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Lets go ahead and define the term need here....haha
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Lets go ahead and define the term need here....haha -
It does, but it's indirectly. There is no "spent fuel", per se, but there will be items that require proper disposal at some point..Originally posted by YALE View Post
The direct "waste products" are Helium-4 and the neutron. The Helium-4 is nothing to be concerned about - it's ordinary stable Helium. What is of concern is that 14.1 MeV neutron - or more specifically - what that 14.1 MeV neutron hits. That's where the "waste" of a fusion reactor is going to come from - the radioactivity induced by the neutron that comes out of the reaction
The 14.1 MeV neutrons irradiate the surrounding structure, and when the neutron is ultimately absorbed, the absorbing nuclide generally becomes radioactive In this sense, fusion does produce waste products in the form of irradiated (and activated) structural materials, which ultimately have to be disposed in some appropriate facility.
Absolutely minuscule when compared to fission reactors though; like 1%.Last edited by Strychnine; 11-03-2015, 09:10 AM.Comment
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In a new round of testing, NASA confirms yet again that the 'impossible' EMdrive thruster works
Engineer Roger Shawyer’s controversial EM Drive thruster jets back into relevancy this week, as a team of researchers at NASA’s Eagleworks Laboratories recently completed yet another round of testing on the seemingly impossible tech. Though no official peer-reviewed lab paper has been published yet, and NASA institutes strict press release restrictions on the Eagleworks lab these days, engineer Paul March took to the NASA Spaceflight forum to explain the group’s findings. In essence, by utilizing an improved experimental procedure, the team managed to mitigate some of the errors from prior tests — yet still found signals of unexplained thrust.
Isaac Newton should be sweating.
Flying in the face of traditional laws of physics, the EM Drive makes use of a magnetron and microwaves to create a propellantless propulsion system. By pushing microwaves into a closed, truncated cone and back towards the small end of said cone, the drive creates the momentum and force necessary to propel a craft forward. Because the system is a reactionless drive, it goes against humankind’s fundamental comprehension of physics, hence its controversial nature.
On the NASA spaceflight forums, March revealed as much as he could about the advancements that have been made with EM Drive and its relative technology. After apologizing for not having the ability to share pictures or the supporting data from a peer-reviewed lab paper, he starts by explaining (as straightforward as rocket science can get) that the Eagleworks lab successfully built and installed a 2nd generation magnetic damper which helps reduce stray magnetic fields in a vacuum chamber. The addition reduced magnetic fields by an order of magnitude inside the chamber, and also decreased Lorentz force interactions.
However, despite ruling out Lorentz forces almost entirely, March still reported a contamination caused by thermal expansion. Unfortunately, this reported contamination proves even worse in a vacuum (i.e. outer space) due in large part to its inherently high level of insulation. To combat this, March acknowledged the team is now developing an advanced analytics tool to assist in the separation of the contamination, as well as an integrated test which aims to alleviate thermally induced errors altogether.
While these advancements and additions are no doubt a boon for continued research of the EM Drive, the fact that the machine still produced what March calls “anomalous thrust signals” is by far the test’s single biggest discovery. The reason why this thrust exists still confounds even the brightest rocket scientists in the world, but the recurring phenomenon of direction-based momentum does make the EM Drive appear less a combination of errors and more like a legitimate answer to interstellar travel.
At this time, it’s unknown when Eagleworks Laboratories intends to officially publish its peer-reviewed paper, however, hearing of the EM Drive’s advancements from one of its top engineers bodes well for the future of this fascinating tech.Comment
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So they just flipped the switch on this bish.Originally posted by Strychnine View PostOK, fuck this.
I hate you, Aaron.
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Nice!
Here's a pic I saw posted somewhere else
10th December 2015: The first plasma in Wendelstein 7-X. It consisted of helium and reached a temperature of about one million degrees Celsius. (coloured black-and-white photo)
On 10th December, the day had arrived: the operating team in the control room started up the magnetic field and initiated the computer-operated experiment control system. It fed around one milligram of helium gas into the evacuated plasma vessel, switched on the microwave heating for a short 1,3 megawatt pulse – and the first plasma could be observed by the installed cameras and measuring devices. “We’re starting with a plasma produced from the noble gas helium. We’re not changing over to the actual investigation object, a hydrogen plasma, until next year,” explains project leader Professor Thomas Klinger: “This is because it’s easier to achieve the plasma state with helium. In addition, we can clean the surface of the plasma vessel with helium plasmas.”
The first plasma in the machine had a duration of one tenth of a second and achieved a temperature of around one million degrees. “We’re very satisfied”, concludes Dr. Hans-Stephan Bosch, whose division is responsible for the operation of the Wendelstein 7-X, at the end of the first day of experimentation. “Everything went according to plan.” The next task will be to extend the duration of the plasma discharges and to investigate the best method of producing and heating helium plasmas using microwaves. After a break for New Year, confinement studies will continue in January, which will prepare the way for producing the first plasma from hydrogen.Comment
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Originally posted by mstng86 View PostOriginally posted by Strychnine View PostNice!
Here's a pic I saw posted somewhere else
10th December 2015: The first plasma in Wendelstein 7-X. It consisted of helium and reached a temperature of about one million degrees Celsius. (coloured black-and-white photo)
http://www.ipp.mpg.de/3984226/12_15
What a time to be alive.G'Day MateComment
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Bad news for the Standard Model?
Potential New Particle Shows Up at the LHC, Thrilling and Confounding Physicists
The gigantic accelerator in Europe has produced hints of an exotic particle that defies the known laws of physics
A little wiggle on a graph, representing just a handful of particles, has set the world of physics abuzz. Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, the largest particle accelerator on Earth, reported yesterday that their machine might have produced a brand new particle not included in the established laws of particle physics known as the Standard Model. Their results, based on the data collected from April to November after the LHC began colliding protons at nearly twice the energy of its previous runs, are too inconclusive to be sure—many physicists warned that the wiggle could just as easily represent a statistical fluke. Nevertheless, the finding has already spawned at least 10 new papers in less than a day proposing a theoretical explanation for the particle, and has the halls and blackboards of physics departments around the world churning.
“This is something that we’ve been waiting for for a long time,” says Adam Falkowski, a physicist at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Warsaw and a member of the CERN Theory Group. “Of course we are aware this could be nothing. But for my generation, this is the first time there is a very large, quite reliable signal of physics beyond the Standard Model, so it’s definitely very exciting.” Of course, others echoed the usual refrain of caution: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and this is not that,” Columbia University physicist Peter Woit wrote on his blog.
If the LHC truly has seen a new particle, however, the question looming large is: What is it? From its signature at the LHC, the particle must weigh roughly 750 giga-electron volts (GeV), around 750 times the mass of the proton, and would fall into the class of bosons, meaning its spin has an integer value. Some theorists say the newcomer looks like a heavier cousin of the Higgs boson, which similarly first showed up at the LHC as a highly intriguing blip in the data about four years ago. Or it could be a kind of portal particle into the dark matter sector—because this particle decays almost immediately, on its own it cannot account for the invisible matter that seems to be ubiquitous in space, but it may be a messenger that communicates with the dark matter particle, theorists suggested. Another hypothetical alternative is that it is a graviton, the predicted carrier particle for the force of gravity.
“There’s a long list of possible things it could be beyond what we already know the universe contains,” says Jim Olsen, a Princeton University physicist who presented the CMS results. “Before today there was no theory paper that predicted we would find this.” Many scientists have been hoping the LHC would manifest proof of a theory called supersymmetry, which predicts many additional “partner” particles to match the ones we already know of. The 750-GeV particle, however, would not be one of these partners. “Even if this signal turns out to be right, it does not yet obviously tell us anything about whether there is supersymmetry,” says Peter Graham, a theorist at Stanford University.
The most striking thing about the results, scientists say, is that two experiments at the LHC—ATLAS and CMS (for Compact Muon Solenoid)—which use different setups and conduct wholly separate analyses of their independent sets of data, saw signs of roughly the same thing. “It’s a significant excess in ATLAS alone and that would be interesting by itself, however additional credence is given by the fact that two experiments see it in the same place,” Falkowski says. “It reduces the chance that it’s a random fluctuation by a large factor.” There is still cause, however, for skepticism. “If you look in a lot of places there’s a decent chance you’ll see a fluctuation in at least one place,” says Ken Bloom of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, a member of the CMS team. “My own personal guess is that it’s most likely a fluctuation. We see relatively low-significance things like this all the time.” Physicists also say that such a particle probably should have shown up in the earlier runs at the LHC. Although those runs were operating at lower energies, they still would have been sufficient to create a particle in the 750-GeV mass range, but researchers saw only a very minor hint of anything there. Statistical flukes, however, run both ways, and perhaps those runs just happened to come up relatively empty.
The signal ATLAS saw amounted to about 10 particles more than would be expected from “background”—that is, normal particles within the standard canon—after around a billion proton collisions. CMS saw roughly three, according to plots scientists presented yesterday. Those tallies may sound meager, but the experiments are so sensitive, and have such precise predictions for the number of particles of any given mass they expect to see, that the results were statistically significant. Still, “it is not a discovery—it’s a potential discovery,” Olsen says.
Impatient physicists will not have to wait long to learn the truth. The data coming back from the LHC next year should soon either confirm or disprove the possible new particle. “I certainly hope we’ll get something interesting in the future, but we don’t know,” Bloom says. “If these results turn out to be the first hint of that, then we’ll look back on this day a few years from now and say, ‘that’s when we first started seeing things.’ I consider this something of a teaser.”Comment
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Decomposition of uranium in a cloud chamber
The chamber is filled with a supersaturated vapor of water or alcohol. If a charged particle (such as an electron or in this gif's case, an alpha particle, aka a helium nucleus) flies through it and charges the vapor molecules. These charged molecules act as a condensation site and the supersaturated vapor quickly condenses on those ions which we see as mist. Different particles leave different trails based on their size, speed, and field strength.Comment
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Not what I would have expected to see, assuming I would ever get to witness such an event.Originally posted by Strychnine View Post
Pretty cool none-the-less.
DavidComment
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Gravitational waves detected 100 years after Einstein's prediction
LIGO opens new window on the universe with observation of gravitational waves from colliding black holes
The plots show signals of gravitational waves detected by the twin LIGO observatories. The signals came from two merging black holes 1.3 billion light-years away. The top two plots show data received at each detector, along with waveforms predicted by general relativity. The X-axis plots time, the Y-axis strain--the fractional amount by which distances are distorted. The LIGO data match the predictions very closely. The final plot compares data from both facilities, confirming the detection.
For the first time, scientists have observed ripples in the fabric of spacetime called gravitational waves, arriving at Earth from a cataclysmic event in the distant universe. This confirms a major prediction of Albert Einstein's 1915 general theory of relativity and opens an unprecedented new window onto the cosmos.
Gravitational waves carry information about their dramatic origins and about the nature of gravity that cannot otherwise be obtained. Physicists have concluded that the detected gravitational waves were produced during the final fraction of a second of the merger of two black holes to produce a single, more massive spinning black hole. This collision of two black holes had been predicted but never observed.
The gravitational waves were detected on September 14, 2015 at 5:51 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (09:51 UTC) by both of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, USA. The LIGO Observatories are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and were conceived, built, and are operated by Caltech and MIT. The discovery, accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters, was made by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (which includes the GEO Collaboration and the Australian Consortium for Interferometric Gravitational Astronomy) and the Virgo Collaboration using data from the two LIGO detectors.
Based on the observed signals, LIGO scientists estimate that the black holes for this event were about 29 and 36 times the mass of the sun, and the event took place 1.3 billion years ago. About 3 times the mass of the sun was converted into gravitational waves in a fraction of a second -- with a peak power output about 50 times that of the whole visible universe. By looking at the time of arrival of the signals -- the detector in Livingston recorded the event 7 milliseconds before the detector in Hanford -- scientists can say that the source was located in the Southern Hemisphere.
According to general relativity, a pair of black holes orbiting around each other lose energy through the emission of gravitational waves, causing them to gradually approach each other over billions of years, and then much more quickly in the final minutes. During the final fraction of a second, the two black holes collide into each other at nearly one-half the speed of light and form a single more massive black hole, converting a portion of the combined black holes' mass to energy, according to Einstein's formula E=mc2. This energy is emitted as a final strong burst of gravitational waves. It is these gravitational waves that LIGO has observed.
The existence of gravitational waves was first demonstrated in the 1970s and 80s by Joseph Taylor, Jr., and colleagues. Taylor and Russell Hulse discovered in 1974 a binary system composed of a pulsar in orbit around a neutron star. Taylor and Joel M. Weisberg in 1982 found that the orbit of the pulsar was slowly shrinking over time because of the release of energy in the form of gravitational waves. For discovering the pulsar and showing that it would make possible this particular gravitational wave measurement, Hulse and Taylor were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1993.
The new LIGO discovery is the first observation of gravitational waves themselves, made by measuring the tiny disturbances the waves make to space and time as they pass through Earth.
"Our observation of gravitational waves accomplishes an ambitious goal set out over 5 decades ago to directly detect this elusive phenomenon and better understand the universe, and, fittingly, fulfills Einstein's legacy on the 100th anniversary of his general theory of relativity," says Caltech's David H. Reitze, executive director of the LIGO Laboratory.
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Not quite as big a deal as detection of Gravity Waves, but...
In the Bernie Sanders' spirit of giving away free shit, download yourself some cool NASA/JPL retro sci-fi space travel posters.
When the government pays, the government controls.Comment
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Theoretical question.Originally posted by Strychnine View Post
Say we develop super high speed space travel. Could we in theory head out into space a determined distance and then turn around and observe the earth from this great distance in order to see the past?
Granted we would have to travel faster than light to get far enough ahead to do this, but in theory I could work, correct?G'Day MateComment
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Only if you do it on a treadmill.Originally posted by Grimpala View Post
And, in theory, yes...it would work, theoretically."It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom - for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself."Comment
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in theory.Originally posted by Grimpala View Post"If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." - Henry FordComment
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