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India has announced intentions to export power reactors to other nations and is developing an advanced design for that purpose.

The head of India's Atomic Energy Commission, Anil Kakodkar, announced yesterday in Vienna a special version of the forthcoming Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR) adapted to use low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel.

123 Thorium
 
The long-term goal of India's nuclear program has been to develop an advanced heavy-water thorium cycle. The first stage of this employs the pressurized heavy-water reactors and light water reactors, to produce plutonium. 

 
Stage two uses fast neutron reactors to burn the plutonium and breed uranium-233 from locally mined thorium. The blanket around the core will have uranium as well as thorium, so that further plutonium is produced as well.
 

In stage three, AHWRs burn the uranium-233 from stage two with plutonium and thorium, getting about two thirds of their power from the thorium.
 

The first AHWR is meant to start construction in 2012, although no site has yet been announced. A prototype 500 MWe fast neutron reactor being built at Kalpakkam should be complete in 2011.

Producing 300 MWe, the unit is less than one third the capacity of a typical large reactor. It is designed to operate for up to 100 years and has a "next generation" level of safety that grants operators three days' grace in the event of a serious incident and requires no emergency planning beyond the site boundary under any circumstances.

The design is intended for overseas sales, and the AEC says that "the reactor is manageable with modest industrial infrastructure within the reach of developing countries."

The new fuel mix, AEC said, produces less p...

India has announced intentions to export power reactors to other nations and is developing an advanced design for that purpose.

The head of India's Atomic Energy Commission, Anil Kakodkar, announced yesterday in Vienna a special version of the forthcoming Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR) adapted to use low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel.

123 Thorium
 
The long-term goal of India's nuclear program has been to develop an advanced heavy-water thorium cycle. The first stage of this employs the pressurized heavy-water reactors and light water reactors, to produce plutonium. 

 
Stage two uses fast neutron reactors to burn the plutonium and breed uranium-233 from locally mined thorium. The blanket around the core will have uranium as well as thorium, so that further plutonium is produced as well.
 

In stage three, AHWRs burn the uranium-233 from stage two with plutonium and thorium, getting about two thirds of their power from the thorium.
 

The first AHWR is meant to start construction in 2012, although no site has yet been announced. A prototype 500 MWe fast neutron reactor being built at Kalpakkam should be complete in 2011.

Producing 300 MWe, the unit is less than one third the capacity of a typical large reactor. It is designed to operate for up to 100 years and has a "next generation" level of safety that grants operators three days' grace in the event of a serious incident and requires no emergency planning beyond the site boundary under any circumstances.

The design is intended for overseas sales, and the AEC says that "the reactor is manageable with modest industrial infrastructure within the reach of developing countries."

The new fuel mix, AEC said, produces less p...

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In a modest building on the west side of Salt Lake City, a team of specialists in advanced materials and electrochemistry has produced what could be the single most important breakthrough for clean, alternative energy since Socrates first noted solar heating 2,400 years ago.

The prize is the culmination of 10 years of research and testing -- a new generation of deep-storage battery that's small enough, and safe enough, to sit in your basement and power your home.

It promises to nudge the world to a paradigm shift as big as the switch from centralized mainframe computers in the 1980s to personal laptops. But this time the mainframe is America's antiquated electrical grid; and the switch is to personal power stations in millions of individual homes.

Former energy secretary Bill Richardson once disparaged the U.S. electrical grid as "third world," and he was painfully close to the mark. It's an inefficient, aging relic of a century-old approach to energy and a weak link in national security in an age of terrorism.

Taking a load off the grid through electricity production and storage at home would extend the life of the system and avoid the expenditure of tens, or even hundreds, of billions to make it "smart."

The battery breakthrough comes from a Salt Lake company called Ceramatec, the R&D arm of CoorsTek, a world leader in advanced materials and elect...

Electric tech could make plugs obsolete

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Imagine a fluid that flows both perfectly and not at all. A Zen master might pose such a riddle, but in a new theoretical proof, physicists have shown that such a paradoxical state of matter can indeed exist.

It’s called a superglass — “super” in the same sense as superconductors and superfluids, which is to say that quantum weirdness lurks.

A superglass would look and feel just like a normal glassy solid. As in regular glass, the atoms in a superglass would be arranged randomly — instead of in a crystalline lattice — because a glass is essentially a liquid that has ceased to flow.

But pick up a piece of superglass and rotate it, and some portion of its atoms won’t rotate. Instead, these atoms flow through the rotating solid with zero friction, as in a superfluid. And because there’s no friction, the rest of the atoms in the solid can’t drag those slippery atoms along — just as a superfluid in a spinning cup will, from an observer’s point of view, hold perfectly still instead of swirling with the cup.

While the existence of superglasses has not been conclusively demonstrated in the lab, research reported in the December 8 Physical Review B shows that the laws of physics do permit this exotic state of matter to exist at temperatures close to absolute zero, or -273º Celsius.

“It’s actually a bit of a paradox that you usually think of a glass as like a fluid that doesn’t flow, but a superglass also behaves like a superfluid,” says Claudio Chamon, a condensed matter theorist at Boston University and coauthor of the study. The phenomenon is “only quantum mechanical — it doesn’t happen in the classical system,” in which atoms are imagined to act like tiny billiard balls.

Physicists still don’t fully understand how some of the atoms in a superglass would be able to move with zero friction. Chamo...

It’s time to stop shrinking. Moore’s Law, the semiconductor industry’s obsession with the shrinking of transistors and their commensurate steady doubling on a chip about every two years, has been the source of a 50-year technical and economic revolution. Whether this scaling paradigm lasts for five more years or 15, it will eventually come to an end. The emphasis in electronics design will have to shift to devices that are not just increasingly infinitesimal but increasingly capable.

Earlier this year, I and my colleagues at Hewlett-Packard Labs, in Palo Alto, Calif., surprised the electronics community with a fascinating candidate for such a device: the memristor. It had been theorized nearly 40 years ago, but because no one had managed to build one, it had long since become an esoteric curiosity. That all changed on 1 May, when my group published the details of the memristor in Nature.

Combined with transistors in a hybrid chip, memristors could radically improve the performance of digital circuits without shrinking transistors. Using transistor...