Showing posts with label Sun. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sun. Show all posts
Wednesday, 5 March 2014
Friday, 14 February 2014
Sustainable nuclear fusion breakthrough raises hopes for ultimate green energy
US researchers have achieved a world first in an ambitious
experiment that aims to recreate the conditions at the heart of the sun
and pave the way for nuclear fusion reactors.
The scientists generated more energy from fusion reactions than they put into the nuclear fuel, in a small but crucial step along the road to harnessing fusion power. The ultimate goal – to produce more energy than the whole experiment consumes – remains a long way off, but the feat has nonetheless raised hopes that after decades of setbacks, firm progress is finally being made.
Fusion energy has the potential to become a radical alternative power source, with zero carbon emissions during operation and minimal waste, but the technical difficulties in demonstrating fusion in the lab have so far proved overwhelming. While existing nuclear reactors generate energy by splitting atoms into lighter particles, fusion reactors combine light atomic nuclei into heavier particles.
In their experiments, researchers at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California use a bank of 192 powerful lasers to crush a minuscule amount of fuel so hard and fast that it becomes hotter than the sun.
The process is not straightforward. The lasers are fired into a gold capsule that holds a 2mm-wide spherical pellet. The fuel is coated on the inside of this plastic pellet in a layer as thin as a human hair.
When the laser light enters the gold capsule, it makes the walls of the gold container emit x-rays, which heat the pellet and make it implode with extraordinary ferocity. The fuel, a mixture of hydrogen isotopes called tritium and deuterium, partially fuses under the intense conditions.
The scientists have not generated more energy than the experiment uses in total. The lasers unleash nearly two megajoules of energy on their target, the equivalent, roughly, of two standard sticks of dynamite. But only a tiny fraction of this reaches the fuel. Writing in Nature, the scientists say fusion reactions in the fuel released at best 17 kilojoules of energy.
Though slight, the advance is welcome news for the NIF scientists. In 2012, the project was restructured and given more modest goals after six years of failure to generate more energy than the experiment consumes, known as "ignition".
Results from the NIF facility will help scientists work out how to build a fusion reactor, but the centre is funded primarily to help the US understand how its stockpile of nuclear weapons is ageing. The experiments help to verify computer models that are used in place of nuclear tests, which are now banned.
Omar Hurricane, the lead author of the report, said the latest improvement came by controlling the implosion of the spherical pellet more carefully. In previous experiments, the pellet distorted as it was crushed, which seemed to reduce the efficiency of the process. By squashing the fuel more softly, helium nuclei that are produced in the fusion reactions dump their energy into the fuel, heating it up even further, and driving a cycle of ever more fusion.
"We are finally, by harnessing these reactions, getting more energy out of that reaction than we put into the DT fuel," Hurricane said. The report appears in the journal Nature.
The dream of controlled fusion remains a distant hope, and Hurricane said it was too early to say whether it was even possible with the NIF facility. The researchers need to get a hundred times more energy from the fusion reactions before the process can run itself, and more for it to deliver an overall surplus of energy.
Steven Cowley, director of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy near Abingdon in the UK, said the study was "truly excellent" and began to address the core challenges of what is known as inertial fusion in the lab. He said the team may need a bigger laser, or a redesigned capsule that can be squashed more violently without becoming unstable. "Livermore should be given plenty of time to develop a better capsule. It strikes me that we have only just begun to understand the fusion regime," Cowley told the Guardian.
The Culham lab has taken a different approach, called magnetic confinement. As long ago as 1997, the facility generated 16MW of power with 24MW put into the device. "We have waited 60 years to get close to controlled fusion. We are now close in both magnetic and inertial. We must keep at it. The engineering milestone is when the whole plant produces more energy than it consumes," Cowley said.
The experimental fusion reactor Iter, which is being built in France, is expected to be the first plant to produce more energy than it consumes. The project has faced delays of more than two years and overrun budgets, but is still an international flagship for fusion research. "Iter is going slowly but progress is happening," said Cowley.
The scientists generated more energy from fusion reactions than they put into the nuclear fuel, in a small but crucial step along the road to harnessing fusion power. The ultimate goal – to produce more energy than the whole experiment consumes – remains a long way off, but the feat has nonetheless raised hopes that after decades of setbacks, firm progress is finally being made.
Fusion energy has the potential to become a radical alternative power source, with zero carbon emissions during operation and minimal waste, but the technical difficulties in demonstrating fusion in the lab have so far proved overwhelming. While existing nuclear reactors generate energy by splitting atoms into lighter particles, fusion reactors combine light atomic nuclei into heavier particles.
In their experiments, researchers at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California use a bank of 192 powerful lasers to crush a minuscule amount of fuel so hard and fast that it becomes hotter than the sun.
The process is not straightforward. The lasers are fired into a gold capsule that holds a 2mm-wide spherical pellet. The fuel is coated on the inside of this plastic pellet in a layer as thin as a human hair.
When the laser light enters the gold capsule, it makes the walls of the gold container emit x-rays, which heat the pellet and make it implode with extraordinary ferocity. The fuel, a mixture of hydrogen isotopes called tritium and deuterium, partially fuses under the intense conditions.
The scientists have not generated more energy than the experiment uses in total. The lasers unleash nearly two megajoules of energy on their target, the equivalent, roughly, of two standard sticks of dynamite. But only a tiny fraction of this reaches the fuel. Writing in Nature, the scientists say fusion reactions in the fuel released at best 17 kilojoules of energy.
Though slight, the advance is welcome news for the NIF scientists. In 2012, the project was restructured and given more modest goals after six years of failure to generate more energy than the experiment consumes, known as "ignition".
Results from the NIF facility will help scientists work out how to build a fusion reactor, but the centre is funded primarily to help the US understand how its stockpile of nuclear weapons is ageing. The experiments help to verify computer models that are used in place of nuclear tests, which are now banned.
Omar Hurricane, the lead author of the report, said the latest improvement came by controlling the implosion of the spherical pellet more carefully. In previous experiments, the pellet distorted as it was crushed, which seemed to reduce the efficiency of the process. By squashing the fuel more softly, helium nuclei that are produced in the fusion reactions dump their energy into the fuel, heating it up even further, and driving a cycle of ever more fusion.
"We are finally, by harnessing these reactions, getting more energy out of that reaction than we put into the DT fuel," Hurricane said. The report appears in the journal Nature.
The dream of controlled fusion remains a distant hope, and Hurricane said it was too early to say whether it was even possible with the NIF facility. The researchers need to get a hundred times more energy from the fusion reactions before the process can run itself, and more for it to deliver an overall surplus of energy.
Steven Cowley, director of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy near Abingdon in the UK, said the study was "truly excellent" and began to address the core challenges of what is known as inertial fusion in the lab. He said the team may need a bigger laser, or a redesigned capsule that can be squashed more violently without becoming unstable. "Livermore should be given plenty of time to develop a better capsule. It strikes me that we have only just begun to understand the fusion regime," Cowley told the Guardian.
The Culham lab has taken a different approach, called magnetic confinement. As long ago as 1997, the facility generated 16MW of power with 24MW put into the device. "We have waited 60 years to get close to controlled fusion. We are now close in both magnetic and inertial. We must keep at it. The engineering milestone is when the whole plant produces more energy than it consumes," Cowley said.
The experimental fusion reactor Iter, which is being built in France, is expected to be the first plant to produce more energy than it consumes. The project has faced delays of more than two years and overrun budgets, but is still an international flagship for fusion research. "Iter is going slowly but progress is happening," said Cowley.
Thursday, 9 January 2014
Sun Goes Wild - NOAA Issues Alert: Earth Directed X-Class Flare On Its Way; Chance Of More
Marc Slavo
SHTFplan.com
[Yesterday morning] The Daily Sheeple reported that the biggest sun spot in recent history had been identified, and that it had moved into position facing earth. The spot is so large that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says it could swallow three earths.
The spot was mostly quiet for the last few days and wasn’t directly facing earth, though a smaller Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) glanced the planet in the early hours of January 7th.
Then at 12:32 Central Time it went wild:
Though an X-1 Class flare is not going to cause widespread power outages across earth, the possibility of increased activity on the sun has been noted by NASA and other researchers, as the sunspot destabilizes further.
The rapid formation of sunspot AR1944 and the earth-facing ejections highlight how quickly life on earth could change if the right conditions are met.
In the summer of 2012 a massive solar flare was ejected by the sun and narrowly missed earth.
A decade ago in 2003 NASA identified the most powerful flare in recorded observational history:
These events occur quite regularly in the grand scheme. Recent observations suggest at least several occurrences in a lifetime. For the last hundred years since electronics made their way into our society we’ve been lucky, having experienced just minor disturbances.
But as the last decade shows, it can happen at any time and the after-effects would be catastrophic.
This is what prompted Senior Member of the House Homeland Security Committee Congresswoman Yvette Clarke to warn that the likelihood of a severe geo-magnetic event capable of crippling our electric grid is 100%.
Despite the various earthbound threats that exist, a solar flare is arguably the most probable threat we face as a civilization.
As Congressman Roscoe Bartlett has noted in the documentary Urban Danger, if an event of this magnitude hit earth we’d revert back to the stone age overnight:
It won’t be easy, but it is certainly survivable, and if you’ve developed a broad preparedness plan you would fair much better then the 90% of people who studies say wouldn’t make it in such a scenario.
Imagine for just a moment what would be going through your mind and the minds of those with whom you share this report if sunspot AR1944 had emitted an X-25+ Class solar flare that was heading for earth right now and that it would be here within 48 hours.
Would you be prepared for what happens when the national power grid collapses? Would you be ready for the catastrophe that would follow within a matter of hours?
Preparedness for such an event starts with a simple grid-down supply. Once those basics are covered and you have enough to keep your family afloat for two weeks, you could broaden your preparedness horizons with long-term food storage, emergency medical supplies, gold and silver as bartering currencies, and self defense strategies to protect against the inevitable hordes that would follow.
The threat is real. Countless officials and experts have warned of the possibility in our lifetimes.
What if tomorrow was the day?
SHTFplan.com
[Yesterday morning] The Daily Sheeple reported that the biggest sun spot in recent history had been identified, and that it had moved into position facing earth. The spot is so large that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says it could swallow three earths.
(Photo by Rocky Raybell : Sun spot AR1944 is so big it can be seen with amateur telescopes)
The spot was mostly quiet for the last few days and wasn’t directly facing earth, though a smaller Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) glanced the planet in the early hours of January 7th.
Then at 12:32 Central Time it went wild:
Massive sunspot AR1944 has erupted. The X1 flare has sent a coronal mass ejection into space, and it’s heading towards Earth.
[…]
NOAA has upped the risk from further X-class flares to 50% for the next 24 hours. Risk of M-class up to 80%The NASA-ESA Heliophysics Fleet is monitoring the sunspot and CME. Depending on its speed it could take anywhere from a day to three days to hit earth. NBC News reports that the flare is already responsible for radio traffic disruptions.
(Pictured: NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory
shows a blast of activity originating from the center of the sun’s disk on Tuesday)
Though an X-1 Class flare is not going to cause widespread power outages across earth, the possibility of increased activity on the sun has been noted by NASA and other researchers, as the sunspot destabilizes further.
The rapid formation of sunspot AR1944 and the earth-facing ejections highlight how quickly life on earth could change if the right conditions are met.
In the summer of 2012 a massive solar flare was ejected by the sun and narrowly missed earth.
Had it occurred just a week prior, the highly charged particles would have struck earth and, according to CU-Boulder Professor Daniel Baker, would have led to nothing short of a technological disaster across the globe.
The CME itself was massive… and its speed was unprecedented, clocking in at 7 million miles per hour.
While typical coronal mass ejections from the sun take two or three days to reach Earth, the 2012 event traveled from the sun’s surface to Earth in just 18 hours.
“The speed of this event was as fast or faster than anything that has been seen in the modern space age,” said Baker.
[…]
Had it hit Earth, the July 2012 event likely would have created a technological disaster by short-circuiting satellites, power grids, ground communication equipment and even threatening the health of astronauts and aircraft crews.
Source: Scientists Warn of Worst Case ScenarioBut that flare wasn’t a once-in-a-million-years event.
A decade ago in 2003 NASA identified the most powerful flare in recorded observational history:
In 2003 a solar flare emitted by the sun was the most powerful in recorded observational history, measuring in at levels so high that had it hit earth it would have likely disabled everything from the internet and mobile phones, to water utility plants and the whole of the U.S. electricity infrastructure.That event was originally thought to have been an X-28 class flare, more powerful than necessary to take out modern electronics across earth. It was later revised to a “whopping” x-45.
These events occur quite regularly in the grand scheme. Recent observations suggest at least several occurrences in a lifetime. For the last hundred years since electronics made their way into our society we’ve been lucky, having experienced just minor disturbances.
But as the last decade shows, it can happen at any time and the after-effects would be catastrophic.
This is what prompted Senior Member of the House Homeland Security Committee Congresswoman Yvette Clarke to warn that the likelihood of a severe geo-magnetic event capable of crippling our electric grid is 100%.
Despite the various earthbound threats that exist, a solar flare is arguably the most probable threat we face as a civilization.
As Congressman Roscoe Bartlett has noted in the documentary Urban Danger, if an event of this magnitude hit earth we’d revert back to the stone age overnight:
We could have events in the future where the power grid will go down and it’s not, in any reasonable time, coming back up. For instance, if when the power grid went down some of our large transformers were destroyed, damaged beyond use, we don’t make any of those in this country. They’re made overseas and you order one and 18 months to two years later they will deliver it. Our power grid is very vulnerable. It’s very much on edge. Our military knows that.So how does one survive such an event, where pretty much everything we have come to expect in our just-in-time modern society comes to a screeching halt within seconds of the disaster striking?
It won’t be easy, but it is certainly survivable, and if you’ve developed a broad preparedness plan you would fair much better then the 90% of people who studies say wouldn’t make it in such a scenario.
Imagine for just a moment what would be going through your mind and the minds of those with whom you share this report if sunspot AR1944 had emitted an X-25+ Class solar flare that was heading for earth right now and that it would be here within 48 hours.
Would you be prepared for what happens when the national power grid collapses? Would you be ready for the catastrophe that would follow within a matter of hours?
Preparedness for such an event starts with a simple grid-down supply. Once those basics are covered and you have enough to keep your family afloat for two weeks, you could broaden your preparedness horizons with long-term food storage, emergency medical supplies, gold and silver as bartering currencies, and self defense strategies to protect against the inevitable hordes that would follow.
The threat is real. Countless officials and experts have warned of the possibility in our lifetimes.
What if tomorrow was the day?
Sunday, 17 November 2013
Sun will 'flip upside down' within weeks, says NASA
The Independent
The sun is set to “flip upside down” within weeks as its magnetic field reverses polarity in an event that will send ripple effects throughout the solar system.
Although it may sound like a catastrophic occurrence,
there’s no need to run for cover. The sun switches its polarity,
flipping its magnetic north and south, once every eleven years through
an internal mechanism about which little is understood.
The swap could however cause intergalactic weather fronts such as geomagnetic storms, which can interfere with satellites and cause radio blackouts.
Nasa said in August that the change would happen in three to four months time, but it is impossible to give a more specific date. Scientist won’t know for around another three weeks whether the flip is complete.
The impact of the transfer will be widespread as the sun’s magnetic field exerts influence well beyond Pluto, past Nasa's Voyager probes positioned near the edge of interstellar space.
The event will be watched closely by researchers at Stanford University’s Wilcox Solar Observatory, which monitors the sun's magnetic field on a daily basis.
Todd Hoeksema, director of the Wilcox Solar Observatory, said the polarity change is built up throughout the eleven year cycle through areas of intense magnetic activity known as sunspots which gradually move towards the poles, eroding the existing opposite polarity.
Eventually, the magnetic field reduces to zero, before rebounding with the opposite polarity.
“It's kind of like a tide coming in or going out,” Hoeksema said. “Each little wave brings a little more water in, and eventually you get to the full reversal.”
One of the most noticeable effect on Earth will be a boost in the occurrence, range and visibility of auroras - the Northern Lights. “It’s not a catastrophic event, it’s a large scale event that has some real implications, but its not something we need to worry about,” added Hoeksema.
The swap could however cause intergalactic weather fronts such as geomagnetic storms, which can interfere with satellites and cause radio blackouts.
Nasa said in August that the change would happen in three to four months time, but it is impossible to give a more specific date. Scientist won’t know for around another three weeks whether the flip is complete.
The impact of the transfer will be widespread as the sun’s magnetic field exerts influence well beyond Pluto, past Nasa's Voyager probes positioned near the edge of interstellar space.
The event will be watched closely by researchers at Stanford University’s Wilcox Solar Observatory, which monitors the sun's magnetic field on a daily basis.
Todd Hoeksema, director of the Wilcox Solar Observatory, said the polarity change is built up throughout the eleven year cycle through areas of intense magnetic activity known as sunspots which gradually move towards the poles, eroding the existing opposite polarity.
Eventually, the magnetic field reduces to zero, before rebounding with the opposite polarity.
“It's kind of like a tide coming in or going out,” Hoeksema said. “Each little wave brings a little more water in, and eventually you get to the full reversal.”
One of the most noticeable effect on Earth will be a boost in the occurrence, range and visibility of auroras - the Northern Lights. “It’s not a catastrophic event, it’s a large scale event that has some real implications, but its not something we need to worry about,” added Hoeksema.
Monday, 7 November 2011
Monstrous Sunspot Rotates Toward Earth
There's a storm brewing on the sun's surface and it could unleash its magnetic fury on Earth within the next five days.
That ominous warning comes from solar scientists at the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center who are tracking a huge group of sunspots that are slowly rotating to face our planet. As imaged by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)
in Friday, this is the largest group of sunspots seen on the sun since
2005. The largest sunspot (pictured above) is 17-times the width of the
Earth. a risky
game of (solar) Russian Roulette.
Friday, 5 August 2011
Geomagnetic Storm Expected
So expect even more "disturbance" here on Earth...
------------
NOAA Region 1261, very active over the past few days, produced the third of a sequence of Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) and Solar Radio Blackout Events early today. The net effect of that activity is convergent CMEs expected to disturb the geomagnetic field in the early hours, Universal Time (UTC) of August 5. G3 (Strong) Geomagnetic Storm conditions are likely as well as a distinct chance of S2 (Moderate) Solar Radiation Storm levels being surpassed.
NOAA 1261 is still in a prime position, relative to Earth, for more geoeffective activity in the next few days.
New Solar Cycle 24 is in its early phase now, and this level activity is typical for this time interval. Expect increased space weather activity over the next few years as the Sun erupts more frequently.
Data used to provide space weather services are contributed by NOAA, USAF, NASA, NSF, USGS, the International Space Environment Services and other observatories, universities, and institutions. More information is available at SWPC's Web site http://swpc.noaa.gov
NOAA 1261 is still in a prime position, relative to Earth, for more geoeffective activity in the next few days.
New Solar Cycle 24 is in its early phase now, and this level activity is typical for this time interval. Expect increased space weather activity over the next few years as the Sun erupts more frequently.
Data used to provide space weather services are contributed by NOAA, USAF, NASA, NSF, USGS, the International Space Environment Services and other observatories, universities, and institutions. More information is available at SWPC's Web site http://swpc.noaa.gov
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