The Russian space agency has proposed a powerful new way to get a spacecraft to Mars or beyond: just put a big ole nuclear reactor on board.

The head of the agency, Anatoly Perminov, just proposed this new class of nuclear-powered spaceships for manned missions to explore our solar system. “The project is aimed at implementing large-scale space exploration programs, including a manned mission to Mars, interplanetary travel, the creation and operation of planetary outposts” [AP], Perminov wrote in an online statement. He suggested that preliminary designs could be completed by 2012, and said it would then take about nine years and $600 million to build the spacecraft. Some experts call these numbers utterly unrealistic, but Russian President Dmitry Medvedev insists that the government is very serious about the project.

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Tired of cellphones and other electronic gadgets that run out of juice too quickly? Then you can happily look forward to further developments from the lab of researcher Jae Wan Kwon, who has developed a long-lasting nuclear battery the size and thickness of a penny. In time, Kwon hopes to get the size down so that the battery is no thicker than a human hair.

The batteries pose no danger of a nuclear meltdown, Kwon notes. Although nuclear batteries generate electricity from atomic energy like nuclear reactors, they don’t use a chain reaction, instead using the emissions from a radioactive isotope to generate electricity [Gizmag]. As the isotope naturally decays, the charged particles released can be used to create an electrical current. Nuclear batteries, which hold their charges for years, are already used in some specialty fields. For example, they’re used to power spacecraft that are voyaging too far from the sun to run on solar panels, and also in pacemakers, since changing a battery inside the body would be rather inconvenient. But the existing batteries are large and expensive.

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Last week’s official dedication of the National Ignition Facility, the massive experiment in nuclear fusion, has set some physicists to plotting ways in which nuclear fusion could be put to work in a new generation of nuclear power plants. Although doubters say that NIF may not even be able to produce a controlled fusion reaction, the same reaction that occurs in the heart of the sun and in thermonuclear weapons, boosters such as U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu are already discussing how fusion energy could best be harnessed.

Chu notes that the Obama administration’s decision to halt construction of the Yucca Mountain repository for nuclear waste has renewed interest in reactors that could actually reduce the nuclear waste produced by traditional nuclear power plants. There are “a resurgence of hybrid solutions of fusion fission where the fusion would impart not only energy, but again creates high-energy neutrons that can burn down the long-lived actinides” [Technology Review], says Chu. Actinides are a group of radioactive chemical elements, including plutonium and uranium, which compose some of the radioactive waste from traditional fission reactors.

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Luminaries gathered today at a lab in Livermore, California to toast the opening of the National Ignition Facility, a massive physics experiment aiming to recreate the reaction that takes place in the hearts of stars: nuclear fusion. “Bringing Star Power to Earth” reads a giant banner that was recently unfurled across a building the size of a football stadium [The New York Times]. Scientists are now ready to begin firing the world’s most powerful laser, comprised of 192 separate beams, at a target the size of a match head. Yet for all the celebration and hoopla, doubters note that there’s no guarantee that the fusion researchers will achieve their goal.

The project’s director, Ed Moses, said that getting to the cusp of ignition (defined as the successful achievement of fusion) had taken some 7,000 workers and 3,000 contractors a dozen years, their labors creating a precision colossus of millions of parts and 60,000 points of control, 30 times as many as on the space shuttle. “It’s the cathedral story,” Dr. Moses said…. “We put together the best physicists, the best engineers, the best of industry and academia” [The New York Times]. The project has also cost at least $3.5 billion. NIF’s researchers will spend the next year gradually increasing the energy of the laser beams, and say serious ignition experiments will begin next year.

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Twenty-three years ago, Chernobyl’s nuclear reactor #4 exploded in the world’s worst nuclear accident to date. Radioactive material was scattered across the surrounding countryside, and the authorities evacuated the nearby town of Pripyat, which remains a ghost town to this day. However, nature has not evacuated the scene, and all manner of plants and animals continue to inhabit the area. “There are no dogs with two heads,” says Martin Hajduch of the Slovak Academy of Sciences – although birds, insects and humans have all been affected to a greater or lesser extent by radioactive fallout [New Scientist].

Hajduch and his colleagues wanted to study how plants had adapted to the radioactive soil, so they grew a plot of soybeans just three miles from the remains of the nuclear power plant, well within the restricted zone that extends 19 miles from the reactors. They grew another patch of soybeans 60 miles from the power plant in uncontaminated soil, and analyzed the resulting beans. Their findings not only illuminate the hardiness of life, they also suggest ways to genetically engineer plants to make them resistant to radiation.

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New oil and gas drilling in the Arctic ocean off the coast of Siberia could be powered by floating nuclear power plants, according to Russia’s nuclear energy agency, and off-shore plants may also be built to provide energy for remote towns and military outposts.

The Russian nuclear agency has reportedly signed a deal to build four plants for towns in the far northern Siberian Republic of Yakutiya, and is currently constructing its first floating nuclear plant for a defense facility by the White Sea. But environmental groups are most alarmed at the prospect of using the portable plants to power oil and gas drilling. The 70-megawatt plants, each of which would consist of two reactors on board giant steel platforms, would provide power to Gazprom, the oil firm which is also Russia’s biggest company. It would allow Gazprom to power drills needed to exploit some of the remotest oil and gas fields in the world in the Barents and Kara seas. The self-propelled vessels would store their own waste and fuel and would need to be serviced only once every 12 to 14 years [The Guardian].

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Researchers in California are preparing to fire 192 lasers at a minuscule pellet of fuel to create their first nuclear fusion reaction, the same reaction that takes place in the center of the sun. Within two to three years, the researchers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) expect to be creating fusion reactions that release more energy than it takes to produce them. If they’re successful, it will be the first time this has been done in a controlled way–in a lab rather than a nuclear bomb, that is–and could eventually lead to fusion power plants [Technology Review].

Earlier this month, technicians test fired all 192 lasers at once, concentrating their beams on a single focal point in the middle of the chamber. For the test, the chamber was empty. But when real experiments begin within the next few months, the target will be a tiny gold capsule the size of an extra-strength Advil. The goal is to mash the contents of the capsule, a BB-size pellet of hydrogen frozen to nearly absolute zero, until the hydrogen atoms fuse into helium and release a gush of energy [Forbes Magazine].

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The blast that shook the Chernobyl nuclear power plant more than 20 years ago, sending a highly radioactive plume of fallout into the air, still affects local populations of butterflies and bees and other insects, according to a new study. The study appears to argue against the idea put forward by previous researchers that the region around the power plant, contaminated by radiation and off limits to most humans, has become a sort of post-apocalyptic Eden [The New York Times], in which animals can live unmolested. However, the new results are stirring up controversy.

A pair of researchers conducted standard surveys in forests around Chernobyl over three springs from 2006 to 2008, noting the numbers of bumblebees, butterflies, grasshoppers, dragonflies and spider webs at points with radiation levels that varied over four orders of magnitude [The New York Times]. They found that the number of bugs declined as the radiation increased, and that even relatively low levels of radiation impacted insect populations. The researchers say insects may be particularly vulnerable because radiation is usually found in the top layer of soil, where many invertebrates spend time during either their egg, larvae, or adult phases.

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Cold fusion is the dream that won’t die for some nuclear physicists. If they could replicate the nuclear reaction that powers our sun under room temperature conditions, the thinking goes, humanity would gain a clean source of nearly limitless energy. Work on cold fusion has been relegated to the margins of science since a much-hyped experiment 20 years ago was discredited, but now a new team of researchers says they’ve conducted experiments that should reinstate the field. “We have compelling evidence that fusion reactions are occurring” at room temperature [EE Times], said lead researcher Pamela Mosier-Boss, of the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego.

On March 23, 1989, physicists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann claimed to have created fusion reactions in a tabletop experiment, at room temperature. [Watch a video of the annoucement here.] Their claims of producing small amounts of excess heat — energy — in their experiments were at first met with excitement, then skepticism and finally derision as other scientists were unable to reproduce the results [Houston Chronicle]. Most physicists eventually concluded that the extra energy was either a fluke or the product of an experimental error.

Mosier-Boss announced her team’s new findings at a meeting of the American Chemical Society yesterday, twenty years to the day since the earlier declaration. She has also published the work in the journal Naturwissenschaft.

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In a blow to the nuclear power industry, the budget released by President Obama last week eliminates most funding for Yucca Mountain, the Nevada site that for decades has been proposed for the permanent burial of radioactive nuclear waste.

The decision will likely be an expensive one, considering how much money the federal government might end up owing the utility industry, and how much—up to $10.4 billion—has already been spent and will have been wasted on the search for a nuclear waste repository since 1983.  The courts have already awarded the companies about $1 billion, because the government signed contracts obligating it to begin taking the waste in 1998, but seems unlikely to do so for years. The nuclear industry says it may demand the return of the $22 billion that it has paid to the Energy Department to establish a repository, but that the government has not yet spent [The New York Times].

The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act called for the establishment of a permanent, high-level nuclear waste repository. Eight proposed sites were narrowed to three, then to one. Over the strong objections of Nevada’s congressional delegation – and controversy over flawed studies – Congress voted in 1987 to approve Yucca Mountain as the sole candidate for a permanent nuclear waste repository. In 2002, President Bush designated Yucca Mountain as the site, and in June 2008, the Department of Energy submitted its license application [Christian Science Monitor].

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Israeli researchers say they’ve developed a way to modify nuclear fuel so that it can be used only in power plants, and can’t be recycled later to build nuclear weapons. Lead researcher Yigal Ronen says the work could help “de-claw” some countries if nuclear fuel producers – the US, Russia, Germany, France and Japan – agree to put the denaturing additive they have proven effective into all plutonium [Jerusalem Post]. 

Israeli scientists suggest in their study that the element americium be added to the fuel at a level of 0.1 percent [Israel National News]. According to their research, the addition would neutralize the fissile plutonium produced by nuclear reactors, making that “denatured” plutonium unusable in a weapon. The research will be published in the journal Science and Global Security next month.

Ronen explains that when a country purchases a nuclear reactor from one of the five nuclear fuel producers, the sale includes nuclear fuel for the reactor. “Thus, if the five agree to insert the additive into fuel for countries now developing nuclear power – such as Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Namibia, Qatar, Oman, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Yemen – they will have to use it for peaceful purposes rather than warfare” [The Register], says Ronen. However, the researchers say that countries with more advanced nuclear programs, like Iran, have other ways to produce weapons-grade fuel.

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It’s one of the biggest cleanup jobs the United States has ever undertaken, and it’s a long way from being done. Near the Columbia River in Hanford, Washington, contractors are decontaminating a nuclear fuel processing site that has 177 underground tanks holding 53 million gallons of nuclear waste, some of which has already leaked into the soil and groundwater. And the cleanup crew has learned that the known hazards are just the beginning. [S]loppy work by the contractors running the site saw all kinds of chemical and radioactive waste indiscriminately buried in pits underground over the 40 years Hanford was operational, earning it the accolade of the dirtiest place on Earth. In 2004, clean-up work uncovered a battered, rusted, and broken old safe containing a glass jug inside which was 400 millilitres of plutonium [New Scientist].

In a new study published in Analytical Chemistry [subscription required], researchers announced that the plutonium inside that jug had quite an impressive and terrible pedigree. Analyzing the sample’s isotopes and studying the historical records revealed that it was processed into plutonium-239 in December of 1944, as part of the first batch of weapons-grade plutonium ever made. Just eight months later, Hanford plutonium was used in the nuclear bomb that fell on the Japanese city of Nagasaki.

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President-elect Barack Obama has thrilled the scientific community with the leaked news that he plans to nominate a Nobel Prize-winning physicist with a passion for green technology for the post of energy secretary. The likely nominee, Steven Chu, currently heads the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and shared the Nobel in physics in 1997 for developing a method to cool and trap atoms.

Recently, however, Chu’s interests have shifted away from particle physics and towards finding scientific solutions for global warming. In an interview last year, Chu said he began to turn his attention to energy and climate change several years ago. “I was following it just as a citizen and getting increasingly alarmed,” he said. “Many of our best basic scientists [now] realize that this is getting down to a crisis situation” [Washington Post]. Since he became director of Lawrence Berkeley Lab in 2004 he has focused on making it a world leader in alternative energy research, spearheading research initiatives on solar energy and biofuels.

Obama is also expected to nominate Carol Browner, the EPA administrator under President Clinton, as the top White House official on climate and energy policy, and Lisa Jackson, who was until recently was New Jersey’s environmental protection chief, to head the EPA. Along with Chu, these people will be at the center of Obama administration’s energy and environment policy, which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions growth and have energy efficiency play an important role in an expected economic stimulus package [CNET].

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The long-cherished dream of creating nearly limitless clean energy from nuclear fusion–the same process that powers our sun–is looking slightly more possible thanks to a new series of experiments. Researchers working with a reactor at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center have managed to control the motion of million-degree plasma using high-power radio waves. “Ours is the first definitive result showing that high-power radio waves can significantly affect the flow of the plasma,” said physicist Earl Marmar [EE Times]. The radio waves successfully propelled the plasma inside the dount-shaped chamber without hitting the cooler vessel walls, which would halt the fusion reaction, and also prevented the plasma from causing turbulence, which can interfere with reactions.

Fusion is thought to have enormous potential for future power generation, because fusion plant operation would produce no emissions, fuel sources are potentially abundant, and it produces relatively little (and short-lived) radioactive waste. That’s unlike nuclear fission (the splitting apart of a heavy atom to release energy), the process that powers all existing nuclear plants [LiveScience]. However, researchers stress that commercial fusion power plants are still a long way off. Physicists still don’t know how to make a reactor that generates more power than it consumes, a rather large problem for a potential energy source.

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It’s a device that could change energy options around the planet: A company called Hyperion Power Generation claims that its miniature nuclear reactors could power anything from water purifiers in developing world villages to oil extraction sites in the remote Arctic tundra to army outposts in the desert.

One reactor, which would cost about $25 million, would produce 25 megawatts of energy, enough to provide electricity for 20,000 average American-sized homes or a major industrial project. Daisy-chained, these micro-reactors, each one about twice the size of an average man, can supply enough electricity to power an entire small city or suburb [The Cutting Edge News]. The company says that its nuclear system is safe and clean, as it produces no greenhouse gases, and claims the reactors will be ready for mass production in five years.

Hyperion’s chief executive, John Deal, says the company already has more than 100 firm orders, largely from the oil and electricity industries, but says the company is also targeting developing countries and isolated communities. “It’s leapfrog technology,” he said…. The first confirmed order came from TES, a Czech infrastructure company specialising in water plants and power plants. “They ordered six units and optioned a further 12. We are very sure of their capability to purchase,” said Deal. The first one, he said, would be installed in Romania. “We now have a six-year waiting list. We are in talks with developers in the Cayman Islands, Panama and the Bahamas” [The Guardian].

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