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Names That Fly to Jupiter, British Uranium, and Very Bright Lights
🕑 Added 2024-01-18 22:43:16 +0000 UTCSend Your Name in a Bottle to Jupiter
Remember those companies that would charge you $19.99 to name a star after someone, but then nobody would actually use the name? Here’s a somewhat more substantial idea: You can send your name (or your friends’) on a trip to orbit Jupiter on NASA’s Europa Clipper!
If you sign up, your name will launch from Earth this coming October 6 on a spacecraft powered by one of Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon Heavy rockets. It’s scheduled to arrive in Jupiter’s orbit, about 968 million km (601 million miles) from our planet's orbit, by April 11, 2030. As you can see in the image above, one of my friends has already signed my name up for the mission! If you would like your name to travel along with mine to Jupiter, you can sign up here.
Jupiter’s moon Europa is one of the most intriguing destinations in our solar system because it has salty warm oceans with more water than Earth under its icy crust. The “Europa Clipper” mission will make multiple flybys of the moon to investigate if its conditions are suitable for life. You can learn more about the Europa Clipper mission here and here.
UK Invests in High-Tech Nuclear Fuel to Push Putin Out of Global Energy Market
The U.K. Department for Energy Security has announced that the United Kingdom will become the first European country to launch a high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) program with a landmark £300 million investment.
With 5-20% of Uranium 235, HALEU is not as highly enriched as the uranium used in nuclear weapons, but the Uranium 235 fraction is still considerably higher than that of the low-enriched uranium which is currently used in almost all commercial reactors (typically 3-5% U235). HALEU has a higher efficiency and better fuel burnup and can be used in advanced reactor designs, such as small modular reactors and molten salt reactors.
Up to now, Russia has been the only country to commercially produce HALEU. The U.K. government aims to change that and, at the same time, also wants to position the U.K. as a world leader in nuclear technology. The government plans that by 2050, 24 GigaWatts – ¼ of the U.K.’s current electrical power needs – will come from nuclear power.
Press release here.
Perovskite LEDs Shine Bright
Image: Perovskite light emitting diodes on sapphire substrate stimulated with current. (Credit: IMEC)
Engineers at Imec nanoelectronics have produced Light-Emitting Diodes (LEDs) that are 1,000 times brighter than the ones we currently use. They did it by using perovskite, a crystal mineral of calcium titanate well known for its optoelectronic capacity, affordability, and ability to efficiently transport charge. It is one of the prime candidates for more efficient solar cells. The engineers now found a way to make the material digest high currents and efficiently convert them into stimulated light emission.
More here and here. Paper here.
Comments
Thomas, too bad about going to Europa. Where does the UK gets its uranium? Certainly not from the UK ... or Russia. The world's main producer of mined low-grade uranium is Kazakhstan, followed by Canada and Australia. The Brits have developed nuclear weapons and still have them, so they have to have the means, such as the special centrifugues, to use the raw uranium to produce the low-enriched uranium to be used in those new reactors: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/mining-of-uranium/world-uranium-mining-production.aspx
Just I deciced to travel to Europa with Sabine, and now I see the deadline has passed, what a pity.😉 I would like to know, where the raw uranium, that the Brits use, comes from. I appreciate these updates in sience and technology👍.
So the same basic material (perovskite) used to convert sunlight into electricity in solar cells can be used to make something that converts electricity into light. Looking around, this article published in "Applied Physics Reviews", that is about probably a lot more than anyone here might want to know, shows, among many other things, that perovskite light-emitting devices, such as some LEDs and lasers have been around for sometime now: https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1723812/FULLTEXT01.pdf Sabine's news is that there have been new successful developments in making much more powerful light-emitting perovskite devices than before. As to the UK government planning to add more efficient nuclear power stations: probably a good idea. I hope that of the many such good ideas that the successive British conservative governments have announced there, in the end with little or no follow-through, this one is given a real go. So we can all learn from reading about how well this works. But they got Brexit done! Yay! Mr. Nigel Farage must be very pleased with such a remarkable historical achievement and probably is also working, right now, on the next one.
