Kilopower project: Los Alamos’ new nuclear reactors could power spacecraft and Moon bases
Assembly at the Nevada National Security Site ahead of a test in 2018. NNSS photo.The future of space exploration may rest in the hands of a group of Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers. They’ve built the first of a new generation of small nuclear reactors intended to power missions to deep space and even future astronaut bases on the moon and Mars.
Called Kilopower, their project aims to achieve a longstanding dream of the space community: a safe, effective, and powerful nuclear power reactor that can power spacecraft for years.
“I don’t think we can expand into deep space without nuclear power, which is what’s made me so passionate about developing the technology,” says David Poston, who leads the Kilopower team. (Full Story)
Build small nuclear reactors for battlefield power
YouTube video.There’s not much the U.S. military does that’s more dangerous than trucking fuel through a war zone.
A solution could be a new micro-nuclear reactor being developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Westinghouse power company. Built around heat-pipe technology, this inherently safe microreactor has no cooling water or pumps that can fail, uses passive regulation systems so that it cannot melt down, and can generate at least 1 megawatt of safe, reliable power for 10 years or more. (Full Story)
Why NASA wants to build a nuclear reactor on the Moon
Artist's concept of new fission power system on the lunar surface, NASA image.If you're going to take nuclear reactors into space on crewed missions to the Moon, Mars and beyond, it had better be safe. That's what the KRUSTY test made sure of.
“We threw everything we could at this reactor, in terms of nominal and off-normal operating scenarios, and KRUSTY passed with flying colors,” said David Poston, the chief reactor designer at NNSA’s Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The experiment included simulated power reduction, failed engines and failed heat pipes, and culminated with a 28-hour, full-power test that simulated a mission. It's planned to first be used on a spaceflight mission in 2020. (Full Story)
Which came first? Galaxies or supermassive black holes
Density of an early galaxy from the DCBH simulation, LANL image.The formation of a black hole could require a million years or so, but to envision what that might have looked like, former postdoctoral researcher Aycin Aykutalp – now at Los Alamos National Laboratory – used the National Science Foundation-supported Stampede Supercomputer at the University of Texas at Austin to run a simulation focusing on the aftermath of DCBH formation. The simulation used physics first principles such as gravity, radiation and hydrodynamics.
The research was supported by NASA, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the National Science Foundation, the Southern Regional Education Board and two Hubble theory grants. (Full Story)
Aluminum triple bond made for first time
Calculated π orbital (purple and pink) Aluminum is yellow and sodium is blue. From C&EN.Chemists have in the past succeeded in creating compounds containing triple bonds between two gallium or two boron atoms, species that are considered chemical oddities. An equivalent version made with aluminum—gallium and boron’s group 13 periodic table sibling—has so far remained elusive. Ivan A. Popov at Los Alamos National Laboratory proposed attempting Al≡Al as a student in Alexander I. Boldyrev’s group at Utah State University. Now, a few years later, along with Kit H. Bowen of Johns Hopkins University and Xinxing Zhang of Nankai University, who had been working toward the same goal independently, Popov and Boldyrev report experimental and computational confirmation of the bond in gas-phase clusters with sodium ions. (Full Story)
UCF, UCX and a car ride on the road to exascale
HPCwire illustration.According to Jeff Kuehn from Los Alamos National Laboratory, the idea for the UCF-style consortium and its eventual project OpenUCX, an open-source framework, was conceived in a car ride from Los Alamos up to Colorado Springs and Denver. “Steve Poole and Rich Graham (both at Los Alamos at the time, working with Mellanox and Gilad Shainer) were discussing stacked architecture and recognized the need for a middleware and the problem.
Los Alamos National Laboratory is chairing the consortium, which includes AMD, Argonne, ARM, IBM, Mellanox, NVIDIA, Ohio State University and others —all active participants in the development – amongst other users and other vendors and the U.S. Government. (Full Story)
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