Tag: Nuclear

  • Space, Nuclear and Quantum

    I recently tweeted looking out for people in the civilian nuclear energy space:

    Do share any people you may know about on Twitter. Thanks in advance.

    Space

    India has developed reasonable capabilities in space. It is now embarking on developing a civilian space sector. In the strategic sector, India has developed a Defence Space Agency and Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO). It has secured communication and remote sensing capabilities.

    The importance of the space sector is to continue reliable communication, navigation and remote sensing capabilities without having to depend on foreign countries. It is also to build and develop products and services in India that can be provided to the world at competitive prices.

    I think we may be late on this path but we are on the right path with respect to space.

    Nuclear

    India needs to grow. India needs energy for this growth. Meeting these energy needs using hydrocarbons is not sustainable.

    I think nuclear will form a large percentage of sustainable energy production in the country.

    Quantum

    Quantum is important for research and computing today. But, in the future, there will be quantum computers that will need Indian expertise to operate and program.

    My understanding of Quantum and Nuclear is limited. I have not been watching these fields as closely as I have watched Space. What I have listed above are my assumptions. This is the starting point for my thinking about these fields.

  • A fusion power generator in every home?

    Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as http://parallelspirals.blogspot.com. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on February 4, 2011 as per the time stamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

    In my early morning flip-through of the Times of India, I came across this interview with M Srinivasan, a retired BARC scientist and the chairperson of the organising committee of The International Conference on Condensed Matter Nuclear Science. About 60 scientists are expected to attend the conference to be held in Chennai next week. The thought that made me pause was Srinivasan’s vision of having a nuclear fusion power generator in 20-100 kW category in every home.

    The concept is great. It could easily replace the diesel and kerosene guzzling generators that are used in buildings and houses today. It also does away with transmission and distribution losses that comes along with having a central grid style architecture. A recent Google Talk by environmentalist Stewart Brand talked about having a few MW installation of nuclear fission reactors being under design with similar purposes.

    Srinivasan describes that cold fusion study in India began with a group of 12 scientists in BARC who were inspired by a Times of India report! Following some work, research came to a standstill in the 1990s and then resumed only in 2008.

    There is skepticism among the scientific community about the working of cold fusion. This mostly comes out of the non-repeatability of the original experiment conducted in 1989 by Martin Fleischmann of the University of Southampton and Stanley Pons of the University of Utah. Following the results which “did not tally with textbook nuclear physics” in the words of Srinivasan, efforts were made to explain the single positive result. Some even went to the extent of saying that the above was not a nuclear fusion reaction at all! Others have even suggested calorimeter errors.

    There have been recent demonstrations of working of cold fusion, some as recently as January 14, 2011.