Latest Tech News

Stay updated with the latest in technology, AI, cybersecurity, and more

Filtered by: fission Clear Filter

Nuclear startup Deep Fission goes public in a curious SPAC

Nuclear startup Deep Fission announced Monday that it has gone public in a reverse merger, netting the company $30 million. No, it’s not 2021. The startup is proposing to build small, cylindrical nuclear power plants and lower them into 30-inch diameter holes drilled one mile down into the Earth. By burying the reactors, the company hopes to solve several problems that plague current reactors, including concerns over meltdowns and potential terrorist attacks. Deep Fission’s 15-megawatt reacto

The History and Physics of the Atomic Bomb

In 1938, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, who had fled to New York to escape fascism, discovered a material in which a process of this type occurred: uranium. Fearing that the Nazis might also discover this element’s capability of producing a chain reaction, the Manhattan Project was born in 1940, a secret program for the development of nuclear weapons led by Arthur Compton. Compton formed a research group, which also included Fermi and Szilard, that would continue to conduct experiments on nucle

Oklo, the Earth's Two-billion-year-old only Known Natural Nuclear Reactor (2018)

Physicist Francis Perrin sat at a nuclearfuel-processing plant down in the south of France, thinking to himself: “This cannot be possible.” It was 1972. On the one hand, there was a dark piece of radioactive natural uranium ore, extracted from a mine in Africa. On the other, accepted scientific data about the constant ratio of radioactive uranium in ore. Examination of this high-grade ore from a mine in Gabon was found to contain a lower proportion of uranium-235 (U-235) — the fissile sort. Onl

Oklo, the Earth's Two-billion-year-old only Known Natural Nuclear Reactor

Physicist Francis Perrin sat at a nuclearfuel-processing plant down in the south of France, thinking to himself: “This cannot be possible.” It was 1972. On the one hand, there was a dark piece of radioactive natural uranium ore, extracted from a mine in Africa. On the other, accepted scientific data about the constant ratio of radioactive uranium in ore. Examination of this high-grade ore from a mine in Gabon was found to contain a lower proportion of uranium-235 (U-235) — the fissile sort. Onl