Hard drives and flash storage have gotten more reliable over the years, but only on a human timescale. What if we need data storage that lasts longer? Decades? Millennia? The key to that vision might be 5D optical storage, which has a data density 10,000 times that of a Blu-ray disc. But it’s always been far too slow to write data onto glass plates in this way—until now. A new technique developed at the University of Southampton speeds up the process dramatically, without impacting the reliability of the data.
This type of data storage uses three layers of nanoscale dots in a glass disc. The size, orientation, and position (in three dimensions) of the dots gives you the five “dimensions” used to encode data. Researchers say that a 5D disc could remain readable after 13.8 billion years, but it would be surprising if anyone was even around to read them at that point. In the shorter term, 5D optical media could also survive after being heated to 1,000 degrees Celsius. You can see an earlier, smaller version of the disc above.
This is not the first time 5G optical data storage has popped up. It was just impractically slow before. Data is added to the discs with lasers, but if the laser moves too fast, the disc’s structural integrity is compromised. The technique devised by doctoral researcher Yuhao Lei uses a femtosecond laser with a high repetition rate. The process starts with a seeding pulse that creates a nanovoid, but the fast pulse doesn’t need to actually write any data. The repeated weak pulses leverage a phenomenon known as near-field enhancement to sculpt the nanostructures in a more gentle way.
The researchers evaluated laser pulses at a variety of power levels, finding a level that sped up writing without damaging the silica glass disc. The study reported a maximum data rate of one million voxels per second, but each bit requires several voxels in 5D optical systems. That works out to a data rate of about 230 kilobytes per second. At that point, it becomes feasible to fill one of the discs, which have an estimated capacity of 500TB. It would take about two months to write this much data, after which it cannot be changed.
This work is still in the early stages, but the team managed to write and retrieve 5GB of text data using a 5D optical medium. All you need to read the stored data is a microscope and polarizer, and it should be readable for eons. We might not have anything interesting enough that needs to be saved for a few billion years, but maybe we will someday.
How did we get here? It’s no small question. Scientists have been hacking away at the origin of life ever since we opened up “science” in the human skill tree. In 1952, two chemists conducted an experiment designed to brew up a kettle of primordial soup, and in doing so, they began to probe the circumstances under which life arose on Earth. Their work still bears their names: the Miller-Urey experiment inspired countless other studies, and it’s in every freshman biology text. But a new analysis of the OG experiment has concluded that one component of the primordial soup must have come from an unexpected source. The analysis is compelling and peer-reviewed, and it raises more questions than it answers.
The groundbreaking Miller-Urey experiment was designed to test the idea of “abiogenesis,” which is the notion that life could come from that which was not previously living. The idea goes like this: if life came from the primordial soup, and we’re living but the soup wasn’t alive, then at some point there must have been some kind of transition from nonlife to life. Life is made of cells. (Don’t get me started on viruses.) Cells are made of polymers, which are made of monomers, which are made of yet smaller, simpler, building-block molecules. There should be some knowable transition from life to unlife, somewhere in the cosmos we live in, for us to witness and understand.
But the early Earth was very different from the one we occupy, enough so that it confounded our experiments at first. One important difference is the atmosphere: before the Great Oxygenation Event, our planet had a reducing atmosphere, made of things like hydrogen, methane, and ammonia. The difference is so great between our current atmosphere and the primordial atmosphere, in fact, that entirely separate classes of chemical reactions are favored. Still, methane and ammonia contain carbon and nitrogen, which are the necessary raw materials for the backbone of all known proteins and amino acids. Add in gaseous hydrogen and you’ve got the materials to make hydrocarbon chains, sugars, and even nucleic acids. So Stanley Miller and his advisor Harold Urey sealed those gases inside a sterile glass vessel, which was connected to another smaller glass bubble containing water. Heating the water made steam, which mingled with the reducing gases to make a microcosm of what we believed the atmosphere was on the primordial Earth. The resulting clouds swirled around electrodes that sent a spark across a gap, over and over, mimicking lightning from ancient storms. A cooling clamp allowed the vapors to condense into a tiny, domesticated version of the corrosive primordial rain, which puddled in a collection chamber below.
The resulting solution contained five amino acids, reported the two chemists; of that the chromatography was unequivocal. Their report acknowledged also that there was weak evidence for the presence of two other amino acids, but too weak to make a definitive claim. In 2007, Miller’s scientific successor, Jeffrey Bada, and several colleagues examined the original chromatography slips from the 1952 experiment. They determined that the original report had been, if anything, too conservative: There had been not just five or seven amino acids created in the reaction chamber, the 2007 analysis reported, there were twenty-five. But looking at the intact setup from Miller and Urey’s work, one coauthor of the 2007 analysis, Joaquin Criado-Reyes, realized that even more must have been going on inside those sealed reaction vessels.
The original Miller-Urey experiment.
Borosilicate glass, sometimes called Pyrex, is a kind of extremely tough glass often used in labware because of its resistance to breakage, corrosion, and other kinds of abuse. Usually a good scrub with some Alconox is enough to clean up lab glass so that it shines like the day it came out of the box. What’s more, glass is often what you store the acids and solvents in before you use them to clean off other, lesser tools. But in the 1952 experiment, in addition to making amino acids, electrifying those reducing vapors produced a highly corrosive, highly alkaline stew of chemicals sufficient to etch and pit the glassware itself. To get a better look, Criado-Reyes and colleagues ran the Miller-Urey experiment again, but in three parallel trials. One used the original glassware from the 1952 work, one used a Teflon vessel, and one used a Teflon vessel with broken chips of borosilicate dropped in. (Teflon is waxy, hard, and obnoxiously nonreactive, and when even glass can’t safely contain a chemical, often Teflon can.) At the end of the experiment, the kinds of organic molecules created inside all three reaction vessels matched. But the quantities didn’t. The Teflon vessels contained less of everything.
The imbalance still supports Miller and Urey’s original work. Etching the glass would have dissolved some of the silicon dioxide. Liberating some silicate into solution creates a twofold catalyst, by way of the silicate molecules themselves as well as the corroded, pitted surface they leave behind. So the Teflon vessels have extra reason not to turn as much yield as the glass. But the results from the 2021 analysis do call other things into question.
One answer to the Fermi paradox is a dismissive hand-wave at the sheer improbability of life. (Never mind that to the best of our knowledge, life does in fact have a 100% probability of existing, which we know because we are here to scratch our collective heads about it.) While chemistry teaches us that higher-order reactions become less likely and therefore harder to find, by virtue of having to line up several different sets of circumstances, the raw components of the primordial soup experiments are not rare. We’ve observed lightning on Jupiter, which has an atmosphere of hydrogen, helium, methane, and ammonia. Rocky planets are common, and with them, the same silicon dioxide that’s in Pyrex. And nearly every star has a “snow line” in which it might be possible to find liquid water. According to the most recent (2018) NASA analysis of data from Kepler, up to half the stars in our galaxy could have terrestrial planets within their habitable zones. The ubiquity of these elements weakens the “rare earth” hypothesis, without necessarily being courteous enough to provide any more information. To begin the Rube Goldberg chain of reactions that eventually produces amino acids from dissociated organic and inorganic molecules, what you need is just rocks, water, and lightning, but coastal storms are not hard to find. So what gives?
The answer is also one big reason we have a scientific interest in exploring places like Titan and Enceladus. Polymers, which are long molecules which can encode information in their sequence, are thought to be essential to life. But there may be another chapter to the story. Miller and Urey didn’t stop work with just one batch of primordial soup. In another experiment, they shot vapors from a nozzle at a spark gap. That work produced almost two dozen amino acids, plus amines and other hydroxylated species. Where else in the universe do you find lightning getting shot through pressurized water vapor? Cryovolcanoes, like those found on the moons of Saturn, represent one place where conditions exist that can produce polymers. We may well need to cast a scientific eye toward the colder reaches of our solar system, to understand how life formed here on Earth.
There’s a rumor making the rounds that AMD’s future Zen 5 CPU family, codenamed Turin, might have a TDP as high as 600W. These future CPUs will supposedly be available in at least two two configurations of 192 cores / 384 threads and 256 cores / 512 threads.
Take this rumor with a mountain of salt. AMD has not said much publicly about Zen 5. With Genoa expected to jump to 96 cores with Zen 4, a leap to 256 cores with Zen 5 would be a large jump indeed — especially since there might not be a die shrink between Zen 4 (5nm) and Zen 5. Alternately, it’s possible that AMD might release a Zen 4 and Zen 4+ before a theoretical Turin CPU launched later.
No matter what, this is a chip we wouldn’t expect to see for another 24 – 36 months. AMD is almost certainly still working on the Zen 5 architecture and considering the configurations it might build relative to where Intel and its potential ARM competition will be in the future.
A number of posts online are referring to a 600W TDP as a “monster,” but that depends on how you evaluate the situation. It’s true that we’ve never seen a desktop or x86 socket that could dissipate this kind of heat, but while 600W is quite high in absolute terms, it’s downright svelte when you consider how many cores this rumor suggests the future chip will offer.
Right now, an AMD Epyc 7763 has a TDP of 280W and 64 CPU cores. This works out to 4.375W per core if you assume the chip’s L3 caches and Infinity Fabric draw no power at all. A future 600W CPU with 256 cores is a chip that allocates no more than 2.34W per core; 1.86x less power than current Epyc CPUs. This implies quite a bit of near-term improvement in AMD’s performance per watt at a time when lithography-based improvements are shrinking every node. Feel free to enjoy some salt mountain at this point.
A CPU with this many cores isn’t going to be aimed at consumer markets. There are so-called “embarrassingly parallel” workloads in computing that can scale to very high core counts, but many of them have been optimized for GPU execution over the last decade. Perhaps more pertinently, a system with 256 cores and the same eight cores per memory channel ratio as current Epyc CPUs would need a 32-channel memory interface to keep the cores fed. While there are ways to reduce the need for memory bandwidth, large L3 caches and on-package HBM aren’t cheap.
A rumor like this is difficult to completely dismiss because the claims it makes are in line with some long-term projections for where CPU development is headed. AMD has aggressively increased x86 core counts with Ryzen. It has publicly stated that it adopted chiplets partly for their superior scaling characteristics relative to conventional monolithic designs.
A 256-core CPU isn’t all that large when you consider that the Ampere Altra Max already offers a 128-core single-socket solution. While it’s an aggressive roadmap for AMD given that the company is “only” expected to ship 96-core chips in 2022, one could argue it shows AMD taking the threat of a resurgent Intel seriously, and that the company intends to retain the leadership position it opened against its rival while Intel was stuck on 14nm.
I don’t have any inside information on when/if AMD intends to ship a 256-core CPU, but it’s definitely something the company has thought about. Silicon development timelines are long and engineers are accustomed to planning for what’s likely to be available 24-36 months in the future. The many-core research projects from a decade ago showed that a balance must be struck between the number of cores and the amount of work those cores are capable of doing. Whether AMD steps up to 256 cores or not will depend in part on how moving from 128 to 256 cores would impact the CPU’s ability to perform useful work in more lightly threaded applications.
As for the 600W figure, that’s not particularly large for a theoretical 256-core CPU. Such a system could wind up saving power by eliminating redundant hardware in multiple chassis that would otherwise be required to provide the same number of cores.
Android phones aren’t getting any cheaper. In fact, they’re getting even more expensive with every release cycle. The mobile marketplace isn’t alone in this trend, but the right phone could last long enough to justify the ever-increasing cost. What’s the right one? Well, we can point you in the right direction. Here are the five best Android phones available right now.
OnePlus Nord N200
Starting in the budget category, the OnePlus Nord N200 offers a 1080p screen with a 90Hz refresh rate, a capable Snapdragon 480 chip, and impressive build quality. OnePlus is in the midst of developing a new Android platform shared with its parent company Oppo, but the Oxygen OS build that ships on the N200 is a known quantity, and it’s great. The Nord doesn’t have a ton of bloatware, and most of the customizations are useful.
It’s not the fastest phone, but it’s plenty fast for its $240 asking price. It’ll outperform most devices in this price range, and it even has 5G. Although, only T-Mobile has certified the Nord for its 5G network at this time. The unlocked Nord will still work on 4G with AT&T and Verizon, too. T-Mobile will also give you the phone free with a new line.
Google Pixel 5a
If you want a premium smartphone experience and don’t fancy spending a lot of money, the Pixel 5a should be your first choice. You won’t get the kitchen sink, but the Pixel is all-around competent. There are even some features, such as the camera, that compete with much more expensive phones. The 12MP shooter might not sound impressive on paper, but Google’s photo processing is second to none. The images you get from the 5a are stupendous in any lighting conditions. Plus, Google’s version of Android is clean, fast, and gets quick updates. While other devices are languishing on Android 11, the 5a will head into late 2021 with Android 12.
The Pixel 5a retails for $450, which is a good value for what it offers. The only drawbacks are you can only get it in one color (a sort of greenish-black), and there’s no in-display fingerprint sensor or high-refresh display. The minty power button is the only splash of color or distinctiveness on what is otherwise a very boring-looking device.
Google Pixel 6
After years of beating around the bush, Google is finally taking its flagship Pixel phones seriously. The Pixel 5a is great, but for only $150 more, you can get Google’s latest high-end phone. No more mediocre screens and small batteries—the Pixel 6 has the best that Google has to offer, including Android 12, the Google Tensor custom processor, and an all-new camera array (50MP primary and 12MP ultrawide) that takes incredible photos. It’s not as versatile as the S21 Ultra’s quad-camera setup, but you will get more photos you actually like out of the Pixel 6.
The Pixel 6 runs on the octa-core Google Tensor chip, 8GB of RAM, 128-256GB of storage, and a 4,612mAh battery. The 6.4-inch display is only 1080p, but it’s crisp, bright, and very smooth thanks to the 90Hz refresh rate. This is also Google’s first phone with an in-display fingerprint sensor, and while it’s not as fast as Samsung’s ultrasonic sensor, it’s a big step up from the cheaper rear-facing sensors used on the older Pixels. Google is only asking $599 for the Pixel 6, which makes phones like the base Galaxy S21 and Motorola Edge look like yesterday’s news. The only real drawback is availability. The Pixel6 is sold out everywhere, and it may be a few months before supply evens out.
Galaxy S21 Ultra
If even the Galaxy S21 isn’t enough for your discerning tastes, the S21 Ultra is like that phone on steroids. The S21 Ultra dunks on almost everything we’ve talked about so far with a fantastic quad-camera setup, featuring two different optical zoom levels and a 108MP primary camera. The only competition is the Pixel 6, which isn’t as good at shooting at long range. The S21 Ultra also sports the best screen you can get on a phone — 6.8 inches, 1440p, and 120Hz refresh rate. It also supports Samsung’s S Pen stylus, one of just a handful of devices that do so. It’s an enormous phone, though, tipping the scales at 229g and 165mm tall. By comparison, the S21 is only 151mm tall and 169g.
The S21 Ultra has the same software as the base model, which is better than Samsung’s version of Android used to be. It’s still not a match for the Pixel, though. The hardware pushes the price tag into the stratosphere. The retail cost is $1,200, but it often goes on-sale for a few hundred bucks off.
Galaxy Z Fold3
The Galaxy Z Fold3 is the Cadillac of smartphones: it’s large, expensive, and uncompromising. The external 6.2-inch display is a little narrow and hard to use, but open the Fold3 up and you have a 7.6-inch folding OLED. It’s basically a small tablet that folds up and fits in your pocket. The software has been optimized for the larger screen with enhanced multi-window support and a special UI mode for select apps. It’s not so large that unoptimized Android apps look comical, though.
The Fold3 is without a doubt the most capable Android phone you can buy, but you’ll have to pay handsomely to have this brick of a phone in your pocket. The $1,800 price tag makes this a non-starter for almost everyone buying a new phone, but you wait for it to go on-sale or have a phone to trade-in, the Fold3 can get close in price to the S21 Ultra. But the Pixel 6 is still the elephant in the room at just $600.
Earth would be a lifeless husk without the warming rays of the sun. But like they say: you have to take the good with the bad. The sun occasionally fires off massive flares and eruptions that can cause problems here at home. A major solar flare this past week caused radio disruptions, and the cloud of charged particles it released is expected to reach us in the coming days when it could cause even more radio interference. The upshot, though, is some spooky boosted northern lights for Halloween.
NASA reported the flare on October 28th, saying it had classified it as an X1 event. That’s the most potent class of solar flares, although it’s not the most powerfullevel. An X1 flare is the bottom rung of the X-class. An X2, for example, would be twice as powerful as this one, and an X3 would be three times as intense. A flare at the X10 level is considered unusually dangerous and powerful, but even an X1 is nothing to scoff at.
Powerful solar flares are often associated with coronal mass ejections (CME). This occurs when a loop of plasma rises off the sun, known as a prominence. Instead of collapsing back into the nuclear inferno, a large volume of that plasma can break free and race off into space. If the flare is facing Earth, those particles can reach us and cause changes in the atmosphere that affect electronic systems.
According to NASA, the initial flare causes radio distortion on the sunward side of Earth, centered on South America. You can see the flare in the animation above, but most of the particles that reach Earth in the coming days won’t emit visible light. You’ll know when they get here, though.
Scientists expect the CME to hit the atmosphere by Saturday or Sunday (Oct. 30-31. When that happens, the particles will ramp up aurorae around the poles. When this solar storm hits, the aurora borealis (also known as the Northern Lights) will become much more intense. While visible aurorae are usually restricted to the northern latitudes, this weekend could see intense lights extending all the way down into the northern United States including Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, and much of New England. Canada will also get a good show, as will Iceland, Norway, and Scotland. The atmospheric glow might even stick around for Halloween night, which is maybe worth the small inconvenience of radio and satellite disruption.
Some despise it, some don’t mind it. Apple’s latest 14” and 16”MacBook Proscome with a notch at the top of the screen where the device’s camera lies, similar to that of the iPhone. But users report that since getting their hands on the new MacBooks, certain applicationshaven’t interacted wellwith the notched display; rather than considering the notch in their formatting, the applications act as though it isn’t there, thus losing a small chunk of their screen real estate.
The issue has prompted Apple to push out a temporary workaround, according to a new supportdocument. In an effort to avoid the notched area entirely, the company has provided 2021 MacBook Pro users with a way to display an app entirely below the camera area in lieu of a slim band of screen space. Users can now go into an app’s settings, open the Info window, and select an option called “Scale to fit below built-in camera.” Apple notes that even after this option is selected, all open apps or apps that share the same space will appear below the camera until users quit the app using the scaled setting.
(Photo: Apple)
The workaround is a band-aid fix intended only to be used until more apps interact with the camera notch properly. Prior to the fix, users complained that toolbars were losing their middle area to the notch, or that cursors would awkwardlyjoltaround the notch as if they don’t know what to do with it. Also, some toolbar options have been accessible under the notch, and some haven’t. Overall, the UI involved in one of Apple’s shiny new MacBook Pro features has been disappointing, to say the least.
Apple’s temporary solution isn’t the most attractive one either, given that many new MacBook Pro owners were drawn to the device for its larger screen. With thicker bezels like those of the old MacBook Pros, it’s harder to show off that you have the latest model at your local coffee shop or in the office. In that way, the notch is a status symbol, something youwantto notice and have others notice—just not in the way users have experienced so far.
In 2019, the government signed mandating that we develop an itty bitty nuclear reactor by 2027. In compliance with that order, the US Air Force is launching a “microreactor” pilot project at Eielson AFB, in Alaska.
Per usual, the Air Force is playing its cards pretty close to the chest. As of October 27, the Office of Energy Assurance (OEA) hasn’t even announced that they’ve chosen a specific reactor technology. But all evidence suggests that this new installation is part of an energy-resilience effort known as Project Pele. The goal of Project Pele, according to the Dept. of Defense’s Research and Engineering office, is to “design, build, and demonstrate a prototype mobile nuclear reactor within five years.” Three separate development contracts have been awarded, with the final “mature” design submissions TBA.
Project Pele has two main themes: the reactor has to be 1) small, and 2) safe. What we’ve learned from Chernobyl and Fukushima is that failure of the coolant system can have terrible consequences, and in both cases, power failure to the cooling system is what allowed the fuel to become so hot that it entered meltdown. Failure is simply unacceptable. With nuclear power, we also have to consider decay heat and spent fuel disposal. Inability to dispose of hazardous byproducts counts as being unsafe. Even worse, the same stuff we use to make the power can be used to make weapons. But the new Generation IV reactors can further the conversation.
Without getting all breathless, I want to talk about one of the three designs likely being put forth in particular. One of the commercial contractors chosen to submit a design is a domestic outfit called X-Energy, whose higher-ups come from NASA and the US Department of Energy. Its CEO, Jeffrey Sells, previously served as Deputy Secretary of Energy, and founder Kam Ghaffarian operated a NASA service contractor that supported the former Mission Operations Data Systems at Goddard. The X-energy model is a Gen IV high-temperature gas-cooled pebble bed reactor. It uses TRISO fuel pellets or “pebbles” (TRISO stands for TRi-structural ISOtropic particle fuel) loaded into a column that’s then flooded with a heavy, nonreactive gas. And the whole thing is absolutely tiny: X-energy’s website describes their reactors not as building sites, but as modular products, shippable using existing road and rail.
The pebble-bed model used by X-Energy is clearly meant to specifically address many known failure points of nuclear power production. Whether it actually delivers on that promise is yet to be seen, because this is all still in the planning stages, but the design principles are there. First and worst is meltdown, which X-Energy is mitigating via the composition of the fuel itself. The TRISO pebbles are made of granules of uranium oxycarbide the size of poppyseeds, layered with pyrolytic graphite and embedded within a silicon carbide firebreak. The whole thing is the size of a cue ball.
Silicon carbide is what NASA uses in the heat shielding for numerous spacecraft. It’s tough stuff, very strong under pressure, and very difficult to melt. Carbides aren’t melted and cast like regular metals, because their melt points are higher than any other metal. Instead, uranium oxycarbide is created using spark plasma sintering. TRISO pebbles are also passively governed by a negative-feedback mechanism that starves the fuel of neutrons as the temperature rises, independent of any active or mechanical control. Higher temperatures mean falling reaction power, enforced by the nature of the material itself. It’s hard to have a meltdown if your fuel just… won’t melt.
Explosions also present their own set of dangers, including particulate from burning fissile material or graphite shielding. In this design, the reaction is held at temperatures far above the annealing point of graphite. This prevents stray potential energy from neutron bombardment from getting “stuck” in the graphite’s crystal lattice and eventually escaping in an uncontrolled burst, which is what happened in the Windscale fire. Pyrolytic carbon can burn in air if it’s also in the presence of enough water to catalyze the reaction, but there is no water-cooling loop, which prevents a steam explosion.
The use of uranium oxycarbide instead of uranium oxide or carbide is intended to reduce the oxygen stoichiometry; carbides are strong under pressure but not under expansion, so the oxycarbide should produce less gas under decomposition. That means that even if one of the carbide pebbles should rupture, smothered in the heavier-than-air gas, it won’t catch fire. The coolant never leaves the gas phase. The design relies on simply placing a critical mass of fissile material inside a gas-cooled reaction vessel, where it will go critical on its own. They’re just sitting a bunch of angry jawbreakers in the bottom of a tank, where they irritate one another into producing energy. Instead of shutting down to replace fuel rods, in pebble bed reactors, at regular intervals a pebble is collected from the bottom of the container by way of gravity, tested, and recycled to the top of the column.
Look at it. It’s the worst Gobstopper.
Once fully operational, the reactor will produce between one and five megawatts. That’s quite small for any power plant, and even more so for a nuclear plant — nuclear plants are often rated in the hundreds of megawatts or even the gigawatt range. At five megawatts it still barely clears a third of the Eielson base’s gross energy budget. But the micro-reactor isn’t being installed so that it can handle the base’s power consumption. This is a proof of concept, for both a reactor design that fails toward safety, and a portable source of radiant energy that doesn’t require a constant external material supply.
One serious weak spot this reactor could address is the way the armed forces get power in the field. For example, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military used fuel convoys to truck in diesel to their installations, which ran on diesel generators. But generators are loud, dirty, expensive, and prone to breakdowns. They are also a hazard to human health: fuel-burning generators produce dangerous fumes and super-fine particulate. Furthermore, the convoys themselves were low-hanging fruit for insurgent attacks. All of this requires maintenance and lots of security. Much of the reason Eielson was chosen over any other site comes down to its reliance on fossil fuels that have to be transported in, like coal and diesel. The armed forces have a direct strategic interest in weaning their operations off petroleum fuels, to the extent they can.
What benefits the military, though, often ends up also improving civilian lives. Eielson AFB is only about a hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle. During the heating season, the base can burn 800 tons of coal every day. Like much of Alaska, it is beholden to energy supply lines prone to failure exactly when they’re most needed. Most of the state uses coal or diesel to provide electricity and heating. Much of Alaska is also only accessible by boat or plane. Juneau doesn’t even have a road connecting it to the outside world, because the terrain is so uncooperative. One failure point can easily line up with another. Eielson’s northerly location, along with its inexhaustible need for fuel, make it an excellent sandbox (snowbank?) for field testing the microreactor. Greater Alaska is also keenly interested: According to the Anchorage Daily News, “a cost-effective 1-5 MW power generator that doesn’t require refueling could represent a sea change for rural power in our state, as that range covers the needs of dozens of villages off the road system that currently have some of the most costly power in the state — and which are vulnerable to generator breakdowns in the dead of winter, when the consequences can be life-threatening.”
The issue of waste disposal remains unresolved. Shiny and chrome though these pebbles may be, they still embody about the same radioactivity per kilowatt hour as spent conventional fuel — it’s just spread across a larger volume. While this makes any generated waste hypothetically less awful to handle, there’s more of it, and that complicates the already manifold problems with waste handling and storage.
Final designs are to be chosen in fiscal 2022. From there, the DOD wants a reactor up and running by 2027.
