UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

Scientists at the UK-based Joint European Torus (JET) lab have smashed a fusion energy record for the first time in 25 years, producing 59 megajoules of energy over five seconds, the BBC reports. That’s 11 megawatts, enough to boil about 60 kettles worth of water, or the equivalent of 30 pounds of TNT.

The test more than doubles the previous record of just 21.7 megajoules, set in 1997 at the same facility.

The team behind the experiment say it’s a major breakthrough, and one that inches closer to a green form of energy that doesn’t run the risk of ending in a nuclear meltdown.

“The JET experiments put us a step closer to fusion power,” Joe Milnes, the head of operations at JET, told the BBC. “We’ve demonstrated that we can create a mini star inside of our machine and hold it there for five seconds and get high performance, which really takes us into a new realm.”

“These landmark results have taken us a huge step closer to conquering one of the biggest scientific and engineering challenges of them all,” Ian Chapman, the chief executive of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, said in a statement. “It’s clear we must make significant changes to address the effects of climate change, and fusion offers so much potential.”

The test involved heating up ionized gases to roughly ten times the temperature of the Sun’s core. In these conditions, atomic nuclei fuse and release copious amounts of energy.

The difficult part is producing more energy than has to be put in to kickstart the reaction, which remains the holy grail of fusion energy. The JET facility achieved a Q value, the fusion power output relative to power, of just 0.33. A value of one would mean the facility produced as much energy as it used.

That may not sound awfully impressive in and of itself, but the fact that it sustained such a value over five seconds represents a major leap in the field. The 1997 record may have achieved a Q value of 0.7 — but it did so for less than 4 billionths of a second, as Nature points out.

Still, the JET reactor won’t be powering homes any time soon.

“Five seconds doesn’t sound like much, but if you can burn it for five seconds, presumably you could keep it stable and keep it burning for many minutes, hours, or days, which is what you are going to need for a proper fusion power plant, Mark Wenman, nuclear materials research fellow at Imperial College London, told The Guardian.

“It’s the proof of that concept that they have achieved,” he added.

The landmark experiment sets the stage for the much larger ITER, a multi-billion dollar fusion reactor being built in France. JET uses the same deuterium-tritium fuel mix that ITER will be using as well.

While it’s a notable moment in the development of fusion energy, scientists still have a long way to go until we can use fusion reactors as a sustainable form of energy.

But, for now, it’s important to celebrate a step in the right direction.

“We didn’t jump up and down and hug each other — we were at 2 metres distance — but it was very exciting,” Fernanda Rimini, a plasma scientist at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) where JET is based, told Nature.

READ MORE:

Nuclear fusion heat record a ‘huge step’ in quest for new energy source [The Guardian]

More on fusion:

China’s “Artificial Sun” Fusion Reactor Just Smashed Its Old Record

My previous article was on the subject of strange anomalies on the planet Mars. With that in mind, I thought I would focus today on a few anomalies of the Moon. Namely, the possibility of some kind of base(s) on the Moon – whether it’s an alien base or a facility of the U.S. military/government. Whatever the truth, the stories are fascinating. We’ll begin with a woman named Donna Hare, who worked for Philco, a company that NASA contracted at the dawning of the 1960s to provide NASA with a worldwide tracking station network for its manned Project Mercury flights. Hare, who became the recipient of a number of awards from NASA, including an Apollo Achievement Award, ultimately spent more than a decade-and-a-half subcontracted to the space agency, working in Building 8 in the Photographic Laboratory at the Houston, Texas-based Johnson Space Center. Hare had an enlightening story to tell. On one occasion she entered a particular room where much of the photographic data that had been collected on the Apollo missions to the Moon, and by NASA satellites in Earth orbit, was dispatched to be developed and studied.

(NASA)

While there, Hare had the opportunity to speak with a colleague who showed her one photograph that displayed what was clearly a circular-shaped object in the skies. The man admitted to Hare that although he couldn’t tell her what it did show, he could confirm that a particular part of his job involved him having to airbrush such imagery, specifically to ensure that aerial anomalies like this one never, ever made their way into the public domain. Someone (or some group) in NASA, it seems, had sent the order down for its own UFO photographs to be censored. And this would not be the only occasion when such a thing reportedly happened.

A further individual who made intriguing revelations was Karl Wolfe, a U.S. Air Force operative whose clearance level was Top Secret. Midway through 1965, Wolfe spent some time working on an assignment at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, that was connected with NASA’s lunar orbiter. Wolfe got talking to a fellow airman who was also working on the project. As the two chatted, it became clear that the airman was deeply worried about something big. He finally confided in Wolfe that during the course of its analysis of its photographs of the Moon, NASA had uncovered evidence of a large base of unknown origin and intent that was situated upon the far side of the Moon’s surface. There was absolutely no doubt that those whose job it was to analyze the pictures were not misinterpreting unusual rock formations. Rather, the pictures clearly showed intelligently designed and crafted structures that made the mysterious base sound much like a huge, sprawling space city than anything else. Wolfe, realizing that he had just been exposed to a story that was surely the subject of a high degree of official secrecyand stringent security, chose to break off the conversation, even though it had clearly fascinated him. For some time afterward, Wolf wondered if such a fantastic discovery would one day be announced to the world at large on the nation’s news. It was not, of course.

(NASA)

There is another angle to this. Some conspiracy theorists have suggested that the mysterious Moon base was actually one of ours, rather than a facility created by extraterrestrials. The reason why I say that is because the U.S. military had plans – decades – ago – to secretly place a base on the Moon. The operation was titled Project Horizon. It fell under the auspices of the U.S. Army, and had its origins in the latter part of the 1950s. The plan was to take the first steps towards constructing an installation on the surface of the Moon by the mid-1960s. The goal was for the base to be armed with nuclear weapons and which could be used to decimate the Soviet Union if the United States was hit by a sneak attack and the infrastructure of the nation was significantly destroyed.

After much preliminary discussion, it was in late March 1959 that the ambitious program was finally put into place. Overseeing many of the plans to create the secret base was Lieutenant General Arthur G. Trudeau. At the time, Trudeau was the Army’s Chief of Research and Development. Now-declassified files on Project Horizon demonstrate that Trudeau and his team estimated it would cost approximately $6 Billion to design, build and fully equip a base on the Moon. In a document titled Project Horizon: A U.S. Army Study for the Establishment of a Lunar Military Post, Trudeau wrote the following words: “There is a requirement for a manned military outpost on the Moon. The lunar outpost is required to develop and protect potential United States interests on the Moon; to develop techniques in Moon-based surveillance of the Earth and space, in communications relay, and in operations on the surface of the Moon, for further exploration into space and for military operations on the Moon if required; and to support scientific investigations on the Moon.”

As far as we know, and as history tells us, Project Horizon was shot-down: the budget and the technology just weren’t up for it. Is it feasible that an arm of the U.S. military really did place a base on the Moon? Or, was the base that Karl Wolfe learned of an extraterrestrial facility? Even more incredible, could there have been both bases? Namely, one of ours and one of…theirs.

(NASA) Note: NASA’s stance on its photos is that its material is not protected by copyright, unless if specified.

These photos are free for use.

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