A State University of New York professor believes he has discovered a way to make nuclear energy so safe that he can prevent Manhattan from becoming “the next lost city of Atlantis.”
For the past two years, Matthew Sidagis, 41, has been toiling away in a laboratory deep underground on the University at Albany campus, blasting pieces of lithium with ion beams and testing their fission properties.
The physics professor discovered that lithium, commonly used in cell phone batteries and abundantly mined on Earth, only fission when hit by ions and stabilizes when the beam stops.
“The concept is to have nuclear fission that can be turned on and off,” Sidagis told the Post. “That creates a really incredible safety factor and makes it completely different from standard nuclear power.”
He continued: “You can’t create a dangerous explosion. You can’t melt it. Even if you tried, it’s intrinsically safe.”
Nuclear power plants operate using nuclear fission, a chain reaction in which atoms split apart and release energy. If controlled, nuclear fission would generate heat that would move water through power-generating turbines.
But if control is lost, there is an inherent risk of uranium fission, effectively creating a hell of an atomic weapon.
“All of our nuclear power plants were built after the Manhattan Project and after the atomic bomb was dropped. So the only way we knew how to make nuclear energy was to take the same technology and the same idea from the bomb. “Uranium has been the standard nuclear fuel for nuclear power plants throughout its history,” Sidaghis said.
“My idea is that you can’t make it into a bomb. You can make it into a nice power plant, but you can’t force it into a runaway chain reaction.”
Sidagis’ model could also potentially negate the dangers of uranium waste produced by standard nuclear reactors. Unlike uranium, which takes almost a billion years to become non-radioactive, fissioned lithium takes “hours, minutes, or even days or even weeks” to become safe.
Although it has been tested only on small samples so far, if Sidagis’ lithium-based model scales up as he hopes, it could replace uranium in nuclear reactors around the world and clean Public safety concerns that have prevented energy sources from generating electricity could also be eliminated. The whole earth.
“The beauty of nuclear power, in my opinion, and not just traditional uranium base plants, is that any nuclear power plant can be built with near-zero carbon emissions and can be operated with near-zero carbon emissions.” said.
Sidagis believes the climate cataclysm has already begun, predicting that New York City will be underwater by 2100 if no precautions are taken. But if successful, his lithium-based nuclear energy could have a “huge” impact on keeping future generations safe.
“I’ll be very frank with you, if his idea is successful, someone sitting in New York may not be underwater in 50 years,” he explained. “So I think it’s a pretty big impact to make sure that Manhattan doesn’t become the next lost city of Atlantis.”
This idea is also sustainable on many levels. Lithium fuel can be harvested from tons of regularly used batteries, and nuclear reactors can be retrofitted into existing power plants.
Sidaghis, an associate professor at the University at Albany, was focused on discovering dark matter in the universe before coming across the idea of lithium fission.
Dark matter hunters spend their time creating neutrons to throw into detectors, and the University of Albany’s underground particle collider is uniquely equipped to do so, and Sidagis said he is interested in conducting such experiments. While working with his team, he came up with the idea for lithium.
This process is still in its early stages. Sidagis has a patent pending and is seeking funding to scale up his experiments, which he plans to publish in a peer-reviewed paper before considering further expansion.
“We’ve already received offers in the millions of dollars, but we’re open to anything,” Sidagis said, explaining that he was confident his idea was right.
“I’m not advocating new physics. I’m not saying we have some incredible zero-point energy or some magical thing that doesn’t actually exist. We’re doing the bread and butter of nuclear fission, which has been understood for a decade.”
If everything goes perfectly, Sidaghis estimates that a lithium reactor could be operational within 10 years.
“I’m not reinventing the wheel,” he said. “My concept is innovative, but at the same time not too revolutionary, if that makes any sense.”
