Juan Orbea

- Thinking about research as a market.

Sodium fast reactors (SFR): In SFRs, liquid sodium acts as the coolant instead of water. Liquid sodium, compared to water, can handle higher temperatures at lower pressures, which improves the efficiency and safety of the reactor.

Having free speech is absolutely necessary and not enough, it’s the bare minimum. 

FLAG, a fiber-optic cable now being built from England to Japan, is a skinny little cuss (about an inch in diameter), but it is 28,000 kilometers long, which is long even compared to really big things like the planet Earth. When it is finished in September 1997, it arguably will be the longest engineering project in history. Writing about it... See more

"I'm a big believer that the only real driver of human progress and economic growth over the long term is the societal structure that enables scientific progress, and then scientific progress itself."

The lesson, as is often the case, may be that we need to start earlier. So let me offer a suggestion for anyone preparing to congratulate a kindergarten graduate. Please tell those little tykes’ parents that one of their most important jobs is to help their children figure out who they are and what they are good at. And that another critical job is... See more

High-temperature gas reactors (HTGRs): In HTGRs, gasses (typically helium) act as the coolant that is fed directly into the turbine to produce energy. Helium is an inert gas, so it generally won’t chemically react with any material, and exposing helium to neutron radiation won’t make it radioactive. Helium can therefore be heated to higher... See more