Flagship fusion reactor could cost twice as much as planned

An experimental fusion reactor that will recreate the conditions at the heart of the sun to create cheap green power could cost twice as much as governments had planned for.

The flagship project, which absorbs almost half of Britain’s energy research budget, will test complex machinery needed to make the world’s first operational fusion power plants – a technology widely expected to transform energy generation by providing abundant power with no greenhouse gas emissions and only small amounts of radioactive waste.

Source Guardian Science 29 January 2009

LHC Computing Award for Intel and Oracle

Intel and Oracle received the prestigious LHC Computing Award from CERN Director General, Robert Aymar, in recognition of their outstanding contribution to Large Hadron Collider (LHC) computing.

The LHC which is the world’s largest particle accelerator, is expected to produce more than 15 million Gigabytes of data each year which will be stored and analysed via the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG).  This ambitious project connects and combines the IT power of more than 140 computer centres in 33 countries.

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