Acquiring Lockheed Martin Lightning II F-35B short take-off vertical landing (STOVL) fighters to operate from the Royal Australian Navy’s (RAN’s) two 27,800-tonne Canberra class landing helicopter dock (LHD) amphibious ships would not be justified, a leading think-tank has concluded. Continue reading
First of class, HMAS Canberra has been commissioned today.
The Canberra class design is based on the warship Juan Carlos I, built by Navantia for the Spanish Navy. The Canberra class vessels are 230.82 metres (757.3 ft) long overall, with a maximum beam of 32 metres (105 ft), and a maximum draught of 7.08 metres (23.2 ft).
At full load, Canberra will displace 27,500 tonnes (27,100 long tons; 30,300 short tons), making her the largest vessel to serve in the RAN. Continue reading
The head of the National Security Agency revealed to a Congressional panel that China and “probably one or two other” countries have the ability to shut down the nation’s power grid and other critical infrastructures through cyberwarfare.
Admiral Michael Rogers, who is also the head of the U.S. Cyber Command, said that U.S. intelligence has detected malware from China and elsewhere on computer systems within the U.S. that affect the daily lives of every American.
“It enables you to shut down very segmented, very tailored parts of our infrastructure that forestall the ability to provide that service to us as citizens,” Rogers said during his review with the House Intelligence Committee.
Rogers sees these attacks as part of “coming trends” in which hostile nations and other actors exploit vulnerabilities in U.S. cyber systems. Continue reading
The two ends of Fusion energy research have claimed ‘success’ this month. The big end of town Hot Fusion researchers, have claimed to have a new technology that will shrink reactor size to manageable proportions, making commercialization more realistic. None other than the famously covert Lockheed Martin Skunk Works have made the claim, of having moved Hot Fusion a step closer to commercialisation by using an alternate containment technology to shrink the usual massive tokamak containment technology to more manageable, and commercial, size. It was claimed by Lockheed Martin, in Aviation Week, that their new CFM technology can increase containment effectiveness by 10 times that of a traditional tokamak.
Meanwhile at the bench-top ‘poor cousin’ Cold Fusion, end of the Fusion energy spectrum, a success of sorts has been claimed by the Andrea Rossi E-Cat Cold Fusion team. It has been claimed in the tech journal Ny Teknik and Pure Energy Systems News that the claimed 1 Megawatt E-Cat cell preformed a test run for 5 hours. The output power was given as 470 Kilowatts, down from the nominal 1 Megawatt due to technical problems running the cell at full power.
THE report ‘Don’t look downstream’ from the September 26 issue of Mining Journal presented a downbeat assessment of the prospects of the nuclear industry. It’s not a view shared by many beyond the more ardent opponents of nuclear energy, writes Dr Jonathon Cobb.
This particular prediction seems to already have proved wrong. Just two days before the publication of the article, construction started on the third reactor at Barakah in the United Arab Emirates. Continue reading