Hasta La Gadget!

Prefab nuclear power plants might sound straight out of a 1950’s vision for the nuclear age, but the technology may be on its way to laboratories across the country. The New York Times is reporting that the Obama administration’s budget, which will be officially proposed tomorrow, includes funding for research into low-cost, modular nuclear plants that can be quickly assembled and shipped without the overhead of traditional designs. Designed to be deployed at first in large-scale national laboratories, like the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, the plants cost up to $2 billion, a small fraction of the $10 billion price of a typical nuclear reactor, but offer about 1/20th of the output. The use of these reactors is expected to help the Energy Department lower its carbon footprint by 28 percent before 2020.

In the long-term, this research is expected to yield the ability to mass-produce these power plants, assembly-line style, allowing them to replace existing coal plants already on the grid. According to the Times, this type of modular reactor saves utilities from the large start-up costs associated with building a traditional reactor, allowing for more options when it comes time to replace older, less environmentally-friendly plants. They also produce roughly the same amount of power as older coal plants from the middle of the century that are now nearing retirement.

The administration will likely be asking for $500 million over five years, which will pay for half of the design costs for two reactors.

[via New York Times, image via Flickr: Bagalute, CC-BY]

There’s a lot of talk these days about how consumers aren’t really interested in having 3D TVs in their home, but that isn’t stopping NICT from creating the largest commercially available 3D screen to date. And it doesn’t even require the use of glasses.

Perhaps it’s more of a show-off product than anything else. NICT was on a mission to dismiss the previous notion that glasses-free 3D displays need to be small and viewed from a direct head-on perspective, otherwise quality would deteriorate and be useless.

However, by adjusting the LED light sources all over the display, NICT was able to greatly reduce these errors, and create what is apparently a pretty solid 3D product.

No word on how many millions of dollars one of these contraptions actually costs.

Via Akihabara News

MSI has confirmed the release of a new GPU called R6870 Hawk, however the bigger news is the cooling system that it will use. MSI has adopted the Twin Frozr III cooling solution for this new GPU. The company also claims that with the new cooling system, the R6870 Hawk will be the fastest GPU yet.

The dual fans allow for more air flow to and from the GPU. MSI of course, is claiming that it was built with first class Military parts, a typical claim for most of their GPUs. The R6870 Hawk will have 930MHz core clockspeed, 1024MB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 4200MHz on a 256-bit bus. MSI has yet to release a price or a date.

MSI sounds pretty confident in this new GPU, let’s hope that it can stand up to claims. I suspect that it will be pretty pricey. I do wonder if the Twin Frozr III will become a common cooling system option for GPUs.

Via Hot Hardware

Intel had to stop shipping Cougar Point chipsets when one if the brands under the series was found to have a defect. The company has since opted to begin shipping rest of the line again. Intel is also planning to start shipping out the new Sandy Bridge chipset as early as next week.

Intel found that some of the Cougar Point series’ chipsets had bad six serial-ATA ports. Thus stopped all shipments of the series in hopes to stop the disaster in the making.

I have to say that I am happy to hear that Intel might not have as of big of loss like it predicted that it would. This could be good news for the computer industry as well. I hope that Intel can save some of that presumed lost money, it could help set start 2011 as a better year for Intel as a whole.

Via Info Tech