The US Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced plans to turn land that previously housed aspects of the Manhattan Project into a 1 GW solar farm. For the uninitiated, the Manhattan Project was a top-secret and successful effort to develop nuclear weapons during the 1940s.

This particular renovation is being conducted at the former home of the Hanford nuclear testing facility, otherwise known as Site W, which is in Washington state. This site housed the world’s first full-scale plutonium production reactor. Plutonium made at this location was used in the very first atomic bomb and the Fat Man bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.

The location certainly is intriguing, but so is the transformation project. This 580-square mile section of semi-arid desert could end up housing the largest solar project in the country, if built to the announced capacity. This record currently belongs to the Edwards Sanborn Solar and Energy Storage project in California, which generates 875 megawatts of solar power.

The DOE has teamed up with Hecate Energy to repurpose the 8,000-acre site. This is part of the Biden-Harris administration’s Cleanup to Clean Energy initiative that launched last year. This program is tasked with repurposing DOE-owned land for clean energy generation. This program has already added around 90 GW of solar capacity to the grid, which is enough to power 13 million homes.

This isn’t quite a done deal yet. The DOE and Hecate Energy still have to negotiate for a realty agreement and the government could cancel these negotiations at any time.

This is good news, but we still have some catching up to do with regard to Europe. The US produces around 5.6 percent of its energy via solar, but the EU recently shot up to 9.1 percent. However, trends are moving upward in both regions.

A technical paper titled “Comparative Analysis of Thermal Properties in Molybdenum Substrate to Silicon and Glass for a System-on-Foil Integration” was published by researchers at Rochester Institute of Technology and Lux Semiconductors.

Abstract:

“Advanced electronics technology is moving towards smaller footprints and higher computational power. In order to achieve this, advanced packaging techniques are currently being considered, including organic, glass, and semiconductor-based substrates that allow for 2.5D or 3D integration of chips and devices. Metal-core substrates are a new alternative with similar properties to those of semiconductor-based substrates but with the added benefits of higher flexibility and metal ductility. This work comprehensively compares the thermal properties of a novel metal-based substrate, molybdenum, and silicon and fused silica glass substrates in the context of system-on-foil (SoF) integration. A simple electronic technique is used to simulate the heat generated by a typical CPU and to measure the heat dissipation properties of the substrates. The results indicate that molybdenum and silicon are able to effectively dissipate a continuous power density of 2.3 W/mm² as the surface temperature only increases by ~15°C. In contrast, the surface temperature of fused silica glass substrates increases by >140°C for the same applied power. These simple techniques and measurements were validated with infrared camera measurements as well as through finite element analysis via COMSOL simulation. The results validate the use of molybdenum as an advanced packaging substrate and can be used to characterize new substrates and approaches for advanced packaging.”

Find the technical paper here. Published May 2024.

Huang, Tzu-Jung, Tobias Kiebala, Paul Suflita, Chad Moore, Graeme Housser, Shane McMahon, and Ivan Puchades. 2024. “Comparative Analysis of Thermal Properties in Molybdenum Substrate to Silicon and Glass for a System-on-Foil Integration” Electronics 13, no. 10: 1818. https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics13101818

Related Reading
The Race To Glass Substrates
Replacing silicon and organic substrates requires huge shifts in manufacturing, creating challenges that will take years to iron out.

The post Comparing Thermal Properties In Molybdenum Substrate To Si And Glass For A System-On-Foil Integration (RIT, Lux) appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

As I watched the gigantic, awesome, triumphant, overwhelming, punishingly large and loud Dune: Part Two in IMAX earlier this week, I couldn't help but think of an old meme. 

Sometime before the 2021 release of Dune: Part One, a clever anonymous poster mocked up a "know your candidates" page featuring Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Only the "issue" they were discussing wasn't health care or foreign policy. It was, "What is Dune about?" 

In the meme, Sanders' answer was typically long-winded and discursive: "Well, it's hard to say Dune is about any one thing, because Dune is rich with themes. The first book, for example, is about ecology, and the hero's journey, and as a criticism of the Foundation series' take on declining empires, among other things. The second book subverts the hero's journey told in the first book, and the later books follow in…" and then the fake Sanders answer trails off the page. 

The meme version of Biden simply responds: "Dune is about worms." 

The magic of director Denis Villeneuve's two-part adaptation of Frank Herbert's 1965 sci-fi novel is that it captures both of the fake candidate answers from the meme. It's an intricate desert epic about ecological balance, the harshness of nature, the economics of resource extraction, imperialism, tribal politics, corporate intrigue, groovy psychedelic drugs, culture clash, and Golden Age science fiction missing the point, among other things. 

But it's also about, you know, worms. 

Specifically: very, very big worms. 

Even more than the first film, which covered a little more than half of Herbert's novel, Dune: Part Two is a showcase for cinematic grandiosity, for movies as conveyors of sheer, terrifying enormity. The movie is the tale of young Paul Atreides, a young duke whose family was killed by their rivals the Harkonnens after a distant emperor granted the Atreides charge of the planet Arrakis. 

Arrakis isn't just any planet: It's the home to spice, a psychedelic drug that also happens to power interstellar travel, which is made by the planet's native giant sandworms. Imagine if oil was also LSD, and it was produced by roving, murderous whales who lived deep in the desert sands. 

The first installment was the story of Atreides' journey to Dune and the defeat of his family. The second is the story of his triumphant revenge, as he unites the local people, the Fremen, in defiance of the Harkonnen overlords.

Herbert's novel is replete with descriptions of corporate structures and what amount to company strategy discussions about economic fundamentals and resource extraction metrics, all mixed with complex political machinations and semi-inscrutable hallucinogenic dream logic featuring religious prophecies and drug-addled visions, plus a lot of asides about the elegant sustainable eco-technology of life on a barren sand planet. At times, reading Dune resembles reading minutes from a corporate board meeting while tripping balls with green-tech climate activists in the desert. 

Anyway, you can probably see what meme-Bernie was talking about. 

The movie, however, captures all of this clunky complexity quite well, capturing desert life among the Fremen and gesturing at their political structures and religious beliefs without subjecting viewers to drawn-out exposition. Villeneuve and co-screenwriter Jon Spaihts understand that a thoughtfully imagined fictional world doesn't need to constantly stop to explain itself; it can just go about its business. 

But then, in the midst of all this, there are the worms. In contrast to Dune: Part One, which closed with a hint of the possibility, this time Paul Atreides gets to ride them. And it is awesome. 

In Dune: Part Two, Villeneuve delivers a handful of truly gargantuan set pieces featuring Arrakis' skyscraper-sized sandworms as they plow through the desert of the film's alien planet. Along with his work on the first-contact film Arrival, they mark Villeneuve as Hollywood's most successful purveyor of colossal mystery.

As with that movie's obelisk and its tentacled alien inhabitants, there's something truly alien about the sandworms of Arrakis, and also a sense of scale and vastness that few other filmmakers convey. Watching a sandworm plunge through desert valleys, blasting tidal waves of sand in its wake, on an oversized IMAX screen in kneecap-rattling surround sound is the sort of audiovisual experience that big-budget, big-screen movies were made for. Dune: Part Two is a glorious, overwhelming sensory smorgasbord. 

In recent years, far too many blockbusters have served up weightless, ugly, computer-generated, mediocre-at-best set pieces. Villeneuve's Dune films are reminders of what real cinematic spectacle looks like. They are movies about worms—really big worms. Hell yeah, they are.  

The post <i>Dune: Part Two</i> Is a Glorious Sci-Fi Spectacle appeared first on Reason.com.