"World’s first renewable gasoline"

[Mr. Wyndham]

I think something along the lines of this might be much more productive....

LEAD: Paul Brown, a college dropout who is vice president of Peripheral Systems Inc., a six-year-old technology concern in Portland, Ore., has won patent approval for a nuclear battery.

Paul Brown, a college dropout who is vice president of Peripheral Systems Inc., a six-year-old technology concern in Portland, Ore., has won patent approval for a nuclear battery.

The device converts the energy of decaying radioactive material into electricity. The company said it has built a prototype about the size of a garbage can, which is capable of generating 50 kilowatts of electricity, enough to maintain about 20 households for 25 years.

The battery can be fueled by strontium 90, a waste product of nuclear plants. A cage of silver ribbons surrounds the material and absorbs the charged particles that are emitted by the decaying radioactive isotope. As the particles bombard the cage, the magnetic field around each particle collapses and induces an oscillating current in the cage.

The battery is not yet ready for home use, however. In addition to the potential hazards of handling radioactive material, the device costs as much as $25,000 to produce said Mr. Brown, who received patent 4,835,433.
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpag...55C0A96F948260

Nanomaterial turns radiation directly into electricity

Materials that directly convert radiation into electricity could produce a new era of spacecraft and even Earth-based vehicles powered by high-powered nuclear batteries, say US researchers.

Electricity is usually made using nuclear power by heating steam to rotate turbines that generate electricity.

But beginning in the 1960s, the US and Soviet Union used thermoelectric materials that convert heat into electricity to power spacecraft using nuclear fission or decaying radioactive material. The Pioneer missions were among those using the latter, "nuclear battery" approach.
Dispensing with the steam and turbines makes those systems smaller and less complicated. But thermoelectric materials have very low efficiency. Now US researchers say they have developed highly efficient materials that can convert the radiation, not heat, from nuclear materials and reactions into electricity.

Power boost
Liviu Popa-Simil, former Los Alamos National Laboratory nuclear engineer and founder of private research and development company LAVM and Claudiu Muntele, of Alabama A&M University, US, say transforming the energy of radioactive particles into electricity is more effective.

The materials they are testing would extract up to 20 times more power from radioactive decay than thermoelectric materials, they calculate.

Tests of layered tiles of carbon nanotubes packed with gold and surrounded by lithium hydride are under way. Radioactive particles that slam into the gold push out a shower of high-energy electrons. They pass through carbon nanotubes and pass into the lithium hydride from where they move into electrodes, allowing current to flow.

"You load the material with nuclear energy and unload an electric current," says Popa-Simil.

Space probes
The tiles would be best used to create electricity using a radioactive material, says Popa-Simil, because they could be embedded directly where radiation is greatest. But they could also harvest power directly from a fission reactor's radiation.

Devices based on the material could be small enough to power anything from interplanetary probes to aircraft and land vehicles, he adds.
"I believe this work is innovative and could have a significant impact on the future of nuclear power," says David Poston, of the US Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory. However perfecting new nuclear technologies requires years of development, he adds.

Popa-Simil agrees, saying it will be at least a decade before final designs of the radiation-to-electricity concept are built.
http://environment.newscientist.com/...ectricity.html

And this:
http://www.rexresearch.com/nucell/nucell.htm
(Long read, so I didn't post.)

[DGthe3]

Originally Posted by Dragoneye

I think something along the lines of this might be much more productive....



And this:
http://www.rexresearch.com/nucell/nucell.htm
(Long read, so I didn't post.)

didn't read that last one, but overall those are great. If the nuclear waste is going to be sitting around for a few thousand years, might as well make use of it.

Nuclear power -the ultimate green energy

[Mr. Wyndham]

Check this out:

As planet swelters, are algae unlikely saviour?

OSLO (AFP) — As the world mulls over the conundrum of how to satisfy a seemingly endless appetite for energy and still slash greenhouse gas emissions, researchers have stumbled upon an unexpected hero: algae.

So-called microalgae hold enormous potential when it comes to reining in both climate change, since they naturally absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide, as well as energy production, since they can easily be converted to a range of different fuel types.

"This is certainly one of the most promising and revolutionary leads in the fight against climate change and the quest to satisfy energy needs," Frederic Hauge, who heads up the Norwegian environmental group Bellona, told AFP.
The idea is to divert exhaust spewed from carbon burning plants and other factories into so-called "photobioreactors", or large transparent tubes filled with algae.

When the gas is mixed with water and injected into the tubes, the algae soak up much of the carbon dioxide, or CO2, in accordance with the principle of photosynthesis.

The pioneering technique, called solar biofuels, is one of a panoply of novel methods aiming to crack the problem of providing energy but without the carbon pollution of costly fossil fuels -- with oil pushing 140 dollars a barrel and supplies dwindling -- or the waste and danger of nuclear power.

Studies are underway worldwide, from academia in Australia, Germany and the US, to the US Department of Energy, oil giant Royal Dutch Shell and US aircraft maker Boeing. This week alone, Japanese auto parts maker Denso Corp., a key supplier to the Toyota group, said it too would start investigating, to see if algae could absorb CO2 from its factories.

The prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), for one, has successfully tested the system, finding that once filtered through the algae broth, fumes from a cogeneration plant came out 50-85 percent lighter on CO2 and contained 85 percent less of another potent greenhouse gas, nitrogen oxide.

Once the microalgae are removed from the tubes they can easily be buried or injected into the seabed, and thus hold captive the climate changing gases they ingest indefinitely.

And when algae grown out in the open are used in biomass plants, the method can actually produce "carbon negative" energy, meaning the energy production actually drains CO2 from the atmosphere.

This is possible since the microalgae first absorbs CO2 as it grows and, although the gas is released again when the biomass burns, the capturing system keeps it from re-entering the air.

"Whether you are watching TV, vacuuming the house, or driving your electric car to visit friends and family, you would be removing CO2 from the atmosphere," Hauge said.

Instead of being stored away, the algae can also be crushed and used as feedstock for biodiesel fuel -- something that could help the airline industry among others to improve its environmental credentials. In fact, even the algae residue remaining after the plants are pressed into biodiesel could be put to good use as mineral-rich fertiliser, Hauge said "You kill three birds with one stone. The algae serves at once to filter out CO2 at industrial sites, to produce energy and for agriculture," he pointed out.

Compared with the increasingly controversial first-generation biofuels made from food crops like sunflowers, rapeseed, wheat and corn, microalgae have the huge advantage of not encroaching on agricultural land or affecting farm prices, and can be grown whenever there's sunlight.

They also can yield far more oil than other oleaginous plants grown on land.
"To cover US fuel needs with biodiesel extracted from the most efficient terrestrial plant, palm oil, it would be necessary to use 48 percent of the country's farmland," according to a recent study by the Oslo-based Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research.

"The United States could potentially replace all of its petrol-based automobile fuel by farming microalgae on a surface corresponding to five percent of the country's farmland," the study added.

As attractive as it may seem however, the algae solution remains squarely in the conception phase, with researchers scrambling to figure out how to scale up the system to an industrial level.

Shell, for one, acknowledged on its website some "significant hurdles must be overcome before algae-based biofuel can be produced cost-effectively," especially the large amounts of water needed for the process. In addition, further work is needed to identify which species of algae is the most effective.

[LegacyZ28]

I think 100% electricity is the future
possibly hydrogen, but the tank has to be pretty huge and there still are problems.
At the current rate, I think we should see fuly electric cars coming out as general releases around 2015-2020
Every year they seem to make a nice leap forward on battery technology

[Nickdago]

I actually saw this I think on the Discovery Channel. They actually did have green crude they showed on the program although it just made you wounder if they could really do it on a large scale.

[Nickdago]

Originally Posted by DGthe3

my turn to play devils advocate . . .

Nuclear is great, but what do you do with the waste? Sure its alot less than the ash comming from coal, but America doesn't have a solution to store the waste it currently produces. Increase that by 5x and you will have more serious problems than greenpeace protesting ANWR. Speaking of which, the public opinion of nuclear isn't that high (however misguided). Those who know about nuclear power know its extremely safe, but the public typically cares about what happens when something goes wrong not how likely that event is.

As far as drilling your own reserves, what do you do when they run low after a couple decades of fueling America?

Actually they have developed new technologies to reuse the nuclear waste and there may be a time they can actually use most of the waste. As far as oil we have more than just a couple of decades worth right here in the good ole USA, plenty enough to help us transition over the next 30, 40 or 50 years into other forms of energy.

[TAG UR IT]

Only use 5% of farmland versus 48%??? Dang! Seems like we would be headed in the right direction!

[DGthe3]

Originally Posted by Nickdago

Actually they have developed new technologies to reuse the nuclear waste and there may be a time they can actually use most of the waste. As far as oil we have more than just a couple of decades worth right here in the good ole USA, plenty enough to help us transition over the next 30, 40 or 50 years into other forms of energy.

I heard about that development after I made that post. I don't believe the stuff that I said would be a big problem anyway. As far as oil goes, we can keep using the stuff at current rates for a hundred years or more (Canada alone has a world supply of about 50 years). But just because we can use it for that long, doesn't mean we should.

Originally Posted by TAG UR IT

Only use 5% of farmland versus 48%??? Dang! Seems like we would be headed in the right direction!

The beauty of it is that it doesn't even need farmland. They could set up shop in Arizona and New Mexico.

Its stuff like this that makes me think that a global hydrogen economy isn't going to happen for quite a while. Why overhaul the entire system (fuel production, transportation, storage, engines) when you can get by making a few tweaks to the existing one.

[Mr. Wyndham]

Originally Posted by DGthe3

Its stuff like this that makes me think that a global hydrogen economy isn't going to happen for quite a while. Why overhaul the entire system (fuel production, transportation, storage, engines) when you can get by making a few tweaks to the existing one.

I've been thinking the same thing. Perhaps the "Hydrogen Economy" will be the next shift, once something goes wrong with whatever we do to fix our current problem.

[Nickdago]

Originally Posted by DGthe3

I heard about that development after I made that post. I don't believe the stuff that I said would be a big problem anyway. As far as oil goes, we can keep using the stuff at current rates for a hundred years or more (Canada alone has a world supply of about 50 years). But just because we can use it for that long, doesn't mean we should.

The beauty of it is that it doesn't even need farmland. They could set up shop in Arizona and New Mexico.

Its stuff like this that makes me think that a global hydrogen economy isn't going to happen for quite a while. Why overhaul the entire system (fuel production, transportation, storage, engines) when you can get by making a few tweaks to the existing one.

Does not mean we should not use it either.

[GTAHVIT]

I think what DGthe3 is trying to say is we will use most of the 50 -100 or so years of oil in north america transitioning to an oil free state. Whether it is electric, ethanol, hydrogen, air, solar, or whatever. Probably all of the above.

So, we don't want to just start tapping into those resources if we aren't going to move towards other options. The cold hard fact is eventually we're gonna use that oil... It's just a matter of sooner or later. My hope is we will find enough alternatives that oil will be around much later.

[Mr. Wyndham]

Originally Posted by gtahvit

So, we don't want to just start tapping into those resources if we aren't going to move towards other options. The cold hard fact is eventually we're gonna use that oil... It's just a matter of sooner or later. My hope is we will find enough alternatives that oil will be around much later.

I sure hopw the people who want to drill for domestic oil have it set in their minds that this is a TEMPORARY move, designed to create a comfortable buffer for a transition to other fuels.

I am deathly afraid that once the drilling starts and gas prices drop (however much), people will become content, and stop investing in alternatives. We Cannot afford to let that happen.

[Fenah]

I hope this works.

[aldaron327]

Originally Posted by Dragoneye

I sure hopw the people who want to drill for domestic oil have it set in their minds that this is a TEMPORARY move, designed to create a comfortable buffer for a transition to other fuels.

I am deathly afraid that once the drilling starts and gas prices drop (however much), people will become content, and stop investing in alternatives. We Cannot afford to let that happen.

I think your fears are justifiable, given that it's human nature to become complacent. Hopefully, though, more and more people are seeing it as the crisis that it's becoming and will keep it in the forefront of our collective conscience as we move forward. Talk to someone who was around during The Great Depression and observe how they go about their day to day lives. They'll reuse just about EVERYTHING they can (at least my great grandparents did) and are generally financially conservative.

I hope that we'll learn from the current situation and not remain complacent, but I'm not holding my breath.