The Greening Continues

— The most eclectic of what I read.

By Harry Babad © 2009

Sources & Credits:

Most of these items were located in the newsletter NewsBridge of ‘articles of interest’ to the libraries users. It is electronically published by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, in Richland WA. I then followed the provided link to the source of the information and edited the content (abstracted) for our readers.

Much of what I will share comes from the various weekly science and environmental newsletters to which I subscribe. Their selections are obviously, and intentionally biased by my views. The resulting column contains a mini-summary with links to articles I found interesting. I also get technology feeds from the New York Times, Business Week, Discover Magazine, and the American Nuclear Society.

With A Chip on My Shoulder — I avoid greening sites that equate a demonstration of a concept (e.g., lab test) to having an industrially viable commercial solution; no government subsidies don’t make things commercial — all governments have the proven habit of bowing to either lobbyists or homo populous <the loudest voice> and have, International, been shown to pick losers. Supporting R&D, and funding large scale demos – wonderful; subsidizing industry — no way. The fifth or sixth law of technology… if you don’t check the whole life cycle of a new process or energy solution; you’re going to fail — 100% bomb out.

Now, As Usual in No Formal Order, the Snippets

A list of entries

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Algae - the NEW ethanol

By Jacob Moeller

A nationwide alliance, including several UA faculties, was recently awarded nearly $44 million by the U.S. Department of Energy to continue research on algae as a sustainable fuel source. The project is essentially to produce a commercially viable biodiesel, said Michael Cusanovich, a UA biochemistry professor and member of the National Alliance for Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts. Algae could be the next alternative fuel for cars.

The NAABB effort will determine the role algae will have in the big picture of alternative energy,” said Kimberly Ogden, a UA chemical and environmental engineering professor and member of the alliance. The U.S. Department of Energy expects quick results with its grant. “They would like something in the order of 2 billion gallons a year of biodiesel by the year 2020, Cusanovich said. Two billion gallons is about 20 percent of the amount the United States uses for transportation fuel.

The algae with which Ogden and Cusanovich are working contain lipids similar to those found in oil. If they can find a way to mass-produce these plants, they can work on burning algae for fuel. The upsides to alternative fuel are obvious in a world in which gasoline is becoming a less available and more expensive fuel. “The conversion in this country to ethanol from corn has caused a huge worldwide crisis in terms of prices of corn, particularly in third-world countries. Another advantage of the algae approach is it doesn’t pull anything out of food production

Arizona DailyWildcat, Tuesday, January 26, 2010

http://wildcat.arizona.edu/news/algae-the-new-ethanol-1.1086352

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General Atomics Proposes a Plant That Runs on Nuclear Waste

By Rebecca Smith

Nuclear and defense supplier General Atomics announced Sunday it will launch a 12-year program to develop a new kind of small, commercial nuclear reactor in the U.S. that could run on spent fuel from big reactors.

In starting its campaign to build the helium-cooled reactor, General Atomics is joining a growing list of companies willing to place a long-shot bet on reactors so small they could be built in factories and hauled on trucks or trains.

The General Atomics program, if successful, could provide a partial solution to one of the biggest problems associated with nuclear energy: figuring out what to do with highly radioactive waste. With no agreement on where to locate a federal storage site, that waste is now stored in pools or casks on utilities' property.

The General Atomics reactor, which is dubbed EM2 for Energy Multiplier Module, would be about one-quarter the size of a conventional reactor and have unusual features, including the ability to burn used fuel, which still contains more than 90% of its original energy. Such reuse would reduce the volume and toxicity of the waste that remained. General Atomics calculates there is so much U.S. nuclear waste that it could fuel 3,000 of the proposed reactors, far more than it anticipates building.

The EM2 would operate at temperatures as high as 850 degrees Centigrade, which is about twice as hot as a conventional water-cooled reactor. The very high temperatures would make the reactor especially well suited to industrial uses that go beyond electricity production, such as extracting oil from tar sands, desalinating water and refining petroleum to make fuel and chemicals.

There are lots more details including barriers faced by this concept so click the link below.

The Wall Street Journal, February 22, 2010.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703791504575079370538466574.html?mod=rss_whats_news_us_business

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Hybrid Solar Panels Combine Photovoltaics with Thermoelectricity

By Larry Greenemeier

Columbia University and N.Y. engineering firm Weidlinger Associates are developing a layered approach that will draw electricity from the sun's energy in multiple ways.

Tar and shingles are hardly environmentally friendly materials, so the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) hopes to soon help homeowners and businesses replace the roofs over their heads with something greener. To that end, the DOE awarded Weidlinger Associates, a New York City-based structural engineering firm, a $150,000 grant earlier this month (matched by a 10-percent commitment from the state) to develop durable hybrid solar roofing panels with integrated photovoltaic cells and thermoelectric materials that harvest the sun's energy to produce both electricity and hot water for buildings.  

Weidlinger is working with Columbia University in New York City on the project, which the engineers and researchers hope will convert at least 12 percent of collected sunlight into electricity. This would be an improvement over the 5- to 10-percent conversion rate possible with relatively inexpensive thin-film plastic solar cells, although a far cry from the most complex (and expensive) solar cells, which have achieved a conversion rate as high as 41.6 percent.

These new photovoltaic thermal hybrid panels presently exist only as prototypes. Beneath the clear, outermost protective cover is a layer of photovoltaic cells, followed by a layer of thermoelectric material, a layer with plastic tubes (called the functionally graded material interlayer) to carry water that will cool the other layers while also carrying away heated water, and a bottom layer of reinforcing plastic. The photovoltaic cells convert the sun's electromagnetic radiation into electricity, while the thermoelectric layer converts the sun's heat into electricity.

The pictured hybrid solar panel that Yin designed has as its outermost layer a clear protective cover, followed by a layer of thermoelectric material, a layer with plastic tubes (called the functionally graded material interlayer) to carry water that will cool the other layers while also carrying away heated water, and a bottom layer of reinforcing plastic.

And although this idea of "building-integrated photovoltaics" (BIPV) is not new, the Columbia-Weidlinger multilayered hybrid design is different from anything currently available to builders. SolarWorld AG in Germany, for example, sells a technology it calls Energyroof, which consists of panels covered with solar laminates that generate electricity but does not include a layer of thermoelectric material.  For details, link on.

Scientific American, December 30, 2009

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hybrid-solar-panels

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U.S. Should Embrace Using Nukes for Nuclear Threat Only, Experts Say

By Martin Matishak — Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON -- The greatest contribution the Obama administration's forthcoming review of U.S. nuclear strategy could make to nonproliferation is to establish a doctrine that pledges to use such weapons only against atomic threats, a leading disarmament advocate said last week.

The Pentagon-led Nuclear Posture Review, expected to be released in March, is to establish policies for the U.S. nuclear deterrent over the next five to 10 years. It should make a "strong statement about nuclear policy which can assure the world that we're still not in the position of planning to use nuclear weapons, particularly in a pre-emptive manner; an impression that had been left in the world in the last decade or so," said former Defense Secretary William Perry.

The highly anticipated review should also "endorse unambiguously" the sweeping nonproliferation goals U.S. President Barack Obama laid out in his 2009 speech in Prague and be "explicit about concrete steps" toward achieving those milestones, Perry said Friday during the U.S. rollout of the report from the International Commission on Nuclear Nonproliferation and Disarmament. [http://www.icnnd.org/reference/reports/ent/pdf/ICNND_Report-EliminatingNuclearThreats.pdf]

The study includes 76 policy recommendations for world leaders to follow as they work toward a world free of nuclear weapons. It was issued last month in hopes of helping to guide deliberations at the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty review conference, scheduled for May in New York.

The document suggests a worldwide nuclear arms rollback to 2,000 weapons, or about 10 percent of today's stockpile, by 2025. It urges countries with nuclear weapons to refine their nuclear doctrines to limit the role of nuclear weapons and provide assurances that they would not consider a nuclear strike against any nation that does not possess such weapons.

NTI – Monday, Jan. 25, 2010 via the Global Security Newswire

http://www.globalsecuritynewswire.org/gsn/nw_20100125_3469.php

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NY Scientists to Study Affect of Everyday Toxins

By Valerie Bauman Associated Press Writer

New York scientists have been awarded a $5 million federal grant to study long-term human exposure to chemicals in the environment.

Chemicals can pop up in plastic bottles, toys, medical equipment and pillows and upholstery. Scientists are looking to see if micro-amounts of environmental compounds that humans are exposed to will stay in the body, or have lasting effects. California and Washington State also have been awarded grants.

Scientists will take samples of urine, blood and saliva, and even test the breath of subjects to get an idea of what is in their body’s right. They'll measure how much and what kinds of chemicals are flowing through blood and fat tissue. Some of those chemicals are metabolized and leave the body, while others hang around.

"The fact that we have, and can measure, some of these chemicals in people does not necessarily mean that they cause disease, and we're very careful to mention that," said Dr. Kenneth Aldous, Director of the Division of Environmental Health Sciences at the state Department of Health's Wadsworth Center laboratories. "However, the fact that they are in our bodies and that they may be increasing — which is something biomonitoring can tell us — may be important down the road measuring their correlation with disease."

Scientists still are exploring what effects various chemicals have on humans, but three that are being closely watch are chemical compounds known as phthalates, Bisphenol-A [BPA] and Polybrominated diphenyl ethers [PBDEs.] The human health effects of low levels of these chemicals are unknown, but they have been shown in animal studies to disrupt several systems, Link on for more details.

Doc Sez, despite the headline, minor mass hysteria, so far there is not direct proof that at the levels used in commerce; that these material are harmful. I get damned upset by media driven scientific conclusions and reliance (based) on un-peer reviewed test data. Never the less, the plastics industry has substituted/replaced products baby products that contained BPA and bottled water is getting ‘voluntary’ waning labels to limit the reuse of these containers. <Check out Wikipedia for more information about these two compounds use for making plastics more flexible and for making materials fire retardant.

ABC News, ALBANY, N.Y. December 28, 2009 (AP)

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=9433594

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What Utilities Have Learned From Smart-Meter Tests ...And why they aren't putting those lessons to use By Rebecca Smith

Utilities have learned a lot about how smart meters can compel consumers to save electricity. Unfortunately, too often they aren't putting the knowledge to good use.

Smart meters are more precise than traditional meters in that they send readings on electricity usage to utility billing departments throughout the day. Not only do smart meters provide customers with a clearer picture of how they use electricity on a daily basis, they also make it possible for utilities to charge more for power when demand is highest—in the afternoon—and less when usage falls off—at night.

By making variable pricing plans possible, smart meters are expected to play a big role in getting customers to reduce their peak-hour energy consumption, a key goal of utility executives and policy makers. Electricity grids are sized to meet the maximum electricity need, so a drop in peak demand would let utilities operate with fewer expensive power plants, meaning they could provide electricity at a lower cost and with less pollution.

Utilities have run dozens of pilot tests of digital meters and found that people cut power consumption the most when faced with higher peak-hour rates. But utility executives and regulators have been reluctant to implement rate plans that penalize people for too much energy use, fearing that if customers associate smart meters with higher bills, they will stall the technology's advance just as it is gaining traction. Only about 5% of U.S. electric meters are "smart" today, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, but that figure is expected to grow to about one-third in the next five years.

"Most CEOs struggle over this issue more than anything else," says Ted Craver, chief executive of Edison International, the Rosemead, Calif., parent of Southern California Edison, which is in the midst of a massive smart-meter rollout. "You could have a real rebellion" if smart meters push up customers' rates, especially if utilities' other capital expenses are increasing, he says.

Pacific Gas & Electric Co., a unit of PG&E Corp., got a taste of the public-relations risk last summer when it installed smart meters in Bakersfield, Calif., as part of a broad upgrade in its Northern California service territory. When customers—who weren't participating in any sort of experimental rate plan—received dramatically higher bills shortly afterward, they blamed the meters for what they assumed was faulty billing. The San Francisco utility investigated and concluded that the meters were functioning properly. It found that the higher bills were simply a case of unfortunate timing: An increase in conventional rates had taken effect just ahead of unseasonably hot temperatures. There’s more so check out the link.

The Wall Street Journal - FEBRUARY 22, 2010

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704878904575031020562238094.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond

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Bill Gates Goes Nuclear With Toshiba's 4S Reactor

BY Addy Dugdale

Bill Gates is going atomic. The Microsoft founder's startup TerraPower is partnering with Toshiba to build a traveling-wave reactor. [See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor] These reactors run on depleted uranium, rather than the enriched sort found in light-water reactors, only have to be refueled every 60 to 100 years, and are small enough to fit in a hot tub. it is all part of Gates' quest for zero carbon emissions in the next 40 years.


Traveling Wave Reactor Power Curve - Fuel Consumption Pattern

Separately, Toshiba has been working, for many years, on its own mini nuclear reactors with a 30-year shelf life, making it the perfect partner for the software magnate-turned-philanthropist. Its 4S model (Super-Safe, Small and Simple) is expected to get U.S. approval this year, and Toshiba is hoping to start production by 2014.

It's not clear whether Gates is simply joining in the development of the 4S, or collaborating on a separate model. The technology will not be commercially available for the next decade or so, according to The New York Times. The Nikkei is also claiming that Gates might invest several billion dollars of his own fortune in the project.

Fast Company.com Blog, March 23, 2010

http://www.fastcompany.com/1594671/bill-gates-goes-nuclear-with-toshiba-tie-up

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May your lives get greener, healthier and more enjoyable.

Harry, aka doc_Babad