Nuclear Power, No Cold War Flavor

Thorium – will this be the future or nuclear energy?

I admit, I had never heard about the stuff until I saw this article in Wired recently, but the idea of thorium-based reactors has been kicking around for decades. In fact, back in the 1950s, when nuclear energy was just getting off the ground, thorium was a leading candidate to become the basic fuel of reactors around the world. In the end, uranium won out (you’ll see why shortly), but some researchers are taking another look at thorium

Here’s what’s cool about it. First, it’s really abundant. There’s lots of it out there. Uranium, by contrast, is less common, especially the U-235 isotope that’s used in reactors.

Also, thorium leaves behind very little waste material. We all know that nuclear waste is a pretty major issue with current reactors. And, the byproducts of thorium reactors are only dangerous for a few hundred years, compared with uranium’s leftovers, that are harmful for thousands of years.

And here’s the kicker: when thorium breaks down, none of the resulting materials can be used to produce nuclear weapons. Uranium, of course, begets plutonium, the key ingredient to bombs.

Obviously, this was seen as a perk during the Cold War – hey, we get electricity and explosives! That’s a win-win.

But our priorities have changed now, and maybe that means the world is ready for a nuclear power plant that doesn’t have much to offer the Pentagon.

Algae - A Reality Check

Algae biofuel companies are up in arms this week over a new study that cast serious doubts about the environmental benefits of what many had seen as a promising technology.

Yes, there are plenty of advantages to algae over other biofuel source-crops: it generates more power than other commonly used plants, and because it grows in water instead of soil it doesn’t compete with farmland that can be used for food.

But the report, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, focuses on other factors. The main problem isn’t the algae, it’s the fertilizer needed to grow it. More specifically, it’s the energy used producing fertilizer and the carbon dioxide emitted by the trucks that haul it to the ponds where algae is raised.

While producing biofuels from crops such as corn and canola can ultimately cut down on carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the report concluded that the algae production could actually increase greenhouse gases.

This is an important point – everything is connected. Even if algae delivers more energy than fuels from other sources, it’s not necessarily a gain if the entire process, start to finish, is less efficient than other source crops.

But don’t rule out algae just because of this report. It’s still a promising concept, and it’s hard to imagine that smart people can’t develop new manufacturing processes that are more efficient than what we’re using now.

Team Effort: Supergrid

When the government really gets behind a project, sometimes it can pull off some pretty impressive work.

In this case, a continent-spanning, green “supergrid” in Europe. Nine countries are collaborating on a massive energy project that would link wind turbines, tidal energy systems, solar farms and hyrdro power sites all across the North Sea region.

The nine nations – Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Sweden and the United Kingdom – are expected to formally approve the project this month, and hope to have firm plans in place by Fall. Various estimates have pegged the cost at close to 30 billion euro.

The vision is to connect wind farms in Scotland, solar facilities and Germany and tidal power systems in Belgium and Denmark through a vast network of high-capacity, undersea DC cables. Direct current transmission lines cost more than AC, organizers say, but lose less energy over long distances.

The project has one more component that seems especially clever: all these alt-energy systems will be linked to a network of hydroelectric plants in Norway. When the wind is a’blowin’ and the waves are a’crashin’ and the sun is a’shinin’ there’s going to be plenty of juice, and the excess power can be diverted to Norway, to push water uphill. Then, when the weather is less cooperative, the water can flow downhill to power the hydro plants.

The EU has pledged to generate 20% of its power from renewable sources by 2020; that’s an ambitious target, but projects like this one could certainly help them get there.

3 Gorges X 5

Amazing article in The New Yorker last month, about China’s green energy programs, and more importantly, how they absolutely dwarf anything we’re trying to do here in the U.S.

I had known that China was a big force in renewables – that the country was a major supplier of wind turbines and solar systems, and that their manufacturing capacity was huge, and growing. But I hadn’t really appreciated the scale, not of what they are able to do now nor of what they are going to be able to do in the near future.

In fact, Chinese researchers have been pushing hard to develop green energy for decades, through an initiative called the 863 Program – so-named because it was the result of a scientific call to action in March of 1986. 1986! That was more than three decades ago.

With such a big head start, it’s no surprise that China has moved into such a leadership position. Here’s my favorite stat about the country’s impressive progress: in the next decade, China is expected to install enough wind power equipment to generate FIVE times energy of the Three Gorges Dam, which is already the world’s biggest electricity producer.

Chinese scientists have also garnered respect for other advanced systems, including clean-coal gasification, batteries for electric cars, thin-film solar cells and more.

And it’s not just scientific progress that’s boosting the country’s green progress; Chinese policy shifts have allowed the price of coal to increase, giving the billion-plus consumers there incentive to seek an alternative for what has long been one of the most common sources of household energy.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S., the Reagan and Bush administrations moved in the opposite direction, dismantling green research projects and developing policies that encourage the use of oil and other sources of greenhouse gases.

This was a powerful reminder of what can result from far-sighted leadership.