The Green Optimistic

University of Columbia researchers, along with their colleagues from MIT, have some results in reproducing the Earth’s magnetic fields for developing nuclear power plants based on nuclear fusion – the ultimate dream of scientists that uses the same principle that the Sun operates on.

The disposal of the old core rods and also the reactor operation results in a large amount of low-level waste, especially contaminated cooling water. But nuclear power could solve our energy problem if only we could find a way to make it clean.

Nuclear power has been discarded for decades since the tragic accidents from the 80’s that led to numerous environmental damages in Ukraine and other parts of the world. Still, nowadays there is a trend of reviving nuclear power, to make it 100% safe and to convince people it’s worth investing in it, as an alternative to coal or petrol.

NASA is said to be the forerunner of the newest invented technologies, even before the military puts an eye on them (or sometimes the second to use them). Still, some NASA officials have decided to use an old technology, such as the Stirling engine, to generate electricity on the future moon bases.

Todd Ditmire, from the University of Texas, has invented a laser device that can produce petawatt power through a process of chirping, that takes a short light pulse (150 femtoseconds) and stretches it out in time, amplifies it to higher energy and then recompresses it to about 100 femtoseconds in time, obtaining 190 joules of energy.

A chemistry professor from the University of Missouri may have found a way to clean radioactive metal contamination. The bacteria-based solution is able to work in this challenging business where most of technologies were too expensive or sometimes did not work.

General Fusion, a small startup company from Canada, claims they can build a new type of a fusion power plant in the next ten years, and build it a lot cheaper than ITER – for less than a billion dollars. They have already gathered $13.5 million from various private and public investors, who understood their technology would work and want some share of the eventual profit.

Modular thinking has brought us many wonderful things in technology, medicine, and in most exact sciences. I see no reason why it should not work in power generation.

An attempt to recreate nuclear fusion, that takes place naturally inside stars’ core, will be experimented at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), in California, that was inaugurated on Friday. The NIF is a 10-storey building with a surface as large as three football fields. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who cut the ribbon of the $3.5bn facility said it could “revolutionise our energy future”.

…what if I told you scientists are about to create a material denser than the Sun’s core? The material is called “ultra-dense deuterium”, and a cube with 10 cm sides made of it would weigh no less than one hundred and thirty (130) tons.

The world’s most expensive and exotic experiment was thought to be CERN. Few people know that the EU, US, China, and Japan have invested billions of dollars to construct the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) that would use nuclear fusion instead of fission, like all nuclear power plants do today.

Who said that the nuclear age is over is not quite right. Nuclear weapons exist all over the world since WW2, and they are being stored in all kinds of places, including submarines. These nuclear supplies could give us extra energy at a price similar to oil, if not better.

Although they provide us with clean electricity, nuclear plants are often criticized, among others, for their residues after the primary radioactive material is spent. Normally, they are buried in depleted uranium mines, and thus their impact is minimized, but there are lots of situations when things could get dangerous as the radioactive material could infiltrate deep inside the earth, and pollute the underground springs.

Toshiba has announced for a while that they will introduce on the market a direct methanol fuel cell-based battery charger(DMFC) at the end of march 2009. The company also announced it will releases for market DMFC packs for cellphones and laptops starting with April.

The president of the Unite States of America Barack Obama could be the person to influence the usage of the ultimate alternative energy ever discovered: THORIUM.

The main problem with nuclear power is that it leaves radioactive residues behind; otherwise, it would be the almost perfect solution for our energetic and climate crises. The almost-perfect solution comes from the physicists at the University of Texas at Austin, who created a way to “use fusion to relatively inexpensively destroy the waste from nuclear fission”.

Two MIT scientists, physicist Yijun Lin and principal research scientist John Rice, using the university’s Alcator C-Mod fusion reactor, proved that electromagnetic waves produced with the help of a Tokamak (pictured above) could be used to keep that plasma hot and make nuclear fusion possible.

NOT many people want a nuclear power station in their backyard, but that’s the prospect facing communities on both sides of the Atlantic as governments weigh up where to build a new wave of reactors.
In the US, where more than 30 reactors are up for approval, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has already given the green [...]

A parliamentary group, called “The Greens” has released a report on Wednesday in which they underline the lack of nuclear development during the latest years, although some over-exaggerate its growing line.
Many aging reactors are to be closed before 2030, they having to be replaced with another 338 new ones. The development rhythm is far too [...]

The US Airforce is said to have invented a battery lasting 30 years(!). It is made from some very weak radioactive material (it’s still enough to power a laptop) for that time. The news has been spread by www.nextenergynews.com and I don’t know if to believe it or not. It has not yet been published [...]