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Earth Day 2019
Energy is clearly in a period of transition. The world knows we need clean sources of energy and sources that don't cause wars. But the world also needs more energy to drive growing and prospering economies. For the two fastest growing energies - wind and solar - deployment will have to accelerate at a much faster clip in the next ten years (and beyond) just to keep up with global economic growth, once we get beyond the current slump that is. (Which will happen.) In ten years, green technology now gaining acceptance could be commonplace. Highway-capable electric vehicles are one example. Another is high temperature superconducting (HTS) electric transmission cables for power grids. These exotic nitrogen-cooled cables are now commercially available and being built into a few scattered small projects. This technology, such as manufactured by American Superconductor (AMSC) of Devens, Massachusetts, can carry as much as 10 times the electric power as ordinary high tension cables. Further, HTS cables don't need to be strung on monstrous environment-altering towers. The cables can be buried safely underground in a Superconductor Electricity Pipeline that needs only a fraction of the right-of-way required by overhead high capacity cables. The U.S. is planning new transmission lines from areas of high potential renewable energy resources to populated areas that could utilize clean power that could be generated. Are utility planners considering incorporating these cutting edge HTS cables at any portion of these projects? They should. HTS power transmission was once just a dream. Now it's a commercialized reality. The same wires, by the way, that are spun to make HTS electric transmission cables can also be used in motors and generators to make them lighter and more efficient. American Superconductor is including the wires in superconducting wind turbine generators and ship engines. It seems feasible that the green energy landscape in 10 years could be completely different than it is today with the introduction of totally new technologies that are now only on the benches of research labs. Anyone who didn't see the 60 Minutes (the CBS television news show) segment "Cold Fusion is Hot Again" which aired on Sunday, April 19, should take the time to view the video or read the transcript available on the 60 Minutes website. As the news story goes, after the first announcement of the discovery of cold fusion was trashed by the scientific community 20 years ago, research continued in labs around the world. Scientists involved with the research now say that they've discovered excess heat in a reaction using palladium in a bath of water containing deuterium energized with an electric current. The extra heat, the scientists interviewed for the program say, is the result of a kind of nuclear affect, not necessarily "cold fusion." The reaction could result in a new source of clean energy for the world. 60 Minutes says that, "At least 20 labs working independently have published reports of excess heat - heat up to 25 times greater than the electricity going in." If this is all true, the world in ten years could be dramatically different than it is today. We'll be driving electric cars that don't need recharging but have a nuclear battery that needs swapping every few years. We'll have laptop computers that never need charging. And the technology could be used as a one-for-one replacement for fuel rods in nuclear power plants, without the radioactive waste. Or we could all go off-grid and have clean, radiation-free nuclear power plants to provide heat and electricity for our homes. All the above, and more, if the technology pans out that is. The segment features a company in Israel, Energetics Technologies, that is getting some of the best reactions from the technology. And, 60 Minutes says the U.S Department of Defense (DOD) through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), did its own analysis. 60 Minutes obtained an internal DARPA memo that concludes there is "no doubt that anomalous excess heat is produced in these experiments." DOD is also funding more experiments at the naval research lab in Washington, D.C. (It's the full DARPA report that I'd like to see, as would a lot of other people I imagine.) There are nay sayers of course. High energy physicist Robert L. Piccioni, Ph.D., author of Everyone's Guide to Atoms, Einstein, and the Universe has offered his rebuttal to the 60 Minutes report. "I once saw Siegfried and Roy make a tiger disappear five feet in front of me. That was very impressive, but I don't think it was magic. The 60-Minutes announcement isn't nearly as impressive, and it certainly is not new science. "Chemical reactions, such as the one discussed last night, release energy by rearranging electrons in molecules. The energy of any chemical reaction is therefore millions of times less than is required to change an atom of one element into an atom of a different element. Chemical reactions can't change lead into gold or deuterium into helium; only nuclear reactions have enough energy to do that. "If these scientists were serious about providing real proof of achieving cold fusion they should have shown evidence of helium gas being generated in the reaction. Fusion in the Sun and all other stars is based on hydrogen and deuterium nuclei being converted into helium. Detecting helium is easy to do and would provide a definitive test, as any competent scientist in this field is well aware." In other words Piccioni thinks this is junk science and junk journalism. Palladium, by the way and something to ponder, has unusual ability to absorb up to 900 times its own volume of hydrogen at room temperatures. Deuterium, know as heavy hydrogen because it has a neutron alongside its single proton in its nucleus, has a natural abundance in the world's oceans of approximately one atom per 6500 of hydrogen. A small amount perhaps, but the oceans are very large and very deep. By the time Earth Day 2019 rolls around the world will be a different place. Given the state of advancement in energy technology, probably a much better one. Links Everyone's Guide to Atoms, Einstein, and the Universe |
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It shouldn't surprise you to learn that all of the efficient and renewable energy technologies being employed today will be considered old technology in just 10 years. There isn't such a thing as "planned obsolesence" in energy technology, as the auto manufacturers were once accused of. It's just that energy research continues at a determined steady pace, so what seems cutting edge today will be just "old", but still useful, a decade from now.