Recently in Energy Category

Wall Street Journal: Hamid Biglari went from physics to finance. Now, he's helping lead efforts to revive Citigroup Inc. Born and raised in Tehran, Hamid Biglari came to the US in 1977 to study mathematics and physics at Cornell University.

Biglari planned to return in Tehran after getting his degree, but the 1979 Iranian Revolution derailed his plans. He realized that his career opportunities would be better in the US so filed for permanent residency.

After earning his PhD in astrophysics at Princeton in 1987 he became a theoretical physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, writing one of the most cited papers in Tokamak fusion research.

But research budget cuts made Biglari consider a career in finance.

He had no business experience, but he cold-called management consultancy McKinsey & Co., and successfully persuaded them to hire him, based on his analytical and computational skills.

After moving to Citigroup in 2000, earlier this year Biglari became vice chairman in charge of strategy and resource allocation, a key post in reframing the company after last year's billion dollar loss.

Science: In the coming weeks, on the plains of Inner Mongolia, China plans to launch its first large-scale effort to capture and store carbon emissions.

A new coal-to-liquid plant in Erdos will burn coal to make, at the outset, a little over 1 million metric tons per year of diesel and other petrochemicals. Operated by China's biggest coal producer, Shenhua Group, the plant will generate as a byproduct about 3.6 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) a year. In an effort to make carbon capture pay, much of the gas will be sequestered in nearby oil reservoirs, where pressure from the CO2 will force hard-to-get oil to the surface.

Shenhua's plant is one of two pivotal carbon capture and storage efforts in China. The other is GreenGen, an integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) plant that the Chinese government approved last June for construction in Tianjin.

Instead of pulverizing coal as a conventional power plant does, IGCC plants turn it into gas, which allows for easy separation of CO2 from combustible gases--and far easier CO2 capture. If successful, GreenGen could redefine how power is generated from coal in China, says Richard Morse of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. "You could make a very strong case that it's the leading carbon-capture project for coal-fired power in the world," he says.

csmonitor.com: Some 60,000 metric tons of radioactive waste is stored at nuclear power plants across the US, awaiting federal action that’s already a decade late.

csmonitor.com: Wind is the fastest growing renewable energy in Europe—making up a third of new energy there, with 20 turbines added every working day in 2008, according to EU statistics.

What the European wind energy industry now wants is to expand—offshore. Ocean winds are a stronger and more predictable form of energy than the ones on land, and the industry is pushing a $57 billion investment to allow broad-winged turbines to spin at sea.

csmonitor.com: Four technologies aim to use heat from the Sun to make electricity. But which one has the edge?

NPR: Steven Chu is an optimist. The secretary of energy, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, believes science can solve many of the nation's energy challenges.

"Scientists by their nature are very optimistic," he said. "We learn about Newton, about Maxwell, about Einstein. And yet you want to do some science that can contribute on the shoulders of those giants—you've got to be pretty optimistic.

"That doesn't mean I'm a cockeyed optimist," he cautioned. "You've still got to come up with the goods."

Chu knows cleaner coal, new nuclear power plants, more renewable energy will take time. In a conversation with NPR's Steve Inskeep, he lays out ambitious plans for the country's energy future.

The Independent: Google is disappointed with the lack of breakthrough investment ideas in the green technology sector but the company is working to develop its own new mirror technology that could reduce the cost of building solar thermal plants by a quarter or more.

"We've been looking at very unusual materials for the mirrors both for the reflective surface as well as the substrate that the mirror is mounted on," the company's green energy czar Bill Weihl told Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.

Bloomberg: First Solar Inc, a US–based renewable energy company, will build the world's largest solar power plant in China as the country plans to increase nonpolluting electricity generation.

The plant would be about thirty times larger than existing solar power stations operating in Europe, Dulce Qu, a Beijing-based spokeswoman for the company, told Bloomberg. The 2,000-megawatt complex will be built in Ordos City, Inner Mongolia, China, by 2019, said First Solar, a company based in Tempe, Arizona.

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NYTimes.com: A $17 million energy project in California that was supposed to demonstrate the feasibility of extracting vast amounts of heat from the Earth's bedrock has been suspended indefinitely after the drilling essentially snagged on surface rock formations.

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California residents shaken over geothermal energy concerns

Nature News: Millions of hectares of land will be needed to meet growing energy demands in the United States over the next two decades, according to new 'energy sprawl' estimates. The researchers behind the study say that biomass production for fuel or electricity generation will have the biggest impact on landscape and habitats.

The broad analysis of potential US energy and climate-mitigation scenarios compared the land and habitat impacts of various energy mixes -- from nuclear power to biofuels -- resulting from an array of policy options. The study is published this week in PLoS ONE

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Energy Sprawl or Energy Efficiency: Climate Policy Impacts on Natural Habitat for the United States of America

latimes.com: In a lab in Caltech, Harry Atwater holds up a plastic panel, a fraction of a millimeter thick. Even in the bright room, the surface's panel remains jet-black—absorbing all the light that hits it.

The high-tech material is 10 times more efficient at absorbing light than the regular silicon cells that some homeowners install on their roofs to harvest the energy of the sun.

It is one of several projects that Atwater's team at Caltech is pursuing in a push to design the next generation of solar cells—ones that are cheap, long-lasting and flexible enough to be practical for homeowners and businesses.

NYTimes.com: International Battery, a small start-up in Allentown, Pennsylvania, is developing a battery that is smaller than a cereal box but with nearly the energy of a conventional car battery.

This summer the Obama administration announced how it will distribute some $2.4 billion in stimulus grants to companies that make such advanced batteries for hybrid or all-electric vehicles and related components. International Battery is vying for a modest chunk of it.

The hope is that the grants will spur far higher levels of experimentation and production, pushing down the costs that have prevented these batteries from entering the mass market.

ScienceNOW: With $27 billion a year in sales, lithium-ion batteries already dominate the market for rechargeables. But there's always pressure to do better. Now researchers report that they've come up with a way to use nanotechnology to either significantly increase the energy storage capacity of lithium-ion batteries or reduce their weight while maintaining their current energy content. The new work could lead to everything from lighter laptops to electric cars with a considerably longer range.

NYTimes.com: The biggest opportunity to improve the nation's energy situation is a major investment program to make homes and businesses more efficient, according to a study released by the consulting firm McKinsey. An investment of $520 billion in improvements like sealing ducts and replacing inefficient appliances could produce $1.2 trillion in savings on energy bills through 2020, the study found.

The report said such a program, if carried out over the next decade, could cut the country's projected energy use in 2020 by about 23 %, a savings that would be "greater than the total of energy consumption of Canada."

NPR: America's electric grid is vulnerable to attack from electromagnetic weaponry, and building a smart grid might make it worse, says Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD). Bartlett, a former research scientist and engineer, offers his solution for securing US electronics from attack.

washingtonpost.com: On one of the fields where students learn about agriculture, the University of Maryland Eastern Shore will soon be planting a new kind of crop with a constantly renewable yield: 20 acres' worth of photovoltaic panels, the largest solar farm in the state.

The 2.1-megawatt system, to be built by Beltsville-based SunEdison, will generate electricity for the 4,100-student campus in Princess Anne, Maryland, when it's finished, which is expected to be by the end of the year.

Physics Today: An engine which blends diesel and gasoline fuels could potentially be 20% more efficient than traditional gas engines, while also lowering the emissions, say researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

The new "hybrid fuel" engine—based on a modified diesel engine from a Caterpillar truck—works via a technique called "fast-response fuel blending," in which the engine's fuel injection mixes the diesel and gas to the perfect ratio for the current combustion conditions.

A fully loaded truck may have a fuel mix of 85% gasoline to 15% diesel; under lighter loads, the percentage of diesel would increase to approximately 50–50.

Normally this type of blend wouldn't ignite in a diesel engine, because gasoline is less reactive than diesel and burns less easily. But in the hybrid fuel engine, just the right amount of diesel is injected to kick-start ignition.

"You can think of the diesel spray as a collection of liquid spark plugs, essentially, that ignite the gasoline," says Rolf Reitz, head of the research group.

This technique has two efficiency and one cost advantage, says Reitz. First, the engine operates at much lower combustion temperatures because of the improved control—as much as 40% lower than conventional engines—which leads to far less energy loss from the engine through heat transfer. Second, because of the burn optimization in the combustion chamber, there is less unburned fuel energy lost in the exhaust, which in turn produces fewer pollutant emissions. Third, the engine can use relatively inexpensive low-pressure fuel injection (commonly used in gasoline engines), instead of more expensive high-pressure injection required by conventional diesel engines.

Reitz's experiments show that the prototype is now the world's most efficient diesel-type engine in the world, with a 53% thermal efficiency, better even than a massive turbocharged two-stroke used in the maritime shipping industry, which has 50% thermal efficiency.

Thermal efficiency is defined by the percentage of fuel that is actually devoted to powering the engine, rather than being lost in heat transfer, exhaust, or other variables.

"For a small engine to even approach these massive engine efficiencies is remarkable," Reitz says. "Even more striking, the blending strategy could also be applied to automotive gasoline engines, which usually average a much lower 25 percent thermal efficiency. Here, the potential for fuel economy improvement would even be larger than in diesel truck engines." Reitz adds that they are already meeting the Environmental Protection Agency's 2010 emissions regulations with the prototype without the addition of expensive additions, such as the urea-injection catalytic reduction used in Mercedes diesel cars and trucks, for example.

The only downside would be the need to have two separate fuel tanks in the truck or car.

The work is funded by Department Of Energy and the College of Engineering Diesel Emissions Reduction Consortium, which includes 24 industry partners.

Reitz presented his findings today at the DOE's 15th Directions in Engine-Efficiency and Emissions Research Conference in Detroit, Michigan.

The Independent: In its first-ever assessment of the world's major oil fields, the International Energy Agency has concluded that the global energy system is at a crossroads and that consumption of oil is "patently unsustainable," with expected demand far outstripping supply.

Oil production has already peaked in non-Opec countries and the era of cheap oil has come to an end, it warned.

Edmunds.com: Engineers have developed a method for creating high-performance membranes from crystal sieves that could increase the energy efficiency of chemical separations up to 50 times over conventional methods and enable higher production rates.

So say a team of researchers led by chemical engineer Michael Tsapatsis of the University of Minnesota, in an article that appeared in Science

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The Economist: Israel, with poor access to fossil fuels and a highly educated population, is growing its solar-power industry.

Shining sunlight onto silicon is the most direct way of turning it into electricity—the light knocks electrons free from the silicon atoms—but it is also the most expensive. Two small companies based in Jerusalem are trying, in different ways, to make solar energy cheaper.

The physicists and chemists at GreenSun Energy, led by Renata Reisfeld, think the way is to use less silicon. In their designs the solar cell uses only 20% of the silicon of existing solar cells.

Around the corner, Jonathan Goldstein of 3GSolar hopes to get rid of silicon altogether. 3G's "dye-sensitized" solar cells use titanium dioxide (more familiar as a pigment used in white paints) and complicated dye molecules that contain a metal called ruthenium. When one of the dye molecules is hit by light of sufficient energy, an electron is knocked out of it and absorbed by the titanium dioxide, before being passed out of the cell to do useful work.

Salon: As the debate over the Waxman–Markey climate bill rages on, Harvard's top environmental economist Robert Stavins sheds some light on how the bill will work.

Chattanooga Times Free Press: The Tennessee Valley Authority is on track to complete a $2.5 billion, five-year plan to finish a second reactor at the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant by 2012.

TVA began construction of Watts Bar II in 1973, but work was suspended in 1988 when TVA's growth in power sales declined. After mothballing the unit for 19 years, TVA's board decided in 2007 to finish the reactor because it is projected to provide cheaper, no carbon-emitting power compared with the existing coal plants or purchased power it may help replace. More than 1850 TVA and contract employees are working on the project.

Watts Bar II is the first commercial reactor in the country to seek a license since 1995 and could be the last reactor of its generation to be built.

Various: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Bevatron, built by the Atomic Energy Commission—the forerunner of the Department of Energy—in the early 1950s, is slowly being demolished thanks to $74 million of stimulus funding. Soon, by 2011, all traces of it will be gone reports Wired magazine.

LBNL has a flicker photo galley of the Bevatron, some of which are posted below.

The 10,000 ton Bevatron is a weak focusing synchrotron that was closely watched by Physics Today, both during construction and for the scientific results it produced.

Paul Dirac had predicted the existence of antimatter in the 1930s and the Bevatron's mission—as the most powerful accelerator in the world—was to discover the antiproton (which it did) and explore the fundamental physics behind hadrons using beams of 6.2-GeV protons.

The Bevatron had a number of upgrades during its lifetime in an attempt to regain its status as one of the most powerful synchrotrons in the world, and to continue to do interesting science.

In 1960 the Bevatron had a three-year upgrade which cost more than the initial construction ($9.6 million) and increased the intensity of the proton beam by a factor of four. In 1967, metal fatigue shut the Bevatron down for three months while repairs were made. In the early 1970s the accelerator switched to nitrogen ions, which were more energetic than the protons initially used in the accelerator, and made the Bevatron more attractive to the biological sciences.

By linking parts of the Bevatron with other equipment at LBNL— the SuperHILAC serving as the injector and the Bevatron as an accelerator—the Bevalac accelerator was created in 1974 which led to a completely new field of research: relativistic heavy-ion reactions. This time carbon-12 ions were injected into the ring (reaching 2.1 GeV), which regained LBNL's reputation of having the most powerful heavy-ion accelerator in the world.

Improvements to the Bevalac continued well into the 1980s. In 1982 new upgrades, which included a new vacuum system for the Bevatron, allowed the Bevalac to accelerate uranium ions.

In science, research at the Bevatron led to at least four Nobel Prizes, one for the discovery of the antiproton by Emilio Segré and Owen Chamberlain.

The Bevatron's beam was finally turned off in 1993 by one of the people who built it: Edward Lofgren.

Related Physics Today articles
Bevatron Launched (1954)
During the next three years (1961)
The Bevatron Reactivated (1963)
Bevatron Shut Down 3 Months: Metal Fatigue in Alternator (1967)
Long-lived kaon shows no 2-muon decay (1971)
Two accelerators switch to nitrogen ions (1971)
Conflicting evidence for K-meson decay (1972)
Bevalac makes a successful debut (1974)
Bevalac accelerates uranium (1982)
Probing Dense Nuclear Matter in the Laboratory (1993)

NYTimes.com: In 2006, Markus O. Häring, a former oilman, drilled a hole three miles deep near the corner of Neuhaus Street and Shafer Lane in Basel, Switzerland, to look for geothermal energy—the heat simmering within Earth’s bedrock.

All seemed to be going well—until December, when the project set off an earthquake, shaking and damaging buildings and terrifying many in a city that, as every schoolchild here learns, had been devastated exactly 650 years before by a quake that sent two steeples of the Münster Cathedral tumbling into the Rhine.

Hastily shut down, Häring’s project was soon forgotten by nearly everyone outside Switzerland. As early as this week, though, an American start-up company, AltaRock Energy, will begin using nearly the same method to drill deep into ground laced with fault lines in an area two hours’ drive north of San Francisco. The New York Times article has worried residents. AltaRock Energy has published a response to the article on their web site.

Slate.com: With oil-sands production at more than 1.2 million barrels per day, Canada, which also produces conventional oil, has quietly passed Saudi Arabia to become the top supplier to the US.

US government analysts expect that production could triple again by 2030 and could eventually deliver to the US as much as 37% of imported crude.

The local environmental fallout—in terms of deforestation, water demand, and toxic waste—varies among the dozens of ongoing extraction projects but is often immense.

In other words, US policymakers are now faced with an awkward problem: How do you balance improvements in energy security with worsening climate change, especially when dealing with a resource that isn't yours?

Related Physics Today article
Physics in the oil sands of Alberta

The Economist: The proteins that make up chicken feathers could provide a cheap ($200 per car) and effective way to store hydrogen fuel in cars.

Richard Wool and a colleague, Erman Senöz, have discovered that keratin—the fibres that make up feathers—when heated in the absence of oxygen, forms hollow tubular structures six millionths of a meter across and riddled with microscopic pores, much like carbon nanotubes.

To avoid melting the fibers they first heat-treated the feathers to around 215°C. This strengthened their structure and allowed further heating to 400–450 °C. At this point the material becomes more porous, increasing its surface area and its hydrogen-storing capacity.

NPR: Some environmentalists believe building more nuclear power plants today is the best way to combat climate change while solar and other renewable energy sources mature. Ira Flatow and experts discuss the economic and engineering hurdles to nuclear development in the US.

The Guardian: Consumers will need to pay more for energy if the UK is to have any chance of developing the technologies needed to tackle climate change, according to a Royal Society report.

The report said that the government must put research into alternatives to fossil fuel much higher among its priorities, and argued that current policy in the area was "half-hearted".

"We have adapted to an energy price which is unrealistically low if we're going to try and preserve the environment," John Shepherd, a climate scientist at Southampton University and co-author of the report said. "We have to allow the economy to adapt to higher energy prices through carbon prices and that will then make things like renewables and nuclear more economic, as carbon-based alternatives become more expensive."

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Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: After years of investment, South Africa has abandoned its plan to develop a fleet of electricity-generating pebble bed modular reactors (PBMR), once hyped as the future of nuclear power.

Problems with the PBMR aren't new; a 2008 German report chronicles Germany's own problems developing the reactor since 1967.

China, the only other country still developing PBMR-based power reactor designs, has taken a slower approach, and it is unclear if they have run into problems as well.

Nature News: ITER—a multi-billion-euro international experiment boldly aiming to prove atomic fusion as a power source—will initially be far less ambitious than physicists had hoped.

Faced with ballooning costs and growing delays, ITER's seven partners are likely to build only a skeletal version of the device at first.

The project's governing council said last June that the machine should turn on in 2018; the stripped-down version could allow that to happen.

But the first experiments capable of validating fusion for power would not come until the end of 2025, five years later than the date set when the ITER agreement was signed in 2006.

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London Times: Europe should scrap its support for wind energy as soon as possible to focus on far more efficient emerging forms of clean power generation including solar thermal energy, says Jack Steinberger, a physicist at CERN and a former Nobel Prize winner.

Steinberger said that wind represented an illusory technology — a cul-de-sac that would prove uneconomic and a waste of resources in the battle against climate change.

“Wind is not the future,” he told the symposium of Nobel laureates at the Royal Society. Instead, he said, technologies such as solar thermal power—for which parabolic mirrors reflect the Sun’s rays to generate heat and electricity—represent a more promising way of supplanting fossil fuels. “I am certain that the energy of the future is going to be thermal solar,” he told The Times. “There is nothing comparable. The sooner we focus on it the better.”

New York Times: The $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility, which houses the world's most powerful laser, as well as the largest optical instrument ever built, will be officially opened on Friday.

The project's director, Ed Moses, said that getting to the cusp of ignition (defined as the successful achievement of fusion) had taken some 7,000 workers and 3,000 contractors a dozen years, their labors creating a precision colossus of millions of parts and 60,000 points of control, 30 times as many as on the space shuttle.

In February, NIF test fired the192 lasers--made of nearly 60 miles of mirrors and fiber optics, crystals and light amplifiers--into its target chamber. Inside the chamber a small fleck of hydrogen fuel, smaller than a match head, was pulverized for the first time.

Compressed and heated to temperatures hotter than those of the core of a star, the hydrogen atoms will fuse into helium, releasing bursts of thermonuclear energy.

But raising its energies still further to the point of ignition could take a year or more of experimentation and might, officials concede, prove daunting and perhaps impossible.

Nature News: The technology of incandescent lights has changed very little since Thomas Edison made it a commercial success in the 1880s.

Inside the bulb is a filament--tungsten in today's models--that is heated by the flow of electricity until it glows white and lights up the room. The design is simple, versatile, and cheap.

Nonetheless, that technology is now on the way out. In today's energy-hungry world, the devices are too wasteful: some 98% of the energy input ends up as heat instead of light. Halogen lamps, which look more high-tech, are not any better.

Multiply that waste by the number of incandescent bulbs in residential, industrial, and commercial settings -- an estimated 4 billion standard light sockets in the United States alone -- and it is clear why several countries are seeking to eliminate the bulbs entirely as a way to control carbon dioxide emissions.

Steven Chu: Yucca Mountain as a repository is off the table. What we're going to be doing is saying, let's step back. We realize that we know a lot more today than we did 25 or 30 years ago. The NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] is saying that the dry cask storage at current sites would be safe for many decades, so that gives us time to figure out what we should do for a long-term strategy. We will be assembling a blue-ribbon panel to look at the issue.

[We're] looking at reactors that have a high-energy neutron spectrum that can actually allow you to burn down the long-lived actinide waste. [Editor's note: Actinides include plutonium, which can be dangerous for 100,000 years.] These are fast neutron reactors. There's others: a resurgence of hybrid solutions of fusion fission where the fusion would impart not only energy, but again creates high-energy neutrons that can burn down the long-lived actinides.

In this quickly evolving environment, investors must assess which technologies and companies are best positioned, policy-makers must assess what role PV generation should play in our energy mix, utility planners must assess the impacts this will have on the electric grid, government and industry must decide how to allocate research and development (R&D) funds, and citizens must sort through a barrage of conflicting messages.

The Boston Globe: Ask most Americans about former President Jimmy Carter and energy, and they'll probably recall the long gas lines during the 1970s Arab oil embargo and the 1979 "malaise" speech in which he outlined his plan for energy efficiency and reducing oil imports.

Tuesday, he is being called upon to offer a "historical review"of US efforts to address energy security before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Reuters: Every household in Britain should by 2020 be able to cut its energy bills and carbon footprint using "smart meters" and handheld devices to control energy use closely, the government said on Monday.

And when Earth lies in the path of that blast, the flare can play havoc with power grids, disrupt radio communications, and disturb or disable satellites. Fifty years into the Space Age, Earth has avoided the worst the Sun can deliver - so far.

But with the Sun entering a period of increased activity, more frequent solar flares could be headed our way. This has many astronomers and companies asking if satellites and power grids are ready.

Experts have thought for years that capturing the emissions from power plants will be a crucial technology for limiting climate change. But high cost projections and scientific uncertainty have meant that progress on the technique has been limited, even as the effects of global warming are starting to be felt around the world.

Now SCS Energy, based in Concord, Mass., contends not only that it can build the world’s first such plant and get it to work, but also do so profitably, despite costs that could approach $5 billion.

Associated Press: The primary US lab for renewable energy will receive $110 million in federal stimulus funds and another $83 million will go toward wind energy and other alternative power and efficiency projects, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Wednesday.

One key stumbling block for an ICF energy reactor is laser technology. NIF managers hope to perform about two shots a day because of the time needed to let optical elements cool down, check for damage, replace any damaged parts, and install a new fuel capsule. At that rate, with each shot producing fusion burns of 20 megajoules--its initial target--NIF will barely generate enough power to keep a single light bulb glowing. According to Steven Cowley, director of the Culham Science Centre, Britain's fusion research lab near Oxford, "laser fusion has all the problems of magnetic fusion, but ICF also has to find a laser that can fire many times per second and is 20% to 30% efficient, plus how to make fuel pellets at low cost."

If built, the 460-mile line would carry about 3,000 megawatts of power, enough to avoid the need for a handful of coal-fired plants and to help utilities meet mandated targets for use of renewable fuel. "We have to connect the sun of the deserts and the winds of the plains to places where people live," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said recently.

But the line would also cross grasslands, skirt two national wildlife refuges and traverse the Rio Grande, all habitat areas rich in wildlife. The graceful sandhill crane, for example, makes its winter home in the wetlands of New Mexico's Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, right next to the path of the proposed power line. And much of the area falls under the protection of the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management (BLM).

If oil prices rise again, adoption of the new coal-to-liquid technology, reported this week in Science, could undercut adoption of electric vehicles or next-generation biofuels. And that's bad news for the fight against climate change.

Dyson is a scientist whose intelligence is revered by other scientists since he came to the US at 23 and right away contributed seminal work to physics by unifying quantum and electrodynamic theory.

Among Dyson's gifts is interpretive clarity, a penetrating ability to grasp the method and significance of what many kinds of scientists do. His thoughts about how science works appear in a series of lucid, elegant books for nonspecialists that have made him a trusted arbiter of ideas ranging far beyond physics.

Formed in a heretical and broad-thinking tradition of British public intellectuals, Dyson left behind a brooding England still stricken by two bloody world wars to become an optimistic American immigrant with tremendous faith in the creative imagination's ability to invent technologies that would overcome any predicament. And according to the physicist and former Caltech president Marvin Goldberger, Dyson is himself the living embodiment of that kind of ingenuity. "You point Freeman at a problem and he'll solve it," Goldberger says. "He's extraordinarily powerful." Dyson seems to see the world as an interdisciplinary set of problems out there for him to evaluate.

Climate change is the big scientific issue of our time, so naturally he finds it irresistible. But to Dyson this is really only one more charged conundrum attracting his interest just as nuclear weapons and rural poverty have. That is to say, he is a great problem-solver who is not convinced that climate change is a great problem.

"Leadership in science remains vital to America's economic prosperity, energy security, and global competitiveness," said Chu at a lunchtime press conference. "These projects not only provide critically needed short-term economic relief but also represent a strategic investment in our nation's future. They will create thousands of jobs and breathe new life into many local economies, while helping to accelerate new technology development, renew our scientific and engineering workforce, and modernize our nation's scientific infrastructure."

The money will mainly be directed to the 10 national laboratories run by DOE. The package also provides substantial support for both university- and DOE-based researchers, working on problems in fields ranging from particle and plasma physics to biofuels, solar energy, superconductivity, solid-state lighting, electricity storage, and materials science, among others.

The news came days after the Obama administration announced that current BP chief scientist Steve Koonin will serve as undersecretary of science at DOE. He would replace Ray Orbach once the position receives Senate confirmation.

Included among the approved projects are the following:

• $150 million to accelerate ongoing construction on the National Synchrotron Light Source-II at Brookhaven National Laboratory, in Upton, New York.

• $123 million for major construction, modernization, and needed decommissioning of laboratory facilities at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL); Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL); and Brookhaven National Laboratory.

• $65 million to accelerate construction of the 12-Billion Electron Volt Upgrade of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF) in Newport News, Virginia.

• $277 million for Energy Frontier Research Centers, to be awarded on a competitive basis to universities and DOE National Laboratories across the country. These centers will accelerate the transformational basic science needed to develop plentiful and cost-effective alternative energy sources and will pursue advanced fundamental research in fields ranging from solar energy to nuclear energy systems, biofuels, geological sequestration of carbon dioxide, clean and efficient combustion, solid-state lighting, superconductivity, hydrogen research, electrical energy storage, catalysis for energy, and materials under extreme conditions.

• $90 million for other core research, providing support for graduate students, postdocs, and PhD scientists across the nation.

• $69 million to create a national scale, prototype 100-gigabit per second data network linking research centers across the nation.

• $330 million for operations and equipment at Office of Science major scientific user facilities, including ORNL's Spallation Neutron Source; the Nanoscale Science Research Centers, located at five national laboratories nationwide; the ARM Climate Research Facility; Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory; and Linac Coherent Light Source at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SNAL).

In addition, the Recovery Act funding provides $125 million for needed infrastructure improvements across nine DOE national laboratories: Ames Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, LBNL, ORNL, PNNL, SNAL, and TJNAF.

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The Christian Science Monitor: Since sunlight and wind can be unreliable, renewable utilities install big backups.

The New York Times: Solar cells adorn the roofs of many homes and warehouses across Germany, while the bright white blades of wind turbines are a frequent sight against the sky in Spain.

The Engineer: The world's first utility-grade solar power plant with central tower and thermal molten salt storage technology is set for construction in Spain.

For that investment, the region has attracted $23.4 million in outside research grants and applied for $35.8 million more. The investment has also generated about 100 jobs and created partnerships with dozens of private fuel cell companies or industries working with the technology.

And later this month, the National Hydrogen Association will bring more than 1,000 researchers, manufacurers and government officials to Columbia for its annual conference and expo.

Boosters say that’s not bad for being in only the fourth year of a 20-year plan to turn the Columbia area into a national center of hydrogen research, part of a statewide push to make hydrogen pay.

But critics, including S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford, say that too much money has been spent on a technology that might not be the wave of the future.

NPR: An all-star cast of politicians, business people and activists sat down Monday in Washington, D.C., to discuss how to transform the nation's energy supply from dirty to clean. The consensus was that it will take a much better system for distributing electricity coast to coast. Participants agreed there are plenty of challenges to doing that.

"Iran has enough nuclear fuel to build a bomb if it decides to take the drastic steps of violating its international treaty obligations, kicking out inspectors and further refining its supply."

However, as Chemist Cheryl Rofer points out, at 3.49% , the concentration of Iran's 1010 kg of enriched uranium-235 is still too low to make an atomic bomb and would have to be reprocessed for a number of months to reach the necessary enrichment level for military applications. The uranium enrichment facility would also have to be reconfigured to reach higher concentration levels of U-235.

An atomic bomb requires highly enriched uranium-235 at greater than 90% concentration. To produce enough low-enriched uranium fuel for the two nuclear reactors Iran is building it needs at minimum a cascade of 5000 centrifuges. Iran currently has 5600 known centrifuges according to the IAEA report.

The report also states that Iran has slowed down its enrichment program and that as long as the IAEA monitors their facilities, they cannot develop nuclear weapons. As IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei recently said in an interview in Süddeutsche Zeitung, "they still do not have the ingredients to make a bomb overnight."

Related coverage
Iran holds enough uranium for bomb Financial Times
Iran has enriched enough uranium to make bomb, IAEA says The Guardian
Iran Has More Enriched Uranium Than Thought The New York Times

Related Links
The gas centrifuge and nuclear weapons proliferation Physics Today

But now with the economic crash and a silicon supply glut that's going to get worse before it gets better, the game has changed. Solar venture capitalists will lean away from innovative technologies toward sure bets closer to commercialization, according to a report released Wednesday by Lux Research.

Environmental News Network: The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), the first multinational agency focused solely on spreading clean energy across the globe, officially launched this week.

The New York Times: Wind and solar power have been growing at a blistering pace in recent years, and that growth seemed likely to accelerate under the green-minded Obama administration. But because of the credit crisis and the broader economic downturn, the opposite is happening: installation of wind and solar power is plummeting.

Environmental News Network: The US overtook Germany as the biggest producer of wind power last year, new figures showed, and will likely take the lead in solar power this year, analysts said on Monday.

Nature News: Nations have begun to hammer out the mandate for the International Renewable Energy Agency.

The last of the project's 6,206 optics units -- the mostly glass and crystal components that focus the lasers onto a tiny target -- was installed on 26 January.

NPR: Antarctica was seemingly the only continent on Earth that had not been warming up, as far as scientists could tell. But now a new study finds that large parts of the southern continent have in fact been getting warmer.

Located at the site of the massive 'Schwarze Pumpe' ('Black Pump') power station in eastern Germany, Sweden's Vattenfall said the new technology has the potential to allow coal to be burnt without releasing harmful greenhouse gases.

'Today industrial history is being written,' Vattenfall Europe's chief executive Tuomo Hatakka told a news conference. 'Coal has a future -- but not the carbon dioxide emissions from it.'

The new method being developed by Vattenfall is called Carbon Capture and Storage, or CCS, which captures the greenhouse gases produced when fossil fuels are combusted. This prevents the greenhouse gases escaping into the Earth's atmosphere and contributing to global warming. The captured carbon dioxide is compressed until it becomes liquid and then injected deep underground and safely sealed away, Vattenfall says.

In the case of the pilot plant near Spremberg close to the Polish border, the liquid carbon dioxide is taken 350 kilometres in lorries and injected 'for permanent storage' in a gas field in northern Germany. It is the first clean-coal power plant built to a commercial scale.

The New York Times: The team President-elect Barack Obama introduced on Monday to carry out his energy and environmental policies faces a host of political, economic, diplomatic and scientific challenges that could impede his plans to address global warming and America's growing dependence on dirty and uncertain sources of energy.

Related links:

Obama Names Energy, Environmental Team
NPR

Physics Today: President-elect Obama's transition team is expected to shortly announce that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu will be nominated as secretary of energy, while Lisa Jackson, a former environmental policy official in New Jersey, has been picked to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Carol Browner, who led the EPA under President Clinton, will fill a new White House "energy czar" role. The announcements came from Democratic officials on Wednesday night.

Chu, who will be the first Nobel Prize winner to be appointed to the US cabinet, is the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and has played a key role in moving the lab in the direction of specializing in renewable energy, particularly in the field of new fuels for transportation. LBNL is experimenting with making biofuels from different types of biomass, using algae in fermentation tanks to make fuel, and applying solar energy to convert water and carbon dioxide to fuels. "[President-elect Obama] certainly needs somebody who can focus on the science and energy policies and I can't think of a better guy than Steve," says Mike Lubell from the American Physical Society.

Originally his father wanted him to be an architect as "the competition in physics was too strong." Chu did both his graduate and postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley. He then spent nine years at Bell Labs before joining Stanford University's physics department where he remained between 1987-2004. He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Phillips for cooling and trapping atoms with lasers.

During the presidential campaign, Obama said he would invest $150 billion over 10 years in clean energy and proposed requiring that 10 percent of electricity in the United States comes from renewable sources by 2012. Chu, has been one of the most public faces of promoting renewable energy. At the National Clean Energy Summit held in August, Chu said "I think political will is absolutely necessary. But we need new technologies."

Chu is also one of the co-authors of the 2006 National Academy of Sciences' report Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future, in which he lobbied for the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) at the Department of Energy as a way of funding risky hich-tech technologies to solve the US energy crisis. ARPA-E, although legislation creating its existence has passed into law, has yet to be receive a budget as the proposal is not supported by the Bush administration. Chu's appointment increases the likelihood that the ARPA-E will finally be created.

The largest part of the Department of Energy's budget however, goes towards maintaining the nuclear weapons stockpile. It is too early to say what the implications are for Chu's appointment to the long term future of the three main nuclear weapons labs at Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia. According to the Wall Street Journal, Chu is likely to focus his attention on the Energy Department's core missions: basic science, nuclear weapons and cleaning up a nuclear-weapons manufacturing complex contaminated since the Cold War.

Related Physics Today articles
Chu Named Berkeley Lab Director (August 2004)
Politicians skeptical about need for ARPA-E (June 2006)
'Gathering Storm' Report Urges Strong Federal Action to Save US Science and Technology Leadership December 2005
Could 'green gasoline' displace ethanol as the biofuel of choice? December 2008
Blueprint for new energy institute February 2007

Related Physics Today science articles
Laser Beam Focus Forms Optical Trap for Neutral Atoms September 1986
New Mechanisms for Laser Cooling October 1990
Atom Interferometers Prove Their Worth in Atomic Measurements July 1995
Work on Atom Trapping and Cooling Gets a Warm Reception in Stockholm December 1997
Atom Interferometer Measures G with Same Accuracy as Optical Devices November 1999
How the Laser Happened: Adventures of a Scientist December 1999 (review by Steven Chu)

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Nobel Winner Chu To Land Top Energy Post (NPR)
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Obama Picks Team to Guide Energy, Environment Agendas Wall Street Journal
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Nobel Physicist Chosen To Be Energy Secretary Washington Post

But all is not well for ITER. "To keep momentum, ITER needs the collective efforts and continued support from its members, laying the foundations for a new model of global scientific collaboration," said Kaname Ikeda, director-general of the ITER Organization, in a statement at the meeting.

The bad news comes from the United States which, "cannot live up to our commitments" to ITER, the Energy Department's Gene Nardella told an advisory committee earlier this month. Congress allocated only $20.5 million for the project, just enough for staffing, instead of a requested $214 million for 2009. A National Research Council panel in June warned, "The lack of funding stability will make it difficult for the U.S. to effectively participate in ITER, and ultimately, to access and thus benefit from the valuable scientific and technical knowledge to be gained from the facility."

The New York Times: The first eco-friendly billboard is coming to Times Square, entirely powered by the sun and the wind — but there is one small catch.

When there’s no sun, and no wind? The $3 million billboard goes dark: there is no backup generator.

Science News: Getting liquid fuels from coal would not reduce carbon emissions, and would likely increase them

Nature: With high oil prices sparking a surge of interest in alternative energy sources, solar cells have become the subject of intense research. Much of this effort focuses on finding new designs that open up fresh applications.

The Asian giants are investigating large-scale commercial projects that would produce energy by burning the coal where it lies, deep below the Earth's surface. Building on pilot projects in the US and elsewhere, the two countries are also looking at the possibility of capturing and permanently storing underground the gases produced, like carbon dioxide, which scientists believe cause global warming.

The Baltimore Sun: Energy producers bid for right to emit carbon dioxide

The New York Times: One of the potential consequences of a warmer world, according to scientists who study such things, is the deep thawing of the permafrost. Thawing could release huge quantities of carbon into the atmosphere, as vegetation, bones and other organic material, long locked up in the deep freezer that is the permafrost, decompose.

Star Tribune: With oil costing more than $100 a barrel, nuclear energy is enjoying a public-opinion comeback. But not everyone is warming to nuclear as the new 'green' energy.

The Washington Post: Almost 70 years ago, as Germany invaded France, President Franklin D. Roosevelt received an urgent visit from Vannevar Bush, then chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics and formerly vice president and dean of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Environmental News Network: What's billed as the world's first coal-fired power station to capture and store environmentally harmful carbon dioxide emissions opens in eastern Germany.

Environmental News Network: The world must speed up the deployment of solar power as it has the potential to meet all the world's energy needs, the chairman of an industry gathering which wrapped up Friday in Spain said.

NPR: Energy independence should be a topic for wide-ranging discussion about science, economics and lifestyle. But David Fiderer, an energy banker and Huffington Post blogger, says reporters are allowing politicians to hijack the conversation, making it about left and right all the while leaving reality out of the picture.

Nature News: Rail travel produces more than a third less emissions than road transport — even though trains carry 7% of traffic, they emit just 0.2% of the carbon monoxide, 2% of nitrogen oxides and 1% of the volatile organic compounds. Although electric passenger trains are relatively green, most of the world's trains are used for haulage and run on diesel. Nature's Duncan Graham-Rowe sees how trains are switching to a greener track.

San Diego Tribune: The U.S. Department of Energy yesterday pledged nearly $500,000 in grants and technical assistance to San Diego as part of an effort to make the city a national model for solar power production.

As the first commercial “concentrating solar power” or CSP plant built in 17 years, Nevada Solar One marks the reemergence and updating of a decades-old technology that could play a large new role in US power production, many observers say.

“Concentrating solar is pretty hot right now,” says Mark Mehos, program manager for CSP at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Co. “Costs look pretty good compared to natural gas [power]. Public policy, climate concern, and new technology are driving it, too.”

Today the United States has 420 megawatts of solar-thermal capacity across three installations – including Nevada Solar One. That’s just a tiny fraction (less than 1 percent) of US grid capacity. But Nevada Solar One could signal the start of a CSP building boom.

The heads of three influential groups, the Sierra Club, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Natural Resources Defense Council, representing more than 2 million members, have written to the foreign secretary, David Miliband, warning that the UK proposals for up to eight new coal plants threatens the chance of the US joining a post-Kyoto international agreement to be agreed in 2009.

A recent report by the IPPR said the European Union's goal of reducing emissions from the power sector and heavy industry through its emissions trading scheme would collapse if the go-ahead were given to seven new coal plants in the UK and up to 75 across Europe./p>

The New York Times: When the builders of the Maple Ridge Wind farm spent $320 million to put nearly 200 wind turbines in upstate New York, the idea was to get paid for producing electricity. But at times, regional electric lines have been so congested that Maple Ridge has been forced to shut down even with a brisk wind blowing.

Mr. Sanns, 51 years old, is part of a small subculture of gearheads, amateur physicists and science-fiction fans who are trying to build fusion reactors in their basements, backyards and home laboratories.

Called fusors and based on a 1960s design first developed by Philo T. Farnsworth, an inventor of television, the reactors are typically small steel spheres with wires and tubes sticking out and a glass window for looking inside. But they won't be powering homes anytime soon -- for now, fusors use far more energy than they produce.

Silicon Republic: Ireland has landed in the top 10 countries worldwide for attracting investment in renewable energy.

Environmental News Network: Burkina Faso student teacher Hema Cecile has a lot more time to crack the books thanks to a recent initiative from the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

Nature News: Electricity generation provides 18,000 terawatt-hours of energy a year, around 40% of humanity's total energy use. In doing so it produces more than 10 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide every year, the largest sectoral contribution of humanity's fossil-fuel derived emissions. Yet there is a wide range of technologies — from solar and wind to nuclear and geothermal — that can generate electricity without net carbon emissions from fuel.

US News and World Report: "Nuclear Help Desperately Wanted" could be the sign in front of dozens of engineering colleges across the country. With worldwide interest in nuclear energy and technology skyrocketing, engineers with a nuclear background are feeling very popular these days. It's welcome news for a field that has been long stifled by negative public opinion. The challenge the discipline faces is how to meet this new demand after years of shrinking interest.

ENN: US wind capacity is expected to increase 45% in 2008 although Congress' failure to extend the production tax credit (PTC) for the renewable energy industry threatens to derail further development, according to the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA).

Total US installed wind power capacity now stands at 19,549MW, up 2,726MW from the end of 2007, making the US the world leader in wind electricity generation, according to the AWEA's second quarter 2008 market report. Germany has installed generating capacity of about 23,000MW, but the US produces more electricity because of stronger winds, the AWEA said.

Environmental News Network: If wind energy converters are located anywhere near a residential area, they must never become too noisy even in high winds. Most such power units try to go easy on their neighbors' ears, but even the most careful design cannot prevent noise from arising at times: One source is the motion of the rotor blades, another is the cogwheels that produce vibrations in the gearbox. These are relayed to the tower of the wind turbine, where they are emitted across a wide area — and what the residents hear is a humming noise. "People find these monotone sounds particularly unpleasant, rather like the whining of a mosquito," says André Illgen, a research associate at the Fraunhofer Institute for Machine Tools and Forming Technology IWU in Dresden.

Nature News: Electricity grids must cope with rising demand and complexity in a changing world. Emma Marris explores the intricacies involved in controlling the power supply.

The Industrial Physicist magazine wrote a similar piece in 2004, What's wrong with our electrical grid?

Reuters: A U.S. scientist has developed a new way of powering fuel cells that could make it practical for home owners to store solar energy and produce electricity to run lights and appliances at night.

The Guardian: Speaking at the Euroscience Open Forum in Barcelona, Arnulf Jaeger-Waldau of the European commission's Institute for Energy, said that the Middle East could supply Europe's energy needs by building solar power farms that would the capture of just 0.3% of the light falling on the Sahara and Middle East deserts on roughly an area the size of Wales.

Scientists are calling for the creation of these series of huge solar farms as part of a plan to share Europe's renewable energy resources across the continent.

The vision for the renewable energy grid comes as the EU commission's joint research centre (JRC) published its strategic energy technology plan, highlighting solar PV as one of eight technologies that need to be championed for the short- to medium-term future.

The JRC plan includes fuel cells and hydrogen, clean coal, second generation biofuels, nuclear fusion, wind, nuclear fission and smart grids. The plan is designed to help Europe to meet its commitments to reduce overall energy consumption by 20% by 2020, while reducing CO² emissions by 20% in the same time and increasing to 20% the proportion of energy generated from renewable sources.

The Guardian: An internal audit undertaken by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (DBERR) of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has found significant financial risk that were exacerbated by misunderstandings, unminuted meetings and lack of sufficiently trained staff which has led to embarrassing cost overruns that forced the department to find £400m worth of emergency funds from other budgets to balance the books.

ENN: The Alberta government is surging ahead on its climate change action plan with two new funds totalling $4 billion to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions equal to taking more than a million cars off the road each year. The province will create a $2-billion fund to advance carbon capture and storage (CCS) projects while a second $2-billion fund will propel energy-saving public transit in Alberta.

Associated Press: Texas officials gave preliminary approval Thursday to the nation's largest wind-power project, a plan to build billions of dollars worth of new transmission lines to bring wind energy from gusty West Texas to urban areas.

The Guardian: A British company is poised to construct the world's first floating wind turbine, in a move that could herald a new generation of cheaper, less problematic wind energy.

The Independent: Prime Minister Gordon Brown is to fast-track the building of at least eight nuclear power stations to cut Britain's dependence on oil following the dramatic rise in its price.

Brown is quoted in a speech at the "Union for the Mediterranean" summit in Paris as saying there will be "no upper limit" on the number of nuclear plants that will be built by private companies. This would mean, despite the decommissioning of nearly all the UK's current reactors over the next 15 years, that nuclear power, which currently provides about 20 per cent of Britain's electricity, could meet a bigger share. The location for the first batch of new nuclear power plants will be announced in 2010.

The speech outlined the UK's vision of a "post-oil economy", calling for "a renaissance of nuclear power" and "massive expansion" of renewable energy in which the North Sea becomes "a vital energy resource through harnessing wind power.

Related Physics Today article
A Stronger Future for Nuclear Power (February 2006)
Nuclear power's costs and perils (January 2007)
Nuclear power challenges and alternatives (September 2007)
DOE urged to proceed more deliberately with global plan to expand nuclear power (July 2008, restricted to subscribers)

BBC: A new way capturing the energy from the Sun could increase the power generated by solar panels tenfold, a team of American scientists has shown.

EETimes: In a country where millions of people worship the sun, the government has launched a "National Mission on Solar Energy" that seeks to tie India's economic development to energy efficiency.

A separate initiative on energy efficiency has also been launched. Specific projects and funding will be announced soon. The announcement of the National Action Plan in New Delhi on Monday (June 30) comes as India is participating in United Nations talks on combating climate change.

Washington Post: As energy costs continue to soar, home owners are becoming concerned that energy expenses could compromise their long-term housing plans. The Washington Post investigates five steps towards reducing your energy costs.

The New York Times : Honda Motor chose a good week to introduce its new hydrogen-powered car. With gas prices rising above $4 a gallon, we could hardly be more eager for an alternative energy source, especially one that claims to have no bad effects on the environment. A car powered by a ubiquitous, inexhaustible gas that emits nothing worse than water.

Science: In papers published over a quarter of a century ago Isaac J. Winograd and Eugene H. Roseboom Jr discussed the assets and liabilities of burying high level radioactive waste (HLW) in areas with deep water tables, specifically within the several-hundred-meter-thick unsaturated zones common to the arid and semiarid Southwest U.S.A.

This idea which was taken by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission eventually led to the proposal of using Yucca Mountain as a potential repository for HLWs. In the ensuing decades, a voluminous body of knowledge of the geology, hydrology, geochemistry, and paleoclimatology of YM and the surrounding southern Great Basin was acquired and documented in hundreds of studies by federal, state, university, and industry scientists.

As a result of these efforts, Yucca mountain remains controversial for storage of HLWs. Winograd and Roseboom examine several reasons for this outcome, two of which would apply to any site being considered for the geologic isolation of HLWs, and suggest a potential way to move beyond the controversy.

CNET: Two reports released on Tuesday make the case that alternative forms of energy--everything from plug-in hybrid cars to solar power plants--are becoming more cost-competitive with fossil fuels.

The New York Times: With higher energy prices seemingly here to stay, new ways to reduce the resources and energy consumed in making a wide range of everyday products is becoming essential.

Consider industrial glass, the basic furnace, which melts sand into glass at extremely high temperatures, hasn’t undergone a fundamental change since the 1850s. Now glassmakers are developing techniques that radically change the way sand is melted into glass using ancient
techniques once discarded to bombarding sand with microwaves.

Science: This month, funders of the €10 billion ITER fusion project, which seeks to demonstrate that a burning plasma can be controlled to produce useful energy, face the daunting task of keeping the project's budget under control, as scientists present a wish list of design changes.

Environmental News Network: Industrialized nations are failing to lead enough at U.N. climate talks in Bonn even as developing states are showing interest in a new global warming treaty, the U.N.'s top climate official said on Wednesday.

Washington Post: A nuclear power plant in Georgia was recently forced into an emergency shutdown for 48 hours after a software update was installed on a single computer.

The incident occurred on March 7 at Unit 2 of the Hatch nuclear power plant near Baxley, Georgia. The trouble started after an engineer from Southern Company, which manages the technology operations for the plant, installed a software update on a computer operating on the plant's business network.

The computer in question was used to monitor chemical and diagnostic data from one of the facility's primary control systems, and the software update was designed to synchronize data on both systems. According to a report filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, when the updated computer rebooted, it reset the data on the control system, causing safety systems to errantly interpret the lack of data as a drop in water reservoirs that cool the plant's radioactive nuclear fuel rods. As a result, automated safety systems at the plant triggered a shutdown.

Nature: A road-map for high energy physics called P5 advises the department of energy and national science foundation to abandon plans to host the International Linear Collider (ILC) and concentrate on starting construction of NOνA, a programme that would send a neutrino beam from
Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, to detectors in an underground mine in Minnesota. The report endorses also building a more powerful neutrino beam that would travel farther, from Fermilab to the planned Deep Underground Science and Engineering Lab (DUSEL) in the Homestake Mine of South Dakota.

The P5 report maps out four different budget scenarios to pay for the experiments.

Bloomberg: India may be forced to slash its target for new nuclear power stations as the US-India nuclear technology accord falters, prolonging electricity shortages that are constraining economic growth.

``Time is slipping out of our hands,'' Shreyans Kumar Jain, chairman of the Nuclear Power Corp. of India Ltd., said in an interview in Mumbai yesterday. India's plan to add 25,000 megawatts before 2020 by importing reactors and fuel will be delayed by two decades if the nation has to rely on indigenous designs, he said.

[From Bloomberg.com: Asia]

Houston Chronicle: Oil and gas may be the prime mover in Houston's economy, but a growing wind power business is proving there's more than one way to spell "energy" in the Bayou City.

Houston is already home to a handful of major wind power project developers, including those owned by oil and gas giants BP and Shell, thanks in large part to the state's ample wind resources, renewable energy incentives created by lawmakers and competitive power markets.

And the industry blew this way again Monday when Danish powerhouse Vestas Wind Systems said it will open its first U.S. research and development facility here. The office will open in 2009 and grow to about 100 researchers by early 2010, not including support staff, with more positions likely to come.

[From Danish wind power giant to open Houston research center | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle]

The Associated Press: Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said Tuesday he's confident the government's license application to build a nuclear waste dump in Nevada will "stand up to any challenge anywhere."

Bodman spoke at a news conference hours after the Bush administration submitted the formal application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to build the underground storage facility at Yucca Mountain more than 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

[From The Associated Press: Bush administration files nuclear dump application]

New York Times: Plans by the Bush administration to develop clean coal technology, where carbon dioxide from coal-burning power plants is pumped back into the ground appear to be stalling despite support from President Bush, the three main presidential candidates, many other members of Congress, industry and environmentalists.

In January, the government canceled its support for what was supposed to be a showcase project, a plant at a carefully chosen site in Illinois where there was coal, access to the power grid, and soil underfoot that backers said could hold the carbon dioxide for eons.

Perhaps worse, in the last few months, utility projects in Florida, West Virginia, Ohio, Minnesota and Washington State that would have made it easier to capture carbon dioxide have all been canceled or thrown into regulatory limbo.

“It’s a total mess,” said Daniel M. Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

The Guardian: Britain and France are to sign a deal to construct a new generation of nuclear power stations and export the technology around the world in an effort to combat climate change.

The pact is to be announced at the "Arsenal summit" next week when prime ministers Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy will meet at the Emirates stadium in north London.

Britain hopes to take advantage of French expertise to build the power stations that do not rely on fossil fuels. Nearly 79% of France's electricity comes from its highly-developed nuclear power industry. The UK's ageing nuclear plants are ready for decommissioning and supply 20% of its energy needs.

Brown hopes the partnership will create a skilled British labour force who would then work in partnership with France to sell nuclear power stations to other countries over the next 15 years.

The Guardian: British Energy is in talks with a number of rivals, which could lead to a tie-up or a takeover offer that some say would value the country's main nuclear power generator at more than US$14 billion.

Shares in the British company soared by nearly 20% after it confirmed the discussions but declined to identify any of the potential partners or predators.

EDF of France, E.ON of Germany and Centrica, owner of British Gas, are among the key players known to have been holding partnership talks that have turned into something more substantial.

British Energy is in demand because it generates about a sixth of Britain's electricity but, more importantly ,has the most attractive potential sites to build a new generation of nuclear plants.

The move comes as the UK government announced that the four new designs being considered for future nuclear reactors in the UK (the European Pressurised Reactor, Westinghouse's AP1000, ESBWR and Atomic Energy of Canada's ACR1000) have all passed initial safety tests.

The Guardian: The government's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has come under fire from the private sector for the allegedly slow speed with which it is handling the award of the second-biggest procurement contract ever - the £1bn-a-year Sellafield clean-up.

Amec, which, with Washington Group and Areva is part of one of the four consortiums shortlisted for the work, said it was increasingly assessing overseas opportunities because of delays. Final bids for the work must be in next month and the contract is expected by the end of the year.

"I am lucky," said Samir Brikho, Amec's chief executive. "This is a very small part of our business but if it was a very large part then I would be worried that it was continually delayed; that I was waiting and waiting and nothing was happening."

It was not as though the clean-up agency was having to decide on which design of reactor it should choose, he added. "What are we fighting over? How to close a plant? They need to take a decision."

Brikho speculated that the delay was a result of "turbulence" inside the NDA, with the departure of two chairmen in six months and a swathe of senior staff more recently.

The NDA said it was inevitable, with so much riding on a contract that could have a total value of well over £10bn, that there would be statements such as those of Brikho but it denied there were any significant delays.

Bloomberg.com: From a windswept corner of Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island, Japan Steel Works Ltd. manufactures the central part of a nuclear reactor's containment vessel in a single piece, reducing the risk of a radiation leak. It is the only plant of its type in the world, and it can only produce four steel forgings a year.

Utilities that won't need the equipment for years are making $100 million down payments now in order to get in line. Even after Japan Steel doubles capacity in the next two years, there won't be enough production to meet building plans.

"If there are 50 to 100 reactors or more to be built, there will be a real shortage and real delays in deliveries," says Ron Pitts, senior vice president for nuclear operations at the construction and engineering company Fluor Corp. in Irving, Texas.

The news comes as Russia announced plans to build four more nuclear power plants over the next twelve years at Tver, Nizhny Novgorod, Chelyabinsk and Yaroslavl or Kostroma regions.

Washington Post: Iranian nuclear engineer Mohsen Fakhrizadeh lectures weekly on physics at Tehran's Imam Hossein University. Yet for more than a decade, according to documents attracting interest among Western governments, he also ran secret programs aimed at acquiring sensitive nuclear technology for his government.

Experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) have repeatedly invited Fakhrizadeh to tea and a chat about Iran's nuclear work. But for two years, the government in Tehran has barred any contact with the scientist, who U.S. officials say recently moved to a new lab in a heavily guarded compound also off-limits to U.N. inspectors.

The Guardian: The most wide-ranging sell-off of British nuclear assets was under way last week, with the private sector being offered everything from stockpiled uranium to atomic fuel manufacturing plants and land at 18 sites.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), which is nursing a £300m budget overrun for 2006-07 alone, is attempting to raise cash to help pay for a £72bn clean-up bill. It looks set to win bids from E.ON of Germany and other power companies that are keen to build nuclear generating plants next to some of the NDA's key locations, such as Sellafield in Cumbria and Wylfa on Anglesey.

The government's clean-up agency confirmed yesterday that controversial fuel reprocessing plants such as Thorp and the Sellafield Mox Plant - as well as the fuel manufacturing facility at Springfields in Lancashire - could all be included in any sale. This is despite operating problems at the first two which are held largely responsible for the latest budget overrun.

Reuters: South Africa's advanced nuclear reactor technology programme will include U.S.-based Westinghouse Electric as a partner and a new shareholders' contract is expected by the end of the month, an official said last week.

South Africa is currently testing elements of the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) and wants to build 24-30 PBMR reactors for its own energy needs.

Lynette Milne, chief financial officer of Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (Pty) Ltd (PBMR) set up in 1999 to develop and market the technology, said a new shareholders' contract will also include South Africa's government, the Industrial Development Corporation and power utility Eskom.

Financial Times: A leading university will today announce plans for a Centre for Nuclear Energy Technology to help plug severe skills gaps in Britain's nuclear sector.

RIA Novosti: Russia and India have upgraded their unique cooperation in building civilian nuclear facilities by initializing an intergovernmental agreement on the construction of four additional energy units at the Kudankulam nuclear power station in Tamil Nadu and on joint work at other sites. Deputy Director of the Federal Atomic Energy Agency Nikolai Spassky, and head of the Indian Nuclear Power Corporation S.K. Jain confirmed the viability of this agreement in New Delhi on February 11. Now the document has to go through the last channels and be approved by the heads of state.

Bloomberg: The U.K. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, created in 2005 to clean up atomic sites, should do more to quantify costs after budget estimates rose 18 percent, the National Audit Office said.

The Associated Press: Nuclear reactors across the Southeast could be forced to throttle back or temporarily shut down later this year because drought is drying up the rivers and lakes that supply power plants with the awesome amounts of cooling water they need to operate.

The Baltimore Examiner: Thousands of canisters of highly radioactive waste from the world's most nuclear-energized nation lie, silent and deadly, beneath this jutting tip of Normandy. Above ground, cows graze and Atlantic waves crash into heather-covered hills.

Guardian Unlimited: The government's white paper on expanding nuclear energy is generating power for the higher education sector, finds Anthea Lipsett

Nature: In the first of a series of articles covering nuclear issues, Declan Butler looks at the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and finds that there has never been a better climate for negotiation.

BBC: A new generation of nuclear power stations in the UK has been given formal backing by the government.

cnews: The head of the Nuclear Safety Commission is accusing Natural Resources Minister Gary Lunn of improper interference with the agency.

Guardian Unlimited: Academics say safety concerns of new generation of plants not yet addressed

Venture Beat: Nuclear power is a bit of a land mine in the field of clean technology. Mention it in any given room of environmentalists, and opinions will explode. Some say nuclear’s terminally unsafe. Others say it’s the only true cleantech solution.

The Wall Street Journal: Even as interest grows in a potential new generation of U.S. nuclear-power plants, scrutiny of existing ones is intensifying.

Bloomberg: China is gearing up to become the world's biggest producer and operator of nuclear plants. The country plans to build about 30 new reactors by 2020, at a cost totaling 450 billion yuan ($61 billion). Deals signed this year with Westinghouse Electric Co. and Areva SA will put the Chinese in position to copy the latest technology. Its biggest threat may be as a competitor in selling the $3 billion to $5 billion nuclear plants at home and abroad. China's atomic industry may follow the copy-and-compete blueprint laid out by local makers of cars, drugs and coal-fired power plants says Bloomberg's Dune Lawrence and Alan Katz.

See also:
Stronger Future for Nuclear Power Physics Today, February 2006
Nuclear Power to Explode in India, but China Prefers Coal New Picks, October 2007
Africa's Pursuit of Nuclear Power, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, November 2007

Guardian Unlimited: Gordon Brown will call for an acceleration of nuclear power today in a speech to business leaders designed to show he is focused on the long term and will not buckle in the face of negative headlines.

The Economist: America wants to ensure that its nuclear warheads would go bang rather than pop—but without letting them off to test them

Wired: A recent application to build the first American nuclear power plant in nearly 30 years has the nuclear community aglow with talk of possible industry resurgence.

The New York Times: The Energy Department has not finished plans to consolidate storage of nuclear bomb fuel and other high-risk materials now spread among numerous sites, even though the department said in 2005 that it would do so within about a year, according to a Government Accountability Office report to be released Monday.

Forbes: Russia, the world's second nuclear power, has long had an active nuclear-energy industry, including exporting reactors to countries such as India and Iran. Yet until recently, the Kremlin devoted far less attention to nuclear energy than to the country's massive and profitable oil and natural-gas industries. In 2005, President Vladimir Putin indicated his interest in the sector by appointing former Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko to head Russia's Federal Atomic Energy Agency (Rosatom).

The San Francisco Examiner: A panel of the National Academy of Sciences urged President Bush on Monday to abandon an ambitious plan to resume nuclear waste reprocessing that is the heart of the administration's push to expand the civilian use of nuclear power.

The New York Times: The mystery surrounding the construction of what might have been a nuclear reactor in Syria deepened yesterday, when a company released a satellite photo showing that the main building was well under way in September 2003 — four years before Israeli jets bombed it.

Wired.com: To curb greenhouse gas emissions, India is poised to dramatically increase its reliance on nuclear energy -- but there'll be no overall benefit to the planet if China's coal binge continues.

A new report by the International Atomic Energy Agency forecasts India will increase nuclear production eight-fold by 2030 to account for 26 percent of its power grid.

Xinhua: The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a landmark multinational fusion energy project involving the European Union (EU), got started on Wednesday, the European Commission announced here.

NC State University: Successes like this at a university reactor are actually starting to drive big ideas and big thoughts around the country and around the world.

BBC: Nearly half of Britain's nuclear power reactors have been out of action due to breakdowns and maintenance.

The Washington Post: Two decades ago, after Duke Energy abandoned its partly built nuclear power reactors here, the site was sold and turned into a movie set. Director James Cameron used it to film "The Abyss," a 1989 movie about civilian divers who encounter aliens while trying to rescue a stricken nuclear submarine. Cameron filled the unused nuclear containment building with water and hauled a section of an oil rig, a tiny submarine and fiberglass rocks inside to make convincing underwater scenes.

As a result of this re-evaluation, scientists say the fire - which sent a plume of caesium, iodine and polonium across Britain and northern Europe - may have caused several dozen more cases of cancer than had been estimated previously.

The Baltimore Sun: or a decade, Dorthe Matowitz worked as a piping inspector at nuclear power plants, but tired of all the travel and switched occupations three years ago.

She is now in demand by a revitalized nuclear power industry scrambling for skilled help.

Guardian Unlimited: Ukraine is to cover the site of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor with a vast metal shelter in a long overdue operation designed to prevent the further leak of deadly radiation. Officials in Kiev yesterday said they had hired a French firm to replace the crumbling concrete sarcophagus that has stood at Chernobyl since 1986 - when it was the scene of the world's worst ever nuclear disaster.

Los Angeles Times: A federal judge rules against Energy officials, who say they need 8 million gallons to continue work on the Yucca Mountain site.

Miami Herald: A three-year veil of secrecy in the name of national security was used to keep the public in the dark about the handling of highly enriched uranium at a nuclear fuel processing plant - including a leak that could have caused a deadly, uncontrolled nuclear reaction.

The Register: It is 21 years since the nuclear plant at Chernobyl went bang, and the extent of the damage wrought by the radioactive fallout is still becoming clear.

Energy Firms Plan New Nuclear Power Plants
Concerns Linger for 2020 Nuclear Dump Openingt

BBC: A team of UN nuclear experts has begun a four-day inspection of a Japanese atomic power plant damaged in a powerful earthquake last month.

The Washington Post: A team of experts from the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog agency will inspect next week the Japanese nuclear power plant damaged in an earthquake, after pressure from local authorities in the area worried about safety.

The New York Times: Workers are trying to determine how to clean up one of the worst radioactive waste leaks in years at the Hanford nuclear reservation, officials said.

Science: An earthquake that roughed up a nuclear power plant last week has Japan once again debating nuclear safety.

USA Today: Bad news continued on Wednesday to leak out of a Japanese nuclear plant shaken by a powerful earthquake.

Two days after a magnitude-6.8 quake rattled the west coast of Japan Monday, killing nine people and causing a fire and a radioactive leak at the nearby Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear complex:

NPR: Nuclear power is getting another look in the United States because of growing concerns about global warming and the plumes of greenhouse gases pumped into the atmosphere by coal-fired plants.

But no member of the public ever did. In fact, no member of the public could find out about the changes. The document describing them, including the notice of hearing rights for anyone who felt adversely affected, was stamped “official use only,” meaning that it was not publicly accessible. “Official use only” is a category below “Secret” and, while documents in that category are not technically classified, they are kept from the public.

The agency would not even have told Congress which factory was involved were it not for the efforts of one of the five commissioners, Gregory B. Jaczko, who named the company, Nuclear Fuel Services, of Erwin, Tenn., in a memo that became part of the public record.

Azom.com: Fifteen years of scientific discovery came to an end on June 30th when the electrons and protons in the HERA accelerator made their final lap of the 6.3 km ring. The HERA ring has provided these particles and their anti-particle equivalents for use in particle and nuclear physics experiments, but is now being shut down to make way for new scientific facilities at the DESY Laboratory near Hamburg in Germany. Experiments using HERA have produced results that have already found their way into textbooks – for example confirming the nature of the strong force and proving that the electromagnetic and the weak force can be unified into a single force.

Reuters: Toshiba Corp. snatched up an order from NRG Energy Inc to build two U.S. nuclear power reactors, a project that had been expected to go to General Electric Co. and Hitachi Ltd., the Nikkei business daily reported on Wednesday.

Wired: 1954: The world's first nuclear power plant becomes operational in Obninsk, outside of Moscow.

Science: The United States is considering the development and deployment of new nuclear weapon designs, the objective being to sustain the nation's ultimate deterrent for the foreseeable future.* These initiatives are presented as supporting the highest U.S. security priorities, which include countering the threats of terrorism and the proliferation of nuclear weapons--priorities that are widely shared internationally

Houston Chronicle: Technicians have been dismantling nuclear warheads much faster than had been expected, taking apart 50 percent more warheads during the last eight months than in all of the previous year, the Energy Department says.

BBC: A major new particle accelerator is to be built at Hamburg, Germany, that is capable of producing super-brilliant, ultra-short flashes of X-ray light.

Telegraph.co.uk: The company, which is the UK's biggest electricity generator, has begun looking for partners in new nuclear projects - from utilities, suppliers, customers and financial investors and hopes to cement one new partnership in "due course".

Guardian Unlimited: A multinational project led by British researchers aims to use a high-power laser to reproduce the physical reaction that occurs at the heart of the sun and every other star in the universe - nuclear fusion. If the project succeeds it has the potential to solve the world energy crisis without destroying the environment.

The Washignton Post: Not far from the old Silk Road, Chinese government scientists have begun boring holes deep into granite in the first steps toward building what could become the world's largest tomb for nuclear waste.