guardian.co.uk: The UK government is poised to allow nuclear power generators to use ordinary landfill sites for dumping "hundreds of thousands of tons" of waste in an attempt to reduce the £73 billion ($140 bn) cost of decommissioning old reactors.
The move has triggered a swath of applications around the country from big corporations trying to cash in on this potential new business, but infuriated local governments and environmental campaign groups.
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.
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.
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
Related article
Energy Sprawl or Energy Efficiency: Climate Policy Impacts on Natural Habitat for the United States of America
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.
Nature News: India's prime minister Manmohan Singh has approved a US$19 billion plan to make the country a global leader in solar energy over the next three decades. The ambitious project would see a massive expansion in installed solar capacity, and aims to reduce the price of electricity generated from solar energy to match that from fossil fuels by 2030.
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.
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.
Washingtonpost.com: When it comes to space, we've outsourced the jobs to machines says Howard McCurdy in the Washington Post.
In his famous 1945 article anticipating communications satellites, Arthur C. Clarke opined that humans would need to operate the orbital switching stations. Wernher von Braun, who proposed a large space telescope, was sure that astronauts would be stationed nearby. For nearly every outpost in space, from spaceships and space stations to lunar colonies and Martian research bases, we thought humans would be there. We were wrong.We did not anticipate the incredible advances in machine technology that the second half of the 20th century would bring. Technologies such as remote sensing, digital imaging, solid-state electronics, electric power generation, space communication and computer capacity reduced the costs and improved the capabilities of robotic spacecraft dramatically. We don't need technicians to change the film in space telescopes—the telescopes don't use film—and we don't need astronauts to maintain communications satellites.
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."
Related Link
Towards a low carbon future
Science: Last month, US Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced that the Department of Energy (DOE) was putting the brakes on research into automotive hydrogen fuel cells.
Chu cites the cost and durability of vehicle fuel cells, the inability to store large volumes of hydrogen fuel, the absence of a carbon-free way of generating the hydrogen, and the need to build a nationwide refueling infrastructure.
The issue came down to a simple question, says Chu: "Is it likely in the next 10 or 15 or even 20 years that we will convert to a hydrogen-car economy? The answer, we felt, was no."
But many scientists and energy experts believe Chu asked the wrong question and, therefore, made the wrong call.
No alternative-vehicle technology will make a major impact on carbon emissions, petroleum use, or anything else within the next 20 years, they say, because it takes longer than that for a new technology to displace what is already on the road.
In the long run, they say only two technologies—hydrogen fuel cells and electric vehicles—are capable of getting the job done. And only one variation, plug-in hybrids, will be on the market anytime soon.
"There are uncertainties with both these technologies," says Joan Ogden, who heads the sustainable transportation energy program at the University of California, Davis. "So the idea of taking one off the table seems shortsighted."
The Daily Telegraph: Steven Chu, the US Energy Secretary, has proposed fitting white roofs to buildings in over to save energy and money on air conditioning by deflecting the sun's rays.
More pale surfaces could also slow global warming by reflecting heat into space rather than allowing it to be absorbed by dark surfaces where it is trapped by greenhouse gases and increases temperatures.
In a wide-ranging discussion at the three-day Nobel laureate Symposium in London, Chu described climate change as a "crisis situation", and called for a whole host of measures to be introduced, from promoting energy efficiency to renewable energy such as wind, wave and solar.
Chu's comments are backed up by research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which suggests white roofs can cut energy bills by 20%.
"This is the first paper in the scientific literature that explicitly melds the two vital issues of global peak oil production and human-induced climate change," Kharecha said. "We're illustrating the types of action needed to get to target carbon dioxide levels."
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)
Obama Team Set on Environment New York TImes
Obama Picks Team to Guide Energy, Environment Agendas Wall Street Journal
Steve Chu, Sixth Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Obama Said to Pick Nobel Laureate Chu as Energy Chief Bloomberg
Nobel Physicist Chosen To Be Energy Secretary Washington Post
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>
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.
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?
Nature News: Can the Chinese government meet its ambitious targets on space, the environment, research, energy and health? David Cyranoski takes a look at China today and what it hopes to be tomorrow.
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.
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.
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.
