Blogs / 80beats

President-elect Barack Obama has thrilled the scientific community with the leaked news that he plans to nominate a Nobel Prize-winning physicist with a passion for green technology for the post of energy secretary. The likely nominee, Steven Chu, currently heads the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and shared the Nobel in physics in 1997 for developing a method to cool and trap atoms.

Recently, however, Chu’s interests have shifted away from particle physics and towards finding scientific solutions for global warming. In an interview last year, Chu said he began to turn his attention to energy and climate change several years ago. “I was following it just as a citizen and getting increasingly alarmed,” he said. “Many of our best basic scientists [now] realize that this is getting down to a crisis situation” [Washington Post]. Since he became director of Lawrence Berkeley Lab in 2004 he has focused on making it a world leader in alternative energy research, spearheading research initiatives on solar energy and biofuels.

Obama is also expected to nominate Carol Browner, the EPA administrator under President Clinton, as the top White House official on climate and energy policy, and Lisa Jackson, who was until recently was New Jersey’s environmental protection chief, to head the EPA. Along with Chu, these people will be at the center of Obama administration’s energy and environment policy, which aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions growth and have energy efficiency play an important role in an expected economic stimulus package [CNET].

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The long-cherished dream of creating nearly limitless clean energy from nuclear fusion–the same process that powers our sun–is looking slightly more possible thanks to a new series of experiments. Researchers working with a reactor at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center have managed to control the motion of million-degree plasma using high-power radio waves. “Ours is the first definitive result showing that high-power radio waves can significantly affect the flow of the plasma,” said physicist Earl Marmar [EE Times]. The radio waves successfully propelled the plasma inside the dount-shaped chamber without hitting the cooler vessel walls, which would halt the fusion reaction, and also prevented the plasma from causing turbulence, which can interfere with reactions.

Fusion is thought to have enormous potential for future power generation, because fusion plant operation would produce no emissions, fuel sources are potentially abundant, and it produces relatively little (and short-lived) radioactive waste. That’s unlike nuclear fission (the splitting apart of a heavy atom to release energy), the process that powers all existing nuclear plants [LiveScience]. However, researchers stress that commercial fusion power plants are still a long way off. Physicists still don’t know how to make a reactor that generates more power than it consumes, a rather large problem for a potential energy source.

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It’s a device that could change energy options around the planet: A company called Hyperion Power Generation claims that its miniature nuclear reactors could power anything from water purifiers in developing world villages to oil extraction sites in the remote Arctic tundra to army outposts in the desert.

One reactor, which would cost about $25 million, would produce 25 megawatts of energy, enough to provide electricity for 20,000 average American-sized homes or a major industrial project. Daisy-chained, these micro-reactors, each one about twice the size of an average man, can supply enough electricity to power an entire small city or suburb [The Cutting Edge News]. The company says that its nuclear system is safe and clean, as it produces no greenhouse gases, and claims the reactors will be ready for mass production in five years.

Hyperion’s chief executive, John Deal, says the company already has more than 100 firm orders, largely from the oil and electricity industries, but says the company is also targeting developing countries and isolated communities. “It’s leapfrog technology,” he said…. The first confirmed order came from TES, a Czech infrastructure company specialising in water plants and power plants. “They ordered six units and optioned a further 12. We are very sure of their capability to purchase,” said Deal. The first one, he said, would be installed in Romania. “We now have a six-year waiting list. We are in talks with developers in the Cayman Islands, Panama and the Bahamas” [The Guardian].

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The U.S. Department of Energy is lobbying to expand the controversial plan to store nuclear waste inside Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, even as the entire project’s fate is thrown into uncertainty with the election of Barack Obama as the nation’s next president. The locally unpopular project has been repeatedly delayed due to lawsuits and safety concerns (the federal government originally promised to start accepting waste from nuclear power companies in 1998, but is now scheduled to open in 2020), and Obama has previously signaled that he might scrap the facility all together.

Yet recent statements by the Energy Department’s Edward Sproat underscored the urgency of finding some safe, final destination for the United States’ growing piles of nuclear waste. Sproat told Congress last week that the 77,000-ton limit Congress put on the capacity of the proposed Yucca waste dump will fall far short of what will be needed and has to be expanded, or another dump built elsewhere in the country…. He said within two years the amount of waste produced by the country’s 104 nuclear power plants plus defense waste will exceed 77,000 tons [AP]. Sproat suggested that Congress scrap the limit, or else empower the Department of Energy to search for another site for a secondary facility.

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The controversial plan to store nuclear waste underground in a facility in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain reached another milestone today, as the Environmental Protection Agency issued limits for how much radiation people in the surrounding area could be exposed to–all the way from when the facility is scheduled to open, in 2020, until 1 million years in the future.

The EPA announced yesterday that to protect the hypothetical people living in Nevada 1 million years from now, the Yucca Mountain facility must be designed to ensure that people living near it then are exposed to no more than 100 millirems of radiation annually — equivalent to about a half-dozen X-rays. And over the next 10,000 years, radiation exposure to the waste dump’s neighbors may be no more than 15 millirems a year, which is about what people get from an ordinary X-ray [AP].

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NASA is hard at work planning a long-term lunar outpost, and the agency now has a potential solution to the energy question: miniature nuclear power systems. This week, NASA announced that it’s planning to build prototypes and simulators that will be ready for testing in 2012 or 2013.

As a lunar settlement draws closer to reality–NASA’s Constellation Program includes returning to the moon by 2020–is busy thinking through the practical details–like how to keep the generators running and the lights on. During the day, solar power is one obvious solution. But lunar nights can last up to 334 hours in some places, and even at the moon’s south pole, the sun never rises high. A fission surface power system would be able to produce power steadily even in harsh environments such as the Moon, or even Mars, without relying on sunlight [World Nuclear News].

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An international group has given India special approval to buy nuclear technology to further its nuclear power program, although the country has steadfastly refused to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. The decision, made by the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), was strongly supported by the United States, which hopes to sell the technology to India. The NSG adopted a one-off waiver of a 34-year-old global ban on nuclear trade with India, allowing New Delhi and Washington to do business [Reuters].

The proposed deal between the United States and India still has to be approved by the U.S. Congress, and there are several roadblocks to its immediate passage. Congress will be in session for only two weeks this September before breaking again for the final flurry of campaigning before the November election, and supporters of the India deal will have to pass special legislation to expedite the approval process. ‘‘I’d say the chances of it getting past the senate are 50-50,” a Senate aide said. ”Senators are good at tying things up in knots” [Times of India].

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A researcher who stirred up controversy when he claimed to have carried out nuclear fusion in a table-top experiment has been found guilty of scientific misconduct by a panel at Purdue University.  Many scientists have been eager to develop nuclear fusion — the process that powers the sun — as an unlimited source of clean energy and an alternative to fossil fuels. But scientists have struggled to unlock the secrets of fusion energy [Reuters].

In 2002, the researcher, Rusi P. Taleyarkhan, announced that he had carried out fusion at room temperature and using relatively cheap materials, and his results were trumpeted on the cover of the prestigious journal Science. The article was published over the vehement objections of several reviewers and was heavily criticized by other physicists [Los Angeles Times]. Now, the Purdue panel’s findings of scientific misconduct cast further doubts on the validity of Taleyarkhan’s experiments.  

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Uranium leaked from a reservoir at a French nuclear power plant earlier this week, contaminating two rivers near the town of Avignon. People in nearby towns have been warned not to drink any water or eat fish from the rivers since Monday’s leak. Officials have also cautioned people not to swim in the rivers or use their water to irrigate crops [BBC News]. In response to the leak, the French nuclear safety agency ordered the plant to shut down temporarily while it improved safety measures.

The incident sparked a national outrage in France and angered residents and environmental organizations, and distrust has grown after officials downplayed the seriousness of the event. The mishap also has the potential to make people and countries that are now re-embracing nuclear power have second thoughts [Spiegel].

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Not a single new nuclear power plant has been built in the United States in the past 30 years, but if presidential candidate John McCain gets his way they’ll soon be sprouting up like mushrooms. In a speech on energy policy yesterday, McCain called for the construction of 45 nuclear reactors by the year 2030, and said that his ultimate goal is 100 new nuclear plants.

The Arizona senator also vowed to spend $2 billion on research into clean-burning coal. “This single achievement will open vast amounts of our oldest and most abundant resource,” McCain, 71, said. “It will deliver not only electricity but jobs to some of the areas hardest hit by our economic troubles” [Bloomberg]. McCain is in the midst of a speaking tour in which he’s offering his ideas on energy policy; his proposal to embrace coal and nuclear energy came two days after he called for lifting the ban on oil drilling in U.S. coastal waters.

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It’s been a big news week for nuclear waste, with most of the attention going to the Department of Energy’s announcement that it has at long last submitted an application to open a nuclear waste repository in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain.

After two decades of planning, the application nudges the project a little closer to reality, but there’s a long way to go yet. Nevada officials remain violently opposed to the “nuclear dump,” and lawsuits are inevitable. The Department of Energy says that the repository won’t be ready to open until 2020, at the earliest.

Meanwhile, in a laboratory in Tennessee, the Energy Department is trying to clean up an aging nuclear waste cache left over from the Cold War, only to have its own inspector general declared the waste a “national resource” because of its potential use in cancer treatments.

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