2015-09-25, 22:25 | Link #1 |
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Future Power Generation
Patent details for Nuclear Fusion using lasers and
ultradense deuterium: "Researchers at the University of Gothenburg and the University of Iceland are researching a new type of nuclear fusion process. This produces almost no neutrons but instead fast, heavy electrons (muons), since it is based on nuclear reactions in ultra-dense heavy hydrogen (deuterium). The new fusion process can take place in relatively small laser-fired fusion reactors fueled by heavy hydrogen (deuterium). They have gotten twice the energy from what they put in and believe they can get to 20 times the energy out as put in." See: http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/09/pat...ion-using.html |
2015-09-26, 15:57 | Link #3 | ||||
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2015-09-27, 06:43 | Link #4 | |
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IIRC such fusors have rather low efficiency and due to the amount of fuel required are only used on a small scale.
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2015-09-29, 19:15 | Link #5 |
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Solar Cells Will be Made Obsolete by 3D rectennas aiming at
40-to-90% efficiency: "A new kind of nanoscale rectenna (half antenna and half rectifier) can convert solar and infrared into electricity, plus be tuned to nearly any other frequency as a detector. Right now efficiency is only one percent, but professor Baratunde Cola and colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech, Atlanta) convincingly argue that they can achieve 40 percent broad spectrum efficiency (double that of silicon and more even than multi- junction gallium arsenide) at a one-tenth of the cost of conventional solar cells (and with an upper limit of 90 percent efficiency for single wavelength conversion)." See: http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/09/sol...ete-by-3d.html |
2015-10-31, 21:32 | Link #6 |
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Germany is about to start up a monster machine that
could revolutionize the way we use energy: "For more than 60 years, scientists have dreamed of a clean, inexhaustible energy source in the form of nuclear fusion. And they're still dreaming. But thanks to the efforts of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, experts hope that might soon change. Last year, after 1.1 million construction hours, the institute completed the world's largest nuclear-fusion machine of its kind, called a stellarator." See: https://beta.finance.yahoo.com/news/...152111129.html |
2015-11-12, 04:09 | Link #7 |
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Thorium Reactors Seen As Promising For World’s Long Term
Energy Needs: "A nuclear energy concept that was demonstrated and abandoned half a century ago is at the heart of an effort by a Livermore physicist and several colleagues to provide energy at affordable cost to a growing world population. The concept, called molten salt technology, uses both thorium and uranium to produce heat energy from a fuel configuration that is “walk-away safe,” according to Livermore physicist, Ralph Moir." See: http://www.independentnews.com/news/...454b2ca22.html & http://fortune.com/2015/02/02/doe-ch...clear-reactor/ Last edited by AnimeFan188; 2015-11-12 at 04:34. |
2015-11-15, 23:34 | Link #8 |
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The Future of Wind Turbines? No Blades:
"It’s no longer surprising to encounter 100-foot pinwheels spinning in the breeze as you drive down the highway. But don’t get too comfortable with that view. A Spanish company called Vortex Bladeless is proposing a radical new way to generate wind energy that will once again upend what you see outside your car window. Their idea is the Vortex, a bladeless wind turbine that looks like a giant rolled joint shooting into the sky. The Vortex has the same goals as conventional wind turbines: To turn breezes into kinetic energy that can be used as electricity. But it goes about it in an entirely different way." See: http://www.wired.com/2015/05/future-...nes-no-blades/ |
2015-12-12, 21:27 | Link #9 |
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The Outlook for Nuclear Power in the U.S. Really
Sucks: "As the Paris climate summit kicked off two weeks ago, venture capitalist Peter Thiel penned a scathing op-ed for the New York Times, decrying the plight of nuclear power in the U.S. He cited a stagnant regulatory environment unable to adapt to innovative new reactor designs, and continued public hysteria over safety and radioactive waste disposal, as the primary culprits holding us back from a bright nuclear-powered future. Thiel makes some valid points. But what’s really killing nuclear power in this country is garden-variety economics: in the emerging energy market of the 21st century, nuclear just can’t compete — particularly with ultra-cheap natural gas." See: http://gizmodo.com/the-outlook-for-n...cks-1746582577 |
2016-04-13, 22:58 | Link #10 |
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2013 Independent Review declares EMC2 Fusion's
progress to be most significant advances made in plasma physics and magnetic fusion over the past 50 years: "Nextbigfuture has obtained the independent reviews of EMC2 Fusions work for the US Navy from 2012 and 2013. The reviews were obtained with a Freedom of Information Act request. In our July 5, 2013, report, the review committee stated, “The EMC2 team is finally at the threshold of success or failure with the Polywell / Wiffle Ball fusion power concept. The focus of EMC2 efforts has sharpened considerably and is now totally concentrated on experimentally producing a so-called Wiffle Ball (WB) plasma in a Polywell magnetic field configuration and diagnosing it in detail to verify its confinement properties, a step that is essential to the success of their fusion power concept.”" See: http://nextbigfuture.com/2016/04/201...2-fusions.html |
2016-07-05, 01:41 | Link #11 |
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Uranium Seawater Extraction Makes Nuclear
Power Completely Renewable: "America, Japan and China are racing to be the first nation to make nuclear energy completely renewable. The hurdle is making it economic to extract uranium from seawater, because the amount of uranium in seawater is truly inexhaustible. James Conca at Forbes describes the latest developments with uranium seawater extraction. James has some update from Nextbigfuture's April coverage of the uranium extraction from seawater research. And it seems America is in the lead. New technological breakthroughs from DOE’s Pacific Northwest (PNNL) and Oak Ridge (ORNL) national laboratories have made removing uranium from seawater within economic reach and the only question is – when will the source of uranium for our nuclear power plants change from mined ore to seawater extraction?" See: http://nextbigfuture.com/2016/07/ura...ion-makes.html |
2016-07-13, 02:11 | Link #12 |
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Super controversial Brilliant light Power aka blacklight
power claims to be generating bursts of megawatt power and claim independent validation: "The SunCell® was invented and engineered to harness the clean energy source from the reaction the hydrogen atoms of water molecules to form a non-polluting product, lower-energy state hydrogen called “Hydrino” wherein the energy release of H2O fuel is 100 times that of an equivalent amount of high-octane gasoline at an unprecedented high power density. The compact power is manifest as tens of thousands of Sun equivalents that can be directly converted to electrical output using commercial photovoltaic cells." "BrLP’s safe, non-polluting power-producing system catalytically converts the hydrogen of the H2O-based solid fuel into a non-polluting product, Hydrino, by allowing the electrons to fall to smaller radii around the nucleus. The energy release is over 200 times that of burning the equivalent amount of hydrogen with oxygen. Due to this extraordinary energy release, H2O may serve as the source of hydrogen fuel to form Hydrinos and oxygen. Moreover, the SunCell® is compact, light-weight and autonomous with a projected capital cost of 1% to 10% that of any other form of power. The anticipated cost is so low that BrLP intends to provide autonomous individual power for essentially all stationary and motive applications untethered to the grid or any fuels infrastructure. Dr. Mills announced, “This is the end of the age of fire, the internal combustion engine, and centralized power and fuels.”" See: http://nextbigfuture.com/2016/07/sup...ant-light.html ============================ This sounds too good to be true. Are we looking at another "Cold Fusion" type fiasco? |
2016-07-24, 19:14 | Link #14 |
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General Atomics' $40-million gamble on small nukes:
"The scientists and engineers at General Atomics think the future of nuclear energy is coming on the back of a flatbed truck. The leadership at the San Diego company, which has been developing nuclear technologies for more than 60 years, has already spent $40 million in the expectation that its ambitious plans for the next generation of reactors will actually work. “We have technology that we think is going to qualitatively change the game," said Christina Back, vice president of nuclear technologies and materials at General Atomics. Called the Energy Multiplier Module, or EM² (EM-squared), the concept is still in the development stage but promises to produce electricity more cheaply, safely and efficiently than the nation’s current fleet of nuclear plants." See: http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...nap-story.html |
2016-07-25, 04:43 | Link #15 | |||
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2016-12-07, 23:41 | Link #16 |
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Microwave oil recovery could unlock trillions of barrels of oil
and drinkable water from Oil shale and oil sands: "Producers would microwave oil shale formations with a beam as powerful as 500 household microwave ovens, cooking the kerogen and releasing the oil. It also would turn the water found naturally in the deposits to steam, which would help push the oil to the wellbore. “Once you remove the oil and water,” Kearl continues, “the rock basically becomes transparent” to the microwave beam, which can then penetrate outward farther and farther, up to about 80 feet from the wellbore. It doesn’t sound like much, but a single microwave-stimulated well, which would be drilled in formations on average nearly 1,000 feet thick, could pump about 800,000 barrels. Qmast plans to have its first systems deployed in the field in 2017 and start producing by the end of that year. Qmast estimates his pumping costs will be about $9 per barrel, which is only about $2 more than conventional wells." See: http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/12...ld-unlock.html |
2017-08-23, 23:37 | Link #17 |
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Nuclear thorium molten salt experiments started in Europe:
"Researchers at NRG, a Dutch nuclear materials firm, have begun the first tests of nuclear fission using thorium salts since experiments ended at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the early 1970s." "The team at NRG is testing several reactor designs on a small scale at first. The first experiment is on a setup called a molten-salt fast reactor, which burns thorium salt and in theory should also be able to consume spent nuclear fuel from typical uranium fission reactions.”" See: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/0...in-europe.html |
2018-11-29, 00:42 | Link #18 |
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Scientists in the U.S. and Japan Get Serious About
Low-Energy Nuclear Reactions: "It’s been a big year for low-energy nuclear reactions. LENRs, as they’re known, are a fringe research topic that some physicists think could explain the results of an infamous experiment nearly 30 years ago that formed the basis for the idea of cold fusion. That idea didn’t hold up, and only a handful of researchers around the world have continued trying to understand the mysterious nature of the inconsistent, heat- generating reactions that had spurred those claims. Their determination may finally pay off, as researchers in Japan have recently managed to generate heat more consistently from these reactions, and the U.S. Navy is now paying close attention to the field. In June, scientists at several Japanese research institutes published a paper in the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy in which they recorded excess heat after exposing metal nanoparticles to hydrogen gas. The results are the strongest in a long line of LENR studies from Japanese institutions like Mitsubishi Heavy Industries." See: https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuc...lear-reactions |
2019-03-30, 00:19 | Link #19 |
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DOE Funds 2022 First Demo for Factory Mass Producible Nuclear Power:
"The late 2020’s could see the start of a new age of factory mass produced nuclear power. The DOE is putting most of its first of its kind funding ($13 million out of $19 million) for advanced nuclear power research into the Westinghouse 25 MWe eVinci nuclear reactor. The funding will prepare Westinghouse’s 25-MWe eVinci micro-reactor for nuclear demonstration readiness by 2022. The eVinci will be mostly solid-state with very few moving parts. It will be using many heat pipes to transfer heat instead of water or steam. Eventually, these microreactor modules will be made in one month in a factory. They could be produced like airplane engines by the thousands. They will be walk-away safe and operate more efficiently and at lower-cost than existing nuclear reactors. They are targeting $2 per watt of electricity which means a cost of $20 million for a 10 MWe reactor that fits on truck. A 25 MWe nuclear reactor would cost $50 million. Forty such microreactors would be equal to a Gigawatt reactor and cost $2 billion. This is four times cheaper than current western nuclear reactors and as cheap as natural gas." See: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/0...ear-power.html |
2019-06-12, 22:53 | Link #20 |
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US report finds sky is the limit for geothermal energy beneath us:
"Advancing enhanced geothermal techniques alone could produce 45 gigawatts of electricity by 2050. Add in the more conventional plants, and you’re at 60 gigawatts—26 times more than current geothermal generation. And in a scenario where natural gas prices go up, making geothermal even more competitive, we could double that to 120 gigawatts. That would be fully 16 percent of the total projected 2050 generation in the US. Additionally, that electricity can be generated around the clock and can even be flexibly ramped up or down, making it an excellent pairing with intermittent forms of renewable energy like wind and solar. On the heating (and cooling) side, there are two main areas of opportunity. Traditional ground-source heat pumps circulate fluid through loops in the ground to provide cooling in the summer and heating in the winter, and they could be much more widely adopted with minimal effort. The report estimates that installations could increase 14 times over, to 28 million homes by 2050, covering 23 percent of national residential demand. Accounting for limitations in how quickly the market could realistically change brings the number down to 19 million homes—still a massive increase. There’s even more potential for district heating systems, where a single, large geothermal installation pipes heat to all the buildings in an area. There are only a handful of such systems operating in the US today (Boise, Idaho, has an example), but the report finds more than 17,000 locations where it would make sense, covering heating needs for 45 million homes." See: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019...-grid-by-2050/ |
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