Jul
31
A Look At the Road of Nuclear Power
July 31, 2008 | 5 Comments
The U.S. Department of Energy through a competitive process announced that it has selected teams led by Idaho National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory to advance the technology of nuclear fuel called “Deep-Burn.” This revolutionary technology in which plutonium and higher transuranics recycled from spent nuclear fuel are destroyed while generating energy not only advances [...]
Jul
30
A New Method to Extract Hydrogen Everywhere
July 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment
I don’t spend much time on hydrogen production methods, as they are so far stunningly expensive even though some new ones are very efficient. One thing is certain; humanity will need free hydrogen to make good use of the planet’s resources and work responsibly with the carbon cycle. Another point made to me about hydrogen [...]
Jul
29
A Compressed Air Energy Storage Reality Check
July 29, 2008 | 1 Comment
A guest author going by Libelle posted a piece titled “Compressed Air Energy Storage – How Viable Is It?” Sunday at TheOilDrum, Canada. It’s a top-flight review of the physics and explains the thermodynamics in a quaint, easy to grasp way.
Libelle suggests that raising the elevation of water might be more effective. From here on [...]
Jul
28
Innovating the Organic LED to High Output
July 28, 2008 | 1 Comment
Stephen Forrest at Michigan University and Yuri Sun at Princeton have their paper describing their new method of building organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) available in Nature Photonics. Like the semiconductor light emitting diodes (SLEDs) from Purdue’s researchers we looked at last week these scientists are driving to a highly efficient LED based [...]
Jul
26
Too Good To Ignore – or $60 Trillion Is Getting Away
July 26, 2008 | 2 Comments
OK, it’s Saturday and I’m going to throw something extra out at you. It’s a (gasp) politician or more accurately a college professor taking a run at the U.S. Congress from Maine. John Frary wrote the following piece for the Village Soup a kind of “Beyond print and online news for community based discourse, debate [...]
Jul
25
A Way to An Affordable LED Lamp
July 25, 2008 | 2 Comments
At this moment LEDs are far more expensive than the compact florescent lamp. The efficiency is similar, but the LED should be much more compact and able to fill many more specialized roles. So when Purdue’s Timothy D. Sands, Professor of Materials Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering has a paper appearing in the journal [...]
Jul
24
The Big Six Reasons For Energy and Fuel Changes
July 24, 2008 | 3 Comments
There are reasons behind the motives for new energy and fuel methods to keep the world economy growing and preserve our way of life while making it possible for everyone else to improve their lives too. It’s oft-said in assorted ways that we’ll need all the energy from every source, every joule, every molecule. As [...]
Jul
23
Is It News or Propaganda
July 23, 2008 | 2 Comments
Now that everyone with any sense is noticing, the plans and policy measures, suggestions, speeches and letters are coming out. Are they news? Are they propaganda? Food for wonks? Worthwhile or a waste of time? Some of each in varying degrees in every case. Some eerily remind of old black and white films of speeches [...]
Jul
22
The Battery Reality Check
July 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Almost everyone coming here has a firm idea that battery technology is a critical part of the changes we need to see for a healthy economy. There is a lot going on in the research and development field. We’re going to look into one in a moment, but first lets have a reality check on [...]
Jul
21
The Energy Problem Is An Abundance Of Politics
July 21, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Last week saw a stream of disgusting, alarming, encouraging and worrisome headlines about activities that have nothing to do with getting supplies up, demand, down, alternatives working or helping out the economy in any significant way in the political arena.
We know who the enemy is – and it’s politics.
The short list:
Al Gore assumes and many [...]
