An EMB (a technical description of a flywheel) stores energy through spinning a composite flywheel with an electric motor that’s built in, driving the rotating mass to speed making the system into a battery. Then use the electricity by using the motor as a generator that slows the flywheel down.  EMBs aren’t quite dead, the once widely admired Beacon Power flywheel builder that’s in bankruptcy has found a buyer that may put the intellectual property back to work and return a chunk of a federal loan to the taxpayers.

Mr. Peart’s idea is quite futuristic. Aside from the problems of either lifting the whole thing into orbit or building a manufacturing system in orbit, the concept does overcome the twin drags on rotating masses, the friction of air and bearings blocking gravity’s effect.  Peart is suggesting the flywheel spin at speeds in excess of 60,000 RPM. The flywheels would float (through the use of magnets) in a frictionless vacuum chamber, removing almost all friction and drag.  That would enable the storage of energy for years on end.

Peart's Orbital ElectroMechanicalBattery Layout. Click image for the largest view.

Peart’s satellite would collect energy through an incorporated solar array.  Once the energy is stored the system would seem conventional with other ideas – the energy can be transferred through the use of a microwave antenna and then converted back into electricity through a rectenna (receiving antenna), located down on Earth. The antenna could be repositioned so to allow energy transfer to multiple reactenna locations on Earth, from a single position in orbit.

Peart's Solar Energy Collector and Storage Satellite. Click image for the largest view.

The idea has some thought in it; the satellite would incorporate a system of easy access doors to allow the servicing or removal of worn batteries. The batteries would be oriented on a circular plate that rotates allowing the removal of a set of batteries in a series. The batteries would be mounted with alternating clockwise and counter-clockwise rotations to balance out the gyroscopic effects.  That way two in pairs would speed up twisting opposite to each other leaving the satellite undisturbed.

Peart's Orbital Power Station EMB Service Door. Click image for the largest view.

The proposal has ten series mounted vertically in a column, and six columns are mounted in each individual satellite making a total of 360 batteries mounted in each satellite. The satellite images shown here are small-scale examples, full power satellites would contain several thousand batteries. Each battery would have capacity ratings about 25kWh.

An orbital power station offers the cleanest renewable energy storage and production so far imagined.  Such power station satellites would provide energy on a constant basis, and could answer demand at peak power consumption times with the stored energy.  Peart also points out orbital power stations can also be used as a practical means to sell power services worldwide.

The problem is going to be the capital investment.  Lifting simply a very large solar array is going to challenge the economics.  Adding in batteries at current orbital lift prices doesn’t seem practical for now.

Yet the concept has great stimulating value.  The Republican primary race has one candidate that sees the future of mankind returning to the solar system, which is for now a government sized job and one best done by the free people of earth instead of despots.

Almost everyone it seems has forgotten the root of the information age is the American effort to put a man on the moon. Without the research and development during the 1960s searching for small, lightweight and energy efficient devices, primarily integrated circuits, the information age we now know would not exist as we know it.  Societies have myopic views of the past; it will always be a challenge to avoid a myopic view of the future.

Peart’s concept has value, a measure of thought that can solve problems, worthy of note and keeping saved for those in the future who can build off planet.  Peart’s idea is part of that vision thing that is so painfully lacking in American political and economic discourse.

It’s a pity that virtually all political energy is devoted to cutting up the proceeds of the past, dividing up the production of the present and promising the potential of the future – without investing in the ideas that make future filled with possibilities, challenges and opportunity.  We’re missing that vision thing.

Wireless Dynamic Car Charging Graphic from Stanford. Click image for the largest view.

The team follows research work from 2007 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology getting magnetic resonance to light a 60-watt bulb.  That experiment demonstrated that power could be transferred between two stationary coils about six feet apart, even when people and other obstacles are placed in between.

The MIT team researchers even created a spin-off company named WiTricity that is developing a stationary charging system capable of wirelessly transferring about 3 kW of electric power to a vehicle parked in a garage or on the street.

But Stanford has proposed a design published in the journal Applied Physics Letters that would transfer up to 10 kW of electrical energy to a coil 6.5 feet away with an efficiency of up to 97%.  One can imagine the groans in Massachusetts.

Both the new company WiTricity and the Stanford team are building high-efficiency wireless charging systems using magnetic resonance coupling that wirelessly transmit large electric currents between metal coils positioned a little less than or about 2 meters apart. The long-term goal of this type of research is to develop an “all-electric” highway that wirelessly charges the cars and trucks as they cruise down the road.

Magnetic resonance coupling transfers power with two copper coils tuned to resonate at the same natural frequency. The coils are placed a couple meters apart with one coil connected to an electric current that generates a magnetic field, which causes the second coil to resonate. This magnetic resonance results in the transfer of electric energy through the space between the first coil and the receiving coil.

The WiTricity design for power transfer efficiency depends on the relative sizes of the power source, capture devices, and on the distance between the devices.  Maximum efficiency of the WiTricity design is achieved when the devices are relatively close to one another, going past 95%.  WiTricity has secured partnerships with automobile manufacturer Toyota and electrical component manufacturer Delphi.

Across the country at Stanford, (Isn’t competition great?) Shanhui Fan, an associate professor of electrical engineering, and his colleagues wondered if the MIT system could be modified to transfer 10 kW of electric power over a distance of 6.5 feet enough to charge a car moving at highway speeds.

Working with computer models the team set out to determine the most efficient way to transmit 10 kilowatts of power to a real car.

Shanhui Fan explains the problem, “Asphalt in the road would probably have little effect, but metallic elements in the body of the car can drastically disturb electromagnetic fields. That’s why we did the APL (computer model) study – to figure out the optimum transfer scheme if large metal objects are present.”

The Stanford team created computer models of systems with metal plates added to the basic coil design.  Using mathematical simulations, postdoctoral scholars Xiaofang Yu and Sunil Sandhu found that a coil bent at a 90-degree angle and attached to a metallic plane can transfer 10 kW of electrical energy to an identical coil 6.5 feet away.

Fan and team members Xiaofang Yu, Sunil Sandhu, Sven Beiker, and Richard Sassoon recently filed a patent application for their wireless system.

Next up are plans to test it in the laboratory and eventually try it out in real driving conditions. The researchers also want to make sure that the system won’t harm, interfere with, or affect drivers, passengers or the dozens of microcomputers that control steering, navigation, air conditioning and other vehicle operations.

The team has started discussions with Michael Lepech, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, to study the optimal layout of roadbed transmitters and determine if rebar and other metals in the pavement will reduce efficiency.  Sven Beiker, executive director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS) and his group are involved to be sure that the remaining 3% is lost as heat and not as potentially harmful radiation.

Both the MIT firm WiTricity and the Stanford team are way out in front of the technology.  The SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) taskforce on wireless charging and positioning of electric vehicles isn’t yet working up an on-road dynamic charging specification, even though a wireless charging and positioning of electric vehicles standard is expected to come with a final draft later this year.

Before everyone gets excited these technologies have quite a way to go.  The level of efficiency now looks very good.  The concept seems feasible.  But these kinds of ideas are going to be road-building projects and consume large amounts of copper.   Then one wonders how to bill the user.  Dynamic charging is a grand idea, and looks like it will work, but we’re quite a way from rolling on the highway and driving unlimited distances.   But it sure is appealing idea for the future.

The team’s research appears in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano.  Lab results show the new oil additive could raise the efficiency of such transfer mediums by as much as 80 percent using an environmentally friendly base material.

The Rice Team's h-BN Comparative Results Graph. See the paper linked above for more details. Click image for the largest view.

While we may be interested in moving heat efficiently, the Rice team focused on electrical transformers.  Electrical transformers step voltage up or down and in doing so the wire resistance within causes heat to build up.  Currently most transformers are filled with fluids that cool and insulate the core and windings inside, as well as components that must remain separated from each other to keep voltage from leaking or shorting out.

The team has discovered that a very tiny amount of hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) particles, which are two-dimensional cousins to carbon-based graphene, suspended in standard transformer mineral oils are highly efficient at removing heat from a system.

Narayanan said, “We don’t need a large amount of h-BN.  We found that 0.1 weight percentage of h-BN in transformer oil enhances it by nearly 80 percent.”  This news will light up a lot of heat management folks worldwide.

Taha-Tijerina adds to the depth of the discovery’s value with, “And at 0.01 weight percentage, the enhancement was around 9 percent. Even with a very low amount of material, we can enhance the fluids without compromising the electrical insulating properties.”

The background focuses on Taha-Tijerina, who was employed by an electrical transformer manufacturer in Mexico before coming to Rice, explains others working on similar compounds are experimenting with particles of aluminum, copper oxide and titanium oxide, but none of the compounds has the combination of qualities exhibited by h-BN.

Narayanan explains the technical details of h-BN particles that are about 600 nanometers wide and up to five atomic layers thick, disperse well in oil and, unlike highly electrically conductive graphene, are highly resistant to electricity. With help from Pasquali the team determined that the important quality of the oil’s viscosity is minimally affected by the presence of the new h-BN nanoparticle fillers.

Professor Ajayan who is Rice’s Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science and of Chemistry said, “Our research shows that with new materials and innovative approaches, we can add enormous value to applications that exist today in industry. Thermal management is a big issue in industry, but the right choice of materials is important; for transformer cooling, one needs dispersants in oils that take heat away, yet remain electrically insulating. Moreover, the two-dimensional nature of the fillers keeps them stable in oils without settling down for long periods of time.”

The Rice press release winds up adding Guanhui Gao, a visiting scholar in Ajayan’s lab; senior Matthew Rohde; and graduate student Dmitri Tsentalovich as team members.

Obviously the team has worked on the project in view of the perspectives of the team members and the interests of the supportive funding.  But the huge improvement of heat transfer is going to affect a much wider range of interests than electricity alone.

Moving heat, or conducting it, is an engineering challenge of getting as much as possible from the source to the work.  The less that’s lost the better.  The Rice University team’s discovery of a particle adding so much efficiency will stimulate a lot more research into other fluids and solids.  The result should be less fuel to drive the same amount of work.

The innovation that earns the applause is connecting the aspects of graphene to the h-BN molecule and particles finding a new result.  It’s a clue for more discoveries born of close observation and creative thought.

The capstone of the class was when Dr. Mitchell Swartz, of JET Energy presented experimental results showing excess power in Palladium/Deuterium and Nickel/Hydrogen systems, with a particular focus on experiments he himself has conducted.

The news reported is Dr. Swartz and Prof. Hagelstein demonstrated cold fusion openly for the attending scientists and engineers.  Using the Jet Energy NANOR device they demonstrated a significant energy gain, greater than 10, much larger than the previous open demonstration back in 2003 with a 2.3 yield.  The demonstration was for the class, meaning no attempt was made to assuage skeptics.  Add the Jet Energy NANOR to the things to watch.

For the highly literate, Dr. Swartz is going to firm ground on the technical description of cold fusion or Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR), as least as far as his perception is concerned.  Swartz says, “The name should be LANR, for “lattice assisted nuclear reactions”.  That is a valid point concerning his technology.

Drs. Fleischmann and Pons actually described their work as “electrochemical experiments” that had produced more energy (“excess energy”) than could be accounted for by input energy and available chemical reactions.  Where “Cold Fusion” came from is due some research – if anyone cares.  Over the media explosion that bombed Fleischmann and Pons and the failures of others to replicate their work the Cold Fusion moniker has acquired an undeserved dubious reputation.

Then came LENR for low energy nuclear reactions.  The phrase and term work fine, but in reality now, with the nickel based work and the increasing improvement of the palladium work, the idea these are low energy is getting to be a vast understatement.

However the moniker battle shapes up, it hardly matters.  The research field’s events are definitely running temperatures lots cooler than any of the big money fusion projects and the energy outputs just keep on climbing.  Depending on the skill set of the experiment replicators, lattice based reactions are getting better and those with well-engineered experiments are showing good returns on the energy input.

It seems that after 5 (about 2 hour classes each day) days of Prof. Hagelstein sharing his breakthrough explanatory theory, the demonstration had the desired effect.  Perhaps the class will encourage the participants to continue their research and more improvement can come over time.

This week also has Defkalion back in the news.  The firm has a short video on YouTube of some testing taking place on one of their “bare” reactors.  This comes soon after the firm offered qualified testing opportunities to worthy scientists and industrial concerns.

The company commented on the firm’s website forum about the video saying, “As you can notice, this is a setup with one Hyperion “bare” reactor testing. The setup of the third party independent tests is with two identical reactors (one active, one not-active) working/tested in parallel, as described in our latest Press Release.”

At another posting the firm (translated) says, “. . . this video . . . is not suitable “tool” for the interpretation of phenomena or the calculation of the performance of reactors or for any other conclusion, and the duration of but also because of deliberately “scattered” content. Consider it as an honest view of some of the places where they work every day our people.”

Before you hit the comment link or email your humble writer, please consider this:

Forty years ago only a visionary could imagine fields free of weeds, only the crop growing.  Twenty years ago the technology was common across the developed world.

Roundup combined with genetically modified crops revolutionized food production.

By about ten years ago the extremists had decided that the genetically modified crops would poison or kill them and law was established where extremists held sway to restrict and eliminate the new crops use.

Over a generation has passed and not a single bit or any evidence, study or proof exists that roundup resistant crops hurt anyone.  But the human resistance has killed tens millions of people by starvation and millions more will die from the denial of technical potential, facts based in experience and human nature’s tendency to be fearful.

Let the visionaries run their courses as best they can and hope that one at least gets to the market with something great for all of us.  Then be on guard for the extremists who will try to take it away from you.

The news comes from technology research in efforts to contain the worst of fission reaction’s byproducts. Tina Nenoff at Sandia National Laboratories’ Surface and Interface Sciences Department and the collaborating team members have used metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) to capture and remove volatile radioactive gas from spent nuclear fuel to reduce radioactive waste.

Metal Oxide Framework from Sandia Labs. Click image for the largest view.

The Sandia team’s discovery could be applied to nuclear fuel reprocessing or to clean up nuclear reactor accidents.  Other countries like France, Russia and India are reprocessing spent fuel, and have in some cases been doing so for decades, exploiting a characteristic of nuclear energy that used fuel can be reprocessed to recover fissile materials and provide fresh fuel for nuclear power plants.

Sandia’s MOF process reduces the volume of high-level wastes, a key concern of the Sandia researchers.

Nenoff starts the explanation, “The goal is to find a methodology for highly selective separations that result in less waste being interred. This is one of the first attempts to use a MOF for iodine capture.”  Removing iodine, whose isotopes have a half-life of 16 million years, from spent fuel would cause a very different storage perspective.

The Sandia team studied known materials, including silver-loaded zeolite, a crystalline, porous mineral with regular pore openings, high surface area and high mechanical, thermal and chemical stability. Various zeolite frameworks can trap and remove iodine from a stream of spent nuclear fuel, but need silver added to work well.

Nenoff continues, “Silver attracts iodine to form silver iodide. The zeolite holds the silver in its pores and then reacts with iodine to trap silver iodide.”  But silver is expensive and poses environmental problems.  In response the team set out to engineer materials without silver that would work like zeolites but have higher capacity for the gas molecules. They explored why and how zeolite absorbs iodine, and then used the critical components discovered to find the best MOF, now named ZIF-8.  “We investigated the structural properties on how they work and translated that into new and improved materials,” Nenoff said.

MOFs are crystalline, porous materials made where a metal center is bound to organic molecules by a mild self-assembly chemical synthesis process. The choices of metal and organic compounds will result in a very specific final framework.

The Sandia team’s research is based on a study searching for the best elements of the zeolite Mordenite because of its pores, high surface area, stability and chemical absorption.  That information allowed the team to identify a MOF that can separate single iodine molecules from a stream of molecules. The MOF with the pore-trapped iodine gas inside can then be incorporated into glass waste for much safer long-term storage.

The Sandia effort is part of the Off-Gas Sigma Team, which began six years ago and is led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  The project studies waste-form capture of volatile gasses associated with nuclear fuel reprocessing. Other team members, Pacific Northwest, Argonne and Idaho National Laboratories, are studying other volatile gases such as krypton, tritium and carbon.

The MOF and iodine research has driven two feature articles in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Dorina Sava said, “The most important thing we did was introduce a new class of materials to nuclear waste remediation.”

The most relevant information in publishing is another recent paper in Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research showing a one-step process that incorporates MOFs with iodine in a low-temperature, glass waste form.

Nenoff says, “We have a volatile off-gas capture using a MOF and we have a durable waste form.” Nenoff and her colleagues are continuing their research into new and optimized MOFs for enhanced volatile gas separation and capture.

The Argonne National Lab’s collaborating Karena Chapman sums up with, “We’ve shown that MOFs have the capacity to capture and, more importantly, retain many times more iodine than current materials technologies.”

The national labs efforts are laudable, but the U.S. failure to pursue a program for recycling spent nuclear fuel has put the nation far behind other countries and represents a missed opportunity for investment, jobs, exports, profits and taxed earnings. The failure to enhance the nation’s energy security also fails to influence other nations to operate more safely and increases the risks of proliferating weapons instead of reprocessing fuel.

Perhaps with more views made possible with the Internet, the hysteria of the media elites and the political class pandering to the lowest level of public opinion shrinking, a little progress can be made – someday.

One of the cost of production problems that holds algae back as a major biomatter resource is an efficient cost-effective method of harvesting and removing the water from the algae for it to be processed.

Algae have the potential to be a very efficient biofuel producer.  The one cell plant produces oil that can be processed to create a useful biofuel.  Biofuels made from plant material are considered important alternatives to fossil fuels.  The carbohydrate portion can be used food or to make more fuel.

The SU team’s new technique builds on previous research in which microbubbles were used to improve the way algae is cultivated.  The early work used the microbubble technology to improve algae production methods, allowing producers to grow crops more rapidly and more densely and earned Zimmerman and the team the Moulton Medal, from the Institute of Chemical Engineers.  The research paper is published in Biotechnology and Bioengineering.

Professor Zimmerman outlines the story saying, “We thought we had solved the major barrier to biofuel companies processing algae to use as fuel when we used microbubbles to grow the algae more densely. It turned out, however, that algae biofuels still couldn’t be produced economically, because of the difficulty in harvesting and dewatering the algae. We had to develop a solution to this problem and once again, microbubbles provided a solution.”

Microbubble Algae Separation at the University of Sheffield. Click image for the largest view.

Microbubbles have been used for flotation before: water purification companies use the process to float out impurities, but it hasn’t been done in this context, partly because the previous methods have been very expensive.

The new system developed by Zimmerman´s team uses as little as one tenth of a percent of the energy to produce the microbubbles.  Additionally, the cost of installing the Sheffield microbubble system is predicted to be much less than existing flotation systems.

Zimmerman explains the technology saying, “What we’ve found is that we can separate the microalgae from the water or harvest it using microbubbles that are created by a fluidic oscillator. A fluidic oscillator switches flows rapidly from one outlet to another, using feedback to do so with no moving parts. It is like an opening and closing mechanical valve that results in pulsing flow. Our bubbles are made under laminar flow and we use practically no more energy than is required to make the interface of the bubble.”

As a result of the low energy input, the bubbles rise very slowly, which is crucial as it means the algae particles can attach themselves to the bubbles more easily. Two chemicals added to the liquid in the process, a flocculant and a coagulant to help the algae bond to the rising microbubbles.

“The idea is to create a surface on the algae particles that is hydrophobic so the microbubbles are attracted to it,” said Zimmerman. When the bubbles and the particles reach the surface, the flocculant and the coaggulant keep the algae in a fixed layer. The blanket of algae can then be skimmed off the surface with something such as a belt skimmer. “In the lab, we use a knife.”

Zimmerman explained that the process is much cheaper than attempting to make microbubbles through an industrial process known as dissolved air flotation, which generates bubbles that are too turbulent to harvest algae.

Next up for the technology is to develop a pilot plant to test the system at an industrial scale.  Professor Zimmerman is already working with Tata Steel at their site in Scunthorpe, where Tata Steel is recovering and using CO2 from their flue-gas stacks.  Zimmerman and Tata plan to continue the partnership to test the new system.

The SU team’s technology may have other soon to be used attributes.  Lakes that have a build-up of nutrients causing algal blooms to form called eutrophication, often attributed to agricultural fertilizers entering water bodies, need the algae harvested and removed instead of left to die and decompose.

The SU team is already in talks with Ken Shu, a scientific adviser to the Chinese government, to set up pilot-scale trials on remediating algal blooms in eutrophied lakes in China.

Zimmerman explains, “China has demographic drinking-water problems. They’re running out because the lakes that used to be used for drinking water are all eutrophied with algal blooms.”

It looks good in the lab.  A lot of ideas have came and went in trying to capture the algae cells in a low cost harvest.  Algae, naturally, are pretty good at keeping themselves separate with each basking in the sunlight. It’s a significant attribute that makes the very high productivity possible as well as makes the harvest problematic.

Lets hope the Brits have it nailed down now.

The new finding gives graphene’s potential a most surprising dimension – graphene can also be used for distilling alcohol by removing water.

Water evaporates through graphene sheets prepared by the team as quickly as if the membranes were not there at all.  The UM researchers have found that it is superpermeable with respect to water.  That opens the possibility to produce alcohol without the energy input for heating the water and alcohol mix to drive the alcohol out in the separation.  That would be a substantial energy input savings for ethanol production.

Dr. Nair with Graphene Sheet - Image from the University of Manchester

Graphene is one of the wonders of the science world, it’s the thinnest known material in the universe and the strongest ever measured. It conducts electricity and heat better than any other material. It is the stiffest one too and, at the same time, it is the most ductile.

The UN team studied membranes from a chemical derivative of graphene called graphene oxide. Graphene oxide is the same graphene sheet but it is randomly covered with other molecules such as hydroxyl groups OH-. The graphene oxide sheets are stacked on top of each other and form a laminate.

The researchers prepared such laminates that were hundreds of times thinner than a human hair but remained strong, flexible and are easy to handle.  Then when a metal container was sealed with such a film, even the most sensitive equipment was unable to detect air or any other gas, including helium, to leak through.

Graphene Sheet Water Filter Prep. Click image for more info, or see the Science link above for complete details.

When the researchers tried the same with ordinary water, they found with complete surprise that it evaporates without noticing the graphene seal. The water molecules diffused through the graphene-oxide membranes with such a great speed that the evaporation rate was the same independently whether the container was sealed or completely open.

Experiment leader Dr. Rahul Nair explains this way, “Graphene oxide sheets arrange in such a way that between them there is room for exactly one layer of water molecules. They arrange themselves in one-molecule thick sheets of ice, which slide along the graphene surface with practically no friction. If another atom or molecule tries the same trick, it finds that graphene capillaries either shrink in low humidity or get clogged with water molecules.”

Professor Geim follows up with, “Helium gas is hard to stop. It slowly leaks even through a millimeter-thick window glass but our ultra-thin films completely block it. At the same time, water evaporates through them unimpeded. Materials cannot behave any stranger. You cannot help wondering what else graphene has in store for us.”

Dr. Irina Grigorieva who also participated in the research points out the process advantage, “This unique property can be used in situations where one needs to remove water from a mixture or a container, while keeping in all the other ingredients.”  The idea has impressive dewatering potential.

Dr. Nair throws in the ‘proof’ positive with, “Just for a laugh, we sealed a bottle of vodka with our membranes and found that the distilled solution became stronger and stronger with time. Neither of us drinks vodka but it was great fun to do the experiment.”

The vodka experiment made it to the research paper.  Yet the team members are not offering visions of use in distilleries in particular, or offer any immediate ideas for applications.  But we can just be certain serious attention is being given to the paper by ethanol researchers.

The basic research the UM team is doing does prompt a comment, albeit quite humble from Professor Geim, “The properties are so unusual that it is hard to imagine that they cannot find some use in the design of filtration, separation or barrier membranes and for selective removal of water.”

The graphene filters are not on the market or anticipated any time soon.  The production cost of graphene for such a use isn’t even suggested or known but the research pathway to find out is now here.  But the lifetime of this the new “filter” if such a term will do for now, looks to be very long indeed.  And cutting the cost of heating the whole of the water and alcohol mix to get the water out is mostly removed, an awful lot of alcohol production that isn’t economic now, would be.

It’s very significant good news for the alterative renewable fuel folks.  There’s lots more here than just ethanol potential, getting the water out cheaply is going to have lots of applications.

This contrasts with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) standing record of never approving a new reactor design.  The December 2011 “approval” by the NRC of the Westinghouse AP1000 is not a new reactor at all; rather it’s a next generation design of existing technology.

Clearly U.S. Federal government is working at cross-purposes.  A fine, expensive and consumer and industrial damaging mess is sure to ensue.

The DOE has new cost-sharing arrangements with private industry to support design and licensing activities.  With considerable astonishment, taxpayers are going to be funding one agency to pay the fees of another.  Make that Astounded.

Small Modular Reactor Samples. Click image for the largest view.

The good news, aside from the circumstances is the DOE intends ultimately to fund up to two designs for small modular reactors (SMR) through a cost-shared partnership, which will support first-of-a-kind engineering, design certification and licensing.  The draft Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) is now out to solicit input from the industry for preparing a full FOA that’s aiming at a reactor deployment date about 2022.

The DOE’s FOA seeks applications for two grants, estimated to total $452 million over five years. The funding anticipates paying up to half the cost of developing and deploying perhaps two small modular reactor designs.

The tooth gnashing fact is that’s not going to be enough money and it leaves all but the chosen one or two designs at a major disadvantage.  This after the Solyndra debacle and others has thoughtful observers realizing that bureaucrats are picking the winners before the competition starts.  That is a terrible policy; a huge waste of resources and the best design is sure to be left out when historic experience is considered.  It will be a lobbyist’s game any moment now.

At issue are small, compact reactors of around 300 MWe and lower in capacity, a third or less of the size of the typical commercial nuclear power plant built so far.  These kinds of plants could potentially offer a range of features in terms of safety, construction and siting as well as potential economic benefits.  But if only one or two are chosen the circumstances for users will be limited or force excess costs to make a mandated choice instead of an optimal one for the situation.

At this size reactors are modular or have a ‘plug and play’ nature, which means they could be made in factories and transported to generation sites.  That manufacturing approach over a custom build method offers economies of scale reducing both capital costs and construction times. The small size could make them suitable for small electric grids and markets that cannot support large reactors costs, production or regulatory expense.

Bravely, US Energy Secretary Steven Chu described the funding as a “significant step” in designing, manufacturing, and exporting small modular reactors.  It takes courage to come out with what is obviously a poorly thought out policy.  Yet, the bravery may be driven by the Congress abandoning its responsibility to organize the law in a fashion that resembles common sense.

Chu is bright enough and has enough outside the beltway experience to understand and say, “America’s choice is clear – we can either develop the next generation of clean energy technologies, which will help create thousands of new jobs and export opportunities here in America, or we can wait for other countries to take the lead.”

Meanwhile – the NRC remains embroiled in a managerial mess.  The commissioners and the Chairman are still at odds, and the oversight of the media has disappeared, the Congress along with it. There is no reasonable expectation anything of consequence is going to happen any time soon, and it’s an election year as well.

There is a lot at stake if such a plan proceeds.  Westinghouse is developing its own 200 MWe SMR, and the information has escaped that Westinghouse’s approved AP1000 nuclear reactor design was supported through a cost-shared agreement with DOE.  This information leads one to suspect that Westinghouse may be looking for a quick taxpayer funded catch up.

There is a long list of technologies with potential. (See Brian Wang’s page at NextBigFuture.)

NuScale Power Inc’s 45 MWe NuScale reactor and Babcock & Wilcox’s 160 MWe mPower should both be eligible, too. The NRC is currently involved in pre-application activities on both designs in anticipation of a design certification application for the NuScale reactor in the first months of 2012, followed by one for the mPower design towards the end of 2013.  These one should think, are the leaders.

The list of good ideas out there is grand, covering three major technologies.  The light water reactors list includes Babcock & Wilcox, NuScale Power Inc., Westinghouse and Holtec’s Inherently Safe Modular Underground Reactor at 140 MWe.

The high temperature gas-cooled reactors are coming from AREVA’s Antares, General Atomics model called Gas Turbine Modular Helium Reactor and Pebble Bed Modular Reactor Ltd.’s reactor named conveniently, the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor.

The liquid metal cooled and fast reactor list is equally impressive.  Here are GE Hitachi’s Nuclear Power Reactor Innovative Small Module, Hyperion Power Generation’s Hyperion Power Module and Toshiba’s – Toshiba 4S for Super Small, Safe and Simple.

That’s 10, add in a couple of thorium fueled ones and that would be a dozen.  The Feds expect to give one or two 40% of a billion dollars head start.  How is that going to work out for the country?

Wouldn’t it be better to just completely revamp the NRC?

Admittedly the DOE must be under stress from the machinations over at the NRC.  And from a government mind, that plan might seem great.  For the rest of us it looks like a waste from the start and a market distortion for decades, perhaps centuries to come.

Ugh.

In today’s circumstances the main player is big temperature differentials where steam can be made to drive a Rankine thermodynamic cycle – commonly thought of as a turbine connected to a generator.  There are other ways using such circulation fluids like ammonia and freon types that will work as well.  These are often binary systems where two steps are used to get to flowing and working heat.

All the Rankine based ideas rely on a fluid heating up, expanding and vaporizing to drive a turbine or Stirling engine that makes mechanical motion to generate electricity. The vapor is then cooled, condensing it back into a fluid that is recycled back through to repeat the process.

Ian Marnoch Shows His MTP Engine. Click image for more info.

Marnoch’s heat engine works using the principle a little differently. There is no phase change in the vaporization of the working fluids.  Marnoch’s system relies on dry pre-pressurized air that expands as it’s heated and contracts as it’s cooled.  That change in volume and pressure causes pistons to move that can generate electricity.

Marnoch isn’t the first to grasp this, but Marnoch has configured his machine such to get an edge over other technologies. He says his engine configuration can process heat much faster and at bigger volumes than Rankine machines.

“It can process about three times as much heat by value as an Organic Rankine machine of the same size,” says Marnoch, adding that his heat engine can be designed to be much smaller and, therefore, less expensive.  All good.

But the new advantage is it can tap into lower temperatures that aren’t viable with other technologies.  This technology doesn’t need the boiling ammonia up to boiling water and beyond levels of temperatures.

Here’s the key – all Marnoch’ cycle needs is the right temperature differential, the spread between the heat source and the heat sink.  That could be cool air, the water in well, a deep mine shaft or the temperature at the bottom of an old oil or natural gas well.

Lots of folks are going to be realizing the opportunities are huge in the natural environment.

The news is all Marnoch needs is a 20º C (38º F) or higher temperature spread and there’s potential to generate electricity. The system becomes more economical the wider the gap.  That’s a lot of territory and the geothermal value can be heat or a heat sink.

It’s quite an idea for mechanical energy from low temperature heat spreads.

Marnoch and a team of PhD students and professors at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT) have been working to perfect his patented heat engine.  Funding from the Canadian and Ontario governments have supported development of the machine for the past five years with early seed money from The Ontario Power Authority and Ontario Centres of Excellence.  The latest prototype of the machine is at UOIT’s new Clean Energy Research Laboratory.

Marnoch is understandably eager to get the machine out in the field and tested in a real-world situation. Companies are lining up.  Canada’s St. Marys Cement is exploring using the Marnoch engine to generate electricity from the waste heat of its Bowmanville cement plant.  Martin Vroegh, environmental manager at St Marys said, “It is in very early discussions but we are very enthusiastic about the potential and what this can mean for industries with large volumes of low-grade waste heat.”

Marnoch knows the current situation saying, “We just need to get out there and prove it works.”

With essentially any temp range where better than 20º C or 38º F can be had on the cheap money can be made or savings held or costs can be recovered.  Some folks are going to sit up and notice and Marnoch’s machine will get market legs.  Next up after field demonstrations is going to be working to more models and mass market pricing.

Go Marnoch!

Back at the end of November PDGT offered news that a series of third party tests on Hyperion products were scheduled to be performed within the first months of 2012.  That test proceeding is being handled privately and was to take place after a certification of some kind.

The Defkalion Hyperion Multieactor Diagram

The new announcement is a major confidence builder as the firm is offering qualified engineers from institutions and industry a first look with their own instrumentation. Obviously at this time the offer isn’t to ship units out of their control, rather the offer is to provide the first look and the opportunity to confirm the claims and identify the applicability and estimate the savings and energy availability.  It is a shrewd move and there very likely will be takers.

The objectives at this early stage are simple.  Determine the excess heat of reactor discharge without a cooling apparatus to determine a total energy consumed to energy production ratio.  Also on the list is a radioactivity measurement and operational stability handled by the Hyperion control system.

The press release offers extensive details on the conditions PDGT hopes to hold through negotiations with test offers. In fact the conditions describe the firm’s resources and a kind of standard such that all tests will have similarity in protocol and the results can be relevant to others.  That’s an advantage to everyone at this stage.

Moreover, the firm is making clear they have minimum standards of test conduct.  At this stage LENR is a controversial technology. The base the level of doubt is the technology is not even credible.  The caution involved is not just protective of the firm’s proprietary technology, the caution also should firewall out the time and resource wasting detractors.

This stage is a very impressive boost for both PDGT and the LENR community.  While Mr. Rossi is at least greatly annoyed, and justifiably incensed, the PDGT effort may well boost his own efforts to a more accepted level faster.

The puff part is the Hyperion’s new very high discharge temperature, capable of exceeding 650º C.  That’s enough to drive steam turbines and getting close to dry steam.

At those discharge temperatures PDGT is suggesting the third party test can expect at least a 1:20 ratio of consumed energy to produced energy. Its also way past what might be installed in homes. PDGT seems to looking at heat production and more industrial applications.

After the press release is a comment section that includes some impressive persons.  Jed Rothwell who runs the respected LENR-CANR.org was there to straighten up some visitors’ questions.  By early this morning the comments were getting quite sophisticated and precise in their assessment for the PDGT test offer.  The comments are a worthwhile read on their own.

LENR has got legs under it now.  Things are sure to move faster and news should be much more important and worthy of attention to a much wider audience.

A Hat Tip to NextBigFuture for seeing the news first and getting the links up fast!