Archive for the ‘Scientific Research’ Category

Nuclear Townhall
January 20, 2011

France has taken the idea of “moving industry offshore” and given it a new twist – plant small nuclear reactors in the seabed and pump the electricity back on land. Called “Flexblue,” the underwater system could provide a large portion of the world’s energy.
 
“The cylinder with the power plant inside would be lowered to the seabed at a depth of 60 meters (196 feet) to 100 meters, at a site between five and 15 kilometers from the coast,” Patrick Boissier, CEO of the French construction company, DCNS, tells Platts. “Undersea cables would bring the electricity to customers on shore.”  Boissier notes that three-quarters of the world’s population lives within 80 km of the sea.
 
DCNS, which does construction for the French Navy, will join Areva, EDF and the CEA research and development organization in exploring the idea, according to an announcement made in Paris yesterday. “The technical, economic and market feasibility study will be conducted over the next two years by 100-150 people from DCNS and the nuclear organizations, after which a decision could be made to build a prototype,” says Platts. “Boissier said a submerged power plant, unlike a floating one, would not be vulnerable to earthquakes, tsunamis, or floods, and would be far less vulnerable to voluntary attack.”  It would also have an unlimited source of coolant and would create a minimal environmental footprint. Areva already builds 100-MW small reactors for French submarines and aircraft carriers and said it would be fairly easy to adapt Flexblue from this prototype.
 
The French project should serve as a warning to American political officials, who also have big dreams about small reactors but are reluctant to streamline regulatory procedures that now make such initiatives a decade-long ordeal. The French are not the only ones who are going to be building small reactors. The rest of the world knows the technology too.

Read more about it at Platt’s

Nuclear Townhall
January 19, 2011

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is what stands in the way of most efforts at conserving energy – the principle that a good portion of the energy in any conversion is lost as waste heat.



Now a team of scientists at Northwestern University claim they can recapture at least some of this heat and convert it to electricity. In a paper published this week in Nature Chemistry, the scientists claimed that by placing nanocrystals of rock salt into lead telluride, they were able to create a material that can harness electricity from heat-generating items such as vehicle exhaust systems, industrial processes and equipment and sun light more efficiently than in the past.


“It has been known for 100 years that semiconductors have this property that can harness electricity,” said Mercouri Kanatzidis, Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry in The Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, in a press release from the university. “To make this an efficient process, all you need is the right material, and we have found a recipe or system to make this material.”  Kanatzidis said the material exhibits a high “thermoelectric figure of merit” that is expected to enable 14 percent of heat waste to electricity.


“We can put this material inside of an inexpensive device with a few electrical wires and attach it to something like a light bulb,” said Vinayak Dravid, a professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, who also worked on the project. “The device can make the light bulb more efficient by taking the heat it generates and converting part of the heat, 10 to 15 percent, into a more useful energy like electricity.”
 


Previous experiments had found that dispersing rock salt in lead telluride increased energy efficiency but led to the scattering of electrons. The current effort designed nanostructures that significantly decreased this scattering.



Whether the system will have any practical application on a broad scale remains to be determined. Telluride is usually found in conjunction with gold and is as rare as platinum. Along with selenium, it is the rarest heavy element in the earth’s crust, believed to have volatilized in large quantities by combining with hydrogen during the early period of the earth’s formation. Large quantities of it are already used in photovoltaic panels, which is one of the things that makes solar electricity so expensive.

Read more about it the Northwestern University News Center