Something earth-changing is afoot among civil
society -- a significant social movement is eluding the radar of mainstream
culture.
I have given nearly one thousand talks
about the environment in the past fifteen years, and after every speech a
smaller crowd gathered to talk, ask questions, and exchange business cards.
The people offering their cards were working on the most salient issues of
our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger,
conservation, human rights, and more. They were from the nonprofit and
nongovernmental world, also known as civil society. They looked after rivers
and bays, educated consumers about sustainable agriculture, retrofitted
houses with solar panels, lobbied state legislatures about pollution, fought
against corporate-weighted trade policies, worked to green inner cities, or
taught children about the environment. Quite simply, they were trying to
safeguard nature and ensure justice.
After being on the road for a week or
two, I would return with a couple hundred cards stuffed into various
pockets. I would lay them out on the table in my kitchen, read the names,
look at the logos, envisage the missions, and marvel at what groups do on
behalf of others. Later, I would put them into drawers or paper bags,
keepsakes of the journey. I couldn't throw them away.
Over the years the cards mounted into the
thousands, and whenever I glanced at the bags in my closet, I kept coming
back to one question: did anyone know how many groups there were? At first,
this was a matter of curiosity, but it slowly grew into a hunch that
something larger was afoot, a significant social movement that was eluding
the radar of mainstream culture.
I began to count. I looked at government
records for different countries and, using various methods to approximate
the number of environmental and social justice groups from tax census data,
I initially estimated that there were thirty thousand environmental
organizations strung around the globe; when I added social justice and
indigenous organizations, the number exceeded one hundred thousand. I then
researched past social movements to see if there were any equal in scale and
scope, but I couldn't find anything.
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The more I probed, the more I unearthed,
and the numbers continued to climb. In trying to pick up a stone, I found
the exposed tip of a geological formation. I discovered lists, indexes, and
small databases specific to certain sectors or geographic areas, but no set
of data came close to describing the movement's breadth. Extrapolating from
the records being accessed, I realized that the initial estimate of a
hundred thousand organizations was off by at least a factor of ten. I now
believe there are over one million organizations working toward ecological
sustainability and social justice. Maybe two.
By conventional definition, this is not a
movement. Movements have leaders and ideologies. You join movements,
study tracts, and identify yourself with a group. You read the biography of
the founder(s) or listen to them perorate on tape or in person. Movements
have followers, but this movement doesn't work that way. It is dispersed,
inchoate, and fiercely independent. There is no manifesto or doctrine, no
authority to check with.
I sought a name for it, but there isn't
one.
Historically, social movements have
arisen primarily because of injustice, inequalities, and corruption. Those
woes remain legion, but a new condition exists that has no precedent: the
planet has a life-threatening disease that is marked by massive ecological
degradation and rapid climate change. It crossed my mind that perhaps I was
seeing something organic, if not biologic. Rather than a movement in the
conventional sense, is it a collective response to threat? Is it splintered
for reasons that are innate to its purpose? Or is it simply disorganized?
More questions followed. How does it function? How fast is it growing? How
is it connected? Why is it largely ignored?
After spending years researching this
phenomenon, including creating with my colleagues a global database of these
organizations, I have come to these conclusions: this is the largest social
movement in all of history, no one knows its scope, and how it functions is
more mysterious than what meets the eye.
What does meet the eye is compelling:
tens of millions of ordinary and not-so-ordinary people willing to confront
despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of
grace, justice, and beauty to this world.
Clayton Thomas-Muller speaks to a
community gathering of the Cree nation about waste sites on their native
land in Northern Alberta, toxic lakes so big you can see them from outer
space. Shi Lihong, founder of Wild China Films, makes documentaries with her
husband on migrants displaced by construction of large dams. Rosalina Tuyuc
Velásquez, a member of the Maya-Kaqchikel people, fights for full
accountability for tens of thousands of people killed by death squads in
Guatemala. Rodrigo Baggio retrieves discarded computers from New York,
London, and Toronto and installs them in the favelas of Brazil, where
he and his staff teach computer skills to poor children. Biologist Janine
Benyus speaks to twelve hundred executives at a business forum in Queensland
about biologically inspired industrial development. Paul Sykes, a volunteer
for the National Audubon Society, completes his fifty-second Christmas Bird
Count in Little Creek, Virginia, joining fifty thousand other people who
tally 70 million birds on one day. Sumita Dasgupta leads students,
engineers, journalists, farmers, and Adivasis (tribal people) on a ten-day
trek through Gujarat exploring the rebirth of ancient rainwater harvesting
and catchment systems that bring life back to drought-prone areas of India.
Silas Kpanan'Ayoung Siakor, who exposed links between the genocidal policies
of former president Charles Taylor and illegal logging in Liberia, now
creates certified, sustainable timber policies.
These eight, who may never meet and know
one another, are part of a coalescence comprising hundreds of thousands of
organizations with no center, codified beliefs, or charismatic leader. The
movement grows and spreads in every city and country. Virtually every tribe,
culture, language, and religion is part of it, from Mongolians to Uzbeks to
Tamils. It is comprised of families in India, students in Australia, farmers
in France, the landless in Brazil, the bananeras of Honduras, the "poors"
of Durban, villagers in Irian Jaya, indigenous tribes of Bolivia, and
housewives in Japan. Its leaders are farmers, zoologists, shoemakers, and
poets.
The movement can't be divided because it
is atomized -- small pieces loosely joined. It forms, gathers, and
dissipates quickly. Many inside and out dismiss it as powerless, but it has
been known to bring down governments, companies, and leaders through
witnessing, informing, and massing.
The movement has three basic roots: the
environmental and social justice movements, and indigenous cultures'
resistance to globalization -- all of which are intertwining. It arises
spontaneously from different economic sectors, cultures, regions, and
cohorts, resulting in a global, classless, diverse, and embedded movement,
spreading worldwide without exception. In a world grown too complex for
constrictive ideologies, the very word movement may be too small, for it is
the largest coming together of citizens in history.
There are research institutes, community
development agencies, village- and citizen-based organizations,
corporations, networks, faith-based groups, trusts, and foundations. They
defend against corrupt politics and climate change, corporate predation and
the death of the oceans, governmental indifference and pandemic poverty,
industrial forestry and farming, depletion of soil and water.
Describing the breadth of the movement is
like trying to hold the ocean in your hand. It is that large. When a part
rises above the waterline, the iceberg beneath usually remains unseen. When
Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize, the wire service stories didn't
mention the network of six thousand different women's groups in Africa
planting trees. When we hear about a chemical spill in a river, it is never
mentioned that more than four thousand organizations in North America have
adopted a river, creek, or stream. We read that organic agriculture is the
fastest-growing sector of farming in America, Japan, Mexico, and Europe, but
no connection is made to the more than three thousand organizations that
educate farmers, customers, and legislators about sustainable agriculture.
This is the first time in history that a
large social movement is not bound together by an "ism." What binds it
together is ideas, not ideologies. This unnamed movement's big contribution
is the absence of one big idea; in its stead it offers thousands of
practical and useful ideas. In place of isms are processes, concerns, and
compassion. The movement demonstrates a pliable, resonant, and generous side
of humanity.
And it is impossible to pin down.
Generalities are largely inaccurate. It is nonviolent, and grassroots; it
has no bombs, armies, or helicopters. A charismatic male vertebrate is not
in charge. The movement does not agree on everything nor will it ever,
because that would be an ideology. But it shares a basic set of fundamental
understandings about the Earth, how it functions, and the necessity of
fairness and equity for all people partaking of the planet's life-giving
systems.
The promise of this unnamed movement is
to offer solutions to what appear to be insoluble dilemmas: poverty, global
climate change, terrorism, ecological degradation, polarization of income,
loss of culture. It is not burdened with a syndrome of trying to save the
world; it is trying to remake the world.
There is fierceness here. There is no
other explanation for the raw courage and heart seen over and again in the
people who march, speak, create, resist, and build. It is the fierceness of
what it means to know we are human and want to survive.
This movement is relentless and unafraid.
It cannot be mollified, pacified, or suppressed. There can be no Berlin Wall
moment, no treaty-signing, no morning to awaken when the superpowers agree
to stand down. The movement will continue to take myriad forms. It will not
rest. There will be no Marx, Alexander, or Kennedy. No book can explain it,
no person can represent it, no words can encompass it, because the movement
is the breathing, sentient testament of the living world.
And I believe it will prevail. I don't
mean defeat, conquer, or cause harm to someone else. And I don't tender the
claim in an oracular sense. I mean the thinking that informs the movement's
goal -- to create a just society conducive to life on Earth -- will reign.
It will soon suffuse and permeate most institutions. But before then, it
will change a sufficient number of people so as to begin the reversal of
centuries of frenzied self-destruction.
Inspiration is not garnered from litanies
of what is flawed; it resides in humanity's willingness to restore, redress,
reform, recover, reimagine, and reconsider. Healing the wounds of the Earth
and its people does not require saintliness or a political party. It is not
a liberal or conservative activity. It is a sacred act.
Paul Hawken is an
entrepreneur and social activist living in California. His article in this
issue is adapted from
Blessed Unrest,
to be published by Viking Press and used by permission.
MONTEREY,
California (AFP) - A scientist who mapped his genome and the genetic
diversity of the oceans said Thursday he is creating a life form that feeds
on climate-ruining carbon dioxide to produce fuel.
Geneticist Craig Venter disclosed his potentially world-changing
"fourth-generation fuel" project at an elite Technology, Entertainment and
Design conference in Monterey, California.
"We have modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry and
becoming a major source of energy," Venter told an audience that included
global warming fighter
Al Gore and Google
co-founder Larry Page.
"We think we will have fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months, with CO2
as the fuel stock."
Simple organisms can be genetically re-engineered to produce vaccines or
octane-based fuels as waste, according to Venter.
Biofuel alternatives to oil are third-generation. The next step is life
forms that feed on CO2 and give off fuel such as methane gas as waste,
according to Venter.
"We have 20 million genes which I call the design components of the future,"
Venter said. "We are limited here only by our imagination."
His team is using synthetic chromosomes to modify organisms that already
exist, not making new life, he said. Organisms already exist that produce
octane, but not in amounts needed to be a fuel supply.
"If they could produce things on the scale we need, this would be a methane
planet," Venter said. "The scale is what is critical; which is why we need
to genetically design them."
The genetics of octane-producing organisms can be tinkered with to increase
the amount of CO2 they eat and octane they excrete, according to Venter.
The limiting part of the equation isn't designing an organism, it's the
difficulty of extracting high concentrations of CO2 from the air to feed the
organisms, the scientist said in answer to a question from Page.
Scientists put "suicide genes" into their living creations so that if they
escape the lab, they can be triggered to kill themselves.
Venter said he is also working on organisms that make vaccines for the flu
and other illnesses.
"We will see an exponential change in the pace of the sophistication of
organisms and what they can do," Venter said.
"We are a ways away from designing people. Our goal is just to make sure
they survive long enough to do that."
Physicist Claims First Real
Demonstration of Cold Fusion
by Lisa Zyga
On May 22, researchers at Osaka University
presented the first demonstration of cold fusion since an unsuccessful
attempt in 1989 that has clouded the field to this day.
To many
people, cold fusion sounds too good to be true. The idea is that, by
creating nuclear fusion at room temperature, researchers can generate a
nearly unlimited source of power that uses water as fuel and produces
almost zero waste. Essentially, cold fusion would make oil obsolete.
However, many experts debate whether money should be spent on cold fusion
research or applied to more realistic alternative energy solutions. For
decades, researchers around the world have been simply trying to show that
cold fusion is indeed possible, but they´ve yet to take that important
first step.
Now, esteemed Physics Professor Yoshiaki Arata of Osaka University in
Japan claims to have made the first successful demonstration of cold
fusion. Last Thursday, May 22, Arata and his colleague Yue-Chang Zhang of
Shianghai Jiotong University presented the cold fusion demonstration to 60
onlookers, including other physicists, as well as reporters from six major
newspapers and two TV studios. If Arata and Zhang´s demonstration is real,
it could lead to a future of new, clean, and cheap energy generation.
In their experiment, the physicists forced deuterium gas into a cell
containing a mixture of palladium and zirconium oxide, which absorbed the
deuterium to produce a dense "pynco" deuterium. In this dense state, the
deuterium nuclei from different atoms were so close together that they
fused to produce helium nuclei.
Evidence for the occurrence of this fusion came from measuring the
temperature inside the cell. When Arata first injected the deuterium gas,
the temperature rose to about 70° C (158° F), which Arata explained was
due to nuclear and chemical reactions. When he turned the gas off, the
temperature inside the cell remained warmer than the cell wall for 50
hours, which Arata said was an effect of nuclear fusion.
While
Arata´s demonstration looked promising to his audience, the real test is
still to come: duplication. Many scientists and others are now recalling
the infamous 1989 demonstration by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons,
who claimed to produce controlled nuclear fusion in a glass jar at room
temperature. However, no one - including Fleischmann and Pons - could
duplicate the experiment, leading many people to consider cold fusion a
pseudoscience to this day.
But one
witness at the recent demonstration, physicist Akito Takahashi of Osaka
University, thought that the experiment should be able to be repeated.
"Arata and
Zhang demonstrated very successfully the generation of continuous excess
energy [heat] from ZrO2-nano-Pd sample powders under D2 gas charging and
generation of helium-4," Takahashi told New Energy Times. "The
demonstrated live data looked just like data they reported in their
published papers [J. High Temp. Soc. Jpn, Feb. and March issues,
2008]. This demonstration showed that the method is highly reproducible."
In addition,
researchers will have to repeat the experiment with larger amounts of the
palladium and zirconium oxide mixture in order to generate larger
quantities of energy.
Silicon Valley is experimenting with bacteria that have been genetically
altered to provide 'renewable petroleum'
Some diesel fuel produced by genetically modified bugs
Chris Ayres
“Ten years ago I could never have
imagined I’d be doing this,” says Greg Pal, 33, a former software executive,
as he squints into the late afternoon Californian sun. “I mean, this is
essentially agriculture, right? But the people I talk to – especially the
ones coming out of business school – this is the one hot area everyone wants
to get into.”
He means bugs. To be more precise: the genetic alteration of
bugs – very, very small ones – so that when they feed on agricultural waste
such as woodchips or wheat straw, they do something extraordinary. They
excrete crude oil.
Unbelievably, this is not science fiction. Mr Pal holds up a
small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the
tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk
it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on
what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, “it’s a brave new
world”.
Mr Pal is a senior director of LS9, one of several companies
in or near Silicon Valley that have spurned traditional high-tech activities
such as software and networking and embarked instead on an extraordinary
race to make $140-a-barrel oil (£70) from Saudi Arabia obsolete. “All of us
here – everyone in this company and in this industry, are aware of the
urgency,” Mr Pal says.
What is most
remarkable about what they are doing is that instead of trying to
reengineer the global economy – as is required, for example, for the use
of hydrogen fuel – they are trying to make a product that is
interchangeable with oil. The company claims that this “Oil 2.0” will
not only be renewable but also carbon negative – meaning that the carbon
it emits will be less than that sucked from the atmosphere by the raw
materials from which it is made.
LS9 has already convinced one oil industry veteran of its
plan: Bob Walsh, 50, who now serves as the firm’s president after a 26-year
career at Shell, most recently running European supply operations in London.
“How many times in your life do you get the opportunity to grow a
multi-billion-dollar company?” he asks. It is a bold statement from a man
who works in a glorified cubicle in a San Francisco industrial estate for a
company that describes itself as being “prerevenue”.
Inside LS9’s cluttered laboratory – funded by $20 million of
start-up capital from investors including Vinod Khosla, the Indian-American
entrepreneur who co-founded Sun Micro-systems – Mr Pal explains that LS9’s
bugs are single-cell organisms, each a fraction of a billionth the size of
an ant. They start out as industrial yeast or nonpathogenic strains of E.
coli, but LS9 modifies them by custom-de-signing their DNA. “Five to
seven years ago, that process would have taken months and cost hundreds of
thousands of dollars,” he says. “Now it can take weeks and cost maybe
$20,000.”
Because crude oil (which can be refined into other products,
such as petroleum or jet fuel) is only a few molecular stages removed from
the fatty acids normally excreted by yeast or E. coli during
fermentation, it does not take much fiddling to get the desired result.
For fermentation to take place you need raw material, or
feedstock, as it is known in the biofuels industry. Anything will do as long
as it can be broken down into sugars, with the byproduct ideally burnt to
produce electricity to run the plant.
The company is not interested in using corn as feedstock,
given the much-publicised problems created by using food crops for fuel,
such as the tortilla inflation that recently caused food riots in Mexico
City. Instead, different types of agricultural waste will be used according
to whatever makes sense for the local climate and economy: wheat straw in
California, for example, or woodchips in the South.
Using genetically modified bugs for fermentation is
essentially the same as using natural bacteria to produce ethanol, although
the energy-intensive final process of distillation is virtually eliminated
because the bugs excrete a substance that is almost pump-ready.
The closest that LS9 has come to mass production is a
1,000-litre fermenting machine, which looks like a large stainless-steel
jar, next to a wardrobe-sized computer connected by a tangle of cables and
tubes. It has not yet been plugged in. The machine produces the equivalent
of one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor space.
However, to substitute America’s weekly oil consumption of
143 million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205 square
miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago.
That is the main problem: although LS9 can produce its bug
fuel in laboratory beakers, it has no idea whether it will be able produce
the same results on a nationwide or even global scale.
“Our plan is to have a demonstration-scale plant operational
by 2010 and, in parallel, we’ll be working on the design and construction of
a commercial-scale facility to open in 2011,” says Mr Pal, adding that if
LS9 used Brazilian sugar cane as its feedstock, its fuel would probably cost
about $50 a barrel.
Are Americans ready to be putting genetically modified bug
excretion in their cars? “It’s not the same as with food,” Mr Pal says.
“We’re putting these bacteria in a very isolated container: their entire
universe is in that tank. When we’re done with them, they’re destroyed.”
Besides, he says, there is greater good being served. “I
have two children, and climate change is something that they are going to
face. The energy crisis is something that they are going to face. We have a
collective responsibility to do this.”
Power points
— Google has set up an initiative to develop electricity
from cheap renewable energy sources
— Craig Venter, who mapped the human genome, has created a
company to create hydrogen and ethanol from genetically engineered bugs
— The US Energy and Agriculture Departments said in 2005
that there was land available to produce enough biomass (nonedible plant
parts) to replace 30 per cent of current liquid transport fuels
Cheap
way to 'split water' could lead to abundant clean fuel
Splitting a few litres of water would be enough to power a home for
a day, scientists claim
Scientists have found an inexpensive way to produce hydrogen from
water, a discovery that could lead to a plentiful source of
environmentally friendly fuel to power homes and cars.
The
technique, which mimics the way photosynthesis works in plants, also
provides a highly efficient way to store energy, potentially paving
the way to making solar power more economically viable.
Hydrogen
is a clean, energy-rich fuel that many experts believe could become
important as nations attempt to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.
The gas can be produced by splitting water but current techniques are
expensive, use harsh chemicals and need carefully controlled
environments in which to operate.
Daniel
Nocera, a chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has
developed a catalyst made from cobalt and phosphorus that can split
water at room temperature, a technique he describes in the journal
Science. "I'm using cheap, Earth-abundant materials that you can
mass-manufacture. As long as you can charge the surface, you can
create the catalyst and it doesn't get any cheaper than that."
He said
the discovery could have major implications for the uptake of solar
photovoltaic technology. One of the reasons, he said, why solar panels
have not penetrated the consumer market properly is that no one has
found a way to store energy in a way that, when the Sun is not
shining, people still have electricity. "You can't think about an
energy economy or a global energy system only when the sun is out."
Batteries could do the job but they cannot store anywhere near as much
energy per unit mass as chemical fuels. Nocera's technique would allow
the storage of excess energy from sunlight during the daytime. "You
could imagine, during the day you have a photovoltaic cell, you take
some of that electricity and use it in your house, then take the other
part of that electricity for my catalyst, feed the catalyst water and
you get hydrogen and oxygen."
At
night, the hydrogen and oxygen could be recombined in a fuel cell to
produce an electrical current to power a home or recharge an electric
car. "So I've made your house a gas station and a power station. It's
all enabled because we can use light plus water to make a chemical
fuel, which is hydrogen and oxygen."
Converting an Olympic swimming pool of water into hydrogen and oxygen
per second would create 43 terawatts of power. "In the next 50 years,
the world needs 16 terawatts. By the end of the century, we'll need
around 30," said Nocera. "There's a heck of lot of energy stored in
chemical bonds."
For a
home, Nocera said that it would be enough to split a few litres of
water per day into hydrogen and oxygen. The water would be reformed
when the gases were put through the fuel cell.
There is
much work to be done in converting Nocera's idea into a commercial
product. At the moment, his catalyst can only accept small amounts of
electrical current at once, meaning that it would be an inefficient
way to quickly store large amounts of energy. But Nocera is certain
that engineers will iron out the issues and produce commercial-scale
products within a decade.
James
Barber, a leading researcher in artificial photosynthesis at Imperial
College London, said Nocera's work was a "giant leap" toward
generating clean, carbon-free energy. "This is a major discovery with
enormous implications for the future prosperity of humankind. The
importance of their discovery cannot be overstated since it opens up
the door for developing new technologies for energy production thus
reducing our dependence for fossil fuels and addressing the global
climate change problem."
An international team of researchers led by Monash
University has used chemicals found in plants to replicate a key process in
photosynthesis paving the way to a new approach that uses sunlight to split
water into hydrogen and oxygen.
The breakthrough could revolutionise the renewable energy
industry by making hydrogen – touted as the clean, green fuel of the future
– cheaper and easier to produce on a commercial scale.
Professor Leone Spiccia, Mr Robin Brimblecombe and Dr
Annette Koo from Monash University teamed with Dr Gerhard Swiegers at the
CSIRO and Professor Charles Dismukes at Princeton University to develop a
system comprising a coating that can be impregnated with a form of
manganese, a chemical essential to sustaining photosynthesis in plant life.
"We have copied nature, taking the elements and
mechanisms found in plant life that have evolved over 3 billion years and
recreated one of those processes in the laboratory," Professor Spiccia said.
"A manganese cluster is central to a plant's ability to
use water, carbon dioxide and sunlight to make carbohydrates and oxygen.
Man-made mimics of this cluster were developed by Professor Charles Dismukes
some time ago, and we've taken it a step further, harnessing the ability of
these molecules to convert water into its component elements, oxygen and
hydrogen," Professor Spiccia said.
"The breakthrough came when we coated a proton conductor,
called Nafion, onto an anode to form a polymer membrane just a few
micrometres thick, which acts as a host for the manganese clusters."
"Normally insoluble in water, when we bound the catalyst
within the pores of the Nafion membrane, it was stabilised against
decomposition and, importantly, water could reach the catalyst where it was
oxidised on exposure to light."
This process of "oxidizing" water generates protons and
electrons, which can be converted into hydrogen gas instead of carbohydrates
as in plants.
"Whilst man has been able to split water into hydrogen
and oxygen for years, we have been able to do the same thing for the first
time using just sunlight, an electrical potential of 1.2 volts and the very
chemical that nature has selected for this purpose," Professor Spiccia said
Testing revealed the catalyst assembly was still active
after three days of continuous use, producing oxygen and hydrogen gas in the
presence of water, an electrical potential and visible light.
Professor Spiccia said the efficiency of the system
needed to be improved, but this breakthrough had huge potential. "We need to
continue to learn from nature so that we can better master this process."
"Hydrogen has long been considered the ideal clean green
fuel, energy-rich and carbon-neutral. The production of hydrogen using
nothing but water and sunlight offers the possibility of an abundant,
renewable, green source of energy for the future for communities across the
world."
The research is published this month in the scientific
journal Angewandte Chemie, International Edition.
Source: Monash University
Prevailing
theory of aging challenged in Stanford worm study
STANFORD,
Calif. - Age may not be rust after all. Specific genetic instructions
drive aging in worms, report researchers at the Stanford University School
of Medicine. Their discovery contradicts the prevailing theory that aging
is a buildup of tissue damage akin to rust, and implies science might
eventually halt or even reverse the ravages of age.
"We were
really surprised," said Stuart Kim, PhD, professor of developmental
biology and of genetics, who is the senior author of the research.
Kim's lab
examined the regulation of aging in C. elegans, a millimeter-long nematode
worm whose simple body and small number of genes make it a useful tool for
biologists. The worms age rapidly: their maximum life span is about two
weeks.
Comparing
young worms to old worms, Kim's team discovered age-related shifts in
levels of three transcription factors, the molecular switches that turn
genes on and off. These shifts trigger genetic pathways that transform
young worms into geezers. The findings will appear in the July 24 issue of
the journal Cell.
The question
of what causes aging has spawned competing schools of thought. One side
says inborn genetic programs make organisms grow old. This theory has had
trouble gaining traction because it implies that aging evolved, that
natural selection pushed older organisms down a path of deterioration.
However, natural selection works by favoring genes that help organisms
produce lots of offspring. After reproduction ends, genes are beyond
natural selection's reach, so scientists argued that aging couldn't be
genetically programmed.
The
alternate theory holds that aging is an inevitable consequence of
accumulated wear and tear: Toxins, free-radical molecules, DNA-damaging
radiation, disease and stress ravage the body to the point it can't
rebound. So far, this theory has dominated aging research.
But the
Stanford team's findings told a different story. "Our data just didn't fit
the current model of damage accumulation, and so we had to consider the
alternative model of developmental drift," Kim said.
The
scientists used microarrays - silicon chips that detect changes in gene
expression - to hunt for genes that were turned on differently in young
and old worms. They found hundreds of age-regulated genes switched on and
off by a single transcription factor called elt-3, which becomes more
abundant with age. Two other transcription factors that regulate elt-3
also changed with age.
To see
whether these signal molecules were part of a wear-and-tear aging
mechanism, the researchers exposed worms to stresses thought to cause
aging, such as heat (a known stressor for nematode worms), free-radical
oxidation, radiation and disease. But none of the stressors affected the
genes that make the worms get old.
So it looked
as though worm aging wasn't a storm of chemical damage. Instead, Kim said,
key regulatory pathways optimized for youth have drifted off track in
older animals. Natural selection can't fix problems that arise late in the
animals' life spans, so the genetic pathways for aging become entrenched
by mistake. Kim's team refers to this slide as "developmental drift."
"We found a
normal developmental program that works in young animals, but becomes
unbalanced as the worm gets older," he said. "It accounts for the lion's
share of molecular differences between young and old worms."
Kim can't
say for sure whether the same process of drift happens in humans, but said
scientists can begin searching for this new aging mechanism now that it
has been discovered in a model organism. And he said developmental drift
makes a lot of sense as a reason why creatures get old.
"Everyone
has assumed we age by rust," Kim said. "But then how do you explain
animals that don't age?"
Some
tortoises lay eggs at the age of 100, he points out. There are whales that
live to be 200, and clams that make it past 400. Those species use the
same building blocks for their DNA, proteins and fats as humans, mice and
nematode worms. The chemistry of the wear-and-tear process, including
damage from oxygen free-radicals, should be the same in all cells, which
makes it hard to explain why species have dramatically different life
spans.
"A free
radical doesn't care if it's in a human cell or a worm cell," Kim said.
If aging is
not a cost of unavoidable chemistry but is instead driven by changes in
regulatory genes, the aging process may not be inevitable. It is at least
theoretically possible to slow down or stop developmental drift.
"The
take-home message is that aging can be slowed and managed by manipulating
signaling circuits within cells," said Marc Tatar, PhD, a professor of
biology and medicine at Brown University who was not involved in the
research. "This is a new and potentially powerful circuit that has just
been discovered for doing that."
Kim added,
"It's a new way to think about how to slow the aging process."
###
Stanford
co-authors on the study included postdoctoral scholar Yelena Budovskaya,
PhD; doctoral student Lucinda Southworth; Kendall Wu, PhD, a former
Stanford postdoctoral scholar now working at Affymetrix Inc., and Min
Jiang, a former Stanford lab technician. The Stanford team collaborated
with Patricia Tedesco and Thomas Johnson of the University of
Colorado-Boulder.
The research
was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the
Ellison Medical Foundation and the Larry L. Hillblom Foundation.
Stanford
University Medical Center integrates research, medical education and
patient care at its three institutions - Stanford University School of
Medicine, Stanford Hospital & Clinics and Lucile Packard Children's
Hospital at Stanford. For more information, please visit the Web site of
the medical center's Office of Communication & Public Affairs at
http://mednews.stanford.edu.
found at: http://www.physorg.com/news138450335.html
Researchers
here have found a way to convert ethanol and other biofuels into hydrogen
very efficiently. A new catalyst makes hydrogen from ethanol with 90
percent yield, at a workable temperature, and using inexpensive
ingredients.
Umit Ozkan,
professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Ohio State
University, said that the new catalyst is much less expensive than others
being developed around the world, because it does not contain precious
metals, such as platinum or rhodium.
"Rhodium is
used most often for this kind of catalyst, and it costs around $9,000 an
ounce," Ozkan said. "Our catalyst costs around $9 a kilogram."
She and her
co-workers presented the research Wednesday, August 20 at the American
Chemical Society meeting in Philadelphia.
The Ohio
State catalyst could help make the use of hydrogen-powered cars more
practical in the future, she said.
"There are
many practical issues that need to be resolved before we can use hydrogen
as fuel -- how to make it, how to transport it, how to create the
infrastructure for people to fill their cars with it," Ozkan explained.
"Our
research lends itself to what's called a 'distributed production'
strategy. Instead of making hydrogen from biofuel at a centralized
facility and transporting it to gas stations, we could use our catalyst
inside reactors that are actually located at the gas stations. So we
wouldn't have to transport or store the hydrogen -- we could store the
biofuel, and make hydrogen on the spot."
The catalyst
is inexpensive to make and to use compared to others under investigation
worldwide. Those others are often made from precious metals, or only work
at very high temperatures.
"Precious metals have high catalytic activity and -- in most cases -- high
stability, but they're also very expensive. So our goal from the outset
was to come up with a precious-metal-free catalyst, one that was based on
metals that are readily available and inexpensive, but still highly active
and stable. So that sets us apart from most of the other groups in the
world."
The new dark
gray powder is made from tiny granules of cerium oxide -- a common
ingredient in ceramics -- and calcium, covered with even smaller particles
of cobalt. It produces hydrogen with 90 percent efficiency at 660 degrees
Fahrenheit (around 350 degrees Celsius) -- a low temperature by industrial
standards.
"Whenever a
process works at a lower temperature, that brings energy savings and cost
savings," Ozkan said. "Also, if the catalyst is highly active and can
achieve high hydrogen yields, we don't need as much of it. That will bring
down the size of the reactor, and its cost".
The process
starts with a liquid biofuel such as ethanol, which is heated and pumped
into a reactor, where the catalyst spurs a series of chemical reactions
that ultimately convert the liquid to a hydrogen-rich gas.
One of the
biggest challenges the researchers faced was how to prevent "coking" --
the formation of carbon fragments on the surface of the catalyst. The
combination of metals -- cerium oxide and calcium -- solved that problem,
because it promoted the movement of oxygen ions inside the catalyst. When
exposed to enough oxygen, the carbon, like the biofuel, is converted into
a gas and gets oxidized; it becomes carbon dioxide.
At the end
of the process, waste gases such as carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and
methane are removed, and the hydrogen is purified. To make the process
more energy-efficient, heat exchangers capture waste heat and put that
energy back into the reactor. Methane recovered in the process can be used
to supply part of the energy.
Though this
work was based on converting ethanol, Ozkan's team is now studying how to
use the same catalyst with other liquid biofuels. Her coauthors on this
presentation included Ohio State doctoral students Hua Song and Lingzhi
Zhang.
Newly evolved "superworms" that feast on
toxic waste
could help cleanse polluted industrial land, a new study says.
These hardcore heavy metal fans, unearthed at disused mining sites in
England and Wales, devour lead, zinc, arsenic, and copper.
The
earthworms
excrete a slightly different version of the metals, making them easier
for plants to suck up. Harvesting the plants would leave cleaner soil
behind.
"These worms seem to be able to tolerate incredibly high concentrations
of heavy metals, and the metals seem to be driving their evolution,"
said lead researcher Mark Hodson of the University of Reading in
England.
"If you took an earthworm from the back
of your garden and put it in these soils, it would die," Hodson said.
DNA analysis of lead-tolerant worms
living at Cwmystwyth, Wales, show they belong to a newly evolved species
that has yet to be named, he said.
Two other superworms, including an
arsenic-munching population from southwest England, are also likely new
to science, Hodson said.
"It's a good bet they are also different
species, but we haven't categorically proved that," he said.
The findings were announced in September
at the British Association Festival of Science in Liverpool.
Micro Processors
Hodson's team's investigation used x-rays
to zap worms with intense light, allowing them to track metal particles
a thousand times smaller than a grain of salt.
The findings suggest the arsenic-tolerant
population produces a special protein that "wraps up the metal and keeps
it inert and safe so it doesn't interact with the earthworms," Hodson
said.
The lead-eating Welsh worms likewise use
a protein to render the metal harmless inside their bodies, he added.
The toxicity of the metal particles once
they have passed through the worms isn't yet known, since the protective
protein wrappings will degrade over time, the study authors noted.
But experiments suggest the superworms
make the metals easier for plants to extract from the soil, Hodson said.
"The earthworms don't necessarily render
the metals less toxic, but they do seem to make them available for plant
uptake," he said. This raises this possibility of using the earthworms
as part of efforts to clean up land contaminated by mining and heavy
industry.
The long-term aim is to breed and then
release the worms at polluted sites to speed up the process of soil
development and help kick-start the ecosystem's rehabilitation, Hodson
said.
Plants could be used to extract toxic
metals once the superworms have got to work, he added.
This in turn could boost the development
of methods for using plants to mine metals.
"The goal at the end of the rainbow is
that the plants become so efficient at it that you can use them as a
source of metal in industrial processes," Hodson said. "So you just crop
off the plants and take them to a processing plant."
Peter Kille of the School of Biosciences
at Cardiff University in Wales has also been tracking the metal-eating
worms.
He said previous studies show it takes
earthworms many years to improve polluted soils. While the new
superworms should prove a useful tool, even they can't compete with
industrial cleanup processes that take one to two years.
The worms, however, are an excellent way
to diagnose metal concentrations in contaminated land, Kille said.
"Basically you can see the earthworms as
biological dipsticks of the soil toxicity and the metal levels," he
said.
And the superworms are perfect subjects
for studying evolution in action, Kille added.
"What's really interesting is that each
patch of high metal creates a unique evolutionary event," he said. The
worms either develop new ways of dealing with the metals or find
solutions similar to other populations.
"Each time it happens it's a localized
event, and it allows us to study the processes of evolution that create
the adaptation," he said.
December 30th,
2008 in General Science / Chemistry
(PhysOrg.com) -- Biological fuel cells use enzymes or whole microorganisms
as biocatalysts for the direct conversion of chemical energy to electrical
energy. One type of microbial fuel cell uses anodes (positive electrodes)
coated with a bacterial film. The fuel consists of a substrate that the
bacteria can break down. The electrons released in this process must be
transferred to the anode in order to be drawn off as current. But how can
the electrons be efficiently conducted from the microbial metabolism that
occurs inside a cell to the anode?
Discoveries
made by Japanese researchers regarding the electron-transfer mechanism of
Shewanella loihica PV-4 suggest an intriguing approach. As reported in the
journal Angewandte Chemie, in the presence of iron(III) oxide
nanoparticles, these metal-reducing bacteria aggregate into an electrically
conducting network.
To meet its
energy requirements, our bodies metabolize energy-rich substances. A
critical step in this process is the transfer of electrons to oxygen, which
enters our bodies when we breathe. Instead of breathing, metal-reducing
bacteria that live in subterranean sediments transfer electrons to the iron
oxide minerals on which they dwell as the last step of their metabolism. In
this process, trivalent iron ions are reduced to divalent ions.
A team led by
Kazuhito Hashimoto has investigated how this transfer is carried out in
Shewanella loihica. They added the cells to a solution containing very
finely divided nanoscopic iron(III) oxide particles and poured the solution
into a chamber containing electrodes. A layer of bacteria and iron oxide
particles was rapidly deposited onto the indium tin oxide electrodes at the
bottom of the chamber. When the cells were “fed” lactate, a current was
detected. Electrons from the metabolism of the lactate are thus transferred
from the bacteria to the electrode.
Scanning
electron microscope images show a thick layer of cells and nanoparticles on
the electrode; the surfaces of the cells are completely coated with iron
oxide particles. The researchers were able to show that the semiconducting
properties of the iron oxide nanoparticles, which are linked to each other
by the cells, contribute to the surprisingly high current. The cells act as
an electrical connection between the individual iron oxide particles.
Cytochromes, enzymes in the outer cell membrane of these bacteria, transfer
electrons between the cells and the iron oxide particles without having to
overcome much of an energy barrier. The result is a conducting network that
even allows cells located far from the electrode to participate in the
generation of current.
The thick hardbound volume
was sitting on a shelf in a colleague’s office when
Kirk Sorensen spotted it. A rookie NASA engineer at the
Marshall Space Flight Center, Sorensen was researching
nuclear-powered propulsion, and the book’s title —
Fluid Fuel Reactors — jumped out at him. He picked it
up and thumbed through it. Hours later, he was still
reading, enchanted by the ideas but struggling with the
arcane writing. “I took it home that night, but I didn’t
understand all the nuclear terminology,” Sorensen says. He
pored over it in the coming months, ultimately
deciding that he held in his hands the key to the world’s
energy future.
Published in 1958 under the auspices of the Atomic Energy
Commission as part of its Atoms for Peace program,
Fluid Fuel Reactors is a book only an engineer could
love: a dense, 978-page account of research conducted at Oak
Ridge National Lab, most of it under former director Alvin
Weinberg. What caught Sorensen’s eye was the description of
Weinberg’s experiments producing nuclear power with an
element called thorium.
At the time, in 2000, Sorensen was just 25, engaged to be
married and thrilled to be employed at his first serious job
as a real aerospace engineer. A devout Mormon with a
linebacker’s build and a marine’s crew cut, Sorensen made an
unlikely iconoclast. But the book inspired him to pursue an
intense study of nuclear energy over the next few years,
during which he became convinced that thorium could solve
the nuclear power industry’s most intractable problems.
After it has been used as fuel for power plants, the element
leaves behind minuscule amounts of waste. And that waste
needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, not a few
hundred thousand like other nuclear byproducts. Because it’s
so plentiful in nature, it’s virtually inexhaustible. It’s
also one of only a few substances that acts as a thermal
breeder, in theory creating enough new fuel as it breaks
down to sustain a high-temperature chain reaction
indefinitely. And it would be virtually impossible for the
byproducts of a thorium reactor to be used by terrorists or
anyone else to make nuclear weapons.
Weinberg and his men proved the efficacy of thorium
reactors in hundreds of tests at Oak Ridge from the ’50s
through the early ’70s. But thorium hit a dead end. Locked
in a struggle with a nuclear- armed Soviet Union, the US
government in the ’60s chose to build uranium-fueled
reactors — in part because they produce plutonium that can
be refined into weapons-grade material. The course of the
nuclear industry was set for the next four decades, and
thorium power became one of the great what-if technologies
of the 20th century.
Today, however, Sorensen spearheads a cadre of outsiders
dedicated to sparking a thorium revival. When he’s not at
his day job as an aerospace engineer at Marshall Space
Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama — or wrapping up the
master’s in nuclear engineering he is soon to earn from the
University of Tennessee — he runs a popular blog called
Energy From Thorium. A community of engineers, amateur
nuclear power geeks, and researchers has gathered around the
site’s forum, ardently discussing the future of thorium. The
site even links to PDFs of the Oak Ridge archives, which
Sorensen helped get scanned. Energy From Thorium has become
a sort of open source project aimed at resurrecting
long-lost energy technology using modern techniques.
And the online upstarts aren’t alone. Industry players
are looking into thorium, and governments from Dubai to
Beijing are funding research. India is betting heavily on
the element.
The concept of nuclear power without waste or
proliferation has obvious political appeal in the US, as
well. The threat of climate change has created an urgent
demand for carbon-free electricity, and the 52,000 tons of
spent, toxic material that has piled up around the country
makes traditional nuclear power less attractive. President
Obama and his energy secretary,
Steven Chu, have expressed general support for a nuclear
renaissance. Utilities are investigating several next-gen
alternatives, including scaled-down conventional plants and
“pebble bed” reactors, in which the nuclear fuel is inserted
into small graphite balls in a way that reduces the risk of
meltdown.
Those technologies are still based on uranium, however,
and will be beset by the same problems that have dogged the
nuclear industry since the 1960s. It is only thorium,
Sorensen and his band of revolutionaries argue, that can
move the country toward a new era of safe, clean, affordable
energy.
Named for the Norse god of thunder,
thorium is a lustrous silvery-white metal. It’s only
slightly radioactive; you could carry a lump of it in your
pocket without harm. On the periodic table of elements, it’s
found in the bottom row, along with other dense, radioactive
substances — including uranium and plutonium — known as
actinides.
Actinides are dense because their nuclei contain large
numbers of neutrons and protons. But it’s the strange
behavior of those nuclei that has long made actinides the
stuff of wonder. At intervals that can vary from every
millisecond to every hundred thousand years, actinides spin
off particles and decay into more stable elements. And if
you pack together enough of certain actinide atoms, their
nuclei will erupt in a powerful release of energy.
To understand the magic and terror of those two processes
working in concert, think of a game of pool played in 3-D.
The nucleus of the atom is a group of balls, or particles,
racked at the center. Shoot the cue ball — a stray neutron —
and the cluster breaks apart, or fissions. Now imagine the
same game played with trillions of racked nuclei. Balls
propelled by the first collision crash into nearby clusters,
which fly apart, their stray neutrons colliding with yet
more clusters. Voilè0: a nuclear chain reaction.
Actinides are the only materials that split apart this
way, and if the collisions are uncontrolled, you unleash
hell: a nuclear explosion. But if you can control the
conditions in which these reactions happen — by both
controlling the number of stray neutrons and regulating the
temperature, as is done in the core of a nuclear reactor —
you get useful energy. Racks of these nuclei crash together,
creating a hot glowing pile of radioactive material. If you
pump water past the material, the water turns to steam,
which can spin a turbine to make electricity.
Uranium is currently the actinide of choice for the
industry, used (sometimes with a little plutonium) in 100
percent of the world’s commercial reactors. But it’s a
problematic fuel. In most reactors, sustaining a chain
reaction requires extremely rare uranium-235, which must be
purified, or enriched, from far more common U-238. The
reactors also leave behind plutonium-239, itself radioactive
(and useful to technologically sophisticated organizations
bent on making bombs). And conventional uranium-fueled
reactors require lots of engineering, including
neutron-absorbing control rods to damp the reaction and
gargantuan pressurized vessels to move water through the
reactor core. If something goes kerflooey, the surrounding
countryside gets blanketed with radioactivity (think
Chernobyl). Even if things go well, toxic waste is left
over.
When he took over as head of
Oak Ridge in 1955, Alvin
Weinberg realized that thorium by itself could start to
solve these problems. It’s abundant — the US has at least
175,000 tons of the stuff — and doesn’t require costly
processing. It is also extraordinarily efficient as a
nuclear fuel. As it decays in a reactor core, its byproducts
produce more neutrons per collision than conventional fuel.
The more neutrons per collision, the more energy generated,
the less total fuel consumed, and the less radioactive
nastiness left behind.
Even better, Weinberg realized that you could use thorium
in an entirely new kind of reactor, one that would have zero
risk of meltdown. The design is based on the lab’s finding
that thorium dissolves in hot liquid fluoride salts. This
fission soup is poured into tubes in the core of the
reactor, where the nuclear chain reaction — the billiard
balls colliding — happens. The system makes the reactor
self-regulating: When the soup gets too hot it expands and
flows out of the tubes — slowing fission and eliminating the
possibility of another Chernobyl. Any actinide can work in
this method, but thorium is particularly well suited because
it is so efficient at the high temperatures at which fission
occurs in the soup.
In 1965, Weinberg and his team built a working reactor,
one that suspended the byproducts of thorium in a molten
salt bath, and he spent the rest of his 18-year tenure
trying to make thorium the heart of the nation’s atomic
power effort. He failed. Uranium reactors had already been
established, and Hyman Rickover, de facto head of the US
nuclear program, wanted the plutonium from uranium-powered
nuclear plants to make bombs. Increasingly shunted aside,
Weinberg was finally forced out in 1973.
That proved to be “the most pivotal year in energy
history,” according to the
US Energy Information Administration. It was the year
the Arab states cut off oil supplies to the West, setting in
motion the petroleum-fueled conflicts that roil the world to
this day. The same year, the US nuclear industry signed
contracts to build a record 41 nuke plants, all of which
used uranium. And 1973 was the year that thorium R&D faded
away — and with it the realistic prospect for a golden
nuclear age when electricity would be too cheap to meter and
clean, safe nuclear plants would dot the green countryside.
The core of this hypothetical nuclear
reactor is a cluster of tubes filled with a fluoride
thorium solution. 1// compressor, 2// turbine, 3// 1,000
megawatt generator, 4// heat exchanger, 5// containment
vessel, 6// reactor core. Illustration: Martin
Woodtli
When Sorensen and his pals began delving
into this history, they discovered not only an alternative
fuel but also the design for the alternative reactor. Using
that template, the Energy From Thorium team helped produce a
design for a new liquid fluoride thorium reactor, or LFTR
(pronounced “lifter”), which, according to estimates by
Sorensen and others, would be some 50 percent more efficient
than today’s light-water uranium reactors. If the US reactor
fleet could be converted to LFTRs overnight, existing
thorium reserves would power the US for a thousand years.
Overseas, the nuclear power establishment is getting the
message. In France, which already generates more than 75
percent of its electricity from nuclear power, the
Laboratoire de Physique Subatomique et de Cosmologie has
been building models of variations of Weinberg’s design for
molten salt reactors to see if they can be made to work
efficiently. The real action, though, is in India and China,
both of which need to satisfy an immense and growing demand
for electricity. The world’s largest source of thorium,
India, doesn’t have any commercial thorium reactors yet. But
it has announced plans to increase its nuclear power
capacity: Nuclear energy now accounts for 9 percent of
India’s total energy; the government expects that by 2050 it
will be 25 percent, with thorium generating a large part of
that. China plans to build dozens of nuclear reactors in the
coming decade, and it hosted a major thorium conference last
October. The People’s Republic recently ordered mineral
refiners to reserve the thorium they produce so it can be
used to generate nuclear power.
In the United States, the LFTR concept is gaining
momentum, if more slowly. Sorensen and others promote it
regularly at energy conferences. Renowned climatologist
James Hansen specifically cited thorium as a potential fuel
source in an “Open Letter to Obama” after the election. And
legislators are acting, too. At least three thorium-related
bills are making their way through the Capitol, including
the Senate’s
Thorium Energy Independence and Security Act,
cosponsored by Orrin Hatch of Utah and Harry Reid of Nevada,
which would provide $250 million for research at the
Department of Energy. “I don’t know of anything more
beneficial to the country, as far as environmentally sound
power, than nuclear energy powered by thorium,” Hatch says.
(Both senators have long opposed nuclear waste dumps in
their home states.)
Unfortunately, $250 million won’t solve the problem. The
best available estimates for building even one molten salt
reactor run much higher than that. And there will need to be
lots of startup capital if thorium is to become financially
efficient enough to persuade nuclear power executives to
scrap an installed base of conventional reactors. “What we
have now works pretty well,” says John Rowe, CEO of Exelon,
a power company that owns the country’s largest portfolio of
nuclear reactors, “and it will for the foreseeable future.”
Critics point out that thorium’s biggest advantage — its
high efficiency — actually presents challenges. Since the
reaction is sustained for a very long time, the fuel needs
special containers that are extremely durable and can stand
up to corrosive salts. The combination of certain kinds of
corrosion-resistant alloys and graphite could meet these
requirements. But such a system has yet to be proven over
decades.
And LFTRs face more than engineering problems; they’ve
also got serious perception problems. To some nuclear
engineers, a LFTR is a little … unsettling. It’s a chaotic
system without any of the closely monitored control rods and
cooling towers on which the nuclear industry stakes its
claim to safety. A conventional reactor, on the other hand,
is as tightly engineered as a jet fighter. And more
important, Americans have come to regard anything that’s in
any way nuclear with profound skepticism.
So, if US utilities are unlikely to embrace a new
generation of thorium reactors, a more viable strategy would
be to put thorium into existing nuclear plants. In fact,
work in that direction is starting to happen — thanks to a
US company operating in Russia.
Located outside Moscow, the Kurchatov
Institute is known as the Los Alamos of Russia. Much of the
work on the Soviet nuclear arsenal took place here. In the
late ’80s, as the Soviet economy buckled, Kurchatov
scientists found themselves wearing mittens to work in
unheated laboratories. Then, in the mid-’90s, a savior
appeared: a Virginia company called Thorium Power.
Uranium-Fueled Light-Water Reactor
Seed-and-Blanket Reactor
Liquid Fluoride Thorium
Reactor
Fuel Uranium fuel rods
Fuel
Thorium oxide and uranium oxide rods
Fuel
Thorium and uranium fluoride solution
Fuel input per gigawatt output
250 tons raw uranium
Fuel input
per gigawatt output 4.6 tons raw thorium, 177
tons raw uranium
Fuel input
per gigawatt output 1 ton raw thorium
Annual fuel cost for 1-GW
reactor $50-60 million
Annual fuel
cost for 1-GW reactor $50-60 million
Annual fuel
cost for 1-GW reactor $10,000 (estimated)
Coolant Water
Coolant
Water
Coolant
Self-regulating
Proliferation potential
Medium
Proliferation
potential None
Proliferation
potential None
Footprint
200,000-300,000 square feet, surrounded by a
low-density population zone
Footprint
200,000-300,000 square feet, surrounded by a
low-density population zone
Footprint
2,000-3,000 square feet, with no need for a buffer
zone
Founded by another Alvin — American nuclear physicist
Alvin Radkowsky — Thorium Power, since renamed Lightbridge,
is attempting to commercialize technology that will replace
uranium with thorium in conventional reactors. From 1950 to
1972, Radkowsky headed the team that designed reactors to
power Navy ships and submarines, and in 1977 Westinghouse
opened a reactor he had drawn up — with a uranium thorium
core. The reactor ran efficiently for five years until the
experiment was ended. Radkowsky formed his company in 1992
with millions of dollars from the Initiative for
Proliferation Prevention Program, essentially a federal
make-work effort to keep those chilly former Soviet weapons
scientists from joining another team.
The reactor design that Lightbridge created is known as
seed-and-blanket. Its core consists of a seed of enriched
uranium rods surrounded by a blanket of rods made of thorium
oxide mixed with uranium oxide. This yields a safer,
longer-lived reaction than uranium rods alone. It also
produces less waste, and the little bit it does leave behind
is unsuitable for use in weapons.
CEO
Seth Grae thinks it’s better business to convert
existing reactors than it is to build new ones. “We’re just
trying to replace leaded fuel with unleaded,” he says. “You
don’t have to replace engines or build new gas stations.”
Grae is speaking from Abu Dhabi, where he has
multimillion-dollar contracts to advise the United Arab
Emirates on its plans for nuclear power. In August 2009,
Lightbridge signed a deal with the French firm Areva, the
world’s largest nuclear power producer, to investigate
alternative nuclear fuel assemblies.
Until developing the consulting side of its business,
Lightbridge struggled to build a convincing business model.
Now, Grae says, the company has enough revenue to
commercialize its seed-and-blanket system. It needs approval
from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission — which could be
difficult given that the design was originally developed and
tested in Russian reactors. Then there’s the nontrivial
matter of winning over American nuclear utilities.
Seed-and-blanket doesn’t just have to work — it has to
deliver a significant economic edge.
For Sorensen, putting thorium into a conventional reactor
is a half measure, like putting biofuel in a Hummer. But he
acknowledges that the seed-and-blanket design has potential
to get the country on its way to a greener, safer nuclear
future. “The real enemy is coal,” he says. “I want to fight
it with LFTRs — which are like machine guns — instead of
with light-water reactors, which are like bayonets. But when
the enemy is spilling into the trench, you affix bayonets
and go to work.” The thorium battalion is small, but — as
nuclear physics demonstrates — tiny forces can yield
powerful effects.
Richard Martin (rmartin@newwest.net),
editor of VON, wrote about the Large Hadron Collider in
issue 12.04.
SOLAR
ENGINE: Stirling engines will be employed
to harvest the sun's heat commercially for the first
time early next year in Arizona.
COURTESY OF SES
Nearly 200 years after their invention, and decades
after first being proposed as a method of harnessing
solar energy, 60 sun-powered Stirling engines are about
to begin generating electricity outside Phoenix, Ariz.,
for the first time. Such engines, which harness heat to
expand a gas and drive pistons, are not used widely
today other than in pacemakers and
long-distance robotic spacecraft.
The 1.5 megawatt (MW) demonstration site, known as
Maricopa Solar, is set to begin operations early January
2010, with units provided by the Arizona-based
Stirling Energy
Systems (SES). While 1.5 MW is only a fraction of
the power that may be generated at sites SES has
contracted to develop in California and Texas,
spokesperson Janette Coates says this is a necessary
first step in the technology’s commercialization. “It’s
important for our industry to see—and our partners and
investors—that we can take a small-scale plant and get
it operational before we break ground on larger ones,”
she says.
That's because Stirling heat engines have a
reputation for being a bit impractical. First
invented by Robert Stirling in 1816, the engines use
a heat source to warm gas, which expands and is pushed
into another chamber. When the gas cools and contracts,
it flows back. The expansion and contraction pushes a
piston, which in turn produces electricity.
In 1996, SES bought solar Stirling design and
engineering patents from companies such as
McDonnell-Douglas and Boeing. SES then partnered with
Sandia National Laboratories, and over the next decade
tweaked and refined the technology. In the
SES SunCatcher, a circle of curved mirrors,
resembling an upturned satellite dish, tracks the sun on
two axes and reflects the sun’s heat onto a single focus
point, the power conversion unit (PCU). The PCU contains
four cylinders, in which hydrogen gas expands and
contracts to move pistons.
Stirling engines are significantly more efficient at
converting sunlight into energy than most photovoltaic
panels or
concentrating solar power plants, whether parabolic
trough or tower designs. The test units have reached 31
percent efficiency, compared to 16 percent for parabolic
troughs and about 14-18 percent for PV panels in use
today (though newer designs not yet on the market
range from 24 to as high as 41 percent). The high
efficiency numbers alone, however, have not made
Stirling an easy sell. The systems have been criticized
as being too expensive, unreliable and requiring
extensive maintenance thanks to many moving parts. Also,
ground has not yet been broken on either California site
for which SES signed purchase power agreements in 2005,
adding to skepticism that these systems will ever become
commercially viable.
“At these high temperatures, with this many moving
parts, people doubted whether SES could really pull it
off,” says Reese Tisdale, research director for
solar power at Cambridge, Mass.-based Emerging
Energy Research. The relatively small Arizona plant is
intended to allay those concerns.
Proponents of the technology point to the advantages
it has over other forms of solar power, particularly
concentrating solar power (CSP), which also captures
the sun’s heat. Most CSP systems require significant
amounts of
water, which has proven to be a challenge in desert
regions of the U.S. where solar power is most
attractive, while Stirling engines require none other
than small amounts for cleaning the mirrors. In
addition, if one engine goes down, it has minimal impact
on overall production.
SES faced a manufacturing challenge in preparing its
SunCatchers for mass production though. “The systems at
Sandia were basically hand-built,” says Charles Andraka, a
Sandia engineer and Stirling expert who worked with SES on
the system’s design. For the Phoenix site, he notes, Sandia
and SES engineers built 60 units in three months. “We have
to do that many in a day for the larger
plants.”
In order to do this, SES turned to the experts in rapid
production of engines and related parts: the automotive
industry. In partnership with automotive companies such as
Tower Automotive and Linamar Corporation, SES managed to
reduce the parts in the PCU by 60 percent (to about 650) and
slash the weight of the entire system by roughly 2,250
kilograms. Andraka highlights one example of the upgrade: in
the original engines, he points out, gas passed over the
outside of the engine, with pieces of tubes and fittings at
either end, requiring a total of approximately 20 parts. “On
the new engine, the gas passage is a part of the block with
no external parts. It’s much more reliable, much cheaper to
assemble, with fewer parts and fewer places to leak,”
Andraka says. The new systems have been running on test
sites for more than 100,000 hours.
Maricopa Solar also represents just one scalable module;
each multi-megawatt field will be grouped first in 60-engine
units that come together to generate 1.5 MW, then those
larger units are linked to each other to produce up to 9 MW.
Explains Coates, “With the large 750 MW commissions, we
won’t have to wait until we have 750 MW of dishes before we
start producing power. This means that the utility can get
the power prior to the full build-out, which can take years
to complete.” This is in comparison to parabolic trough or
tower CSP technology, which doesn’t generate electricity
until the entire system is complete.
Meanwhile, Tessera Solar, SES’s sister company in charge
of development, is renegotiating contracts with utilities in
California but expects to
supply power at or below the cost of other solar
technologies, and they plan to break ground on bigger
solar Stirling engine power plants in Texas and California
in 2010. Tisdale says he remains somewhat skeptical, but
also optimistic: “This 1.5 MW site is key to demonstrating
that it works.”
MONTEREY,
California (AFP) - A scientist who mapped his genome and the genetic
diversity of the oceans said Thursday he is creating a life form that feeds
on climate-ruining carbon dioxide to produce fuel. 
