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Greetings!
To start off, we would like to give a promotional word
about the upcoming Extraordinary
Technology conference, which will be held at the Embassy
Suites hotel in Albuquerque NM , which has just finalized their speaker list.
We are also negotiating to collaborate on COFE7 to be held next July
2015 along with the same Tesla Tech group in parallel, giving all
attendees twice the attraction and choice for the same low
registration fee.
Our
first story #1 this month is a good example of the scope of the IRI
Bioenergetics Program which includes products like
the multi-frequency
Premier Junior. It explains a definitive experiment by Dr.
Kevin Tracey to prove that the brain communicates directly
with the immune system when previously it was thought there
was no "central command" for the immune's roaming army.
When Dr. Tracey achieved the same effect as a drug by
stimulating the vagus nerve. Now his work has expanded to the control
of several different diseases, even giving new hope for cancer, with
the new buzzword, "electroceuticals". Now of course,
you might ask whether the brain might consciously communicate
with the immune system and that is one of the benefits of our book, Modern
Meditation: Science and Shortcuts (Valone),
which is a "How To" book, based on my training slideshow
given at events everywhere.
The
second story #2 has been a shared fantasy among many for years, in
order to save on the fuel cost and perhaps the disposable rocket too,
as well as go for a weekend space stayover at the hotel in the sky.
Our future energy concept here is actually a well-tested concept
of the space elevator endorsed by Arthur C. Clarke
years ago. In fact, the Additional Articles we recommend add
significant facts to this survey article, like the Japanese Obayashi company promise
of being the first by 2050. Of course the big question is whether
carbon nanotubes can be woven into rope or ribbon, which has been
answered by a significant collection of patents and patent
applications on the subject of continuous woven ribbon even up to ten
feet wide, like Bradley
Edwards "Cable for a space elevator" #20040149485
or one of the latest which is patented in 2013, Peter Capizzo
"Carbon nanotube (CNT) extrusion methods" #8,444,891.
The #3 story is just as ground-breaking and
reminiscent of last month's story on the new VW car that can go over
500 miles on two gallons of gas. Here we are talking about the ARPA-E
funding of over $3 million of several projects that promise 500
mile travel on a single charge of the liquid
electrode batteries. With energy dense electrode powders in a
liquid, these funded research projects which may swap liquids at the
charging station are competing heavily with Tesla
Motors who is aiming to charge conventional
battery-powered electric cars in 5 to 10 minutes with
over 120 kW of electricity blasted into the batteries, in about as
much time as a regular fill-up.
With the #4 story, our IRI support of fusion
development is garnered slightly by the inertial confinement
milestone of more energy out than in (overunity) achievement by the
Lawrence Livermore National Lab. Led by the appropriately named
scientist, Omar Hurricane, the experiment is in the quadrillion
fusion event realm but hopes to reach 100 quadrillion events per
laser blast to have a fusion "ignition" happen. Of course,
there are other competing types of fusion such as Cavitation
Fusion andPlasma Focus
Fusion also represented at past IRI COFE events which
are very promising and much less costly to develop. We also endorse
Prof. George Miley's
"Black Swan" book surveying all of the fusion
research in the world, since George has been a COFE speaker more than
once and a career expert on fusion at the U of Illinois. It also has
received good reviews.
In the last story #5, I always enjoy it when other
groups embrace the future of energy since it has been a watchword for
IRI since COFE 1999 and is the title of one
of my books. Here we have the Noble Prize
Foundation reviewing their "Exploring the
Future of Energy" event held at the end of last year which
included the Nobel Prize winner, Stephen Chu and others. A video link
to Dr. David Gross' introduction is included.
Don't forget that we are here to serve you with the
latest futuristic energy information and products just beyond today's
standards. You can benefit by trying our improvement to Dr. Glen
Gordon's EMPulse, called an EM PULSER, for 30
days at no risk or obligation (money back guarantee) and available at
a 10% discount by using "enews10" in the comment field.
Sincerely,
Thomas
Valone, PhD, PE.
Editor
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PREMIER
JUNIOR 500
Electric
Medicine Device
The
Best book on Electric Medicine
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1) Electric Medicine: Hack Body Electricity to Heal
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 We're learning to
speak the electrical language of the body - and using it to develop
treatments for diseases from arthritis to diabetes
FOR Goran Ostovich*, just
driving his delivery van was a daily agony. The painful swelling in
his hands, wrists and elbows made it nearly impossible to grip and
turn the wheel - never mind loading and unloading the produce his van
carried. The drugs that he had taken for years to alleviate his
rheumatoid arthritis didn't help much. He had reluctantly abandoned
his favourite sport, ping pong. He stopped working. The final cruelty
was when he could no longer lift his young children or play with
them.
It was then that Ostovich
volunteered for a last resort treatment: he had a small computer
implanted in his neck that would instruct his immune cells to stand
down. 
Ostovich's implant is a
harbinger of a revolution in the pharmaceutical industry. Researchers
are waking up to the idea that the electrical language of nerves
might be spoken more widely in the body than anyone thought, playing
a pivotal role in coordinating the actions of our organs, glands and
cells. It may even be possible to use the nervous system to coax the
body into healing itself in ways we never dreamed of.
The pharmaceutical industry
is on the case, and a spate of projects is under way around the world
to map the exact circuits that allow the nervous system to intervene
when things go wrong in the body.
Autoimmune
diseases, asthma, diabetes and gastric conditions are just a few of
the disorders that appear amenable to electrical intervention. There
are even hints it could be used as a radical way of treating cancer.
Within a decade or two, electrical implants could replace many common
drugs. Welcome to the brave new world of electroceuticals.
The idea that electrical
signals can control the immune system will sound bizarre to anyone
who has studied biology. After all, electricity is the language of
the nervous system, not the immune system. Electrical signals, in the
form of action potentials, travel to and from the brain via the
numerous nerve pathways throughout the body. For example, to regulate
your heartbeat, sensory nerve fibres detect your heart rate and relay
that information to the brain, which in turn sends instructions back
to the heart telling it to speed up or slow down. A similar circuit
controls blood pressure. "It's like setting a thermostat,"
says Kevin Tracey of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in
New York. "The nervous system constantly responds to changes and
adjusts everything back to the set point." We can manipulate
that electrical language when the body's natural thermostat goes
wrong, with defibrillators that use electricity to jump-start a
stalled heart, or pacemakers that regulate the rate at which it pumps
blood.
No such central governor was
thought to control the immune system. A decentralised army, including
white blood cells and virus-eating macrophages, was thought to roam
around in the bloodstream fighting ad hoc battles against bacteria
and viruses where they needed to be fought. Damaged tissue might send
out a call for reinforcements, but there was no central command.
Tracey challenged that
understanding in the late 1990s. He and his colleagues were testing a
new anti-inflammatory drug. When they injected it into rats' brains,
they noticed it also dampened inflammation in their limbs and
peripheral organs. "The amount of drug we were using was vanishingly
small so we knew the signal wasn't going through the
bloodstream," Tracey says. The only explanation was the nervous
system. The idea was too intriguing to ignore. "So we started
stimulating different nerves to see if we could reproduce the effect,"
he says. Sure enough, he found that electrically stimulating the nerve fibres
that linked to the spleen - home to immune cells known as
T-cells - dampened their activity. It was one of the first hints that
the brain might be talking to the immune system after all.
But how? Tracey had
discovered that nerve cells speak to immune cells in the spleen using
chemicals called neurotransmitters - the same language they use to
speak to each other. Nerve stimulation triggered a complex reaction
that told the T-cells to stop the production of inflammatory
substances, such as tumour necrosis factor (TNF).
In healthy people this nerve
circuit ensures that levels of TNF never get too high. However, in
autoimmune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis, the normal brakes
fail and TNF production spirals out of control. It accumulates in
people's joints, triggering pain, inflammation and the breakdown of
tissue.
To stave off these
debilitating effects, people with rheumatoid arthritis often turn to
drugs called TNF inhibitors. However, because these mop up all the
TNF they find, they leave people at increased risk of infection.
Worse, they don't always work for rheumatoid arthritis. Ostovich was
on several different drugs, but his pain was still debilitating.
But he was fortunate. The
clinic he attended had just started recruiting people for a trial of
a therapy based on Tracey's findings. Following successful animal
studies, Tracey had founded a company called SetPoint Medical to
treat arthritis in people. For its pilot trial, SetPoint chose
Ostovich's home country, Bosnia and Herzegovina, where few have
access to TNF inhibitors. The plan was to implant tiny computers into
the necks of 12 people with rheumatoid arthritis to see if electrical
stimulation eased their symptoms.
Ostovich's computer tapped
into his vagus nerve, the electrical superhighway that links the
brain to all of the major organs, to intermittently stimulate the
nerve fibres that connect to the spleen (see diagram). The researchers hoped
that the device would instruct his immune system to stand down and
stop attacking his joints.
It worked. The constant pain
in Ostovich's joints stopped. Levels of an inflammatory protein
called CRP that is usually elevated in people with arthritis fell
back to normal. Best of all, this intervention had no serious side
effects. Nerve stimulation only removes around 80 per cent of TNF -
as opposed to eliminating it the way drugs do. It also suppresses the
production of other immune factors that can damage tissue when
released in excess. Like Ostovich, seven other volunteers have shown
similar improvements (Arthritis and Rheumatism, vol 64, p 1).
With this triumph, Tracey
believes that he has identified the first of many neural circuits
that control the immune system. Last August, Clifford Woolf of
Harvard Medical School announced that he and his colleagues had found
a second: nerves in the skin, which were able to
suppress infection when stimulated. Similar circuits are cropping up
elsewhere too. The carotid body - a cluster of cells that sense
glucose levels in the main artery carrying blood to the head - has a
connection to the central nervous system that can affect rats'
insulin sensitivity and blood pressure (Diabetes, vol 62, p 2905).
Implanted electrodes, says Silvia Conde at the New University of
Lisbon, where the study was conducted, might manipulate some nerve
signals and not others, making it possible to tweak insulin
sensitivity without disrupting other vital functions of the carotid
body. At any rate, it is becoming clear that these circuits are all
plugged into a body-wide electrical grid.
But as Conde's work implies,
the immune system isn't the only thing these circuits can manipulate.
Electrocore, an electroceutical device manufacturer with headquarters
in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, has been working to isolate a different
set of fibres within the vagus nerve to treat asthma. "A nerve
is like a transatlantic telephone wire," Tracey says. "It
has lots of individual cables inside it." The nerve fibres
targeted by Electrocore's neck stimulator link to a region of the
brain involved in the physiological response to stress and panic.
Zapping them triggers the release of noradrenaline, which dampens the
activity of neurons that control the airways, prompting them to open,
averting the asthma attack. "The message we're sending is:
'everything's fine, you can relax, there's no fight or flight to
engage in'," says Electrocore CEO JP Errico.
It appears to work. In 81
people admitted to emergency departments during an asthma attack who
didn't respond to standard drugs within an hour, electrical
stimulation with Electrocore's implanted electrode led to a significant improvement in their lung
function. Electrocore is now testing a device that activates
nerve fibres through the skin.
While vagus nerve
stimulation is an attractive strategy, it may not be focused enough,
says Brendan Canning of the Johns Hopkins asthma and allergy centre
in Baltimore, Maryland. The nerve fibres Electrocore targets are
unlikely to combat some of the other troublesome symptoms of asthma,
such as coughing and the feeling that you are not getting enough air,
he says. Canning has discovered that these symptoms are controlled by
a different set of fibres in the vagus nerve. However, stimulating
these also triggers "fight or flight" responses such as
boosting the heart and breathing rate, which often exacerbate an
attack by activating a person's panic response.
Such early measures are
relatively blunt instruments. No existing implant is able to isolate
individual cables. Instead, SetPoint's implants use a workaround:
they are tuned so that the amount of electricity you put in only
stimulates a small subset of the cables.
It's an elegant fix, but
what if you could also eavesdrop on the electrical signals to detect
abnormalities and only speak to the fibres that were misfiring? Such
a smart electrode, Canning says, could also "detect changes in
nerve activity, provide therapy as needed and then shut off".
This is exactly what global
pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is working on. "The
goal is to have rice-sized implants that sit on the peripheral nerves
and record the complexity of the electrical language that flows
through them, detect when something's out of balance and then fix
it," says Kristoffer Famm of GSK. "We believe this
treatment could be crucial for a whole host of chronic diseases -
things like diabetes, hypertension, arthritis and chronic pain."
Tracey and Woolf's research
shows that achieving Famm's goal is possible, although
commercialising it will be more difficult. It will require
collaboration between scientists who don't usually interact -
engineers that design brain-machine interfaces, say, and lung or
immunology experts. In December, GSK hosted a forum in New York to
identify the key hurdles most likely to stop the field of
electroceuticals from progressing, and offered a $1 million bounty to
the group that overcomes them.
That reward is only a
fraction of what the firm is spending on electroceuticals. GSK has
funded six centres to begin teasing apart the neural circuits that
underlie specific diseases. Unofficially, 11 more have joined the
team.
And while GSK may have the
biggest budget, it is by no means the only company betting big on
this technology. Beyond Electrocore, the field includes medical
device giant Medtronic, which is working on electrical interference
for stubborn gastrointestinal problems. "We're learning to speak
the electrical language of the body," says Famm. GSK expects to
treat a range of common disorders with electrical implants.
However, even that may be
just the tip of the iceberg. Electroceuticals may also offer new
avenues to treat cancer.
The reason nerve cells can
transmit electrical signals is because the inside of the cell is
negatively charged relative to the outside, known as its resting
potential. When a nerve cell fires, there is a sudden influx of
positive ions into the cell through channels in its membrane. These
ion channels open and close much more quickly in nerve cells, but
other cells speak this electrical language too. "All cells
maintain a resting potential. They use it signal to their
neighbours," says Michael Levin of Tufts University in Medford,
Massachusetts.
Each kind of cell has its
own resting potential, and Levin has discovered that these
differences play a key role in determining which embryonic cells turn
into what part of the body during development. In frog embryos, for
example, setting the voltage of what are normally destined to become
gut cells to the normal range of eye cells triggered the growth of
complete eyes in the embryo's gut. "A lot of this can be done
using drugs that are already in human use," he says.
Levin has taken it even
further. By soaking the stump of a frog's amputated leg in a cocktail
of drugs that trigger the flow of sodium ions into cells, his lab has
managed to coax adult frogs to grow new legs - something which is not
normally possible.
Intrigued, he wondered
whether he could reverse this logic to inhibit unwanted cells. Last
year, he successfully used ion channel drugs to stop the growth of
tumours in tadpoles primed to develop cancer.
Levin's work is early, and
electroceuticals won't cure every disease - but we should expect to
see a lot more stories like Ostovich's. Eight weeks after getting his
implant, he returned to work. When Tracey heard the success story, he
says, "I said, 'I have to meet this guy'".
Tracey speaks no Bosnian and
Ostovich speaks no English, so the meeting required a translator. But
conversation was hardly necessary to see that the treatment had
changed Ostovich's life. "The expression on his face was
unbridled joy, gratitude and relief," Tracey says. "It made
all the years of basic bench research worthwhile." Ostovich told
Tracey that the device had worked so well he had been able to take up
ping pong again. And he felt so great after playing ping pong that he
decided to try tennis. Indeed, this may have revealed a potential
downside of the device: in his pain-free enthusiasm, he overdid it
and ended up with a tennis-related knee injury. His doctors were
forced to caution the man who, just two months earlier was unable to
play with his children, to take it easy.
*name has been changed to
protect confidentiality
back to table of contents
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2) Can Quiet
Space Elevators Really Work?
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By
Leonard David, Space.com's Space Insider Columnist |
February 19, 2014 06:38am ET
Is
it time to push the "up" button on the space elevator?
A space elevator consisting of an
Earth-anchored tether that extends 62,000 miles (100,000 kilometers)
into space could eventually provide routine, safe, inexpensive and
quiet access to orbit, some researchers say.
A
new assessment of the concept has been pulled together titled
"Space Elevators: An Assessment of the Technological Feasibility
and the Way Forward." The study was conducted by a diverse
collection of experts from around the world under the auspices of the
International Academy of Astronautics (IAA). [Quiz: Sci-Fi vs. Real Technology]
The study's final judgment
is twofold: A space elevator appears possible, with the understanding
that risks must be mitigated through technological progress...and a
space elevator infrastructure could indeed be built via a major
international effort.
The tether serving as a
space elevator would be used to economically place payloads and
eventually people into space using electric vehicles called climbers
that drive up and down the tether at train-like speeds. The rotation
of the Earth would keep the tether taut and capable of supporting the
climbers.
Rooted in history
The notion of a beanstalk-like
space elevator is rooted in history.
Many point to the
ahead-of-its-time "thought experiment" published in 1895 by
Russian space pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. He suggested
creation of a free-standing tower reaching from the surface of Earth
to the height of geostationary orbit (GEO; 22,236 miles, or 35,786
km).
Over the last century or so,
writers, scientists, engineers and others have helped finesse the
practicality of the space elevator. And the new study marks a major
development in the evolution of the idea, says IAA president Gopalan
Madhavan Nair. [10 Sci-Fi Predictions That Came True]
"No
doubt all the space agencies of the world will welcome such a
definitive study that investigates new ways of transportation with
major changes associated with inexpensive routine access to GEO and
beyond," Nair writes in the new study's preface.
"There is no doubt that
the Academy, due to this study, will contribute to advancing
international consensus and awareness on the need to search and
develop new ways of transportation in conducting space exploration while
preserving our universe in the same way we are now trying to preserve
our planet Earth," Nair adds.
Elevator operator
While it's always tricky to
predict the future study lead editor Peter Swan told Space.com that
space elevators are more than just a science-fiction fantasy.
"The results of our study are encouraging," he said.
Swan's view is fortified by
the late science fact/fiction soothsayer, Arthur C. Clarke, who stated in 2003:
"The space elevator will be built ten years after they stop
laughing...and they have stopped laughing!"
Swan is chief engineer at
SouthWest Analytic Network, Inc. in Paradise Valley, Ariz., and is
focused on developing and teaching innovative approaches to "new
space" development. He's also head elevator operator of the
International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC), which has
organizational members in the United States, Europe and Japan and
individual members from around the world.
ISEC's goal is nothing short
of getting a lengthy space elevator built.
"The question is when,
of course," Swan said. "But the point is that the
technologies are progressing in a positive manner, such that we who
work in it believe that there will be space elevators."
Pacing technologies
Swan said the giggle factor
regarding space elevators is "down significantly" given
work carried out over the last decade by a global network of
individuals and groups. "Still, there are many, many issues and
I certainly would not want to say that it's not a challenging
project."
The IAA appraisal delves
into a number of issues, such as: Why build a space elevator? Can it be
done? How would all the elements fit together to create a system of
systems? And what are the technical feasibilities of each major space
elevator element ?
Two technologies are pacing
the development of the space elevator, Swan said.
Producing an ultra-strong
space tether and other space elevator components, Swan said, has been
advanced by the invention of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) that are
1,000 times better in strength-to-weight ratio than steel. The good
news, he said, is that CNTs are being developed with billions of dollars by
nanotechnology, electronics, optics, and materials specialists.
Similarly, lightweight solar cells "are coming
along nicely," Swan said. "That's an industry that the
space elevator people are watching, too. We're not going to drive it,
but we can certainly watch it and appreciate the advances."
Money,
motivation and desire
Regarding who would erect a
space elevator, Swan said the study dives into details. A primarily
commercial effort with some government support is possible, as is a
public-private enterprise, or an entirely governmental project.
"All three are viable.
Any one of them could work. It's a matter of money, motivation and
the desire to do it," Swan said, though the study centers on
commercial development of the space elevator. "It's conceivable
all three could be going on at the same time."
The study team was
encouraged by the future, though Swan and others acknowledge there
are many questions left to be studied. Indeed, another evaluation of
the space elevator idea 10 years hence would be worthwhile, Swan
said.
Are there any technical,
political or policy "showstoppers" that could prevent the
space elevator from becoming a reality?
"You're asking the
wrong guy," Swan responded. "I am an optimist. I have
always had the attitude that good people, motivated by good rationale
working hard will make it work. My guess is that space elevators are
going to work, whether it's by 2035, 2060 or even 2100."
Swan said the rationale is
moving beyond the "rocket equation," which involves tossing
away 94 percent of a rocket's mass sitting on the launch pad.
"And it still costs a
lot of stinking money to get up there," he said.
The space elevator opens
everything up, Swan said. It's a soft ride, a week to GEO. There are
no restrictions on the size or shape of payloads.
"People will laugh and
ask why did we ever do space rockets...it's a dumb idea," Swan
said. "Space elevators are the answer if we can make them work.
Why would you do anything else?"
A copy of "Space
Elevators: An Assessment of the Technological Feasibility and the Way
Forward" is available through Virginia Edition Publishing
Company at:www.virginiaedition.com/sciencedeck
Leonard David has been
reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is
former director of research for the National Commission on Space and
is co-author of Buzz Aldrin's new book "Mission to Mars - My
Vision for Space Exploration" published by National Geographic.
Follow us @Spacedotcom,Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
RECOMMENDED
ADDITIONAL ARTICLES
|
3) Liquid
Battery Means Faster Charging, Longer Range Electric Cars
|
 A new kind of battery stores energy in what
researchers are calling "rechargeable fuel"-electrodes in
liquid form. The result can be either recharged like a conventional
battery or replaced by pumping in new fuel like gasoline.
The
materials could theoretically allow an electric car to travel 500
miles on a charge, five times farther than most electric vehicles can
now, say the researchers developing the technology, who are based at
Argonne National Laboratory and the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Replacing them at a fueling station would take just a few minutes. In
contrast, even the fastest charging stations for conventional
batteries take an hour to provide a full charge.
Limited
driving range and long recharging times are two of the biggest
challenges for electric cars. Liquid battery electrodes could allow
longer range by increasing the amount of energy battery packs can
store, and because fewer non-energy-storing components would be
needed, it could also make them cheaper.
Batteries
that use liquid electrodes could also be safer than conventional
ones, says Ping Liu, a program manager at the Advanced Research
Projects Agency for Energy, which is funding the work. Positive and
negative electrode materials would be stored in separate tanks,
rather than inside the same battery cell as in conventional
batteries. This could prevent the short circuits and overheating that
can cause lithium-ion batteries to catch fire.
Rechargeable
fuels are at an early stage, but ARPA-E has deemed them promising,
announcing funding for four groups that are developing the
technology. In addition to the Illinois project, it is backing
projects at GE, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and 24M, an
MIT spinoff.
The
Illinois researchers have so far demonstrated a small
"half-cell" battery that uses one fluid electrode and one
solid one. For their $3.4 million ARPA-E-funded project, which
started last month, they plan to build a prototype that uses liquids
for both the positive and negative electrodes. This battery should
store one kilowatt-hour of energy, enough for a few miles of driving.
In
conventional electric-car batteries, as much as 75 percent of the
material inside a battery pack consists of components that don't
store energy-cell packaging, sensors, electrical connections, cooling
systems, and so on. With fluid energy storage, at least in theory,
much of that material can be eliminated, decreasing the size and cost
of battery packs.
The
key is separating the energy-storing materials from the structures
used to extract that energy and create electrical current. In a
conventional battery, every layer of electrode material is paired
with a sheet of foil and a plastic membrane that allow electrons and
ions to flow, creating electrical current. If you want to store more
energy, you need to add more layers of foil and plastic, too.
In
the new battery, the fluid electrodes would be stored in tanks and
pumped through a relatively small device to interact and generate
electricity. Increasing energy storage would just be a matter of
making the storage tanks bigger; the device where electricity is
generated could stay the same size. The larger the tanks, the less of
the total volume the energy-generating device would take up.
Fluid
electrodes have been around for a while-for example, as part of
devices called flow batteries-but they typically store energy in a
dilute solution that requires too much volume to be used in a car.
Some batteries have molten electrodes that are better suited for
stationary applications (see "Ambri's Better Battery").
Each of the ARPA-E projects aims to find ways to increase the energy
density of the liquids by an order of magnitude. The MIT spinoff 24M
is a pioneer in this area, having shown that it's possible to suspend
high concentrations of conventional, energy-dense electrode powders
in a liquid and extract energy from them (see "A Car Battery at Half the
Price"). The main challenge is achieving high enough
electrical conductivity for a practical battery.
The
Illinois researchers have a similar approach. They emphasize the use
of nanoscale powders that can be suspended in very high
concentrations and still flow easily, thanks to the peculiar
properties of particles at such a small scale. They've also developed
a new way of extracting electrical current from the particles, and
they hope this will allow them to increase conductivity. The details
are secret until they finish filing patents.
Liquid
electrode batteries do have some potential drawbacks. Nanoparticles
can degrade quickly, and the researchers have only begun to design
the entire system. They need to design a way to pump the materials
efficiently and manufacture the battery cheaply. And recharging cars
by refilling the tanks with new material would require installing new
infrastructure, which can be expensive.
Meanwhile,
conventional batteries continue to get cheaper, and improved
technology is making them faster to recharge (see "How Tesla Is Driving
Electric Car Innovation" and "Forget Battery Swapping:
Tesla Aims to Charge Electric Cars in Five Minutes").
|
4)
Fusion Energy Sets New Milestone
|
By Joel Achenbach FEB 12, 2014,
Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/fusion-energy-milestone-reported-by-california-scientists/2014/02/12/f511ed18-936b-11e3-84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html?tid=pm_pop
Scientists are
creeping closer to their goal of creating a controlled fusion-energy
reaction, by mimicking the interior of the sun inside the hardware of
a laboratory. In the latest incremental advance, reported
Wednesday online in the journal Nature, scientists in
California used 192 lasers to compress a pellet of fuel and generate
a reaction in which more energy came out of the fuel core than went
into it.
There's still a
long way to go before anyone has a functioning fusion reactor,
something physicists have dreamed of since Albert
Einstein was alive. A fusion reactor would run on a common
form of hydrogen found in seawater, would emit minimal nuclear waste
and couldn't have the kind of meltdown that can occur in a
traditional nuclear-fission reactor.
Fusion energy heats up
AUDIO: Scientists
cleared a hurdle in fusion energy research by achieving a fuel gain.
Lead authors Omar Hurricane, Deborah Callahan and Tammy Ma discuss
their research.
Source: Nature
Scientists are
creeping closer to their goal of creating a controlled fusion-energy
reaction, by mimicking the interior of the sun inside the hardware of
a laboratory. In the latest incremental advance, reported
Wednesday online in the journal Nature, scientists in
California used 192 lasers to compress a pellet of fuel and generate
a reaction in which more energy came out of the fuel core than went
into it.
There's still a
long way to go before anyone has a functioning fusion reactor,
something physicists have dreamed of since Albert
Einstein was alive. A fusion reactor would run on a common
form of hydrogen found in seawater, would emit minimal nuclear waste
and couldn't have the kind of meltdown that can occur in a
traditional nuclear-fission reactor.
"You kind of
picture yourself climbing halfway up a mountain, but the top of the
mountain is hidden in clouds," Omar Hurricane, the lead author
of the Nature paper, said in a teleconference with journalists.
"And then someone calls you on your satellite phone and asks
you, 'How long is it going to take you to climb to the top of the
mountain?' You just don't know."
Hurricane and
other scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, home
of the multibillion-dollar National
Ignition Facility, took pains to calibrate their claims of
success. This was not fusion "ignition," the NIF's ultimate
ambition. The experiment overall requires much more energy on the
front end - all those laser shots -than comes out the back end.
Only about 1
percent of the energy from the laser actually winds up in the fuel,
according to Debra Callahan, a co-author of the Nature paper. Most of
the laser energy gets absorbed by surrounding material - a gold
cylinder called a hohlraum, and a plastic capsule within that -
before it reached the fuel, which coats the inside of the capsule and
is made of two hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium.
But the experiment
worked as hoped. When briefly compressed by the laser pulses, the
isotopes fused, generating new particles and heating up the fuel
further and generating still more nuclear reactions, particles and
heat. This feedback mechanism is known as "alpha heating"
and is an important goal in fusion research.
"They've got a
factor of about 100 to go," said Mark Herrmann, director of the
Pulse Power Sciences Center at the Sandia National Laboratories, a
sister institution to the Livermore lab. "We want a lot of
fusions. They made 5 million billion fusions, but we want more than
that. We want 100 times than what they made."
To frame the
challenge further: Even if ignition is achieved in coming years, the
contraption required is so extremely elaborate and capital-intensive
- total cost of the NIF operation is in the realm of $5 billion -
that it may be of limited practical application for generating
electricity to power someone's toaster.
Still, the new
result represents progress in the fusion-energy field and came as a
relief for Lawrence Livermore scientists after early efforts produced
energy yields lower than what had been predicted from computer
models. The process requires exquisite precision in operating the
lasers to compress the fuel pellet by a factor of 35, like squeezing
a basketball to the size of a pea, Callahan said.
The latest
technique modified the laser pulses to create a better-shaped
implosion of the pellet.
"The real
significance of this is, we're now matching our models, we have our
feet back on the ground where we know where to go forward," said
Jeff Wisoff, the principal associate director of NIF and photon
science at the lab. "We have a number of knobs we can
turn."
NIF is funded by
the National Nuclear Security Administration and does fusion research
only part of the time. Usually it is engaged in tests that help
scientists understand the processes involved in nuclear weapons
explosions.
Another fusion
energy strategy, developed at the Princeton
Plasma Physics Laboratory in New Jersey and more
widely used by researchers worldwide, uses giant magnets to confine
the hot plasma in which the fusion reactions occur.
Stewart Prager,
director of the Princeton laboratory, applauded the new results
reported in Nature by the California team, saying, "It's the
first sign that they're getting what we call self-heating."
He's optimistic
about fusion energy in the long run.
"In 30 years,
we'll have electricity on the grid produced by fusion energy -
absolutely," Prager said. "I think the open questions now
are how complicated a system will it be, how expensive it will be,
how economically attractive it will be."
The short-term
problem is funding. Congress
appropriated about $500 million for fusion energy
science in the 2014 budget, a boost of more than $100 million from
the tight budgets of the previous two years, but fusion advocates
want more.
Rep. Rush D. Holt
(D-N.J.), a physicist who spent 10 years working at the Princeton
lab, said Wednesday that the United States is losing leadership in
fusion energy research to Europe, Japan, South Korea and China.
"It's nowhere
close to making your electric meter run backwards," Holt said of
fusion energy. "But the reason other countries are now investing
more than we are - this is a sad story in itself - is that the
country that was the world's leader in fusion research is no
longer."
back to table of contents
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5) Review of
Exploring the Future of Energy
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www.NobelPrize.org
February 2014
Exploring the Future of Energy
Audiences across the
globe joined Nobel Laureates, world-leading experts and business
leaders in a discussion about the future of energy during the 2013
Nobel Week Dialogue. Watch Physics Laureate David Gross'
introduction Three Nobel anniversaries - the case for basic
science.
Watch
the lecture
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Morning Plenary Session 2 - Nobel Week
Dialogue 2013
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"Why does the Sun shine?" One of
Physics Laureate Hans Bethe's contributions was to reveal how the
Sun behaves and to describe the role nuclear reactions play in
producing the energy of the Sun and the stars.
More
about Hans Bethe's Nobel Prize
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One way nuclear energy can originate is from
the splitting of uranium atoms in a process called
fission. It is a powerful source for energy, but it can also
be misused. IAEA, awarded the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize, works to
ensure that nuclear energy is not misused for military purposes.
Watch a
documentary about IAEA's work
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