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Obama Administration Tests the Waters With Ocean Power Startups
Stirfry192 sends this excerpt from an article discussing the Obama Administration's funding of renewable energy projects that are experimenting with hydrokinetics:
"Currently, the Department of Energy has a mandate to spend $50 million a year on backing such research. For its part, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has approved 72 permits for pilot projects over the past two years , according to its records. Ocean Renewable Energy Power Company, LLC , which has plans to build the largest ocean-based system in the U.S., is one of the companies that has won such funding. ... Virtually all hydrokinetic turbines resemble giant manual lawnmowers, a design patented by Alexander Gorlov of Northeastern University in 2001. [CEO Chris Sauer] calls what his company uses an 'advance cross-flow' model, and he says each of his 150 kilowatt units could power 50 to 75 homes. ... The company plans to install one of its 150 kilowatt turbines this year, and four next year, anchoring them near the floor of the bay, and progressively build out to 3.2 megawatts by 2014. The system would tie into Bangor Hydro Electric Co. grid."
My cyber-warfare-enabled endangered snails will bring this project to its knees! or something about not doing it on porpoise just for the halibut. Never mind.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Fission is not something the free market will invest in. They never have. So far it has taken government backed loans and government provided insurance just to get the plants we have. I think it is a great source of power, but he free market seem to disagree.
They only carry $375 Million in insurance on the plants and the Price-Anderson act covers over that. This act is so anti-free market that it moves civil suits to federal jurisdiction and no claimant can get punitive damages.
Over the past 30 years if there is one thing that I've seen dry up is privately funded research. It simply no longer exists..
Uh, what?
I've been working in R&D in most of the companies that I've worked for in the last twenty years. So I'm somewhat surprised to discover that I've just been imagining it.
As for this particular 'research', if the 'researcher' could make a good business case for it working and making financial sense then plenty of people would be eager to throw money at them. When they have to go to the government for taxpayers money that's pretty good evidence that there is no such case that makes any sense.
As for this particular 'research', if the 'researcher' could make a good business case for it working and making financial sense then plenty of people would be eager to throw money at them. When they have to go to the government for taxpayers money that's pretty good evidence that there is no such case that makes any sense.
Exactly. Real Research does not come with a guarantee of a payoff. You may have worked in R&D devisions, but they do not do Bell Labs, Xerox PARC levels of research. These days only short term payoff kinds of research are done privately. Thanks for proving the GPs point for him.
Where a big-wig senator thinks it'll interfere with his view of the sea or his enjoyment of sailing his yacht.
Oh yeah, he's dead -- full spead ahead!
For the last couple decades while all these vastly faster and more efficient processors just magically sprung from Obama's immaculate ass?
There's plenty of research being done.
Any private company doing this will get railroaded by the "environmentalists." And by that in quotes I mean those people who are against progress at all costs, BANANA, and not necessarily for the environment. You know, the people that caused Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore to leave the organization.
At least with the backing of FedGov they might have a chance to get something done instead of having their project put on hold in the courts until it dies.
To be fair, most people that would make stupid Obama name jokes tend to be Republican.
Nobody cares what the CAPTCHA for your post was.
Re: $375 Million and the Price-Anderson act. So far the Fukushima disaster has cost the Japanese over $240 Billion. If something even close were to happen to a US reactor we the people are on the hook for any costs over $375 Million. No nuclear power plants will be built if it's left only to the free market.
Fusion?
I had a random idea several months ago that I think might work but would be impractical in the "We need metric shit-tons of energy *NAOW!*" climate we live in.
Basically, the main problems with current fusion systems are the following:
Concentrating the plasma tight enough to release over unity energy directly often causes pinching of the magnetic confinement feild, cutting off plasma flow, and killing the fusion reaction. (A little like turning the gas up too high on a cutting torch blows the flame out, only in this case the confinement snaps the plasma stream, making it stop conducting electricity, causing the plasma to disperse violently, such as in Z-Pinch type devices.)
Instances where the magnetic confinement field does not pinch off the plasma flow often are extremely expensive to operate under, requiring lots of power to contain/maintain the fusion. (Currently more than is usefully generated by the reaction-- Such as in Tokamak style fusors.)
Low energy confinement fusion favors production of neutrons which are useless for power generation, and difficult to shield. (Such as found in Farnsworth type fusors.)
It was the last one that gave me the idea:
Carbon 14 is a neutron bombardment synthesized isotope of carbon, created from nitrogen atoms. It is also beta-voltaic. It decays back into nitrogen after emitting a high energy electron, and a (Tau?) neutrino. When assembled into nanostructures, it is also highly conductive in and of itself, just like carbon 12.
Because of these properties of carbon 14, I had the strange idea that if you surrounded a farnsworth type fusor (The easiest to construct of the 3 types above.) with a large metal spherical capsule, filled with carbon aerogel and liquid nitrogen (which does not need to be refrigerated or circulated once installed. The vessel is meant to be pressurized to maintain fluidity of the contents.) you could effectively use this shell as a neutron conversion catalyst to convert neutron emissions into high energy electron emissions, gather them up, and channel them for power generation.
The carbon aeogel inside the vessel does not need to be C14. It can be ordinary C12 and work just fine. It functions as the cathode matrix for the beta-voltaic emissions of the C14 that gets developed inside the converter. Since it is ALREADY a highly porous nanostructural carbon material, it conducts electricity fairly well, and can be totally immersed in the liquid nitrogen reactant.
As the neutrons from the farnsworth fusor pass through the catalyst, they get absorbed by the nitrogen atoms, turning them into C14 atoms. These atoms would be energetic, and would tend to "cling" to the existing carbon nano-structures of the aerogel. As they decay, the turn back into nitrogen, and detach.
After a sufficient incubation period, the device should be capable of turning an otherwise "Hobby novelty only" farnsworth into a useful power generating device.
Problems:
Size. The catalyst chamber would need to be very large to have reasonably good statistical rate of neutron capture, even with highly pressurized nitrogen inside.
Cost. Carbon aerogel is expensive... (Liquid nitrogen is fairly cheap. Cheaper than beer.)
Time. It would take a considerable charging period before useful power output would be detected from the catalyst system.
Pros:
C14 has an obscenely long half-life. The catalyst layer would continue to produce electrical energy for extended periods of time, even with the fusion reaction totally shut off. (Arguably thousands of years.....)
Production of carbon isotopes intrinsically within the catalyst layer would actively regenerate damage to the nanostructures of the cathode, which normally plagues betavoltaic devices.
The high energy nature would help to ensure tight ring structures like fullerene cages and the like.
Unknowns:
Ideal hardness and energy level of harvested neutronic emissions for ideal C14 creation in the cataylst. Reason: Fucking paywalls.
Ideal thickness of catalyst layer for optimal absorbtion. Reason: Fucking paywalls.
Fission is not something the free market will invest in because the fact that were still running 40yr old reactor designs, restricted from fuel reprocessing, and stuck using expensive and rare U235, in addition to all the bureaucracy needed to install a new plant, means that by the time you get the thing built, it will be several decades before you recoup its cost, at which time it's nearing its end of life and will need to be replaced.
Original poster here. I'm an oceanographer -- a physicist, not an ocean engineer, but I've talked with enough marine engineers to know about the issues. Designing instruments that operate unattended for long periods of time in the ocean without getting covered with barnacles, slime, worms, algae, and all manner of crap is one of the big unsolved problems in our field. Our best solution to the problem is to minimize the number of moving parts, and to keep most of the equipment well below the photic zone (the sunlit shallows where most of the life hangs out). Neither of these is possible for a hydrokinetic marine turbine.
(Random anecdote: another problem we have is that devices that carry electric current tend to get attacked by sharks, which have delicate electrosensory organs, so cables need special anti-shark armor.)
Another commenter mentioned corrosion: that's fairly easy to deal with using a sacrificial anode (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_anode). But biofouling is a lot harder to deal with. I'm willing to believe that the designers of this system have a solution, but only after they've successfully operated a turbine for several years without problems.
3.2 megawatts in 2 years? Great job, guys. In 200 years you might be able to replace a coal plant.
Nonsense. One should always be investing, even when in debt. If I'm broke, you can bet your ass that I'll borrow money to travel to job interviews. Austerity makes for good sound bites, but in practice it's a disaster.
Call it investing in the future. Not all investments work out but you never know unless you try.
Once you have suburbia, the better method is distributed power generation via solar panels and vertical wind turbines http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertical_axis_wind_turbine (take up less space, spin slower ie less of bird threat and quieter).
Rather than subsidising, better to buy out patents and offer them patent free (when locally manufactured). Promote development of lower cost production techniques. Most importantly promote open free of patent encumbrances (for local production) to accelerate development.
With suburbia already covering thousands of square kilometres, getting those roofs producing energy makes more sense, especially when consumers themselves would pay all of or a substantial portion of the capital costs, perhaps even very low interest loans to accelerate the uptake.
So solar panel roofs with vertical axis wind turbines distributed along the ridges, makes a lot more sense.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I think you're right, the $240 billion is probably and estimate of the total cost and may be on the high side depending on a lot of factors. But you can't tell me that the total cost of Fukushima is not going to be higher than the $375 million limit of private liability in the Price-Anderson Act and no doubt several multiples of that.
No private insurance company is willing to take on the potential liability of a nuclear plant without government guarantees to back them up.
I find in unconscionable that we are doing this with a deficit as large as ours. Exploring such things when you're in the black is one thing; there will be no return on these funds.
Are you trolling? Basic research should always continue. We won't be able to solve our problems until we learn how, and the way to do that is ... research. One cannot reasonably expect all lines of research to pay off: most don't. But the ones that do produce great rewards, and history has demonstrated, very clearly, that in the long run we've always been better off making an investment in knowledge. To not do so is shooting ourselves squarely in the foot, and selling ourselves short into the bargain.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
It should be noted that your so-called "private taxes" differ from real taxes in one significant way - the energy monopolies can't throw you in jail for not paying them.
Though, I'm curious - do you actually believe that the people who manufacture the hardware you'll be using for your point-of-use energy generation won't be making a profit when they sell them to you?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"