Nuclear Reactor Wall Charts [Flickr via BibliOdyssey]

Hastings Borough Council in East Sussex has announced that it is investing in technology to reclaim some of the energy lost in the cremation process. Although the technology is still in its proving stages, the crematorium hopes to have new generators that will capture and reuse the excess heat created by the cremation process to heat and eventually power the facility.

The spokespeople say it's still several steps away from actually using human bodies as fuel; the energy will come from the machines themselves rather than the bodies. But given how much fuel crematoria consume, it seems plausible that bodies could someday help fuel their own cremation process.

Crematorium to use burning bodies to generate electricity [Telegraph via Xenophilia]

Portuguese architectural firms Atelier Data and Moov designed Forwarding Dallas for the Re:Vision Dallas competition, which solicited sustainable designs to construct on a city block in downtown Dallas. Forwarding Dallas took the top prize, which means it will actually be built, with construction starting in early 2011.

The design is inspired by natural hills, with different portions of the hills designated for different uses. The valleys are filled with public green spaces; vegetation, including food, will be grown on the step-filled slopes, and the peaks are topped with solar panels and wind turbines. The plan is for the community to be completely self-powered, and it even features a rainwater collection and storage facility.

But the community — which will include apartments, a gymnasium, a cafe, a daycare, and exhibition space — isn't merely sustainable; it's also a practical, cost-effective design. The construction is completely prefabricated and streamlined for rapid construction. The purpose of projects like Re:Vision Dallas is to provide cities with a model for off-the-grid architecture that's quickly realized and doesn't break the bank.

Dallas sprouts green city block downtown [Re:Vision Dallas via Inhabitat]

Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland of Kansas State University propose a way to use black holes as fuel that is entirely within the bounds of physics and technology as we know them, but would take phenomenal amount of engineering.

The crux of their idea involves using using a laser to form a micro black hole, which could be used as an energy source. This would be a Schwarzschild, or non-rotating, black hole which outputs Hawking Radiation, and the smaller the black hole, the more energetic.

Of course, making a black hole isn't the world's most easy undertaking. It takes a huge amount of power to build one in the first place. To make one of these mini black holes, Crane and Westmoreland propose a 370km2 solar panel, at an orbit one million km from the surface of the sun, which, if perfectly efficient, would gather enough energy per year to make one black hole. This power would be fed to a spherically converging gamma laser, with a lasing mass of around 10^9 tonnes. However, after you make a few black holes, you can use them as a power source to make more.

According to the authors, a black hole to be used in space travel needs to meet five criteria:

1. has a long enough lifespan to be useful,
2. is powerful enough to accelerate itself up to a reasonable fraction of the speed of light in a reasonable amount of time,
3. is small enough that we can access the energy to make it,
4. is large enough that we can focus the energy to make it,
5. has mass comparable to a starship.

Fortunately, black holes have a sweet spot in terms of size, power and lifespan which is almost ideal. If you take a trip to Alpha Centauri, with an acceleration of 1g to the half way point, and then decelerate at 1g for the remainder of the journey, the trip takes a relativistic 3.5 years. A black hole that would survive the entire trip would have a radius of 0.9 attometers, would have a mass of 606,000 tonnes, and a power output of 160 petawatts. The lifespan of the black hole could be extended by feeding it mass, too.

For longer trips, you could use larger but weaker holes, and smaller and more powerful ones for short trips.

Getting the black hole to act as a power source also requires a bit of work. One potential method involves placing the hole at the focal point of a parabolic reflector attached to the ship, creating forward thrust. A slightly easier, but less efficient method would involve simply absorbing all the gamma radiation heading towards the fore of the ship, and let the rest shoot out the back to push you onwards.

Of course, there are potential problems with Crane and Westmoreland's ideas. According to Govind Menon, Professor of Physics at Troy University, most views on extracting energy from black holes involve using ones that rotate. "With non-rotating black holes, this is a very difficult thing...we typically look for energy almost exclusively from rotating black holes. Schwarzschild black holes do not radiate in an astrophysical, gamma ray burst point of view. It is not clear if Hawking radiation alone can power starships." Menon adds that extracting energy from black holes is highly problematic. "Given [this type] of black hole, it is not clear to me how someone would go about extracting energy."

Another issue is what to do with the black hole when it reaches the end of its life span, as they tend to explode. "Such an explosion is powerful by terrestrial standards, but not by astronomical standards", say Crane and Westmoreland, so it's merely a matter of dropping the black hole around 1 AU away from anything too important, and letting it detonate.

With a set of four machines: black hole generator, black hole drive, power plant, and a self perpetuating black hole powered black hole generator, the potential is enormous. As Crane and Westmoreland say:

A civilization equipped with our four machine tool set would be almost unimaginably energy rich. It could settle the galaxy at will.

Article available on ArXiv
Found via Next Big Future

Imagine what would happen if prices rose, say, to $300 a barrel. Or higher. Not only would it become too expensive to drive unless absolutely necessary, but food would become prohibitively expensive to transport, goods from China would be too expensive to ship, and plastics, which come from oil, would be unaffordable. The cold turkey after more than a century of cheap oil would be painful indeed. For developing countries it would be fatal – many could not afford energy at those prices.

The Guardian quotes the International Energy Agency as stating the world needs to find an extra 64 million barrels of oil per day by 2030 — or around six times Saudi Arabia's production capacity — to meet demand. But nobody knows where that oil is going to come from. [Guardian]

Why rabbits? The fuzzy critters have actually become a bit of a pest in Sweden; wild and stray pet rabbits alike have ravaged city parks in Stockholm, forcing hunters to think out the population. With all those bunny bodies piling up, it makes sense to put them to good use. So the bodies are shipped to Konvex, a company that turns animal and vegetable oils into automotive and heating oils. But even the reproductively prolific rabbits don't provide sufficient power, so Stockholm supplements their bunny-based power with other animal corpses, including cats and horses.

So does this mean human-derived fuels are next? As Scientific American notes, the jokes have been made. A group of activists called the Yes Men crashed a gas and oil industry luncheon, claiming to be representatives from Exxon Mobile. They then proceeded to deliver a presentation for a mock product called "Vivoleum," a fuel made from human bodies. The audience was reportedly less than amused.

Burning bunnies for biofuel? [Scientific American]

Imagine a 10-centimeter cube that weighs 130 tons and is more dense than the core of the sun. Ultra-dense deuterium is just that heavy. Here you can see the facility where chemists are experimenting with the material, which they have managed to create in microscopic amounts at the University of Gothenburg. Deuterium atoms are packed together so tightly that they create an "ultra-dense" material.

When that material is heated up with lasers, those atoms fuse together and release a tremendous amount of energy. Also, according to researcher Lief Holmlid:

We believe that we can design the deuterium fusion such that it produces only helium and hydrogen as its products, both of which are completely non-hazardous. It will not be necessary to deal with the highly radioactive tritium that is planned for use in other types of future fusion reactors, and this means that laser-driven nuclear fusion as we envisage it will be both more sustainable and less damaging to the environment than other methods that are being developed.

My main question is: How can this be a renewable energy source if you still need lots of energy to create the ultra-dense deuterium and power up those lasers?

Cool fact: Scientists believe ultra-dense deuterium is naturally occurring on Jupiter. Time to get those orbital mines in shape.

via University of Gothenberg

If only the Sunday funny pages were littered with art like this, just think how many budding eight-year-old scientists we could sucker into the environmental cause.

Comic: An Alternative, Alternative Energy [Popular Science]
Google.org Enhanced Geothermal Systems
The Future of Geothermal Energy (PDF)

Nam’s pump uses a wooden boardwalk, which he sees placed on major roads and other sources of heavy foot traffic. The kinetic energy from humans and animals stepping on the boardwalk can then be stored and used to power underground pumps, which bring water to the surface. The waterfall presents a dramatic effect, but the main purpose of the sculpture is to allow citizens to easily and efficiently collect water for drinking and farming, ensuring that they have a readily available source of safe water, and freeing up the time usually spent pumping water by hand.

The Human Pump will get a test drive as part of Urban Re:Vision, where it will debut as part of an effort to build a sustainable city block in the city of Dallas.

Human Pump [Re:Vision via Inhabitat]

Schwartz, who has consulted with oil companies as well as the SciFi Channel, is a master at creating plausible future scenarios for companies and government organizations trying to determine their long-term strategies. He pointed out that peak oil is difficult to determine realistically:

The peak oil people simply don't know what they're talking about, they don't know the facts . . . We really don't know how much oil there is in most of the oil reservoirs of the world. Oil reservoirs are complex geological structures, and most of the data is in private hands, or in state governments, and they are not particularly forthcoming about how much is there.

While his argument sounds like he's being an apologist for oil companies or businesses that want to ignore emissions limits, in fact he's taking a more radically green stance than many peak oil advocates. He's saying, essentially, that we may be nowhere near peak oil, and that we nevertheless need to act now to create greener technologies and foster alternative power sources. Peak oil should not be our argument against oil, he says. Rather, climate change should be:

We are not going to run out of oil before the issue of climate change drives change. It'll be costly oil. But it'll be climate change catastrophes [such as sudden, unexpected displacement of large numbers of people, and massive property damage], and more expensive oil, not the fact that we're running out of oil, that will drive change.

His point, though polemical and brash, is nevertheless a subtle one. He's basically saying that peak oil is a kind of rhetorical strategy. And it's doomed to fail, he thinks, because it's not based on truth. Or at least, not on a truth that can be easily proven.

Therefore, he's suggesting that we come up with a new motivating strategy for companies planning their long-term futures in terms of energy investment. Don't try to convince those companies to go green based on tenuous arguments about something unprovable like peak oil. Base it on science that has a more solid basis, such as the studies that demonstrate climate change is happening right now.

Photo by David McNew/Getty Images.

Peak Oil "Wrong," Says Schwartz [via Cleantech]

At first blush, a humpback's fins looks like a pretty shoddy design for an airfoil — its leading edge is knobby and gnarled-looking. But the knobs actually reduce drag over the fin, allowing it to provide lift like an airplane wing only better because it works at lower speeds and higher angles to the wind.

Fish has shown that humpback designed fan blades lower power consumption by up to 20 percent on industrial fans. Now he's running tests on an experimental wind farm in Canada to see how much more power he can generate using wind turbines with fin-shaped blades.

Source: WhalePower via Discovery News

As hot air rises from the base of the AVE it forms a vacuum, sucking in yet more air (which also has to be hot). The rising air also begins to rotate into that familiar and deadly funnel shape. Once up to speed, an AVE building would have a tornado extending miles into the sky, perhaps even altering local weather patterns and causing some extra precipitation.

The main issue is getting a reliable supply of hot air. Michaud says one of the best ways is to build an AVE next to an existing power plant and using the hot exhaust stream to power it. A solar thermal plant could work, too.

But new, innovative ways to renewably generate electricity are always going to have problems getting off the ground (pun, sorry). Especially when one of the world's largest consumers of energy, the United States won't even fund research into a clean-burning coal-fired power plant, or let solar energy companies build on public land.

Source: LiveScience

Yeah, it's something like this. Here you can see the Boxberg Power Plant, torching massive amounts of coal, chewing up the landscape, and shooting smoke into the atmosphere. Apparently these kinds of plants have been spun as a positive alternative to nuke power. I'd rather get electricity from nukes any day than power my computer with coal.

Images by Carsten Koall/Getty.

Unlike today's light water reactors, gen IV nuclear power plants like this futuristic one, in Japan, will be fast reactors that won't have any highly-radioactive Plutonium or Uranium waste to bury deep underground. Instead, these elements will be stripped out of the nuclear waste in a process called "partitioning," and reused. There will be some waste, of course, but it won't have a half-life of several hundred thousand years. Probably more like 1000. AFP/AFP/Getty Images

Here's a schematic for a sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor. Also, fast reactors don't produce products that can be weaponized. So countries using gen IV fast reactors, like this one (below) being built in Kalpakkam, India, won't have to worry that somebody might steal a byproduct and stick it in a bomb. Fun fact: experimental facilities like the Idaho National Laboratory in the US have been experimenting with fast reactor technology for over fifty years. Fast reactors were among the first designs tested for nuclear power, but were scrapped because they were too expensive. AP Photo M.Lakshman

The numbers you see are kilowatt hours used per year, and the money is amount spent. Red is for devices that stand by in passive mode, and blue is for ones standing by in active mode. Oops, I think I own all the ones that suck most. But I love my plasma screen electron-guzzler! Good magazine [via TreeHugger]