nuclear

INDIAN WELLS, Calif.--Nuclear fusion will move from the lab to reality in a few years, a noted venture capitalist says.

"Within five years, large companies will start to think about building fusion reactors," Wal van Lierop, CEO of Chrysalix Energy Venture Capital, said in an interview at the Clean Tech Investor Summit taking place here this week. In three to four years, scientists will demonstrate results that show that fusion has a 60 percent chance of success, he said.

If van Lierop were some crazy guy off the street with an old stack of Omni magazines, you … Read more

We could put a bigger dent in greenhouse gases, says Patrick Moore, if it weren't for environmentalists.

Expanding the use of nuclear power would let the U.S. and other nations reduce dependence on coal, one of the biggest producers of carbon dioxide and other pollutants (and industrial accidents). Nuclear plants emit virtually no greenhouse gases, and more plants would also give the green light to the electric car industry.

"They (environmentalists) are the ones who are screaming that the sky is falling and that the climate catastrophe is coming and it's going to be global and … Read more

I enjoy reading the personal blogs of Scott Adams (the creator of Dilbert) and John Dvorak (PC Magazine columnist and host of Cranky Geeks), but I don't expect to learn anything there. The entertainment is value enough.

Today, however, I was surprised to see these two gentlemen linking to the same story on Next Energy News covering Toshiba's announcement of a "200 kilowatt" nuclear reactor only "20 feet by 6 feet" in size. Such a reactor could be installed in a garage-sized building and shared among the houses on just one residential block, the … Read more

Oil officials see limit looming on production. It's not an oil peak; it's an oil plateau. The Wall Street Journal reports on impending restrictions on oil extraction. Now both oil industry skeptics and execs are seeing limits. Recently, Don Paul, CTO of Chevron (not the presidential candidate), told us that the world has consumed 1.1 trillion barrels of oil and will go to 1.5 trillion by 2012. The world only had 3 trillion barrels to begin with.

A deeply green city confronts its energy needs and nuclear worries. The New York Times reports on the struggle … Read more

Nuclear power plants have a lot of excess heat, so why not use that heat to make fresh water?

That's the idea of S.S. Verma, with the Department of Physics at the Sont Longowal Institute in Punjab, India. If located offshore near large population centers, the plants could provide cheap electricity as well as fresh water to megacities like Mumbai.

Some companies are already looking at developing desalination platforms that can be attached to nuclear plants, he said, according to the Indo-Asian News Service (via Earthtimes). (Verma's complete paper can be found here.)

The general and very … Read more

With global interest in nuclear power rising, Toshiba said on Monday that it will construct a new nuclear power engineering facility for designing and testing technology for nuclear plants at the Isogo Nuclear Engineering Center (IEC) in Yokohama, Japan.

After the new facility is built, Toshiba will employ around 3,000 people at IEC.

Construction will start in February 2008, and the facility is scheduled to be complete by March 2009 or earlier. The facility will be able to withstand a 6.8 quake. The builders will also insert anti-liquefaction measures to keep the facility from sinking during a quake. … Read more

The government will spend $26 million on high-end computers to cut costs and standardize systems among the three U.S. labs charged with ensuring the safety and reliability of the nation's aging nuclear stockpile.

The Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) awarded the multimillion-dollar contract to Milpitas, Calif.-based Appro to supply Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories with 438 teraflop high-performance computing clusters based on the Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor. To date, each of these labs had used its own combination of computer systems, which were not always compatible with the others.

"This … Read more

Canada's General Fusion has received $1.2 million in venture funding to conduct further research on its fusion reactors, according to VentureWire.

The company's ultimate plan is to build small fusion reactors that can produce around 100 megawatts of power. The plants would cost around $50 million. That could allow the company to generate electricity at about 4 cents per kilowatt hour, relatively low. (By contrast, roughly $250 million was spent on a 64-megawatt solar thermal plant in Las Vegas recently.)

General Fusion has adopted the Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF) model. In this scenario, an electric current is … Read more

The explosion in clean tech investing has been a boon to material scientists and engineers from the semiconductor industry. Sources at Intel tell me that many of them have seen co-workers depart for solar start-ups or companies working on new types of batteries.

But software experts shouldn't feel left out, notes Warren Weiss, a general partner at venture capital firm Foundation Partners in a stopover at the firm's offices last week (They are right next to Sunset Magazine in Menlo Park, Calif.). In clean tech, one of the bigger opportunities, he says, is with companies that want to … Read more