We came across this article on the BBC News web-site week before last. It is about a new technology under research that is very interesting, and potentially, could go a long way, if developed fully, to meeting much of the World's energy needs. Take a look, then we'll give you our view on this interesting research.
23 December 2010 Last updated at 14:11 ET
New solar fuel machine 'mimics plant life'
In the prototype, sunlight heats a ceria cylinder which breaks down water or carbon dioxide
A prototype solar device has been unveiled which mimics plant life, turning the Sun's energy into fuel.
The machine uses the Sun's rays and a metal oxide called ceria to break down carbon dioxide or water into fuels which can be stored and transported.
Conventional photovoltaic panels must use the electricity they generate in situ, and cannot deliver power at night. Details are published in the journal Science.
The prototype, which was devised by researchers in the US and Switzerland, uses a quartz window and cavity to concentrate sunlight into a cylinder lined with cerium oxide, also known as ceria.
Ceria has a natural propensity to exhale oxygen as it heats up and inhale it as it cools down.
If as in the prototype, carbon dioxide and/or water are pumped into the vessel, the ceria will rapidly strip the oxygen from them as it cools, creating hydrogen and/or carbon monoxide.
Hydrogen produced could be used to fuel hydrogen fuel cells in cars, for example, while a combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide can be used to create "syngas" for fuel. It is this harnessing of ceria's properties in the solar reactor which represents the major breakthrough, say the inventors of the device. They also say the metal is readily available, being the most abundant of the "rare-earth" metals. Methane can be produced using the same machine, they say.
The prototype is grossly inefficient, the fuel created harnessing only between 0.7% and 0.8% of the solar energy taken into the vessel. Most of the energy is lost through heat loss through the reactor's wall or through the re-radiation of sunlight back through the device's aperture. But the researchers are confident that efficiency rates of up to 19% can be achieved through better insulation and smaller apertures. Such efficiency rates, they say, could make for a viable commercial device.
"The chemistry of the material is really well suited to this process," says Professor Sossina Haile of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). "This is the first demonstration of doing the full shebang, running it under (light) photons in a reactor." She says the reactor could be used to create transportation fuels or be adopted in large-scale energy plants, where solar-sourced power could be available throughout the day and night. However, she admits the fate of this and other devices in development is tied to whether states adopt a low-carbon policy. "It's very much tied to policy. If we had a carbon policy, something like this would move forward a lot more quickly," she told the BBC. It has been suggested that the device mimics plants, which also use carbon dioxide, water and sunlight to create energy as part of the process of photosynthesis. But Professor Haile thinks the analogy is over-simplistic.
"Yes, the reactor takes in sunlight, we take in carbon dioxide and water and we produce a chemical compound, so in the most generic sense there are these similarities, but I think that's pretty much where the analogy ends."
The PS10 solar tower plant near Seville, Spain. Mirrors concentrate the sun's power on to a central tower, driving a steam turbineDaniel Davies, chief technology officer at the British photovoltaic company Solar Century, said the research was "very exciting". "I guess the question is where you locate it - would you put your solar collector on a roof or would it be better off as a big industrial concern in the Sahara and then shipping the liquid fuel?" he said.
Solar technology is moving forward apace but the overriding challenges remain ones of efficiency, economy and storage.
New-generation "solar tower" plants have been built in Spain and the United States which use an array of mirrors to concentrate sunlight onto tower-mounted receivers which drive steam turbines.A new Spanish project will use molten salts to store heat from the Sun for up to 15 hours, so that the plant could potentially operate through the night.
This is really exciting. Think about it, CO2, the greenhouse gas pollutant that is building up inexorably in our atmosphere, from fossil-fuel combustion, and that is poised to reach 550-600 ppm concentration by mid-century (it is now about 392ppm), could actually be converted with sunlight, back into fuel. A cycle that would add no net CO2 into the atmospheric system, if developed and implemented on an emergency, mass scale, world-wide. The 550-600 ppm CO2 concentration expected to be reached in mid-century, is one not seen by humanity, ever. Global climate-change modeling suggests world-wide average temperature increases of 3-5C with this. Which may not seem cause for alarm, but we've already had about a 1C increase since 1900. And we've documented what has, and is occurring here. The Arctic Ocean summer-ice shrinkage, which is happening far faster than modeling had been suggesting. Increasing forest-fire severity and longer fire season duration in Australia, North America, and Russia/Siberia. A stunning 40 percent loss in the production of phytoplankton in the oceans, since 1950, which is the base of the marine food chain, due to warmer seawater. Droughts and floods on every continent, more frequent, and more severe.
So do we think this research will receive the funding and emphasis it deserves, by the US, and other developed countries? Unfortunately, no. Because we know who really dictates policy to the US and to different extents, the other industrialised countries.
Which is to say, producing hydrogen, or natural gas this way, would not be as profitable, as oil extraction/use currently is, for the large corporations. So, there will have to be concerted pressure on politicians by the populace in the US and all the other industrialised nations, to shift resources and attention to alternative energy research and development, before global sea-level rises of up to ten metres, from Greenland, and northern Canadian island rapid ice sheet melting occurs. How much longer do we have, before this could happen? 30-40 years, at best.
The US defense budget is now almost a trillion dollars annually, after factoring in the costs of the Iraqi and Afghani occupations. More than all the rest of the World combined, and at least six or more times that of China, the next biggest spender. And what is there to show for it?
You aren't seeing these kind of images on the US corporate media, but this is what is occurring, and has been, in Iraq and Afghanistan, on a daily basis, for many years now. Afghanistani military operations have now gone on longer than any other US war? Why?The UN has estimated that for 47 billion USD, all the people in the World, who need clean water, could be provided it. Think about that. One-twentieth of the annual US defense/offense outlay. Which do you think would bring greater global good-will and safety?
"...A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." (4 April, 1967)
But it is corporate profit that drives our military spending, operations, and governmental policy, in general. Which is why the new solar technology we just presented, will have a tough time expanding, unless big changes occur in our system of government. We'll leave it to you to judge for yourselves, about where the US is, as a nation, spiritually speaking, according to MLK's guidelines.
THE BAD WITH THE GOOD
We often scan the BBC News web-site, just for quick updates on fast-moving global events, such as natural disasters, political upheaval, etc.. The A.P.R. understands that although it is from a European country, and hence, less likely to be corrupted by the usual US corporate media's sports/celebrity/fluff bread-and-circus pulp for the masses, it still is an entity of the U.K. government. And hence, not to be fully trusted for some categories of news and events. But when we came across this, yesterday, we were appalled! This is blatant propaganda, and for us, totally untrustworthy. So much so, we are even going to seek a second opinion on this, more on that to come, in the weeks ahead. But for now, give this a look, supposed Peruvian Shamans, in a ceremony.
There are so many things wrong with this, it's hard to know where to begin. Firstly, any shamanic practitioner world-wide, who knew the truth about Wiki-leaks exposes of how the global elite works, and it's courageous head, Julian Assange's travails as he faces possible extradition, to the US, followed by torture and murder or a long prison sentence, would never behave in this way.
Second, most shamanic practitioners, world-wide, don't engage in behaviours like that anyway, cursing and demonising actual people. They are healers, who access alternate levels of reality to gain information and energy to heal their people, and bring beneficial things like rains for the crops, or locations of animals to hunt for their food supply.
It's frankly disgusting, that these people were put up this way, probably by the Peruvian government, with some help from the US/UK. To soften up the populaces of both these countries, for Julian Assange's likely deportation and torture.
As Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, in the Reagan Administration, astutely puts it:
"Today the press is a propaganda ministry for the government. Any member who departs from his duty to lie and spin the news is expelled from the fraternity. A public increasingly unemployed, broke and homeless is told that they have vast enemies plotting to destroy them in the absence of annual trillion dollar expenditures for the military/security complex, wars lasting decades, no-fly lists, unlimited spying and collecting of dossiers on citizens supplemented by neighbors reporting on neighbors, full body scanners at airports, shopping centers, metro and train stations, traffic checks, and the equivalence of treason with the uttering of a truth.
Two years ago when he came into office President Obama admitted that no one knew what the military mission was in Afghanistan, including the president himself, but that he would find a mission and define it. On his recent trip to Afghanistan, Obama came up with the mission: to make the families of the troops safe in America, his version of Bush’s “we have to kill them over there before they kill us over here.”
No one snorted with derision or even mildly giggled. Neither the New York Times nor Fox News dared to wonder if perhaps, maybe, murdering and displacing large numbers of Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen and US support for Israel’s similar treatment of Lebanese and Palestinians might be creating a hostile environment that could breed terrorists. If there still is such a thing as the Newspaper Publishers Association, its members are incapable of such an unpatriotic thought.
Today no one believes that our country’s success depends on an informed public and a free press. America’s success depends on its financial and military hegemony over the world. Any information inconsistent with the indispensable people’s god-given right to dominate the world must be suppressed and the messenger discredited and destroyed.
