creative solutions for a sustainable world: 2017

Monday 13 November 2017

Thorium nuclear reactors are in the news after an announcement that Holland is starting to get into ther firld.
Read more here,
http://www.thoriumenergyworld.com/news/finally-worlds-first-tmsr-experiment-in-over-40-years-started
and an exerpt:

Competition
China, India and Indonesia are developing TMSRs of various kinds. Indonesia together with ThorCon want to skip the entire test reactor scaling up process and directly build a radiation-free full-scale reactor and test it to the maximum before loading it with fuel.

India has two TMSR types in the planning but doesn’t seem to prioritize construction since they are going for their AHWR utilizing thorium.

China has a streamlined TMSR effort with government support and funding. They take an intermediate step by developing and building a molten salt cooled pebble bed reactor, a technology which they are world leaders in, as a rather quick test reactor towards their TMSR prototype.

If the NRG loop experiment proves feasible, this has the potential to give Europe, showing up from nowhere, a major head-start in Thorium Molten Salt Reactor (TMSR) development further speeding up the race.

We would like to thank Sander and Ralph for their hard work making this important step in TMSR development a reality and for choosing us to publish this breaking news, thank you!
Gijs Zwartsenberg at the local Thorium organization (ThMSR.nl) did the interviews and deserves all the Dutch support you can give!

Saturday 11 November 2017

New chemistry proposed for low cost flow battery.

https://www.seeker.com/new-batteries-could-last-a-decade-with-minimal-upkeep-2261389684.html

The technology is good," said Shriram Santhanagopalan, a senior engineer at the Advanced Vehicles Group of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. He said he has been following Aziz's work for some time. However, it's "three to four times the size of a traditional lithium-ion battery size for the same amount of energy. It's just going to be a huge battery the size of your garage [rather] than your car."

It might be a year or two before the battery is ready for commercial testing, Aziz said. His team is still refining the ion membrane and tweaking the viologen and ferrocene molecules.

This research is the fourth in a series of papers published by SEAS on flow battery technology. "I can't really say this particular publication is groundbreaking," Aziz said. But of the whole body of research: "I think just about anyone would say this is groundbreaking."