http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2008/2008-08-02-01.asp

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts, August 2, 2008 (ENS) - Within 10 years,
homeowners could power their homes in daylight with solar photovoltaic
cells, while using excess solar energy to produce hydrogen and oxygen
from water to power a household fuel cell. If the new process
developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology finds
acceptance in the marketplace, electricity-by-wire from a central
source could be a thing of the past.

"This is the nirvana of what we've been talking about for years," said
MIT's Daniel Nocera, senior author of a paper describing the simple,
inexpensive, and efficient process for storing solar energy in the
July 31 issue of the journal "Science."

"Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can
seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon," Nocera said.

Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because
storing extra solar energy for later use is expensive and inefficient.
But Nocera and his team of researchers have hit upon an elegant solution.

Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, Nocera and Matthew
Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera's lab, have developed a new
process that will allow the Sun's energy to be used to split water
into hydrogen and oxygen gases.

Later, the oxygen and hydrogen can be recombined inside a fuel cell,
creating carbon-free electricity to power buildings, homes or electric
cars - day or night.

The key component in the new process is a new catalyst that produces
oxygen gas from water - another catalyst produces valuable hydrogen gas.

The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode,
placed in water.

When electricity from a photovoltaic cell, a wind turbine or any other
source runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate form a
thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced.

Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce
hydrogen gas from water, the system can duplicate the water splitting
reaction that occurs in plants during photosynthesis.

The new catalyst works at room temperature, in neutral pH water, and
is easy to set up, Nocera said. "That's why I know this is going to
work. It's so easy to implement," he said.

Sunlight has the greatest potential of any power source to solve the
world's energy problems, said Nocera. In one hour, enough sunlight
strikes the Earth to provide the entire planet's energy needs for one
year.

James Barber, a leader in the study of photosynthesis who was not
involved in this research, called the discovery by Nocera and Kanan a
"giant leap" toward generating clean, carbon-free energy on a massive
scale.

"This is a major discovery with enormous implications for the future
prosperity of humankind," said Barber, the Ernst Chain Professor of
Biochemistry at Imperial College London. "The importance of their
discovery cannot be overstated since it opens up the door for
developing new technologies for energy production thus reducing our
dependence for fossil fuels and addressing the global climate change
problem."

Currently available electrolyzers, which split water with electricity
and are often used industrially, are not suited for artificial
photosynthesis because they are very expensive and require an
environment that has little to do with the conditions under which
photosynthesis operates.

More engineering work needs to be done to integrate the new scientific
discovery into existing photovoltaic systems, but Nocera said he is
confident that such systems will become a reality.

"This is just the beginning," said Nocera, principal investigator for
the Solar Revolution Project funded by the Chesonis Family Foundation
and co-Director of the Eni-MIT Solar Frontiers Center. "The scientific
community is really going to run with this."

The project is part of the MIT Energy Initiative, a program designed
to help transform the global energy system to meet the needs of the
future and to help build a bridge to that future by improving today's
energy systems.

MITEI Director Ernest Moniz said, "This discovery in the Nocera lab
demonstrates that moving up the transformation of our energy supply
system to one based on renewables will depend heavily on frontier
basic science."

This project was funded by the National Science Foundation and by the
Chesonis Family Foundation, which gave MIT $10 million this spring to
launch the Solar Revolution Project, with a goal to make the large
scale deployment of solar energy within 10 years.

Copyright Environment News Service (ENS) 2008. All rights reserved.
--------------------------------------------------------------

Anger at police raid on green camp ahead of coal protest

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/aug/04/kingsnorthclimatecamp.climatec\
hange
[quote]Green MEP Carolyn Lucas, who is attending the week-long event,
said police had confiscated hundreds of items including disabled
access ramps, board games and fire safety equipment.

"The police seem to be trying to stop Kingsnorth climate camp going
ahead and if this is the intention it is illegal and I will be drawing
it to the attention of the European Commission as well as the UK
authorities," she said.[/quote]
[quote]The event is being held at the proposed site of the UK's first
new coal-fired power station in 30 years at Kingsnorth in Kent.[/quote]
-------------------------------------------------------------

The WMD That Really Should Be Worrying Us

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-the-wm\
d-that-really-should-be-worrying-us-884253.html
[quote]The oceans are the greatest carbon sink we have. They have
inhaled a third of the carbon dioxide pumped by us into the atmosphere
and buried it on the ocean floor. But there is a price. When CO2
combines with water, it creates a fizzy carbonic acid. You taste this
acid on your tongue every day in your can of Coke. The more carbon the
ocean soaks up, the more acid it produces. Since the start of the
Industrial Revolution, the acidity of the seas has soared by 30
percent, and by the end of my life, it will have increased by 150
percent – unless we reverse course fast. "A change of that magnitude
is more than we have seen in 20 million years," says Richard Feely of
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle.

Turning the seas acidic sets off a series of disasters, only some of
which can be predicted in advance. Disaster one: The collapse of the
oceanic food chain. At the turn of the century, the US, Japanese and
German governments were so impressed by the capacity of the oceans to
mop up CO2 that they proposed compressing emissions from power plants
and pumping the goo into the sea. So a series of tank-experiments were
set up to see what would happen. Once the water became strongly
acidic, the shells of dozens of sea creatures – from sea urchins to
molluscs – simply dissolved, and they died. The food chain collapsed;
almost everything else in the experiment died too.

One of the creatures that is killed by acidity is the pteropod, a tiny
little sea snail. That doesn't sound like a big deal – until you
realise pteropods are the major food source for salmon, herring, cod
and pollack. If they die, so does the staple food of hundreds of
millions of humans. So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Disaster two: the death of coral. Acidic oceans dissolve coral like a
fizzing paracetamol in a glass. So the coral reefs – the rainforests
of the ocean, home to a quarter of all sea life – are dying at a rate
that has staggered the scientists who study them. And the Reefer
Madness gets worse: atolls like the Maldives and Tuvalu have
foundations made of coral, so they will dissolve and collapse, if
rising sea levels don't get them first.

Disaster three: the seas will lose their ability to soak up carbon
dioxide. The creatures that currently "eat" carbon dioxide and sink to
the bottom of the ocean – shelled plankton – are killed by acidity.
The result? A sharp acceleration in global warming up here. There is
even a fear the vast amounts of methane stored in the oceans will be
destabilised and rise to the surface. The last time this happened, 55
million years ago, it caused warming so rapid most life on earth died.
Think of it as the fart at the end of the world. That's why the
biological oceanographer Professor David Hutchins says: "Frankly,
ocean acidification is apocalyptic in its impact." [/quote]
---------------------------------------------------------

Weapons Plutonium Fuel Test Fails

Nuclear Fuel Test Failure Should Trigger Suspension of Weapon-Grade
Plutonium Fuel Use, Groups Say
Hazardous Fuel Behavior Another Setback For Troubled Energy Department
Program, Has Implications for Other Reactors

http://www.commondreams.org/news2008/0804-01.htm
http://www.ucsusa.org/
http://www.foe.org/

WASHINGTON - August 4 - Citing the recent failure of an experimental
plutonium fuel assembly test at a South Carolina nuclear plant, two
watchdog groups today called on the Department of Energy (DOE) to
suspend a risky, multibillion dollar program that would use 37 tons of
surplus nuclear weapons plutonium for U.S. nuclear reactor fuel.

Friends of the Earth (FOE) and the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS)
discovered that the test, scheduled to run for four-and-a-half years
to demonstrate the safety of mixed-oxide (or MOX) fuel in Duke
Energy's Catawba nuclear reactor, had to be aborted after only three
years. The fuel assemblies, produced by the French state-owned company
AREVA, grew abnormally long in the reactor. This excessive growth is a
safety hazard, the groups said, because it can deform and damage the
MOX fuel. Duke Energy informed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)
about the aborted test in a June 10 report.

"The failure of the plutonium fuel experiment is another major setback
for the MOX program, and will further increase the already
considerable cost overruns, delays and risks," said Tom Clements,
FOE's Southeastern Nuclear Campaign coordinator, who is based in
Columbia, South Carolina. "Congress needs to pull the plug before even
more taxpayer money is wasted."

"DOE should not cut corners in safety testing," said UCS Senior Staff
Scientist Edwin Lyman. "To go forward with MOX now, AREVA would have
to redesign the MOX fuel, and Duke would have to repeat the entire
experiment, delaying the testing program by at least eight years. DOE
should instead dispose of the plutonium directly by mixing it with
radioactive waste and encasing it in glass, which would be safer and
cheaper than continuing the MOX program."

Lyman further noted that the French facility where AREVA produced the
MOX fuel from U.S. weapons plutonium is now closed, potentially
leaving the DOE without a test fuel supplier.

The abnormal fuel assembly growth that terminated the MOX experiment
has broader safety implications. The NRC has allowed dozens of AREVA
uranium fuel assemblies with the same flaw to remain in other U.S.
reactors, including Three Mile Island-1 in Pennsylvania, Davis-Besse
in Ohio, Oconee in South Carolina, and Crystal River in Florida. AREVA
told the NRC in April that it has not as yet determined the cause of
the problem, although it may be related to an experimental alloy known
as "M5" AREVA uses in the "guide tubes" where the control rods that
shut down the reactor are inserted. Whatever the cause, the problem
indicates that the NRC's licensing process for new fuels is
inadequate, the groups said.

For a brief UCS-FOE backgrounder on the MOX test, go to
www.ucsusa.org/MOX.

For Duke's June 10, 2008 report to the NRC, go to the NRC's ADAMS
digital library. Search for "ML081650181" at
www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/adams/web-based.html.

For an April 2008 AREVA presentation that discusses the abnormal fuel
assembly growth problem, go to NRC's ADAMS digital library and search
for "ML081300390."

###

Founded in 1969, the Union of Concerned Scientists is the leading
science-based nonprofit organization working for a healthy environment
and a safer world. The organization is headquartered in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, and also has offices in Berkeley, Chicago and
Washington, D.C. For more information, go to www.ucsusa.org.

Friends of the Earth (www.foe.org ) is the U.S. voice of the world's
largest grassroots environmental network, with member groups in 70
countries. Since 1969, Friends of the Earth has been at the forefront
of high-profile efforts to create a more healthy, just world.