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dpack

Joined: 02 Jul 2005
Posts: 46235
Location: yes

Posted: Mon May 10, 21 10:22 am Post subject: Energy via elements
thorium umm some issues with it the one about copper has some interesting stuff about leccy the gold one is interesting as well.

tahir

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 45674
Location: Essex

Posted: Mon May 10, 21 10:44 am Post subject:
Very good series, thorium is definitely worth exploring but you never know, fusion might happen soon! There are several firms in the UK and US that reckon they'll have working reactors by the 2030s. Solar power is becoming more efficient too, hyprid silicon/perovskite cells push efficiency up by almost 15% and perovskites are at a very early stage of development.

jema
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 28238
Location: escaped from Swindon

Posted: Mon May 10, 21 1:08 pm Post subject:

tahir wrote:

Very good series, thorium is definitely worth exploring but you never know, fusion might happen soon! There are several firms in the UK and US that reckon they'll have working reactors by the 2030s. Solar power is becoming more efficient too, hyprid silicon/perovskite cells push efficiency up by almost 15% and perovskites are at a very early stage of development.

Fusion seems to have gone from being 30 years away in the 1970's to under 20 years in the 2020's, I'm not holding my breath yet.

tahir

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 45674
Location: Essex

Posted: Mon May 10, 21 2:00 pm Post subject:
In the 70s they were all national or international state funded programmes, there are now several private companies in the field that I guess are under more pressure to deliver. Lets see.

dpack

Joined: 02 Jul 2005
Posts: 46235
Location: yes

Posted: Mon May 10, 21 3:22 pm Post subject:

the physics of fusion is easy, the engineering to boil a kettle rather than make a crater in a fraction of a second very inefficiently is a bit tricky

it can be done, so far it is a few decades in the future

the reactors and/or bangy stuff is a doddle compared to keeping a plasma stable and contained and making more energy than that requires for a useful continuous energy source

iirc a few seconds at lab scale(big lab but not even a few solar panels) of that is best so far

the thing i like with the thorium thing is that if there is a load of nasty carp lying around(500 tons pu is a low estimate of the sellafield stock) it can be used for energy and made safer, if it dont go bang it is a start
ps i know the pu is probably as oxide or similar although maybe not as a lot of that was metallic from the fast breeder experiments as well as assorted mil and civ stocks and still might be
it would not go bang without a bit of work, but knock it down to short half life stuff in a thorium reactor and boil a kettle for leccy has some merit over storing it for a few million years, half life does not mean safe after Hf, just less horrible until half of half of etc is safer

any sort of fission reactor has issues, some more than others, owt that eats plutonium is maybe ok til the Pu runs out, making more is daft.
might buy time to get a fusion kettle working

jema
Downsizer Moderator

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 28238
Location: escaped from Swindon

Posted: Mon May 10, 21 6:22 pm Post subject:

tahir wrote:

In the 70s they were all national or international state funded programmes, there are now several private companies in the field that I guess are under more pressure to deliver.

Lets see.

The reports I have read, certainly put a more positive spin on things, but then that reminds me of Mandy Rice-Davies!

Mistress Rose

Joined: 21 Jul 2011
Posts: 15985

Posted: Tue May 11, 21 7:58 am Post subject:

In the early 1990s someone claimed to have managed a fusion reactor on the lab bench. As nothing more was heard of it, I assume it wasn't fusion but some other reaction. I didn't know the person, but met someone on a course who did, and they said the claimant was a good experimenter, so probably mistaken reaction. Not heard anything of any successful work since.

I understand some of the most recent work on solar cells is showing very promising conversion rates; up to 20% with the perovskite ones I think. The major thing with solar or any other power form is to use easily available materials, not ones that are rare or scarce.

dpack

Joined: 02 Jul 2005
Posts: 46235
Location: yes

Posted: Tue May 11, 21 8:42 am Post subject:

afaik PV development is going well, cheaper , better and lower inputs

re the cold fusion thing from the 90's, nobody could replicate the results

i conclude they were mistaken or experienced a "strange event" and it has not developed further

re semi cold the ignition lab at livermore did seem to get quite a response when they used many huge lasers and some optics to put a couple of states worth of energy onto a speck of target

there was a video of that making the sealed lab go a funny shade of purple before the cameras failed

re the hot plasma route it is the engineering that needs sorting

tahir

Joined: 28 Oct 2004
Posts: 45674
Location: Essex

Posted: Tue May 11, 21 1:09 pm Post subject:
Perovskite/silicon cells are at around 28% now

Mistress Rose

Joined: 21 Jul 2011
Posts: 15985

Posted: Wed May 12, 21 6:38 am Post subject:
Knew it was 20 somthing %. Was reading about a new one the other day in Chemistry World, but too tired to remember properly.

dpack

Joined: 02 Jul 2005
Posts: 46235
Location: yes

Posted: Wed May 12, 21 8:49 am Post subject:
pv, gravity and water, wind, geo if you got it storage for peak and baseline need different kit but both are available use less more efficiently

dpack

Joined: 02 Jul 2005
Posts: 46235
Location: yes

Posted: Sun May 16, 21 6:52 am Post subject:
mineral supplies different materials but 300 times less mass needed for renewable vs fossil does make sense even if it is harder to find.

Mistress Rose

Joined: 21 Jul 2011
Posts: 15985

Posted: Sun May 16, 21 8:38 am Post subject:
The requirement for less common materials could well be a problem. There is development to use alternatives, but reuse is a better bet if at all possible. I must admit it is not a thing I have looked into in detail, but the reuse of the materials from batteries is an obvious one.

Ty Gwyn

Joined: 22 Sep 2010
Posts: 4613
Location: Lampeter

Posted: Sun May 16, 21 12:14 pm Post subject:
And the outlook is much higher electricity charges.

Ty Gwyn

Joined: 22 Sep 2010
Posts: 4613
Location: Lampeter

Posted: Sun Jul 23, 23 11:12 am Post subject:

Does`nt this sound like fracking?

Professor Gawen Jenkin, a Cornish native who heads Leicester University’s Centre for Sustainable Resource Extraction, said new green solvents – based on materials including vitamin B4 – offer a more sustainable way of extracting minerals and mining companies are even seeking a “holy grail” of being able to pump state-of-the-art liquid solutions into seams to dissolve and remove metals without the need for direct mining.

He said: “There is a strong moral case for a country like the UK to take on some of the burden of producing the huge resources that we need for the green revolution. If done well, mining could benefit the national and local economies and we would not be off-shoring our carbon footprint. Mining technology is very different from the last time we were extracting large amounts of minerals in Britain 150 or 200 years ago.”

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