Fission Fast! New Slogan for Nuclear Energy Revolution

Just as our industrial development was finding more and more ways to use energy to improve human health and prosperity, we found an fuel that contained two million times as much energy per unit mass as the hydrocarbons that had been powering that development.
http://theenergycollective.com/rodadams/191626/fission-fast-new-slogan

Obama Aims for Nuclear Breakthroughs

Two years ago, some thought that the nuclear energy had been leveled. But the industry today is picking up steam by getting construction licenses to build four new units and by getting government funding to develop smaller nuclear reactors.

http://theenergycollective.com/breakthroughinstitut/186876/obama-aims-

Mobile CPU chip maker ARM looking to supply chips for ultra-low-power servers

The Internet is sucking down electricity by the megawatt and all our gains from widespread communication could be lost to the energy and resource cost required to run the Internet.  We want to avoid cooking the planet (wide-spread surveys of the people say environmental issues are high on their mind) so it's best if the internet infrastructure were to be made of highly efficient machines.

Enter ARM and their ultra-low-energy-required CPU's.  ARM got its start building chips for small computers and really took off along with the cell phone boom.  Their CPU design has all sorts of goodness baked in to let cell phone operating systems keep power consumption low, to give cell phone owners long standby times.  Apparently they're now looking to apply their low energy smarts to server design and the internet infrastructure.

Yay!

Currently there are two primary companies making CPU chips for servers - Intel and AMD.  AMD is largely beholden to Intel which means they don't have much freedom to innovate, which then means that the server market is basically tied to one CPU architecture.  Intel's.  Not that Intel has been able to use that power to impose new CPU architectures, as they were unable to get the market to go along with the Itanium chips.

Not only does ARM offer a low power CPU design, it offers server vendors a chip design with little in the way of licensing stranglehold and freedom to innovate.  The way this works is that ARM licenses out the basic chip design to companies that make custom ARM-compatible chips.  For example AppliedMicro is planning to manufacture chips using a next generation design from ARM that will deliver 3GHz clock speeds at the fraction of energy for an equivalent Intel chip.  At a lower price.

One of the trends in Internet technology is "cloud computing" where the idea is to automatically allocate servers to meet traffic demands.  Large website operators hope to avoid losing customers during traffic spikes by making sure they ramp up (and down) the number of servers based on traffic.  That's great for the customers but isn't so good for the environment if the servers being ramped up use high amounts of energy.

AppliedMicro in particular wants to use these ARM cpu's in "webscale" servers.

HP is partnering with Calxeda to design a line of servers using ARM-based CPU's, making them the first major server vendor to do so.

ARM recently released details of their next generation architecture which will now include 64-bit CPU design as well as the 32-bit designs they've offered for awhile.  64-bit CPU's are important in the server world in part due to large memory requirements.

The move to adoption of ARM based architectures will take awhile, perhaps not until 2014 by which time Intel may have increased the efficiency of their chips.

 

ARM’s new IP lets AppliedMicro make cloud servers

ARM CTO: We’re changing server economics

HP Planning ARM-Based Servers With Calxeda, Challenging Intel: Reports

The ARM v. Intel fight just got good

 

Michael Pawlyn: Using nature's genius in architecture, dematerialization, and biomimicry

What if you had a building, a greenhouse in a desert, that cooled itself without power but instead through water evaporation, grew plants, desalinated water, and produced enough desalinated pure water to water the ground around the greenhouse to convert desert into a green plant-filled landscape? Magical? That's what one man says can come from using biomimicry principles to design systems.

Biomimicry principles, he says, can produce systems which perhaps 1000x energy and resource savings. He points to animals for example spiders who can weave silk stronger than anything humans have been able to make, the closest requires special materials, high pressures, and produces loads of pollution, whereas the spiders do it at ambient temperature with the simplest of raw materials. Obviously, as he said, "we have a lot to learn".

The challenges we face to maintain our technological society requires

• Radical increases in resource efficiency
• Switching from linear systems to closed loop systems
• Switch from a fossil fuel to solar energy economy

He claims that biomimicry can easily produce these changes.

The natural world around us is the result of billions of years of "research & development" by Nature.

Resource efficiency: Naturehas, through evolution, developed the most efficient shapes and chemistries.

Closed loop systems: In Nature, everything is reused. One creatures waste is another creatures food. "Waste" is the wrong way to look at the system.

Solar energy: Nature doesn't convert sunlight to electricity to use it. It just directly uses it as an analog process. Perhaps that's more efficient than conversion to electricity?

Mercury in energy-saving bulbs worries scientists

There's a growing awareness of the compact fluorescent lights. That's a good thing because they're generally a good thing, they last longer than incandescent bulbs and use less electricity to produce the same amount of light. BUT, if you're observant you'll see a notice on the package saying they contain Mercury.

Mercury poisoning has played a role in many environmental toxin disasters. There was a fishing village in Japan where mercury was dumped into the ocean near their fishing grounds and the villagers became desperately sick. And mercury poisoning is also known as Mad Hatters Syndrome, because in old England hatmakers used mercury for something or other and ended up injesting lots of mercury and going mad as a result.

With over 150 million CFL bulbs sold every year it's an interesting problem. Yes the lights last longer than incandescent bulbs, but eventually they'll break or wear out and be tossed. So what happens to the mercury afterward? And I think we shouldn't stop at the mercury, because the CFL bulbs I've examined all have a printed circuit board on them with various electrical components, and its well known that other toxic chemicals like PCB's generally are used in the components in electrical circuits.

This is another case of solving one problem and creating several others.

Article Reference: 

Mercury in energy-saving bulbs worries scientists

Powerful Little Light: LED With 1,000 Lumens

Lights is perhaps something we take for granted but have you tried living without electric lights? I haven't, though I have spent some time in places where there are no electric lights. The people who live there have all sorts of ways to create light when there's no electric lights.. like, candles. Anyway the ability to have light when it's dark is one of the miracles of the modern age. But it's also a curse of sorts because electric lighting has become so ubiquitous that it's using a tremendous amount of power. The most common light bulb, the incandescent bulb, wastes 95% of the energy sent into the bulb, yet the companies that make them have done a great job keeping costs down, and the inexpensive price is a barrier to entry for any other product.

There are two sorts of electric lights which are more efficient than incandescent bulbs. The compact fluorescent is about 3x as efficient, and those bulbs last 10x longer (or thereabouts) so the higher price for the compact fluorescent pays for itself over the life of the bulb but I suspect the much higher price puts off most people and hence they are not so popular. However LED lighting is even more efficient, using about 1 percent the power required for an incandescent bulb, while lasting hundreds of times longer. Unfortunately LED bulbs which could adequately light a room were astronomically expensive and almost nobody knows these exist much less own any.

Osram has developed a small light-emitting diode spotlight that achieves an output of more than 1,000 lumens for the first time. That's the same brightness as a 75 watt bulb.

Article Reference: 

Powerful Little Light: LED With 1,000 Lumens

Osram

Keeping cool without air conditioning

Earlier I'd written about the issue of keeping cool without having to use an air conditioner. Our society has thousands of years of experience of living without the modern technology and air conditioners, so why do we today need this? Is there anything we can learn from our ancestors?

Air Conditioning: "We're cooking our planet to refrigerate the diminishing part that's still habitable": explains some of the cost involved with over use of air conditioning. It costs a lot of power, and the power only contributes to global warming, making the heat worse, which then just makes people want to crank up the air conditioners.

Other air conditioning alternatives and Make your own air conditioner: cover a couple alternatives to air conditioners. These are low-tech methods made by individuals. They have a cooler full of ice water, submerge a pump in the water, and use the pump to send the cold water through some coils. The coils are intertwined into a fan. As the fan blows air over the coils the air cools etc.

How much ice would I have to store up in the winter in order to air condition my house all summer? is an interesting HowStuffWorks.com question along those lines. The idea is, during the winter there's snow, and what if you stored that snow and used it for cooling during the summer.

Before you scoff and say the snow would melt before summer ... do you realize that's exactly what an "ice house" is? Our ancestors would dig a hole in the ground and store snow/ice there. They called it an "ice house".

It shows a possible method to avoid having an air conditioner, so long as you have a significant amount of snow in the winter. It would be the same method as "make your own air conditioner" but on a larger scale.

The HowStuffWorks people tried to answer how much snow is required to be collected. But I think their calculations are faulty. Read it carefully and the base number is the BTU rating of the air conditioner in a typical house. The BTU rating of a gadget like that is going to be the peak capacity of the unit, not its actual usage. You aren't going to have the air conditioner cranked to the max for 12 hours a day all year long. Instead the actual usage in the air conditioner is going to vary during the day.

In any case this seems somewhat achievable to collect enough snow to make a cube 25 feet on a side. Interestingly the ice houses I've seen in colonial era houses were similar size.

While an individual might get tired thinking of shoveling 900,000 pounds of snow, don't most people in heavily snowed places own snow blowers? In other words technology can come to the rescue and some form of snow blower could be used to move snow into a modern day ice house.

Collecting that much snow would also answer this question: What about keeping warm in the winter?

But, really, this solution only helps for places that get a lot of snow in the winter, and are hot in the summer. There are a lot of places which either don't get very hot in the summer, or don't get a lot of snow in the winter. Georgia for example gets rather hot, but gets no snow, and therefore people there wouldn't be able to build an ice house for summertime cooling.

What about keeping warm in the winter?

It's midsummer and it's hot out. I've had a few articles recently about keeping cool in the summer without spending a lot of energy, e.g. without running an air conditioner. But, what about keeping warm in the winter?

Winter? Isn't that months away? Well, yeah, but the same principle holds true as I've been discussing about keeping cool without air conditioners. Our ancestors didn't have central heating nor central air conditioning. Our ancestors did not have fossil fuels easily available. Our ancestors didn't have the over abundance of energy that we enjoy today. How did they survive? How did they make it through cold winters and hot summers? That's worth studying and seeing what can be applied today.

The Furnace-free House in Vermont is a three-way conversation between Donella (Dana) Meadows (the client), Marc Rosenbaum, PE (the ecological design/energy consultant), and Amory Lovins (world famous energy expert). It began when Amory told Donella that it was possible to build a passive solar home in the Vermont climate which required no heating system or back-up heat. They discussed it, and the discussion is presented on that page.

Air Conditioning: "We're cooking our planet to refrigerate the diminishing part that's still habitable"

In The deluded world of air conditioning William Saletan offers a very interesting perspective. "We're cooking our planet to refrigerate the diminishing part that's still habitable".

When you air condition a building you're taking heat that's inside the building and moving it outside. That's what an air conditioner is, a heat pump. The fluids that go through an air conditioning system? They're the medium through which heat is exchanged, or rather pumped, from one place to another.

And, when we pump heat outdoors that costs energy. The energy used comes from somewhere, most likely through burning natural gas. So when we run an air conditioner and pump energy outside, that natural gas that's burned to make the electricity emits carbon into the atmosphere, which then in turn increases the greenhouse and global warming effect.

Air conditioners hasten global warming. So it's a fools journey to run an air conditioner because when you do it's just tightening a noose around your neck. Unfortunately the tightening of that noose is happening slowly enough that it's hard to connect the air conditioner with the global warming.

And, it's not just air conditioners. It's the whole range of gadgets that use electricity or gasoline. Want to clean up the fallen leaves in your yard? Are you going to get out a rake, or use a leaf blower? Want to go grocery shopping? Are you going to drive a Hummer or a Geo Metro or a Neighborhood Electric Vehicle (NEV) or a bicycle? When your teenager turns 16 do they get a car immediately? Do you know what a "phantom electrical load" is?

In this hot summer air conditioning is a, er, hot topic. There are some alternatives to consider. But something I wonder about is, just how the heck did our ancestors survive without air conditioners?

Why do we have to use air conditioners when there are thousands of years of human experience that could show us how to live without air conditioning in the first place?

For example, there are herbal ways to cool down. Ways that do not require refridgeration or air conditioning.

In the Middle East Sekanjabin (?sp?) is a traditional drink. It's main active ingredients are mint and sugar. Both are known to herbalists as cooling substances that, when ingested, will act to cool the body.

How can you prove this to yourself? Let me offer a simple test from Healing with the Herbs of Life. First take a sprig of fresh mint, crush it up, and pop it in your mouth. Doesn't your mouth feel cool? Take a breath in and out. Cool?

Now take some cinnamon, just a dab, and put it in your mouth. Hot?

Mint is a cooling herb, while cinnamon is a heating herb. Healing with the Herbs of Life goes into this in extensive detail from the perspective of Chinese Medicine. But the concepts are known to herbalists of all societies.

Another example of how the thousands of years of human experience can show us how to cool our living quarters without air conditioning. A few years ago I visited some friends who own some land in the Sierra Nevada mountains. It was mid-summer, on a hot day. On their land is an old one-room schoolhouse that sits out in the direct sun all day long. However, the inside of that schoolhouse remains cool all day long. How? Thick walls. Similarly in California there are many old buildings left from the Spanish. These are "adobe" buildings and the main feature is the thick walls.

Thick walls mean good insulation. You might think insulation only helps keep heat inside. Actually what insulation does is impede the flow of heat. So the heat outside the building has a harder time getting inside the better the insulation.

Another alternative to air conditioning is offered by the plant kingdom. Plant trees around your house, trees that are large enough to shade the roof. The trees will keep the heat from hitting your house in the first place. If you live in a place that that gets real cold in the winter, then you want trees that shed their leaves in the fall. That way in the winter the branches are bare and the sun will reach your house to provide some heat.

Reference: The Deluded World of Air Conditioning

Other air conditioning alternatives

As I mentioned in Make your own air conditioner, I want to minimize my power use. So I'm looking at alternatives to buying another window sized air conditioner (especially as none of the stores have any in stock).

One alternative I saw was to drape a cloth in a bowl of water, and blow air over the cloth with a fan. The evaporation is supposed to make the air cool. I tried this, and it didn't make any effect.

The one thing I do find helpful is to have fans blowing air directly over my body, and to have fans blowing air in from the outside. This combination makes life bearable except in the hottest of times.

Another thing which helps is to enlist the aid of the trees. Trees naturally do the evaporative cooling effect, because that's what their function is. Trees draw water out of the ground and perspire the water through their leaves. If you sit under a tree you're in an evaporative cooling zone.

The opposite kind of zone is, unfortunately, what our cities are tending to build for us. Namely, the long stretches of asphalt. Consider, what color is the most absorptive of heat? Black. What color is asphalt? Black. Why, oh why, are asphalt parking lots to hot? It's because they're black. Do you think that perhaps the abundance of asphalt parking lots in cities might contribute to the heat in cities? Yes, they do, and U.S. government scientists did study this very issue several years ago. So why do cities like to continue supporting the installation of asphalt parking lots? HeckifIknow..!!!

There is also the swamp cooler. Swamp coolers are widely used in the desert areas, and work best with dry climates. In the SF Bay Area our humidity hovers around 50%, which is the top end of the claimed humidity range where these work. Swamp coolers work by evaporating water, so of course the more readily the water evaporates the better the cooling action. I have ordered a swamp cooler and hopefully it will arrive next week.

Make your own air conditioner

It's been hot the last few days. In St. Louis severe storms knocked out power over most of the city. In general the U.S. has had a real serious heat wave, and in England they've set another all time high temperature record. In the SF Bay Area it's been very hot for this area.

Since my interest is to see how I can live comfortably while keeping my power use minimized ... I don't have an air conditioner in my house, and instead rely on fans and one window-sized air conditioner. Okay, it's more accurate to say the house doesn't have central air conditioning. For the most part I'm uncomfortable but it's not unbearable. But I think I'm being more accomodating to the weather than my neighbors, many of whom have central air conditioning cranked to the max.

Cranking the air conditioning to the max may seem like it's helping you, but in the big picture it's only making the heat worse. The higher power draw required by having the AC maxed means the power plants are running at maximum capacity. Indeed there have been day after day where the power producers have been at emergency production levels, barely able to meet the demand with the generating capacity. That high power production use directly turns into higher levels of pollution, because most of the power plants are burning fossil fuels. Higher pollution levels mean higher degrees of global warming and heating.

Make Your Own Air Conditioner and PETE'S HOMEMADE AIR CONDITIONER and How to build a $30 air conditioner and GEOFF'S ORIGINAL HOMEMADE AIR CONDITIONING cover a low-cost low-energy-required alternative.

The idea is ultra simple. You get a cooler of ice water, and a submersible pump. Attach the pump to a hose arrangement where the hose is woven through a fan, and then direct the hose back into the cooler. Turn on the pump and the fan. The result will be to pump cold water through piping over which you're blowing air. The air should cool down while going over the piping.

It's simple enough, and inexpensive to put together. One of the pages claimed a cost of $30.

I've acquired the required parts and will be putting it together later to see how well it works. To make ice water, I've bought some of those freezable blue blocks. The plan is to freeze them, and put them in a cooler with some water. I have a submersible pump I bought to make a water fountain several years ago. For tubing I bought some plastic tubing at the pet store, and intend to, if this works out, buy some brass tubing for the heat exchanger.

The first experiment was to hook the pump to the tubing. Unfortunately the pump is not powerful enough to make water go up very high above itself. The tubing is three feet long, and the pump is unable to get the water to go the full length of the tubing if it is stretched straight up. But if you have the tubing coiled just above the pump, then water goes through just fine.

It's hot ... here's how to cool off w/o using lots of energy

We're having a heck of a heat wave this summer. I live in the SF Bay Area and the temperatures are moderated a bit by the ocean. But yesterday it was over 100 where I live, which is an outrageous temperature. I know, I know, 100 isn't so outrageous in other parts of the U.S. but in the SF Bay Area our climate is highly moderated by the ocean. Usually severe winter or summer weather is but a rumor we hear about from friends in other parts of the country.

And I was reading that England is also seeing 100 degree weather. That they were expected to set an all time high temperature. And that it's the second time in the last three years that England is recording an all time high temperature.

Anybody doubt about Global Warming?

Anyway ... this is supposed to be about keeping cool. One reason I wanted to live in the SF Bay Area is the climate. I read in a "Places Rated" book that here in the Bay Area we have a low percentage of air conditioners installed in houses. Obviously that's climate related, and any place that doesn't have the people using air conditioning has got to be relatively cool in the summer.

And, indeed, that's what we have. Usually we have moderate temperatures in the summer with only a few days where we wish we had air conditioners.

Here's a few ideas I've collected about keeping cool without using a lot of power. Air conditioners use a lot of power, and if you want to live sustainably it's worth considering other ways of keeping cool without using air conditioning.

Attic fans work to exhaust hot air from your attic. The attic is like global warming on a miniature scale. Your roof is probably black color and is probably exposed to the sun, and therefore absorbs heat that's transmitted into the attic. The attic then sends that heat into the house. But an attic fan turns on when the temperature is high, draws the air out of the attic, reducing that effect.

Keep the windows open at night when it's cool, use fans to draw air into the house at night, and then shut the windows during the day. The idea is to capture cool air and keep it as long as you can during the day.

wiki how has some tips on keeping cool

For example .. aim a fan so it blows over the top of a bucket of ice. This will work better when the humidity is low. It's a similar idea to the swamp coolers they use in the desert.

Take a cool shower .. cover yourself with a cool cloth .. wear socks that have been soaked in cool water ..

The general idea is to use evaporative cooling.

Scoot Coupe, a high fuel efficiency three-wheeler that's perfect for city use

URL: 

Scoot Coupe, a high fuel efficiency three-wheeler that's perfect for city use

Description: 

The Scoot Coupe is an interesting vehicle that's a cross between a car and a scooter. A lot of the underlying parts seem to be from scooters, such as the handlebars and the 49cc gas motor. However it's a three-wheeler, giving it more stability than a scooter, and seats two people side by side. The best part is it gets over 60 miles/gallon. As a three-wheeler it will register as a motorcycle, but will not require a motorcycle license (at least this is the case in California).

Energy Hog

energyhog.org is a flash-based web site geared to children, and offers a game environment in which one can learn about "Energy Hog's" in the typical household. The Energy Hog's are the basic innefficiencies people have around the house ...

For example, if you have a television or other electronic gadget with an instant-on feature, it is probably constantly pulling current. For a television to be instant-on the CRT tube has to be kept warmed up and ready to go, and this requires constant power. That along with all the other trickles of current around the house adds up to a significant amount of electricity.

The typical house window is a single pane of glass, which doesn't make for much insulating power. In the winter or summer the window can either be a source of cold or a source of heat, but if it's double paned then it's a better insulator.

Chimneys can provide you with a place to put a fire and create warmth in your house. But at the same time if the flue is open (and you don't have a fire burning) it can let cold air into the house. Alternatively, during the summer a chimney can let the air conditioned air escape.

Refidgerators and other major can be energy innefficient, or energy efficient. Pay close attention to the labeling when you buy them.

Keeping the house cooled or heated during the day when nobody is at home wastes energy. Why not leave the thermostat adjusted so the heating/cooling is off until you get home?

Energy Efficient LIghting

Lighting seems simple, doesn't it? You go to the store, get a lightbulb, screw it into a socket, turn it on, and "let there be light". So simple, yet so seductive, and completely innefficient.

With the typical incandescant lightbulb only 10% of the energy put into the lightbulb turns into light. Put another way, incandescant lightbulbs are 90% innefficient. That 90% of the energy turns into heat, which is why these lightbulbs are so hot. The heat is the innefficiency.

The next time you are in a store, take a close look at the different lightbulbs. On the packaging is an important factor in measuring lightbulbs, the "lumens" they output. The lumen is a direct measure of the quantity of light produced by a lightbulb.

There are two major types of lightbulb currently available in the U.S. mass market:

• Incandescant: Little changed from Edison's famous invention.
• Compact Flourescent: A miniaturized version of the larger flourescent lightbulbs, that are shaped to fit with the usual lightbulb sockets.

As you're in the store comparing lightbulbs, what you should look at is two numbers: The wattage, and the lumens. The efficiency of a lightbulb is directly measured by the wattage required to produce a given number of lumens.

The compact flourescent lightbulbs, as you see by comparring wattage->lumens, is far more efficient than the traditional incandescant lightbulbs. Simply by switching the type of lighting you use, you can get the same amount of light (lumens) while spending less money for the energy.

Even more efficient lighting is coming up, primarily the high intensity LED's. They are far more efficient than even the compact flourescent. At the moment they are unnavailable in a shape suitable for use in regular lightbulb sockets. However they are being used in various ways, such as running lights and turn signals on cars and trucks, traffic signals, flashlights, and more.

Another measure of lighting efficiency is the usable lifetime. While incandescant lightbulbs are rated for 1000 hours of use, compact flourescent are rated for much more, around 10,000 hours, and LED lighting is rated for even more, 100,000 hours or more.

Resources

• Lighting for Tomorrow (http://www.lightingfortomorrow.com/)
• BetterBulbsDirect.com (http://betterbulbsdirect.com/) is a retailer's resource for buying and promoting energy-saving, high-performance, ENERGY STAR® subcompact fluorescent light bulbs (sub-CFLs). Your customers expect them. You've got them -- at an affordable price!

News Articles

• [June 16, 2004] Saving the world by building a better light bulb (http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/06/16/lightbulbs/) By Farhad Manjoo

Manufacturers

• Lumileds Lighting (http://www.lumileds.com/) Designer and manufacturer of high efficiency LED lighting products.