Energía barata

microsiervos

"La manera mas fácil de conseguir energía barata es prohibiendo a los políticos estar en los consejos de administracion de las eléctricas".

– AMV8 (#10)

Fuel of the future produced at Russia’s high-tech underground plant

Follow the money

http://rt.com/news/188332-mox-nuclear-fuel-production/
Russia’s ‘Breakthrough’ energy project enables closed a nuclear fuel cycle and a future without radioactive waste. The first batch of MOX nuclear fuel has been manufactured for the world’s only NPP industrially power generating breeder reactors.
The first ten kilograms of the mixed-oxide fuel (MOX) – a mixture of plutonium and uranium dioxides (UO2 and PuO2), have been industrially produced by Russia’s nuclear monopoly, Rosatom, at the Mining & Chemical Combine (GKhK) in the Krasnoyarsk region.
A world first, tablets of the fuel of the future have been put on serial production and are destined for Russia’s next generation BN-800 breeder reactor (880 megawatts), currently undergoing tests at the Beloyarskaya nuclear power plant.
The production line, now undergoing start-up and adjustment, was assembled in a mine 200 meters underground and will become fully operational by the end of 2014.
Fast fission reactors solve the problem of depleted uranium nuclear fuel on the planet. They can ‘burn’ not only ‘classic’ uranium-235, (scarce and already coming to an end), but also uranium-238, which is abundant, and expands the world’s nuclear fuel capacity by an estimated 50 times.
Fuel for breeder reactors could even be made from nuclear waste, which from an ecological point of view is a priceless advantage.
The GKhK facility will be equipped with a unique dissolvent reactor that will break down nuclear waste containing plutonium and extract plutonium dioxide to be used in MOX-fuel production.
Also, while producing electric energy, breeder reactors actually generate more fissile material, and that one also can be used as nuclear fuel.
The GKhK plant is Russia’s leading full nuclear fuel cycle complex, processing nuclear waste from power generating nuclear reactors to establish future nuclear fuel ring closure.
MOX-fuel for previous versions of fast breeder reactors in the USSR and Russia had limited production at Russia’s oldest Mayak nuclear processing facility.
Starting from 2016, industrial-level MOX-fuel production in Russia will run at full capacity.
“Produced MOX-fuel tablets fully conform to the technical specifications,” Rosatom’s statement said, adding that the fuel will now be thoroughly tested.

Economies and Human Sustainability - Gail Tverberg

The Energy Collective

Gail Tverberg

A few years ago, I had an ah-ha moment when it comes to what we as humans would need to do

to live in a sustainable manner. It is very easy. All we have to do is leave our homes, take off all of our clothes, and learn to live on the raw food we are able to gather with our own hands. We have a built-in transportation system, so that is not a problem.

Some animals are eusocial, that is, organized in away that allows for cooperative brood care and other joint tasks. If we follow that approach, we would get our extended families to join us living in nature, au naturel. We could then co-operate on tasks such as child rearing and gathering food.

Nature’s Provision for Order

Nature is organized in a number of ways that make certain that there will be modest change over time to adapt to new conditions, but that no one species will dominate. These are a few of the basic parts of the system:

1. Animals tend to have more offspring than required to replace the parents. Through natural selection, offspring that are best adapted to changing conditions tend to survive and grow to adulthood.

2. Animals tend not to kill all prey available because if they did so, they would have no food source in the future. Species are usually fairly balanced in their abilities, so that population will fluctuate within a range, rather than result in a total die-off.

3. Nature provides a great deal of redundancy, both in number of offspring, and in back-up systems. We have two ears and two kidneys, and two of many other parts of the body. The goal isn’t maximum efficiency, but to have a good chance at survival, even in the case of injury or damage to one part.

4. Nature has built-in instincts to prevent depletion of shared resources, sometimes called Tragedy of the Commons. Among primates, one of these instincts is an instinct toward territoriality. Males of the species tend to mark off territory much larger than they would need simply for gathering food, and will fight others to death who try to enter to their territory (Dilworth 2010).

5. In primates, another instinct that prevents excessive population of any one species is a tendency toward hierarchical behavior when population becomes too crowded for resources  (Dilworth 2010). Nature’s plan is that if there is an inadequate amount of resources, there will still be some survivors. Those at the bottom of the hierarchy will lose out, but those at the top will survive.

6. Each plant or animal requires energy-related inputs (food for humans) and eliminates waste. What is waste for one species acts as an input for other species. For example, plants need carbon dioxide, even though it is a waste produce for humans.

Using Nature’s approach, there is a balance over time. One species may dominate for a time, and then another.  The world tends to cycle from state to state. There is never a complete die-off, no matter how bad things get. Because of natural selection, species evolve to fill new niches. Climate change is a concern from humans’ perspective, because we are the potential losers. But Nature is probably equipped to deal with the issue, in one way or another.

The Hunter-Gatherer Economy

www.peaceparks.org

Humans, as hunter-gatherers, were “sort of close” to following Nature’s pattern. Man’s big deviation from the pattern of other animals was learning to burn biomass over one million years ago. Burning biomass made man better able to cope with cold weather. Humans also evolved a higher level of intelligence, perhaps in part because cooked food allowed better absorption of nutrients, allowing humans to put energy previously used for creating big jaws and digestive apparatus into a bigger brain.

As humans became smarter, they found ways to circumvent survival of the fittest, both to live longer themselves, and to allow more offspring to survive to adulthood.  (Dilworth 2010)  If hunter-gatherer groups wanted to avoid over-population, they had to adopt customs that would keep population down. Such customs might include infanticide, sexual abstinence during nursing, or frequent wars with neighboring tribes.

Research on hunter-gatherer groups that have survived until modern times suggests that very often they spent only a few hours a day hunting and gathering food, allowing much time for leisure activities (Sahlins 1972). Humans were tall (men averaged 5’10″ in height), had few dental cavities, and showed other signs of excellent health (Wells 2010).

As hunter-gatherers, there was no need for money or land ownership. Sharing within the clan seems to have been typical, perhaps as a gift economy, where status is gained by how much one can give away. Thus, all had access to food. There was no storing up goods for a “rainy day.” The only “storing up” was what nature provided in terms of stored body fat that prevented starvation if food was unavailable for a short period of time.

Keep reading Here >> 

Obama 's climate change proposal just another diversionary tactic?

Entrevista con Fidel Castro Díaz-Balart, el hijo mayor de Fidel Castro

ActualidadRT

Smart Lighting: A Future Illuminated by LED Technology

ForaTv

Cuba's Energy Future

Published by: Brookings Institution Press 

Strategic Approaches to Cooperation

Foreword by Vicki Huddleston. edited by Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado

Publication Year: 2010

Approaching an uncertain future without Fidel Castro, and still reeling from a downturn at the end of the cold war, Cuba must act decisively to improve its economy and living conditions. One of the major challenges facing the impoverished island nation is securing access to energy resources that are sufficient to meet the needs of its revitalization and development goals. What steps can Cuba take to achieve both short- and long-term energy sustainability and self-sufficiency? In this timely analysis, Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado and his colleagues answer that question.
Cuba's Energy Future sets the geostrategic context within which . . . Show more >>

U.S. Energy Independence

TimeMagazine

TIME senior editor Bryan Walsh explains a hot topic from the presidential race, whether the U.S. can truly be energy independent.

Natural gas - Special Report

EconomistMagazine

Obama plays energy politics while China and Cuba drill wells

By: Examiner Editorial

[Getty Images file photo]

A protester rallies in San Francisco against the Keystone Pipeline project.

How odd that President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton couldn't make a final decision on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline by the Feb. 21 deadline set by congressional Republicans. TransCanada, which would use private investment to build the $7 billion project, filed its application for environmental approval in 2008. The State Department conducted exhaustive studies and approved the application in 2010 and again last year, apparently clearing the way for a pipeline to move oil from Canada's rich tar sand region of Alberta to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast. So now Obama decides against issuing a permit for the project because of "the arbitrary nature of a deadline that prevented the State Department from gathering the information necessary to approve the project and protect the American people." He previewed this disingenuous ruling last November when he cited environmental concerns in delaying final approval until after the 2012 election. That came shortly after environmentalists encircled the White House with a human chain to protest the pipeline. Obama clearly has his eye on the big prize: millions of campaign dollars and thousands of campaign volunteers from the environmental movement for the coming campaign. Obama is angering another key part of his electoral supporters, the labor unions that desperately want the estimated 20,000 jobs the pipeline would create. But Big Labor is not as monolithic as most people think. For every construction worker, pipefitter and welder who would benefit from Keystone XL, there are many more unionists who are siding with Big Green so they can stay in the good graces of the White House and get the goodies that will be dispensed in a second Obama term. Never mind the benefits to the country that would accrue from the ancillary jobs created by the project and from the oil that would come from our steadfast friends to the north.

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/2012/01/obama-plays-energy-politics-while-china-and-cuba-drill-wells/2119211#ixzz1kCppMu8h

Prime Minister: Canada oil may go to China without US pipeline

OTTAWA — Delays in US approval of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline to carry oil from Alberta has forced Canada to consider a "different track" that could see the oil shipped to China instead, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said.

"I am very serious about selling our oil off this continent, selling our energy products off to Asia. I think we have to do that," Harper told broadcaster CTV in a year-end interview.

"When I was down in the United States recently it was interesting, I ran into several senior Americans who all said 'Don't worry we'll get Keystone done. You can sell all of your oil to us.' I said, 'Yeah we'd love to but I think the problem is now that we're on a different track."

Supporters say the plan to bring oil from Canada's tar sands to the United States is the ultimate shovel-ready job creation project and would spur the hiring of thousands of workers.

Environmental activists fear an accident along the 1,700-mile (2,700-kilometer) pipeline extension would be potentially disastrous for aquifers in central US Great Plains states.

Others oppose the multibillion-dollar project because exploiting the tar sands requires energy that generates a large volume of greenhouse gases that scientists blame for global warming.

The Obama administration has ordered an extra environmental assessment of a possible new route through Nebraska, which could delay a final decision until after next November's election.

That move prompted Obama's opponents to accuse him of dodging a difficult issue to avoid angering sections of his Democratic political base vote.

Global Energy Outlook

Tom Murphy: The Fossil Fuel Joyride Is Over

Energy Farmer powered by waste

White Roofs: Energy Conservation Project

An energy conservation project is cooling New York City's roof tops with a simple paint job.

IBM sees energy, money in motion of the ocean

Photo courtesy Ocean Energy, Ltd

IBM is developing the technology and expertise to analyze the impact wave energy converters such as the one pictured here have on the noise environment of the ocean.

By John Roach

The computer giant IBM sees a profitable future in high-tech analytical tools that could expedite and enhance the rollout of machines to turn the motion of the ocean into electricity.

Such machines, called wave energy converters, are under development around the world as a means to tap what appears to be a clean, green source of renewable energy — wave power.

But there's no standard design for the machines or a consistent and reliable way to measure their environmental impact, according to Harry Kolar, a chief information technology architect with IBM's Smarter Planet initiative.

"In order for this industry to move forward, they have to do these environmental impact assessments, which include a lot of baseline studies in the case of noise," he told me.

Noisy technologyScientists are concerned the noise generated by the machines could, for example, disturb marine mammals such as dolphins and whales that communicate with each other via sound waves and navigate via echo-location. 

"Basically, a lot of noise degrades the habitat of marine mammals, makes it harder for them to live their lives and they may go somewhere else if it becomes bad enough," Jim Thomson, an assistant professor in the department of environmental fluid dynamics at the University of Washington, explained to me. More >

HAARP: Weather Warfare -That’s Impossible Part 3 - Documentary

Uploaded by DMTilian on Apr 20, 2011

Control over Weather cataclysms; earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes & tsunamis as inflictions of War...

Is it a weapon of hostility or a domestic control of population? HAARP?

The Future of Energy

The Daily Reckoning Presents

Byron King

An Interview with Byron King

Dan Rodricks, Host, Midday: I'm Dan Rodricks, and you're listening to a special edition of Midday we call Power Ahead, The Energy Future. We finish our discussion about energy with a look into the coming decades, the innovations ahead, and the power sources that are probably going to be with us for a while. Our guests include Byron King, resident energy expert with Baltimore-based Agora Financial. He's the editor of Outstanding Investments and Energy & Scarcity Investor. Byron King is a Harvard-trained geologist, a self-described old rock hound who keeps an eye on energy, mining, and precious metals for his readers. Byron King, thank you for joining us on Midday at WYPR in Baltimore.

Byron King, Agora Financial: It is a pleasure to be with you. Thank you.

Rodricks: Byron King, please draw a picture of the year 2031 in terms of energy. What does the world look like? What sort of power-related technologies will be in wide use that are not in wide use now? Could you draw that picture for us?

King: Well, it's a great question because twenty years is a long time. Twenty years ago, people didn't know what cell phones were. Now they're ubiquitous around the world. Twenty years from now, it's going to look a lot the same, and there's going to be some things that are different. Much of the world is powered by coal today. Much of the world will still be powered by coal in future years. We might burn it differently or what have you, but when people build coal plants, they're built for 50 years, and the Chinese have been building hundreds of them, so they're not going to go away. Natural gas is going to take a much bigger share.

We're starting to figure out how much more natural gas there is out there than people estimated. An absolute revolution in technology in the past few years has been in this shale gas development... Nuclear has taken it on the chin in the last month or two, but nuclear isn't going anywhere.

I think the long-term view is that we've had problems with the [nuclear] technology from the '50s, '60s, and '70s. There's different technology today, and I think it's going to be around. And don't count out oil. There is a lot of oil out there. There is a lot of oil yet to be found. And there's a lot of oil that's going to stay in the system for many decades to come. And when you look at it in the year 2031, I think that you'll see perhaps up to 10% of the world running on what we consider alternative energy, alternative fuels, things like that. But I think that the main base of energy and of power to run things is going to be what we have today, natural gas, oil, and coal, with nuclear.


And lots and lots and lots of different technology in how it's produced, how it's distributed, how people use it, efficiency, conservation, things like that.

Read more...

The Future of #Oil

Uploaded by StanfordUniversity

Roland Horne, Thomas Davies Barrow Professor in the School of Earth Sciences at Stanford University, discusses the future of oil. The Energy Seminar meets weekly during the academic year.

Why It’s Wrong to Agree with the Malthusians about Ethanol

By Robert Zubrin

 

In an op-ed article printed in the Denver Post May 8, editorial columnist Vince Carroll endorsed the view of population control advocate Lester Brown that the U.S. corn ethanol program is threatening the world’s poor with starvation. This endorsement is especially remarkable in view of the fact that, as the otherwise generally astute Mr. Carroll has correctly noted many times in the past, all of Lester Brown’s many previous limited-resources doomsday predictions have proven wildly incorrect.

In fact, Lester Brown is wrong about the alleged famine-inducing potential of the ethanol program for exactly the same reason he has been repeatedly wrong about the alleged famine-inducing potential of population growth. There is not a fixed amount of grain in the world. Farmers produce in response to demand. The more customers, the more grain. Not only that, but the larger the potential market, the greater the motivation for investment in improved techniques.

FULL STORY