New Scientist has a 3 page online review of CO2 capture from the air technology. Capturing CO2 gas is not difficult. In fact, in the near future we are likely to be extracting quantities of the stuff from the flue gases of power plants and factories, and stashing it deep underground. In 2005 a special …
Technology Blogger Roland Piquepaille has died He had his own blog, Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends and those articles were often contributed to zdnet as well and were often well featured at Slashdot. From his zdnet bio: Roland Piquepaille lives in Paris, France, and he spent most of his career in software, mainly for high performance …
The large scale cost of getting a lot more oil is currently $200-400 billion to get each 100 billion bbl. 100 billion barrels is about a 14 year supply of oil for the United States. It is about a 3.5 year supply of oil for the world. The Oil industry’s 2008 -pre-crash global exploration and …
Eli Rabett claims that a pure standard chemical reaction can explain Blacklight Powers energy generation UPDATE: Dr Mills has responded to an analysis by Rabett“ It is not a question of more accurate heats of formation. They are accurate to at least three significant figures. It is a question of using the correct ones. That …
A repulsive quantum force, opposite of casimir force, has been verified and measured. This is the cover story, [Measured long-range repulsive Casimir-Lifshitz forces], of the Jan 8, 2009 Nature journal and is from Harvard researchers: J. N. Munday, Federico Capasso & V. Adrian Parsegian. Controlling the casimir forces is potentially a huge capability and DARPA …
Developing countries have a problem of insufficient iodine which degrades intelligence by 10-15 percent. This is mostly solved by adding iodine to salt in the developed world. Most people are aware of the importance of getting enough calcium, which remains a widespread problem. Common micronutrient deficiencies are zinc, magnesium, iron, folic acid, and iodine. A …
Eric Drexler at Metamodern points out a two page roadmap to low cost DNA production by one of the top people in the field of DNA synthesis, George Church. George lays out a roadmap synthesize DNA material for dollars per kilogram of DNA. This price is about a billion times cheaper than current costs for …
Here is a study of future scenarios where there is a lot of nuclear power. Can Future Nuclear Power Be Made Proliferation Resistant ?” by the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland. From that study it seems clear the problems are manageable, especially with proper reactor design selection and looking at processing, reprocessing …
Non electric uses for nuclear fusion were presented in a 2003 report to the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (FESAC). There are at least 5 unique products that we can “sell” from fusion reactions before the fusion community enters the main market for fusion energy (the generation of electricity): A.) high energy neutrons (2-14 MeV) …
China has officially broken ground on six domestically engineered CPR-1000 pressurized water reactors, generating around 1080 MWe each. The total investment in Yangjiang’s six reactors is to be 69.5 billion reminbi ($10.1 billion), giving a construction cost of 10,700 reminbi per MWe ($1565 per KWe), according to Zhang Guobao, head of the National Energy Bureau. …
Eric Drexler, the visionary of molecular nanotechnology and mechanosynthesis, has started a new blog Metamodern: The Trajectory of Technology. Metamodern isn’t intended to be “a blog about nanotechnology”; its scope includes broader issues involving technologies with world-changing potential. For example, looking well downstream in technology development, I will sketch the requirements for large-scale systems able …