Sander Olson Blogs Day One of the 2009 International Electron Devices Meeting

Sander Olson is attending the 2009 International Electron Devices Meeting in Baltimore, Maryland. Below is a summary of the first day of the conference, Dec 7.

The first day of the 2009 International Electron Devices Meeting(IEDM) began with bold prognostications regarding the future of computing and electronics. The IEDM meeting, held in Baltimore, is being attended by hundreds of engineers, researchers, and scientists attempting to discern how much longer Moore's law can continue. A succession of papers from researchers around the world provided clear evidence that although the challenges and costs associated with scaling are continually increasing, a plethora of new devices and components being developed in various labs and Universities should continue Moore's Law for at least the next decade. Nvidia's John Chen gave the Keynote talk on "GPU: Trends and Future Requirements" in which he outlined the future of GPU computing. Chen noted that Nvidia's NV1 GPU in 1995 had only a million transistors, whereas Nivida's upcoming Fermi GPU contains 3.2 billion. Fermi contains 12 kilometers of interconnects, and the large die size and routing of the interconnects is causing yield problems for fabless companies such as Nvidia. Chen concluded by predicting that GPUs would soon contain 10 billion transistors and provide up to 200x the performance of current devices, and that the ideal for such devices was zero leakage, zero defects, and zero variation. In order to ameliorate these issues, Chen predicted that the industry will need to transition to 3-D devices.




Takao Soneya, an electronic engineering Professor at the University of Tokyo, gave a talk highlighting the progress being made in organic transistors such as OLEDs. He noted that organic transistors have fundamental advantages, including transparency, low-cost, flexibility, and thin and lightness, and that such transistors could be used for a variety of products. Flexible, bendable, and stretchable prototype displays have already been created, and with further development inexpensive, large-screen displays should become available. Organic transistors could even be used to make entire floors and walls composed of such screens. Soneya stated that the stability of molecules used for organic displays has substantially improved, and also revealed that "e-skins" embedded with nanotube gels could form the skin and faces of future robots.

The conference, which is sponsored by the Electron Devices Society of the IEEE, runs December 7-9.

Rice lab makes solid material transparent to terahertz waves

. Rice University Professor Junichiro Kono and his team weren't looking for a breakthrough in the transmission of terahertz signals, but there it was: a plasmonic material that would, with adjustments to its temperature and/or magnetic field, either stop a terahertz beam cold or let it pass completely.

Their paper, "Interference-Induced Terahertz Transparency in a Magneto-Plasma in a Semiconductor," appears in today's online version of the journal Nature Physics and will be published in the Dec. 24 edition.

Kono's team had been studying the conductivity of indium antimonide. "This is a classic material people started working on in the 1940s," he said. "It's a typical semiconductor, and if you dope it, it's highly conductive. But if you apply a magnetic field, it becomes an insulator, and that's what we planned to look at."

When Wang used terahertz spectroscopy to study the material, its unusual properties became apparent. "He started tuning various parameters -- the magnetic field, temperature and then the frequency -- and found that the terahertz transmission of the material changed drastically," Kono said. "It went from opaque to transparent."

They found that in a magnetic field, the doped indium antimonide, a solid-state plasma, transmitted circularly polarized waves that interfered with each other. This affected terahertz beams in much the same way polarized sunglasses interfere with visible light. To their surprise, at particular combinations of settings, the beams would pass right through.

"Terahertz is an exciting field right now," said Kono, a newly named fellow of the American Physical Society whose lab focuses on the physics and applications of semiconductor nanostructures and quantum devices. "This frequency range is considered to be the last frontier of the electromagnetic spectrum."

Kono said neither type of semiconductor device in common use today -- photonic and electronic -- works in the terahertz range. "Photonic devices work in the visible and near-infrared ranges and electronic devices work in the kilohertz, megahertz and gigahertz ranges. There's a clear gap where there's no mature solid-state technology. That's why a lot of people are working to fill it."

"I wouldn't say the terahertz region is unexplored, but it's less so," said Mittleman, who specializes in terahertz technologies and worked on the development of a terahertz version of Rice's famous single-pixel camera. "There are some open problems that people haven't thought about -- or have thought about, but haven't found good solutions for. The whole technology base is a lot less mature."

Kono said applications for terahertz technology include imaging, spectroscopy and communications, and having a device that can serve as a terahertz switch would be a step forward.

Still, there are hurdles to making the lab's discovery practical, one being the operating temperature. Wang worked with the indium antimonide at temperatures between 2 and 240 kelvins (approximately -456 to -27 degrees Fahrenheit).

"The temperature is certainly a concern," Mittleman said. "If it's going to have impact as a useful device for controlling terahertz beams, there is some work yet to do. I don't think that's impossible, but the route is not immediately clear.

"There's not a lot of shocking new physics here," he said, but the combination of techniques used to treat the indium antimonide made for interesting science. "People are going to think it's pretty cool.

A Predicted Repulsive Casimir Effect Using Exotic Chiral Metamaterials

Ames Laboratory research team discovers a new use for metamaterials that promises to eliminate mechanical friction in nanotechnology

The groundbreaking research, conducted through mathematical simulations, revealed the possibility of a new class of materials able to exert a repulsive force when they are placed in extremely close proximity to each other. The repulsive force, which harnesses a quantum phenomenon known as the Casimir effect, may someday allow nanoscale machines to overcome mechanical friction.

The findings were published in the Sept. 4, 2009 issue of Physical Review Letters, in an article entitled, “Repulsive Casimir Force in Chiral Metamaterials.”

this new discovery demonstrates that a repulsive Casimir effect is possible using chiral metamaterials. Chiral materials share an interesting characteristic: their molecular structure prevents them from being superimposed over a reverse copy of themselves, in the same way a human hand cannot fit perfectly atop a reverse image of itself. Chiral materials are fairly common in nature. The sugar molecule (sucrose) is one example. However, natural chiral materials are incapable of producing a repulsive Casimir effect that is strong enough to be of practical use.

For that reason, the group turned its attention to chiral metamaterials, so named because they do not exist in nature and must instead be made in the lab. The fact that they are artificial gives them a unique advantage, commented Koschny. “With natural materials you have to take what nature gives you; with metamaterials, you can create a material to exactly meet your requirements,” he said.

The chiral metamaterials the researchers focused on have a unique geometric structure that enabled them to change the nature of energy waves, such as those located in the gap between the two closely positioned plates, causing those waves to exert a repulsive Casimir force.

The present study was carried out using mathematical simulations because of the difficulties involved in fabricating these materials with semiconductor lithographic techniques. While more work needs to be done to determine if chiral materials can induce a repulsive Casimir force strong enough to overcome friction in nanoscale devices, practical applications of the Casimir effect are already under close study at other DOE facilities, including Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories. Both have expressed considerable interest in using the chiral metamaterials designed at Ames Laboratory to fabricate new structures and reduce the attractive Casimir force, and possibly to obtain a repulsive Casimir force.

Repulsive Casimir Force in Chiral Metamaterials

We demonstrate theoretically that one can obtain repulsive Casimir forces and stable nanolevitations by using chiral metamaterials. By extending the Lifshitz theory to treat chiral metamaterials, we find that a repulsive force and a minimum of the interaction energy possibly exist for strong chirality, under realistic frequency dependencies and correct limiting values (for zero and infinite frequencies) of the permittivity, permeability, and chiral coefficients.

Blacklight Power Plans for 2010-2013

A webcast (FBR Capital Market conference) updates the situation with Blacklight Power

They are now indicating that they will have continuous run prototypes in 2010. This is a delay from previous talk about a commercial system in 2009. However, if they make their continuous run prototypes with 50KW to 75KW of power available for independent testing in 2010 that would go a long way to reducing the controversy surround Blacklight Power. Pilot plants at the megawatt level are planned for 2011-2013.

This might be too late for some small bets made at this site that commercial power would be generated by the end of 2010, which is a trivial issue.

The main question is if Blacklight Power will be prove that it has a revolutionary new power source with costs of about $1500 per Kilowatt of capital cost and generation cost of one cent per kilowatt hour onsite. The power would also be non-polluting.

























































































FBR Capital Markets Corporation (FBR Capital Markets; NASDAQ:FBCM) is a top ten investment bank1 with an international franchise, one of the strongest equities distribution capabilities in the securities industry and an active asset management business

Advertising

Trading Futures
  Nano Technology
  Netbook     Technology News
  Computer Software
    Future Predictions

Self Assembled 20 Nanometer Transistors Using DiBlock CoPolymer Lithography

Semiconductor Research Corporation (SRC), the world's leading university-research consortium for semiconductors and related technologies, and researchers from Stanford University and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) today announced they have developed the industry’s first top-gated field effect transistor (FETs) and CMOS inverters featuring 20 nanometer (nm) contact holes using diblock copolymer lithography.

In recent years, researchers have begun to look at block copolymers, an organic material that is compatible with conventional semiconductor manufacturing processes, because a thin film of it, under the right conditions, can self-assemble into regular arrays of holes on the order of 20nm or smaller in diameter. This tiny, self-assembled swiss cheese of block copolymer can act as a stencil for creating electrical contacts to very small semiconductor devices.

Previous attempts at using block polymers have fallen short because the self-assembled holes were not aligned to existing electrical features on the semiconductor wafer. Now, the SRC-sponsored work by researchers from Stanford University and TSMC has produced the industry’s first functional devices and circuits that employ diblock copolymer patterning for sub-22nm CMOS technologies on a full wafer scale.

“We believe this development will help to bring self-assembly closer to broad application in the semiconductor industry and will help increase the use of nanotechnology for advancements in electronics for years to come,” said H.-S. Philip Wong, a professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.

The research is expected to catalyze further innovations in the area of extensible nanomanufacturing and possibly be integrated into the manufacturing process in the next seven to 10 years.

More information about the research and results will be published in a paper entitled “Top-Gated FETs/Inverters with Diblock Copolymer Self-Assembled 20nm Contact Holes” and presented at IEEE’s 2009 International Electron Devices Meeting in Baltimore, Md., on December 9. The paper is co-authored by graduate student, Li-Wen Chang and H.-S. Philip Wong of Stanford University, and T.L. Lee, Clement H. Wann, and C.Y. Chang of TSMC

FURTHER READING
copolymer at wikipedia

A heteropolymer or copolymer is a polymer derived from two (or more) monomeric species, as opposed to a homopolymer where only one monomer is used. Copolymerization refers to methods used to chemically synthesize a copolymer.

Commercially relevant copolymers include ABS plastic, SBR, Nitrile rubber, styrene-acrylonitrile, styrene-isoprene-styrene (SIS) and ethylene-vinyl acetate.

Diblock copolymer articles at Stanford

Lithography with a mask of block copolymer microstructures, J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B Volume 16, Issue 2, pp. 544-552 (March 1998)

Ultrahigh-Density Nanowire Arrays Grown in Self-Assembled Diblock Copolymer Templates (2000)

Peer Review Confirmation of Some of Joe Ecks Superconducting Experiements and Superconducting MgB2 Wire

The groundbreaking superconducting work of Joe Eck is getting more confirmation in peer reviewed journals. Joe Eck has released several experimental results where YCBO superconductors achieved indications of critical temperatures at 175K and another superconducting material with Messner transition indications at 254K The peer reviewed articles cover the earlier work on UltraYCBO which got YCBO up to 105K. This suggests that Joe Eck's later work is also likely to be on the right track for increasing the critical temperature of superconductors up to near room temperature.

Much of Joe Ecks' superconducting work is based on taking advantage of planar weight disparity to increase critical temperature.

Joe Eck has experiments where he has gotten YCBO to indicate supercondution at 175K

The discovery of a structure type that facilitates an improvement in the Tc of YBCO beyond 175K. And, while the volume fraction derived from the method of synthesis is low (only a small amount is showing the effect and would need to have purification to make soemthing potentially very useful), the profound Tc improvement again validates planar weight disparity (PWD) as a robust Tc-enhancement mechanism.

THE EUROPEAN
PHYSICAL JOURNAL B: How Tc can go above 100 K in the YBCO family

We report the results of the electronic structure calculation of a newly discovered member of the YBCO high-Tc family, i.e., Y3Ba5Cu8O18 (Y358) with Tc > 100, based on the full-potential linearized augmented plane waves method (FP-LAPW) of density functional theory in the generalized gradient approximation (GGA). The evolution of the number of hole carriers in different sites of the CuO2 planes and CuO chains has been investigated in comparison with the other YBCO family members, i.e., Y123, Pr123, Y124, and Y247. The results suggest that pumping hole carriers out of the chains toward the planes enhances the transition temperature. The band structure calculations have been performed for Y358, and the results show similar features with the other family members. Most notably, a van Hove singularity forms near the X point of the Brillouin zone below the Fermi level and within the energy of the buckling phonon mode, for which the interplay is discussed.

YBa2Cu3O7 (Y123) is the first superconductor discovered with the transition temperature above the liquid nitrogen boiling temperature. YBa2Cu4O16
(Y124) and Y2Ba4Cu7O15 (Y247) are other two familiar members of the YBCO-family, but with lower transition temperatures: 84 K and 65 K , respectively.

We have presented here the electronic structure calculations of the newly discovered Y358 compound with Tc > 100 K. The hole content of different sites of its planes and chains has been compared to the other members of the YBCO family. Our results show that in the Y358 system the hole content in four of its five planes increases, and in the other plane which has no apical oxygen the hole content decreases. It is notable that in one of those four planes, the total amount of hole increase puts the plane in the overdoping regime. By comparing the charge differences in the chains, our results imply that in order to have a better superconductor with higher Tc in the YBCOfamily, one should pump more holes from the chains to the planes.

The band structure calculations show similar features with the other YBCO compounds but with a VHS rather far from the Fermi level, which is sensitive to the out-ofplane buckling mode of the oxygen atoms. The discovery of Y358 compound is very promising in finding still better Y-based compounds with higher transition temperature. More investigations are needed experimentally and computationally to better understand how Tc correlates with different structures and with different arrangement of the building blocks of the YBCO family compounds.

Physica C article on the same work

OTHER SUPERCONDUCTING NEWS
Bruker Energy and Supercon Technologies, Inc. (BEST) announced today the completion of its first 1000 meter unit length magnesium diboride (MgB2) superconducting wire, with a strand Je of up to 91 A/mm² at 4.2K and 5T. The MgB2 wire strand is designed to fit into a wire-in-channel superconductor design, focusing on applications in magnetic fields up to 5 Tesla, like clinical or pre-clinical magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) magnets.

Dr. André Aubele, the BEST MgB2 R&D project leader, said: “We have been able to reach state-of-the-art MgB2 performance with our 1000 meter binary MgB2 wire by using magnesium and boron raw materials of industrial quality, which are produced today in quantities of tons. We believe that we can further increase wire performance, especially by using special high quality boron raw material and by optimizing our wire design and production.”

“In order to reach comparable performance and price levels to today’s NbTi wires for MRI systems, further R&D in terms of increased Je performance and manufacturing optimization is necessary. Medium-temperature MgB2 superconductors could then be the material of choice for future generations of liquid cryogen-free MRI magnets operating at temperatures of 10-20 Kelvin without the need for liquid nitrogen or liquid helium cryogens.”

Suborbital Tourism is Stepping Stone to Two Hour Flights Around the World

Spaceshiptwo is being unveiled today and should soon result in thousands of trips from a spaceport to suborbital 60+ mile height and then return to the same launch point for $200,000 per trip

This is laying the groundwork for global high-speed air and space travel with two hour flights anywhere in the world (where there is a suitable takeoff and landing site).

Here is a 15 page presentation by the Fast Forward advocacy group about Getting Faster Point to point travel

The FastForward Study Group proposes a new incremental aerospace strategy that recognizes the synergistic role that the emerging market for high-speed global transportation has with the nation’s long-term goals for low-cost, reliable space access.

The emerging commercial high-speed global transportation market for passengers and goods offers significant technical and economic synergies with future commercial space access services. Recognizing the key transitional role that this new Point-to-Point (or PTP) transportation service will play between today’s single-site suborbital space tourism markets and future low cost, reliable orbital spaceflight, the FastForward Study Group supports the development of a new coordinated national strategy that recognizes the synergistic role that the emerging market for high-speed global transportation has with the nation’s long-term goals for low-cost, reliable space access.

Building on its successful business model for subsonic air travel, many players in the U.S. aviation industry are now focused on “getting faster”. Driven by economic globalization, flight speeds and ranges are being pushed to make global air travel more practical by reducing flight times and eliminating stopovers. Ongoing technological advancements in highspeed aviation and suborbital space tourism
will soon produce extremely long range, reusable aerospace vehicles capable of flying at hypersonic speeds and exo-atmospheric altitudes. For some shippers and business travelers speed is crucial, and these aviation customers would greatly value and utilize air transportation systems that fly much faster than achievable today. Global high-speed PTP flight will require reusable flight vehicles utilizing new propulsion and structures technologies, ground infrastructures, and business strategies that prioritize reliability, safety, and affordability due to market necessity. Environmental impacts such as noise and emissions must be reduced

Step 1 – Continued Encouragement of Single-Site Reusable Suborbital Transport (like Virgin Galactic - spaceshiptwo and white knight two)

Step 2 - Global High-speed Point-To-Point

Building on a successful aviation industry foundation, a future PTP transportation network could serve important commercial centers around the globe with new and enhanced services, specifically better next-day and same day options for fast package deliveries and time-saving flight options for long distance transoceanic passenger routes. For passenger service, key business traveler routes exist between the U.S. and Asia and the U.S. and Europe that support 500 - 1,000 passengers per day each way. For cargo, a future PTP priority cargo service could be an evolution of the current $100B per year global fast package businesses operated by companies like UPS, FedEx, and DHL. Decreasing door-to-door transportation times in an increment of value to private and military customers will demand significantly faster transportation systems relative to today’s subsonic airliners. To be successful, a revolutionary new global PTP service must “get faster” while maintaining economic competitiveness and a track record for safety and reliability.

The technological challenge of flying vertically up in altitude to the edge of space and back to the launch site is moderate compared to the technological challenges of 1) flying halfway around the globe exo-atmospherically in under two hours or 2) reaching an orbital flight condition. In either latter case, focused technology
developments will be needed.

A parallel emphasis of the proposed incremental space development plan must address the requisite ground infrastructure. In reaction to the emerging suborbital space
tourism market, new FAA-licensed aerospaceports are springing up in many states
across the country (e.g. New Mexico, Florida, Oklahoma, California, and Virginia).

Step 3 - Reusable Orbital Flight

Energy News Roundup - Renewable Plan in China, US Starts a new Uranium mine, GE Helps Indian Nuclear Build

1. GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy supports India’s plans to expand electricity supply

India plans to expand its electricity production from nuclear energy more than tenfold, from 4.1 gigawatts (GW) today to 63 GW by 2032. Of that total, an estimated 30-40 GW would come from imported reactor technologies. India has set aside two sites for potential 10,000-MW nuclear power stations featuring reactor designs from U.S.-based providers. One of the two sites is in the western state of Gujarat and the other is in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. GEH could help India’s nuclear utility build multiple third-generation nuclear reactors at one of the two sites.

The 1,350-MWe ABWR, GEH offers the world’s only commercially proven Generation III reactor with successful construction and operational experience. The first of four ABWRs now in service went online in 1996, and four additional units are being built today.

GEH’s 1,520-MWe ESBWR design is Generation III+ technology offering advantages including passive safety features, a further simplified design and even higher safety margins than the already safe, deployed fleet of nuclear reactors. The ESBWR currently is progressing in the design certification process of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

2. By 2020, renewable energy should account for 15 percent of China's primary energy consumption, supplying the equivalent of 600 million tonnes of coal, the China Daily said this weekend.

It cited a renewable energy blueprint laid out by Han Wenke, director-general of the Energy Research Institute under top planning body, the National Development and Reform Commission.

By 2030, renewable energy's share should rise to 20 percent of the national energy mix, displacing 1 billion tonnes of coal, Han said, and by 2050, it would supply one-third of China's energy, displacing two billion tonnes of coal, the paper said.

3. White Canyon Uranium's Daneros mine in Utah has produced its first uranium ore.

Daneros, the first new uranium mine to be permitted in Utah in 30 years, is ultimately expected to produce some 500,000 pounds U3O8 (227 tonnes U3O8) per year.

4. The Time online UK reports that BP (British Petroleum) claims that new technology including smart meters, “intelligent” electricity grids and teleconferencing systems could cut global carbon dioxide emissions by up to 20 per cent.

The UK Government sets out details today of a £9 billion plan to introduce smart meters in all 26 million British homes by 2020. However, the company (BP) advising the Government on the technology said yesterday that there was no reason “in principle” why the introduction could not be completed four years ahead of the government schedule.

Consumers will be rewarded for using energy-hungry appliances such as dishwashers and tumble dryers at off-peak times, such as between 1am and 5am, allowing for a reduction in the total number of power stations needed to power Britain.

Inaccurate billing should also end because suppliers would receive exact data.

Mr Abbosh said: “The rapid roll-out of smart meters is critical if they are to help address the generation gap forecast for 2014 to 2017, as meters will help reduce and manage consumption. We expect the industry to be ready for mass deployment by 2013, so full deployment by 2016 is possible, albeit challenging.”

Mr Svanberg also said that large chunks of global air, road and rail passenger traffic could be removed through the use of teleconferencing and telecommuting.

“We continue to travel the world just to have meetings . . . [but] you can replace an awful lot of meetings with teleconferencing.”

Transport accounts for 14 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The bulk of these are from road transport, at 76 per cent of total transport emissions, and aviation, at 12 per cent

Virgin Galactic Unveils Spaceship Two

Virgin Galactic unveils Spaceshiptwo

SpaceShipTwo (SS2) and its mothership, VMS Eve (WhiteKnightTwo) herald a new era in commercial space flight with daily space tourism flights set to commence from Spaceport America in New Mexico after test program and all required US government licensing.

SpaceShipTwo uses all the same basic technology, carbon composite construction and design as SpaceShipOne. However it is around twice as large as that vehicle and will carry six passengers and two pilots. It is 60ft long with a 90" diameter cabin which is similar in size to a Falcon 900 executive jet albeit with no floor dissecting the cabin allowing maximum room for the astronauts to float in zero gravity. Each passenger gets the same seating position with two large windows: WINDOW SIZE one side window and one overhead, so that, if you don't want to float free in space, and you'd rather just remain in your seat, you still get a great chance to see the view. No more squabbling over who has the best seat!

The spaceship can be thought of as an air launched glider with a rocket motor and a couple of extra systems for spaceflight. Just like any conventional flying machine, it requires aerodynamic forces to provide its stability and control which, clearly, it only has whilst in the atmosphere. In space it follows a purely ballistic trajectory, but here it can use small thrusters known as the reaction control system (RCS) which allow the pilots to maneuver the vehicle in space and provide a changing view for the passenger astronauts.

The spaceship is powered by a hybrid rocket motor. This type of system is not a new idea but offers important safety and environmental advantages over liquid or solid systems that are more commonly used on manned space vehicles. In particular, it means that the pilots will be able to shut down the SpaceShipTwo rocket motor at any time during its operation and glide safely back to the runway.

Spaceshiptwo at Virgin Galactic site

Fiber lasers Are Increasing to 50 Kilowatts and More

Diode pumping of a dual-clad fiber laser can be from the end or the side, but light must enter at an angle close to the axis of the fiber so the pump light (blue) can be guided within the outer core. The laser species is doped into the inner core (red), which confines laser emission

Single-mode Fiber laser powers are reaching 10 kW, and multimode powers to 50 kW. Fiber lasers are going beyond industrial applications to become candidates for battlefield deployment as high-energy laser weapons.

Like other diode-pumped lasers, fiber lasers essentially convert the raw low-quality pump laser output into a much higher-quality laser beam that can be used in applications from medicine and materials-working to weapons. The fiber geometry has two important advantages for high-power operation: efficient conversion of pump power into output in a high-quality beam, and good dissipation of the inevitable waste heat.

The active species in most fiber lasers is ytterbium, chosen because the small quantum defect–the difference between energy of pump and output photons–is only about 6% when pumping a 1035 nm Yb-fiber laser on its 975 nm absorption line. In contrast, the quantum defect of a 1064 nm neodymium laser pumped on its 808 nm absorption line is 20%. The small quantum defect helps allow optical-to-optical pumping efficiency to exceed 60% for ytterbium-fiber lasers. With electrical-to-optical conversion efficiency of 50% for pump diodes, that means wall-plug efficiency can reach 30%.

Producing higher powers comes at a steep cost in beam quality. Yusin said IPG’s 50 kW laser has a beam quality M2 of 33, although with 170 kW of power needed to generate the multimode beam, its wall-plug efficiency is higher than the single-mode laser. The output comes from combining the beams from an array of 1.1 kW modules in a single length of 200 µm core output fiber. The whole system is about the size of three large refrigerators

Raw power is far from the only story. Nilsson is working on wavelength conversion and Raman fiber lasers. Others are working on ultrafast fiber lasers

Historical Colonization versus Historical Navies and Future Spaceships

In terms of the scale of the effort for colonizing North America, I think it is useful to compare the size of the naval fleets of the time and other historical benchmarks. We know how large the military is today and the share of the total economy that it has. It will be more useful to approximate how large the interplanetary space travel industry will need to be before an interstellar colonization expedition would be a reasonably sustainable activity.

This relates to the discussion of spaceships and whether interstellar spaceships will happen

Technology will be key in lowering the costs and energy requirements (even for communication). However, we will need to build up the economic scale and interplanetary space capabilities to achieve sustainable results and progress.

Military Comparisons to Colonization
The Spanish Armada of 1588 at wikipedia

The Spanish fleet was composed of 151 ships, 8,000 sailors and 18,000 soldiers, and bore 1,500 brass guns and 1,000 iron guns. The full body of the fleet took two days to leave port. It contained 28 purpose-built warships: 20 galleons, 4 galleys and 4 (Neapolitan) galleasses. The remainder of the heavy vessels consisted mostly of armed carracks and hulks; there were also 34 light ships present.

In the Spanish Netherlands 30,000 soldiers awaited the arrival of the armada, the plan being to use the cover of the warships to convey the army on barges to a place near London. All told, 55,000 men were to have been mustered, a huge army for that time

English fleet however did outnumber the Spanish, with 200 to 130 ships, however the Spanish outgunned the English fleet: its available firepower was 50% more than that of the English. The English fleet consisted of the 34 ships of the royal fleet (21 of which were galleons of 200 to 400 tons), and 163 other ships, 30 of which were 200 to 400 tons and carried up to 42 guns each; 12 of these were privateers owned by Lord Howard of Effingham, Sir John Hawkins and Sir Francis Drake.

In 1600, there were about 500 million people in the world

Largest cities in Spain in 1600: Sevilla (40,000), Toledo (44,000), Madrid (40,000), Barcelona (40,000), Valencia (35,000), Valladolid (32,000), Córdoba (25,000). Population of Spain in 1600: 9 million.

One of the most successful conquistadors was Hernán Cortés, who with a relatively small Spanish force but also crucially the support of around two hundred thousand Amerindian allies, overran the mighty Aztec empire in the campaigns of 1519–21 to bring what would later become Mexico into the Spanish empire as the basis for the colony of New Spain. Of equal importance was the conquest of the Inca empire by Francisco Pizarro, which would become the Viceroyalty of Peru. After the conquest of Mexico, rumours of golden cities (Quivira and Cíbola in North America, El Dorado in South America) caused several more expeditions to be sent out, but many of those returned without having found their goal, or having found it, finding it much less valuable than was hoped. Indeed, the American colonies only began to yield a substantial part of the crown's revenues with the establishment of mines such as that of Potosí (1546). By the late 16th century American silver accounted for one-fifth of Spain's total budget. In the 16th century "perhaps 240,000 Europeans" entered American ports.

More people and money over the course of century than were on both sides of a very large naval engagement. There were also expeditions and fleets of colonizing ships (1-11 ships were common).







In 1600 the economies were estimated at :

Region / Country GDP (PPP)
                  mill. of International dollars      GDP Share percentage (%) 
World                                329,417                             100 
Ming China                            96,000                              29.2 
Mughal India                          74,250                              22.6 
Far East (excluding China, India, 
Japan, Russia)                        24,088                               7.3 
Africa                                22,000                               6.7 
Spanish Empire                        20,789                               6.3 
France                                15,559                               4.7 
Italian States                        14,410                               4.4 
Ottoman Empire                        12,637                               3.8 
Germany                               12,432                               3.8 
Russia and Central Asia               11,447                               3.5 
Japan                                  9,620                               2.9 
Eastern Europe (excluding Russia)      8,743                               2.7 
Spain                                  7,416                               2.1 
British Isles                          6,007                               1.8 

The voyages of Christopher Columbus are invoked by Americans more than any other historical analog to capture the ethos of the manned space program. A better analogy would be Leif Ericksson. He and his fellow Norsemen reached North America five centuries before Columbus by travelling in the most remarkable sailing vessels of their time. Not until Columbus, however, did Europeans have at their disposal a robust maritime technology that would allow them to not only reach the Western hemisphere but also to sail back and forth to Europe reliably. Over the last forty-five years, the United States has developed space launch vehicles that can carry astronauts to near-Earth orbit and even to the moon. It has failed, however, to develop the space ship that can do for the United States what the caravel did for Columbus. The current program to build a new suite of launch vehicles simply recycles old technology. It builds longships, not caravels.

Colonial Population Estimates

Estimates of population of Colonial America, from 1610 to 1780.

       North American    Latin American   Europe 
Year   Population        Population       Population
1610        350 
1620      2,300 
1630      4,600 
1640     26,600 
1650     50,400 
1660     75,100 
1670    111,900 
1680    151,500 
1690    210,400 
1700    250,900 
1710    331,700 
1720    466,200 
1730    629,400 
1740    905,600 
1750  1,170,800      16 million      163 million
1760  1,593,600      
1770  2,148,100 
1780  2,780,400 
1800  7 million      24 million      203 million
1850 26 million      38 million      267 million 

Historical population figures

Northern America comprises the northern countries and territories of North America: Canada, the United States, Greenland, Bermuda, and St. Pierre and Miquelon. Latin America comprises Middle America (Mexico, the nations of Central America, and the Caribbean) and South America.

The figures for North and Central America only refer to post-European contact settlers, and not native populations from before European settlement.

Future Space Settlements

If (when) there is human settlement of space and
If there were parallels to the scale of the settlement of the Americas.

then there would be thousands of spaceships capable of carrying hundreds of people at a time for interplanetary and later interstellar travel. The interplanetary capability (out to the Oort comet cloud) would be something like the ships traveling and trading around the mediterranean.

Stages of ease of movement around space

Ease of getting to orbits and to the moon and near earth asteroids
Ease of getting Mars (1. AU) the Asteroid belt (between 2.3 and 3.3 AU)
Ease of getting out to Saturn (9.5 AU)
Ease of getting out to the Kuiper belt (30 and 50 AU with over 100,000 Kuiper belt objects with a diameter greater than 50 km and a total mass of 1-10% of earth)
Ease of getting out to the Oort comet cloud and the gravitational lensing points

The hypothetical Oort cloud is a spherical cloud of up to a trillion icy objects that is believed to be the source for all long-period comets and to surround the Solar System at roughly 50,000 AU (around 1 light-year (LY)), and possibly to as far as 100,000 AU (1.87 LY). It is believed to be composed of comets which were ejected from the inner Solar System by gravitational interactions with the outer planets.

Ease of getting out to other solar systems (brown drawfs and stars)

Converting Coal Plants for Clear Displacement of Pollution and CO2

Eddystone coal power station will be shutdown and replace with natural gas and nuclear plant uprates

A small coal-fired generating plant in northwestern New Mexico will be used to test new hybrid technology that combines solar- and coal-generated steam to produce electricity. Solar thermal concentrating technology will provide heat for the turbine and reduce coal usage.

The 245-megawatt Escalante Generating Station in Prewitt, 27 miles northwest of Grants, is one of two host sites that California’s Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) chose to test the technology. The other site is a natural gas-powered generating station near Las Vegas, Nev.

Most coal plant conversion projects have been to replace coal with biomass or natural gas Nuclear is playing a smaller role in replacing the coal power that is shutting down, but nuclear does have role.

Exelon said that it would completely close the Cromby Generating Station along the Schuylkill in Phoenixville and that it would retire two coal-fired generators at the Eddystone Generating Station on the Delaware River.

The targeted units have 933 megawatts of capacity. Exelon contends that there is sufficient generation capacity in the region to meet demand, and with new natural gas supplies coming into the market, it is supplanting coal as the preferred fossil fuel. Exelon also has plans to increase the output of its Limerick and Peach Bottom nuclear reactors in the next eight years.

Georgia Power Company will convert its Plant Mitchell Unit 3 from a coal-fired power plant to a biomass power plant.

The facility will be able to produce 96 megawatts of power once the conversion is completed in June 2012, making it one of the largest biomass power plants in the United States. It will draw on surplus wood fuel from suppliers within a 100-mile radius of the power plant. Georgia Power, the largest subsidiary of Southern Company, requested the conversion last summer and plans to begin the conversion by spring of 2011. The Georgia PSC approved Georgia Power's request on March 17, while also approving the utility's construction of two new nuclear power units at its Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant in southeast Georgia

Progress Energy Carolinas, a wholly owned subsidiary of Progress Energy, today announced that by the end of 2017, the company intends to permanently shut down all of its remaining N.C. coal-fired power plants that do not have flue-gas desulfurization controls (scrubbers).

The utility outlined its plan to close a total of 11 coal-fired units, totaling nearly 1,500 megawatts (MW) at four sites in the state:

The 600-MW L.V. Sutton Plant near Wilmington.
The 316-MW Cape Fear Plant near Moncure.
The 172-MW W.H. Weatherspoon Plant near Lumberton.
And the 397-MW H.F. Lee Plant near Goldsboro (retirement announced in August).

Progress Energy Carolinas has announced a plan to build new generation fueled by natural gas in Wayne County, N.C., and expects to announce additional gas plans in the near future. The company will continue to operate three coal-fired plants in North Carolina after 2017. The company has invested more than $2 billion in installing state-of-the-art emission controls at the 2,424-MW Roxboro Plant and the 742-MW Mayo Plant, both located in Person County, and the 376-MW Asheville Plant in Buncombe County. Emissions of nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, mercury and other pollutants have been reduced significantly at those sites.

Why Coal Plants are Closing Now

Treehugger discusses the start of large numbers of coal plant closures/mothballing

At the national level, several things are driving the closings or "mothballing" of old coal-fired plants.

1. The closing plants are very old, and are relatively inefficient, with many parts and components at the end of design life. Physical size of the property may not allow for large scale upgrades. Moreover, an upgrade that ups capacity would open up the air emissions permitting process (see point 2. below).

2. Older coal-fired plants may not support cost-effective implementation of the pollution controls that will be needed to meet new standards for mercury and fine particulatesl.

3. These plants may be in air sheds where air quality standards are not currently being met (true in Pennsylvania for certain). Once such plants are closed, emission credits embodied in their air emissions permits can be in effect 'traded' for a new permit that puts out fewer grams of pollution per kilowatt generated: more power output for the same emission load.

4. Because of deregulation of power markets which occurred in the recent past, utilities are under pressure to keep power prices down, which makes it harder still to justify added capital upgrade costs on these old plants. With loans still hard to come by, the cheaper, faster to build, less-polluting natural gas plant gets the banker's nod every time.

5. You will read and hear plenty of speculation about how the prospect of a 'cap and trade' regime is what is behind these closings. That's load of horse apples being dumped by people who do not understand capital investment and pollution control standards. The climate bill, as proposed, gives these utilities free credits for carbon emissions above the moving cap. The costs of managing fly ash and mercury, and the relatively high expense of keeping these nags running is what the game is about.

As USEPA gets down to reviewing more air permits, you will see numerous additional announcements of capacity cut backs, mothballing, and outright plant closures. Keep in mind that some of the old coal fired plants are on polluted ground and that outright closure would mean expensive cleanup. Therefore, I am betting that 'mothballing' will be the prevailing modality


Coal to Nuclear
Coal2nuclear discusses the details for replacing coal burners with nuclear reactors.

● Man dumps 37 billion tons of CO2 into the air every year. Nature manages to remove only 21 of them. The excess 16 is Global Warming's CO2.
● Half of Global Warming comes from a few supersized coal-burning boilers that could be quickly replaced with a modified Russian BN-800 nuclear boiler.

5,000 Supersized Power Plant Coal Boilers are making 53% of Global Warming's accumulating CO2 (8.6 billion tons of CO2/year). Few in number, these modern energy giants power only 2% of the world's power plants but are making 53% of all Global Warming CO2. The world has about 5,000 supersized boilers in 1,200 huge power plants such as Taichung. 5,000 weapons of mass combustion, each one burns a mile-long train of coal every day - that's over 5,000 miles of coal every day. They are truly Global Warming's smoking gun. Suggested nuclear boiler replacement: BN-800

Intel Larrabee Canceled

IEEE Spectrum picked the Intel Larrabee as a technology winner for 2009

Intel has canceled the Intel Larrabee, so the IEEE Spectrum pick is completely, unambiguously wrong

I had commented about the prediction of the IEEE Spectrum when it was made, that it was vague. What would it mean that Larrabee would be a winner ? Clearly it cannot be canceled and win.

Intel could not get the Larrabee to outperform the Nvidia Fermi or AMD GPUs.

Compact Proton Beam Accelerators and Handheld Fusion Reactors

Previously this site had reported on the DARPA project to create chip scale high energy atomic beams as a path to commercial nuclear fusion.

There is a DARPA budget document with a bit more description that what was previously referenced.

The Chip-Scale High Energy Atomic Beams program will develop chip-scale high-energy atomic beam technology by developing high efficiency radio frequency (RF) accelerators, either linear or circular, that can achieve energies of protons and other ions up to a few mega electron volts (MeV). Chip-scale integration offers precise, micro actuators and high electric field generation at modest power levels that will enable several order of magnitude decreases in the volume needed to accelerate the ions. Furthermore, thermal isolation techniques will enable high efficiency beam to power converters, perhaps making chipscale self-sustained fusion possible.

Program Plans:
FY 2009 Plans:
- Develop 0.5 MeV proton beams and collide onto microscale B-11 target with a fusion Q (energy ratio) > 20, possibly leading to self sustained fusion.
- Develop neutron-less fusion allowing safe deployment for handheld power sources.
- Develop microscale isotope production by proton beam interaction with specific targets.
- Explore purification of isotope systems.
- Develop hand-held pico-second laser systems to introduce wakefield accelerators for x-ray and fusion sources.

UPDATE: Physicist Art Carlson comments:

For those who might not know: Even if you can make a 0.5 MeV ion beam, and even if you can make it with 100% energy efficiency, when it slams into a solid target it will unavoidably lose more energy by heating the electrons in the solid than it will produce by fusion. This is true for D-T and it is 1000 times more true for p-B11.

It seems likely that the higher voltages suggested in Winterberg's fusion proposals (gigavolts) would be needed.
END UPDATE

Principles and applications of compact laser–plasma accelerators



There are various laser pumped proton beam systems in the 3 Million EV to the 58 million EV range. Some of the 3 million EV systems are relatively compact.

Testing the first goal:
Develop 0.5 MeV proton beams and collide onto microscale B-11 target with a fusion Q (energy ratio) > 20, possibly leading to self sustained fusion.

Seems to be testable even if making everything chipscale takes longer.



Proton beams

In contrast to electrons, ions are best accelerated by a low-frequency (compared with the electron plasma wave frequency) or even a quasi-static electric field. Indeed, owing to their higher mass, the rapid field oscillations associated with an electron plasma wave average out to zero net acceleration for an ion. In experiments
so far, the mechanisms of ion acceleration can be classified into two categories, on the basis of how the electric charge separation that produces the quasi-static field is generated: ponderomotive or thermal explosion acceleration.

Proton beams produced by rear-surface acceleration show good collimation, increasing at higher proton energy, and very low transverse emittance (below 10-2 mmmrad for protons above 10MeV). Several paths for beam optimization are now being actively pursued. The first is to operate with ultrathin targets, in the sub-100nm range, which requires ultrahigh-contrast laser pulses. Improved acceleration with such targets has been reported recently.

Proton beams with energies up to 58MeV have been measured at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with the now dismantled Nova petawatt laser. With smaller facilities, of the 1 J/30 fs class, distributions extending up to 10MeV have been
obtained.

The evolution of short-pulse laser technology, a field in rapid progress, will still improve the properties of laser produced particle sources. For example, the development of diode pumped lasers will enable the laser power efficiency to be increased by up to tens of per cent and will also lead to a significant reduction of the size of the laser systems. The rapid evolution of chirped pulse amplification laser technology, coupled to progress in laser–plasma interaction modelling, will soon result in improved performances, lower cost and still wider applicability of these compact particle sources.

The Extreme Light Infrastructure project in Europe and other projects are advancing the technology of lasers and accelerators and are bringing researchers together to look at uses for these new particle and photon beams.

Neely, D. et al. Enhanced proton beams from ultrathin targets driven by high contrast laser pulses.
Appl. Phys. Lett. 89, 021502 (2006).

Antici, P. et al. Energetic protons generated by ultrahigh contrast laser pulses interacting with ultrathin targets. Phys. Plasmas 14, 030701 (2007).

Ceccotti, T. et al. Proton acceleration with high-intensity, ultra-high-contrast laser pulses. Phys. Rev.
Lett. 99, 185002 (2007).

Proton Acceleration with High-Intensity Ultrahigh-Contrast Laser Pulses

We report on simultaneous measurements of backward- and forward-accelerated protons spectra when an ultrahigh intensity ( 5 X 10^18 W=cm2), ultrahigh contrast (>10^10) laser pulse interacts with foils of thickness ranging from 0.08 to 105 micrometers. Under such conditions, free of preplasma originating from ionization of the laser-irradiated surface, we show that the maximum proton energies are proportional to the p component of the laser electric field only and not to the ponderomotive force and that the characteristics of the proton beams originating from both target sides are almost identical. All these points have been corroborated by extensive 1D and 2D particle-in-cell simulations showing a very good agreement with the experimental data.

Nano to Macro Scale Nuclear Technology Applications

Betavoltaics can store about one million times more energy than other battery like devices but currently cannot release it very quickly.

Nano-to-Macro Scale Engineering Applications of Nuclear Technology-An Overview by Rusi P. Taleyarkhan, School of Nuclear Engineering, Purdue University (7 page pdf)

Nuclear science and technology offers the capability for radical industrial innovations from the nano-to-macro scales and is a field that already impacts over $600B in annual worldwide activity. Areas impacted are as diverse as medicine, industrial process control, energy, explosives, materials processing, agriculture, food preservation, sterilization, non-destructive interrogation for the molecular structure of compounds to use as tracers for transport and the tracking of fluids. This paper focuses on novel nano-macro scale peaceful applications for the oil-gas industry, for the metals industries, for enabling fundamental advances in boiling heat transfer, for induction of super compression in imploding bubbles to then lead to thermonuclear fusion and energy amplifications of over x one million times compared to chemical sources, to generation of nanopores in materials that may see applications such as for high-efficiency membranes for use in batteries and for dialysis, to the development of a novel class of low cost, multidisciplinary, fundamental particle detection systems.

Nuclear safety studies have spinoffs that improve safety in other industries. It has helped to improve the understanding and safety for handling liquid natural gas and help prevent aluminum-water explosions.

The Science of Nuclear safety has also resulted in advancements with supercooled powders. Nano-micron scale supercooled powder production using spontaneous molten metal-water explosions (e.g., 10g Sn at ~1100 K dropped into water bath at ~310 K); Cooling rates estimated to be in range of 100,000 K/s to one million K/s.





Enhancement of boiling heat transfer and hydrophilicity via irradiation

Some of the most wide-ranging phenomena utilized in every-day life involves hydrophilicity and the boiling of water at hot surfaces. This aspect governs the safety limits and consequently, the power output of water-cooled nuclear reactors; for a 1,000 MWe plant, even 1% enhancement implies power generation availability for an additional 10,000 homes (based on per capita electricity consumption in the USA). Enhancement of boiling heat flux for a given system has enormous significance and implications on economics and safety of operations (including that of nuclear reactors). Radiation treatment of solid surfaces appears to provide such a means as has been noted lately in several nuclear safety-motivated studies (Honjo, 2008) wherein gamma radiation has been shown to improve surface hydrophilicity and enhancement of critical heat flux (CHF) by an impressive ~ 10%, as well as delaying the onset of the well-known Leidenfrost point of the boiling curve – thereby, fundamentally impacting quenching characteristics of hot metals.

Betavoltaics

The promise and potential of betavoltaics is immense. This primarily due to recent advances in a combination of areas related to:
(1) isotope production and potential availability at reasonable cost;
(2) significant advances in novel radiation-hard semi-conductor chips that can be micro-to-nano-fabricated; and,
(3) leap-ahead advances in intrinsic conversion efficiencies; as also from significant advances in photo-voltaic technology.

Unlike the ~ 1 eV energy level of visible photons used for photovoltaic cells, beta energies from isotopes are in the 100,000 – one milllion eV range, and thus can provide unsurpassed higher-energy densities for application in confined quarters.

The theoretical conversion efficiency of a betavoltaic increases sub-linearly with increasing semiconductor bandgap. The direct-conversion technology results in a number of advantages over conventional power sources: Long-lived power: Continuous current is produced during the entire decay period of the radioisotope source. The use of isotope sources with half-lives that range from years to decades allows continuous power production for similar periods. Examples include 204Tl ,85Kr , 90Sr, 147Pm and 3h with half-lives of 3.8y, 10.8y, 28.8y, 2.6y and 12.3y, respectively. Recent advances in efficiency of conversion to > 10% as well as materials degradation with 247Pm type isotopes and related studies using 3H at Purdue University will be discussed at the conference.

Comment from Regular Reader Goatguy

The betavoltaic concept is actually intriguing from a number of perspectives.

Let's go with the obvious gotchas first: it is not a 'public' technology no matter how packaged. It is absolutely impossible to imagine ordinary consumers having megacuries of isotopes either in their homes, vehicles or general workplaces. It also is only marginally a commercially-feasible concept: the same security issues exist, and it won't be placed into all but the most hardened secure locations. So ... "big business" is about it, with security forces, cards, cameras, fences, reconnaisance, etc. The military is an obvious (but again, strangely, compromised by the 'tight security' issue!) placement, as are utilities, police forces, municipal entities, heavy industry, mining & exploration, shipping and rail, and the like. Aerospace, yes - especially so.

So.

First, the diagram is wrong. The semiconductor would be on both sides of the isotope. (duh). The beta electrons aren't particularly inclined to to one way or the other.

Second, beta has an extremely short free path through solids. Therefore only the thinnest films of it (and the thinnest barriers through the semiconductor) allow for efficient tunneling and capture.

Third, The cells would most likely be chemical-vapor deposited so that thousands of layers per centimeter could be built up. there is a COST to that (though it is also readily mass-producible)

Fourth, using shorter half-lives, typically with higher beta energy, energies of 100Wh/kg (360kJ/kg) aren't out of the realm of the possible. Combined with conventional emerging super-caps and conventional Li-ion battery systems having a net power density of 200 kJ/kg and specific energies up to 1000+ W/kG are clearly achievable.

At the dozen-kilogram level, such power systems might be perfect for remote data loggers where photovoltaic is out of the question. Satellites wouldn't need the batteries, but could probably use the super-caps, to allow them to work in burst mode over long lifetimes.

At the megagram (ton) level:

100 watt, peak, practical cell
50% weight utilization
50.00 =W/kg
180.00 =kj/kg-hr
0.05 =kWh/kg
1000 kg (proposed)
50.00 =kWh/kg/h
1,200.00 =kWh/kg/day


producing over 1,000 kWh/day of electricity...

2,500 heat kWh
9,000,000,000 joules
9,000,000 BTU
375,000 BTU/hr

So, removing the 375,000 BTU with simple air-cooling would be satisfactory.

the biggest problem there would be having triplicate or quadruplicate cooling systems to keep the 'energy block' from melting down in the event of a coolant breakdown. Probably "different systems" - underground aquifer tap + air cooling + "city water" cooling as a backup.

There are quite a few businesses that could use such power densities, and autonomy from the grid. Computer facilities in particular come to mind, if for nothing but the "core-core" equipment and routers, telecommunications and robotic systems-control apparatus.

Another player might be municipalities - especially rapid-transit 'underground' type systems. Virtually all substations can be quite hardened (and secured, and surveillance watched), and the net availability of the baseline power (with capacitive storage) is ideal for running the nominal system without purchasing much grid power.

I don't think there is much of a need though for systems larger than a few tons, say 10 or so megawatt-hours/day. Reason is, the systems rapidly approach the size where compact natural-gas generation, or pebble-bed nuclear systems have much higher energy density for the weight and footprint.

Police stations could use the devices at the several-ton level to generate baseline electricity (and deliver it quickly by the capacitive discharge route) for fleets of flywheel cars, or fast-charge ionic battery systems. (Busses could use this too). Here, the only real metric is whether the cost per megajoule of the betavoltaic power is no more than a factor of 2 greater than grid power. Why 2? Because at a 2:1 parity, in the event of a long-term electrical failure, the fleet of cars wouldn't diminish by more than 25% or so to keep law and order.

Significantly: if the cost per kilowatt-hour of electricity is even reasonably close to the grid wholesale level, then the technology is an easy "must buy" - since with all likelihood, the plateauing production of oil combined with the necessarily increased demand for it by route of India, China and the whole Far East ... is going to cause baseline grid electricity to markedly increase in price in the not too far future.

FURTHER READING
Previous coverage of liquid nuclear betavoltaic batteries

In 2007, IEEE Spectrum reported that DARPA wanted GTI (one of the betavoltaic companies) to run full speed toward proving that a reactor of the 100- to 1000-kilowatt scale could be built.

A liquid nuclear diode could catch energetic alpha and beta particles, gamma rays, and even the new atoms left over from the fission of larger atoms, Tsang says. Fissile fragments could be a particularly good source of energy. In the fission of U-235, for example, the fragments carry 85 percent of the energy released. Because the fragments are heavy, as they plow through the semiconductor they ”make a shower of electron-hole pairs along the path,” he says.

Note: Alpha radiation (positively charged helium nuclei) and beta radiation (electrons).

MIT Technology Review reports on Widetronix's batteries are made up of a metal foil impregnated with tritium isotopes and a thin chip of the semiconductor silicon carbide, which can convert 30 percent of the beta particles that hit it into an electrical current. "Silicon carbide is very robust, and when we thin it down, it becomes flexible," says Widetronix CEO Jonathan Greene. "When we stack up chips and foils into a package a centimeter squared and two-tenths of a centimeter high, we have a one microwatt product." The prototype being tested by Lockheed Martin produces 25 nanowatts of power.

IEC Fusion, National Ignition Facility and Other Nuclear Fusion Projects

Alan Boyle at MSNBC cosmic Log reviews the status of nuclear fusion projects

He does not mention General Fusion or Japan's Muon fusion project.

For IEC Fusion:

In September, EMC2 Fusion was awarded a Navy contract, backed by $7.9 million in stimulus funds, to develop a scaled-up version of a Polywell fusion reactor. Development and testing of the device is expected to take two years, and there's an option to spend another $4.4 million on experiments with hydrogen-boron fuel (known as pB11).

The Navy contract for $7.9 million and the $4.4 million option

Award includes an option for a Wiffleball 8.1 for an additional $4,455,077.

National Ignition Facility

The National Ignition Facility is a the $3.5 billion laser research site at California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. NIF is designed to produce fusion power on a small scale by aiming 192 laser beams simultaneously at a hydrogen target the size of a pencil eraser for a burst lasting just a few billionths of a second.

NIF was certified for operation in March, and last month officials reported that the laser beams could generate enough X-ray energy during the initial testing phase to ignite the fuel capsules as required. The research campaign is scheduled to begin in earnest early next year, and there's already talk in the fusion community that the reaction could reach the break-even point by the time 2010 ends.

Transistor made with a Single Atom Active Region

Figure caption:
(a) Colored scanning electron microscope image of the measured device. Aluminum top gate is used to induce a two-dimensional electron layer at the silicon-silicon oxide interface below the metallization. The barrier gate is partially below the top gate and depletes the electron layer in the vicinity of the phosphorus donors (the red spheres added to the original image). The barrier gate can also be used to control the conductivity of the device. All the barrier gates in the figure form their own individual transistors.
(b) Measured differential conductance through the device at 4 Tesla magnetic field. The red and the yellow spheres illustrate the spin-down and -up states of a donor electron which induce the lines of high conductivity clearly visible in the figure.



Researchers from Helsinki University of Technology (Finland), University of New South Wales (Australia), and University of Melbourne (Australia) have succeeded in building a working transistor, whose active region composes only of a single phosphorus atom in silicon. The results have just been published in Nano Letters.

The working principles of the device are based on sequential tunneling of single electrons between the phosphorus atom and the source and drain leads of the transistor. The tunneling can be suppressed or allowed by controlling the voltage on a nearby metal electrode with a width of a few tens of nanometers.



Nanoletters: Transport Spectroscopy of Single Phosphorus Donors in a Silicon Nanoscale Transistor

Abstract
We have developed nanoscale double-gated field-effect-transistors for the study of electron states and transport properties of single deliberately implanted phosphorus donors. The devices provide a high-level of control of key parameters required for potential applications in nanoelectronics. For the donors, we resolve transitions corresponding to two charge states successively occupied by spin down and spin up electrons. The charging energies and the Land g-factors are consistent with expectations for donors in gated nanostructures.

Fujitsu Runs Prototype of Ten Petaflop Supercomputer and Wants Restart of Project

Fujitsu Ltd. (6702) on Wednesday successfully operated a prototype of its next-generation supercomputer, in spite of a government panel's decision to freeze funding for the project.

The Ministry of Science and others are calling for the project to be continued, and Fujitsu says it is ready to start production as soon as it gets the green light.
The electronics manufacturer has already developed a trial CPU especially for the supercomputer. Plans for the actual supercomputer call for some 20,000 circuit boards and approximately 80,000 CPUs. The prototype connected a few dozen boards -- each of the boards used four CPUs.

Fujitsu has been receiving over 10 billion yen in financial aid from the government through the research laboratory Riken. But Fujitsu has shouldered almost twice that amount on its own. If the next-generation supercomputer is brought online in 2012 as scheduled, Fujitsu plans to develop its CPUs for use in smaller supercomputers and corporate servers

China COSCO CEO Seriously Considering Nuclear Powered Container Ships

The boss of the world’s largest shipping conglomerate has advocated the use of nuclear power onboard merchant ships.

Outlining the container alliance CKYH’s decision to push ahead with super slow steaming, COSCO ceo and president Capt Wei Jiafu said that the move was in part a green one. He then went on to say that he was in favour of using nuclear power onboard merchant ships as a further green initiative. ‘As they are already onboard submarines, why not cargo ships?’ he mused. Later he spoke to Seatrade Asia Online and revealed COSCO is in talks with the national nuclear authorities to develop nuclear powered ships.

Earlier that morning Wei had said as much as 40% of the global total orderbook is under threat. Wei’s prediction is far higher than most analysts’ at present. He was speaking at the Senior Maritime Forum coorganised by UBM and Seatrade at this year’s Marintec China. Citing ‘financing and cash flow problems in medium and small sized corporations’ since the outbreak of the financial crisis, Wei said that his ‘personal feeling’ was that ‘about 40% of newbuilding orders will be postponed or cancelled this year and next year’. COSCO, itself, has cancelled 126 bulkers and postponed the delivery of a large swathe of boxships by one to two years.

Technical and Economic Analysis of Nuclear Container Ships
This site had examined a study of the economics of nuclear power for commercial shipping. The study showed that a nuclear ship would be $40 million per year cheaper to operate when bunker oil is at $500/ton.
Those studies had indicated improved economics when bunker fuel is over $300/ton. Bunker oil is currently about $375/ton. Also, changing to nuclear powered container ships would reduce air pollution by the equivalent of about 20,000 cars converted to electric per container ship that is converted.

A second article had more analysis, pictures and video.

The 2008 International conference of Container Ship Design & Operation had another presentation of nuclear powered commercial shipping (page 3 of 4) H/T DV82XL at the Energy from Thorium Forum

Analysis of High-Speed Trans-Pacific Nuclear Containership Service
G. A. Sawyer, J. W. Shirley, J A. Stroud, E. Bartlett, General Management
Partners LLC, USA. C. B. McKesson, CCDoTT, USA.

35 knot ships that could hold more cargo could be built and operated more cheaply than regular oil powered ships. Initial costs are 6 times higher ($900 million versus 150 million.) Three nuclear ships could do the work of 4 regular ships and operational costs would be lower. The higher speed means the fast cargo niche could be addressed. A reasonable timeline is for nuclear commercial shipping in the 10-15 year timeframe.

More information in this artiticle "The Ultimate Green Ship: Nuclear Powered ?"




More Economic Analysis

A nuclear powered container ship was analyzed by Femenia, C.R. Cushing & Co, Inc. in 2008.




Capacity 15,000 TEU (a big container ship)
Length 405 m
Beam 60 m
Draft 15.5 m
Speed 32 knots
Power 150 Mw (200,000 SHP)
Propellers 2

Economic Issues
Capital Costs (Source: Femenia, C.R. Cushing & Co, Inc)
150,000 kW (200,000 HP)
1. Assumes Nuclear @ $2500 / kW
2. Assumes Diesel @ $800 / kW
3. Assumes Plant Life 40 Years
4. Assumes Interest Rate 10%




COSCO website


What is the size of a VLCC?

With its US$ 15.4135 billion (122.8825 billion RMB) in annual revenue, COSCO was successfully listed as the 488th of Fortune Global 500 in 2006; in 2007, COSCO secured the 405th of the list with its US$ 20.84 billion (158.5135 billion RMB).

COSCO owns or operates a fleet of more than 800 modern merchant vessels with a total capacity of over 50 million DWT and an annual shipping volume of over 400 million tons, covering over 1,500 ports in 160 countries and territories across the globe, ranking China's first and world's second in general. In specific, the containers fleet ranks No.1 in China and No.6 in the world; the dry bulk fleet ranks the top in the world;

VLCC is the abbreviation of "Very Large Crude Carrier". It is one of the largest crude carriers currently in operation throughout the world. Its deck is as big as 3 soccer fields. Full load of a VLCC on oil is equivalent to the quantity consumed by 8 million private automobiles throughout the country in 10 days. COSCO currently has got 3 VLCCs in operation and will take delivery of another two in 2004.

Why is the fifth-generation container ship reputed as sea mega-carrier?
The fifth-generation containership is regarded as one of the world's most advanced containerships in service so far. Currently COSCO operates 13 of them. This kind of vessels can carry as many as 5,446 TEU (Twenty Equivalent Unit) in terms of slot capacity. If these containers are connected one by one, such a connection line is supposed to be as long as 33 Km and if a train has 60 carriages, 50 of such trains will be needed to carry all these boxes away. By 2005, COSCO will have taken delivery of another 5 jumbos, each with a slot capacity of up to 8000 TEU. These vessels are probably included in a new generation in global container liner industry. By then, the container fleet of COSCO shall be more powerful.

RELATED INFO
Britain and other European governments have been accused of underestimating the health risks from shipping pollution following research which shows that one giant container ship can emit almost the same amount of cancer and asthma-causing chemicals as 50m cars.

Confidential data from maritime industry insiders based on engine size and the quality of fuel typically used by ships and cars shows that just 15 of the world's biggest ships may now emit as much pollution as all the world's 760m cars. Low-grade ship bunker fuel (or fuel oil) has up to 2,000 times the sulphur content of diesel fuel used in US and European automobiles.

Pressure is mounting on the UN's International Maritime Organisation and the EU to tighten laws governing ship emissions following the decision by the US government last week to impose a strict 230-mile buffer zone along the entire US coast, a move that is expected to be followed by Canada.

The setting up of a low emission shipping zone follows US academic research which showed that pollution from the world's 90,000 cargo ships leads to 60,000 deaths a year in the US alone and costs up to $330bn per year in health costs from lung and heart diseases. The US Environmental Protection Agency estimates the buffer zone, which could be in place by next year, will save more than 8,000 lives a year with new air quality standards cutting sulphur in fuel by 98%, particulate matter by 85% and nitrogen oxide emissions by 80%

Japan Starts MOX Burning Reactor and Small Dose Radiation Risks Are Lower

1. Japan's first ever nuclear power reactor to use mixed oxide (MOX) fuel assemblies is now operating at full capacity, fuel supplier Areva has announced. Kyushu's Genkai 3 was loaded with the fuel fabricated from uranium and the plutonium recovered from previously used nuclear fuel in October.

Recycling of plutonium in MOX is to play a key role in Japan's future nuclear fuel cycle, and two other utilities - Shikoku Electric Power Co and Chubu Electric Power Co – plan to introduce MOX fuel into their reactors in or after 2010.

2. The risks of small radiation doses could have been exaggerated, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) has found. This matters because we should not waste money trying to protect against things that are not actually dangerous. We do not spend money trying to protect against 2 mile per hour collisions or lower because those kind of collisions are not dangerous. Trying to protect against those kinds of collisions would mean spending trillions of dollars without any increase in safety.

The risks from small doses over longer periods have been largely assumed under the 'linear-no threshold' model, which implies that any level of radiation exposure - no matter how small - would cause a corresponding level of biological damage.

After collating more than 200 peer-reviewed publications on the topic, EPRI was able to conclude that this methodology may have been over-estimating the risks. Different mechanisms are at work at each end of the scale, EPRI found from recent studies, and "when radiation is delivered at a low dose rate (i.e. over a longer time period), it is much less effective in producing biological changes than when the same dose is delivered in a short time period."

The data covers more than 100,000 workers per year at US nuclear power plants. Nobody has been exposed to more than the US regulatory annual limit of 50 rem (0.5 Sv) since 1989. "Doses of less than 10 rem (0.1 Sv) in a single exposure are too small to allow detection of any statistically significant excess cancers," said EPRI.

The Ritch letter focused on the currently ongoing revision of the IAEA Basic Safety Standards and a proposal to reduce dose limits for the public from 1 mSv per year to 0.3 mSv. Ritch warned that a "wholly theoretical gain in radiation safety could take precedence over, and act to the detriment of, the real gains in public health and environmental protection that can be achieved through a worldwide expansion of nuclear power."

The tendency to strive for ever-lower radiation doses in the absence of evidence of real health gains "undercuts the fundamental, well-established principle of optimisation of doses, which entails that a judicious balance be struck among real risks and benefits," said Ritch.

In practical terms, a constant drive for lower doses would lead to increasing cost and complication for nuclear operators and regulators, with no measurable benefit for workers or the public.