Greenpeace International and the European Renewable Energy Council have produced a report titled: "Energy [R]evolution: A Sustainable World Energy Outlook" which provides a detailed blueprint for cutting carbon emissions while achieving economic growth by replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy and energy efficiency. Acopy of the full 212-page report is here; a 16-page summary is here.

Under the Energy [R]evolution scenario, global CO2 emissions would peak in 2015 and drop afterwards. Compared with 1990 CO2 emissions would be more than 80% lower by 2050. The report says that by 2050 around 95% of electricity could be produced by renewable energy.

The report also says that this phase-out of fossil fuels offers substantial additional benefits such as energy security, independence from world market fuel prices as well as the creation of millions of new green jobs.

By 2015 global power supply sector jobs in the Energy [R]evolution scenario are estimated to reach about 11.1 million, 3.1 million more than in the business-as-usual Reference scenario. By 2020 over 6.5 million jobs in the renewables sector would be created due a much faster uptake of renewables, three-times more than today.

The report finds that this can be achieved with proven technologies by adhering to five key principles:

• Equity and fairness
• Respecting natural limits
• Phasing out dirty, unsustainable energy
• Implementing renewable solutions and decentralising energy systems
• Decoupling growth from fossil fuel use.

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Toshiba is in talks Terrapower, a company backed by Bill Gates, to jointly develop traveling wave nuclear reactors which are designed to use depleted uranium as fuel and could run for 60 years or more without refueling. (See http://www.greenbizcafe.com/?p=881 for a description of travelling wave reactors.)

Toshiba owns the Westinghouse Electric Company whose technology is the basis for about half of the world’s commercial nuclear reactors.

Toshiba is already developing its own mini nuclear reactors designed to operate continuously for 30 years and believes that 80 percent of the technologies used in the reactor under development can be applied to traveling-wave reactors.

Toshiba anticipates that commercialisation of traveling wave reactors could take about ten years.

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Scientists have been working on developing nuclear fusion power generation since the early 1950s. The main problem has always been that more energy has been required to produce the reaction than is produced.

Scientists at the National Ignition Facility in California believe that their latest experiments will overcome the problem.

Their technique uses lasers to concentrate isotopes of hydrogen. The pressures and densities achieved are close to what occurs in the sun. At these densities. mass becomes energy in the form of heat which can be used to drive a turbine.

A demonstration reactor is expected to begin testing later this year and to be in operation within two years. If successful, the scientsist believe that they could have a power plant delivering electricity to the grid within ten years. Electricity produced in this way would be economical, carbon free and effectively limitless.

However, other scientists are more sceptical.
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Scientists at Northwestern University in Chicago have developed a new material which permanently traps only the radioactive ion cesium and not other harmless ions like sodium.

The material is made from layers of a gallium, sulfur and antimony compound. It has been found to be extremely effective in removing radioactive cesium - which found in nuclear waste but is very difficult to clean up - from a sodium-rich solution, similar to real liquid nuclear waste. The cesium triggers a structural change in the material, causing it to snap its pores shut, like a venus flytrap, and trap the cesium ions within. The material sequesters 100 percent of the cesium ions from the solution while ignoring all of the sodium ions.

The research was described in an article in the Nature Chemistry journal. The paper’s senior author, Mercouri G. Kanatzidis, Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences commented that "Seeing the windows close was completely unexpected, We expected ion exchange — we didn’t expect the material to respond dynamically. This gives us a new mechanism to focus on….A new class of materials that takes advantage of the flytrap mechanism could lead to a much-needed breakthrough in nuclear waste remediation."

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A Canadian company, General Fusion, claims that it can build a relatively low-tech prototype nuclear fusion power plant within the next decade for less than a billion dollars.

For decades, billions of dollars have been spent on research into ways of building a practical fusion reactor for electricity production. The major problem is creating a controllable fusion reaction that gives off more energy than is needed to trigger it and most scientists believe that achieving this will take several more decades and cost tens billions of dollars.

General Fusion’s approach involves building a metal sphere about three metres in diameter filled with a liquid lead-lithium mixture. This liquid is spun to open up a vertical cylindrical cavity in the center of the sphere. Two magnetized plasma rings composed of deuterium-tritium fuel are then injected into each end of the cavity and merge in the centre.

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The first generation of nuclear power plants were the experimental plants ot the 1950s and early 60s, which were also used to power nuclear submarines. The second generation were the commercial plants from the later 1960s to the 1990s.

After the Three-mile Island and Chernobyl accidents, a third generation of nuclear plants was developed. These emphasise improved fuel technology, superior thermal efficiency, passive safety systems and standardized design for reduced maintenance and capital costs and longer life (60 years compared to 40 years for Generation 11 reactors). However, the technology is basically the same as in older reactors.

Most of these are "light water reactors" meaning that they use ordinary water for cooling and to transfer the heat from the nuclear reation to the turbines that generate electricity. Most do this by making steam; most of the rest use pressured water.

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The Italian senate has voted 154-1 to overturn a 22-year-old prohibition on new nuclear power stations. Their decision is line with those taken recently in several other European countries as a means of reducing their carbon dioxide emissions.

Sweden has lifed its 29-year ban on new nuclear plants, Spain has begun to reverse its 25-year old policy of phasing out nuclear power. The Netherlands abandoned its policy of phasing out nuclear power in 2005. Germany’s coalition government is continuing the policy, introduced in 2001, of phasing out nuclear power by 2020 but Chancellor Angela Merkel has promised to abandon the policy if she wins elections in September. The UK government has reaffirmed that atomic power is central to the strategy for building a low-carbon Britain and is considering plans to build the first new reactors in over 20 years.

France, which gets 77% of its electricity from 59 nuclear power plants, is buillding an improved third generation "European Pressurised Reactor" in Normandy. The project is intended to be a prototype for up to forty power plants. Italy is already undertaking a feasibility study to construct four of the plants.

Europe currently has a total of 165 nuclear rectors with six under construction and several more planned.

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According to scientists at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden, attempting to tackle global warming by capturing carbon dioxide or switching to nuclear power will not work because a large part of the warming results from the heat produced by industrial processes rather than the greenhouse effect.

In a paper published in the International Journal of Global Warming, Bo Nordell and Bruno Gervet  have calculated the total energy emissions from the start of large-scale industrialisation in the 1880s to the modern day  They point out that net heat emissions during that time account for almost three quarters of the global warming during that period - the greenhouse effect accounts for the remaining 26%.

The implication of their findings are  that those processes which produce heat, such as burning fossil fuels and using nuclear power, would continue to cause global warming even if all of the carbon dioxide which they emit is captured. On the other hand, those sources of energy which ultimately use the sun’s heat, including wind and marine power as well as solar, do not contribute to global warming.

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John Wellinghoff, the Chairman of the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has told a U.S. Energy Association forum.that no new nuclear or coal plants may ever be needed in the United States,

"We may not need any, ever," Mr Wellinghoff said. Renewables like wind, solar and biomass will provide enough energy to meet baseload capacity and future energy demands. Nuclear and coal plants are too expensive, he added.

"I think baseload capacity is going to become an anachronism," he said. "Baseload capacity really used to only mean in an economic dispatch, which you dispatch first, what would be the cheapest thing to do. Well, ultimately wind’s going to be the cheapest thing to do, so you’ll dispatch that first."

He added, "People talk about, ‘Oh, we need baseload.’ It’s like people saying we need more computing power, we need mainframes. We don’t need mainframes, we have distributed computing."

"What you have to do, is you have to be able to shape it," he added. "And if you can shape wind and you can effectively get capacity available for you for all your loads.

"So if you can shape your renewables, you don’t need fossil fuel or nuclear plants to run all the time. And, in fact, most plants running all the time in your system are an impediment because they’re very inflexible. You can’t ramp up and ramp down a nuclear plant. And if you have instead the ability to ramp up and ramp down loads in ways that can shape the entire system, then the old concept of baseload becomes an anachronism."

"I think it’s being settled by the digital grid moving forward," he said. "We are going to have to go to a smart grid to get to this point I’m talking about."

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In 1989, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons anounced that they had demonstrated the production of excess heat during electrolysis with palladium cathodes in heavy water. The phenomenon was dubbed "cold fusion" and their claims were quickly dismissed.

However, many laboratories have since repeated their expeiments. Although most have failed, a few have reported success. A 2007 review determined that more than 10 groups world wide reported measurements of excess heat in a third of their experiments. Most of the research groups reported occasionally seeing 50-200% excess heat for periods lasting hours or days.

If the production of excess heat is real, it could be a source of cheap, pollution-free energy.

The American "60 Minutes" has produced the following review of the current state the science:

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