Energywise

I've been half-following this story, and I can't tell if it's a tempest in a teapot, or the real thing. Today Tennessee Rep. Bart Gordon, the chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, introduced legislation to ban the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from allowing us to import foreign-generated nuclear waste.

"No other country in the world is accepting nuclear waste from other countries," said Gordon. "By doing so, the United States is putting itself in position to become the world's nuclear dumping ground."

According to the terms of the bill, the president can grant specific exemptions if an application shows importing said waste would serve a national or international policy goal, such as a research purpose.

In February, Utah-based EnergySolutions applied for an NRC license to import 20,000 tons of low-level nuclear waste (that means no glowing rods) from decommissioned nuclear reactors in Italy. The waste would be ultimately disposed of at a site in Clive, Utah. "The United States has only a finite amount of space available for disposal of nuclear waste," said Gordon.

Not the red planet, but rather the Monterey Accelerated Research System, an undersea observatory taking form--if haltingly--in the icy depths of the Pacific Ocean some 32 kilometers off California's coast. Last month an ROV from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute installed the observatory's main science node at a depth of 900 meters. But when engineers threw the switch on the node's 10,000 volt power supply, they discovered a ground fault in the main underwater electrical plug connecting the node to shore.

The fault necessitated surfacing of the 2-ton package of electronics as well as the observatory's trawl-resistant steel frame, requiring a large ship and complex logistics. Replacing the plug and reinstalling the node will set the project back at least several months.

Spectrum readers will recognize this setback as simply one more sign of the inherent challenge of connecting high power and broadband information to deep-sea instruments--the subject of the 2005 Spectrum feature, "Neptune Rising", which profiled a family of U.S. and Canadian projects sharing engineering and components to create the world's most advanced remotely-operated and internet-connected underwater research stations. One piece of the program--VENUS--is delivering real-time data from relatively shallow installations off Vancouver Island in British Columbia, while the deeper MARS and NEPTUNE projects remain works in progress.

Power is a key challenge. As Neptune Rising was going to press in the fall of 2005 engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory were troubleshooting bugs in the sophisticated power supply they designed for MARS--a problem that would ultimately take another 14 months and a new engineering team at Alcatel to solve. Imagine the disappointment of the MARS team to be upended by a faulty plug after all that high-tech sweat and blood!

The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, in a communiqué issued last month, put the problems down to life on the cutting edge, quoting the words of David Packard (of Hewlett Packard fame) when he founded the institute in 1987. Packard apparently admonished the new institute's researchers to take risks and ask big questions. "Don't be afraid to make mistakes," said Packard. "If you don't make mistakes, you're not reaching far enough." Let's hope the National Science Foundation officials supporting MARS agree.

Photo credit: David Fierstein, MBARI

The Heartland Institute's International Conference on Climate Change (motto: "global warming is not a crisis"), which ended yesterday in New York City, might be quickly written off because of the "dizzying range" and inconsistency of ideas expressed, as Andrew Revkin put in The New York Times, or the presumed vested interests bankrolling the meeting. But that is too facile. If nothing else, Heartland--which describes itself as dedicated to "promoting free-market solutions to social and economic problems"--mustered an impressive number of cosponsors: more than 50 organizations with a similar social philosophy, many of them in Europe.

Free marketeers have looked upon climate alarmism with a jaded eye, seeing it as a Trojan horse for statism, central planning, and internationalism. But can they actually muster credible scientists to support their suspicions? The Heartland meeting, which took place March 3-4, suggests that they still can.

To sample the situation, I attended a set of sessions about paleoclimatology, the study of the earth's climatic prehistory, gleaned from study of tree rings, and ice cores, among other indicators. I found a good deal to support my skepticism about the climate skeptics: highly technical talks with eccentric claims by scientists who are not actually climate professionals; selective use of limited time periods and data sets to support sweeping conclusions; scant mention of the pioneering geologists, ecologists, and glaciologists who laid the foundation for what's been, in the last 50 years, a revolution in paleoclimatology.

In a whole morning of talks about paleoglaciology, I heard scant mention of the ice scientists Dansgaard and Oeschger, and no critical discussion of their work. It's as if one were to hear four hours of talks critiquing the revolution in modern physics without mention of Einstein and Bohr.

But it was not all eccentric, empty, or ill-informed, either. Commenting on the 650,000-year ice-core record of greenhouse gases and global temperatures, astrophysicist Willie Soon poked fun with a cartoon comparing the relative roles of the Sun and carbon dioxide: the former Chicago Bears tackle Refrigerator Perry represented the Sun, while CO2 was personified by an average-sized Asian, namely Soon himself. Soon, who works for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, asked pointedly why the record shows changes in temperature leading rather than lagging behind changes in greenhouse gas levels, if it's the carbon dioxide and methane changes that supposedly cause climate change. "It's as if we said that cancer causes cigarette smoking," he said, echoing other speakers.

That's not the only argument we'll be hearing more and more, as the debate heats up in the next year over whether the United States should adopt a carbon trading system and commit to a Kyoto-like schedule of greenhouse gas cuts. To judge from my Heartland sample, we'll also be hearing doubts cast on the generally accepted estimate of pre-industrial greenhouse gas levels, the magnitude and geographic extent of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, and the scope and significance of carbon uptake by the oceans.

The climate skeptics are complaining that they have trouble being heard, and they may have a point. On the eve of the Bali conference, with Australia and perhaps even the United States heading toward belated membership in the Kyoto regime, 100 scientists signed a petition to the U.N. Secretary General rejecting climate alarmism. Sure, a lot of them were the usual suspects, people like Fred Seitz, the distinguished semiconductor physicist who first emerged in the public arena as an enthusiastic adherent of Ronald Reagan's Star Wars program, and in recent years has just as enthusiastically denounced climate alarmism. But there also were some eye-catching new names, notably Freeman Dyson, the maverick math and physics theorist at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies who is always interesting and often right.

In the wake of the power outages that swept South Florida this afternoon, the usual questions are sure to raise their heads: had Florida Power & Light (FPL) done all it could to enhance and maintain infrastructure in the affected region, with some 6 million inhabitants and perhaps 680,000 affected customers? Was it alert and on top of events today, which was almost record-hot, with summer-like air conditioning loads? Or was it like the sleepy and controversial Ohio utility in whose operating region the great Northeast-Midwest blackout of August 2003 began? Are blackouts inevitable?

An IEEE Spectrum article published in June 2000 drew attention to a crisis in U.S. power systems: everywhere in the country grids were thin-stretched, with additions to transmission and generation lagging behind growth in electricity demand, and with the personnel needed to design and maintain power systems in ever-shorter supply. Since then, some regions have been much more successful than others in building out their power systems and improving their management: New England, for example, has a highly regarded independent system operator, which has successfully overcome political and community obstacles to expand the region's transmission system.

FP&L reports that the South Florida blackout began with troubles at an electricity distribution substation at a nuclear power plant, and that the nuclear reactors shut down, either right before the outage or in response to it. When troubles develop in a the grid, electricity turbines in generating plants spontaneously speed up in an effort to maintain voltage and frequency levels; they can burn out unless they shut themselves down to protect themselves.

Since power systems can easily collapse in reaction to small initiating causes, some argue that large blackouts are mathematically inevitable, that only their scope and consequences can be mitigated. Indignantly, power system specialists reject the counsels of despair. Bloviating blogsters are supposed to know all the answers, but this one is an agnostic.

A little after 1:00 pm EST today, much of southern Florida lost electricity. CNN began reporting shortly afterward that the blackout affected a region stretching from Daytona in the north to the Florida Keys in the south, impacting the lives of millions of people. The TV news network said that a mix of eight regular and nuclear power plants were affected by the outage.

The blackout has knocked out communications, traffic lights, rail lines, and other vital infrastructure components. Miami International Airport lost power for about a half hour before backup resources kicked in.

Det. Robert Williams, a spokesperson for Miami-Dade County, told CNN, "It has been raining pretty hard, but if that's the cause of the outage, I couldn't really tell you."

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security told CNN that the incident had nothing to do with terrorism. "There is no indication of a nexus to terrorism at this time," Laura Keehner said. "[W]e will continue to monitor the situation."

Early speculation pointed to an initial failure at Florida Power and Light's (FPL) Turkey Point nuclear facility near Homestead.

As of 2:30 pm, FPL said that some systems were beginning to come back on line.

Sometimes, virtually the same group of scientists can say slightly different things, when they feel less politically constrained. Or at least they can say them more concisely. That's the case with the American Geophysical Union and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Our space correspondent Barry E. DiGregorio reported this on 25 January.

The American Geophysical Union (AGU), the world's largest scientific society of Earth and space scientists made the official statement that: "The Earth's climate is now out of balance and is warming" and is best explained by "the increased atmospheric abundances of greenhouse gases and aerosols generated by human activity during the 20th century". Unlike the report made in 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (a scientific intergovernmental body set up by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and by the United Nations Environment Program) the new AGU statement calls for the world community to take individual action [http://blogs.spectrum.ieee.org/tech_talk/2007/09/buying_carbon_reductions_to_of.html] in an effort to stave off the human impact on global climate change.

Special guest speaker at the meeting, Michael J. Prather, Professor of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine, California who was also a lead author of several chapters of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said, "The IPCC has a different role to play than the AGU. The IPCC adjudicates the science, reviews it, and ascertain the pros and cons, and then state what they think is happening or what the uncertainties are but are responding to the request of the international government (UN). The encapsulated summary/statement made by the AGU is made by group of scientists saying here is what is happening, listing the dangers, and then suggests that we should all be doing something, The IPCC report didn't do that".

"If you dig at the individual details of the AGU statement I don't think there is anything new there in terms of scientific content, although there is a bit of an update. What is new is pulling it all together in one page," says Prather. "As an example we took the IPCC's workshop summary and wrote it in the first paragraph of the statement. We are trying to get a message across to what really are the big issues and it shows that global warming is no longer disputed by most scientists." The second paragraph of the AGU statement describes what the dangers are we and what is necessary to avoid them. The third paragraph is a call for action and says combating human impacts on climate change is a diversified and shared responsibility amongst both AGU members and others members of society. "We are actually calling on individuals to use their ability and their own perception and make their choice so everyone can contribute in their own way to the best of their ability, Prather explained.

For the AGU, which is a very broad body of scientists, Prather and his colleagues who drafted the statement had to convince space scientists, geologists and oceanographers about a call to action on the human influence on climate. "I think that this was an honest statement of the current facts as we know them and best statement we can make. You are not going to get 100 percent agreement from every AGU member but from the AGU leadership in general, nobody voted against it on the council."

The AGU boasts a membership of 50 000 researchers in 137 countries and every four years releases a new public statement reflecting their position on global climate change.

Online AGU statement:

http://www.agu.org/sci_soc/policy/positions/climate_change2008.shtml

San Diego--Yesterday's most intriguing presentation came right up front, and it came from an unlikely discipline to boot. The goal was simply to answer the question: Who really buys hybrid cars, anyway?

Anthropologists aren't the usual presenters at Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) events. But research anthropologist Tom Turrentine, director of the UC-Davis Plug-In Hybrid Electric Vehicle Research Center, kept the audience rapt as he summarized the results of 2600 surveys completed by hybrid buyers, along with dozens of in-person interviews.

It's common wisdom that early hybrids were bought by "green" car buyers. And the engineers in the audience acknowledged that "early adopters" love the remarkably sophisticated technology in their Priuses. But beyond that...who are the people who have taken hybrids to roughly 2% of the US market?

Before answering the question, Turrentine had to demolish a myth. "Car buyers don't calculate paybacks," he said firmly. While consumers are hardly irrational, only 10% accurately track their fuel costs. They may think they do, but when you dig down, "knowing my fuel costs" may mean stuffing receipts into the car's ashtray--or only tracking one vehicle's costs.

Instead, "meanings are what motivate hybrid buyers." The symbolic value of our vehicles is a rich area for anthropologists, who create so-called meaning maps from lengthy individual interviews to tease out what really lies behind an individual's second-costliest purchase. Most hybrid households blended three motivations: a desire for independence and control, a drive to preserve the environment, and an embrace of new technology.

"None of them had ever opened the hood," said Turrentine. "They all point to the instrumentation; it's how they understand their cars." The real-time display that shows when a hybrid runs on gasoline, when it's in electric-only mode, and how the fuel economy changes--that's the owner's window into what makes the hybrid vehicle so special.

Turrentine identified four market segments. First were the greens, and shortly thereafter the techies. No suprises there.

But the third group was less obvious; it was those buyers--across the political spectrum--for whom fuel security, or energy independence, was a high value. Turrentine related the example of an Oklahoma farmer and gun enthusiast, hardly the stereotypical hybrid buyer, who had been razzed by his peers for "buying a Democrat car" when he parked his Prius among their pickup trucks.

His comeback was simply, "Hey, I'm the one who's sticking it to the Saudis, not you guys!"

The final buyer group identified by Turrentine was "economizers," those people who most valued hybrids for their ability to reduce running costs through better fuel economy. They came into the picture somewhat later, he said--but stressed that almost all buyers fell into more than one of the four groups.

Turrentine is now studying the potential consumer acceptance of plug-in hybrids. Will owners consider it a hassle to plug in? Will plugging in wane over time? Are there easily accessible power outlets at home? At work? Will drivers expect shopping malls to provide power for their cars? The answers could be vitally important for how companies like General Motors and Toyota launch their first plug-in cars in 2010 or 2011--especially after Toyota has spent many years pointing out that while a Prius can run on electricity, it doesn't have to be plugged in.

After energetic questioning, Turrentine was followed by GM's Pete Savagian, whose "Driving the Volt" presentation returned the conference to more familiar territory. But attendees could be heard discussing Turrentine's findings at breaks and during lunch.

Sometimes anthropology makes sense for technology conferences.

I'll be posting at least daily; if any readers have specific issues they'd like me to comment on, please send me a note: J V [dot] spectrum [at] ieee [dot] org.

It's a small step down the hydrogen highway, but could turn out to be a significant one. After all, if you get used to a technology in the form of a toy, it doesn't seem so daunting when it grows up.

That is the strategy of Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies, a company whose goal is to integrate fuel cells into a wide range of products, starting small, evolving towards bigger and higher power applications. The Singapore-based company started in 2003 with fuel-cell science kits. It's working on an inexpensive charger for consumer devices. And at Toy Fair next week in New York City, it's introducing a fuel-cell powered radio-controlled car, made in cooperation with Corgi International--the H2GO. The company says the car can run about 5 minutes on a "tank" of fuel, but the on-board hydrogen fuel cell recharges in moments when the car docks with refueling station. A solar cell powers the refueling station, that breaks down tap water into hydrogen and oxygen, releases the oxygen, and pumps the hydrogen into a balloon in the car. It also powers the remote. And even the car's body is environmentally friendly--it's made of wheat-based plastic.

The H2GO is slated to go on the market for $99.99 in September.

San Diego--Greetings from southern California, where the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) is holding its Hybrid Vehicle Technologies Symposium.

As we did from EVS in December, we'll bring you news, impressions, and thoughts as we go through two days of presentations from major automakers, regulators, and industry analysts.

One of the more intriguing presentations on the conference agenda is called "Driving the Volt," by Peter Savagian. He's director of engineering for GM hybrid powertrains. In other words, the man's got a lot of toys in his sandbox at the moment.

Everyone wants to know what it's like to drive the engineering prototypes, or "mules," of the plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt that GM has said it will launch at the end of 2010. It'll be the first production serial hybrid: It will run up to 40 miles (64 km) on its lithium-ion battery pack alone, and then a small engine will run a generator to recharge the batteries for another 300 miles (480 km)--but not directly power the wheels.

I was lucky enough to chat with Pete last night. His paper will have two main thrusts, he said: First, what is driving GM to build the Chevrolet Volt? Groan. OK, fine, GM deserves a chance to present its slides showing growth in the "global car park" and the technologies it plans to use to increase energy independence, reduce consumption, and begin to electrify the fleet.

Second, and far more interesting: What will the Volt be like to drive in the real world? And for this, he revealed, GM is using a new and different set of real-world data, recently gathered from actual Southern California drivers in actual cars.

What's the bottom line? It's that the driving cycles GM is using to benchmark the Volt are tough. Much tougher than the regulatory cycles used by the US Environmental Protection Agency for fuel-economy or emissions testing. And very, very different indeed from those of economy-focused Prius drivers who keep their car in electric mode as long as possible and compare mileage figures like baseball stats.

Why is this data set so significant? Because, like other sprawling suburban areas connected by freeways and six-lane arterials, southern California lends itself to a rapid mix of high-speed driving and bursts of stop-and-go traffic--and its drivers are impatient. As such, it's much more reflective of how average US drivers behave. That's critical for a mass manufacturer like GM, launching a radical electric vehicle like the Volt under its main brand, Chevrolet.

What, asked Savagian, was the median freeway speed from actual SoCal driving data? I guessed 81 miles per hour (130 km/h). I was slightly low; the answer was 83 mph (133 km/h). Or, as he said solemnly, "drivers in LA turned out to be very, ahhhh, aggressive."

(Which is hardly a shock to anyone who's driven out here in the last, oh, 10 years. On my drive yesterday, I was tailgated by a guy in $400 sunglasses yelling on his cellphone while driving a brand-new 3-ton Cadillac Escalade SUV. A stereotype, but true.)

More to come as it happens. I'll be posting at least daily; if any readers have specific issues they'd like me to comment on, please send me a note: J V [dot] spectrum [at] ieee [dot] org.

South Africa's painful electricity shortages suggest that the wealthiest country on the African continent is a technological laggard. That's not so. Indeed, despite the well-publicized woes of Eskom, the national electricity supplier, South Africa is an exception to the general rule that sub-Saharan Africa is impoverished scientifically and technology, at least in the realm of originality.

In the case of South Africa, the legacy of European immigration and the now-dismantled apartheid regime meant that the country maintained an active and dynamic scientific and engineering sector. Because of trade sanctions, South African technologists tended to create their own versions of everything, including nuclear weapons.

While the country dismantled its weapons when the apartheid system collapsed in 1994, South Africa remains a leader in nuclear power, owning much of the intellectual property for an exciting new approach to reactor design called "pebble bed." The country also has two operating nuclear reactors that provide 6% of the country's electricity. Uranium is also mined from South Africa.

Westinghouse, the leading American producer of nuclear reactors (and now owned by the Japanese), is part owner of the South Africa research entity devoted to commercializing the pebble-bed concept. The design approach, which is considered inherently safer and more economical than existing reactor designs, is also being tested in the U.S. and China.

South Africa's government said earlier this year that it plans to fund the construction and operation of as many as 24 pebble-bed reactors relying on its home-grown designs. The rollout would be the world's largest of its type, and evidence of continued strength of South African energy technology. The technology behind pebble bed was originally developed in Germany, but when the Germans shut off funding for nuclear energy development in their own country they sold off their innovations.

At the time of South Africa's purchase more than a decade ago, pebble bed looked like a useless curiosity but the revival of nuclear energy in general has cast a new light on the value of South Africa's nuclear expertise. And so has the country's electricity shortage.

[By the way, Spectrum featured an article by J. Weil in 2001 about pebble-bed reactor technology]