The University of Colorado at Boulder has designed a hydrogen plant that uses an array of mirrors to focus sunlight onto a huge tower. The tower heats up to 1,350 °C – enough to liberate hydrogen from steam.
‘We have designed something here that is very different from other methods and frankly something that nobody thought was possible before,’ said lead scientist Professor Alan Weimer, from the University of Colorado at Boulder
‘Splitting water with sunlight is the Holy Grail of a sustainable hydrogen economy.
Hydrogen could be used as a fuel for road transport, distributed heat and power generation, and for energy storage.
A recent piece in Uzbekistan's state-sanctioned media has advocated joining NATO and taking over the territory of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and most of the rest of Eurasia. The piece, published on 12news.uz, was taken down shortly after being published, but was preserved on inoSMI.ru. [PBI: English translation below the line.]
The piece, at nearly 9,000 words, offers a number of controversial (to put it kindly) claims: that Tajiks are merely Persian-speaking Uzbeks, that Uzbekistan is the successor state to the Mongol Golden Horde, that the agreement between Russia and Kyrgyzstan to develop hydropower plants is invalid because it misspells “Kyrgyzstan,” among many others. Its main thesis, however, is that the “threats of a natural-technical character” — namely proposed hydropower plants in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan — are the gravest security threats facing Uzbekistan, comparable to a nuclear bomb. And the solution is that Uzbekistan should join NATO.
The piece is a bit out there, but Uzbek analysts point out that it must have been officially sanctioned. “This site [12news.uz] is not just semi-official, it’s official,” dissident political analyst Tashpulat Yuldashev told uznews.net. “It's curated by Dilshod Nurullaev, former Security Commission chairman and advisor to the President,” he said. “There is total censorship in Uzbekistan, and such a politically charged article would not have been allowed to be published without permission from the very top.” That assertion was backed up by another Uzbek analyst to The Bug Pit.
It needs further development, but when scaled up it could provide desalinated sea water at a fraction of the cost of today's membrane based reverse osmosis systems…
Chemists with the University of Texas and the University of Marburg have devised a method of using a small electrical field that will remove the salt from seawater.
Incredibly this technique requires little more than a store-bought battery.
Called electrochemically mediated seawater desalination (EMSD) this technique has improved upon the current water desalination method.
Richard Cooks, chemistry professor at the University of Austin said : “The availability of water for drinking and crop irrigation is one of the most basic requirements for maintaining and improving human health.”
Cooks continued: “Seawater desalination is one way to address this need, but most current methods for desalinating water rely on expensive and easily contaminated membranes. The membrane-free method we’ve developed still needs to be refined and scaled up, but if we can succeed at that, then one day it might be possible to provide fresh water on a massive scale using a simple, even portable, system.”
Video, rest of article, and comment below the line — this is huge.
A technology proposed to ARPA-E uses electricity to convert natural gas to high octane gasoline, specialty chemicals, and hydrogen in a single process efficiently powered by electricity. The electricity can be generated by efficient turbines. The conversion reactors are modular and can be placed near pipelines in units which can be scaled as needed. Each modular unit using 1 megawatt of energ can produce 50 barrels of gasoline and approximately equal volume of hydrogen. This can provide fuel for transportation, electricity generation and hydrogen from natural has which can be piped from Somalia's natural gas resources.
The electron beams provide very high wall plug efficiency making the process very profitable. $1 a gallon based in today's market price, including operation and maintenance, not including capital costs.
If biomass is added to the process a portion of the output will be diesel and jet fuel.
The high energy electron beam technology works by modifying the hydrocarbon polymers. These devices can be used to remediate water at high speed as they generate massive free radicals which cut all carbin bonds, killing all organisms in water, sewage and sludge. A pilot plant funded by the EPA was operating successfully for many years in Miami, Florida.
Our children, grandchildren, and all the generations that follow are going to curse us. As the Republicans in the senate and the house, and their Theocratic Right base block any meaningful action on climate change, and Obama is reduced to doing what he can through executive order, our world is slipping away. The changes are going to be mind-boggling. Here is just one aspect of what is coming. Miami, as this story makes clear, is doomed. As Ha! rold Wanless, the chairman of the department of geological sciences at the University of Miami says, “It's not a question of if. It's a question of when.”
Even more than Silicon Valley, Miami embodies the central technological myth of our time – that nature can not only be tamed but made irrelevant.
. . . . . .
One of the first consequences of rising seas will be loss of drinking water.
. . . . . .
Miami Beach has other infrastructure problems, too. One of them is how to dispose of the 22 million gallons of sewage the city's residents create each day.
. . . . . .
Beyond all these fears that keep south Florida's environmentalists and urban planners up at night, rising sea levels present an even more chilling threat to life in greater Miami. Turkey Point Nuclear Plant, which sits on the edge of the Biscayne Bay just south of Miami, is completely exposed to hurricanes and rising seas. “It is impossible to imagine a stupider place to build a nuclear plant than Turkey Point,” says Philip Stoddard, the mayor of South Miami and an outspoken critic of the plant.
Quality information on the Rivers Of The Fertile Cresent tends to be dense and technical, but there are occasional bits of political dynamite, such as this quote. The Fig. 1 mentioned is the above map of the Jordan & Litani river basins.
On the other hand, it is worthy to note that while analyzing the Lebanese part of the Jordan River Basin, no connection between the Litani River Basin and the Jordan River Basin was found in terms of surface flow, even though both basins lie close to each other (Fig. 1). The Litani basin was found to lie entirely in Lebanon. This result removes any ambiguity pertaining to the inclusion of the waters of the Litani River in any future water allocation scheme for the Jordan River Basin. As it was mentioned in the Johnston Plan and the Israeli “Cotton Plan”, some Israeli negotiators wished to include the Litani River in the Jordan River Basin plan (Amery 1998). Today, the inclusion of the Litani River is still present in the opinion of some politicians but these arguments are not credible since hydrological connections between the Litani and Jordan River Basin have not been proven (Medzini and Wolf 2004; Zeitoun et al. 2012).
Click on Image to Enlarge
Water has been a pressing concern for the region, driving the dispute between Arabs and Jews since Israel’s inception. This quote from a 1982 Christian Science monitor article reveals the entanglement of aquifers and state boundaries.
Two aquifers provide almost all of the groundwater for Northern and Central Israel, both arising in the West Bank. The shallower sandstone aquifer is recharged partly from runoff and percolation of rainwater falling on the former Jordanian lands. The deeper and more copious limestone aquifer is recharged largely or, possibly, entirely by rainwater from the West Bank.
The Litani River of Lebanon from 1993 is the best overview I have found regarding this situation and it notes interest in transferring a portion of the flow of the Litani to the south has existed for over a century. The web page looks to be the sort of thing that might vanish, so I preserved a copy of the content in Scribd.
Each of these waterways is shared between at least three countries, with the exception of the Litani, which has been determined to be entirely within Lebanon’s territory. Each is heavily overdrawn and plagued by mishandling, most often in the form of aging, leaky irrigation infrastructure.
Click on Image to Enlarge
The area was the scene of our mastery of agricultural and animal husbandry between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago. Cities such as Damascus and Jericho are believed to have been continuously occupied for the last 11,000 years. But current reports on all five drainage basins point to trouble brewing for the entire region.
Water issues are embedded in any geopolitical concerns for the region, but this far I have only written The Nile’s Annual Flood, Losing The Euphrates, and mentioned the Jordan in passing in Monitoring The Golan Heights. Like my attention on wheat production, examining rainfall and groundwater usage can provide insight into the potential for trouble far in advance of events that actually make the news.
