Korean physicists achieved a breakthrough in research for clean nuclear energy when they managed to create an “artificial sun” by igniting a nuclear reaction so powerful that it achieved temperatures seven times hotter than our star. The team of scientists from Seoul National University and the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy reported that the reactor at the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) reached temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Celsius for some 30 seconds — the first time hitting that milestone. The real sun hits temperatures of around 15 million degrees at its core. The study, which aims to mimic the natural reactions of the sun, is considered a breakthrough in what researchers say is the ultimate in “unlimited clean energy” — nuclear fusion, which combines atomic nuclei found in stars through the self-heating of matter in a plasma state. Researchers hope that the technology can be developed to harness the vast amounts of energy produced by nuclear fusion into electricity without emitting greenhouse gases, or creating the radioactive waste that’s generated by fission-based nuclear reactors, according to New Scientist.

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“We usually say that fusion energy is a dream energy source – it is almost limitless, with low emission of greenhouse gases and no high-level radioactive waste – [but the latest breakthrough] means fusion is not a dream,” said Yoo Suk-jae, president of the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy. Korean researchers are aiming to achieve plasma temperatures of more than 100 million degrees for 50 seconds by the end of the year. Eventually, they hope to reach the same temperatures for 300 seconds by 2026. “This is not the end of the story, we must move on to 300 seconds – 300 is the minimum time frame to demonstrate steady-state operations, then this plasma can work forever,” said KSTAR director Yoon Si-woo. “If we can’t achieve that, we have to do something else.”

In January, Chinese researchers said that their “artificial sun” reached 70 million degrees Celsius for 20 minutes — or five times hotter than the sun. The same “artificial sun” ran a plasma temperature of 120 million degrees for 101 seconds in May of last year.

The KSTAR team’s research paper has been published in Nature.

Source: https://nypost.com/

A Stockholm restaurant crew is wearing cotton aprons that capture greenhouse gas from the air, in a pilot of a technique developed by H&M-backed researchers as the fashion industry struggles to lower its climate impact.

The textile industry has a large carbon footprint, something fashion giants are under increasing pressure to address as shoppers become more aware of the environmental impact of clothes and as global temperatures rise. The Hong Kong Research Institute of Textiles and Apparel (HKRITA) has developed an amine-containing solution with which to treat cotton – fibre, yarn or fabric – making the cotton pull carbon dioxide gas towards it and capture it, to thereafter stabilise and store it on the surface of the textile.

HKRITA CEO Edwin Keh said in an interview his team had been inspired by techniques used in chimneys of coal-fired power plants to limit emissions.

“Many power plants have to scrub as much carbon dioxide as they can out of the air before the exhaust is released,” Keh told Reuters. “We thought ‘why don’t we try to replicate that chemical process on a cotton fibre”.

A T-shirt is able to absorb about a third of what a tree absorbs per day, Keh said. “The (capturing) capacity isn’t super high but this is quite inexpensive to produce and quite easy, and we think there are a lot of potential applications.” The aprons in the pilot were produced at a H&M supplier in Indonesia, using the factory’s existing equipment for the treatment, Keh said. “It is a fairly simple chemical process.“

In the pilot the aprons are after use heated to 30-40 degrees Celsius at which temperature they release the CO2 – into a greenhouse where the gas is taken up by plants.

H&M Foundation said the innovation could potentially be a game changer in the reduction of global CO2 emissions. Projects to develop CO2 absorbing textiles are however at an early stage, and their potential contribution to lessening the environmental impact of the textile industry remains to seen.

Keh said the institute would now develop its technology further, and try to find other uses for it, as well as other ways to use or dispose of the captured CO2.

HKRITA, which is part-financed by the philanthropic arm of Swedish fashion retailer H&M (HMb.ST), has developed a number of innovations aimed at making fashion more sustainable. One that has reached industrial scale use is a technique to separate cotton and polyester fibres in blend-textile

Source: https://www.reuters.com/

In a lab in Boston, a startup has spent the last few months cultivating mammary cells from a cow—and recently succeeded in finding the perfect conditions to get those cells to produce real cow milk without an animal.  “We spend a lot of time trying to understand how the biology works in a cow, and then trying to do that,” says Sohail Gupta, CEO and cofounder of the startup, called Brown Foods, which makes a product that it calls UnReal Milk.

The startup, which operates in India and the U.S., just completed a stint at the tech accelerator Y Combinator. Alternative-dairy sales keep growing: In 2020, according to the most recent data available, sales of oat, soy, almond, and other alt-milk products made up 15% of all milk sales in the U.S., a 27% growth over the previous two years. But Brown Foods, like others in the space, recognized that plant-based milk still can’t replicate traditional dairy.

“They’re not yet there in terms of taste and texture,” Gupta says. They also often have less protein and other nutrients. He argues that other new milk alternatives, including those that use precision fermentation to make animal-free dairy proteins, also can’t perfectly match dairy since they still use plant ingredients for fat and other components. There are multiple reasons to move away from traditional dairy, including the fact that cows raised for milk and meat are responsible for around 30% of the world’s emissions of methane,a potent greenhouse gas. But Gupta thinks that it makes sense to stay as close to the natural process as possible. Mammary cells “have evolved naturally over centuries to produce milk in mammals,” he says. “So these cells have the entire genetic architecture to produce the fats, the carbs, the proteins.”

The company’s biochemical engineers have been studying how the cells behave, what they need nutritionally to survive, and what triggers lactation. “We’re trying to emulate nature and understand what kind of chemical signals are released in a mammal to trigger the cells to lactate and start secreting milk and get into the lactation phase,” he says. Now that they’ve shown that it can work at the small scale in the lab, they’re beginning to prepare for commercial production in larger bioreactors. The company believes that it can eventually reach price parity with conventional milk. In early calculations, it says that it could cut the greenhouse gas emissions from milk by 90%. (Unlike lab-grown meat, which requires an energy-intensive process of growing cells, producing milk just requires keeping cells alive, and has a far smaller footprint.)

Source: https://www.fastcompany.com/

Algae and bacteria are normal parts of a healthy freshwater environment, but sometimes they can grow out of control and deplete the water of oxygen, creating ‘dead zones‘. This tends to happen with global warming, deforestation, and the rush of soil nutrients into waterways, which can feed microbes. All three of these factors are in play today, which is why we are probably seeing increases in toxic blooms already. Considering what’s happened in the past, that’s a disturbing sign.

According to soil, fossil, and geochemical data from the Sydney Basin, researchers think the spread of microbes in the wake of the Permian extinction “was both a symptom of continental ecosystem collapse, and a cause of its delayed recovery.” Volcanic eruptions in the Permian first triggered an accelerated and sustained rise in greenhouse gas emissions. This caused higher global temperatures and sudden deforestation due to wildfires or drought.

Once the trees were gone, it wasn’t long before the structure of the soil began to erode, and its nutrients slipped into freshwater ecosystems. For more than three million years, Earth’s forests struggled to recover. The Sydney Basin was instead littered with lowland ecosystems that “were regularly inundated by stagnant, fresh/brackish waterbodies hosting thriving algal and bacterial populations“, the authors write. In turn, these persistent dead zones prevented the reestablishment of important carbon sinks, like peatlands, and slowed down climate and ecosystem recovery.

This major episode caused vast amounts of dust and sulfate aerosols to rise into the atmosphere, but compared to volcanic activity, the meteorite only caused a modest increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature, not a sustained one. As such, freshwater microbes only seemed to undergo a short-lived burst after the extinction event. Unfortunately, that’s very different from what occurred during the Permian extinction and what is happening today.

For instance, the researchers note that the “optimal temperature growth range” of these harmful algae in freshwater environments is 20-32 °C (68-89.6 °F). That range matches the estimated continental summer surface air temperatures for the region during the early Triassic. That range is what’s projected for mid-latitude continental summer surface air temperatures in 2100. Scientists are noticing other similarities, including an increase in forest fires and the subsequent destabilization of soils.

“The other big parallel is that the increase in temperature at the end of the Permian coincided with massive increases in forest fires,” says geologist Chris Fielding, also from the University of Connecticut. “One of the things that destroyed whole ecosystems was fire, and we’re seeing that right now in places like California. One wonders what the longer-term consequences of events like that as they are becoming more and more widespread.”

The good news is that this time many of the changes are in our control. The bad news is that whatever happens next is our own fault. “The end-Permian mass extinction event took four million years to recover from,” Fielding says. “That’s sobering.”

Source: https://www.nature.com/
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https://www.sciencealert.com/

Global warming is dangerously close to spiralling out of control, a U.N. climate panel said in a landmark report Monday, warning the world is already certain to face further climate disruptions for decades, if not centuries, to come.

Humans are “unequivocally” to blame, the report from the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said. Rapid action to cut greenhouse gas emissions could limit some impacts, but others are now locked in.

The deadly heat waves, gargantuan hurricanes and other weather extremes that are already happening will only become more severe.

https://www.reuters.com/

Humans depend on fossil fuels as their primary energy source, especially in transportation. However, fossil fuels are both unsustainable and unsafe, serving as the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions and leading to adverse respiratory effects and devastation due to global warming.

A team of researchers at the Institute of Technological Sciences at Wuhan University has demonstrated a prototype device that uses microwave air plasmas for jet propulsion. They describe the engine in the journal AIP Advances.

“The motivation of our work is to help solve the global warmingproblems owing to humans’ use of fossil fuel combustion engines to power machinery, such as cars and airplanes,” said author Jau Tang, a professor at Wuhan University. “There is no need for fossil fuel with our design, and therefore, there is no carbon emission to cause greenhouse effects and global warming.”

Beyond solid, liquid and gas, plasma is the fourth state of matter, consisting of an aggregate of charged ions. It exists naturally in places like the sun’s surface and Earth’s lightning, but it can also be generated. The researchers created a plasma jet by compressing air into high pressures and using a microwave to ionize the pressurized air stream.

This method differs from previous attempts to create plasma jet thrusters in one key way. Other plasma jet thrusters, like NASA‘s Dawn space probe, use xenon plasma, which cannot overcome the friction in Earth’s atmosphere, and are therefore not powerful enough for use in air transportation. Instead, the authors’ plasma jet thruster generates the high-temperature, high-pressure plasma in situ using only injected air and electricity.

The prototype plasma jet device can lift a 1-kilogram steel ball over a 24-millimeter diameter quartz tube, where the high-pressure air is converted into a plasma jet by passing through a microwave ionization chamber. To scale, the corresponding thrusting pressure is comparable to a commercial airplane jet engine. By building a large array of these thrusters with high-power microwave sources, the prototype design can be scaled up to a full-sized jet. The authors are working on improving the efficiency of the device toward this goal. “Our results demonstrated that such a jet engine based on microwave air plasma can be a potentially viable alternative to the conventional fossil fuel jet engine,” Tang said.

Source: https://phys.org/

Nuclear fusion has been seen as the unattainable holy grail of clean energy for decades, but just in the last year it’s been seeming more and more within reach. As catastrophic climate change looms just over the horizon, the scientific community has galvanized to find more and better solutions to decarbonizing the global economy and replacing fossil fuels with a commercially viable, renewable, and green alternative. While much of the time and capital investment has flowed to more realistic options like solar and wind, some researchers have been dedicating their time and energy to capturing the energy of the sun here on earth–a silver bullet solution to global warming.

Conventional nuclear energy has also been hailed as a good, greenhouse gas emissions-free alternative to fossil fuels, but it has some major drawbacks, from the rare but catastrophic instance of nuclear meltdown to the industrial byproduct of nuclear waste. Nuclear fission, which is what nuclear energy plants currently use to create massive amounts of energy by splitting atoms, creates radioactive waste that remains hazardous for tens of thousands of years, if not longer.

The beauty of nuclear fusion is that, not only does it produce energy without creating radioactive waste since it can be achieved using only hydrogen or lithium, it’s also several times more powerful than fission. If we were ever able to harness it in a commercially viable way, it would mean the end of the oil-based economy as we know it. That’s why any news about nuclear fusion is major news. And in the past couple of years, there’s been a lot of new reports emerging about commercial nuclear fusion getting closer and closer to becoming a reality.

Last summer, reps from the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), an intergovernmental project headquartered in the south of France, reported that they are a mere six and a half years away from achieving first plasma inside their tokamak–in other words: nuclear fusion by just 2025. Then, just a month later in August, 2019, Oak Ridge National Laboratory reported their own nuclear fusion breakthrough, which uses novel implementation of AI and supercomputing to successfully scale up nuclear fusion experiments and manage plasma.

Then, in October, the Los Alamos National Laboratory‘s Plasma Liner Experiment (PLX) unveiled a totally new approach to nuclear fusion, using the very science-fiction combination of plasma guns, magnets, and lasers. According to the American Physical Society, “the PLX machine combines aspects of both magnetic confinement fusion schemes (e.g. tokamaks) and inertial confinement machines like the National Ignition Facility (NIF). The hybrid approach, although less technologically mature than pure magnetic or inertial confinement concepts, may offer a cheaper and less complex fusion reactor development path.” That project is projected to be up and running by the end of this year.

And now, just this week, there are new and exciting claims about yet another novel fusion technology to vie for the best path toward commercial nuclear fusion. Startup HB11, which has its impetus at Australia’s University of New South Wales (UNSW), has pioneered a technology that uses lasers to encourage nuclear fusion between hydrogen and boron without the use of radioactive materials to facilitate the reaction. They’re so confident about the technology that they have already applied for and received patents in the United States, Japan, and China.

“The secret,” reports Popular Mechanics, “is a cutting-edge laser and, well, an element of luck.” According to managing director Warren McKenzie, as quoted by New Atlas, “You could say we’re using the hydrogen as a dart, and hoping to hit a boron, and if we hit one, we can start a fusion reaction.” While this may sound a little wishy-washy, McKenzie says that the approach is actually more precise than using extreme heat to facilitate fusion because the laser is directed, whereas heat-based reactors waste huge amounts of energy heating up the entire reactor and waiting for a collision to take place.

This means that this new technology–which is now four decades in the making–could make machines like the tokamak obsolete. UNSW emeritus professor Heinrich Hora’s design “seeks to not just compete with but replace entirely the extremely high-temperature current technologies to achieve fusion. These include fussy and volatile designs like the tokamak or stellarator, which can take months to get up to functionality and still spin out of working order in a matter of microseconds.”

Last but not least, two months ago, Newsweek reported that China is about to start operation on its “artificial sun“—a nuclear fusion device that produces energy by replicating the reactions that take place at the center of the sun. If successful, the device could edge scientists closer to achieving the ultimate goal of nuclear fusion: near limitless, cheap clean energy.

Source: https://www.newsweek.com/
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https://oilprice.com/

Scientists have taken a major step toward a circular carbon economy by developing a long-lasting, economical catalyst that recycles greenhouse gases into ingredients that can be used in fuel, hydrogen gas, and other chemicals. The results could be revolutionary in the effort to reverse global warming, according to the researchers. The study was published in Science.

Newly developed catalyst that recycles greenhouse gases into ingredients that can be used in fuel, hydrogen gas and other chemicals

“We set out to develop an effective catalyst that can convert large amounts of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane without failure,” said Cafer T. Yavuz, paper author and associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and of chemistry at KAIST (Korea).

The catalyst, made from inexpensive and abundant nickel, magnesium, and molybdenum, initiates and speeds up the rate of reaction that converts carbon dioxide and methane into hydrogen gas. It can work efficiently for more than a month.

This conversion is called ‘dry reforming’, where harmful gases, such as carbon dioxide, are processed to produce more useful chemicals that could be refined for use in fuel, plastics, or even pharmaceuticals. It is an effective process, but it previously required rare and expensive metals such as platinum and rhodium to induce a brief and inefficient chemical reaction.

Other researchers had previously proposed nickel as a more economical solution, but carbon byproducts would build up and the surface nanoparticles would bind together on the cheaper metal, fundamentally changing the composition and geometry of the catalyst and rendering it useless.

“The difficulty arises from the lack of control on scores of active sites over the bulky catalysts surfaces because any refinement procedures attempted also change the nature of the catalyst itself,” Yavuz said.

The researchers produced nickel-molybdenum nanoparticles under a reductive environment in the presence of a single crystalline magnesium oxide. As the ingredients were heated under reactive gas, the nanoparticles moved on the pristine crystal surface seeking anchoring points. The resulting activated catalyst sealed its own high-energy active sites and permanently fixed the location of the nanoparticles — meaning that the nickel-based catalyst will not have a carbon build up, nor will the surface particles bind to one another.

“It took us almost a year to understand the underlying mechanism,” said first author Youngdong Song, a graduate student in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at KAIST. “Once we studied all the chemical events in detail, we were shocked.”

The researchers dubbed the catalyst Nanocatalysts on Single Crystal Edges (NOSCE). The magnesium-oxide nanopowder comes from a finely structured form of magnesium oxide, where the molecules bind continuously to the edge. There are no breaks or defects in the surface, allowing for uniform and predictable reactions.

“Our study solves a number of challenges the catalyst community faces,” Yavuz said. “We believe the NOSCE mechanism will improve other inefficient catalytic reactions and provide even further savings of greenhouse gas emissions.”

Source: https://news.kaist.ac.kr/

Engineers from Lehigh University (Bethlehem, Pennsylvania)  are the first to utilize a single enzyme biomineralization process to create a catalyst that uses the energy of captured sunlight to split water molecules to produce hydrogen. The synthesis process is performed at room temperature and under ambient pressure, overcoming the sustainability and scalability challenges of previously reported methods.

Solar-driven water splitting is a promising route towards a renewable energy-based economy. The generated hydrogen could serve as both a transportation fuel and a critical chemical feedstock for fertilizer and chemical production. Both of these sectors currently contribute a large fraction of total greenhouse gas emissions.

One of the challenges to realizing the promise of solar-driven energy production is that, while the required water is an abundant resource, previously-explored methods utilize complex routes that require environmentally-damaging solvents and massive amounts of energy to produce at large scale. The expense and harm to the environment have made these methods unworkable as a long-term solution.

Now a team of engineers at Lehigh have harnessed a biomineralization approach to synthesizing both quantum confined nanoparticle metal sulfide particles and the supporting reduced graphene oxide material to create a photocatalyst that splits water to form hydrogen. The team reported their results in an article entitled: “Enzymatic synthesis of supported CdS quantum dot/reduced graphene oxide photocatalysts” featured on the cover of the August 7 issue of Green Chemistry, a journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry. “Our water-based process represents a scalable green route for the production of this promising photocatalyst technology,” says Professor Steven McIntosh, who is also associate director of Lehigh’s Institute for Functional Materials and Devices.

Source: https://engineering.lehigh.edu/