Vol. 5,  No. 20          August 15, 2008

Nevada's Online State News Journal-- Serving Informed Nevadans Since 2003

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Top News Story:

Analysis

Nevada Energy Summit

Scheduled For Las Vegas

UNLV Campus Hosts Renewable

Energy Leaders / Politicians

Issues Becoming More Political

Than Practical

by Johnny Gunn

Called a National Clean Energy Summit, originally planned along the lines of the Nevada Clean Energy Summit held in Reno in 2007, the gathering scheduled for the University of Nevada at Las Vegas campus on August 18 and 19 is rapidly becoming a political affair dominated by the democratic Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, and former democratic President Bill Clinton.  While leaders of various forms of clean energy will be attending, it is those not attending that are drawing attention, such as Nevada Governor Jim Gibbons.

Along with Reid and UNLV, the sponsors include the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a liberal organization whose web site can be found at http://www.americanprogressaction.org/. Among the other politicians invited to attend and speak are Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, Colorado Governor Bill Ritter, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

According to press releases dealing with the summit, the objective is to define consensus ideas and principles that participants can carry to the parties' political conventions this summer.  Besides Gibbons, among the missing is California’s Arnold Schwarzenegger, and between the two states, Nevada and California, there is more renewable energy production than any other two states in the nation.

Between geothermal energy production in northern Nevada and solar energy production in southern Nevada, the Silver state is a leader in the industry.  In California., solar energy production in the Mojave Desert along with wind energy production in several locations, and geothermal energy production, the state leads the nation in renewable energy production.  Nevada’s interests will be overseen by two state senators, Dina Titus (D) and Randolph Townsend (R).  California’s lone political representative is Congresswoman Hilda Solis.

While the world watches what happens to the atmosphere when there are no restrictions in the telecasts from China during the Summer Olympics, the concept of clean energy development in this country has deteriorated into a political mud bath.  The idea of renewable energy sources replacing traditional sources such as oil, natural gas, and coal is a far stretch, but the combination of renewable energy sources coupled with nuclear energy, followed immediately by reprocessing high level nuclear waste has received much discussion and debate.

The commercial production of electrical energy by geothermal systems has reached the point where it is viable with natural gas and oil, and only slightly more costly than energy produced by coal.  Solar energy, particularly that produced in thermal solar plants, is expected to reach that same level within a short period of time.  Most scientists and those involved in energy production are aware of the tremendous influence the burning of oil, natural gas, and coal has on the atmosphere.  It matters not whether one believes there might be global warming, it is very apparent that the earth’s atmosphere is polluted and is a health hazard, if nothing else.

We should have reached the point where the question is not, is one source slightly more economic than another, but rather, is one source more harmful than another?  With modern technology available today, the idea of spewing millions of tons of harmful gasses into the atmosphere should not even be part of the debate, and yet there are forces at work that insist on making the debate political rather than practical.  Is there a troika involving coal, oil, and Wall Street investors behind the effort?  Coal producers would have you believe that coal is a clean burning fuel, and oil producers are selling their products at incredibly inflated rates, while Wall Street investors may be behind the massive profits being garnered by both.

Yes, that is just one of many conspiracy theories being floated about the Internet these days, and like so many, it has its roots in reality.  When the amount of money involved is so large, anything is possible in today’s era of reduced personal ethics.  For the U.S. Government to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build Yucca Mountain, the so called national underground high level nuclear waste repository in southern Nevada while technology exists today to reprocess and reuse the waste, is a perfect example of how to use the word waste.

There are some that question whether the money for Yucca actually comes out of the U.S. Treasury, and that relates back to when nuclear energy first came about, during the hottest times of the old cold war with the USSR.  The federal government felt it had to have full control of anything nuclear, times haven’t changed much in that respect, and a facility for storing waste was conceived, but it was to be paid for by way of the nuclear energy producers, which in turn created a nuclear energy tax on the rate payers.  That tax is being collected today, as it has for more than 20 years.

If even a small percentage of that rate payer tax had gone into research for reprocessing high level nuclear waste, this country would be billions of dollars ahead instead of 20 years and billions of dollars wasted in fighting for a concept that wasn’t good in the first place.  The production of nuclear energy today is among the safest forms of industry in the world, and those frightened of it only think of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, the two major industry disasters, both a generation ago.

Southern Nevada is primed to leap into the 21st Century as the leader in solar energy, and a pair of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) may have come up with a groundbreaking solution for commercial uses and home and office use of solar energy.  In an article in the MIT News by Anne Trafton, “In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn’t shine.”

For years, that question has hovered over every attempt at making solar energy available 24-hours a day.  Batteries have been the mainstay, and they are as inefficient as anything ever devised.  Blankets of heat maintaining synthetic materials are being used today in thermal solar plants, but what Dr. Daniel Nocera has developed may revolutionize the industry.  The solution, they say, “is a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.”

This is how it was described in the MIT News, “Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera's lab, have developed an unprecedented process that will allow the sun's energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Later, the oxygen and hydrogen may be recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power your house or your electric car, day or night.

“The key component in Nocera and Kanan's new process is a new catalyst that produces oxygen gas from water; another catalyst produces valuable hydrogen gas. The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode, placed in water. When electricity -- whether from a photovoltaic cell, a wind turbine or any other source -- runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced.

“Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce hydrogen gas from water, the system can duplicate the water splitting reaction that occurs during photosynthesis.

“The new catalyst works at room temperature, in neutral pH water, and it's easy to set up, Nocera said. "That's why I know this is going to work. It's so easy to implement," he said.”  When combing oxygen and hydrogen, one must always remember this creates one very large explosion, one reason it works as a fuel for combustion engines, rockets to the moon, and possibly the generation of electricity in your home, office, or community.

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