(AGENPARL) – ven 10 novembre 2023 A weekly compendium of media reports on science and technology achievements
at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Though the Laboratory reviews
items for overall accuracy, the reporting organizations are responsible for
the content in the links below.
….. LLNL Report, Nov. 10, 2023
The NET Power Plant in La Porte, Texas, utilizes NET Power’s Allam-Fetvedt
Cycle technology. It converts natural and renewable gas into zero-emissions
power. The plant achieved first fire in May 2018, becoming the world’s
first large-scale supercritical carbon dioxide power plant. Photo courtesy
of: NET Power.
… Backing up the power grid
https://spectrum.ieee.org/methanol-energy-storage
It would be great if everyone could back up the intermittent power from wind
and solar plants with energy stored as low-cost, zero-carbon hydrogen gas.
But hydrogen can be hard to store.
But a closed-loop storage-plus-power system stockpiles renewable energy
wherever it’s needed. A German research team reported that storing energy as
methanol can be cost-effective. The key is to integrate equipment producing
hydrogen, methanol and electricity, all of which are being commercialized or
are in industrial development. This also could help with the intermittent
power challenge.
Research led by Jessica Wert, a power systems engineer at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory, found that U.S. states regularly experience periods of
48 hours or more where wind or solar resources fall well below seasonal
norms. California, for example, experienced two dozen “solar resource
droughts” between 1973 and 2022. In the same period, Iowa experienced 158
wind droughts, three of which lasted a full week.
Read More https://spectrum.ieee.org/methanol-energy-storage
LLNL will co-lead the “Center for Coupled Chemo-Mechanics of Cementitious
Composites” (CM4) and will lead “Terraforming Soil,” both part of the
Department of Energy Office of Science Energy Earthshot program.
… Terraforming soil to ease climate change
https://energycentral.com/c/ec/llnl%E2%80%99s-terraforming-soil-project-and-related-posts
The Terraforming Soil Energy Earthshot Research Center (EERC) may sound minor
on the surface, but it is both major and critical to mitigating climate
change.
While the United States’ 410 million acres of agricultural soils have lost
a vast amount of carbon in the past century due to cultivation and erosion,
there is clear potential to reverse this trend and actively manage
agricultural lands with strategies that capture CO2 from the atmosphere.
The Terraforming Soil EERC at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will
research new bio- and geo- engineered techniques to understand, predict and
accelerate scalable and affordable CO2 drawdown in soils, via both organic
and inorganic carbon cycle pathways.
Read More
https://energycentral.com/c/ec/llnl%E2%80%99s-terraforming-soil-project-and-related-posts
More than 2.3 billion years ago, Earth’s atmosphere spent about a million
years filled with a methane-rich haze; and this haze drove a large amount of
hydrogen out of the atmosphere, clearing the way for massive amounts of
oxygen to fill the air, known as the Great Oxidation event. Image courtesy of
Francis Reddy/NASA.****
… A window to the past
Microfossils from Western Australia may capture a jump in the complexity of
life that coincided with the rise of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere and oceans,
according to an international team of scientists.
The findings provide a rare window into the Great Oxidation Event, a time
roughly 2.4 billion years ago when the oxygen concentration increased on
Earth, fundamentally changing the planet’s surface. The event is thought to
have triggered a mass extinction and opened the door for the development of
more complex life, but little direct evidence had existed in the fossil
record before the discovery of the new microfossils, according to the team
that includes a Lawrence Livermore scientist.
When compared to modern organisms, the microfossils more closely resembled a
type of algae than simpler prokaryotic life -— organisms like bacteria, for
example — that existed prior to the Great Oxidation Event, the scientists
said. Algae, along with all other plants and animals, are eukaryotes, more
complex life whose cells have a membrane-bound nucleus.
More work is required to determine if the microfossils were left behind by
eukaryotic organisms, but the possibility would have significant
implications, the scientists said. It would push back the known eukaryotic
microfossil record by 750 million years.
Americans used more renewables to generate electricity than in previous
years, according to the most recent energy and carbon flow charts produced by
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
…. Electrify everything everywhere
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelbarnard/2023/11/06/radical-electrification-of-everything-for-climate–economy/?sh=61fa95634e4d
In our future economy, any economic value chain that can go from wind
turbines to wires to energy services without going through molecules will
win. It will be vastly cheaper. It will be vastly lower carbon. It will be
vastly more efficient.
And the degree of electrification that’s possible and probable is likely to
astound. This series digs through all of the energy requirements of a modern
economy and point out the reasons why radical electrification of everything,
everywhere, all the time is our future.
Let’s start with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory energy flows
Sankey diagram. Most countries in the world have variants of this. The
International Energy Agency maintains its own versions for the world. Most of
them aren’t as good as the LLNL one. They are eye charts and they
understate one of the big problems, rejected energy.
That’s the gray bars and big gray box. That’s energy that comes into the
economy on the left from coal, nuclear energy, natural gas or renewables and
then turns into waste heat that just evaporates into the sky. It’s a very
clear indicator of inefficiency. We have been able to afford throwing away
two-thirds of all energy in modern economies because fossil fuels are dirt
cheap and we were able to use the atmosphere as a dumping ground without
consequences.
In the future, we won’t be doing that. We’ll be making low-carbon
electricity only on the left, and getting rid of the big gray bar of rejected
energy from burning coal, gas and oil to make electricity. We won’t be
making molecules like hydrogen or synthetic natural gas to burn for
electricity because that will be vastly less efficient and so much more
costly.
Read More
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelbarnard/2023/11/06/radical-electrification-of-everything-for-climate–economy/?sh=61fa95634e4d
A NIF fusion target contains a polished capsule about two millimeters in
diameter, filled with cryogenic (super-cooled) hydrogen fuel. NIF uses
capsules of plastic, diamond or beryllium.
… LLNL offers a helping hand
Focused Energy and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have signed
a strategic partnership project agreement for LLNL to assist the
American-German fusion company with developing and assessing the performance
of isochoric compression target designs for inertial fusion energy.
Focused Energy’s approach is to use millimeter-scale plastic capsules,
filled with a small amount of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium,
and driven by a laser to produce clean, safe and nearly inexhaustible energy
in the future.
At LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF), inertial fusion ignition and
target gain greater than 1 were achieved in December 2022 — a historic
breakthrough for the future production of clean energy. Under this contract,
LLNL will use its codes and tools to help Focused Energy study and optimize
target designs for achieving high compression in ischoric fuel assemblies
required for fast ignition inertial confinement fusion..
“We are very pleased to have another renowned partner on board with LLNL to
optimize the target design together,” said Thomas Forner, CEO and co-founder
of Focused Energy.
Read More
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challenges through innovative science, engineering and technology. Lawrence
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Administration.
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