Article Archive | Page 9

• Big Brother is Bipartisan, Good to Know

  Now that the House of Representatives has approved a controversial bill on cyber security, which the White House has promised to veto, the ball is in the Senate’s court, which would propose a much harder-hitting bill if it could muster the support. The House (Republican-controlled) approved the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) late last week, in a bipartisan 248-168 vote after five hours of debate over the technicalities of a bill that would allow and encourage companies to share electronically collected information with the government to help prevent cyber attacks on critical energy and other infrastructure.  It’s easier…

• Is Constant Economic Growth Possible?

  If we read the financial pages, economic growth seems to be viewed as the “normal” situation to which economies inevitably return. But is it really?If we look back over the past 50 years, or even over the past 100 years, economic growth has predominated. Over the longer term, we know that people have become more prosperous, and that world population has grown.  The natural assumption is that economic growth will continue in the future as it has in the past.Let’s think about this a little further. We live on an earth with a fixed surface area. If the population of…

• Attack on Iran's Oil Industry Ups Cyber Warfare Stakes

  Stuxnet failed to cause enough damage to Iran’s nuclear program, and more recent attacks on the country’s science ministry and oil industry have also apparently fallen flat, but practice makes perfect, and cyber warfare will continue to escalate, presumably with Iran going on the offensive as soon as its capabilities allow.  Iran’s Fars news agency claimed on 29 April that cyber attacks on the Iranian Science Ministry and the oil industry “failed to penetrate” or to leave “any impact on the data system”. A cyber attack on Iran’s oil industry earlier this week saw a virus penetration that damaged hard…

• Solar Cells that can be Painted or Printed Onto Materials

  Scientists at USC think they have the material made of nanocrystals that could be painted on surfaces for making a solar cell. If the team gets to commercial market, the projection is a pathway to cheap, stable solar cells made with a liquid ink that can be painted or printed onto clear surfaces. Richard L. Brutchey, assistant professor of chemistry at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and USC postdoctoral researcher David H. Webber developed the new surface coating for the nanocrystals, which are made of the semiconductor cadmium selenide. Their research was featured as a “hot…

• New Nanotechnology That Turns Windows Into Transparent Solar Panels

  Our modern world is consuming energy at insatiable rates. The high-tech complexity of contemporary society has created a demand for energy resources that are both easily accessible and infinitely available, and unfortunately the energy sources of yesterday simply do not hold up to the rapid evolution of the times. Perhaps the major flaw in our previous approach to discovering a renewable energy source was not the narrowness, but the broadness of our scientific focus. Yesterday’s Energy Market looked towards monumentally visible energy sources like Oil, blindly clinging to the notion that material visibility equated to energetic abundance. However, the energy…

• Sky Falls for Wind Energy

  A study featured in the journal Nature suggests that the latest victim of the green-versus-clean debate is the wind turbine. Researchers looking at wind farms in Texas found that overnight temperatures could increase over time compared with areas that don't have wind farms. This prompted a flurry of media massaging over the global warming link to wind farms, but there were a few "ifs" in the study that might quiet the alarm bells. The study, published in the journal Nature, found that while wind energy was among the fastest growing renewable energy sectors in the world, there were some drawbacks. The…

• High Voltage Politics, Life and Times of the Electric Car

  Expensive to buy, cheaper to operate and of course friendlier to the environment, the electric car is traveling a bumpy road globally, with the added barrier of a bit of high-voltage politics Stateside – the toll it must pay for its bailout bounty. EVs (electric vehicles) and PHEVs (plug-in hybrid vehicles) are intended to help reduce fuel usage and CO2 emissions. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN’s energy watchdog, hopes to see widespread adoption of electric vehicles by 2050. The IAEA envisions sales of electric vehicles reaching 7 million per year globally by 2020 and 100 million by…

• Mother Nature Mugs California's Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant

  On 11 March 2011 TEPCO’s Fukushima nuclear power plant was rattled by an offshore 9.0 on the Richter scale earthquake. The tremor subsequently generated a tsunami that effectively destroyed the complex, sending shock waves worldwide through the nuclear power industry, hoping that 24 years after Chernobyl, public amnesia and governmental commitments to curbing greenhouse gas emissions, nuclear power was moving back into the mainstream.Instead of a nuclear renaissance, Fukushima refocused a most unwelcome spotlight on existing nuclear power plants (NPPS) and their safety procedures.And in the U.S., of the nation’s 104 commercials, the NPP most assiduously avoiding the spotlight is…

• The Un-Renewable Nature of Renewable Energy

  “Renewable energy” has two fundamental conceptual flaws. It’s not really renewable, and it’s not really energy.What is “Renewable”?“Renewable” in most definitions approximates to something like “naturally replenished” and it often contrasted with allegedly inferior, “finite” sources. It brings to mind the image of a pizza where a slice, once eaten, magically reappears. There is no such phenomenon in nature, though. Everything is finite. The sun and the photons and wind currents it generates are not infinite; they are just all part of a very large nuclear fusion reaction. True, that nuclear fusion reaction will last billions of years, but so…

• Pakistan Nuclear Power Plant in Karachi - Bad Idea

  Pakistan is deep in a power crisis. Quite aside from distressing domestic consumers, the country’s episodic and erratic electrical generating capacity is also nobbling Pakistani exports. Endemic energy shortages have crippled Pakistan’s textiles industry, which account for 63 percent of Pakistan’s exports and whose mills employ 20 percent of the nation’s workforce. An example. In the past year half of Faisalabad’s 250,000 power looms have gone out of business because of natural gas shortages, which power the looms. In discussing the power shortages Faisalabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry president Muzammil Sultan said, after noting that at least 200,000 workers have…