Hussain M Elius

The load shedding problem has led to some pretty hard times, but it is the hard times that bring the best of things. Even the ordinary people in the streets are talking about renewable energy, and many who are able are seriously considering putting up solar panels on their rooftops. Unfortunately, non-renewable energy sources are still the cheapest to go around. Well, we bring you news about two alternate energy supplies that don’t get as much press as they deserve.

First up is Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor, a nuclear technology. Now, many people have an irrational fear of anything with the word “nuclear” in it, thinking it might blow up any second; when in actuality nuclear energy is one of the safer energy sources that are around. The incidents of Cheronobyl has scared the bejeesus out of many, but even then that was because of faulty design. Modern nuclear power plants have excellent safety record compared to that of, say, coal or hydro.

Now thorium, as a naturally occurring element, is abundant. More so than uranium, in fact. We have thousands, if not millions of year’s worth of thorium lying around, and I literally do mean lying around. It can be easily extracted from sand and in Europe, it costs only U$4 per KG. This one kilogram of thorium can produce energy equivalent to one thousand cubic meters of liquid natural gas (that’s CNG, but compressed to the point to make it liquid). You know how much that much LNG costs? U$173.

The LFTR approach is better than current nuclear reactors in every way. It cannot be easily used to make weapons and it cannot have meltdowns (because, ironically, the fuel is already melted). It produces thousands of times less in waste and the tiny amount of waste it does produce only stays radioactive for a couple hundred years. The technology is scalable from very small reactors (a few MW) to very large (10 GW). The reactor can also be used to burn up old long-lived nuclear waste and turn it into short-lived waste.

Like other nuclear reactors, this has many advantages over other energy technologies. This directly taps into the strong nuclear force, which is the most powerful and energy dense source of energy humanity can access (that’s E in E=MC²). It uses very little land and emits no carbon dioxide or other pollutants during power generation.

Have I got your attention yet?

Next up, is something a little close to home: Solar powered electrolysis. Doesn’t ring a bell? Well how about photosynthesis? Artificial photosynthesis?

Remember how I mentioned hard times bring the best of people? Well an interesting research project the stimulus bill funded involved using a special catalyst, carbon-dioxide and water to produce water and energy efficiently. How efficiently, you ask? What if I tell you that you can use just a bottle of water and four hours of sunlight to produce THIRTY kilowatt of power per hour! For reference, your entire house takes in just a little over a kilowatt a day.

Feel the Powah!

The catalysts are cheap, and so is the entire setup. So cheap, in fact, that the inventors have no trouble envisioning a day when every house will run on its own energy. The technology, however, is still in its infancy. So we’ll just have to make do with splitting atoms into a million parts for now…

It’s unfortunate that awareness about such massively useful technologies is so low. You might be thinking they must have some big problem, otherwise you’d have known about them. But really, some technologies just don’t have any cons. That’s what we call progress. The problem, I’ll tell you, is this: technologies of the present have lobbyist; technologies of the future do not.

Published in Rising Star, The Daily Star, 29th April 2010