Recapturing Waste Heat and Reviving Nuclear Power

As a Cal lifetime alum, I get a free subscription to Forefront, a quarterly publication the College of Engineering puts out. The Fall issues cover was titled "Green Future". There were a few really cool ideas in there that researchers in the engineering department are pushing forward. There were two that I wanted to comment on.

The first was a project to recapture waste heat by creating nano-scale devices that convert heat to elecricity. The premise is to use the "Seebeck Effect" (thermoelectric effect) in cheap organic materials to produce electricity from all of the wasted heat that's created in burning fossil fuels. Apparently, for every 1 watt of power, you waste 1.5 watts of energy in waste heat. That's a ridiculous amount of waste. The world's power output is somewhere in the 10 trillion watt range, so that means there's 15 trillion watts being wasted. If you could recapture even a small fraction of that with these types of thermoelectric devices, you could reduce green-house gas emissions considerably. There were also some really interesting ideas for how this could be used for the developing world as well - "A thermoelectric sheet wrapped around a cooking stove, for example, could generate 10 watts of power, enough to keep a reading lamp burning all evening." Very very cool.

The other project was to revive the nuclear power industry by creating reactors that are safer and more efficient in handling waste. It always seemed so sad to me that we still use coal as one of our primary fuel sources when nuclear fission is so clean. Why are Americans so afraid of nuclear power? European nations have actively embraced it and are benefiting from that. In France, 77 percent of their power is derived from nuclear. That compares to only 20 percent here in the U.S. The problems have been safety (post-Three Mile Island) and waste. Researchers are working on a self-contained reactor that would help solve both those problems. The fissile material is safely locked away in the reactor - so you don't have to worry about either meltdowns or with someone stealing the material to make a bomb. Hopefully the U.S. will get nuclear back on the agenda as we're evaluating options for energy independence.

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