There's a way for fusion reactors to sidestep high-temperature plasmas, steam turbines, neutron radiation and even nuclear waste--and still generate inexhaustible nuclear energy for less money than Google's annual electricity bill. That's the position, and latest mission, of physicist Robert Bussard.

In the 1960s, Bussard proposed the ramjet, a paper engine design that would power deep-space vehicles by collecting hydrogen atoms in space and feeding them into a fusion reactor. Now, in a proposal titled "Should Google Go Nuclear?" (video.google.com/videoplay?docid= 1996321846673788606), Bussard presents an alternative to thermonuclear fusion. He claims an inertial electrostatic confinement (IEC) reactor can provide fusion power that is simpler, cleaner and cheaper than would be possible under the various routes now being pursued by the Department of Energy.

"Everything [the DOE] is doing is highly radioactive and expensive--measured in tens of billions of dollars, with projected run-out costs of greater than $12 billion, plus another $30 billion over the next 20 or 30 years. The United States has already spent $18 billion [on fusion]," said Bussard. "And there is no end in sight."

By contrast, Bussard estimates startup costs of $200 million for an IEC fusion reactor that would operate at 95 efficiency.

The ramjet, proposed in the 1960s, sought to remove an obstacle to deep-space travel. Traditional spacecraft cannot carry enough fuel to reach distant stars, but the ramjet would harvest particles present even in natural vacuums, using fusion to release energy. Bussard parlayed his ramjet fame into a career working to redirect the nation toward simpler, cleaner, cheaper fusion reactors. He founded Energy Matter Conversion Corp. (EMC2; Santa Fe, N.M.), which initially focused on contract work for the Department of Defense. Lately, Bussard has been courting deep-pocketed corporations to help him build a commercial version of the IEC fusion reactor. He has set up a nonprofit organization, EMC2 Fusion Development Corp. (www.EMC2Fusion.org), to fund the work.

The current, third-generation prototype uses six doughnut-shaped electromagnets to create a cube in which to confine the fusion reactions in a strong magnetic field. The original protype operated in air and was just centimeters in diameter; the current design operates in a vacuum chamber and measures roughly a cubic yard.

When all six electromagnets are energized, the magnetic fields meld into a nearly perfect sphere. Electrons are in jected into the sphere to create a superdense core of highly negative charge. Given enough electrons, the electrical field can be made strong enough to induce fusion in selected particles. Positively charged protons and boron-11 ions ("p-B11") are injected into the sphere and are quickly accelerated into the center of the electron ball by its high negative charge. Protons and boron ions that overshoot the center are pulled back with an oscillatory action of a thousand or more cycles.

If the negative charge of the core is high enough, the positively charged particles will accelerate enough during their oscillations to induce a fusion reaction. The boron-11 collides with a proton to create carbon-12, which then splits into a helium nucleus and a beryllium nucleus. The beryllium particle splits into two more helium nuclei, resulting in a total of three helium nuclei, each of which has almost 3 million electron volts of energy. The force of the final splitting step drives the helium nuclei out of the center of the reactor, where a surrounding electrical grid directly dissipates their energy by generating electricity at a claimed efficiency of 95 percent.

• "Focus Fusion Report" www.IntegrityResearchInstitute.org  
• "Dense Plasma Focus Fusion Power & Space Propulsion," Future Energy, Vol. 2, No. 2, Summer, 2007, p. 7
• "Advances in Dense Plasma Focus Fusion for Electric Power and Space Propulsion" - Dr. George Miley, University of Illinois,  DVD from IRI's COFE2

2) Record Efficiency for Plastic Solar Cells

Peter Fairley, Technology Review, Friday, July 13, 2007 http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/19044/

Researchers find a new way to make cheap and flexible photovoltaic cells.

A new process for printing plastic solar cells boosts the power generated by the flexible and cheap form of photovoltaics. Initial solar cells made with the technique can, according to a report in today's issue of Science, capture solar energy with an efficiency of 6.5 percent--a new power record for photovoltaics that employ conductive plastics to generate electricity from sunlight. Most photovoltaics are made from conventional inorganic semiconductors.

The new process stacks multiple polymer layers within a single photovoltaic device to produce a "tandem" cell. Alan Heeger <http://www.ipos.ucsb.edu/ajh.html>, who won the 2000 Nobel Prize for his codiscovery of electrically conducting polymers, and his colleagues at the University of California, Santa Barbara <http://www.ipos.ucsb.edu/> (UCSB), created the process with a group from South Korea's Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology <http://www.gist.ac.kr/english/index.php>. Heeger says that the tandem architecture offers plenty of room for further improvement--enough to eventually make plastic solar cells practical in rooftop solar panels. "We see a pathway here toward even higher efficiencies," he says. "We can do significantly better than 6.5 percent in the near future."

Tandem cells, commonly employed in conventional solar panels, increase power output in two ways. The semiconductors in the different layers can be optimized to capture different bands of light, thus enabling the tandem device to absorb a broader spectrum of sunlight. And the multiple layers boost the voltage of the tandem device, yielding more power from every photon absorbed. "You do a better job of light harvesting and a better job of utilizing the photon energy," explains Heeger.

Until now, however, the tandem architecture spoiled plastic photovoltaics such as Heeger's, which are "printed" by spraying solutions of conductive plastics and other materials onto a plastic film. Layers of different plastics sprayed on top tended to mix, degrading rather than enhancing power output. Heeger and his colleagues beat the mixing problem by finding an effective spray-on separator to keep the layers in place.
The bottom cell is filled with a proprietary polymer first disclosed last year by plastic PV developer Konarka Technologies <http://www.konarkatech.com/>, based in Lowell, MA, which Heeger cofounded and for which he serves as chief scientist. The polymer (a derivative of polythiophene) absorbs both infrared and ultraviolet light. Next comes a titanium-suboxide layer, which seals in the bottom cell, provides a foundation for building the top layer, and, as it's a metal, efficiently carries away the charged electrons generated in both layers. Finally, the top layer sports a different type of conducting polymer that absorbs mostly blue and green light.

Heeger expects further efficiency strides as device developers gain experience with the cell's new materials. For example, in May, the UCSB researchers reported a processing tweak that doubles the power output of single cells made with Konarka's new polythiophene polymer. Heeger says that the processing trick was not used in the tandem cell. Yang Yang <http://164.67.192.163:81/index.aspx>, a physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, agrees that rapid improvement is likely. He says that such optimization could yield a tandem cell that's more than 10 percent efficient. "I would call this important progress," he says.

Not all experts are as optimistic. Sean Shaheen, who recently left a research post at the Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory <http://www.nrel.gov/> for the University of Denver, cautions not to overreact to the report. For one thing, says Shaheen, efficiency estimates are notoriously unreliable because each research group tests efficiency under its own approximation of the solar spectrum.
Another hurdle for the tandem cell is manufacturing. Konarka vice president of research Russell Gaudiana expects that the company would be able to produce Heeger's tandem cells on the same printing lines it now uses to make prototype modules containing single cells of plastic photovoltaics, but he says it will be "trickier" to keep the tandem cell's layers from intermixing in commercial-scale production. "We anticipate seeing the typical problems that one always sees when putting down multiple layers," says Gaudiana. "Alan does it in the laboratory and does a very good job at it, but doing it on a coating machine at high speed is a little different."

For the time being, says Gaudiana, Konarka will stay focused on producing single-cell plastic photovoltaics with 5 percent efficiency. That power output is sufficient for Konarka's first application, portable battery chargers, which the company hopes to begin selling next year. But tandem cells could help Konarka reach the more demanding rooftop market, which Gaudiana says will require at least 7 percent efficiency.

3) A Power Plant for the Home

 Prachi Patel Predd , IEEE Spectrum, April, 2007 http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/apr07/5010

When you flip on a light switch in an average American home, the light bulb probably uses electricity generated in a far-away power plant. But that is not the most efficient way to use fuels-two-thirds of their energy is lost as waste heat at the plant and while traveling over power lines.

What if the power plant were sitting in your home's basement instead? Combined heat and power (CHP) systems can utilize up to 90 percent of a fossil fuel's energy by simultaneously generating heat and electricity on-site, reducing energy consumption and slashing utility bills. Such systems already power hospitals, university campuses, and large petrochemical factories, and they are widely used for district heating in Denmark, the Netherlands, and other northern European countries. But only in the last few years has the technology evolved to the point that it can power and heat individual homes. Recently gaining popularity in Europe and Japan, micro-CHP, as it's called, has now broken into the lucrative U.S. market.

The Freewatt system, made by Honda, can be installed in a basement as shown in a Boston-area home. Climate Energy, a company in Medfield, Mass., is testing a 1.2-kilowatt system in 25 U.S. homes and hopes to sell several hundred units this year. The company, a joint venture of ECR International, in Utica, N.Y., and Yankee Scientific, also in Medfield, is marketing a system developed by Honda Motor, Tokyo [see photo, "Basement Installation" Honda has sold 50 000 1-kW units for single-family homes in Japan. SenerTec, a firm in Schweinfurt, Germany, markets a 5-kW system for apartment buildings in Europe.

Micro-CHP systems typically consist of an internal combustion engine and a furnace. The engine drives a generator to produce electricity, and the heat created in the process goes to the furnace via a heat exchanger module. Micro-CHP equipment can run on a range of fuels, including coal and oil. The most popular systems, including Climate Energy's, run on natural gas.

Unlike solar panels, wind turbines, and fuel cells, CHP is, as Climate Energy CEO Eric Guyer says, "an approach that's much more like the hybrid gasoline-electric automobile than an exotic automobile such as one running on fuel cells. It's a good application of available technology-nothing extraordinarily new, no new science, no new way of converting energy."

The micro-CHP setup costs a few thousand dollars more than a traditional gas furnace. Whether it is worth the extra money depends on where you live. This is because it is driven by heat demand: in the winter the generator runs as much as possible without turning off, providing heat and about half of a typical home's electricity. When you do not need heat, the power plant switches off and you buy all your electricity from the grid. And if you generate more electricity than you need-say, at night-you could sell it to the utility company.

The Climate Energy system makes the most sense if you live in one of those states where it gets very cold in the winter and you pay a lot for electricity. In that case, it can pay for itself in two years and save you US $500 a year thereafter. Otherwise, the payback period could be up to 10 years.

More than 35 U.S. states now require utilities to provide net metering, a simple way for customers to sell power to a utility using standard meters. But states decide what type of residual energy customers can pump into the grid, and so far, just 11 states allow net metering for CHP.

The main market for micro-CHP in the United States would be homes that require more than 4000 heating hours per year, according to Peter Banwell of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, who is investigating residential CHP. Banwell says roughly 30 million U.S. homes are in that bracket. Guyer notes that Climate Energy's system is especially attractive in states such as Massachusetts and Connecticut, where electricity can cost as much as 20 cents per kilowatthour and where local utilities are offering financial incentives for micro-CHP buyers.

According to John Jimison, a former executive director of the U.S. Combined Heat and Power Association, in Bethesda, Md., micro-CHP growth might be slower in North America than in Europe and Japan because many of the same homes that require a lot of heating in winter also run electricity-hungry air conditioners in the summer. The drawback of trying to use CHP in such homes is that it makes no contribution to a consumer's electricity bill during the summer, when usage is highest.
On the other hand, Jimison argues, the U.S. market has much more potential than Europe or Japan in the long term because of the country's copious power consumption, recent high fuel prices, and growing environmental awareness.

Strong incentives from major utilities and the government would help spur residential CHP in the United States, Jimison says, but traditional utilities still see home power generation as a threat. Europe and Japan offer good examples of how financial incentives can boost micro-CHP sales. In Germany, micro-CHP users do not have to pay an eco-tax that is attached to the use of natural gas, and they are paid more than the wholesale price of electricity for what they deliver to the grid. Micro-CHP users in the United Kingdom get a big discount on the natural gas tax, paying just 5 percent rather than 17.5 percent. In Japan, where consumers cannot sell electricity back to utilities, the government gives subsidies toward micro-CHP, and gas utilities also give a discounted rate to encourage people to use it. Jon Slowe, a director in Glasgow of Delta Energy and Environment, a distributed energy research and consulting firm based in the UK and Belgium, says the Japanese subsidy is "in recognition of the carbon dioxide savings" obtainable from using CHP.

"My expectation is that when it's time to replace [the furnace], they'll be putting in a micro-CHP unit" -- John Jimison

Government support for micro-CHP in the United States has been scant. The U.S. Department of Energy funded preliminary system-design research in 2004, including R&D done by one of Climate Energy's parent companies, ECR International. But there have not been enough funds to support the research in subsequent years, says Douglas F. Gyorke, a program manager at the DOE's National Energy Technology Laboratory. "It's a novel technology that I wish we could've played around with a little more," Gyorke says.

Climate Energy's Guyer says the hesitancy of the government and utilities to embrace micro-CHP is natural. "This is the case of the microcomputer versus the mainframe," he says. "There were people in the mainframe business who thought that there was no role for personal computing."

Guyer and Jimison say they expect things to be different in a few years. A typical gas furnace has a life of 15 to 20 years, Jimison notes, adding, "My expectation is that for people who are putting in a new gas furnace now, when it's time to replace that, they'll be putting in a micro-CHP unit."