The Campus as Living Laboratory

Like all organizations, colleges and universities need to eliminate their direct contributions to unsustainable practices. More importantly, students must experience sustainable living first hand and be involved in helping their schools become powerful role models of sustainable practices for the rest of society. As Michael Crow, President of Arizona State University (ASU), has said of the U.S. higher education sector: “We may only have 2% of the carbon footprint, but we have 100% of the education footprint.”

» via Fast Company

emergentfutures:

Perfect Insulator Could Eliminate Heating Bills

A new material developed by MIT scientists perfectly reflects heat and absorbs none of it.

abcsoupdot:

Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke

After it has been used as fuel for power plants, [thorium] leaves behind minuscule amounts of waste. And that waste needs to be stored for only a few hundred years, not a few hundred thousand like other nuclear byproducts. Because it’s so plentiful in nature, it’s virtually inexhaustible. It’s also one of only a few substances that acts as a thermal breeder, in theory creating enough new fuel as it breaks down to sustain a high-temperature chain reaction indefinitely. And it would be virtually impossible for the byproducts of a thorium reactor to be used by terrorists or anyone else to make nuclear weapons.

Weinberg and his men proved the efficacy of thorium reactors in hundreds of tests at Oak Ridge from the ’50s through the early ’70s. But thorium hit a dead end. Locked in a struggle with a nuclear- armed Soviet Union, the US government in the ’60s chose to build uranium-fueled reactors — in part because they produce plutonium that can be refined into weapons-grade material. The course of the nuclear industry was set for the next four decades, and thorium power became one of the great what-if technologies of the 20th century.

Wired Magazine

What Fish Can Teach Us About Wind

A trio of CalTech students released a paper today arguing that wind farms could yield much greater power density if they were modeled on formations of fish. The most widely used wind turbines have a propeller-like horizontal axis of rotation that converts more than half the energy of the wind it is exposed to, but these turbines must be kept far apart from their nearest neighbors to be effective.

Instead, the Caltech researchers propose closely bunched vertical-axis turbines modeled after schools of fish, which save energy by swimming in offset rows and allowing the vortices created by the two neighbors swimming ahead of them to carry them forward. (It’s a similar principle to the idea that jumbo jets could save on fuel costs by flying in a V formation, like migrating geese.) They discovered that staggered rows of freestanding turbines alternately rotating clockwise and counterclockwise creates similar vortices, accelerating the wind and increasing energy capture. Their findings could reduce infrastructure expenses associated with setting up wind farms and make wind power more viable for countries that have lots of wind but not much space, like Japan.

» via Fast Company

abcsoupdot:

World’s Smallest Solar-Powered Sensor Could Run Forever - Inhabitat

It’s easy enough to find a solar-powered charger for iPods, cell phones, and other gadgets, but this ultra-tiny solar-powered sensor system is smaller than anything else on the market — 1,000 times smaller than standard systems, in fact. Developed at the University of Michigan, the 2.5 x 3.5 x 1 millimeter system is the smallest in the world, and it can harvest energy from its surroundings almost perpetually.

Norway’s Turbine City Concept Should Be The Future of Energy and Tourism

Norway already boasts the world’s first floating wind turbine, and is apparently the windiest coastline in Europe, making it perfect for even more turbines. Or a turbine city, like On Office’s proposal which shows a stunning vision of the future.

» via Gizmodo

hiten:

[CES 2010] RCA Airnergy Charger Harvests Electricity From WiFi Signals

Uranium Is So Last Century — Enter Thorium, the New Green Nuke

Named for the Norse god of thunder, thorium is a lustrous silvery-white metal. It’s only slightly radioactive; you could carry a lump of it in your pocket without harm. On the periodic table of elements, it’s found in the bottom row, along with other dense, radioactive substances — including uranium and plutonium — known as actinides.

Actinides are dense because their nuclei contain large numbers of neutrons and protons. But it’s the strange behavior of those nuclei that has long made actinides the stuff of wonder. At intervals that can vary from every millisecond to every hundred thousand years, actinides spin off particles and decay into more stable elements. And if you pack together enough of certain actinide atoms, their nuclei will erupt in a powerful release of energy.

To understand the magic and terror of those two processes working in concert, think of a game of pool played in 3-D. The nucleus of the atom is a group of balls, or particles, racked at the center. Shoot the cue ball — a stray neutron — and the cluster breaks apart, or fissions. Now imagine the same game played with trillions of racked nuclei. Balls propelled by the first collision crash into nearby clusters, which fly apart, their stray neutrons colliding with yet more clusters. Voilè0: a nuclear chain reaction.

Actinides are the only materials that split apart this way, and if the collisions are uncontrolled, you unleash hell: a nuclear explosion. But if you can control the conditions in which these reactions happen — by both controlling the number of stray neutrons and regulating the temperature, as is done in the core of a nuclear reactor — you get useful energy. Racks of these nuclei crash together, creating a hot glowing pile of radioactive material. If you pump water past the material, the water turns to steam, which can spin a turbine to make electricity.

» via Wired

Green Goes Bad: LED Traffic Lights Can’t Melt Snow, Cause Accidents

New-fangled LED traffic lights last longer, pierce the darkness more effectively and consume 90% less energy than incandescent bulbs. That’s also their drawback. They’re not hot enough to melt snow that sticks to their lenses, causing dozens of accidents.

LED’s are, by design, more thermally efficient than incandescent bulbs, meaning more of the electricity is turned into light and less into heat. Incandescent bulbs are generally considered to “waste” electricity as a result of this thermal inefficiency, but in the case of traffic lights in northern climes there’s a happy benefit, the “waste” heat melts snow so, you know, people can see the lights.

» via Jalopnik