Wilmot McCutchen

Hg removal from flue gas by sorption on sponge coke will not be feasible at the huge scale required. Lab scale chemistry can't possibly scale up to handle the huge volumes of hot and dirty flue gas emitted by a utility boiler. Better would be separation of Hg along with fly ash in a scalable kinematic separator based on the open von Karman geometry. See http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1001605814600196 Hg molecules have a higher momentum than N2 and H2O, although at thermal equilibrium all molecules in flue gas have the same kinetic energy, so Hg can't follow the convergent flow path of the low molecular weight fractions, N2 and H2O, through the vortex cores to axial extraction. So Hg vapor gets spun out to collection in a shrouding tank, along with fly ash and CO2.

The underground injection of CO2 is currently the aim of global warming policy-makers. But in our panicked desperation, let's not make things even worse by cracking the bedrock and salting the groundwater. “We have faults that are accumulating stress over thousands to hundreds of thousands of years, even in Iowa,” says Stanford University geophysicist Mark Zoback. “So when you inject water or gas or any fluid it can set some of them off. ... Stanford’s Zoback says the standard calculations that have convinced some that immense volumes of CO2 can be buried safely in the pore space of deep formations reflect “science that could be done by a fourth grader. They are leaving out one important fact,” he says. “Those pores are already filled with saline water. Where are you going to put that?”” https://www.sciencenews.org/article/pumping-carbon-dioxide-deep-underground-may-trigger-earthquakes

Accepting poverty (conservation) is not a solution to water scarcity on this scale. New technology needs to be developed, but there is no interest or funding because policymakers have been persuaded to believe scrimping on our water usage will be enough.

There is an excess of tritium in the Fukushima wastewater, and superheavy water could be centrifugally separated. The availability of deuterium and tritium for fusion should not be a major obstacle to development of sustained net usable energy generation. Magnetic confinement fusion appears to be making progress away from tokamaks. Hot fusion still has a pulse. From Strange's link: "Spheromaks were in vogue in the 1970s when Jarboe began working on them at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, but back then they couldn't confine a hot plasma for longer than the blink of an eye. The car-sized experiment that Jarboe has working today is the first spheromak to confine high-pressure plasma. "It could go on indefinitely if we had the cooling and power supply," he says."

You're right, slow neutrons are not mentioned in that article, but in another. NASA says that slow neutrons can be produced by nickel with lots of hydrogen in the lattice. http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/149090-nasas-cold-fusion-tech-could-put-a-nuclear-reactor-in-every-home-car-and-plane

Each kWh of electricity consumes 1.8 liters of water evaporated into the atmosphere for heat rejection at thermal power plants. That's poor water efficiency. But air cooling can't dissipate more than 1 W/cm2 even with blowers. For nuclear and coal plants sited in dry areas, poor water efficiency -- on the part of the biggest water hog of all, power generation -- has led to a needless confrontation. It's not necessary to chose water or electricity. Both could be improved by harvesting the power of wet steam more completely by expanding it in the radial counterflow open von Karman geometry between counter-rotating coaxial spiral-bladed radial turbines having axial extraction of low enthalpy saturated vapor into the condenser. By pushing on the blades and causing the disks to counter-rotate, the wet turbine exhaust steam loses enthalpy doing useful work, making more electricity and reducing the need for heat rejection to a scale that air cooling might handle. For even more power harvesting from waste heat, a bottoming organic Rankine cycle. The solutions are out there, but no money is being spent to improve water effiiciency.

The Rossi reactor, which generates slow neutrons in the transmutation of hydrogen-loaded nickel into copper under THz radiation, has produced 1.5 MWh of energy over 32 days. http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/191754-cold-fusion-reactor-verified-by-third-party-researchers-seems-to-have-1-million-times-the-energy-density-of-gasoline

David Sedlak's new book, Water 4.0, tells the history of water and waste treatment. Water 1.0 was the Roman system of aqueducts to supply dense populations and flush away their waste. Water 2.0 was disinfection of drinking water, and 3.0 was treatment of sewage. Emerging technologies, such as desalination, and concerns, such as disinfection byproducts and endocrine disruptors in wastewater effluent, are succinctly presented in this lucid little book. It's a great service to have compiled this vital knowledge, which is hard to find. The author is the Malozemoff Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley.

What would be the right name for this -- unmixing ... antidiffusion? Momentum is diffused from the slowly rotating cylinder for five revolutions, and then the direction is reversed until the viscous fluid snaps back to its original state of three inclusions at approximately the same depth in the corn syrup. Viscosity is energy storage.

The Fukushima disaster should be an occasion for collaborative problem solving. The issue is what is to be done with the RO concentrate (which is polluted by cesium)? The leak flowrate from the concentrate tanks is not large (1 gallon per second), so solution scalability should not be a problem. Tedious reiteration of unsubstantiated talking points seeking to scare people away from nuclear generation is not helpful, nor is the coal-is-worse retort. What is the real magnitude of the danger posed by the leak? What is the state of the art of nuclear wastewater treatment, and how could it be improved?

The flow rate of the leak is only 300 m3/day, which is a gallon a second. The Japanese government is prepared to spend half a billion dollars to solve that. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/japans-government-pledges-nearly-500-million-as-tepco-deals-with-water-crisis/2013/09/03/581876c6-147c-11e3-880b-7503237cc69d_story.html?wprss=rss_asia-pacific

Very brief radio bursts have been detected from 11 billion light years. Could these be the axial jets of black holes or collapsars? The burst may be because Earth is very briefly transiting the beam. Other possibilities? http://phys.org/news/2013-07-cosmic-radio-cataclysmic.html

Collapsar axial jets transport matter away from the black hole. Not everything falls in. The axial jets can result in gamma ray bursts perceived on Earth from sources billions of light years away. This 2012 astrophysics paper by Milosavljevic et al. is entitled "Supernovae powered by collapsar accretion in gamma ray burst sources." http://iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/744/2/103/fulltext/

Hydrogen embrittlement of metal tanks used to store hydrogen is another unsolved problem. As Mr. Monkeybat points out, hydrogen is hard to contain. If it leaks, it could ignite. If the metal in the containment gets brittle, it could crack (viz. the SF Bay Bridge bolts) with catastrophic failure. Joe Romm's book "The Hype about Hydrogen" is recommended reading to get a sense of the issues.

The News forum was probably deemed the wrong classification of your interesting work so the administrator removed it to a more appropriate forum. Nevertheless, I've found you and I would like to find out more about the clay process you speak of. I would also like to find out more about the power generation idea, although it seems at first glance that the amount of work from the heat flux would be too small to harvest. The particular problem I'd like to hear your thoughts on is the sludge ponds of Alberta, the legacy of oil sands extraction. Mature fine tailings make them the consistency of yogurt. The electrostatic house-of-cards edge-to-face arrangement of clay platelets prevents them from settling. Up until now the profit from cleaning up the sludge ponds was not appreciated. Thickened tailings may be rich ore.