Japan Prime Minister at the outset of the nuke catastrophe turned to a handful of advisors who knew little about nuclear plants or barely exchanged info with plant's operators. And now equipment problems delaying water treatment at FUKU, and another nuke in JP to dump radioactive water into ocean.
MD ordered halt to fracking while effects are studied.
N. Europe bracing for serious crop losses as record drought continues. Also facing blackouts from river-cooled nuke reactors having to shut down from lack of water.
Ford to intro a hybrid minivan.
Report by 10 intl agencies, including World Bank and WTO, says govts should scrap policies to support food-based biofuels because they force up food prices globally. We've known this without paying for another dam study for how many years?
Zinc $2/kg. World reserves 1.9B tons, production 30M tons/y. 1 kg contains enough E to raise 5 cu meters of water ( 1,321 gallons = almost 4 tons) 100 meters, using zinc/air and catalyst battery. Zinc oxide byproduct can be recycled back into zinc. EOS Energy Storage batts for grid storage to cost $1k/kwh when intro'd next yr. Can store 6MW. Expecting price to drop to $400-650/kwh in coming yrs. Lead-acid batt still lower at ~$350/kwh. But lead and acid. At scale, Zinc would beat or match.
Electric bus maker Proterra got $30M from GM Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and others. Buses already in use in Pomona, CA, soon to be in San Antonio and Tallahassee. Chargers at each end of route give full charge in under 10 minutes. Battery packs from 54 to 72kw. (Tesla Roadster 53kw). But. 3 buses, 2 chargers for Pomona were $5.6M. But. By next year, 15% of muni buses purchased for CA operators must be zero emission. Bus gets equiv of 24mpg.
DOE announced $36M for 6 small projects to advance non-food biomass for fuel/chems.
NASCAR now using E15 eth blends.
US eth production hit 5-mo high with 915k bls in week ending June 3. Stocks fallen to <20M bls, production using 7M bushels of corn less than USDA estimates.
And S&P downgraded Greece 3 notches, saying default (debt restructuring) likely.
No comments:
Post a Comment