"Russia will never catch up"
"We will never catch up," writes Alexey Melnikov, member of the bureau of Russia's liberal opposition party, Yabloko, in Gazeta.ru. "Twenty years of unsuccessful reforms, propaganda lies, theft, corruption, and brain drain have deprived Russia of the possibility to develop and compete with other nations. Our lot is to rot away, selling the only thing that anybody still buys from us: oil and gas," Mr Melnikov laments. http://finrosforum.fi/russia-will-never-catch-up
How To Make Oil in Minutes
Chemical engineers at the University of Michigan hope to make fuel in minutes. They are applying heat and pressure on microalgae, exploring a method to create affordable biofuel that could replace fossil fuels. They also hope to use the byproducts of bio-oil production as feedstock for more biofuel. "The vision is that nothing would leave the refinery except oil. Everything would get reused," chemical engineering professor Phillip Savage said in a statement. "That is one of the things that makes this project novel. It’s an integrated process. We are combining hydrothermal, catalytic and biological approaches." "We make an algae soup," Savage said. "We heat it to about 300 degrees and keep the water at high enough pressure to keep it liquid as opposed to steam. We cook it for 30 minutes to an hour and we get a crude bio-oil. We are trying to do what nature does when it creates oil, but we do not want to wait millions of years."
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/04/university-of-michigan-bio-oil/
Sun + Water = Hydrogen Gas
Thanks to a new discovery, we may in the future be using solar energy during the day and hydrogen turbines or fuel cells during the night:
A new technique can convert 60% of sunlight energy absorbed by an electrode into hydrogen gas. Organic molecules have been used before to perform the same feat. But they are quickly bleached by the sunlight they are collecting, rendering them inefficient after a few weeks. The inorganic materials used in the University of East Anglia's system are more resilient. Their first generation proof of concept is "a major breakthrough" thanks to its efficiency of over 60% and ability to survive sunlight for two weeks without any degradation of performance.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18511-sunpowered-water-splitter-makes-hydrogen-tirelessly.html
Uranium is so last century
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 along with other radioactive substances known as actinides. Thorium is abundant -- the US has at least 175,000 tons of the stuff -- and doesn’t require costly processing. It is also extraordinarily efficient as a nuclear fuel. As it decays in a reactor core, its byproducts produce more neutrons per collision than conventional fuel. The more neutrons per collision, the more energy generated, the less total fuel consumed, and the less radioactive nastiness left behind. Even better, you could use thorium in an entirely new kind of reactor, one that would have zero risk of meltdown.
