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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.
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Discrete Event Modeling of Algae Cultivation and Harvesting at Commercial Scale: Capital Costs, Operating Costs, and System Bottlenecks
The third annual ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit was held in Washington D.C. in February, 2012. The event brought together key players from across the energy ecosystem - researchers, entrepreneurs, investors, corporate executives, and government officials - to share ideas for developing and deploying the next generation of energy technologies. Following introduction by Rep. Steve Womack of Arkansas, Lee Scott, Chairman of BDT Capital Partners and former Walmart CEO, gave the second keynote presentation of the day.
Factory capital expenditure (capex) for photovoltaic (PV) module manufacturing strongly influences the per-unit cost of a c-Si module. This provides a significant opportunity to address the U.S. DOE SunShot module price target through capex innovation. Innovation options to reduce the capex of PV manufacturing include incremental and disruptive process innovation with c-Si, platform innovations, and financial approaches. and financial approaches.
We propose a general method to consolidate distillation columns of a distillation configuration using heat and mass integration. The proposed method encompasses all heat and mass integrations known till date, and includes many more. Each heat and mass integration eliminates a distillation column, a condenser, a reboiler and the heat duty associated with a reboiler. Thus, heat and mass integration can potentially offer significant capital and operating cost benefits. In this talk, we will study the various possible heat and mass integrations in detail, and demonstrate their benefits using case studies. This work will lay out a framework to synthesize an entire new class of useful configurations based on heat and mass integration of distillation columns.
Overview on the Energy Facility Contractor Group's (EFCOG) most recent work in partnership with DOE to improve performance and EFCOG's mission is to ensure safety, security, and quality across the US DOE complex. Best practices were highlighted in discussions with US DOE/ NNSA leaders and key project executives. EFCOG's key priorities for 2020 were featured in the panel discussions to include: addressing human capital issues to ensure future mission needs can be met; addressing supply chain issues for nuclear projects; improving the data quality and performance assurance; and improving risk communication and stakeholder relations. EFCOG accomplishes its mission through working groups that provide forums to address common challenges and exchange proven techniques and other management and technical information among member contractors. Panelists with presentations: WM EFCOG Panel Slides (Morgan Smith); EFCOG DOE Supply Chain Initiative (SCI) - Enabling The DOE Mission - (Darrell Graddy); Data Quality and Performance Assurance (JD Dowell); Risk Communication - Different Events - Very Different Responses from the Community (Rick McLeod); Current State of Cybersecurity (Liz Porter)
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This report provides an update on the previous cost model for thermal energy storage (TES) systems. The update allows NREL to estimate the costs of such systems that are compatible with the higher operating temperatures associated with advanced power cycles.
Brookhaven National Laboratory’s (BNL’s) Nonproliferation and National Security Department contributes to the National Nuclear Security Administration Office of Nonproliferation and International Security Next Generation Safeguards Initiative (NGSI) through university engagement, safeguards internships, safeguards courses, professional development, recruitment, and other activities aimed at ensuring the next generation of international safeguards professionals is adequately prepared to support the U.S. safeguards mission. This report is a summary of BNL s work under the NGSI program in Fiscal Year 2014.
The purpose of this section of the Quality Guidelines is to provide a standard basis for scaling costs, with specific emphasis on scaling exponents. The intention of having a standardized document is to provide guidelines for proper procedures to reduce the potential of errors and increase credibility through consistency. This document contains a listing of frequently used pieces of equipment and their corresponding scaling exponent for various plant types, along with their ranges of applicability. This document also details the equations to be used with each exponent.
Our Mission: To solve national security challenges through simultaneous excellence; Our Vision: To be trusted by our nation, emulated by our peers, and respected by the world; Our Culture: How we do work is as important as what we do; Our Values: service, integrity, teamwork, and excellence.
The rare earth crisis slowly evolved during a 10 to 15 year period beginning in the mid-1980s, when the Chinese began to export mixed rare earth concentrates. In the early 1990s, they started to move up the supply chain and began to export the individual rare earth oxides and metals. By the late 1990s the Chinese exported higher value products, such as magnets, phosphors, polishing compounds, catalysts; and in the 21st century they supplied finished products including electric motors, computers, batteries, liquid-crystal displays (LCDs), TVs and monitors, mobile phones, iPods and compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) light bulbs. As they moved to higher value products, the Chinese slowly drove the various industrial producers and commercial enterprises in the US, Europe and Japan out of business by manipulating the rare earth commodity prices. Because of this, the technically trained rare earth engineers and scientists who worked in areas from mining to separations, to processing to production, to manufacturing of semifinished and final products, were laid-off and moved to other fields or they retired. However, in the past year the Chinese have changed their philosophy of the 1970s and 1980s of forming a rare earth cartel to control the rare earth markets to one in which they will no longer supply the rest of the world (ROW) with their precious rare earths, but instead will use them internally to meet the growing demand as the Chinese standard of living increases. To this end, they have implemented and occasionally increased export restrictions and added an export tariff on many of the high demand rare earth elements. Now the ROW is quickly trying to start up rare earth mines, e.g. Molycorp Minerals in the US and Lynas Corp. in Australia, to cover this shortfall in the worldwide market, but it will take about five years for the supply to meet the demand, even as other mines in the ROW become productive. Unfortunately, today there is a serious lack of technically trained personnel to bring the entire rare earth industry, from mining to original equipment manufacturers (OEM), up to full speed in the next few years. Accompanying this decline in technical expertise, innovation and new products utilizing rare earth elements has slowed dramatically, and it may take a decade or more to recapture America's leading role in technological advancements of rare earth containing products. Before the disruption of the US rare earth industry, about 25,000 people were employed in all aspects of the industry from mining to OEM. Today, only about 1,500 people are employed in these fields. The ratio of non-technically trained persons to those with college degrees in the sciences or engineering varies from about 8 to 1 to about 4 to 1, depending on the particular area of the industry. Assuming an average of 6 to 1, the number of college degree scientists and engineers has decreased from about 4,000 to 250 employed today. In the magnetic industry the approximate numbers are: 6,000 total with 750 technically trained people in the 1980s to 500 totally employed today of which 75 have degrees. The paucity of scientists and engineers with experience and/or training in the various aspects of production and commercialization of the rare earths is a serious limitation to the ability of the US to satisfy its own needs for materials and technologies (1) to maintain our military strength and posture, (2) to assume leadership in critical energy technologies, and (3) to bring new consumer products to the marketplace. The lack of experts is of even greater national importance than the halting in the 1990s and the recent restart of the mining/benification/separation effort in the US; and thus governmental intervention and support for at least five to 10 years will be required to ameliorate this situation. To respond quickly, training programs should be established in conjunction with a national research center at an educational institution with a long tradition in multiple areas of rare earth and other critical elements research and technology. This center should form close affiliations with other universities, governmental laboratories and non-profit research organizations having complementary strengths. In addition, single investigators or small teams of rare earthers at other universities should be supported by the usual grants from NSF, DOD and DOE. These investigators may or may not be affiliated with the center.
Calculations of the uncertainty in the Levelized Cost at Equilibrium (LCAE) of generating nuclear electricity typically assume that the costs of the system component, notably reactors, are uncorrelated. Partial cancellation of independent errors thus gives rise to unrealistically small cost uncertainties for fuel cycles that incorporate multiple reactor technologies. This summary describes an expert elicitation of correlations between overnight reactor construction costs. It also defines a method for combining the elicitations into a single, consistent correlation matrix suitable for use in Monte Carlo LCAE calculations. Both the elicitation and uncertainty propagation methods are demonstrated through a pilot study where cost correlations between eight reactor technologies were elicited from experts in the US DOE Fuel Cycle Research
This presentation summarizes NREL finance activities for Department of Energy clients.
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Stringent long-term climate targets necessitate a strict limit on cumulative emissions in this century for which sufficient policy signals are so far lacking. Based on an ensemble of ten energy-economy models, we explore how long-term transformation pathways depend on policies pursued during the next two decades. We find that weak GHG emission targets for 2030 lead, in that year alone, to excess carbon dioxide emissions of nearly half of the annual emissions in 2010, mainly through coal electricity generation. Furthermore, by consuming more of the long-term cumulative emissions budget in the first two decades, weak policy increases the likelihood of overshooting the budget and the urgency of reducing GHG emissions. Therefore, to be successful under weak policies, models must prematurely retire much of the additional coal capacity post-2030 and remove large quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the latter half of the century. While increased energy efficiency lowers mitigation costs considerably, even with weak near-term policies, it does not substantially reduce the short term reliance on coal electricity. However, increased energy efficiency does allow the energy system more flexibility in mitigating emissions and, thus, makes the post-2030 transition easier.