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The utilization of nuclear energy and the predicted impact of future uses of nuclear energy are discussed. Areas of application in electric power production and transportation methods are described. It is concluded that the need for many forms of nuclear energy will become critical as the requirements for power to supply an increasing population are met.
Dynamic phenomena linked to inverter-based resources (IBRs) have gained global attention. Several IBR-induced dynamics have caused bulk power system-connected wind or solar power plants to trip, and some have even led to widespread outages. In addition, many oscillations have been observed involving IBR power plants. In 2023, the IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) IBR Subsynchronous Oscillations (SSO) task force published a journal article, “Real-World Subsynchronous Oscillation Events in Power Grids With High Penetrations of Inverter-Based Resources,” in which 19 IBR oscillation events were examined for their causation. Earlier in 2020, another PES task force article, “Definition and Classification of Power System Stability-Revisited & Extended,” authored by prominent academics, introduced converter-driven stability as a new category of stability. The international power grid industry community also took action by publishing the CIGRE Green Book, Power System Dynamic Modelling and Analysis in Evolving Networks (led by Babak Badrzadeh and Zia Emin) in 2024. In August 2024, the Energy Systems Integration Group (ESIG) released a practical guide led by Nick Miller, “Diagnosis and Mitigation of Observed Oscillations in IBR-Dominant Power System: A Practical Guide.” The goal of the guide is to assist practicing engineers in making initial judgments and conducting detailed analyses about oscillations. Finally, when addressing the classification of stability and oscillations, the guide emphasizes a causality-based taxonomy for grouping, such as voltage control-induced oscillations, synchronization-induced oscillations, and frequency or active power control-induced oscillations.
This poster was presented at the 2024 IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting, July 21-25, 2024, Seattle, Washington.
Nuclear fuel is a compact and abundant source of energy. Its cost per unit of energy is less than that of fossil fuel. Disadvantages of nuclear fuel are connected with the high cost of capital equipment required for releasing nuclear energy and the heavy weight of the necessary shielding. In the case of commercial electric power production and marine propulsion the advantages have outweighed the disadvantages. It is pointed out that nuclear commercial submarines have certain advantages compared to surface ships. Nuclear powerplants might make air-cushion vehicles for transoceanic ranges feasible. The problems and advantages of a nuclear aircraft are discussed together with nuclear propulsion for interplanetary space voyages.
It is pointed out that the earth's crust holds 30,000 times as much energy in the form of fissionable atoms as fossil fuel. Moreover, nuclear fuel costs less per unit of energy than fossil fuel. Capital equipment used to release nuclear energy, on the other hand, is expensive. For commercial electric-power production and marine propulsion, advantages of nuclear power have outweighed disadvantages. As to nuclear submarines, applications other than military may prove feasible. The industry has proposed cargo submarines to haul oil from the Alaskan North Slope beneath the Arctic ice. Other possible applications for nuclear power are in air-cushion-vehicles, aircraft, and rockets.-
Energy models make projections for infrastructure, yet struggle to map deployment pathways at the ground level, where risks and benefits to human and natural systems materialize. Furthermore, a study now shows how blending in geospatial science can help to preserve natural capital while allowing for new infrastructure to be built.
Society of American Military Engineers (SAME) Space Coast Post - Our presenter will be Jennifer Hill, PE, LEED AP, Energy Manager for NASA at Kennedy Space Center. Ms. Hill will present on the NASA KSC Energy Program, providing an overview of KSC’s energy program and of projects that have been implemented to reduce energy and water intensity, increase renewable energy usage, and to improve resilience in support of the NASA KSC Mission.
The demand for space-efficient energy storage, from grid to device scale, has soared with the rapid electrification of society. To increase energy density while maintaining high rate performance, shaping electrodes has been shown to be an effective strategy. Computational optimization can suggest designs that improve energy storage performance; however, generated designs are often complex, leading to manufacturing challenges. Additionally, most optimization is typically conducted in standard rectangular domains, whereas some applications, such as in the aerospace industry or in consumer electronics, may benefit from optimized electrodes that fit in a nonstandard form factor. Here, in this work, we use topology optimization to design capacitive full-cell electrodes in a curved domain. We propose a simplified corrugated electrode design based on the optimization results and show that the energy stored in the simplified design is only reduced by about 5–27% when compared to that in the fully optimized design, with more deviation occurring when ionic transport in the porous electrode is particularly impeded. Overall, we find that these simplified designs are promising, particularly given the more conventional manufacturing techniques required, and have a 42–369% increase in energy stored compared to monolithic electrodes.
California's post-industrial society demands confidence in the energy supply system as an essential ingredient for social harmony and adequate job creating capital investment. Confidence requires policies which balance supply and demand using believable methods with adequate allowance for the unexpected, reliance on diverse sources and locations, respect for our environment, sustain our individual freedoms and provide opportunities for economic mobility. Coal will play only a part, but an important part, in a multifaceted energy policy using numerous energy sources and systems, conservation techniques, and cooperating societal institutions. Today's extensive and challenging research and development provides the foundation for future technologies which will further resolve the environmental effects associated with coal.
Laboratory astrophysics is a strong and vibrant field in the US with its primary national representation as a full Division of the American Astronomical Society (AAS). Laboratory Astrophysics is also represented in other major scientific societies such as the Astrochemistry subdivision of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the High Energy Density Laboratory Astrophysics (HEDLA) and the Division of Astrophysics (DAP) of the American Physical Society (APS) to cite a few. Laboratory Astrophysics and Astrochemistry is also well represented in federal agencies such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) where research programs are fully dedicated to the support of laboratory astrophysics research. Laboratory Astrophysics is also well represented in the Academic arena where Physics, Astronomy and/or Chemistry Departments in many universities host a laboratory Astrophysics or Astrochemistry curriculum. The increasing recognition of the field of laboratory astrophysics has been recently reinforced by its inclusion into the recommendations of the two most recent Decadal Surveys of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). I will discuss and present the many aspects and representations of Laboratory Astrophysics in the US and summarize the current efforts in the field.
Plastics such as polyamides (PAs) possess unique physicochemical properties that make them indispensable in modern society. However, their energy‐intensive production and challenging end‐of‐life management highlight the urgent need for efficient recycling or remanufacturing solutions. Enzymatic depolymerization offers a promising route toward circular recycling, yet remains constrained by limited enzyme characterization, lack of validation under industrially relevant conditions and substrates, and overall performance. Here, we optimized the reaction conditions for three recently discovered nylon‐degrading enzymes. One of them, Nyl12, achieved product titers with PA6 and PA66 that exceed previously reported values, without enzyme engineering or substrate pretreatment. We further demonstrated the scalability of the process and its application to complex PA‐based materials used in microelectronic components. Analysis of substrate features, including surface area and particle size, revealed key parameters governing enzymatic activity and provided a framework for future pretreatment and process optimization efforts. In combination, these efforts provide a new benchmark for enzymatic nylon recycling.
This document is the final report for the project with the title, “Uranyl Capture with Lewis Acids and Macrocyclic Hosts.” Nuclear power is attractive for meeting the current and future energy needs of society, in that it does not release carbon dioxide or other pollutants into the atmosphere during routine use. This motivated the project, because preparation of nuclear fuel, recovery of useful components from used fuel, and handling of waste materials remain significant impediments to further deployment of important nuclear technologies. In part, these problems arise from limited availability of chemical reactions that can reliably interconvert forms of uranium and other heavy elements during preparation and processing. For example, harsh and expensive chemicals are often required for making and breaking chemical bonds to uranium, and the reactions involved are inefficient. The overall objective of this research was to harness knowledge of chemical structure and bonding to develop a useful and predictive und
To address the driving forces of climate change and to ensure society has reliable and plentiful energy, considerable amounts of new energy infrastructure will need to be built in scores of communities over the near future. Democratic societies give communities considerable authority, influence, and autonomy on land-use decisions and regulatory policy making. Involving community members and stakeholders in decision making about facility siting and hosting is vital to minimize local opposition. But while there is much written about how to engage communities successfully, there is comparatively little attention given to understanding the civic capacities communities need to be able to participate. This paper reviews literatures on civic capacity and presents a new taxonomy based on six categories: leadership, knowledge, resources, civic engagement, social capital, and culture. It then proposes a systems framework to convey how capacities are developed and employed in collaborative decision making processes about siting and hosting energy facilities. Project sponsors, regulators, stakeholder groups, and communities can use these insights to better prepare and empower communities to participate as equal partners in conversations about energy facility siting.
Large-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) have found ever-increasing use across industry and society to accelerate clean energy transition and improve energy supply reliability and resilience. However, their optimal power management poses significant challenges: the underlying high-dimensional nonlinear nonconvex optimization lacks computational tractability in real-world implementation, and the uncertainty of the exogenous power demand makes exact optimization difficult. This paper presents a new solution framework to address these bottlenecks. The solution pivots on introducing power-sharing ratios to specify each cell’s power quota from the output power demand. To find the optimal power-sharing ratios, we formulate a nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) problem to achieve power-loss-minimizing BESS operation while complying with safety, cell balancing, and power supply-demand constraints. We then propose a parameterized control policy for the power-sharing ratios, which utilizes only three parameters, to reduce the computational demand in solving the NMPC problem. This policy parameterization allows us to translate the NMPC problem into a Bayesian inference problem for the sake of 1) computational tractability, and 2) overcoming the nonconvexity of the optimization problem. We leverage the ensemble Kalman inversion technique to solve the parameter estimation problem. Concurrently, a low-level control loop is developed to seamlessly integrate our proposed approach with the BESS to ensure practical implementation. This low-level controller receives the optimal power-sharing ratios, generates output power references for the cells, and maintains a balance between power supply and demand despite uncertainty in output power. We conduct extensive simulations and experiments on a 20-cell prototype to validate the proposed approach.
America Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) Space Coast Section - Our presenter will be Jennifer Hill, PE, LEED AP, Energy Manager for NASA at Kennedy Space Center. Ms. Hill will present on the NASA KSC Energy Program, providing an overview of KSC’s energy program and of projects that have been implemented to reduce energy and water intensity, increase renewable energy usage, and to improve resilience in support of the NASA KSC Mission.
The transition toward a carbon-neutral society based on renewable energies goes hand in hand with the availability of energy-efficient technologies. Here, magnetocaloric cooling is a very promising refrigeration technology to fulfill this role regarding cryogenic gas liquefaction. However, the current reliance on highly resource critical, heavy rare-earth-based compounds as magnetocaloric material makes global usage unsustainable. Here, we aim to mitigate this limitation through the utilization of a multicaloric cooling concept, which uses the external stimuli of isotropic pressure and magnetic field to tailor and induce magnetostructural phase transitions associated with large caloric effects. In this study, La 0.7 Ce 0.3 Fe 11.6 Si 1.4 is used as a nontoxic, low-cost, low-criticality multiferroic material to explore the potential, challenges, and peculiarities of multicaloric cryocooling, achieving maximum isothermal entropy changes up to −28 J (kg K) −1 in the temperature range from 190 K down to 30 K. Thus, the multicaloric cooling approach offers an additional degree of freedom to tailor the phase transition properties and may lead to energy-efficient and environmentally friendly gas liquefaction based on designed-for-purpose, noncritical multiferroic materials.
Abstract Existing studies indicate that future global carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) removal (CDR) efforts could largely be concentrated in Asia. However, there is limited understanding of how individual Asian countries and regions will respond to varying and uncertain scales of future CDR concerning their energy-land-water system. We address this gap by modeling various levels of CDR-reliant pathways under climate change ambitions in Asia. We find that high CDR reliance leads to residual fossil fuel and industry emissions of about 8 Gigatonnes CO 2 yr −1 (GtCO 2 yr −1 ) by 2050, compared to less than 1 GtCO 2 yr −1 under moderate-to-low CDR reliance. Moreover, expectations of multi-gigatonne CDR could delay the achievement of domestic net zero CO 2 emissions for several Asian countries and regions, and lead to higher land allocation and fertilizer demand for bioenergy crop cultivation. Here, we show that Asian countries and regions should prioritize emission reduction strategies while capitalizing on the advantages of carbon removal when it is most viable.
Directly visualizing chemical trajectories offers insights into catalysis, gas-phase reactions and photoinduced dynamics. Tracking the transformation of chemical species is best achieved by coupling theory and experiment. Here we developed Digital Twin for Chemical Science (DTCS) v.01, which integrates theory, experiment and their bidirectional feedback loops into a unified platform for chemical characterization. DTCS addresses a core question: given a set of experimental conditions, what is the expected outcome and why? It consists of a forward solver that takes a chemical reaction network and predicts spectra under experimental conditions, and an inverse solver that infers kinetics from measured spectra. We applied DTCS to ambient-pressure X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy measurements of the Ag–H2O interface as an example. This approach enables real-time knowledge extraction and guides experiments until a stopping condition is met based on accuracy and degeneracy. As a step toward autonomous chemical characterization, DTCS provides mechanistic knowledge in a verified, standardized manner.