Eideard

It hasn’t happened for most Totoya Prius drivers, but one day – perhaps 150,000 or so miles down the road – it will. An indicator light will appear on the dash to signal that the battery pack is past its prime and needs to be replaced.

Some critics of hybrids and electric vehicles have pointed to this moment as proof that these vehicles actually have more environmental impact than conventional autos, as battery packs potentially clutter up landfills with toxic materials. Only, that’s not what’s happening at Toyota.

When a Prius battery pack reaches end of life, Toyota provides a UPS shipping container so the battery can be sent to a recycling center. For U.S. cars, that center is in California. The batteries are shorted out to prevent accidents with any remaining charge, then all of the components are disassembled. The plastic case is shredded and recycled. The electrolyte is decanted and the rare earth elements recovered. The nickel plates are sent to a smelter where they are used in making steel. All the components of the pack are recycled or reused, leaving nothing to go to the landfill. The same recycler is already equipped to deal with the lithium batteries found on the Chevy Volt, Nissan Leaf, and plug-in Prius.

Of course, there is the problem of cost. Toyota has lowered the price over the years, but a new Prius battery pack still rings up at $2,589. And while some Prius batteries are fine up to 300,000 miles, facing a potential bill that large can make Prius owners decide that seeing 150k miles on the odometer makes a good time to trade…That’s why some dealers have instituted a policy of replacing batteries on high mileage trade-ins before they’re put up for sale.

Having a fresh battery on board assures purchasers that they’ll drive for years without worrying about that little light, and helps assure dealers that a used Prius won’t spend too long on the sales lot.

Also a reason why a used Prius might be a tad more expensive than you thought it was going to be. Demand also has a lot to do with it, though. One of the few used cars I’ve ever tucked away in the back of my mind as potential for the next family commuter-mobile.

Yes – be certain the dealer puts in writing the fact that he replaced the battery.

COGEMA La Hague site for reprocessing fuel rods
DISCLAIMER: I own a few shares in the company that owns this reactor. Har.

The Fukushima Daiichi disaster is focusing attention on a problem that has bedeviled Washington policymakers since the dawn of the nuclear age — what to do with used nuclear fuel.

[Any regular reader of this blog knows what my answer be. The rest of y'all should read on.]

Currently, spent fuel — depleted to the extent it can no longer effectively sustain a chain reaction — is stored in large pools of water, allowing the fuel to slowly cool and preventing the release of radiation.

But events in Japan, where two of the six spent fuel pools at the Fukushima Daiichi facility were compromised, have raised questions about practices at the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors, which rely on a combination of pools and dry casks to store used fuel.

[CNN is progressing. First mention I recall of dry casks.]

Currently, there is no maximum time fuel can remain in spent fuel pools, the NRC said Wednesday. As a result, critics say, nuclear plants have made fuel pools the de facto method of storing fuel, crowding pools with dangerous levels of fuel, industry critics say.

As of January 2010, an estimated 63,000 metric tons of spent fuel was in storage at U.S. power plants or storage facilities, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission…

“Spent fuel pools are considered ‘safety significant’ systems, so they meet a lot of the same standards that the reactor itself would have to meet,” said Greg Jaczko, chairman of the NRC. “For example, the spent fuel pools themselves are required to withstand the natural phenomena like earthquakes and tsunamis that could impact the reactor itself…”

A nuclear industry representative said the “lack of a national strategy” on waste storage is exacerbating the problem, since it does not know whether to place spent fuel in permanent, on-site containers, or containers suitable for transport.

The Yucca Mountain storage fiasco will raise it’s ugly head once again. I thought it was dead and buried, literally, after [1] geologic faults were revealed and [2] they had been known for years and covered up by site reports filled with lies.

Congress still thinks recycling anything is a mortal sin.

The power plant at the centre of the biggest civilian nuclear crisis in Japan’s history contained far more spent fuel rods than it was designed to store, while its technicians repeatedly failed to carry out mandatory safety checks, according to documents from the reactor’s operator…

According to documents from Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), the company repeatedly missed safety checks over a 10-year period up to two weeks before the 11 March disaster, and allowed uranium fuel rods to pile up inside the 40-year-old facility…

The revelations will add to pressure on Tepco to explain why, under its cost-cutting chief executive Masataka Shimizu, it opted to save money by storing the spent fuel on site rather than invest in safer storage options.

The firm already faces scrutiny over why it waited so long to pump seawater into the stricken reactors and, according to a report in the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper last week, turned down US offers of help to cool the reactors shortly after the disaster.

Critics of Japan’s nuclear power programme say the industry’s patchy safety record and close ties to regulating authorities will have to change if it is to regain public trust…

One month before the tsunami, government regulators approved a Tepco request to prolong the life of one of its six reactors by another decade, despite warnings that its backup power generator contained stress cracks, making them more vulnerable to water damage.

Weeks later, Tepco admitted it had failed to inspect 33 pieces of equipment inside the plant’s cooling systems, including water pumps, according to the nuclear safety agency’s website…

When disaster struck earlier this month, the plant contained almost 4,000 uranium fuel assemblies kept in pools of circulating water – the equivalent of more than three times the amount of radioactive material usually kept in the active cores of the plant’s reactors.

And like the First and second-generation nuclear plants in the United States – those uranium fuel rods could have been recycled. Beancounters in charge? You can almost be guaranteed that cost was more important than efficiency – or safety.

Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, cola wars rivals for a century, are now locked in a bottle battle.

PepsiCo Pepsi’s new bottle is made from switch grass, pine bark, corn husks and other materials. Ultimately, Pepsi plans to also use orange peels, oat hulls, potato scraps and other leftovers from its food business.

Two years after Coca-Cola Co. unveiled a bottle made partly from plant materials, PepsiCo says it is introducing a better one. The Purchase, N.Y. company says it has developed the world’s first plastic bottle made entirely from plant-based, fully renewable resources, cutting the use of petroleum. Coke’s PlantBottle is made of up to 30 percent plant sugars…

Beverage companies are trying to design bottles to counter environmental concerns. The bottled water industry is using lighter plastics, dropping the average weight of the 16.9 ounce “single serve” bottle by a third over the past eight years, according to the International Bottled Water Association.

That means less fuel consumed to transport the beverages.

Meanwhile, Coca-Cola’s PlantBottle is available in nine countries and is expected to reach more than a dozen other markets this year. More than 2.5 billion PlantBottles have reached the marketplace, a number Coca-Cola says equates to saving about 3 million gallons of gasoline.

The technology will also appear in Heinz bottles, under a partnership with the ketchup-maker, and possibly in bottles for Honest Tea, a Maryland company Coca-Cola just acquired. The PlantBottle is made partly with natural sugars found in sugarcane ethanol from Brazil. Odwalla, a Coca-Cola juice brand, plans to switch to the PlantBottle within the next few weeks.

Before someone brings it up – yes, I know that glass is one of the easiest after-use commodities to recycle. And we’re not about to run out of sand to make glass bottles either. But, either road, glass production in the traditional manner consumes a boatload of energy. And that, too is a commodity which must be paid for by consumers.

Olkiluoto 3, a Gen 3+ powerplant, online in Finland by the end of 2012

Failure to pursue a program for recycling spent nuclear fuel has put the U.S. far behind other countries and represents a missed opportunity to enhance the nation’s energy security and influence other countries, the former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said.

Dale Klein, Ph.D., Associate Vice Chancellor for Research at the University of Texas System, said largely unfounded concerns and “long-held myths” about the reprocessing of spent fuel have prevented the U.S. from tapping into an extremely valuable resource.

Spent nuclear fuel, which includes some plutonium, often is inaccurately referred to as waste, Klein said.

“It is not waste,” he said. “The waste is in our failure to tap into this valuable and abundant domestic source of clean energy in a systematic way. That’s something we can ill-afford to do…”

Compared to other fuels used in the production of electricity, the energy density of uranium is remarkable, Klein said, noting that 95 percent of the energy value in a bundle of spent nuclear fuel rods remains available to be re-used.

“The once-through nuclear fuel cycle, which is our practice in the U.S., is an enormous waste of potential energy,” he said…

While the U.S. has sat on the sidelines, other countries, including France, Japan, the United Kingdom, Russia, India, and China have dedicated significant resources toward their reprocessing programs, Klein added.

“U.S. leadership in this area has been lost, and the underlying technological capability and intellectual capital needed to compete internationally have diminished to near irrelevance.”

I make this point as a comment at one or another website or blog probably once a week. The responses are predictable. The Luddite Left throws up their hands in fear and trembling. The anti-science crowd makes their usual farting noises about freedom and government – as irrelevant as ever. A few who understand that nuclear power plants are a progressive alternative – especially if constructed to current standards – support the idea, especially if they weren’t previously aware of the potential.

The chemistry hasn’t changed much since I worked in the field 50 years ago. All that is required is sensible decision-making in government. Oh.

Here’s a new way of looking at oil spill clean-up: Forget the big ships, massive work crews and hefty price tags.

Instead, just deploy an army of autonomous, oil-scrubbing robots. They can find the oil on their own. And when they reach the site of an oil spill, they talk to their robot friends to figure out the best way to get the whole thing mopped up.

That’s the vision the Massachusetts Institute of Technology put forward on Wednesday as the school announced the development of a prototypical robot called Seaswarm. The $20,000 robots will be unveiled officially to the public on Saturday at an event in Venice, Italy, and will be ready to deal with oil spills in about a year, said Assaf Biderman, who oversaw MIT’s research team on the project.

The Seaswarm robots…look like a treadmill conveyor belt that’s been attached to an ice cooler. The conveyor belt piece of the system floats on the surface of the ocean. As it turns, the belt propels the robot forward and lifts oil off the water with the help of a nanomaterial that’s engineered to attract oil and repel water…

The material on the robot’s conveyer belt, which MIT calls a “paper towel for oil spills,” can absorb up to 20 times its weight in oil.

Once it has absorbed the crude from the surface of the ocean, the robot can either burn off the oil on the spot, using a heater on the “ice cooler” part of its body, or it can bag the oil and leave it on the surface of the water for a later pick-up, Biderman said. That oil could be reused or recycled…

The Seaswarm robots operate on solar energy and require only 100 watts of power, or about that of a bright light bulb. They could stay at sea for months, Biderman said, and could operate around the clock.

The science silver lining rolls out, once again. Too bad it took a disaster to prompt research along this and other lines, research to deal with oil spills.

Consider what could have been if the ever-greedy oil corporations spent a fraction of one percent of their profits on remediation and prevention of environmental disasters? Instead of turning their tame Congressional pimps to churning out taxpayer-paid subsidies to exploration schemes?

The Plastiki, a boat with a hull built of 12,500 plastic bottles, set sail from a Sausalito yacht harbor this morning on a risky and adventurous voyage across the Pacific.

The purpose, said expedition leader David de Rothschild, is to draw attention to the health of the oceans and to demonstrate the value of recycled plastic bottles. De Rothschild and his crew of five hope to sail to Australia, a voyage of about 11,000 nautical miles.

The Plastiki, named in honor of Norwegian explorer Thor Hyderdahl’s raft Kon Tiki, is a boat like no other in the world. Besides the hull of recycled plastic water and soda bottles, the vessel is made of a hardened plastic called PET.

The boat is a twin-hulled catamaran rigged as a ketch. It will rely on the wind for propulsion and has only a small auxiliary engine. No such boat has ever made an ocean passage before.

Skipper Jo Royle said the first port of call will be one of the Line Islands, a small group of atolls south of Hawaii.

The voyage can be followed on the Internet at www.theplastiki.com.

Bon voyage, folks. It ain’t ever easy with a craft this small.

Japanese cities are profiting from the sale of precious metals sifted from cremated ashes…as the country attempts to cash in on a potentially huge “urban mine” of gold, silver and palladium. Several cities, including Tokyo, have earned millions of yen from the sale of rare elements found in capped teeth and artificial bones.

The precious metals are being retrieved from ashes and bone fragments left behind after the family of the deceased have completed the ritual of packing some of the bones into an urn for burial.

While the practice has ugly historical precedents – the Nazis routinely searched for gold in the ashes of murdered concentration camp prisoners – the Japanese authorities have the law on their side.

In 1939, the supreme court ruled that any leftover ashes not taken away by bereaved relatives belonged to the municipality; any income they generate is considered part of the city’s miscellaneous income…

“There’s nothing illegal about it, so it’s not something we can condemn outright,” said Yuji Moriyama, of the Japan Society of Environmental Crematory. “But personally, I think it’s wrong. We’re talking about human beings, not mobile phones.

Frankly, I don’t worry more about recycling human beings and their artifacts than any other useful commodity.

In research that touches on two of Americans’ great obsessions — coffee and cars — scientists at the University of Nevada, Reno, have made diesel fuel from used coffee grounds. The technique is not difficult and there is so much coffee around that several hundred million gallons of biodiesel could potentially be made annually.

Dr. Mano Misra, a professor of engineering who conducted the research with Narasimharao Kondamudi and Susanta K. Mohapatra, said it was by accident that he realized coffee beans contained a significant amount of oil. “I made a coffee one night but forgot to drink it,” he said. “The next morning I saw a layer of oil floating on it.” He and his team thought there might be a useful amount of oil in used grounds, so they went to several Starbucks stores and picked up about 50 pounds of them.

Analysis showed that even the grounds contained about 10 to 15 percent oil by weight. The researchers then used standard chemistry techniques to extract the oil and convert it to biodiesel. The processes are not particularly energy intensive, Misra said, and the researchers estimated that biodiesel could be produced for about a dollar a gallon.

Even if all the coffee grounds in the world were used to make fuel, the amount produced would be less than 1 percent of the diesel used in the United States annually. “It won’t solve the world’s energy problem,” Misra said of his work. “But our objective is to take waste material and convert it to fuel.” And biodiesel made from grounds has one other advantage, he said: the exhaust smells like coffee.

Perish the thought we decide to run our economy more sensibly. It’s called recycling, folks. There is a small percentage of people who learned about this decades ago.

Our politicians in all their wisdom decided it was unimportant. Maybe we should recycle the politicians into jobs they’re better suited for?

Over a dozen of the UK’s former coalmining sites are to be redeveloped as wind farms under a revolutionary energy scheme to turn old energy into new.

UK Coal, once the main part of the National Coal Board, has unveiled a joint venture with Peel Energy that would see 14 old colliery locations used to erect 54 turbines generating around 133MW of electric power…

The company, which has already moved into renewables through the harnessing of methane gas for power, was unwilling to say which of the 14 sites are currently earmarked for early submission for planning permission but says it hopes to have some approved within three months.

Peel Energy already boasts an onshore wind portfolio in excess of 450MW already and is involved in England’s largest scheme at Scout Moor in Lancashire which has 26 turbines.

Peel and UK Coal intend to create special purpose vehicles with a 50/50 shared ownership between them to develop a particular former colliery site for wind schemes. The coal mining group could grant the joint venture an option for a 30 year lease on the land.

What a wonderful idea. Might even make the cost of redressing disused collieries provide a bit of return on investment?

Sound thinking – and worth passing along to coal industrialists elsewhere.