A battery with a lifespan measured in decades is in development at the University of Rochester, as scientists demonstrate a new fabrication method that in its roughest form is already 10 times more efficient than current nuclear batteriesÑand has the potential to be nearly 200 times more efficient. The details of the technology, already licensed to BetaBatt Inc., appears in today’s issue of Advanced Materials.
“Our society is placing ever-higher demands for power from all kinds of devices,“ says Philippe Fauchet, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Rochester and co-author of the research. “For 50 years, people have been investigating converting simple nuclear decay into usable energy, but the yields were always too low. We’ve found a way to make the interaction much more efficient, and we hope these findings will lead to a new kind of battery that can pump out energy for years.“
The technology is geared toward applications where power is needed in inaccessible places or under extreme conditions. Since the battery should be able to run reliably for more than 10 years without recharge or replacement, it would be perfect for medical devices like pacemakers, implanted defibrillators, or other implanted devices that would otherwise require surgery to replace or repair. Likewise, deep-space probes or deep-sea sensors, which are beyond the reach of repair, also would benefit from such technology.
Betavoltaics, the method that the new battery uses, has been around for half a century, but its usefulness was limited due to its low energy yields. The new battery technology makes its successful gains by dramatically increasing the surface area where the current is produced. Instead of attempting to invent new, more reactive materials, Fauchet’s team focused on turning the regular material’s flat surface into a three-dimensional one.
Similar to the way solar panels work by catching photons from the sun and turning them into current, the science of betavoltaics uses silicon to capture electrons emitted from a radioactive gas, such as tritium, to form a current. As the electrons strike a special pair of layers called a “p-n junction,“ a current results, physorg.com reported.
What’s held these batteries back is the fact that so little current is generatedÑmuch less than a conventional solar cell. Part of the problem is that as particles in the tritium gas decay, half of them shoot out in a direction that misses the silicon altogether. It’s analogous to the sun’s rays pouring down onto the ground, but most of the rays are emitted from the sun in every direction other than at the Earth. Fauchet decided that to catch more of the radioactive decay, it would be best not to use a flat collecting surface of silicon, but one with deep pits.
A layer of silicon riddled with pits, each of which would fill with the radioactive tritium gas, would be like dropping the sun into a deep well lined with solar panels. Almost all of the sun’s rays, no matter which way they were emitted, would strike a well wall. Only those rays that fired straight up and out of the well would be lost. With this reasoning, Fauchet devised a method to excavate pits into a microscopic piece of silicon.
The pits, or wells, are only about a micron wide (about four ten-thousandths of an inch), but are more than 40 microns deep. After the wells are “dug“ with an etching technique, their insides are coated with a material to form a p-n junction just a tenth of a micron thick, which is the best thickness to induce a current. The Advanced Materials paper details how these wells were dug in a random fashion, yielding a 10-fold increase in current over the conventional design. The team is already working on a technique to create and line the wells in a much more uniform, lattice formation that should increase the energy produced by as much as 160-fold over current technology.

Recently, I wrote an editorial in New Scientist magazine about the “not-in-my-backyard“ approach some people and groups have adopted in regards to wind farms. It caused quite a fuss.
Apparently, some wind energy developers used the article as a blanket endorsement that all proposed wind farms should be allowed to proceed--as though I was arguing the need for wind energy trumps all other concerns. I said no such thing.
Wind energy is an important part of a clean, renewable energy system that we need to develop if we want to reduce air pollution and climate change and improve our quality of life.
It’s just one part of a variety of innovative ways Canada can become more efficient and ultimately more competitive in the 21st century.
But wind farms, like any development, need to be sited properly and appropriately. Environmental assessments must be conducted and wind farms placed in areas where they can have the greatest positive effect with the smallest environmental footprint. After all, the whole point of clean energy is to reduce our environmental burden, not make it worse, whistlerquestion.com said.
For example, according to a University of Birmingham report released last week, poorly sited wind farms could pose a real threat to some birds.
Researchers reviewed studies from all over the world on the impact of wind farms on bird populations and concluded that the birds most likely to be negatively affected are wading species and ducks.
This means that estuaries and shallow shorelines could be risky sites for wind-energy development.
The researchers also pointed out that the quality of most existing literature on the effects of windmills on bird populations was poor. And they said that the existing research was largely done over short time frames and for individual wind farms.
In other words, right now, no one can say what sort of cumulative impact building hundreds of large wind farms will have on bird populations. Much more research obviously needs to be done on this important issue. However, the researchers also point out that, compared to other threats posed to birds--from intensive agriculture to persistent toxic pollutants and climate change--the impact of wind farms is relatively low. The purpose of the review was to help ensure that wind farms are sited accordingly to reduce the threat as much as possible.
That makes sense for any developing energy technology, whether it’s solar, wind, micro-hydro, biomass or tidal energy. All of these technologies have potential-- and drawbacks. But our current reliance on fossil fuels is polluting our air and water, politically destabilizing entire regions of the planet, and disrupting our climate. Each of these problems alone is enough to justify changing our ways. Together, they threaten the health and well being of future generations.
We are on the cusp of a new energy revolution, from fossil fuels as our primary energy source to renewable energy and energy efficiency.
We’ve been through these revolutions before--when we s witched from wood to coal, then when we made the transition from coal to oil and to gas. Each step had challenges and detractors, but ultimately these transitions have reduced pollution, improved efficiency and made our lives better. That’s the challenge with our new energy revolution--to harness new technologies and improve existing ones, learn to do more with less, and become smarter and less wasteful. That’s a sustainable energy future and wind power is a part of it.
By David Suzuki, reporter

Reluctance by big oil companies to blend more ethanol in their gasoline costs consumers 5 to 8 cents a gallon at the pump, a report claims.
The report, released Thursday by the Consumer Federation of America, argues that oil companies are keeping gas supplies tight and prices high even though ethanol is plentiful and available at prices that have dropped 40 cents a gallon or more since the beginning of the year.
“The major oil companies are reaping huge windfall profits while consumers across the nation are facing the highest gasoline prices in recent memory,“ said Mark Cooper, the federation’s director of research.
A petroleum industry spokesman denied that oil companies are making undue profits. John Felmy, chief economist for the American Petroleum Institute, said the allegation the industry is artificially keeping prices high “is simply wrong.“
Felmy said the oil industry already blends more ethanol than required by national clean air standards. “We are using a lot more ethanol,“ Felmy said. He said the present transportation and pumping infrastructure won’t accommodate more ethanol, according to enn.com.
Ethanol, which is mainly denatured alcohol, is most often blended with gasoline at a ratio of 10 percent ethanol to 90 percent gasoline. It is promoted as a renewable fuel that burns cleaner and reduces the country’s dependence on foreign oil.
While gas prices have risen 23 percent or more since last year, the price of ethanol, produced from grain, has remained steady or actually dropped, partly because of increased production as more ethanol plants are built in the Midwest.
The consumer group contends the technology, destination terminals and pumps are now available to allow gas companies to blend more ethanol and reduce the cost of gas per gallon. But it contends gas companies can make more money selling gas.
According to the report, the 10 largest companies that refine crude oil in the United States increased profits by almost 60 percent in the first quarter of 2005 compared with the first quarter of 2004.
Felmy said those figures are misleading. He said while gas prices have boosted revenues, petroleum profit margins are in line with other industries, and are often lower.
He said fourth-quarter 2004 profit margins for oil and gas averaged 7 percent compared with 7.3 percent for other industries. “We are getting a fair return for everything we have to do to supply consumers’ every day, seven days a week,“ Felmy said.

Chemists at the University of California, San Diego and Purdue University have discovered that natural chemical processes in the atmosphere may be removing smog and other damaging hydrocarbons at a faster rate than once believed.
The scientists report that naturally-occurring atmospheric chemicals react with sunlight more effectively than scientists previously thought, breaking down smog and other pollutants after they absorb energy from sunlight.
While many molecules have been known to behave in this way, producing natural air cleaners called OH radicals, the chemicals the team studied have for the first time been observed to produce smog-destroying OH radicals at low ultraviolet wavelengths.
This observation had long eluded scientists primarily because photochemistry at these wavelengths had been difficult to study. But a sensitive laser technique allowed the scientistsÑAmitabha Sinha and Jamie Matthews of UCSD and Joseph Francisco of PurdueÑto record these reactions for the first time.
“Thanks to an innovative laser technique that at last allowed us to observe these chemicals in action, we now theorize that the atmosphere may produce up to 20 percent more OH radicals from these chemicals than we once thought,“ said Francisco, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences and chemistry at Purdue. “We now have a better understanding of an atmospheric process that could be giving our pollution-weary lungs more breathing room.“
“This study is important because it shows that the atmosphere could be generating far more OH radicals than previously thought and accounted for by current models, which neglect the new chemistry we observe,“ said Sinha, an associate professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UCSD who headed the research team. “It could imply that the atmosphere is more effective at breaking down pollution than models have shown. We hope the results will improve our understanding of how the atmosphere works.“
Sinha cautioned, however, that the results do not mean we can now safely ignore atmospheric pollution, e4engineering.com said.
“This study in no way implies that we are out of the woods with regard to atmospheric pollution,“ he said. “What it means is that we need to do a much more careful job with our measurements in order to accurately account for all sources of OH radicals present in the air.“
Much of the hydrocarbon pollutants pumped into the atmosphere by humans result from burning organic matter such as wood or fossil fuels. The atmosphere has three main ways to cleanse itself of such pollutants. Two are relatively direct: water droplets in clouds absorb and rain them out of the atmosphere or sunlight breaks the molecules apart.
“The third way is the one we are concerned with here, the way that involves breaking these hydrocarbons down chemically,“ said Francisco. “For that, the atmosphere relies on a reactive group of chemicals called OH radicals that attach themselves to hydrocarbons and rip them into inert pieces.“
OH radicals arise naturally from many atmospheric constituents. The effect they have on pollution has long been factored into models that describe the atmosphere and attempt to predict how it will react to increasing quantities of hydrocarbon pollutants, which generate smog. But these models do not always function well, Francisco said, in part because OH radicals are in some ways an unknown quantity.
“One of the biggest questions in our field concerns the amount of OH radicals the atmosphere holds,“ he said. “It’s tough to get a handle on them because they are so reactiveÑwhich means they vanish fastÑand also because we don’t have complete knowledge of all the sources that produce them yet.“
The experimentsÑwhich Sinha and Matthews, a graduate student in his laboratory, performed at UCSDÑused a laser technique that allowed the team to look at the OH radical-producing molecules in a new way.

Renewable energy communities seem to be an increasingly popular approach to introducing new technology into an area power market.
Kyotango City in Japan will receive a 250 kW Direct FuelCell (DFC), which was manufactured by FuelCell Energy, as part of the electric grid servicing a school, a hospital, apartment buildings and city hall in a planned, renewable energy community on the western coast of Japan.
“There is a great deal of excitement in Japan over the use of fuel cells to generate power on a community-wide scale,“ said Herbert T. Nock, FuelCell Energy’s Senior Vice President of Marketing and Sales. “In Japan and other Asian and European nations that are attempting to reduce emissions in accordance with the requirements of the Kyoto Protocols, this energy site represents an important double-win for us. It replicates our success in providing power in renewable waste treatment facilities and it goes further in demonstrating the feasibility of tying DFC technology into the grid, as we have previously accomplished in industrial settings.“
In keeping with the Kyoto Eco-Energy organization’s desire to balance intermittent power generated by sources such as wind and solar, the fuel cell plant will convert waste from a food processing plant into electricity. Heat energy produced by the power plant also will be used to warm water flowing into the food waste digestion process, which should increase the overall system efficiency, solaraccess.com said.
Kyotango City’s DFC power plant is part of an 850 kW mini-grid consisting of the fuel cell unit, a wind turbine, photovoltaics (PV) and gas engines connected in parallel to the local electrical grid. Acknowledging the environmental advantages of the project, Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) is supporting the capital and installation cost.
“The Eco-Energy Project is ideal for a DFC power generation plant,“ said Marc G. Aube, who is the vice president of FuelCell Energy’s Asia subsidiary Marubeni. “Its ultra-clean, highly efficient generation process provides a breakthrough means to enable Japan’s earth-minded municipalities and industry to deploy and stabilize the renewable energy solutions that help parties comply with the Kyoto Protocol.“
The Eco-Energy project was launched in 2003 in Japan’s Kyoto Prefecture to demonstrate how renewable energy systems can be employed to provide stable power supplies in community settings. It combines the intermittent power from solar and wind sources with biomass energy and fuel cells, which produce electricity on a controllable yet ultra-clean basis.