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A further advance in energy technology is revealed - the great white hope it seems is salt. Only up to powering light bulbs so far, salt power for all is a distant prospect. The important point here is that, new concepts such as this, which are technological undercurrents, may one day rise to offer helpful energy solutions.

The device is a piece of paper infused with carbon nanotubes and a salt, which serves as an electrolyte. Because it stores energy and conducts it, the device can act like a battery. A number of corporate labs and universities have come up with flexible batteries in the past. Power Paper from Israel makes a flexible battery printed on polymers that relies on zinc as an electrolyte. It sells it to the cosmetics industry. Japan Inc. also has trotted out a lot of prototypes. Still, these things haven't gone commercial so any advance is welcome.

The device is a piece of paper infused with carbon nanotubes and a salt, which serves as an electrolyte. Because it stores energy and conducts it, the device can act like a battery. A number of corporate labs and universities have come up with flexible batteries in the past. Power Paper from Israel makes a flexible battery printed on polymers that relies on zinc as an electrolyte. It sells it to the cosmetics industry. Japan Inc. also has trotted out a lot of prototypes. Still, these things haven't gone commercial so any advance is welcome.

Very interesting presentation at the TED Conference.  Not quite a nuclear battery, but a really good redesign of nuclear power systems. excerpt: "Instead of finding a new way to boil water, Wilson's compact, molten salt reactor found a way to heat up gas. That is, really heat it up. Wilson's fission reactor operates at 600 to 700 degrees Celsius. And because the laws of thermodynamics say that high temperatures lead to high efficiencies, this reactor is 45 to 50 percent efficient. Traditional steam turbine systems are only 30 to 35 percent efficient because their reactors run at low temperatures of about 200 to 300 degrees Celsius. And Wilson's reactor isn't just hot, it's also powerful. Despite its small size, the reactor generates between 50 and 100 megawatts of electricity, which is enough to power anywhere from 25,000 to 100,000 homes, according to Wilson. Another innovative component of Wilson's take on nuclear fission is its source of fuel. The molten salt reactor runs off of "down-blended weapons pits." In other words, all the highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium collecting dust since the Cold War could be put to use for peaceful purposes. And unlike traditional nuclear power plants, Wilson's miniature power plants would be buried below ground, making them a boon for security advocates. According to Wilson, his reactor only needs to be refueled every 30 years, compared to the 18-month fuel cycle of most power plants. This means they can be sealed up underground for a long time, decreasing the risk of proliferation. Wilson's reactor is also less prone to proliferation because it doesn't operate at high pressure like today's pressurized-water reactors or use ceramic control rods, which release hydrogen when heated and lead to explosions during nuclear power plant accidents, like the one at Fukushima in 2011. In the event of an accident in one of Wilson's reactors, the fuel from the core would drain into a "sub-critical" setting- or tank-

My Clean Break column today is actually more of a feature looking at compressed-air energy storage (CAES) and how Ontario, geologically, would be an excellent location to give it a try. About 50,000 natural gas and oil wells have been drilled in southwestern Ontario over the past 150 years and most of them are depleted. Turns out that depleted gas fields are one of several types of underground reservoir that can be used to store compressed air. Salt caverns are another option, and we have plenty of those as well. In fact, 60 per cent of Canada's natural gas storage is in the region. Compressing and storing air wouldn't be that different technically. Another benefit is that southwestern Ontario has strong wind resources, so building a 1,000 MW-plus CAES facility on its own or as part of a partnership with area wind developers could prove quite economical. The idea, of course, is that cheap wind power generated overnight when demand is down could be used to compress and store the air. The air could then be released to generate electricity during daytime peaks, making wind a dispatchable resource in Ontario and more of a realistic replacement for coal power as it gets phased out of the province. Surplus overnight nuclear power, when we have it (mostly during the summer), could also be stored this way.

The important point, missed in this page and the comments on it, is that the energy is stored as latent heat of fusion. The mass is effectively a constant temperature heat sink/source over a wide range. There is nothing new in the world of course - this approach was extensively studied at BICC Research in the early 70's for peak lopping/load shifting for heating systems. The materials studied then had melting points in the 30 - 40 C range, but I don't remember the latent heat values. At that time it was rejected as too large and heavy - then the oil crisis passed. How does it compare with flow cells?

One of the most common questions in the realm of water security is, what are the main barriers to dramatically expanding desalination? It seems to offer an essentially unlimited supply of water, and it's practiced on a large scale in other parts of the world, so why not here?