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Forever moving - our restless oceans have enough energy to power the world. As long as the Earth turns and the moon keeps its appointed cycle, the oceans will absorb and dissipate vast amounts of kinetic energy - a renewable energy resource of enormous potential.

"Just 40 tons of this stuff has enough potential energy to meet the total U.S. electricity demand for a year." Does this mean we will be mining the moon for Helium-3 any time soon to fuel the earth? Probably not, since the cost to extract Helium-3 from the moon would be enormous and it would require "hundreds of millions of tons of soil" to "be processed to extract a ton of helium-3".

Given its limited reserves of natural uranium and its abundant supply of thorium, India has chalked out a unique three-stage nuclear program. In the first stage, pressurized heavy water reactors (PHWRs)—similar to those used in advanced industrial countries—burn natural uranium. In the second stage, fast-breeder reactors, which other countries have tried to commercialize without success, will burn plutonium derived from standard power reactors to stretch fuel efficiency. In the key third stage, on which India's long-term nuclear energy supply depends, power reactors will run on thorium and uranium-233 (an isotope that does not occur naturally).

New findings by the mission to Titan, reported on Wednesday by the European Space Agency (ESA), say Saturn's orange moon has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth.

They look like foil party balloons, but they are actually very efficient solar concentrators. These solar “balloons” were developed by a company called Cool Earth, based in California, and it has just received $21 million dollars in investor funding. The company is now planning to build a 10-megawatt plant of solar balloons in the next couple years. This power plant would be comprised of 10,000 balloons, and cover roughly 80 acres!

Party balloons may be the next big thing in solar power. Cool Earth has made some giant balloons with gizmos inside that will convert the collected sun and focus it onto a cell. They have been given a big chunk of moola to make 10,000 balloons to cover 80 acres in California and hopefully in a couple years be generating 10 megawatts of power.

THE dream of climate-friendly, petroleum-free motoring is creeping closer - thanks to a clutch of breakthroughs in nanotechnology. Several recently reported lab findings promise to vastly improve the safety and performance of the high-capacity batteries that electric cars will need, at last making them a viable alternative to today's petroleum-powered vehicles.

A lick of solar-power paint could see the roofs and walls of warehouses and other buildings generate electricity from the sun, if research by UK researchers pays off.

The New Scientist of 19 Jan 2008 carries an article, "Coal: Bleak outlook for the black stuff" (subscription required for full article), belatedly drawing attention to an interesting piece of analysis by Professor David Rutledge of CalTech in a lecture last October, where he suggests that world coal reserves are grossly overstated and could be substantially exhausted this century. It's well worth watching the whole hour of the lecture, because the PowerPoint alone [3MB] doesn't do his argument justice.

Chances are you've heard of hybrids and biofuels, but what about oil-producing yeast and turbinelike buoys that transform ocean waves into electricity? Those are just a couple of the alternative-energy sources that may power the future according to Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund and coauthor, with Miriam Horn, of the new book "Earth: The Sequel"