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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (3212)	11/21/2005 7:04:43 PM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24233

Richard Smalley And Smart Grids The Houston Chronicle reports that Nobel Prize winner Richard Smalley, discoverer of fullerene and the carbon nanotube, has passed away. Richard Errett Smalley, a gifted chemist who shared a Nobel Prize for the discovery of buckyballs, helped pioneer the field of nanotechnology and became Houston's most notable scientist, died this afternoon after a six-year struggle with cancer. He was 62. Smalley possessed prodigious talent both within the lab, where he cobbled individual atoms together like tinker toys, and outside academia after he won science's greatest prize. In the decade since he became a Nobel laureate, Smalley pushed Rice University and Houston to the forefront of nanotechnology research. "He was a person with extraordinary intelligence," said Neal Lane, President Clinton's science adviser. "But more than that, he was a real civic scientist, one who not only does great science, but uses that knowledge and fame to do good, to benefit society, and to try and educate the public. He had a palpable wish to solve some of the world's problems." Smalley, along with Robert Curl at Rice and Sir Harold Kroto of University of Sussex, discovered a new form of carbon. This fullerene, or buckyball, contained 60 carbon atoms arranged in a perfect sphere. Few scientists had expected to discover a new arrangement of carbon atoms because the element already was so well-studied. "It was an absolutely electrifying discovery," said James Kinsey, then a chemistry professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who later became dean of natural sciences at Rice. "Within a year or two, you couldn't pick up a chemistry journal without one-third of the articles being about fullerenes." The new carbon material proved to be surprisingly strong and lightweight, and had almost magical electrical properties. The buckyball's discovery helped fuel today's explosion of nanotechnology research, in which scientists are racing to exploit the unique properties of myriad nanomaterials, with applications for everything from medicine to bulletproof vests. After discovering the buckyball, Smalley's research group found a method to produce large quantities of carbon nanotubes, a cylindrical material also made of carbon which has eclipsed the buckyball in utility. And then, in 1996, Smalley, Curl and Kroto won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Besides being a famous chemist, Smalley was also a keen observer of energy issues. Energy Bulletin posted a good excerpt a while ago from a paper by Smalley called "Future global energy prosperity: the Terawatt Challenge" (pdf) which looked at peak oil and the top 10 global challenges. Energy topped his list of the challenges facing us (he noted "energy is the key to solving all of the rest of the problems—from water to population"), with the others as follows: 1. Energy 2. Water 3. Food 4. Environment 5. Poverty 6. Terrorism and war 7. Disease 8. Education 9. Democracy 10. Population Smalley's comments on peak oil: There are three core problems that I think the president ought to address, all of which are connected with and impinge on the major issue of energy prosperity: inspiring the next generation of U.S. scientists and engineers, developing replacements for the dwindling fossil fuel resources that have provided a majority of our energy in the past, and finding a solution to global warming. At some point, almost certainly within this decade, we will peak in the amount of oil that is produced worldwide. Even though there will be massive amounts of oil produced for the rest of this century, the volume produced each year will never again reach the amount produced at its peak. This year, 2005, might very well end up being the historic date of that global peak. Oil, along with gas, is tremendously important. The history of oil is basically the history of modern civilization as we have known it for the past 100 years. As our principal transportation fuel, oil has been the basis of our country’s power and prosperity. What will we do when there is no longer enough oil and gas? We do not yet have an answer. While he did not have an answer to the peak oil problem, he did have a number of ideas (and I won't quote the whole paper - you should read the whole thing yourself when you have some free time), in particular what he called "The Distributed Energy Grid". The key (and missing piece) to the distributed energy grid ? Localised energy storage - or in other words - large capacity household scale batteries, and improved efficiency in power distribution. more... peakenergy.blogspot.com