March 2024 Vol.25

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1.  Hydrogen Underground - Gaseous Gold

2.  Earth Receives First-Ever Power Beam from Space

3.  Iron Fuel Shows its Mettle

4.  Heat Pumps Work in Sub-Zero Temperatures

5.  AI Solves a Fusion Problem

Hello Jacqueline,

Let’s start with the biggest news for North America coming on April 8, 2024 à Solar Eclipse DAY. A partial or total eclipse maximum for less than 5 minutes will be visible in the afternoon for all 48 American states +/- an hour for the moon’s complete transition. The best info is available at https://science.nasa.gov/eclipses/future-eclipses/eclipse-2024/where-when/ where you can punch in your zip code and get precise times and percentage coverage. For those who want the essential details, 1) Buy eye protection glasses made for solar eclipse watching at  Amazon right away; 2) Click on this link https://science.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/eclipse-map-2024-1920-1.png?w=2560&format=webp  to the NASA map to get all the details for your area in one picture. Such a solar event demonstrates to us the amazing and possibly unique size and location of our relatively large moon (as compared to ALL other planets astronomers have cataloged), that makes a solar eclipse matching the sun’s apparent dimensions even possible.

Another synchronicity worth mentioning is the environmental connections to the current Dune: Part Two movie https://www.history.com/news/dune-science-fiction-novel-climate-environment . Interestingly, the author Frank Herbert spoke at the first Earth Day in 1970 and was influenced by the science of ecology, including water scarcity, desertification, future wars over oil, and the need for renewable energy.

For those creative geniuses, spread the word that they can receive a $25,000 prize in the Create the Future design contest https://contest.techbriefs.com/ with nice guidelines and hints at https://www.mouser.com/createthefuture/. The contest just opened this month and closes on July 1, 2024. Great technology sponsors.

Story #1 is our best discovery in many years and could be called the “best energy news of the century.” With the universal need for clean energy, hydrogen (which burns to produce pure water) has constantly seemed to be just out of reach for many reasons, until now. Tons of hydrogen from out of the ground almost seems to be too good to be true but the USGS suggests that trillions of tons may be available as geologic hydrogen (also called white or gold since it simply requires drilling). Now the US DOE also agrees and has invested $20 million for research in mining it. Eden GeoPower is a leader in this effort for Stimulated Geologic Hydrogen https://www.edengeopower.com/stimulated-geologic-hydrogen and is unlocking new sources and increasing the rate of geologic hydrogen generation.

Story #2 documents another milestone with the first test of Space Solar Power. Credit goes to Caltech for the demonstrator which grabs 24-hour solar energy at about ten times the intensity than available on earth. On the roof of Caltech’s Moore Laboratory, a tracking apparatus keeps an “eye” on MAPLE’s location, while an RF receiver accepts incoming energy and converts it to direct current (DC) energy. For ten months, the SPPD-1 satellite proved the feasibility of capturing solar power in space.

Story #3 offers a more mature energy generation technology with the burning of iron powder to create megawatts of electricity. After demonstrating a 100 kW pilot generation, now by the end of June, a large 1-megawatt plant that burns iron fuel will fire up in the Netherlands. Other firms around the world are also involved in similar startups. In Canada, meanwhile, startup Altiro Energy https://www.altiroenergy.com/, launched by McGill University researchers, has run a prototype 10-kW iron fuel plant that they now plan to scale up, since they solved the stability issue with continued burns. Quite exciting since the exhaust is pure iron oxide that can be collected and treated with hydrogen to recover the iron!

Story #4 is a fascinating counter intuitive breakthrough with a challenge by the US DOE for comparing heat pumps that claim to work at subzero temperatures. We will keep you posted on the results of the tests comparing performance by eight companies.

Story #5 gives us more hope that someday the infamous tokamak, which has struggled for over 50 years, will finally become commercially viable. The world record fusion power was achieved in the JET tokamak in England in December 2021. JET produced 59 megajoules of head energy, more than doubling the previous record set in 1997. Now AI is helping control the US tokamak to improve its stability. As reported in Nature (Feb. 21, 2024), “This (AI) controller paves the path to developing stable high-performance operational scenarios for future use in ITER.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07024-9

Onward and Upward.

Tom Valone, Editor

1) Hydrogen Underground - Gaseous Gold

New Scientist March 2024

Prospectors around the world are scrambling to find reserves of "gold hydrogen", a naturally occurring fuel that burns without producing carbon dioxide. But how much is really out there and how easy is it to tap into. Proponents of using this form of hydrogen say it could dramatically accelerate our transition to net zero, which explains why researchers and start-ups are prospecting for it far and wide. Many questions remain, though, not least how much of it there really is and whether it can be easily tapped. For his part, Alali, co-founder of geological resources firm Eden GeoPower, wants to test something even more ambitious: can we stimulate the ground to boost the amount of hydrogen it produces?

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2) Earth Receives First-Ever Power Beam from Orbiting Satellite

Extreme Tech, March 2024

Stationary solar panels aren’t the only way we can harvest the raw power of the Sun. In a groundbreaking experiment conducted last year, researchers across the public and private sectors successfully collected solar power using an orbiting satellite and then beamed that energy down to Earth. The team has since detailed the results of their experiment in a new paper shared to the arXiv. The team behind the achievement is the California Institute of Technology’s (Caltech) Space Solar Power Project, or SSPP. In collaboration with Indie Semiconductor, Inc., NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Amazon Web services, and a Caltech spinoff startup called GuRu Wireless, the SSPP developed a prototype last year called the Space Solar Power Demonstrator (SSPD-1). This prototype will eventually be responsible for three experimental technologies, one of them being space solar power. 

3) Iron Fuel Shows Its Mettle - Could Be a Carbon Fuel and Store Energy Long Term

TIEEE Spectrum March, 2024

By the end of June, a large 1-megawatt plant that burns iron fuel will fire up, producing the heat needed to brew beer at the Swinkels brewery near Eindhoven, Netherlands, in a test lasting for several months. Startup IRON+ is a joint venture between three companies and built on technology first demonstrated as a 100-kilowatt system in 2020 by the Metal Power Consortium, which includes the Eindhoven University of Technology and innovation center Metalot, which was spun out of the university.

4) Heat Pumps Take On Cold Climates

IEEE Spectrum 2024

Heat pumps aren’t common in homes at this latitude, because historically they haven’t worked well in subzero temperatures. But heat-pump manufacturers say they now have the technology to heat homes just as efficiently in bitter cold as they do in milder winter temperatures. To prove it, eight manufacturers are publicly testing their prototypes in the Cold-Climate Heat Pump Technology Challenge, hosted by the U.S. Department of Energy in partnership with Natural Resources Canada. The companies’ task is to demonstrate a high-efficiency, residential air-source heat pump that can perform at 100 percent capacity at -15 °C. Companies can choose to further test their machines down to -26 °C.

5) Avoiding fusion plasma tearing instability with deep reinforcement learning

Nature February 2024

Previously, we developed a multimodal dynamic model that estimates the likelihood of future tearing instability based on signals from multiple diagnostics and actuators5. Here we harness this dynamic model as a training environment for reinforcement-learning artificial intelligence, facilitating automated instability prevention. We demonstrate artificial intelligence control to lower the possibility of disruptive tearing instabilities in DIII-D6, the largest magnetic fusion facility in the United States. The controller maintained the tearing likelihood under a given threshold, even under relatively unfavourable conditions of low safety factor and low torque. In particular, it allowed the plasma to actively track the stable path within the time-varying operational space while maintaining H-mode performance, which was challenging with traditional preprogrammed control.