Volcanic ash proves cheap and highly effective for solar energy storage

It's rarely great news when an area gets blanketed in volcanic ash – but University of Barcelona researchers have discovered it has a rare combination of useful properties, which make it remarkably useful as an energy storage medium.

We've written a number of times about super-cheap thermal energy storage, and a number of other times about highly efficient heat batteries operating at super-high temperatures. The cheapest of these 'brick toasters' use the most abundant of materials, and the most efficient can handle extraordinarily high temperatures using materials like liquid tin and carbon materials – but volcanic ash, as it turns out, might offer a kind of goldilocks proposition in the middle for certain applications.

Fusion record paves way for commercial reactors The key application at the heart of a new study published in the Journal of Energy Storage is concentrated solar power. So, not photovoltaic panels – we're talking those towers out in the desert with huge rows of parabolic mirrors all around them designed to precision-track the Sun and reflect its light toward a single point.

Coal burnt in its raw, or.pulverized form even with scrubbers will never be clean it’s not possible because of physics. Coal contains heavy metals that at coal combustion temperatures turns them into vapor form. No scrubber can get those vapors down to zero they struggle to get to ppt levels. There is no safe level of heavy metal exposure to humans they bioaccumulate for life. Then there is NOx and SOx here again the best scrubbers will never get that to zero. Natural gas can and does get to zero, and NG has no heavy metals so zero there as well.

The Japanese have the very best coal tech it turns coal into gas then they put that gas through six or more stages of clean up because the process to make the gas is lower in temp than coal combustion most of the metals stay in the ash along with most of the sulfur, nitrogen in the coal itself still forms NOx but at much lower levels. That coal gas is concentrated which makes analytical clean up possible down to the ppm levels this is the only way to approach the cleanliness of natural gas but it still is not as clean. The EPA is fuel and technology agnostic they simply say for X megawatt hours you can make X grams of criteria toxins how you meet that limit is up the the individual operator. Natural gas easily makes the current limits coal takes hundreds of millions of dollars in scrubbers and even then they wont meet the 2027 limits , gas is already meeting 2027 limits today. Coal is in the dust bin of history where it belongs.

Very cool, my dad’s alma mater Rice putting good work in.

Graphene has some.wondrous properties it has pores so small only H2O can pass all other ions stay on the other side...salt water >>>> fresh water with a fraction of the energy costs of RO or flash evap.

The material also has a interesting ability to split hydrogen atoms of different atomic weight...protium, deuterium, tritium this is of huge importance to the nuclear power industry. Graphene reduces the energy and production cost for heavy water by a factor of 100. This makes the already cheapest nuclear power technology CANDU and makes it even cheaper. CANDU means Canadian deuterium uranium it is the only reactor that can burn raw natural uranium as fuel at half the cost of PWR tech.

CANDU also burns up used PWR fuel doubling the energy you get from a fuel pellet while reducing the long term transuranium elements. CANDU can burn MOX made with military PU destroying it in the process, with thorium CANDU can breed U233 in a self sustaining cycle that will power humans for billions of years due to thorium being five times more prevalent than U238/35 in the crust.

Graphene solves two in humans species level problems , how to cheaply and at one energy cost turn seawater/ ground water brines into freshwater.

The second is how to mass produce cheap nuclear power that doesn’t need weapons technology which is what enrichment is ask the Iranians about that. CANDU uses raw uranium no enrichment needed the water is enriched to deuterium oxide aka heavy water. Graphene cuts the cost by two orders of magnitude.

A CANDU has been built in 60 months from first pour to powerlines power. The largest expense of a CANDU is the 300 tonnes of heavy water it needs for a 900 megawatt reactor. It’s fuel cost is already half a PWR so cheap that seawater raw uranium at $600 lb wouldn’t raise the cost but a half cent or so less if you mix in spent PWR fuel and burn both using the seawater uranium as the fertile and the PWR as the fissile material.

Better yet use both use the CANDU to power the desal stack with the graphene membranes inside with the waste heat of the reactors turbines driving a secondary rapid spray evaporation desalination plant that has zero brine discharge the output of RSEVP is solid sea salt itself a valuable commodity.

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