Author: scott
The electrical age
When the Velib bike-hire scheme was launched in European cities four years ago, there were far more sceptics than believers. But now the concept is being adopted in cities across the world.
In December, the city of Paris officially opened a similar but even more ambitious scheme. Dubbed ‘Autolib’, it provides battery-powered cars for public hire, to be returned after use to Velib-type, plug-in parking stations.
But these aren’t the under-powered, short-running, much-mocked electric cars of previous years like the General Motors’ models of the nineties which were all recalled and crushed. These four-seater Bluecars have a top speed of 130kmh and can travel 250km on a single charge, quite enough to get around a city.
And at just ¤5 a half-hour after payment of a modest subscription fee, they’re much cheaper than taxis and not much more expensive than public transport. The venture is the ¤100m brainchild of the family-owned Bollore Group which aims to have 3,000 Bluecars on the roads in Paris by next summer.
After years of unfulfilled promises and technological failures, the era of the electric car may finally be nigh. That’s what a growing number of automobile bosses such as Carlos Ghosn, the chief executive of Renault-Nissan, are saying. “This will be the decade of the electric car,” he recently predicted.
According to a recent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ghosn may not be bullish enough. PwC estimates that “green” vehicles including hybrids could account for a third of all global sales by 2020. “The race for electric vehicles is heating up,” insists PwC’s Dr Martin Hoelz. Certainly, there’s a flood of models coming on the market. Renault-Nissan has started mass production of not one but two electric cars – the Leaf and the premium Fluence. Cost∞conscious municipal authorities in France have already booked entire fleets of them. Next year, two big-selling badges are released in electric versions – Ford’s Focus and Toyota’s Prius.
Hybrid-powered cars are proliferating too. Chastened by its experience in the nineties, GM made sure its $41,000 (£26,000) hybrid Volt is a high-performing saloon. Boosted by a petrol engine, the much-praised Volt will be able to run for 340 miles.
A line-up of hybrid supercars are also in their final stages of development. Jaguar’s electric-petrol model is due out as soon as 2013; roughly the same time as BMW’s $200,000 electric-diesel, Vision EfficientDynamics, capable of travelling 62.5 miles on a single gallon. Evidently a huge step from the battery-powered milk-delivery vans that wheezed around cities in the 1960s.
This silent revolution started in public transport. The city of Chattanooga in Tennessee started running electric buses around 20 years ago. At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, visitors were transported in a 50-strong fleet of battery-driven buses. And America’s first fast-charge bus – the Proterra EcoRide in Pomona, California – has only been in operation since September 2010.
The breakthrough came with the development of the faster-charging, light-weight lithium-ion battery. Billionaire Vincent Bollore believes his company’s lithium metal polymer battery will store five times more energy than any other battery on the market.
The environmental benefits of electric vehicles are irrefutable. Because they do not produce any emissions – all electric cars don’t have an exhaust pipe, they would help to reduce carbon dioxide pollution in most cities by between 20–40 percent. This is why Washington has belatedly pledged $2.4bn in federal grants for the programme while China, having showcased its buses at the Olympics, has budgeted $15bn for electric transport.
And next up? Vehicles could be sun-powered. From next year, a California-based company will start selling solar panels made from multi-crystalline polysilicone that can be mounted on the car roof. Ford’s already offering a solar package.
Emission impossible
As the world’s shipyards launch ever greater ocean-going vessels from cruise ships to bulk carriers, there’s a commensurate effort in making them less pollutant. Take the Maersk group’s mighty Triple-E class container ships. Behemoths of 397m in length and nearly 171,000 gross tonnage, they are the largest active vessels afloat and, by 2014, there will be 20 of them.
A 20-strong fleet of such ships plying the world’s oceans may sound like an environmental nightmare – and it would be if one of them split its hull on a reef somewhere. But Triple-E stands for economies of scale, energy efficiency and environmental improvement.
Maersk is harnessing the latest pollution-reducing technology to reduce the size of the ocean footprint of these titanic vessels. Engine exhaust is recycled, hull design reduces resistance through the water and, for good measure, the hull’s surface is coated with silicon to reduce any hint of drag.
Although today’s fleet of container ships, bulk carriers and cruise ships may look exactly the same as they did a decade or more ago, a green revolution has in fact taken place below decks. The big boys of the oceans can now showcase a whole range of low-polluting technology such as fast oil recovery systems, the diesel-electric propulsion on Tembek’s latest fleet of LNG carriers boasting their own liquefaction plants, and low-cost gas containment systems on Aker Yard’s LNG carriers.
Today’s ever-bigger fleet of cruise ships has also adopted the green mantle. As well as more efficient propulsion systems, they feature a variety of energy-saving technologies. For instance, tinted windows on Cunard’s new Queen Elizabeth help to reduce the load on air-conditioning systems. Furthermore, the company has even replaced the ice used in its buffet displays with re-usable chilled river rocks. And some lines recycle cooking oil into biodiesel.
As Bud Darr, director of environmental and health programmes for the Cruise Lines International Association, explains: “The reality is that most of our shipboard energy needs are being met by way of consuming fossil fuels. Like most of society, this results in anthropogenic contribution to greenhouse gas loading in the atmosphere.”
The biggest battle is now in the engine room, particularly to reduce harmful sulphur emissions. This is a race against time, with engine-builders in the forefront. Globally, the sulphur content of fuel oil must be down to 3.5 percent by early 2012 and, to 0.5 percent by 2020.
Helsinki-based Wartsila, which has just secured a ¤150m loan from the European Investment Bank to pursue low-pollutant research, didn’t wait for the new standards. In the last ten years the engine-builder has cut nitrogen and sulphur oxide emissions by 25-30 percent over previous generations of engines with breakthroughs such as the scrubber – a system for cleaning exhausts of harmful oxides. Competing engine builders believe a 30-40 percent reduction in nitrogen oxide emissions is possible, even on older engines.
Big shipping’s efforts to clean up its act may however be stymied by big oil. As Francesco Balbi, environmental coordinator for Mediterranean-based MSC Cruises told the magazine, nobody knows how much low-sulphur fuel will be available by 2020 – and at what price – because the refining industry is lagging way behind demand. “The costs involved in the desulphurisation process [are high]. In turn that means extra costs for shipping.” But then big oil has never exactly been in the forefront in the race for low emissions.
Stigma of the Nobel Prize
They no longer fear the Spanish Inquisition. But four centuries after Galileo, charges of heresy from their peers and dread of being cast into a wilderness of ridicule still haunt those pioneers who strike out beyond the frontiers of established science to win Nobel prizes.
Dan Shechtman’s recent chemistry Nobel Prize for discovering quasicrystals was sweet vindication after years being branded a “quasi-scientist” by one of the greatest names in his field. New laureates in physics and medicine also told of fear after making revolutionary discoveries or of good ideas left long overlooked.
“In the forefront of science there is not much difference between religion and science,” Shechtman said earlier this year. “People harbour beliefs. That’s what happens when people believe something religiously.”
Galileo was grilled by the Inquisition in Rome in the 17th century and branded a heretic by the church for promoting Copernicus’s idea that the Earth moved round the Sun. Today it is loss of grants and public humiliation that gives sleepless nights to those whose studies force a rewrite of accepted laws, like the astronomers who found the universe’s expansion was speeding up, not slowing down.
“It seemed too crazy to be right, and I think we were a little scared,” said Brian Schmidt after winning the 2011 Nobel physics prize for a discovery which also revealed the likely existence of mysterious dark energy, or anti-gravity – an idea the Einstein once had and later dismissed as his “biggest blunder”.
The researchers who said last month that they appeared to have fired sub-atomic particles from the CERN centre at Geneva to Italy’s Gran Sasso laboratory at faster than the speed of light – in seeming defiance of Einstein – have similar anxiety about embarrassment as they ask others to check their findings.
While scientists generally defend and applaud a system of sceptical peer review, the neglect of apparently promising new discoveries – such as the potential germ and cancer-killing dendritic cells discovered in the 1970s by 2011 medicine Nobel winner Ralph Steinman – can surprise the public at large.
So too will Shechtman’s recollections of the humiliation he suffered on identifying what turned out to be an entirely new class of solid material, between amorphous matter like glass and regular, repeating patterned crystals. Speaking to Israel’s Haaretz newspaper in April, he remembered the leader of his research team in the United States approaching his desk in 1982. “He gave a sheepish smile, placed a textbook on my desk and said, ‘Please read what’s written here’,” Shechtman said. A day later, he was asked to leave the team for “bringing disgrace” on his fellow researchers.
Wilderness years
“The wilderness years are common in the history of science, especially when there’s a paradigm shift in the offing,” said Carole Reeves, a historian of medicine at University College London (UCL).
Copernicus, Newton, Lavoisier, Einstein, Darwin – all later hailed as revolutionaries – created new models that required the scientific community to reject an existing one. Reeves picks out Copernicus who, like Darwin with evolution, was loathe to publish his new theory because of the expected controversy, particularly in theological terms.
Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal and professor of cosmology and astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, says things have got a little better recently, but there is still “a minority who are underappreciated and have a tough time”. Tragically, Ralph Steinman died three days before learning of his Nobel award, after a long period early on when his work on a new type of immune system cell was largely ignored. “He really had to pursue this…discovery in the face of a lot of scepticism,” said his son Adam.
While scientific advances don’t always involve disruptive and counter-intuitive ideas, very often the biggest ones do – and the task of the scientific community is to stress test these ideas to breaking-point.
Bassam Shakhashiri, president-elect of the American Chemical Society (ACS), says that’s the nature of the game. “That’s how we do science. We scrutinise, we contemplate, we look at evidence, we debate with each other about the consistency of the evidence and how it makes sense.”
The ACS lauded Shechtman’s “a great work of discovery” this week, when his Nobel prize was announced. Yet in the 1980s and early 1990s it was a one-time president of the ACS, the double Nobel laureate Linus Pauling, who was the fiercest critic of Shechtman’s research, saying: “There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists.” For those researchers whose work is at odds with the established dogma, life is not easy.
“Of course scientists, being people, need to be convinced about revolutionary advances more than incremental advances,” remarked Alan Leshner, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “That’s how science proceeds: Prove it to me. If you can’t prove it, it remains a bad idea.”
Shechtman said he was all too aware of the high stakes in the years before the world’s crystallography textbooks were rewritten in his favour: “I knew that if it turned out to be a flop, it would be a major flop,” he said. John Forrester, professor of history and philosophy of the sciences at the University of Cambridge, finds many echoes of historic controversies in the 2011 Nobel science prize winners.He points to the late Thomas Kuhn, who set out the idea that science undergoes periodic upheavals in his 1962 book ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’. It was Kuhn who first used the term “paradigm shift” for such cutting-edge research. “It’s a dangerous place to be because careers can be put on the line. But that is the Kuhnian story – you are going to have conflicts between groups,” Forrester said in an interview.
Spooking Einstein
Pauling, who died in 1994, was not alone among science’s big guns in questioning a new idea that turned out to be a winner. An exasperated Einstein famously dismissed quantum entanglement – the theory that particles can be connected in such a way that changing the state of one instantly affects the other, even when they’re miles apart – as “spooky action at a distance”.
Einstein may have been dissatisfied with the concept, but research in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s confirmed the effect. Scientists behind this work were actually tipped this year as potential winners of the Nobel prize in physics by numerous colleagues. So why does it have to be so lonely out there for those willing to take a risk?
Experts say the nature of scientific revolution is that new models are incompatible with the old, and they force the professional community to re-evaluate long familiar concepts which they may not be too eager to let go of.
Reeves and Rees point to the discovery by Barry Marshall and Robin Warren – who won the 2005 Nobel for medicine – of Helicobacter pylori as the bacteria responsible for around 80 percent of peptic ulcers as another illustration of scientists having to stand alone for many years.
“A whole industry had been built on seeing peptic ulcer disease simply as one of over-secretion of gastric acid,” Reeves explains, adding that in the 1980s this theory also supported GlaxoSmithKline’s then biggest∞selling drug Zantac, which reduced stomach acid.
“It was literally a billion-dollar product so you can see why powerful pharmaceutical companies, scientists funded by them who were working on gastric acid secretion, surgeons who had developed umpteen surgical procedures to resect the stomach and duodenum, might have challenged the findings,” she said. In the end, going down in history as a revolutionary scientist may come down to strength of character as much as strength of conviction.
Perhaps recalling the mortification of that fateful day when his research team leader brought him the crystallography textbook to read, Shechtman took to Twitter after his Nobel vindication to record succinctly: “A good scientist is a scientist that is not sure 100 percent in what he read in the textbooks.”
Crossing the line
The Karman Line isn’t, as the name suggests, a physical boundary of any kind. Indeed it’s not even a line. Yet it’s a boundary that 150 adventure-hungry individuals are prepared to pay $200,000 to cross because the Karman Line, named after Hungarian-American aeronautical engineer and physicist Theodore von Karman, marks the theoretical edge of space. It’s the point 100km above the earth’s surface where, by general consent, ordinary terrestrial flight ends and space flight begins. Putting it another way, you need rocket ships to get up there.
These early-birds have put down $40,000 deposit for a seat on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo when it makes the first commercial passenger flight above the Karman Line. And the day of that inaugural flight came a step closer in mid-October when Richard Branson’s highest-profile business venture opened the world’s first commercial Spaceport in southern New Mexico.
Named with a typical Branson flourish as Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space, the building will be the starting point for sub-orbital flights aboard SS2. At first derided as a wacky, publicity-seeking venture, the flights look like they will become a reality within the next two years or so, just as soon as the company has passed all the safety checks. “Safety is our North Star,” insists George Whitesides, Virgin Galactic’s chief executive and president.
Already though, SS2 has completed 30 full flights, while WhiteKnightTwo, the mother-ship that will launch the passengers beyond the edge of space has achieved no less than 75 accident-free take-offs and touch-downs.
For Branson, who predicts space travel will become “one of the most important industrial sectors of the 21st century”, the business case for Virgin Galactic is obvious. It’s not just about taking up six passengers at a time – SS2’s current maximum payload – at a ticket price of about $950 a minute for the 3 ½-hour sub-orbital flight. With a further 450 reservations already confirmed, passenger flights will continue to provide a steady revenue stream for the group.
The commercial return is also measured in research, and Virgin Galactic has just signed a $4.75m charter contract with NASA, the US space agency, to conduct experiments up there. The long-term strategy also calls for space science missions, satellite launches and eventually orbital flights in the thinnest of air. In time Branson plans to open similar Spaceports around the world. Other companies also see the potential and are working on rival projects, but Virgin Galactic has by common consent made a big head start.
However, the technical challenges remain considerable. The mother ship will take SS2 to a height of only 16km, albeit considerably higher than the flight path of trans-oceanic commercial passenger jets, before releasing it and its passengers. From there, SS2 will hurtle towards the Karman Line some 84km above at a speed of Mach 3, 1600kms an hour.
But the space ship won’t stop there. Its two pilots will take SS2 to about 110km for a sub-orbital period of six minutes before making a tricky re-entry. The pilots fold up the wings for a rocket-like descent below the Karman Line, then re-open them for a long unpowered glide back to the runway where SS2 lands under its own steam. Naturally, Branson and his family have booked themselves on the first flight.
Finland’s nuclear reaction
Matti Pahkala braces from the chilly winds blowing in from the Gulf of Bothnia as he surveys a map of the Hanhikivi peninsula in northern Finland, an area he first visited as a child. As then, the shore is lined with rocky beaches and vegetation, much of it untouched for hundreds of years. Nearby, birch and aspen trees rustle, scattering yellow autumn leaves.
That landscape is about to change dramatically after Finnish nuclear consortium Fennovoima recently announced that it will build a reactor here, the first nuclear reactor site to be announced since the March nuclear plant disaster in Fukushima, Japan.
While environmentalists worry about damage to the area’s natural habitat, Pahkala, who is chairman of the local Pyhajoki municipal board, couldn’t be more excited. He expects Fennovoima’s investment of ¤4-6bn will bring more jobs and new business, meaning greater tax revenue to an area that sees a large majority of youngsters leave for bigger towns each year in search of better jobs and education.
Around 3,400 people live in Pyhajoki, with many working at steel maker Rautaruukki in Raahe some 30km away, and the rest working in small local business and farming. Local student Heini Mattila said the reactor could help Pyhajoki avoid merging with neighbouring towns as many small Finnish municipalities have been forced to do to cut costs.
“It will bring more jobs and life to this village. Otherwise we might have to soon consider joining the town of Raahe,” Mattila said. The unemployment rate in Pyhajoki is hovering around the six percent mark, not much different to the country’s average.
But local unemployment shot to around 15 percent as recently as early 2010 as a nationwide recession prompted lay-offs. Some fear this could happen again, with economists predicting Finland could tip into recession again as Europe’s debt crisis hits exports such as metals, paper and ships.
Cheap power
Finland sees nuclear energy as a means to cut greenhouse gas emissions while supplying a steady source of energy for industry. It is also trying to curb dependence on energy from Russia on fears that economic growth could push up prices and impact deliveries. Its four nuclear reactors produced 25 percent of electricity used in Finland last year, while 12 percent was imported, mainly from Russia.
Fennovoima was set up in 2007 to produce electricity for its consortium members consisting of Finish power and industrial companies. Members include steel makers Outokumpu and Rautaruukki, although its biggest single shareholder is German utility E.ON’s Finnish subsidiary.
In 2010, it and Teollisuuden Voima (TVO) won parliament’s approval to construct new nuclear reactors, which are expected to come on line by around 2020 and raise the number of reactors in Finland to seven. The forest businesses and steel makers depend on cheap electricity, and those sectors are vital to Finland’s economy, particularly now that Nokia is no longer the growth driver it once was.
While Finland launched a review of nuclear safety after the Fukushima disaster, authorities found no need for changes at the reactors in operation, although they asked TVO and Fortum for more information on back-up plans for extraordinary events. There was no talk of halting Fennovoima’s project.The position contrasts sharply with others in Europe. Following Fukushima, Germany decided to phase out nuclear power for the forseeable future.
Protests by the anti-nuclear movement have gained little political traction in Finland. Although the Green’s party has been against nuclear energy and voted against allowing new reactors, it is part of a coalition government that includes nuclear advocates. Economy Affairs Minister Jyri Hakamies, who is responsible for energy issues, said Finland’s decision to stay on course with its nuclear plan reflected the “rational, pragmatic” nature of its people.
Bomb in the backyard
But critics say Finland may be underestimating the risks and overestimating the benefits of nuclear power. Many point to construction delays and ballooning costs at Olkiluoto 3, Finland’s fifth reactor, as proof that nuclear energy doesn’t always go well as planned. The promise of more jobs means little for pensioner Tuula Wallin, who has lived for 20 years just 5km from the planned site. “It is like a bomb in the backyard,” she said, her voice trembling.
“How come these people planning this have not come to their senses, despite Chernobyl and Fukushima? My child and grandchildren live here in Pyhajoki, and I’m scared thinking about their future.” Environmentalists say the nuclear plant will disrupt the area’s natural habitat. There are few signs of human activity on the peninsula – a road and some wooden cabins without electricity or modern plumbing and used only in the summer.
Local environmental association Pro Hanhikivi, which is cooperating with other conservation groups as well as Greenpeace to oppose the reactor, says the peninsula is home to a variety of threatened and protected wildlife and a resting and feeding place for migrating arctic birds.
There are some nature conservation sites near the planned plant, including some areas designated in an EU programme aimed at protecting threatened species and habitats. Some of the area’s streams, springs and rocks are part of Finnish biodiversity programmes. While the reactor will avoid most of these areas, critics say they are so close that the impact is unavoidable.
Excitement comes to town
Fennovoima will have to negotiate with some landowners over the 80 hectares of the 450-hectare site it does not already control, and some of those are residents of the neighbouring village of Parhalahti who are likely to put up a fight, said Pro Hanhikivi vice chairwoman Hanna Halmeenpaa.
Pro Hanhikivi has also complained to the European Commission and a European Parliament petition committee that Finland is not obeying directives on protecting threatened species and habitats. “The question is can this area of various threatened habitats be split up for industrial use, or should it be protected,” Halmeenpaa said. “We are prepared for a long battle.”
When news of the site selection broke it created a rare buzz in Pyhajoki’s normally sleepy village centre, bringing local politicians, business leaders and media to Fennovoima’s small office to hear Chief Executive Tapio Saarenpaa’s plans for construction work due to begin in 2015. “Our home has been announced and it is here,” Saarenpaa said.
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