Gizmorama - March 3, 2014

Good Morning,

Today's issue is all about fuel. Researchers are gaining ground on a successful step toward fusion energy and plastic shopping bags being converted into diesel, natural gas and other useful petroleum products.

Learn about these interesting stories from the scientific community in today's issue.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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*-- Researchers take plastic bags from litter to efficient fuel source --*
URBANA, Ill. - Plastic shopping bags littering much of the Earth can be converted into diesel, natural gas and other useful petroleum products, U.S. researchers report. The conversion process produces significantly more energy than it consumes and results in transportation fuels such as diesel that can be blended with existing ultra-low-sulfur diesels and biodiesels, scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign said Thursday. Other products such as natural gas, solvents, gasoline, waxes and lubricating oils also can be obtained from shopping bags, they said. The technique, which involves heating the bags in an oxygen-free chamber in a process called pyrolysis, is very efficient, researcher leader Brajendra Kumar Sharma said. "You can get only 50 to 55 percent fuel from the distillation of petroleum crude oil," he said. "But since this plastic is made from petroleum in the first place, we can recover almost 80 percent fuel from it through distillation." Previous studies have used pyrolysis to convert plastic bags into crude oil, but Sharma's team took the research further by converting the crude oil into different petroleum products. Americans throw away about 100 billion plastic shopping bags annually, the Worldwatch Institute says, while the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reports only about 13 percent are recycled.


*-- Researchers report another successful step toward fusion energy --*
LIVERMORE, Calif. - Scientists in California say they're one step closer to fusion energy, generating a reaction in which more energy came out of the fuel core than went into it. In what they're calling an incremental advance, the researchers report using 192 lasers to compress a pellet of fuel as a step toward creating a controlled fusion-energy reaction by mimicking the interior of the sun inside a laboratory. There's a long way to go before a functioning fusion reactor can run on a common form of hydrogen found in seawater, creating massive amounts of energy while emitting minimal nuclear waste, they said. What was achieved was not fusion "ignition," scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said, since their experiment required much more energy on the front end from all the laser shots than came out the back end. Still, when briefly compressed by the laser pulses, the isotopes in the fuel pellet fused, generating new particles and heating up the fuel further and generating still more nuclear reactions, particles and heat, they reported in the journal Nature. The effect -- known as "alpha heating" -- is an important goal in fusion research, researchers not involved in the Livermore work said. "It's the first sign that they're getting what we call self-heating," Stewart Prager of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in New Jersey told the Washington Post. He said he's optimistic about achieving fusion energy in the long run. "In 30 years, we'll have electricity on the grid produced by fusion energy -- absolutely," Prager said. "I think the open questions now are how complicated a system will it be, how expensive it will be, how economically attractive it will be."

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