Chicken Manure to power 90,000 Homes in the Netherlands!

by Mike Chino

Here at Inhabitat we love to see innovative reuses for organic waste, and so we’re perpetually fascinated by the potential of poo to be used as a renewable source of energy. Last week Dutch agriculture minister Gerda Verburg announced a groundbreaking development for the field as she unveiled the world’s largest biomass power plant to run exclusively on poultry manure. The plant will convert a third of the nation’s chicken waste into energy while running at a capacity of 36.5 megawatts - enough to power 90,000 homes!

Part of the promise of biomass energy lies in its two-for-one benefit: it generates energy while disposing of waste. We’ve covered poo power schemes in the past, but never on such a massive scale!

Situated in Moerdijk, the 150 million euro plant was constructed by the Dutch multi-utility company Delta. It will convert roughly 440,000 tons of chicken manure into energy annually, generating more than 270 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year. The plant also addresses a key environmental problem in the Netherlands: “managing the vast excess stream of chicken manure, which, until today, had to be processed at a high cost”.

Delta’s biomass plant has even been described as being carbon neutral, since it will prevent the manure from sitting in fields and seething greenhouse gases into the air. Once methane from the poultry waste has been extracted and ignited, the left over ash will be used to make fertilizers and other agricultural products.

Peter Boerma, the CEO of Delta states:
The biomass power plant is one of the strategic components of our energy mix, which includes a wide range of renewable sources, as well as nuclear power. This diverse energy mix is needed to meet the ever increasing demand for electricity, but for us, building a smart and clean fuel sourcing strategy is more than meeting the consumer’s demand, it is a matter of meeting our social obligations.
Photo credit:Paul de Lhama

+ Delta

Via Metaefficient and Checkbiotech

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The Sun Will Eventually Engulf Earth--Maybe

By David Appell

Overheated: Researchers debate whether Earth will be swallowed up by the sun as it expands to its red giant state billions of years from now.
Lynette Cook Photo Researchers, Inc.

The future looks bright—maybe too bright. The sun is slowly expanding and brightening, and over the next few billion years it will eventually desiccate Earth, leaving it hot, brown and uninhabitable. About 7.6 billion years from now, the sun will reach its maximum size as a red giant: its surface will extend beyond Earth’s orbit today by 20 percent and will shine 3,000 times brighter. In its final stage, the sun will collapse into a white dwarf.

Although scientists agree on the sun’s future, they disagree about what will happen to Earth. Since 1924, when British mathematician James Jeans first considered Earth’s fate during the sun’s red giant phase, a bevy of scientists have reached oscillating conclusions. In some scenarios, our planet escapes vaporization; in the latest analyses, however, it does not.

The answer is not straightforward, because although the sun will expand beyond Earth’s orbit, or one astronomical unit (AU), it will lose mass along the way. As a result, Earth should drift outward as the gravitational tug lessens over time. (At its maximum radius of 1.2 AU, the sun will have lost about one third of its mass, compared with its current heft.) In this way, Earth could escape solar envelopment.

But other factors complicate the analysis. Drag on the planet from the sun’s outermost, tenuous layers will cause Earth to drift inward. Smaller forces from the other planets—all in turn reacting to the same reducing, expanding sun—are even more difficult to account for completely.

Earlier this year two teams reported different kinds of calculations indicating that Earth will be swallowed up by the sun. In a calculation that would thrill any college junior studying classical mechanics, Lorenzo Iorio of Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics used perturbation theory. It simplifies analyses by dropping relatively small factors, thereby making complex equations of motions that describe the interactions between the sun and Earth mathematically manageable. Assuming that the sun’s yearly mass loss (currently about one part in 100 trillion) remains small for the duration of its evolution to the red giant phase, Iorio calculates that Earth will move outward at about three millimeters a year, or only 0.0002 AU by the sun’s red giant phase. But at that point the sun will balloon up, in only a million years, to 1.2 AU in radius, thus vaporizing Earth.

Iorio’s paper, submitted to Astrophysics and Space Science, has not yet been peer-reviewed. Several scientists question whether quantities that Iorio assumes are small will indeed remain small throughout the sun’s evolution.

Even if Iorio got his number crunching wrong, he may have the right answer. In an analysis published in the May Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Klaus-Peter Schröder of the University of Guanajuato in Mexico and Robert Smith of the University of Sussex in England also conclude that Earth is doomed, by using more exact solar models and by considering tidal interactions. As the sun loses mass and expands, its rotation rate must also slow down—physics students learn this relation as the conservation of angular momentum. The slowed rotation causes a tidal bulge on the sun’s surface. The gravity exerted by this bulge pulls Earth inward. With such a consideration, the researchers find that any planet with a present-day orbital radius of less than 1.15 AU will ultimately perish.

Could Earth be saved if someone is still left at home? In a bold piece of astronomical engineering, Don Korycansky of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and his colleagues have proposed nudging Earth with a large asteroid arranged to pass nearby periodically. It could take one billion years to move our planet out to somewhere safe, like the orbit of Mars. Our moon, though, might have to be left behind, and any miscalculation could mean extinction. Needless to say, more study is required.

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Forecasting The Fate Of Mysteries

Our modern answer to the Pyramids
Frank Wilczek, MIT, Nobel laureate (2004)
As a project, it's magnificent—i like to say it's our civilization's answer to the Pyramids of Egypt, but much better because it's driven by curiosity rather than superstition, and built on collaboration, not command. The scale isn't just vanity—everything has to be as big as it is. But it's not only big in physical size; it's extremely sophisticated, extremely delicate. It's probably the most complex thing we've ever done—we being humanity.

We have now a very well-established, highly tested, highly rewarded-with-Nobel-Prizes theory of the weak interaction that's based on a concept that's never been directly proved. The concept is that the universe is a kind of cosmic superconductor, not for electricity but for weak charges: what appears as empty space is anything but empty. Another way of saying that is we're living in a kind of ocean, surrounded by—something. But we've never isolated a water molecule; we don't know what the ocean consists of. The LHC [the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva] will discover what that is. That's the minimal achievement.

But I expect much more. We have a description of the world that's potentially magnificent and beautiful—in part—but has pieces missing. We have four fundamental forces—strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravity—and lovely ideas for how to tie them together. And when you try to follow that inspiration out, you find a lot of things work out very nicely, but it doesn't really work in detail, unless you expand the equation to include more stuff. Some of that stuff should be within the range of the LHC. So ideas about unification—that go by the name of supersymmetry—are really in play. We'll have a much more unified description of the world than we've had before, many more particles to play with [whose] properties will be a window into a vast new physics—a whole new world of fundamental behavior.

If you just take the particles we have and extrapolate their known behavior, you run into contradictions—you start to contradict basic principles of quantum mechanics or common sense. There has to be a deviation of some kind from the laws we have at present when you go up to high energy: if there's not a new particle, then we'll need different laws. That would be maybe even more profound than finding new particles—if we have to give up quantum mechanics or change what we mean by the laws. So finding new particles is much more conservative than the alternative. We'd have to unlearn a lot of what we know.

There will be less room for religion
Steven Weinberg, University of Texas, Nobel laureate (1979)
As science explains more and more, there is less and less need for religious explanations. Originally, in the history of human beings, everything was mysterious. Fire, rain, birth, death—all seemed to require the action of some kind of divine being. As time has passed, we have explained more and more in a purely naturalistic way. This doesn't contradict religion, but it does takes away one of the original motivations for religion.

If we put together something like a final theory in which all the forces and the particles are explained, and that theory also throws light on the origin of the big bang and gives us a consistent picture of cosmology, there will be a little less for religion to explain. But religion has evolved along with science. It is something created by human beings, and as human beings learn more and more, their religion changes. Today, especially in the more established religious sects in the West, they've learned to stop trying to explain nature religiously and leave that to science.

The more we learn about the universe, the fewer signs we see of an intelligent designer. Isaac Newton thought that an explanation of how the sun shone would have to be made in terms of the action of God. Now we know that the sun shines because of the heat produced by the conversion of hydrogen into helium in its core. People who expect to find evidence of divine action in nature, in the origin of the universe or in the laws that govern matter are probably going to be disappointed.

What will be completely satisfying will be to show that there was only one kind of nature that was logically possible and derive the laws of nature in the same way that we derived the principles of arithmetic. I don't think that will be possible, because we can already imagine logically consistent laws of nature that don't quite describe the world we see. We will always be somewhat disappointed. But people who believe in God have the same problem. They will never be able to understand why the God that they believe in is that way and not some other way. All human beings, whether religious or not, are caught in a tragic situation of never fully being able to understand the world we are in.

I don't believe in God, but I don't make a religion out of not believing in God. It is logically possible that something could be discovered that will make me change my mind, and it will be interesting to see if that happens. But I don't expect it. It is always possible that we will discover something in nature that cannot be explained in the naturalistic way that we've gotten used to in science and that will really require divine intervention. That hasn't happened. I don't know of any religious people who say that the breaking of the symmetry between the weak and the electromagnetic interactions requires divine intervention. Discovering the Higgs boson, or confirming the theory of electroweak symmetry breaking, is not going to upset people's religion.

Possible evidence of a 4th dimension
Brian Greene, Columbia University, string theorist
The one insight that we are most confident or hopeful about is supersymmetry. It's a little complex to describe in detail, but I can describe an implication: for every known particle species in the world—electrons, quarks and so on—we should see a partner particle that is as yet undiscovered. We find this possibility exciting because supersymmetry is an intrinsic quality of string theory. If you discover supersymmetry, it doesn't prove string theory right, but it does prove one of its central attributes to be right.

What Einstein did with general relativity, in terms of its role in theoretical physics, is give us an understanding of certain symmetries or qualities of space and time. Supersymmetry in essence is taking that to the next level. If supersymmetry is right, it's telling us that space and time have qualities that Einstein couldn't have dreamed of but naturally fit into the same progression that he started. There are other things beyond supersymmetry that again would tie into Einstein in a deep way that could also be found.

The LHC could provide evidence for more than three dimensions of space. One of the ways that we have formulated string theory in the last five or 10 years suggests that the following might happen at the LHC. What happens there is you slam one proton against another proton traveling in opposite directions near the speed of light. And there are literally trillions of protons going around the LHC at something like 11,000 times a second. And then you have these collisions. What might happen is there will be some debris created in the collision that gets ejected out of our three dimensions of space into a higher dimensional space, dimensions that we don't have direct access to. How would you notice that? If some debris gets rejected, it will carry some energy with it, which means that if you measure the energy just before the protons collide and you measure what's left over just after, you should have a little less at the end than you had at the beginning. That would be indirect evidence that energy had been lost to more dimensions.

[The follow up to the LHC is] already being planned: the International Linear Collider. You can think about the LHC as a very powerful microscope, but it's likely to reveal just the gross features of the new physics. The ILC is a machine of a different design that has the capacity to then take the gross road map that the LHC can provide and begin to really go down the little alleyways and enchanting avenues, to really explore the terrain with the kind of detail and precision that the LHC likely can't. Let's say some new particles are discovered at the LHC. The ILC would have the capacity to study the very fine detailed properties of those particles, to really produce them copiously and understand with great precision their mass, election charge, interactions, things of that sort, which the LHC may be able to roughly say. The ILC is one that really can get in there and describe the properties with fantastic precision.

No, it won ' t swallow up the Earth
Stephen Hawking , Cambridge University, mathematician
The large Hadron Collider will allow us to study particle collisions at energies three times greater than previous particle accelerators. We can guess at what this will reveal, but our experience has been that when we open up a new range of observations, we often find what we had not expected. That is when physics becomes really exciting, because we are learning something new about the universe.

The LHC is part of an international effort to unlock the secrets of the universe. It cost about $10 billion over four years, which sounds a lot, but which is only 0.005 percent of the world gross domestic product for that period. Can't we afford two hundredths of a percent to understand the universe?

And it is absolutely safe. There has been a scare story that it might create a tiny black hole that would swallow up the Earth. But if the collisions in the LHC produced a micro black hole, and this is unlikely, it would just evaporate away again, producing a characteristic pattern of particles. Collisions at these and greater energies occur millions of times a day in the Earth's atmosphere, and nothing terrible happens. The world will not come to an end when the LHC turns on. The LHC is feeble compared with what goes on in the universe. If a disaster was going to happen, it would have happened already.

Pointing to a future path for physics
Alan Guth, MIT, cosmologist
What we're trying to understand is the first fraction of a second of the history of the universe, and how the evolution that took place then put the universe on the path to become what it is today. Inflationary theory is a twist on the conventional big-bang picture. What changes is our understanding of the history of the universe for a very short period during the first minute. The theory modifies the evolution to include a brief period during which gravity is turned on its head and becomes repulsive instead of attractive. If inflation is right, this short period of repulsive gravity is the actual bang of the big bang, in the sense that it is what propelled the universe into its enormous expansion, which we're still seeing today.

I think many physicists, including me, feel that the direction of physics in the coming years is very uncertain. I'm talking about the actual science, not just the funding. The key shocker for many of us was the discovery about 10 years ago that the universe is accelerating. It was not expected theoretically, at least not by most of us, and it is very hard to understand in the context of the theories that we have been using all these years. The LHC is likely to play a major role in telling us the direction in which we should be moving.

Think of it like the Hubble telescope
Edward Witten, Institute for Advanced Study, string theorist
There's a chance that something would be discovered that wouldn't fit well with any of our ideas. The chance of finding higher dimensions—it's possible, but just barely possible. If everything is lined up exactly right, it's conceivable the LHC could do that. Energy would seem to disappear because the idea is that, when particles have a sufficiently high energy, they can escape into a higher dimensional world. If it's a long shot to get direct evidence for extra dimensions, it's even more of a long shot to get a clear black-hole signature at the LHC.

What the LHC really does is explore the energies at which the nature of the weak interactions can be understood. The important forces of nature are gravity, the nuclear force—also called the strong interactions—electromagnetism and weak interactions, which is probably the least familiar force to those who aren't physicists, responsible for certain forms of atomic radioactivity. The weak interactions are a big piece of the puzzle. They're the least understood because they're so weak. It's very mysterious.

We've already discovered the W and Z particles, which are two important ingredients in weak interactions. Putting together what we already know, we know the energy scale at which the weak-interaction symmetry is broken. And it's definitely in reach of the LHC. In fact, the LHC goes beyond that. That's the big question which I'm sure the LHC will answer.

You should think of the LHC as being something like the Hubble space telescope: it's built to explore the universe and understand it better.

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