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Category: sustainability – Page 284

Lydie Evrard — Deputy Director General, IAEA — Head of the Department of Nuclear Safety and Security

Protecting People, Society & Environment — Lydie Evrard, Deputy Director General; Head, Department of Nuclear Safety & Security, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)

Lydie Evrard (https://www.iaea.org/about/organizational-structure/departme…d-security) is Deputy Director General and Head of the Department of Nuclear Safety and Security at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Ms. Evrard’s department focuses on the protection of people, society and the environment from the harmful effects of ionizing radiation, whether the cause is an unsafe act or a security breach, and her team aims to provide a strong, sustainable and visible global nuclear safety and security framework. Her department was created in 1996 as a response to the Chernobyl nuclear accident.

Prior to joining the IAEA, Ms. Evrard held the role of Commissioner at the French Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN).

Ms. Evrard started her career in the field of engineering, joining the French Ministry of Energy as an engineer and she has worked extensively in the regulatory field over the last 25 years in positions including as Unit Head at the Industry, Research and the Environment Direction of France’s Ministry of the Environment (Paris Region); Deputy Head of the Paris Region Division of the Nuclear Safety Authority (ASN) and subsequently Head of the Authority’s waste, decommissioning, fuel cycle facilities, research facilities and contaminated soils remediation Department. At the ASN, Ms. Evrard handled both radiation protection and nuclear safety issues. In particular, she led, together with counterparts at the Ministry of Energy, the 2013–2015 national plan for the management of radioactive materials and waste and coordinated the stress tests performed on research and fuel cycle facilities, following the Fukushima Daiichi accident.

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Elon Musk Visits Twitter as $44 Billion Deal Nears Completion

Mr. Musk, who runs Tesla and SpaceX, visited Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters on Wednesday and tweeted a nine-second video of himself smiling and carrying a porcelain sink into the building.

“Entering Twitter HQ — let that sink in!” he wrote.

The world’s richest man arrived at Twitter’s San Francisco offices on Wednesday ahead of a Friday deadline to complete the acquisition of the social media service.

How one startup plans to increase EV range

It will also increase energy density by 30 percent.

The innovative UK start-up Ionetic, specializing in EV battery pack technology, introduced its cutting-edge EV battery pack design platform, which can shorten the time and cost of development for automakers developing new electric vehicles.

It has traditionally been expensive and time-consuming for many automobile firms to provide a high-performance and secure battery pack solution. Fully customized designs are frequently out of reach for most consumers, while current off-the-shelf battery pack solutions have low energy density and optimization. This is especially true for specialty, low-volume automakers who have particular needs.

Tiny Ultrasound Sensors Could Monitor EV Batteries

Ultrasound sensors as small as a thumbnail can scan lithium-ion batteries to check their charge, health, and safety, a new study finds.

The findings suggest that ultrasound—that is, sound waves at frequencies higher than human hearing can detect—might one day help electric vehicles better estimate how much charge remains in their batteries. This approach might also help detect unstable batteries on the verge of disaster, quickly test battery quality during manufacturing, and identify which used batteries are healthy enough to be resold to reduce waste, says study lead author Hongbin Sun, an ultrasonic engineer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee.

Estimating how much charge is left in a commercial lithium-ion battery is currently a challenging task. For instance, electric vehicles typically experience an uncertainty of about 10 percent when estimating battery charge. This in turn reduces their driving range by about 10 percent, to ensure that they stay within their batteries’ safety margins.

Tesla is rumored to be looking to invest in Mexico

Tesla is rumored to be looking to invest in Nuevo Leon, a Mexican state bordering Texas, as CEO Elon Musk meets with the governor.

Earlier this year, people crossing the border between Texas and Nuevo Leon were surprised to see not just the usual marked lanes for cars and trucks but also one marked “Tesla” – pictured above.

We ended up finding out that Tesla had struck a deal with the state of Nuevo Leon to have its own lane at the border crossing in order to reduce wait times for cargo going through the border. Or at least that was the explanation of Ivan Rivas, the economy minister of Nuevo Leon.

Carbon dioxide can revolutionize rooftop farming, here is the proof

A new way to boost the growth of plants in rooftop farms.

Humans constantly breathe out large amounts of CO2 and when we are inside a building for a period of time, it creates high concentrations of carbon dioxide inside the building. This CO2 is removed through a building’s exhaust system.

Plants take in CO2 as a source of food and when they are exposed to lots of CO2, they will grow bigger than they would have otherwise.

Dr. Sarabeth Buckley.

Interestingly, a team of researchers from Boston University has proposed a system called BIG GRO in which excess CO2 from a building’s exhaust system can be utilized as a fertilizer to grow thriving rooftop gardens.

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Bill Gates-backed startup builds a massive refinery to turn alcohol into jet fuel

Bill Gates founded Breakthrough Energy and has recently announced that its first Catalyst project funding will come in the form of a $50 million grant to LanzaJet’s Freedom Pines Fuels sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) plant in Soperton, Georgia.

Breakthrough Energy Catalyst is a unique program that brings together businesses and nonprofits to fund key first-of-its-kind commercial-scale projects that speed up the deployment of essential technologies.

Tandem solar cells with perovskite: Nanostructures help in many ways

Tandem solar cells made of perovskite and silicon enable significantly higher efficiencies than silicon solar cells alone. Tandem cells from HZB have already achieved several world records. Most recently, in November 2021, HZB research teams achieved a certified efficiency of 29.8% with a tandem cell made of perovskite and silicon. This was an absolute world record that stood unbeaten at the top for eight months. It was not until the summer of 2022 that a Swiss team at EPFL succeeded in surpassing this value.

Three HZB teams worked closely together for the record-breaking tandem cell. Now they present the details in Nature Nanotechnology. The journal also invited them to write a research briefing, in which they summarize their work and give an outlook on future developments.

Adding Heat to Electric Vehicle Batteries Helps Them Charge in Just 10 Minutes

Most efforts so far have relied on external heating and cooling systems, but these add a lot of bulk and also tend to use up a considerable amount of energy themselves. The researchers’ innovation, outlined in a recent paper in Nature , was to add an extra component to the batteries: a sheet of nickel foil just a few micrometers thick between the stacked electrodes of each cell.

This ultra-thin sheet is used as a heating element, and when a current is passed through it the cell heats up to 149° Fahrenheit in about a minute. This temperature is maintained through charging, but the cell then quickly cools back to room temperature as soon as the current is switched off.

When they tested their approach, the researchers found that they could charge a 265 watt-hour battery to 70 per cent in 11 minutes. They also showed that heating the battery didn’t seriously affect its lifetime, as it survived 2,000 cycles of charging, which would provide enough energy to drive more than 500,000 miles overall.

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