Solar cheaper than Nuclear?
It was brought to my attention that an article published by wired this week, discussed the fact that solar power has now become cheaper per MWh than Nuclear. This must be a significant milestone to have been reached in the development of new novel power solutions to our current massive drain. We have had numerous seminars in the department over the last few years discussing new ways to make more efficient solar cells, and decreasing the reliance on expensive rare earth metals to make them.
I don’t know what the current development has been to drop the pricing below that of Nuclear, however I want to put forward that this could be somewhat of a misnomer. Nuclear has a huge (in the order of billions of £s) initial outlay, with, what wired has called huge chances of defaulting on loans (greater than 50%) which will obviously increase the interest on any loan of capital that these consortiums are taking. One of the primary reasons that nuclear is so expensive is that there has been a reduction in the number of plants being built. This must have led to a loss of the specialist knowledge required to build and manufacture the components. I put forward a discussion that had we carried on building Nuclear to keep up with the current demands then Nuclear would be significantly cheaper, enabling much cheaper power plants to be created.
If you haven’t realised by now I am a huge proponent for nuclear power, I still believe that it is the only way to keep up with the current world energy demands (well until fusion becomes a significant possibility, cheap enough to be created for domestic use). Anyone who is against Nuclear just because of the inherent risks, then you really should look up how these systems are controlled, and why catastrophes such as Chenobyl happened. Most people blindly follow their media of choice, and so until the media gets behind the only possible option to keep up with the current power draw then Nuclear is bound to fail.
Which leads back to why Solar is not the best option. Primarily it is because these require very rare earth resources, and secondly because the conversion ratio of each *cheaper* panel is well under the 50% mark.
No matter how cheap solar becomes, it will never become a more viable option than Nuclear, the only way to completely move towards solar and wind would be for each country to decrease their reliance of electricity, and decrease the amount they use.
The paper is due to be published in Physical Chemistry, Chemical Physics (PCCP) a high impact journal by The Royal Society of Chemistry. The paper is entitled “” and considers the catalytic properties of defected Ice Ih on the dissociation of Chloro-flourocompounds (CFCs) which play a fundamental role in ozone depletion. Once the paper is published I will add link and citation here.
Having never really been that interested in UK politics before this general election, the Twitter trend #scivote has made me realise that politics does have a role to play in a scientists everyday life, and in my own constituency I made sure that I voted to make my #scivote count. However from watching and reading the results today it seems to me that there is a gross injustice in how the votes matter. Only weak constituencies are important in the grand scheme of things, voting against the holder of a stronghold usually is but a drop in the ocean of what is required. Swinging a constituency from one party to another requires such a large volume of votes that it is unlikely to happen, however in a area where every vote counts it can be down to 100s, or less, votes which can cause the swing from one party to another handing them another seat in the houses of parliament, and (as the BBC represented it) another slab in the road to number 10.
Well having played about 10 hours of the excellent Just Cause 2, and not being upset by the seemingly simple and over exaggerated physics, it is time to explore why this is. Games in general have become more and more physics orientated, what started as a real advantage for the sublime Half-Life 2 on the PC, has now become a real buzzword in the development of any game. Physics has become one of the most touted parts of a new shooter, RPG, RTS etc. Through the development of such hardware solutions as PhysX (changed from a dedicated hardware solution to becoming an integral part of the Nvidia drivers package, and the ability to run concurrently on Nvidia graphics cards), and Havok, these API’s have allowed developers to include more and more complex physics in their games. Just how important are accurate physics, and what problems come from having more and more accurate physics?
forming nano clusters and the attachment of an excess electron forming an anionic species 
. These models are important in multiple disciplines, as in biology anionic water clusters could be responsible for radiation damage, pollutants modelled in anionic water clusters are important for atmospheric science as the additional charge could potentially act as a catalyst in the atomic dissociation of the Halides in the pollutants forming free radicals.
in both the neutral and anionic forms, and the water trimer 
, where quantum dynamics have been performed on the trimer using the Car-Parrinello Molecular Dynamics to allow the system to evolve in time, where the electronic wave-functions effectively follow the ionic movements and stay close to the Born-Oppenheimer surface. We have seen that in the anionic water trimer the favoured geometrical structure is a linear shape, with the loss of a hydrogen bond, which has lead to the discussion that the geometry is defined through the maximisation of the dipole moment of the structure, allowing the electron to become dipole bound.
is being studied, NO is well known as a neuro-receptor, and plays important roles in the body. 
) in an almost instantaneous time frame (sub pico-seconds), where the formation of the Cl free radical is more energetically stable than the whole CFC on the surface. It was observed that the radical is triply hydrogen bonded to the surface, with the additional electron spatially localised on the halogen.
Following on from the initial calculator design, extensions to allow the additional functionality of single float point memory. Adding this is fairly simple, when you remember that previously we were able to send the characters from the display to a float variable and then perform an operation on them.
SocialVibe