I believe that one of the most accessible and plentiful sources of energy available is being overlooked by the majority of researchers: the energy of wave and tidal action in the sea!

These are very apparent when we visit the coast and see the waves pounding in on the shore every hour of every day. Surely it can't be too hard to channel the energy to turn turbines, creating electricity?

Below are some reports of research being done in some parts of the world. It may seem there is quite a lot of research being done on sea power, but if we compare it with that for other sources, like nuclear, fossil fuel, oil etc (see below) there is really a very tiny amount being done.

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Albany looks to green power

The Mayor of Albany says he wants the city to become Western Australia's first green city by harnessing both wind and wave energy for its power. Albany's wind farm generates about 50 per cent of the city's energy and there are plans to increase that output with the addition of six turbines. Mayor Milton Evans says the city is also investigating the possibility of wave energy and has approached the Perth-based Carnegie Corporation to undertake a feasibility study. Councillor Evans says he wants Albany to eventually rely entirely on sustainable energy. "Carnegie Corporation was approached and given the option of looking at Albany," he said. "We have a unique situation of being right near the wind farm and they look like coming down here and carrying out the feasibility [study]."

Failed tidal generator attempting comeback

The proponents of a failed tidal power station for Derby in the Kimberley in northern Western Australia have resurrected their plans, turning their focus to the Ord River. Tidal Energy Australia was proposing a scheme at Doctor's Creek near Derby but the project collapsed in 2003 when costs blew out. Now the consortium has proposed a facility for the Lower Ord River near Wyndham, which it is trying to promote as a possible power source for an underground expansion at the Argyle Diamond Mine. Spokesman Brian Rourke says the company is waiting to hear if it has been granted approval for the project from the area's traditional owners. "Our proposal has the ability to supply Argyle at present and also the ability to be extended up to 180 megawatts, so there is a very large possibility of expansion," he said.

Ocealinx chosen for major UK energy project

The company behind the Port Kembla wave energy plant in south-eastern NSW, Oceanlinx, has been chosen as the fourth developer to become involved in a major wave energy project in the United Kingdom. The wave hub project would see the installation of a large electrical socket onto the seabed off the coast of Cornwall to carry electricity from various wave energy converters. The chief financial officer of Oceanlinx, John Bell, says the company's decision to become involved means the project can now move forward. "Part of the funding for this wave hub was conditional on the the South West England Regional Development Authority actually getting four companies on the hub," he said. "Now they have that, that actually ensures that they will in turn get the funding for building that wave hub, so it's double benefit really in that respect."

Bigger desal unit planned for Port Kembla Energetech plant

The Energetech wave-to-energy plant trialed and tested off Port Kembla has been installed in its new permanent home off the port's northern breakwater. The plant transforms raw energy from ocean waves into electricity or desalinated water. Energetech now intends to install a larger desalination unit on top of the plant, with the capacity to produce up to 200,000 litres of water a day. Energetech's chief financial officer, John Bell, says those modifications will take place over the next two months."Because it's in a different location to where we had originally had it located, we need to move the connection to the grid so that we can actually generate electricity into the grid," he said. "That will happen over the next month ... secondly, we're going to put a much larger scale desalination unit on the device just to prove our full-scale concept for that desalination facility which we have."

Maritime College riding a wave of power

Two technologies that generate electricity from the ocean are going through final testing at the Australian Maritime College in Launceston this week. Sydney company BioPower Systems has created two designs for ocean power conversion - one which harnesses energy from currents, the other from waves. Both models are more than 20 metres tall, sit just below the ocean surface and are designed to move and respond in a similar way to plants and fish. Smaller scale models are being tested in the AMC towing tank this week and prototypes will be installed off King and Flinders Islands later this year. Dr Tim Finnigan from BioPower Systems says the technology would benefit the environment. "These are clean power generators so they tap inexhaustible renewable energy from the ocean which is a massive energy resources which is relatively untapped and deliver power straight into communities," he said. "So it really is a method of offsetting greenhouse gas and other polluting energy sources." "These devices each are designed to produce in the order of half a megawatt and the idea is that you would deploy them in multiples like you would a windfarm but under the ocean surface and then you could build the capacity up to 100 megawatts to deliver a base load level power to communities."

Wave technology could be 'holy grail' of renewable energy

Federal Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane says a new technology harnessing wave energy could be the "holy grail" in providing electricity and drinking water to Australia's major capital cities. The system developed by Perth-based Carnegie Corporation with the help of more than $775,000 dollars in seed funding from the Federal Government works through a number of submerged buoys tethered to seabed pumps. The company chairman, Alan Burns, says the buoys move in harmony with the motion of the passing waves, pumping pressurised seawater to shore. "There is a very slow acting pump that pressurises the water from the sea brings it to shore at a very high pressure which then runs through a turbine and desalination plant, so there is no electricity, no oil, no nothing, it's simply sea water coming to shore at very high pressure," he said. Mr Macfarlane says the technology is capable of making a real difference with power and water supply to people living near the coast "The fact that the constancy of the waves even when the surface is dead calm means that you can build a base load renewable energy power station and that is really the holy grail for us, if you can produce renewable energy 24/7," he said.

Countries agree to build fusion power reactor

A seven-member international consortium has agreed to build a multi-billion-dollar experimental nuclear reactor in southern France designed to emulate the power of the Sun. Scientists hope the reactor will eventually lead to the production of abundant supplies of cheap, clean nuclear power without radioactive waste. The French poetically refer to the project as a way for mankind to recreate the energy of the Sun and the stars on Earth. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is the biggest international science project so far this century. It unites countries representing more than half the world's population behind the search for a clean, safe source of energy for the future. The project was launched after years of talks between France, South Korea, Russia, China, the EU, the US, India and Japan. ITER will first build a demonstration plant and says the project could produce electricity for the power grid within 30 years. This expensive experiment is aimed at using nuclear fusion rather than fission to create energy. The French president, Jacques Chirac, says action must be taken as soon as possible. "If nothing changes, humanity will have consumed in 200 years the fossil fuel resources that have been built up over hundreds of millions of years, giving rise at the same time to a real climate earthquake," he said. "The decline in natural resources and the struggle against global warming require a revolution in our ways of producing and consuming."

And…

Scientist urges switch to thorium

Supporters of an alternative energy source say it has the potential to revolutionise the nuclear power industry and is a safer alternative to uranium. Thorium oxide, which is three times more abundant than uranium, is also a radioactive material. But senior research scientist Dr Hashemi-Nezhad, from Sydney University, says it is safe to hold in your hand. "This is the future of the energy in the world - energy without green, without greenhouse gas production," he said. Dr Hashemi-Nezhad says thorium has all of the benefits of uranium as a nuclear fuel but none of the drawbacks. It can generate power without emitting greenhouse gases and it can be used to incinerate the world's stockpiles of plutonium. Dr Hashemi-Nezhad says thorium waste would only remain radioactive for 500 years, not the tens of thousands that uranium by-products remain active. "In fact, the green movement must come behind this project because we are moving in a direction to destroy all these existing nuclear wastes, to prevent nuclear weapons production, to [prevent] Chernobyl accident happening again," Dr Hashemi-Nezhad said.

Unlike uranium, thorium is not fissile, meaning it must be coaxed into a chain reaction.  At present, there are two methods of achieving this: a mixed fuel thorium reactor, which uses a small amount of uranium to kick-start the nuclear reaction; and then there is the project that Dr Hashemi-Nezhad is working on. "A particle accelerator is coupled with a nuclear reactor," he said. "A beam of protons sent from the accelerator heats a heavy metallic target, such as lead, and produces huge number of neutrons. "These neutrons start the chain reaction in the reactor. And once you switch off the accelerator, everything dies down." The thorium reactor being proposed by Dr Hashemi-Nezhad can be switched off immediately in the event of an accident - an option not available in conventional reactors.

But Australian Conservation Foundation president Ian Lowe says although thorium has advantages, using thorium is like being run over by a diesel train rather than a steam train. "It's true that the period of danger of radioactive waste from thorium reactors, if the design can be worked up and proven, would be hundreds of years rather than hundreds of thousands of years," he said. "But we're still talking about very long lifetimes." Mr Lowe says nuclear power is still a long way from becoming clean and green, even with thorium. "If we spent as much as we spend every year on nuclear research on renewable energy, we wouldn't be talking about this issue," he said. "We'd have had enough solar and wind and other forms of renewable energy to give us clean energy solutions for the entire future."

Also…

Scientists look to fusion energy

Scientists will today launch their plan for Australia to develop the potentially safe and sustainable energy source, fusion energy.The launch will outline how Australia can support the world's largest science experiment, by investing in the construction of the fusion energy experiment, ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor). ITER forum Chairman Dr Matthew Hole says Australia will receive international prestige by being involved in the project. "The principal point of this strategic plan is to develop capability for Australia such that when fusion power does come online, lets say in 20 or 30 years, Australia will be in a position of expertise in which to be able to make an intelligent assessment about fusion power," he said. "So it's about staying in the game."

Scientists clear technical hurdle in fusion research

Physicists working in the United States believe they have cracked an important problem facing man-made nuclear fusion, touted as the cheap, safe, clean and almost limitless energy source of the future. In fusion, atomic nuclei are fused together to release energy, as opposed to fission - the technique used for nuclear power and atomic bombs - where nuclei are split. In a fusion reactor, particles are rammed together to form a charged gas called a plasma, contained inside a doughnut-shaped chamber called a tokamak by powerful magnetic coils. A consortium of countries signed a deal last year to build the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) in southern France as a test-bed for an eventual commercial design. But many experts have been shaking their heads at the many challenges facing the ITER designers. One of them is a phenomenon called edge localised modes, or ELMs. These are sudden fluxes or eddies in the outer edge of the plasma that erode the tokamak's inner wall - a highly expensive metal skin that absorbs neutrons emitted from the plasma. Erosion means that the wall has to be replaced more often, which thus adds hugely to costs. Eroded particles also have a big impact on the plasma performance, diminishing the amount of energy it can deliver. Writing on Sunday in the British journal Nature Physics, a team led by Todd Evans of General Atomics, California, believes that the problematic ELMs can be cleverly controlled. They found that a small resonant magnetic field, derived from special coils located inside a reactor vessel, creates "chaotic" magnetic interference on the plasma edge, which stops the fluxes from forming. The experiments were conducted at the General Atomics' DIII-D National Fusion Facility, a tokamak in San Diego. Nuclear fusion is the same process used by the Sun to radiate energy. In the case of our star, hydrogen atoms are forced together to produce helium. On Earth, the fusion would take place in a reactor fuelled by two isotopes of hydrogen - deuterium and tritium - with helium the waste product. Deuterium is present in seawater, which makes it a virtually limitless resource. Tritium would be derived from irradiating the plentiful element lithium in the fusion vessel. The 10-billion-euro ($16.9 billion) ITER scheme entails building the largest tokamak in the world at Cadarache, near the southern French city of Marseille. The partners are the European Union (EU), the United States, Japan, Russia, China, India and South Korea. It is designed to be a test bed of fusion technologies, with a construction period of about 10 years and an operational lifespan of 20 years. If ITER works, a prototype commercial reactor will be built, and if that works, fusion technology will be rolled out across the world. Other problems facing fusion technology include the challenge of creating a self-sustaining plasma and efficiently containing the plasma so that charged particles do not leak out. In the various tokamaks, no one has achieved a self-sustaining fusion event for longer than about five seconds, and at the cost of using up far more energy than was yielded. A huge jolt of heat, of nearly 100 million Celsius, is needed to kick-start the process, which then has to be sustained by tiny amounts of fuel pellets.

 To me, it seems that the energy that's in the tide and waves is not being given anything like the attention it deserves!

Alternative energy sources

I think Al Gore really has something in his challenge to America to produce 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years . This would largely be accomplished through the development of solar energy and wind power. Imagine getting all the power we need from these basic elements of nature: the sun and the wind.

Laurence R. Smith
Kansas City Star