I have long been a fan of Rick Smalley and of nanotechnology. I'm sorry to hear that he is no longer with us, but his achievments may well transform our lives.
[QOUTE]S: One area is in the transmission and storage of electrical energy.
It would be transforming to have much more efficient electrical energy transport by wire over continental distances in hundreds of gigawatts. It would also be transforming to have electrical energy storage on a vast scale. I believe it’s best to do this locally in our houses and small businesses. We need to be able to pull electrical power off the grid when it is cheapest and tuck it away somewhere so that it is available for use later, whenever that home or business needs it. Long-distance electrical power transfer would allow primary energy producers to market their energy thousands of miles away. Imagine vast solar farms in the deserts. You know, if you look at the planet, virtually every continent has deserts. Those deserts have tremendous energy resources in the form of sunlight. Even if we find a way of generating the electricity, you’ve got to transport that energy from the deserts, where people don’t live, to other places on the continents where they do live, and you’ve got to shift the time when the energy is available. I’m confident that the best answer is going to be enabled by nanotechnology.
What can nanotechnology do?
S: Let’s talk first about transmission. The angle I’ve been devoting my efforts to is a new kind of conducting cable made of what are called armchair quantum wires: single-walled carbon nanotubes [buckytubes] with a particular structure.
These are quantum wave guides for electrons. I am confident over time we will be able to find new ways of spinning continuous cables using such technology.
This approach could yield cables with the conductivity of copper but with a strength greater than steel at one-sixth the weight. Carbon nanotubes are capable of handling incredible levels of electrical current, as much as a billion amps per square centimeter. That’s compared with conventional cabling material, which can carry only a couple thousand amps per square centimeter. In storage, our hope is to develop new batteries. The chemistry of batteries needs to be improved at the nano level and brought up to the macro level. The best candidates include buckytubes in lithium ion batteries, flow cells, and hydrogen fuel cells. [/quote]
I believe that carbon nanotuble transmission lines will be the key to transferring huge quantities of power efficiently from generating sites in other time zones, to the cities where it is needed.
