Why Germany's Nuclear Phase Out is Leading to More Coal Burning

In September 2012 Germany's Environment Minister opened a new lignite power plant, arguing the following: “If one builds a new state-of-the-art lignite power plant to replace several older and much less efficient plants, then I feel this should also be acknowledged as a contribution to our climate protection efforts.”

Peter Altmaier is not alone, recently the climate benefits of Germany's new and apparently ultra-efficient coal power plants have been extolled not only by manufacturers such as Siemens and power companies including RWE, but even some of the German nuclear phase out's most vocal proponents.

We are also now seeing increasing numbers of people suddenly noticing an uptick in coal power, and deciding it has little to do with Germany's decision to move away from nuclear energy. These arguments however require both an alternative arithmetic, and an alternative history. Here is why.

In the aftermath of Fukushima, Germany prematurely shut 8 nuclear power plants. Respect for arithmetic and the intelligence of my readers dictates that I do not explain why this should lead to an increase in carbon dioxide emissions. However, the relationship between Germany's nuclear phase out and the construction of new coal power plants deserves an explanation.

Between 2011 and 2015 Germany will open 10.7 GW of new coal fired power stations. This is more new coal coal capacity than was constructed in the entire two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The expected annual electricity production of these power stations will far exceed that of existing solar panels and will be approximately the same as that of Germany's existing solar panels and wind turbines combined.

• Solar panels and wind turbines however have expected life spans of no more than 25 years. 
• Coal power plants typically last 50 years or longer. 

At best you could call the recent developments in Germany's electricity sector contradictory.

(Coal production: author's calculation based on 80% load factor projected by Pöyry. Wind and solar production from Fraunhofer ISE. )

These new power plants are sometimes blamed by nuclear proponents on the post-Fukushima decision to shut all nuclear power plants by 2022. This is a myth. Any large piece of infrastructure takes a long time to build, and Germany simply could not respond to Fukushima by building new coal power plants at this scale and speed. Investment decisions for these power plants were made in 2005-2008 (see table 2 here). In response supporters of the nuclear phase out claim this shows that construction of new coal power plants have nothing to do with Germany's decision to phase out nuclear energy. This however is historical revisionism.

A terse history lesson. In the year 2000 the government of Gerhard Schröder announced that all of Germany's nuclear power plants must close by 2022, and this was passed into law in 2002.. This policy was revised by Angela Merkel in September 2010 to extend the lives of nuclear power plants so that the phase out would occur by 2032. Then after Fukushima, Merkel wisely or opportunistically - take your pick - decided to revert largely to the earlier phase out plan, closing eight nuclear power plants immediately and ruling that all would close by 2022.

The policy to phase out nuclear power was vital to the decisions to build new coal power plants. Closing down a quarter of your electricity generation leaves a gap that must be filled by something, and Germany realised it would largely have to be filled by one thing: coal. This is more or less beyond doubt, because Germany's then Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said so. Gabriel, now Germany's Minister for Energy and Economics told climate scientist James Hansen that Germany had to build new coal power plants because of its nuclear phase out, and stated elsewhere that Germany would have to build 8 to 12 coal power plants to replace its nuclear fleet.

And this is exactly what he got. In the first half of this decade Germany will open 9 new coal power plants.

ORIGINAL: Energy Collective

By Robert Wilson

Posted January 20, 2014

Blooming marvellous! Pretty flowers that open up before your eyes are the world's first ever INFLATABLE 3D printed objects

Richard Clarkson created the design as part of his seamless blossom project
Flowers open as air is pumped into chambers, revealing a colourful core

They were produced using Objet’s 3D printer which is able to simultaneously print a mix of both a flexible and rigid material

As remarkable as 3D printing is, most objects created using the technique have, up until now, been limited to rigid structures.

But this could be about to change with a new generation of materials that are allowing designers to create morphing 3D designs.

Richard Clarkson from Victoria University of Wellington has become one of the first to make use of multi-material 3D printing by creating inflatable rubber-like flowers.

Scroll down for video...

MULTI-MATERIAL 3D PRINTING

As well as creating beautiful art installations, multi-material 3D printing aims reduce the number of manufacturing steps for one object.

it allows, for instance a working product to be created with different properties without the need to bring together separate components.

Experts claim it increases speed to market by allowing organisations to prototype increasingly complex parts. It also reduces waste products by using exactly the right amount of material required.

The flowers, created as part of the ‘seamless blossom project’, open up as air is pumped into inner chambers, revealing a colourful inner core.

Mr Clarkson claims they are the first ever inflatable objects to be created with 3D printing.


‘Basically, it’s a curved hollow chamber with flexible rubber. As you inflate it, it creates a gap of air that pushes against the inner layer, forcing the outer layers open. It almost blooms, like a flower,’ he said.

Recent advances in 3D printing now allow the simultaneous layering of different build materials in a single print

Incredible inflatable 3D printing technology shows flowers...

Seamless Blossom - Richard Clarkson (video)

A screenshot from the computer aided design (CAD) programme Richard Clarkson used to create the flowers

The flowers were created using Objet’s multi-material printer which is able to simultaneously print a mix of both a flexible and rigid material at point of print.


Mr Clarkson has designed his project as an interactive installation without any electronics, sensors or computer control, working only on air pressure.


It is the first in what experts are predicting could be a wave of 3D printed objects that use different materials to morph shape.


Last year, for instance, U.S. architect Skylar Tibbits announced a project to develop morphing materials in collaboration with Minneapolis-based group Stratasys

Mr Clarkson has designed his project as an interactive installation without any electronics, sensors or computer control, working only on air pressure

The flowers, created as part of the 'seamless blossom project' open up as air is pumped into inner chambers, revealing a colourful inner core

Mr Tibbits has now set up a radical lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to create materials that self-assemble.


Like Mr Clarkson, the MIT lab plans to use of multi-material 3D printing to programme different properties into various parts of a product’s geometry.


The idea is that these parts will have varying water-absorbing characteristics that activate a change in shape when they come into contact with moisture.

Te technique could lead to structures such as self-assembling furniture, or water pipes that know when to expand and contract.

Mr Clarkson claims these flowers are the first ever inflatable objects to be created using 3D printing

The technique could lead to structures such as self-assembling furniture, or water pipes that know when to expand and contract

ORIGINAL: Daily Mail

By Ellie Zolfagharifard
24 January 2014

New MIT 3-D Printing Innovations Create Printable Objects That Assemble Themselves

ORIGINAL: FastCo Exist

With 4-D printing, Skylar Tibbits and the Self Assembly Lab are printing materials that fold, transform, and shape themselves, and could adapt to changing environmental conditions. No assembly required.

When Skylar Tibbits drops a plastic-like rod into a tub of water, it starts to take shape, turning into a cube. It’s a result of what he calls 4-D printing, which adds the fourth dimension, time, to the increasingly popular process of 3-D printing. Over the time dimension, the objects self-assemble. But this isn’t like adding water to shrunken animal-shaped sponges and watching them grow.

This notion of self-assembly seems futuristic, but it’s been researched before, particularly within the field of nanotechnology. And Tibbits, along with collaborators Stratasys Ltd. and Autodesk, sees the potential to use 4-D printed objects to solve larger efficiency problems in disaster relief or the oil and gas industries. 

His Self Assembly Lab is working with engineering firm Geosyntec, to explore programmable water infrastructure. “The idea is these pipes would expand or contract to either pinch water, expand for capacity or potentially undulate to move water,” Tibbits says. Think of it--a water main that knew whether it needed to shrink or expand and could prevent burst pipes and eliminate pumps and valves.

With 3-D printing reaching the mainstream, Tibbits’s vision for 4-D printing isn’t exclusive to large problems either: “We want to try to find more elegant solutions to have smarter systems in interacting and making things on your own.”

Change Generation | Skylar Tibbits from BFD Productions, LLC. on Vimeo.

A cross-disciplinary research lab at MIT composed of designers, scientists and engineers inventing self-assembly technologies aimed at reimagining processes of construction, manufacturing and assembly at all scale-lengths.

Self-Assembly is a process by which disordered parts build an ordered structure through local interaction. We have demonstrated that this phenomenon is scale-independent and can be utilized for self-constructing and manufacturing systems at nearly every scale. We have also identified the key ingredients for self-assembly as a simple set of responsive building blocks, energy and interactions that can be designed within nearly every material and machining process available. Self-assembly promises to enable breakthroughs across every applications of biology, material science, software, robotics, manufacturing, transportation, infrastructure, construction, the arts, and even space exploration. The Self-Assembly Lab is working with academic, commercial, nonprofit, and government partners, collaborators, and sponsors to make our self-assembling future a reality.

For more information, please contact us at sjet at mit.edu

4D Printing
MIT 2013

BioMolecular
Self-Assembly
TED Global, Edinburgh 2012

Self-Assembly Line
TED Conference, CA 2012

Self-Folding Proteins
MIT 2012

Biased Chains
MIT 2010

Decibot
MIT 2009

About the Director
Skylar Tibbits is a trained Architect, Designer, Computer Scientist and Artist whose research focuses on developing self-assembly and programmable material technologies for industrial applications in our built environment. Skylar is currently a faculty member in MIT's Department of Architecture, teaching graduate and undergraduate design studios and co-teaching How to Make (Almost) Anything, a seminar at MIT's Media Lab. Skylar was recently awarded a 2013 Architectural League Prize, The Next Idea Award at Ars Electronica 2013, the Visionary Innovation Award at the Manufacturing Leadership Summit, a 2012 TED Senior Fellowship and was named a Revolutionary Mind in SEED Magazine’s 2008 Design Issue. Previously, he has worked at a number of renowned design offices including: Zaha Hadid Architects, Asymptote Architecture and Point b Design. He has designed and built large-scale installations around the world, including locations in New York, Philadelphia, Paris, Calgary, Berlin, Frankfurt, Long Beach, Edinburgh and Cambridge. He has also exhibited work at prestigious institutions, including; The Guggenheim Museum NY, the Beijing Biennale, Storefront for Art and Architecture and lectured at MoMA and SEED Media Group's MIND08 Conference. He has been published extensively online and in print outlets such as the New York Times, Wired, Nature, Fast Company, various peer-reviewed journals and books including: Fabricate: Making Digital Architecture, Digital Architecture, Testing to Failure, Scripting Cultures and Form + Code. As a guest critic, Skylar has guest lectured at schools around the world including; The University of Pennsylvania, The Institute for Computational Design, The Architectural Association, Pratt Institute and Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

Skylar has a Professional. Bachelor of Architecture degree and minor in experimental computation from Philadelphia University. Continuing his education at MIT, he received a Masters of Science in Design + Computation and a Masters of Science in Computer Science under the guidance of advisors; Patrick Winston, Neil Gershenfeld, Erik Demaine and Terry Knight.

Skylar is also the founder and principal of a multidisciplinary architecture, art and design practice, SJET LLC. Started in 2007 as platform for experimental computation and design, SJET has grown into a research-based practice crossing disciplines from architecture, design, sculpture, fabrication, computer science, toys to robotics.

A number of influential collaborations include:

Neil Gershenfeld, Director of The Center for Bits and Atoms | Arthur Olson, Director of the Molecular Graphics Lab at The Scripps Research Institute | Shelly Linor, Daniel Dikovsky and Shai Hirsch of Stratasys | Carlos Olguin, Director of the Bio/Nano Programmable Matter Research Group at Autodesk | Erik and Marty Demaine at MIT, CSAIL | Adam Bly, CEO of SEED Media Group | Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch, Principals of Aranda/Lasch | Matt Trimble, Principal of RadLab | Marc Fornes, Principal of THEVERYMANY | Jared Laucks, Brandon Kruysman, Jonathan Proto and many others....

If You Think 3D Printing Is Disruptive, Wait for 4D

ORIGINAL: WSJ - Tech Europe
By Ben Rooney

3D printing will have a direct economic impact of between $230 and $550 billion a year in 2025, according to a report by McKinsey & Company.
Every now and then you come across a technology, or a mooted technology, that sounds so far-fetched, so outlandish that it belongs with proper flying cars and the paperless office. Things that will never happen.

Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

The idea of “printing” objects, so-called 3D printing once seemed pretty outlandish but it has already made the voyage from science fiction to startup. According to a recent report by analysts McKinsey & Company, “Disruptive technologies: Advances that will transform life, business, and the global economy,” 3D printing will have a direct economic impact of between $230 billion and $550 billion a year in 2025.
But if you think 3D printing is disruptive, then what about a technology that could in the view of one of its main evangelists “make the world editable.” That is disruption.

That technology is 4D printing — 3D printing but with designs that continue to evolve after manufacture. That really does sound far-fetched. But then a rocket was never supposed to be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere and four-member guitar bands were never going to be big.

According to Jeff Kowalski, chief technology officer for Autodesk, Inc., the very earliest building blocks for that future are in place today.

Before we stray into to that extra dimension, what do we mean by 3D printing? Additive printing, as it sometimes known, is the opposite of conventional, subtractive, production. Say you want to make a metal part. Normally, you start with a large block of metal and mill, drill and grind bits off. To 3D-print that same part you start with a metal powder and, in much the same way as a bubble jet printer builds up a 2D image one row at a time, a 3D printer builds up the part one layer at a time. Using fusion techniques the metal powder becomes a solid.

That changes the economics of complexity. “Historically, the cost of objects has been determined by the number of processed steps. The number of times I have to touch the mill … that’s what affects the price,” Mr. Kowalski said. But in 3D printing “whether you’re just making a cubic solid block, or a highly filigreed whatever it might be” the price is the same. “Complexity turns out to be free,” he said.

But the problem with objects today, conventionally manufactured or produced by 3D printers, is that they are unchanging. “When we make most items today, that’s the end of their definition. Take a backpack, it achieved ‘backpackness’ when it was manufactured,” Mr. Kowalski said.

What 4D printing offers is the opportunity for objects to change, to adapt to their environment, to respond.

Earlier this year, Skylar Tibbits, director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Self-Assembly Lab, created a bit of a stir with his talk on 4D printing.

“We are looking at the ability to program physical and biological materials to change shape, change properties and even compute outside of silicon-based matter,” Mr. Tibbits told the TED conference in February. He demonstrated a string of 3D-printed smart materials that reacted when it came into contact with water by folding into a cube.

“Imagine if water pipes could expand or contract to change capacity or change flow rate; or maybe undulate like peristalsis to move the water themselves,” he said.

Mr. Tibbits is talking about the macro level. What Mr. Kowalski is taking about is design at the cellular level. He is about taking the tools nature uses to make things and essentially re-programming them. Nature makes objects by re-arranging disordered structures into ordered ones. Doesn’t that sound a lot like 3D printing? Except your base material isn’t powdered metal, it is molecules, and you don’t use a 3D printer, you use natures own factory — cells. That puts design at the junction of material science and synthetic biology.

“The key is instructing that factory, understanding DNA, being able to predict what is going to happen at the metabolic level and at the environmental level,” Mr. Kowalski said.

“In some cases we will need to understand the interior, the pathway, the chemistry of what is going on. In other areas we will not need to understand that chemistry, we can treat it more as the black box and simply address it. We know that for example this sequence, followed by this sequence, will produce this effect.”

“The cell can be programmed to make molecules, that’s what cells do. So we can make other materials, even ones that plants and animals don’t make today if we find the right instruction for it to ‘print’.” If cells can manipulate calcium compounds to make bones, can they manipulate other molecules to make other structures?

DNA sequencing, reading the genome, has gone from taking years and costing millions, to costing thousands. “The next step after sequencing is annotation, where we scan through that massive six billion letters and we figure out what does what. After that it really becomes a design problem of recombination. It’s like code, like computer programming with libraries and APIs.”

It still sounds utterly fanciful and like science fiction, and Mr. Kowalski jumped rather quickly through the difficult part: “We figure out what does what.” That is a task of Herculean proportion.

But work has already started, and even today with just a minute proportion completed you can create your own DNA and have it synthesized. The Israeli startup Genome Compiler has a drag-and-drop editor that literally allows you to pick-and-mix bits from genomes to create new DNA that can be synthesized. Want a plant that glows in the dark? There is a sequence for that.

Additional Resources for you to Explore

http://selfassemblylab.net/ 
 

 

Skylar Tibbits is a trained Architect, Designer, Computer Scientist and Artist whose research focuses on developing self-assembly technologies for large-scale structures in our physical environment. Skylar is currently a faculty member in MIT's Department of Architecture, teaching graduate and undergraduate design studios and co-teaching How to Make (Almost) Anything, a seminar at MIT's Media Lab. Skylar was recently awarded a TED2012 Senior Fellowship, a TED2011 Fellowship and has been named a Revolutionary Mind in SEED Magazine's 2008 Design Issue. 

Previously, he has worked at a number of renowned design offices including: Zaha Hadid Architects, Asymptote Architecture and Point b Design. He has designed and built large-scale installations around the world, including locations in New York, Philadelphia, Paris, Calgary, Berlin, Frankfurt, Long Beach, Edinburgh and Cambridge. He has also exhibited work at prestigious institutions, including; The Guggenheim Museum NY, the Beijing Biennale, Storefront for Art and Architecture and lectured at MoMA and SEED Media Group's MIND08 Conference.  

He has been published extensively online and in print outlets such as the New York Times, Wired, Nature, Fast Company, various peer-reviewed journals and books including: Fabricate: Making Digital Architecture, Digital Architecture, Testing to Failure, Scripting Cultures and Form + Code. As a guest critic, Skylar has visited schools around the world including; The University of Pennsylvania, The Institute for Computational Design, The Architectural Association, Pratt Institute and Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

Skylar graduated from Philadelphia University with a 5 yr. Bachelor of Architecture degree and minor in experimental computation. Continuing his education at MIT, he received a Masters of Science in Design + Computation and a Masters of Science in Computer Science under the guidance of advisors; Patrick Winston, Neil Gershenfeld, Erik Demaine and Terry Knight.

Skylar is also the founder and principal of a multidisciplinary architecture, art and design practice, SJET LLC. Started in 2007 as platform for experimental computation and design, SJET has grown into a research-based practice crossing disciplines from architecture, design, sculpture, fabrication, computer science, toys to robotics.