Welcome ! As a young French Marketing professional with a Master's in International Management I have been selecting since January 2007 the latest headlines and best researches on sustainable development, climate change, cleantech and the world energy sector. Sounds great ? Don't hesitate to subscribe now !
The French magazine Science & Vie [Fr] published this month a lengthy series of articles on thorium-based nuclear, and how it could solve the various issues encountered with uranium-based energy generation.
Much more safer, without the need to be enriched, Thorium is also four times more abundant than Uranium. Molten salt reactors could also recycle the waste of current reactors.
In today’s post we will have a look at the various other advantages of this still not commercially developped technology. Continue »
It is no news for you if you subscribed to this website : solar thermal alone could provide up to a quarter of global electricity by 2050. The use of molten salt could enable our civilization to store solar electricity for up to seven hours.
Morocco is ideally located to harvest all this energy as the average sunshine there is over 3,000 hours per year ( over 8 hours a day ). The Kingdom will build for $9 billion (6.6 billion euros) up to 2 GW of capacity.
This will be brought by five different plants of both solar photovoltaic and thermal and will answer up to 42 percent of the national need by 2020. Continue »
One of the main hindrances of solar energy is that when there is no more sun, there is no more electricity as well. This problem is being solved with the molten salt technology which stores energy for seven hours.
A Californian company is willing to build a 150 Megawatt plant – The Rice Solar Energy Project – using this technology in the Sonoran Desert near Palm Springs. A similar project with 280 MW of capacity could soon be built in Arizona.
Answering the main issue faced by solar, molten salt and similar technologies will play an important role if solar is due to answer a quarter of our global electricity needs.
