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      A green hydrogen innovation for clean energy

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      Renewable energy today — mainly derived from the sun or wind — depends on batteries for storage. While costs have dropped in recent years, the pursuit of more efficient means of storing renewable power continues.

      “All of these technologies, unfortunately, have a long way to go,” said Sossina Haile SB ’86, PhD ’92, the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University, at recent talk at MIT. She was the speaker of the fall 2023 Wulff Lecture, an event hosted by the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) to ignite enthusiasm for the discipline.

      To add to the renewable energy mix — and help quicken the pace to a sustainable future — Haile is working on an approach based on hydrogen in fuel cells, particularly for eco-friendly fuel in cars. Fuel cells, like batteries, produce electricity from chemical reactions but don’t lose their charge so long as fuel is supplied.

      To generate power, the hydrogen must be pure — not attached to another molecule. Most methods of producing hydrogen today require burning fossil fuel, which generates planet-heating carbon emissions. Haile proposes a “green” process using renewable electricity to extract the hydrogen from steam.

      When hydrogen is used in a fuel cell, “you have water as the product, and that’s the beautiful zero emissions,” Haile said, referring to the renewable energy production cycle that is set in motion.

      Ammonia fuels hydrogen’s potential

      Hydrogen is not yet widely used as a fuel because it’s difficult to transport. For one, it has low energy density, meaning a large volume of hydrogen gas is needed to store a large amount of energy. And storing it is challenging because hydrogen’s tiny molecules can infiltrate metal tanks or pipes, causing cracks and gas leakage.

      Haile’s solution for transporting hydrogen is using ammonia to “carry” it. Ammonia is three parts hydrogen and one part nitrogen, so the hydrogen needs to be separated from the nitrogen before it can be used in the kind of fuel cells that can power cars.

      Ammonia has some advantages, including using existing pipelines and a high transmission capacity, Haile said — so more power can be transmitted at any given time.

      To extract the hydrogen from ammonia, Haile has built devices that look a lot like fuel cells, with cesium dihydrogen phosphate as an electrolyte. The “superprotonic” material displays high proton conductivity — it allows protons, or positively charged particles, to move through it. This is important for hydrogen, which has just a proton and an electron. By letting only protons through the electrolyte, the device strips hydrogen from the ammonia, leaving behind the nitrogen.

      The material has other benefits, too, Haile said: “It’s inexpensive, nontoxic, earth-abundant — all these good things that you want to have when you think about a sustainable energy technology.”

      Play video

      2023 Fall Wulff LectureVideo: Department of Materials Science and Engineering

      Sparking interest — and hope

      Haile’s talk piqued interest in the audience, which nearly filled the 6-120 auditorium at MIT, which seats about 150 people.

      Materials science and engineering major Nikhita Law heard hope in Haile’s talk for a more sustainable future.

      “A major problem in making our energy system sustainable is finding ways to store energy from renewables,” Law says. Even if hydrogen-powered cars are not as wide-scale as lithium-battery-powered electric cars, “a permanent energy storage station where we convert electricity into hydrogen and convert it back seems like it makes more sense than mining more lithium.”

      Another DMSE student, senior Daniel Tong, learned about the challenges involved in transporting hydrogen at another seminar and was curious to learn more. “This was something I hadn’t thought of: Can you carry hydrogen more effectively in a different form? That’s really cool.”

      He adds that talks like the Wulff Lecture are helpful in keeping people up to date in a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary field such as materials science and engineering, which spans chemistry, physics, engineering, and other disciplines. “This is a really good way to get exposed to different parts of materials science. There are so many more facets than you know of.”

      In her talk, Haile encouraged audience members to get involved in sustainability research.

      “There’s lots of room for further insight and materials discovery,” she said.

      Haile concluded by underscoring the challenges faced by developing countries in dealing with climate change impacts, particularly those near the equator where there isn’t adequate infrastructure to deal with big swings in precipitation and temperature. For the people who aren’t driven to solve problems that affect people on the other side of the world, Haile offered some extra motivation.

      “I’m sure many of you enjoy coffee. This is going to put the coffee crops in jeopardy as well,” she said. More

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      A civil discourse on climate change

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      A new MIT initiative designed to encourage open dialogue on campus kicked off with a conversation focused on how to address challenges related to climate change.

      “Climate Change: Existential Threat or Bump in the Road” featured Steve Koonin, theoretical physicist and former U.S. undersecretary for science during the Obama administration, and Kerry Emanuel, professor emeritus of atmospheric science at MIT. A crowd of roughly 130 students, staff, and faculty gathered in an MIT lecture hall for the discussion on Tuesday, Oct. 24. 

      “The bump is strongly favored,” Koonin said when the talk began, referring to his contention that climate change was a “bump in the road” rather than an existential threat. After proposing a future in which we could potentially expect continued growth in America’s gross domestic product despite transportation and infrastructure challenges related to climate change, he concluded that investments in nuclear energy and capacity increases related to storing wind- and solar-generated energy could help mitigate climate-related phenomena. 

      Emanuel, while mostly agreeing with Koonin’s assessment of climate challenges and potential solutions, cautioned against underselling the threat of human-aided climate change.

      “Humanity’s adaptation to climate stability hasn’t prepared us to effectively manage massive increases in temperature and associated effects,” he argued. “We’re poorly adapted to less-frequent events like those we’re observing now.”

      Decarbonization, Emanuel noted, can help mitigate global conflicts related to fossil fuel usage. “Carbonization kills between 8 and 9 million people annually,” he said.

      The conversation on climate change is one of several planned on campus this academic year. The speaker series is one part of “Civil Discourse in the Classroom and Beyond,” an initiative being led by MIT philosophers Alex Byrne and Brad Skow. The two-year project is meant to encourage the open exchange of ideas inside and outside college and university classrooms. 

      The speaker series pairs external thought leaders with MIT faculty to encourage the interrogation and debate of all kinds of ideas.

      Finding common ground

      At the talk on climate change, both Koonin and Emanuel recommended a slow and steady approach to mitigation efforts, reminding attendees that, for example, developing nations can’t afford to take a developed world approach to climate change. 

      “These people have immediate needs to meet,” Koonin reminded the audience, “which can include fossil fuel use.”

      Both Koonin and Emanuel recommended a series of steps to assist with both climate change mitigation and effective messaging:

      Sustain and improve climate science — continue to investigate and report findings.
      Improve climate communications for non-experts — tell an easy-to-understand and cohesive story.
      Focus on reliability and affordability before mitigation — don’t undertake massive efforts that may disrupt existing energy transmission infrastructure.
      Adopt a “graceful” approach to decarbonization — consider impacts as broadly as possible.
      Don’t constrain energy supply in the developing world.
      Increase focus on developing and delivering alternative responses  — consider the potential ability to scale power generation, and delivery methods like nuclear energy.
      Mitigating climate risk requires political will, careful consideration, and an improved technical approach to energy policy, both concluded.

      “We have to learn to deal rationally with climate risk in a polarized society,” Koonin offered.

      The audience asked both speakers questions about impacts on nonhuman species (“We don’t know but we should,” both shared); nuclear fusion (“There isn’t enough tritium to effectively scale the widespread development of fusion-based energy; perhaps in 30 to 40 years,” Koonin suggested); and the planetary boundaries framework (“There’s good science underway in this space and I’m curious to see where it’s headed,” said Emanuel.) 

      “The event was a great success,” said Byrne, afterward. “The audience was engaged, and there was a good mix of faculty and students.”

      “One surprising thing,” Skow added, “was both Koonin and Emanuel were down on wind and solar power, [especially since] the idea that we need to transition to both is certainly in the air.”

      More conversations

      A second speaker series event, held earlier this month, was “Has Feminism Made Progress?” with Mary Harrington, author of “Feminism Against Progress,” and Anne McCants, MIT professor of history. An additional discussion planned for spring 2024 will cover the public health response to Covid-19.

      Discussions from the speaker series will appear as special episodes on “The Good Fight,” a podcast hosted by Johns Hopkins University political scientist Yascha Mounk.

      The Civil Discourse project is made possible due, in part, to funding from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations and a collaboration between the MIT History Section and Concourse, a program featuring an integrated, cross-disciplinary approach to investigating some of humanity’s most interesting questions.

      The Civil Discourse initiative includes two components: the speaker series open to the MIT community, and seminars where students can discuss freedom of expression and develop skills for successfully engaging in civil discourse. More

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      Working to beat the clock on climate change

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      “There’s so much work ahead of us and so many obstacles in the way,” said Raisa Lee, director of project development with Clearway Energy Group, an independent clean power producer. But, added Lee, “It’s most important to focus on finding spaces and people so we can foster growth and support each other — the power of belonging!”

      These sentiments captured the spirit of the 12th annual Women in Clean Energy Education and Empowerment (C3E) Symposium and Awards, held recently at MIT. The conference is part of the C3E Initiative, which aims to connect women in clean energy, recognize the accomplishments of leaders across different fields, and engage more women in the enterprise of decarbonization.

      The conference topic, “Clearing hurdles to achieve net zero by 2050: Moving quickly, eliminating risks, and leaving no one behind,” spoke to the shared sense of urgency and commitment to community-building among the several hundred participants attending in person and online.

      As symposium speakers attested, the task of saving the world doesn’t seem as daunting when someone has your back.

      Melinda Baglio, chief investment officer and general counsel of the renewable energy finance firm  CleanCapital, said “I have several groups of women in my life … and whenever I am doing something really difficult, I like to close my eyes for a minute and imagine their hands right on my shoulders and just giving me that support and pushing me forward to do the thing that I need to do.”

      The C3E symposium was hosted by the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), which partners in the C3E Initiative with the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), Stanford University’s Precourt Institute for Energy, and the Texas A&M Energy Institute.

      Gender diversity and emissions

      “Time is not on our side in the race to achieve net zero by 2050,” said Martha Broad, executive director of MITEI, in her opening remarks.“However, by increasing the gender diversity of the energy sector, we’re putting our best team forward to tackle this challenge.”

      Closing a pronounced gender gap in corporate leadership and legislative bodies would also help, she said. Research has demonstrated that improving gender diversity in the energy sector leads to stronger climate governance and innovation. In addition, Broad noted, a recent study showed that increasing gender diversity in legislative bodies results in stronger climate policy and “hence lowers CO2 emissions.”

      There was wide agreement that beating the clock on climate change means recruiting, training, and retaining a vast and diverse workforce. In talks and panels, symposium participants described their wide-ranging roles as leaders in this enterprise.

      “This is a very exciting time to be working in clean energy, and an exciting time to be doubling down on the work that C3E does, because clean energy technologies are ready,” said Kathleen Hogan, principal undersecretary for infrastructure at DoE. In her keynote address, Hogan highlighted “the amazing, historic funding through the bipartisan infrastructure law and Inflation Reduction Act, where we are putting ultimately trillions of dollars into clean energy.” This presents a “tremendous opportunity to grow the clean energy workforce … to pull in the next generation of women to advance this field of work, and to figure out how to deliver the maximum impact.”

      Gina McCarthy, who received the C3E Lifetime Achievement Award, rallied symposium participants to remain hopeful and engaged. “It’s all about a world of new possibilities, new partnerships we can create together,” said the former White House national climate advisor and Environmental Protection Agency administrator. “Use each milestone as an opportunity to pat ourselves on the back and be more passionate than ever before — that is how change happens.”

      “You belong”

      Other speakers provided ample evidence of passion and persistence in their pursuit of clean energy goals.

      C3E advocacy award winner and climate justice policy leader Jameka Hodnett works to ensure that historically underfunded Black communities benefit from decarbonization programs. Not all of her community contacts share her concerns about climate change or recognize the necessity of an energy transition. “This is difficult work, where I must be willing to stick my neck out and build relationships with others across differences,” she said.

      Remote and often marginalized communities in the United States and around the world pose other kinds of challenges. Wahleah Johns, director of DoE’s Office of Indian Energy Policy and Programs, described the loss of jobs on tribal lands as fossil fuel companies shut down, and the problem of developing trust with local groups. She believes energy justice in these communities must draw “on Indigenous, traditional knowledge of design, building, and planning” and demonstrate “value for future generations.”

      Evangelina Galvan Shreeve, daughter of immigrant farm workers, is tapping the talent of diverse communities to build the next generation’s clean energy workforce. The C3E education award winner, chief diversity officer, and director of STEM education at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory tells young people: “You are worthy of joining places you dream about, you are brilliant, and we need both to pursue the clean energy future. You belong.”

      Reducing the carbon budget

      In her keynote address, Sally M. Benson, the Precourt Family Professor of Energy Science Engineering at Stanford University’s School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences, warned of the hazards of not acting quickly to reduce the global carbon budget. “It’s starting to cost us lots of money: In some years we are getting half a trillion dollars in damage,” she said. “We need all hands on deck, and to do that we need to align people’s views to give us the speed and scale to beat incredibly short timelines.”

      Benson’s strategies include generating community- and city-scale, rather than individual-scale actions; streamlining the process for approving renewable energy projects; and advancing technological innovations based on “which would have the largest, transformational impact, the kind that could meet our 2050 [net-zero carbon emissions] goals.”

      The symposium offered examples of innovations that could play out at the scale and speed that Benson recommends. 

      Elise Strobach SM ’17, PhD ’20 developed a nanoporous nanogel coating for windows that can cut energy losses — estimated at $40 billion a year — in half. Her spinout company, AeroShield Materials, aims to make windows light, thin, and affordable.

      Claire Woo’s startup employer, Form Energy, has designed an iron-air battery that could bolster the electric grid as renewable sources such as sun and wind fuel more of the world’s energy needs. Stacked like so many blocks in giant arrays, the batteries provide 100-hour energy backup for multi-day power outages due to storms or other emergencies.

      Grids and energy equity

      Panelists discussed the requirements for resilient electric grids in the clean energy transition. Peggy Heeg, a corporate board member of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), celebrated her state’s top-ranked status in solar and wind production but cautioned that “the shift is creating some real problems with our operations of the grid.” She believes that, currently, the only viable backup when heat or storms cause demand peaks is natural gas generation.

      Caroline Choi, the senior vice president of corporate affairs at Edison International and Southern California Edison, described “unprecedented grid expansion” under way in California, as more solar and wind suppliers plug in. This will require “a significant acceleration in the pace of deployment of transmission systems,” said Julie Mulvaney Kemp, a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Such expansion is complicated by fragmented regional planning, high costs, and local siting issues.

      Not all power systems are super-sized. “I flew in small bush planes with my baby daughter in order to shadow Alaska microgrid operators,” said Piper Foster Wilder, founder and CEO of 60Hertz Energy and the C3E entrepreneurship award winner. Her software enables energy suppliers in even the most inaccessible places to monitor and protect utilities and infrastructure.

      “Given the fundamental aspects of energy for life, the widely entrenched nature of the energy system, and the intersecting challenges with other priorities, everyone has a vital role to play,” said Kathleen Araújo, a professor of sustainable energy systems, innovation, and policy at Boise State University. In a panel devoted to energy justice, speakers hammered home the centrality of historically marginalized groups in achieving a global energy transition.

      In the United States, communities must play a vital role in shaping their clean energy futures, whether former mining counties in Pennsylvania, Indian tribes whose lands have been exploited for fossil fuel production, or diesel-importing regions in Alaska, said Araújo. “Inclusive engagement, knowledge sharing, and other forms of collaboration can strengthen the legitimacy and [lead to] more enduring outcomes.”

      Worldwide, 675 million people lack access to electricity, and 590 million of them live in sub-Saharan Africa, according to Rhonda Jordan Antoine, a senior energy specialist at The World Bank. The bank is committed to providing the populace of this vast region with reliable, renewable energy sources, customizing solutions to specific countries and communities. “Africa’s not just about connecting households to power but also supporting activities, agricultural productivity, and provision of essential services such as health care and education,” she said.

      Whether confronting environmental injustice, supply chain gridlock, financing difficulties or communities resistant to addressing decarbonization, symposium participants candidly shared their challenges and frustrations. “I personally find this is really hard work,” Sally Benson acknowledged. “It took us 100 years or more to build the energy system that we have today and now we’re saying that we want to change it in the next 20 years.”

      But the words of Gina McCarthy were invoked repeatedly over the two-day conference, lifting spirits in the room: “I am hugely optimistic,” she said. “The clean energy future isn’t just around, it isn’t just possible, it is already under way. And it is the opportunity of a lifetime.” More

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      The power of knowledge

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      In his early career at MIT, Josh Kuffour’s academic interests spanned mathematics, engineering, and physics. He decided to major in chemical engineering, figuring it would draw on all three areas. Then, he found himself increasingly interested in the mathematical components of his studies and added a second major, applied mathematics.

      Now, with a double major and energy studies minor, Kuffour is still seeking to learn even more. He has made it a goal to take classes from as many different departments as he can before he graduates. So far, he has taken classes from 17 different departments, ranging from Civil and Environmental Engineering to Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences to Linguistics and Philosophy.

      “It’s taught me about valuing different ways of thinking,” he says about this wide-ranging approach to the course catalog. “It’s also taught me to value blending disciplines as a whole. Learning about how other people think about the same problems from different perspectives allows for better solutions to be developed.”

      After graduation, Kuffour plans to pursue a master’s degree at MIT, either in the Technology and Policy Program or in the Department of Chemical Engineering. He intends to make renewable energy, and its role in addressing societal inequalities, the focus of his career after graduating, and eventually plans to become a teacher.

      Serving the public

      Recognizing the power of knowledge, Kuffour says he enjoys helping to educate others “in any way I can.” He is involved with several extracurriculars in which he can be a mentor for both peers and high school students.

      Kuffour has volunteered with the Educational Studies Program since his first semester at MIT. This club runs Splash, “a weekend-long learning extravaganza,” as Kuffour puts it, in which MIT students teach over 400 free classes on a huge variety of topics for local high school students.

      For his peers, Kuffour also participates in the Gordon Engineering Leadership Program (GEL). Here, he teaches first-year GEL students leadership skills that engineers may require in their future careers. In doing this, Kuffour says he develops his own leadership skills as well. He is also working as a teaching assistant for multivariable calculus this semester.

      Kuffour has also served as an advisor for the Concourse learning community; as president of his fraternity, Beta Theta Pi; as a student representative on the HASS requirement subcommittee; and as a publicist for the Reason for God series, which invites the MIT community to discuss the intersections of religion with various facets of human life.

      Renewable energy

      Kuffour’s interest in energy issues has grown and evolved in recent years. He first learned about the ecological condition of the world in the eighth grade after watching the climate change documentary “Earth 2100” in school. Going into high school and college, Kuffour says he started reading books, taking classes, watching documentaries, participating in beach and city clean ups, to learn as much as possible about the environment and      global warming.

      During the summer of 2023, Kuffour worked as an energy and climate analysis intern for the consulting company Keylogic and has continued helping the company shift programming languages to Python for evaluating the economics of different methods of decarbonizing electricity sectors in the U.S. He has also assisted in analyzing trends in U.S. natural gas imports, exports, production, and consumption since the early 2000s.            

      In his time as an undergraduate, Kuffour’s interest in renewable energy has taken on a more justice-focused perspective. He’s learned over the course of his that due to historical inequalities in the U.S., pollution and other environmental problems have disproportionately impacted people of lower economic status and people of color. Since global warming will exacerbate these impacts, Kuffour seeks to address these growing inequalities through his work in energy data analysis.        

      Translating interests into activity

      Kuffour’s pursuit to expand his worldview never rests, even outside of the classroom. In his free time, he enjoys listening to podcasts or watching documentaries on any subject. When attempting to list all his favorite podcasts, he cuts himself off, saying, “This could go on for a while.”

      In 2022, Kuffour participated on a whim with a group of friends in an American Institute of Chemical Engineers competition, where he was tasked with creating a 1-by-1 foot cube that could filter water to specifications provided by the competition. He says it was fun to apply what he was learning at MIT to a project all the way in Arizona. 

      Kuffour enjoys discovering new things with friends as much as on his own. Three years ago, he started an intramural soccer team with friends from the Interphase EDGE program, which attracted many people he had never interacted with before. The team has been playing nearly every week since and Kuffour says the experience has been, “very enriching.”

      Kuffour hopes other students will also seek out knowledge and experiences from a wide range of sources during their undergraduate years. He offers: “Try as many things as possible even if you think you know what you want to do, and appreciate everything life has to offer.” More

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      How to decarbonize the world, at scale

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      The world in recent years has largely been moving on from debates about the need to curb carbon emissions and focusing more on action — the development, implementation, and deployment of the technological, economic, and policy measures to spur the scale of reductions needed by mid-century. That was the message Robert Stoner, the interim director of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), gave in his opening remarks at the 2023 MITEI Annual Research Conference.

      Attendees at the two-day conference included faculty members, researchers, industry and financial leaders, government officials, and students, as well as more than 50 online participants from around the world.

      “We are at an extraordinary inflection point. We have this narrow window in time to mitigate the worst effects of climate change by transforming our entire energy system and economy,” said Jonah Wagner, the chief strategist of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Loan Programs Office, in one of the conference’s keynote speeches.

      Yet the solutions exist, he said. “Most of the technologies that we need to deploy to stay close to the international target of 1.5 degrees Celsius warming are proven and ready to go,” he said. “We have over 80 percent of the technologies we will need through 2030, and at least half of the technologies we will need through 2050.”

      For example, Wagner pointed to the newly commissioned advanced nuclear power plant near Augusta, Georgia — the first new nuclear reactor built in the United States in a generation, partly funded through DOE loans. “It will be the largest source of clean power in America,” he said. Though implementing all the needed technologies in the United States through mid-century will cost an estimated $10 trillion, or about $300 billion a year, most of that money will come from the private sector, he said.

      As the United States faces what he describes as “a tsunami of distributed energy production,” one key example of the strategy that’s needed going forward, he said, is encouraging the development of virtual power plants (VPPs). The U.S. power grid is growing, he said, and will add 200 gigawatts of peak demand by 2030. But rather than building new, large power plants to satisfy that need, much of the increase can be accommodated by VPPs, he said — which are “aggregations of distributed energy resources like rooftop solar with batteries, like electric vehicles (EVs) and chargers, like smart appliances, commercial and industrial loads on the grid that can be used together to help balance supply and demand just like a traditional power plant.” For example, by shifting the time of demand for some applications where the timing is not critical, such as recharging EVs late at night instead of right after getting home from work when demand may be peaking, the need for extra peak power can be alleviated.

      Such programs “offer a broad range of benefits,” including affordability, reliability and resilience, decarbonization, and emissions reductions. But implementing such systems on a wide scale requires some up-front help, he explained. Payment for consumers to enroll in programs that allow such time adjustments “is the majority of the cost” of establishing VPPs, he says, “and that means most of the money spent on VPPs goes back into the pockets of American consumers.” But to make that happen, there is a need for standardization of VPP operations “so that we are not recreating the wheel every single time we deploy a pilot or an effort with a utility.”

      The conference’s other keynote speaker, Anne White, the vice provost and associate vice president for research administration at MIT, cited devastating recent floods, wildfires, and many other extreme weather-related crises around the world that have been exacerbated by climate change. “We saw in myriad ways that energy concerns and climate concerns are one and the same,” she said. “So, we must urgently develop and scale low-carbon and zero-carbon solutions to prevent future warming. And we must do this with a practical, systems-based approach that considers efficiency, affordability, equity, and sustainability for how the world will meet its energy needs.”

      White added that at MIT, “we are mobilizing everything.” People at MIT feel a strong sense of responsibility for dealing with these global issues, she said, “and I think it’s because we believe we have tools that can really make a difference.”

      Among the specific promising technologies that have sprung from MIT’s labs, she pointed out, is the rapid development of fusion technology that led to MIT spinoff company Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which aims to build a demonstration unit of a practical fusion power reactor by the decade’s end. That’s an outcome of decades of research, she emphasized — the kinds of early-stage risky work that only academic labs, with help from government grants, can carry out.

      For example, she pointed to the more than 200 projects that MITEI has provided seed funds of $150,000 each for two years, totaling over $28 million to date. Such early support is “a key part of producing the kind of transformative innovation we know we all need.” In addition, MIT’s The Engine has also helped launch not only Commonwealth Fusion Systems, but also Form Energy, a company building a plant in West Virginia to manufacture advanced iron-air batteries for renewable energy storage, and many others.

      Following that theme of supporting early innovation, the conference featured two panels that served to highlight the work of students and alumni and their energy-related startup companies. First, a startup showcase, moderated by Catarina Madeira, the director of MIT’s Startup Exchange, featured presentations about seven recent spinoff companies that are developing cutting-edge technologies that emerged from MIT research. These included:

      Aeroshield, developing a new kind of highly-insulated window using a unique aerogel material;
      Sublime, which is developing a low-emissions concrete;
      Found Energy, developing a way to use recycled aluminum as a fuel;
      Veir, developing superconducting power lines;
      Emvolom, developing inexpensive green fuels from waste gases;
      Boston Metal, developing low-emissions production processes for steel and other metals;
      Transaera, with a new kind of efficient air conditioning; and
      Carbon Recycling International, producing cheap hydrogen fuel and syngas.
      Later in the conference, a “student slam competition” featured presentations by 11 students who described results of energy projects they had been working on this past summer. The projects were as diverse as analyzing opposition to wind farms in Maine, how best to allocate EV charging stations, optimizing bioenergy production, recycling the lithium from batteries, encouraging adoption of heat pumps, and conflict analysis about energy project siting. Attendees voted on the quality of the student presentations, and electrical engineering and computer science student Tori Hagenlocker was declared first-place winner for her talk on heat pump adoption.

      Students were also featured in a first-time addition to the conference: a panel discussion among five current or recent students, giving their perspective on today’s energy issues and priorities, and how they are working toward trying to make a difference. Andres Alvarez, a recent graduate in nuclear engineering, described his work with a startup focused on identifying and supporting early-stage ideas that have potential. Graduate student Dyanna Jaye of urban studies and planning spoke about her work helping to launch a group called the Sunrise Movement to try to drive climate change as a top priority for the country, and her work helping to develop the Green New Deal.

      Peter Scott, a graduate student in mechanical engineering who is studying green hydrogen production, spoke of the need for a “very drastic and rapid phaseout of current, existing fossil fuels” and a halt on developing new sources. Amar Dayal, an MBA candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management, talked about the interplay between technology and policy, and the crucial role that legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act can have in enabling new energy technology to make the climb to commercialization. And Shreyaa Raghavan, a doctoral student in the Institute of Data, Systems, and Society, talked about the importance of multidisciplinary approaches to climate issues, including the important role of computer science. She added that MIT does well on this compared to other institutions, and “sustainability and decarbonization is a pillar in a lot of the different departments and programs that exist here.”

      Some recent recipients of MITEI’s Seed Fund grants reported on their progress in a panel discussion moderated by MITEI Executive Director Martha Broad. Seed grant recipient Ariel Furst, a professor of chemical engineering, pointed out that access to electricity is very much concentrated in the global North and that, overall, one in 10 people worldwide lacks access to electricity and some 2.5 billion people “rely on dirty fuels to heat their homes and cook their food,” with impacts on both health and climate. The solution her project is developing involves using DNA molecules combined with catalysts to passively convert captured carbon dioxide into ethylene, a widely used chemical feedstock and fuel. Kerri Cahoy, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics, described her work on a system for monitoring methane emissions and power-line conditions by using satellite-based sensors. She and her team found that power lines often begin emitting detectable broadband radio frequencies long before they actually fail in a way that could spark fires.

      Admir Masic, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, described work on mining the ocean for minerals such as magnesium hydroxide to be used for carbon capture. The process can turn carbon dioxide into solid material that is stable over geological times and potentially usable as a construction material. Kripa Varanasi, a professor of mechanical engineering, said that over the years MITEI seed funding helped some of his projects that “went on to become startup companies, and some of them are thriving.” He described ongoing work on a new kind of electrolyzer for green hydrogen production. He developed a system using bubble-attracting surfaces to increase the efficiency of bioreactors that generate hydrogen fuel.

      A series of panel discussions over the two days covered a range of topics related to technologies and policies that could make a difference in combating climate change. On the technological side, one panel led by Randall Field, the executive director of MITEI’s Future Energy Systems Center, looked at large, hard-to-decarbonize industrial processes. Antoine Allanore, a professor of metallurgy, described progress in developing innovative processes for producing iron and steel, among the world’s most used commodities, in a way that drastically reduces greenhouse gas emissions. Greg Wilson of JERA Americas described the potential for ammonia produced from renewable sources to substitute for natural gas in power plants, greatly reducing emissions. Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor in materials science and engineering, described ways to decarbonize cement production using a novel low-temperature process. And Guiyan Zang, a research scientist at MITEI, spoke of efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of producing ethylene, a major industrial chemical, by using an electrochemical process.

      Another panel, led by Jacopo Buongiorno, professor of nuclear science and engineering, explored the brightening future for expansion of nuclear power, including new, small, modular reactors that are finally emerging into commercial demonstration. “There is for the first time truly here in the U.S. in at least a decade-and-a-half, a lot of excitement, a lot of attention towards nuclear,” Buongiorno said. Nuclear power currently produces 45 to 50 percent of the nation’s carbon-free electricity, the panelists said, and with the first new nuclear power plant in decades now in operation, the stage is set for significant growth.

      Carbon capture and sequestration was the subject of a panel led by David Babson, the executive director of MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges program. MIT professors Betar Gallant and Kripa Varanasi and industry representatives Elisabeth Birkeland from Equinor and Luc Huyse from Chevron Technology Ventures described significant progress in various approaches to recovering carbon dioxide from power plant emissions, from the air, and from the ocean, and converting it into fuels, construction materials, or other valuable commodities.

      Some panel discussions also addressed the financial and policy side of the climate issue. A panel on geopolitical implications of the energy transition was moderated by MITEI Deputy Director of Policy Christopher Knittel, who said “energy has always been synonymous with geopolitics.” He said that as concerns shift from where to find the oil and gas to where is the cobalt and nickel and other elements that will be needed, “not only are we worried about where the deposits of natural resources are, but we’re going to be more and more worried about how governments are incentivizing the transition” to developing this new mix of natural resources. Panelist Suzanne Berger, an Institute professor, said “we’re now at a moment of unique openness and opportunity for creating a new American production system,” one that is much more efficient and less carbon-producing.

      One panel dealt with the investor’s perspective on the possibilities and pitfalls of emerging energy technologies. Moderator Jacqueline Pless, an assistant professor in MIT Sloan, said “there’s a lot of momentum now in this space. It’s a really ripe time for investing,” but the risks are real. “Tons of investment is needed in some very big and uncertain technologies.”

      The role that large, established companies can play in leading a transition to cleaner energy was addressed by another panel. Moderator J.J. Laukatis, MITEI’s director of member services, said that “the scale of this transformation is massive, and it will also be very different from anything we’ve seen in the past. We’re going to have to scale up complex new technologies and systems across the board, from hydrogen to EVs to the electrical grid, at rates we haven’t done before.” And doing so will require a concerted effort that includes industry as well as government and academia. More

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      Engineers develop an efficient process to make fuel from carbon dioxide

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      The search is on worldwide to find ways to extract carbon dioxide from the air or from power plant exhaust and then make it into something useful. One of the more promising ideas is to make it into a stable fuel that can replace fossil fuels in some applications. But most such conversion processes have had problems with low carbon efficiency, or they produce fuels that can be hard to handle, toxic, or flammable.

      Now, researchers at MIT and Harvard University have developed an efficient process that can convert carbon dioxide into formate, a liquid or solid material that can be used like hydrogen or methanol to power a fuel cell and generate electricity. Potassium or sodium formate, already produced at industrial scales and commonly used as a de-icer for roads and sidewalks, is nontoxic, nonflammable, easy to store and transport, and can remain stable in ordinary steel tanks to be used months, or even years, after its production.

      The new process, developed by MIT doctoral students Zhen Zhang, Zhichu Ren, and Alexander H. Quinn; Harvard University doctoral student Dawei Xi; and MIT Professor Ju Li, is described this week in an open-access paper in Cell Reports Physical Science. The whole process — including capture and electrochemical conversion of the gas to a solid formate powder, which is then used in a fuel cell to produce electricity — was demonstrated at a small, laboratory scale. However, the researchers expect it to be scalable so that it could provide emissions-free heat and power to individual homes and even be used in industrial or grid-scale applications.

      Other approaches to converting carbon dioxide into fuel, Li explains, usually involve a two-stage process: First the gas is chemically captured and turned into a solid form as calcium carbonate, then later that material is heated to drive off the carbon dioxide and convert it to a fuel feedstock such as carbon monoxide. That second step has very low efficiency, typically converting less than 20 percent of the gaseous carbon dioxide into the desired product, Li says.

      By contrast, the new process achieves a conversion of well over 90 percent and eliminates the need for the inefficient heating step by first converting the carbon dioxide into an intermediate form, liquid metal bicarbonate. That liquid is then electrochemically converted into liquid potassium or sodium formate in an electrolyzer that uses low-carbon electricity, e.g. nuclear, wind, or solar power. The highly concentrated liquid potassium or sodium formate solution produced can then be dried, for example by solar evaporation, to produce a solid powder that is highly stable and can be stored in ordinary steel tanks for up to years or even decades, Li says.

      Several steps of optimization developed by the team made all the difference in changing an inefficient chemical-conversion process into a practical solution, says Li, who holds joint appointments in the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and of Materials Science and Engineering.

      The process of carbon capture and conversion involves first an alkaline solution-based capture that concentrates carbon dioxide, either from concentrated streams such as from power plant emissions or from very low-concentration sources, even open air, into the form of a liquid metal-bicarbonate solution. Then, through the use of a cation-exchange membrane electrolyzer, this bicarbonate is electrochemically converted into solid formate crystals with a carbon efficiency of greater than 96 percent, as confirmed in the team’s lab-scale experiments.

      These crystals have an indefinite shelf life, remaining so stable that they could be stored for years, or even decades, with little or no loss. By comparison, even the best available practical hydrogen storage tanks allow the gas to leak out at a rate of about 1 percent per day, precluding any uses that would require year-long storage, Li says. Methanol, another widely explored alternative for converting carbon dioxide into a fuel usable in fuel cells, is a toxic substance that cannot easily be adapted to use in situations where leakage could pose a health hazard. Formate, on the other hand, is widely used and considered benign, according to national safety standards.

      Several improvements account for the greatly improved efficiency of this process. First, a careful design of the membrane materials and their configuration overcomes a problem that previous attempts at such a system have encountered, where a buildup of certain chemical byproducts changes the pH, causing the system to steadily lose efficiency over time. “Traditionally, it is difficult to achieve long-term, stable, continuous conversion of the feedstocks,” Zhang says. “The key to our system is to achieve a pH balance for steady-state conversion.”

      To achieve that, the researchers carried out thermodynamic modeling to design the new process so that it is chemically balanced and the pH remains at a steady state with no shift in acidity over time. It can therefore continue operating efficiently over long periods. In their tests, the system ran for over 200 hours with no significant decrease in output. The whole process can be done at ambient temperatures and relatively low pressures (about five times atmospheric pressure).

      Another issue was that unwanted side reactions produced other chemical products that were not useful, but the team figured out a way to prevent these side reactions by the introduction of an extra “buffer” layer of bicarbonate-enriched fiberglass wool that blocked these reactions.

      The team also built a fuel cell specifically optimized for the use of this formate fuel to produce electricity. The stored formate particles are simply dissolved in water and pumped into the fuel cell as needed. Although the solid fuel is much heavier than pure hydrogen, when the weight and volume of the high-pressure gas tanks needed to store hydrogen is considered, the end result is an electricity output near parity for a given storage volume, Li says.

      The formate fuel can potentially be adapted for anything from home-sized units to large scale industrial uses or grid-scale storage systems, the researchers say. Initial household applications might involve an electrolyzer unit about the size of a refrigerator to capture and convert the carbon dioxide into formate, which could be stored in an underground or rooftop tank. Then, when needed, the powdered solid would be mixed with water and fed into a fuel cell to provide power and heat. “This is for community or household demonstrations,” Zhang says, “but we believe that also in the future it may be good for factories or the grid.”

      “The formate economy is an intriguing concept because metal formate salts are very benign and stable, and a compelling energy carrier,” says Ted Sargent, a professor of chemistry and of electrical and computer engineering at Northwestern University, who was not associated with this work. “The authors have demonstrated enhanced efficiency in liquid-to-liquid conversion from bicarbonate feedstock to formate, and have demonstrated these fuels can be used later to produce electricity,” he says.

      The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. More

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      Rafael Mariano Grossi speaks about nuclear power’s role at a critical moment in history

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      On Sept. 22, Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), delivered the 2023 David J. Rose Lecture in Nuclear Technology at MIT. This lecture series was started nearly 40 years ago in honor of the late Professor David Rose — a nuclear engineering professor and fusion technology pioneer. In addition to his scientific contributions, Rose was invested in the ethical issues associated with new technologies. His widow, Renate Rose, who spoke briefly before Grossi’s lecture, said that her husband adamantly called for the abolishment of nuclear weapons, insisting that all science should serve the common good and that every scientist should follow his or her conscience.

      In his prefatory remarks, MIT Vice Provost Richard Lester, a former PhD student of David Rose, said that even today, he still feels the influence of his thesis advisor, many decades after they’d worked together. Lester called it a “great honor” to introduce Grossi, noting that the director general was guiding the agency through an especially demanding time. “His presence with us is a reminder that the biggest challenges we face today are truly global challenges, and that international organizations like the IAEA have a central role to play in resolving them.”

      The title of Grossi’s talk was “The IAEA at the Crossroads of History,” and he made a strong case for this being a critical juncture, or “inflection point,” for nuclear power. He started his speech, however, with somewhat of an historical footnote, discussing a letter that Rose sent in 1977 to Sigvard Eklund, IAEA’s then-director general. Rose urged the IAEA to establish a coordinated worldwide program in controlled fusion research. It took a while for the idea to gain traction, but international collaboration in fusion formally began in 1985, eight years after Rose’s proposal. “I thought I would begin with this story, because it shows that cooperation between MIT and the IAEA goes back a long way,” Grossi said.

      2023 David J. Rose Lecture in Nuclear TechnologyVideo: MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering

      Overall, he painted a mostly encouraging picture for the future of nuclear power, largely based on its potential to generate electricity or thermal energy without adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. In the face of rapidly-unfolding climate change, Grossi said, “low-carbon nuclear power is now seen as part of [the] solution by an increasing number of people. It’s getting harder to be an environmentalist in good faith who is against nuclear.”

      Public acceptance is growing throughout the world, he added. In Sweden, where people had long protested against radioactive waste transport, a poll now shows that more than 85 percent of the people approve of the nation’s high-level waste handling and disposal facilities. Even Finland’s Green Party has embraced nuclear power, Grossi said. “I don’t think we could imagine a pro-nuclear Green Party five years ago, let alone in 1970 or ’80.”

      Fifty-seven nuclear reactors are being constructed right now in 17 countries. One of the world’s newest facilities, the Barakah nuclear power plant in the United Arab Emirates, “was built on ground rich in oil and natural gas,” he said. In China, the world’s first pebble-bed high-temperature reactor has been operating for two years, offering potential advantages in safety, efficiency, and modularity. For countries that don’t have any nuclear plants, small modular reactors of this kind “offer the chance of a more gradual and affordable way to scale up nuclear power,” Grossi noted. The IAEA is working with countries like Ghana, Kenya, and Senegal to help them develop the safety and regulatory infrastructures that would be needed to build and responsibly operate modular nuclear reactors like this.

      Grossi also discussed a number of lesser-known projects the IAEA is engaged in that have little to do with power generation. Seventy percent of the people in Africa, for example, have no access to radiotherapy to fight cancer. To this end, the IAEA is now helping to provide radiotherapy services in Tanzania and other African countries. At the IAEA’s Marine Environmental Laboratories in Monaco, researchers are using isotopic tracing techniques to study the impact of microplastic pollution on the oceans. The Covid-19 pandemic illustrated the potentially devastating effects of zoonotic diseases that can infect humans with animal-borne viruses. To counteract this threat, the IAEA has sent hundreds of reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) machines — capable of detecting specific genetic materials in pathogens — to more than 130 countries.

      Meanwhile, new risks have emerged from the war in Ukraine, where fighting has raged for a year-and-a-half near the six nuclear reactors in Zaporizhzhia — Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. Early in the conflict, the IAEA sent a team of experts to monitor the plant and to do everything possible to prevent a nuclear accident that would bring “even more misery to people who are already suffering so much,” Grossi said. A major accident, he added, would likely stall investments in nuclear power at a time when its future prospects were starting to brighten.

      At the end of his talk, Grossi returned to the subject of fusion, which he expects to become an important energy source, perhaps in the not-too-distant future. He was encouraged by the visit he’d just had to the MIT spinoff company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems. With regard to fusion, he said, “for the first time, all the pieces of the puzzle are there: the physics, the policy drivers, and the investment.” In fact, an agreement was signed on the day of his lecture, which made MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center an IAEA collaboration center — the second such center in the United States.

      “When I think of all the new forms of collaboration happening today, I imagine Professor Rose would be delighted,” Grossi said. “It really is something to hold [his] letter and know how much progress has been made since 1977 in fusion. I look forward to our collaboration going forward.” More

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      3 Questions: What should scientists and the public know about nuclear waste?

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      Many researchers see an expansion of nuclear power, which produces no greenhouse gas emissions from its power generation, as an essential component of strategies to combat global climate change. Yet there is still strong resistance to such expansion, and much of that is based on the issue of how to safely dispose of the resulting radioactive waste material. MIT recently convened a workshop to help nuclear engineers, policymakers, and academics learn about approaches to communicating accurate information about the management of nuclear waste to students and the public, in hopes of allaying fears and encouraging support for the development of new, safer nuclear power plants around the world.

      Organized by Haruko Wainwright, an MIT assistant professor of nuclear science and engineering and of civil and environmental engineering, the workshop included professors, researchers, industry representatives, and government officials, and was designed to emphasize the multidisciplinary nature of the issue. MIT News asked Wainwright to describe the workshop and its conclusions, which she reported on in a paper just published in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity.

      Q: What was the main objective of the this workshop?

      A: There is a growing concern that, in spite of much excitement about new nuclear reactor deployment and nuclear energy for tackling climate change, relatively less attention is being paid to the thorny question of long-term management of the spent fuel (waste) from these reactors. The government and industry have embraced consent-based siting approaches — that is, finding sites to store and dispose nuclear waste through broad community participation with equity and environmental justice considered. However, many of us in academia feel that those in the industry are missing key facts to communicate to the public.

      Understanding and managing nuclear waste requires a multidisciplinary expertise in nuclear, civil, and chemical engineering as well as environmental and earth sciences. For example, the amount of waste per se, which is always very small for nuclear systems, is not the only factor determining the environmental impacts because some radionuclides in the waste are vastly more mobile than others, and thus can spread farther and more quickly. Nuclear engineers, environmental scientists, and others need to work together to predict the environmental impacts of radionuclides in the waste generated by the new reactors, and to develop waste isolation strategies for an extended time.

      We organized this workshop to ensure this collaborative approach is mastered from the start. A second objective was to develop a blueprint for educating next-generation engineers and scientists about nuclear waste and shaping a more broadly educated group of nuclear and general engineers.

      Q: What kinds of innovative teaching practices were discussed and recommended, and are there examples of these practices in action?

       A: Some participants teach project-based or simulation-based courses of real-world situations. For example, students are divided into several groups representing various stakeholders — such as the public, policymakers, scientists, and governments — and discuss the potential siting of a nuclear waste repository in a community. Such a course helps the students to consider the perspectives of different groups, understand a plurality of points of view, and learn how to communicate their ideas and concerns effectively. Other courses may ask students to synthesize key technical facts and numbers, and to develop a Congressional testimony statement or an opinion article for newspapers. 

      Q: What are some of the biggest misconceptions people have about nuclear waste, and how do you think these misconceptions can be addressed?

      A: The workshop participants agreed that the broader and life-cycle perspectives are important. Within the nuclear energy life cycle, for example, people focus disproportionally on high-level radioactive waste or spent fuel, which has been highly regulated and well managed. Nuclear systems also produce secondary waste, including low-level waste and uranium mining waste, which gets less attention.

      The participants also believe that the nuclear industry has been exemplary in leading the environmental and waste isolation science and technologies. Nuclear waste disposal strategies were developed in the 1950s, much earlier than other hazardous waste which began to receive serious regulation only in the 1970s. In addition, current nuclear waste disposal practices consider the compliance periods of isolation for thousands of years, while other hazardous waste disposal is not required to consider beyond 30 years, although some waste has an essentially infinite longevity, for example, mercury or lead. Finally, there is relatively unregulated waste — such as CO2 from fossil energy, agricultural effluents and other sources — that is released freely into the biosphere and is already impacting our environment. Yet, many people remain more concerned about the relatively well-regulated nuclear waste than about all these unregulated sources.

      Interestingly, many engineers — even nuclear engineers — do not know these facts. We believe that we need to teach students not just cutting-edge technologies, but also broader perspectives, including the history of industries and regulations, as well as environmental science.

      At the same time, we need to move the nuclear community to think more holistically about waste and its environmental impacts from the early stages of design of nuclear systems. We should design new reactors from the “waste up.”  We believe that the nuclear industry should continue to lead waste-management technologies and strategies, and also encourage other industries to adopt lifecycle approaches about their own waste to improve the overall sustainability. More