COLLEGE STATION -- In the mind of Texas A&M University physicist Peter McIntyre, two of America's most pressing energy challenges -- what to do with radiotoxic spent nuclear fuel and dwindling energy resources -- can be solved in one scientific swipe. He is developing the technology that is capable of destroying the dangerous waste and, at the same time, potentially providing safe nuclear power for thousands of years into the future.

In his high-energy physics laboratory east of the Texas A&M campus, McIntyre and his research team are developing a new form of green nuclear power that would extract 10 times more energy out of spent nuclear fuel rods than currently obtained in the first use, as well as destroy the transuranics -- the chemical elements beyond uranium in the periodic table -- lurking within the hazardous toxic soup of used nuclear fuel.

Buoyed by seed funding from Texas A&M University ($750,000) and the Cynthia and George Mitchell Foundation ($500,000), McIntyre is preparing a proposal to the U.S. Department of Energy seeking the large-scale funding that would enable him to take the next steps.

Although viewed as a major national issue, McIntyre says the nuclear waste problem is a multifaceted one for which no viable solution yet has emerged, despite decades of discussion. Most recently in 2010, federal authorities scrapped a plan to create a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada to store the nationwide spent nuclear fuel capacity that now stands at 65,000 tons.

"In my opinion, the only way to properly deal with transuranics is to destroy them," McIntyre said. "They are an unthinkable hazard if they ever get into the biosphere. There has long been discussion that we could find a site like Yucca Mountain that's so isolated from groundwater and so stable geologically that we could say with confidence it will be the same 100,000 years from now as it is today, and that burying fuel there, closing the door and forgetting it is something we can responsibly do. I don't buy those arguments."

To read more about Dr. McIntyre and his research, go to http://www.science.tamu.edu/articles/1059/. 

by The Associated Press, Ramit Plushnick-Masti, Monday, November 11, 2013

MIDLAND, Texas (AP) - When the rain stopped falling in Texas, the prairie grass yellowed, the soil cracked and oil drillers were confronted with a crisis. After years of easy access to cheap, plentiful water, the land they prized for its vast petroleum wealth was starting to dry up. 

At first, the drought that took hold a few years ago seemed to threaten the economic boom that arose from hydraulic fracturing, a drilling method that uses huge amounts of high-pressure, chemical-laced water to free oil and natural gas trapped deep in underground rocks. But drillers have found a way to get by with much less water - they recycle it using systems that not long ago they may have eyed with suspicion.

"This was a dramatic change to the practices that the industry used for many, many years," said Paul Schlosberg, co-founder and chief financial officer of Water Rescue Services, the company that runs recycling services for Fasken Oil and Ranch in West Texas, which is now 90 percent toward its goal of not using any freshwater for fracturing, or "fracking," as it is commonly known. Before the drought, "water was prevalent, it was cheap and it was taken for granted," he added.

Just a few years ago, many drillers suspected water recyclers were trying to sell an unproven idea designed to drain money from multimillion dollar businesses. Now the system is helping drillers use less freshwater and dispose of less wastewater. Recycling is rapidly becoming a popular and economic solution for a burgeoning industry.

The change is happening so swiftly that regulators are racing to keep up and in some cases taking steps to make it easier for drillers to recycle. 

See more at: http://www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?hpf=1&a_id=130056&utm_source=DailyNewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2013-11-11&utm_content=read&utm_campaign=feature_2#sthash.mbFUgC92.dpuf  

With a generous donation of $40,000 from ConocoPhillips, the Energy Institute awarded eight fellowships to support outstanding graduate students doing energy research. Over 60 applicants from numerous departments were nominated for this competitive award. The award recipients are known as "Energy Institute Fellows."

Each month, a Fellow will be featured in the highlights section of News Briefs.  This month's featured Fellow is Adolfo Escobedo-Pinto, a PhD candidate in the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering.

Adolfo's research project is entitled "Large-Scale Power Systems and Transmission Line Switching." For a brief abstract of Adolfo's research, click here.  

To see the complete listing of EI Fellows, visit our web site at http://energy.tamu.edu/.