Reply To: The Harmful Economics of Biofuels

[mitakeet]

Thanks for the feedback!

I haven’t been able to find much on the Rogowski coil, unfortunately. I have found this patent, though:

“Apparatus for direct conversion of radioactive decay energy to electrical energy” (4,835,433)

but haven’t figured out yet how to get Firefox to install the image viewer. I found some smaller images elsewhere on the ‘net (for instance http://www.scribd.com/doc/8929973/Nuclear-Battery on page 9), but in any case, I would wonder how economically practical it is as it looks very complicated and thus expensive to build.

If anyone knows of something that is actually in-use to capture as electric energy the movement of the alpha particle please speak up, but I am getting the impression that, just like the promise of fusion energy, theoretically trivial often turns out to be extremely non-trivial in practice.