Nanotechnology: Best Prospect for a Sustainable Future?

Not only is present technology exhausting its resource base while polluting the environment, it is also ludicrously inefficient and almost gratuitously dirty. No law of nature demands that things must be done this way, states Stephen Gillett in Nanotechnology for Clean Energy and Resources.

The solution is nanotechnology, according to Gillett. “It offers the only prospect of providing something like a sustainable First World standard of living for the entire world. This is the most critical near-term application of nanotechnology.” Nanotechnology is the study and manipulatioin of objects that are measured in nanometers (nm). One nanometer is a billionth of a meter, or a millionth of a millimeter.

By manipulating atoms at this level we can emulate biological processes, creating a sea change in how we create energy and products. Imagine, for example, molecule-sized solar cells mixed into road pavement. A few hundred square miles of solar nanocells in sunny pavement could generate enough energy for the entire country.

Futurist Glen Hiemstra sees Nanobots, with fingers 50,000 times as thin as human hair, manipulating atoms in an oil spill to render it harmless. Atoms bonded together in a specific fashion create a machine that converts water to hydrogen with the use of sunlight, promising a limitless energy source.

Gillett continues: Today’s inefficiencies and pollution come about largely through an overwhelming dependence on heat: on energy in its most disorganized and wasteful form. Other inefficiencies, and associated pollution, come about from what may be termed the “(dis)economies of scale”. Matter-organizers (“factories”) are large-scale, capital-intensive affairs to which raw materials are brought, and from which finished products are exported, requiring the enormous transportation infrastructure that now subsumes the entire world. Bauxite, for example, is mined in Jamaica, and then processed into aluminum in Norway where there is abundant cheap hydropower, and travels around the world to be made into finished products.

Another result of this clumsy approach to arranging matter is the unintended manufacture of unwanted byproducts. Conventional synthetic processes yield a suite of molecular products, of which typically only one or two is desired. The others become waste that must be discarded or treated.

Stephen Gillett sees many ways nanotechnology can benefit the environment:

* greatly increase energy efficiency by using chemical energy without heating, as organisms do. Fuel cells are an example of this;

* highly specific catalysts generate only the desired product, thus avoiding unwanted by-products;

* nanoscale fabrication from local materials, supplanting the enormous present transportation infrastructure

Cheap nanofabrication will also lead to such things as:
– Materials for passive energy management, such as electrochromic or photochromic “smart windows”;
– Efficient energy conversion devices such as non-thermal illumination sources (e.g., “white LEDs”);
– Electrosynthesis for fuel manufacture and electricity storage;
– Better electricity storage devices such as high-performance “ultracapacitors.”

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Nanotechnology for Clean Energy and Resources:
http://www.foresight.org/impact/GillettWhitePaper.txt

More on Nanotechnology: http://www.foresight.org/