Energizing materials

Materials science and engineering will continue to play a major role in realizing new energy opportunities.

Jeff Wadsworth, President and CEO of the private nonprofit R&D company Battelle Memorial Institute, relies on two clichés to neatly sum up the energy topic. The first is that there is no silver bullet. “Although we started to hear that there might be silver buckshot,” he added, eliciting laughter from attendees of a “Powering the Future” session during the 2009 Materials Science and Technology (MS&T) Conference, held in Pittsburgh, PA. The second is there's no free lunch. “What I mean by ‘no free lunch’ is it's very tempting to say nuclear energy's a problem because of the waste. But every energy supply source has problems-there are no free lunches,” Wadsworth said.

For example, solar and wind power may offer zero net carbon generation, but they also require “massive areas” for generation at scale, he noted. And electric vehicles-being heavily pursued for their promise of reduced point-of-use emissions and oil dependence-require, obviously, electricity.