The Magnesium Civilization - An Alternative New Source of Energy To Oil

THE MAGNESIUM
CIVILIZATION
Copyright 2011 by Pan Stanford Publishing Pte. Ltd.

THE MAGNESIUM
CIVILIZATION
AN ALTERNATIVE
NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY TO OIL
Takashi Yabe
Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
Tatsuya Yamaji
binWord Inc., Japan
Translated from the original Japanese by

Tomoko and Tayfun Tezduyar

Published by
Pan Stanford Publishing Pte. Ltd.
Penthouse Level, Suntec Tower 3
8 Temasek Boulevard
Singapore 038988
Email: editorial@panstanford.com
Web: www.panstanford.com
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The Magnesium Civilization: An Alternative New Source of Energy to Oil

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Contents
Preface vii
Chapter 1 Natural Energy and Hydrogen Society:

Alternatives to Oil Civilization? 1
Chapter 2 Make Laser from Sunlight 21
Chapter 3 Making Magnesium with Laser 61
Chapter 4 Burning Magnesium 81
Chapter 5 Extracting Freshwater and Magnesium
from Seawater 103
Chapter 6 The Magnesium-Recycling Society Is Coming! 115
Epilogue 131
Afterword 137
Index 139

Preface
This is it.
It was a short stick made of a beautiful green-colored material
like jade that the professor placed on the table. And a plastic bag
filled with small metal flakes in silver-white color was placed next
to it.
This green stick and the silver-white metal will change the
world.
If someone told you that, what would you think?
The green stick was a chromium co-doped neodymium yttrium
aluminum garnet (YAG) laser medium. It is a magic stone that
converts sunlight into a direct laser beam. The silver-white metal
is not such a rare thing. It is magnesium, a lightweight and durable
metal.
About a few years ago I (Yamaji) heard for the first time about the
research of Professor Takashi Yabe at Tokyo Institute of Technology.
The professor said that he could smelt metal magnesium with laser
generated by sunlight. It is magnificent research, but how on earth
can such research be realized? I clearly remember that that was what
I thought.
Was the research really advancing? I visited Professor Yabes
laboratory by coincidence and found out that in fact they were
steadily getting results from their research there.
Even with the bad weather conditions in Tokyo, the chromium co-
doped neodymium YAG laser medium oscillates laser from sunlight.
And a powerful laser smelts the magnesium. Metal magnesium can
be smelted from a compound instantly by irradiating laser. Professor
Yabe says that we can drive a car and operate a power station by
using as fuel magnesium produced in this way.

viii Preface
What will supply the enormous amount of magnesium is the

seaextracting magnesium from seawater, smelting it at low cost,
and returning the wasted fuel into metal magnesium with laser
again.
In this cycle greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, are not
emitted. This is the vision for the recycling society using magnesium
in place of oil and coal.
Hearing just this part of the research, many would think of it as
science fiction. Actually the practical use of some part of the research
has already started.
Recently natural energy is attracting much attention because of
the uneasiness with the supply of fossil fuels and the sense of the
global-warming crisis. The usage of solar power generation with
the solar battery panel, wind power generation, and biomass is
advancing slowly. The hybrid car, which combines a gasoline engine
with a charged battery, is now popular, and it is said that a car running
only by electricity will soon be on the market.
Then, would solar power generation and the electric car become
the radical solution to the energy and environmental problems?
To tell the truth, solar power generation cannot meet our current
energy demand. The electric car has problems with the resources
that it needs and the mileage it can give.
Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama announced, as an
ambitious target, that Japan would reduce the greenhouse gases
25% compared to 1990, but the response from the business world
has not been welcoming: It is impossible to realize that, anyway.
However, I think a big opportunity is waiting for us. An idea that
is beyond the conventional framework produces new technologies
and even changes the social structure. We are at an industrial
turning point, the end of the fossil fuel era, which lasted for almost
200 years.
The vision of the magnesium-recycling society offers us a
suggestion about the society we should aim for.

Preface ix
For this book, Yamaji gathered research material from Professor

Yabe (I in the text means Professor Yabe). I tried to, as much as I
could, explain a complicated research in plain words so that a person
who is not an expert can easily understand it.
What kind of world does advanced technology lead us to? I very
much want you to feel the excitement with this book.
Tatsuya Yamaji

Chapter 1
Natural Energy and Hydrogen

Society: Alternatives to Oil
Civilization?
Oil Civilization: A Beginning of an End
It wont take us that long to reach the end of the jackpot (a big win)
period that we human beings have been temporarily experiencing.
After the Industrial Revolution, which began in the 18th century,
we have consumed abundant fossil fuels to enrich our lives and meet
our material needs. It started with the use of the steam engine in
the textile industry. Heavy industry such as the steel industry greatly
progressed, and the steam locomotive and steamship made great
strides in the area of public transportation. In the 18th century, coal
was the main source of fossil fuels; however, oil recovery started in
the latter half of the 19th century.
And in the 20th century, the world was changed dramatically
by oil. The raw materials from oil facilitated mass production of
industrial products, and the fuel from oil made mass transportation
of people and supplies possible. The electricity from burnt oil
brought electric appliances to our homes, and information and
communication services flourished.

By Takashi Yabe
www.panstanford.com

The Magnesium Civilization
We have been living in nothing but an oil civilization. We take for

granted a life relying on electric appliances or going out wherever
we want by car. However, such a blessed situation is merely a kind of
fluke that has lasted only for 200 years.
Will Oil Disappear, or Not?
Though nuclear energy has increased since the 1970s, it is not

mainstream because of the well-known radioactive waste problem.
The main energy sources in the 21st century are still coal and oil.
The three fossil fuelscoal, oil, and natural gasmake up nearly
90% of the worlds energy sources.
Can the fossil fuels coal and oil remain as sustainable energy
sources that we can count on?

Natural Energy and Hydrogen Society
Though different statistical data show different numbers, it is

reported that the reserve-to-production ratio (RPR) is approximately
150 years for coal, 60 years for natural gas, and 40 years for oil, the
shortest of all. One might wonder that several decades have already
passed since it was said that oil would disappear soon, but it didnt
at all.
The reserves that are recoverable with the existing technology

are called proven reserves. The proven reserves divided by the
annual production is the RPR. The proven reserves and RPR can both
be increased by discovering new oil fields and coal mines or using
advanced extraction technologies that were unavailable in the past.
However, according to the majority of predictions, oil production
will reach its maximum by the year 2020, and after that it will
face a decrease (peak oil). Peak oil doesnt immediately imply the
disappearance of oil, but it will be more difficult to expect oil with
low cost in a steady and stable supply, as in the current situation. On
the other hand, instead of decreasing, the demand for oil and coal
will increase more and more in the future.
Though it was delayed by the economic crisis of 2008, the annual
rate of economic growth for India and China will stay at around a

little less than10% in the future. In such countries the middle-class

populations increase and the purchasing power rises rapidly. The
energy consumption per capita in China and India is relatively small
compared with that in the United States and Japan. But as the number
of middle-class people leading rich lives increases, it is inevitable
that the energy consumption will increase explosively.
In India, the production of the car Tata-Nano, which is widely
talked about because of its low price of 250,000 yen, has already
begun. If the Indian middle class starts owning cars like the Americans
and Japanese do, oil consumption will certainly jump higher.

Global Warming Worsening
The use of fossil fuels creates a major problem, not only because of its
limited capability for meeting the energy demand, but also because
of its probability for causing destruction of the environment.
At the Beijing Olympics of 2008, air pollution in China became
big news. Perhaps many of you were shocked at the smoggy picture
of the city with polluted air.
In the developing countries where growth is remarkable, forests
turn into factories and pollutants flow into rivers and contaminate
water necessary for life. The use of fossil fuels leads to the drying up
of aquatic resources.
And the keyword for the impact on the environment is global
warming, which there isnt a single day we pass without hearing
about. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
pointed out, in its fourth evaluation report, that the use of fossil fuels
by human beings mainly caused the increase in atmospheric carbon
dioxide and the activities of human beings after 1750 brought about
global warming. The report warns that if greenhouse gases, including
carbon dioxide, are emitted at the same level as they are now or at a
higher level, they may have a great impact on the climate.
Some people still seem skeptical about global warming, but I think it
is very likely that the use of fossil fuels causes drastic environmental
changes. Fossil fuels such as oil and coal are the accumulation of the
energy from the sun (light and heat) and the earth (terrestrial heat
and crustal movement), which has been stored over several billions of
years. Human beings have consumed energy in very large quantities
in just a short period of 200 years. The atmosphere and seawater on
the earth are in a delicate balance, and a slight change in the surface
temperature of the ocean in an area causes an ocean current change,
and that determines the climate of countries far from there. There
is no doubt that the huge consumption of fossil fuels has some role
here.

You Cannot Stop the Growth of the World Economy
We are not in a position to say that we will stop using fossil fuels
because they possibly promote global warming. It is important to
reduce the waste of energy, but it is just not possible to scale down
economic activities. Blocking the creation of jobs and production of
wealth drives people into crises.
The policy deliberated in various countries is the Green New
Deal, which doesnt destroy the environment and at the same time
sustains economic growth. U.S. President Barack Obama announced
that he would invest 150 billion dollars in renewable energy,
including solar energy, and create several million jobs with energy-
saving measures.
Is There an Alternative Energy Source to Oil and Coal?
It is not so simple to use renewable energy such as solar energy or

wind power in place of fossil fuels.
There are some flaws with using oil and coal as sources of energy.
They generate carbon dioxide and other harmful elements, yet they
are really superior energy sources despite these drawbacks. Lets
reaffirm the advantages of coal and oil here.
The first advantage is that oil and coal have a high heat generation
capacity. The heat release of coal is 30 MJ/kg, and for oil it is 44 MJ/
kg. Because the heat release of wood is 15 MJ/kg, oil and coal have
two to three times the energy density of wood.
And you can get all this heat release at a very low cost. Crude
oil prices exceeding US$100 became the topic in 2007; this is the
price per barrel (approximately 160 L). Even though it exceeded 100
dollars per barrel, it is cheaper than mineral water (market price) in
a polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottle. It prevailed as an energy
source rapidly simply because it is so affordable.

Furthermore, it has another virtue that is easily missed, and that

is its easy transportation. Japan imports a large amount of oil and coal
from foreign countries, and this portability makes that possible.
The world energy consumption in 2006, converted to oil, was
more than 10 billion tons. Of this, fossil fuels, such as oil, coal, and
natural gas, made up around 90%.
After having understood the above-mentioned data, we will look
into how to deal with various kinds of energy.
Can Solar Power Generation Meet the Energy Demands of

Japan?
When you think about the usage of renewable natural energies, it is

solar power generation that first comes to mind.
The performance of solar cells, which convert sunlight to electric
power, is improving every year. They achieve conversion efficiencies
of more than 10% currently and can reach conversion efficiencies of
more than 40% when cells using different wavelengths are stacked in
the tandem model. Since the performance of the battery is improving,
if you put solar light and heat together, it would not be impossible to
provide energy for our homes.
However, solar power generation is not a sufficient energy source
for large factories or transportation that requires large energy
consumption. The reason is that Japan has many cloudy and rainy
days.
Then, is it possible to supply all the energy necessary for Japan
by building an enormous solar power generation station? Let us
calculate.
The daylight length in Japan is approximately four hours per day,
accounting for rainy days. According to the data from the New Energy
and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), the

annual average for the total energy from all-weather sunlight in

Japan is about 10 MJ/m2, giving 3,650 MJ/m2 in a year.
On the other hand, the overall energy consumption of Japan is
560 million tons (560 billion kg), converted to oil. Because the energy
density of oil is 44 MJ/kg, the energy we need is 560 billion 44 MJ.
Assuming that with solar cells we are able to extract 30% of the
3,650 MJ/m2 solar energy, to get 560 billion 44 MJ of energy, the
area needed is 560 billion 44/(3,650 0.3) = 22,500 million m2 =
22,500 km2.

Since the area of Japan is 378,000 km2, if 6% of the country is

covered by solar cells, theoretically that might provide us with all the
energy consumption of Japan.
However, in the case of solar power generation, it doesnt end
there (6% of the country is already an unrealistically large area),
because in Japan it is not unusual for rain to continue for more
than 10 days, especially during the rainy season. If we have to stop
factories and offices whenever the weather worsens, the economy
does not function well.
Imagine how it would be if we had cloudy weather for 10 days,
then fine weather for just 1 day, and cloudy weather for another
10 days. We would need the ability to store energy for the next 10
days in just 1 day. Then the area needed for solar power generation
would rise by a factor 10 and would occupy 60% of the country.
Furthermore, it would be difficult to store energy for 10 days. There
are no rechargeable batteries that are capable of storing sufficient
electricity for operating factories. Solar energy is sparse and both
time-consuming and costly to collect. Even if solar cell panel prices
are reduced to almost zero, it would be difficult to reserve huge lands
for solar power generation, in addition to the agricultural land and
residential areas. And the precious green would be lost from Japan if
hills and fields are covered with solar cell panels.
Electricity Is Not Storable
Another problem is transmission. Electricity is energy that is

versatile, and its output easy to control. On the other hand, it has the
big flaw of lack of portability and capability for storage.
Even though there are rechargeable batteries for a small
apparatus, they are not sufficient for factory operation for days.
Transmission from the power station is limited to short distances.
Approximately 5% of the electricity is lost before it reaches homes
and offices from the power station.

10 The Magnesium Civilization
Therefore, research that aims to solve the problem of transmission

over long distances using high-temperature superconductivity is
ongoing. Using material with electrical resistance becoming zero at
200C to 100C, it accomplishes long-distance transmission with
zero loss. If such long-distance transmission is enabled, we can send
the electricity generated in desert areas to Japan.
However, cost is a problem in this case. Even with the current
power transmission technology, it is estimated that the line
construction would cost 100 million yen per kilometer. I think it is
too costly to build facilities that can cool a power transmission line
to temperatures between 200C and 100C at all times in a very
large area.
Use Solar Light/Heat, Wind Power, and Terrestrial Heat as

Local Energy Sources
The problem related to the amount of energy and transmission

also applies to wind-generated electricity and geothermal power
generation. This doesnt necessarily mean that I reject these natural
energies.
Natural energy is suitable for local production for local
consumption. You should actively promote the use of natural energy
by setting up geothermal power generation in volcanic areas or solar
cell panels for homes. However, they cannot be substituted for oil
and coal use in the whole of Japan or in the entire world.
Fossil fuels besides oil and coal are natural gas and methane
hydrate. Because these emit less carbon dioxide than coal and oil,
they are promising short-term energy alternatives, but after all, this
cant be a fundamental solution. There are many problems with
nuclear power generation. Because there is uneasiness about the
safety of radioactive waste disposal from the power station and of
the power station itself, promoting atomic energy actively will not
be a good direction.

Natural Energy and Hydrogen Society 11
Is a Hydrogen Society Feasible?
How would it be if electricity generated from natural energy becomes

transportable in a different form?
It is a vision called the hydrogen society, which has been
proposed on the basis of this idea. In this vision, electricity is
generated from natural energy and used for electrolyzing water
into oxygen and hydrogen (there is another method of separating
hydrogen from natural gas). The hydrogen is then stored in a tank
and carried to where it is used in fuel cells.
When hydrogen and oxygen are mixed and ignited, hydrogen
burns explosively. As an outcome, the reaction generates just water.
A hydrogen fuel cell generates electricity using this reaction, and
it doesnt emit greenhouse or other harmful gases. Hydrogen was
thought to be an ideal energy source.
However, the vision of the hydrogen society is not as popular as
before. Why is that so?
Is it difficult to make the hydrogen fuel cell come true? Though
it is costly because it requires using precious platinum as catalyst,
the practical performance of a hydrogen fuel cell has already been
established.
Is hydrogen production costly? The possibility that it can be done
by electrolysis at a sufficiently low cost is within reach.
The biggest problem is rather clear; hydrogen is difficult to store
and transport.
Lets look at a service station, for example.
Even a very small tank in a service station is around 10 m3. This
has the capacity to fill up 200 cars. If we try to achieve the same
amount of energy with hydrogen at 1 atmospheric pressure, 33,000
m3 will be required. This means that 30 m 30 m 35 ma large
tankwill be necessary.

If all of the energy consumed in Japan today is replaced with

hydrogen, all the space underground will have to be turned into
hydrogen storage tanks.
Then, is it possible to use a smaller-capacity tank under higher
pressure?
It is not so easy. Such a gas pressure would be tremendous and
beyond imagination.
The television with the cathode-ray tube was widely popular in
olden days. Inside the cathode-ray tube is vacuum, and the outside
is at 1 atmospheric pressure. Although the difference is only 1
atmospheric pressure, the cathode-ray tube sustains 10 tons of
weight per square meter. Since the cathode-ray tube needs the
strength to bear that load, the flat display screen was difficult.
Because one can find a hydrogen tank that can bear 700
atmospheric pressure, some might think that we should use that, but
in this case the load becomes 7,000 tons/m2. It might be possible to
build a small hydrogen tank for a car, but it is easy to figure out that it
is impossible to build a tank that can store energy for general use.

To use hydrogen in liquid form instead of gas, it is necessary to

maintain the temperature around 250C, and this requires a large
amount of energy. This is unreasonable.
Another way is to use metallic alloys for hydrogen storage, but
that will not be suitable for large-scale storage because such an alloy
is not only heavy but also expensive.
Besides the problem with the tank, hydrogen also has the danger
of exploding. It would be considerably scary to have so many huge
hydrogen tanks buried underneath us, wouldnt it?
Though hydrogen as fuel could be an alternative in a limited area
or for a limited purpose, it is difficult for it to replace oil and coal
after all.
Nuclear Fusion Is the Energy of the Future
How about nuclear fusion, which is said to be the dream energy?

I have conducted research on laser fusion for over 30 years. As
an expert, I am sorry to say that the practical use of nuclear fusion is
not yet in sight. Because the energy problem that we face today will
be the issue in the next 2030 years, nuclear fusion will not be there
soon enough.
At the early stages of nuclear fusion research, the prospect of its
practical use was considerably optimistic, and it was believed that
it would be realized by the beginning of the 21st century. However,
every time nuclear fusion solves one of its difficult problems, another
problem, one with more difficulty, stands in the way, and the road
map to the realization is considerably uncertain.
Furthermore, it has another problemtritium (an isotope of
hydrogen), used in nuclear fusion, hardly exists on the earth. The
method currently considered for producing tritium is to strike
lithium with neutrons released from a nuclear fusion reactor. But
scarcity of lithium reservesjust 11 million tonsmight become an

obstacle. Lithium exists in seawater in very small amounts, and the

extraction cost is 10 times higher than that for mining it.
Thinking about New Energy and Circulation of Resources
I hope I was able to make you understand how difficult it is to replace

oil and coal.
Let us consider the situation with the energy and material cycle
on the earth.
All the energy available on the earth comes originally from the
sun and the earth itself (terrestrial heat). Winds and ocean currents
are produced by this energy, and the heat stored on the earth is
released into space by the circulation of the atmosphere and water.
Therefore, the earth does not become too hot.
The material also circulates. Plants photosynthesize by absorbing
sunlight, animals eat plants, and the circulation of the material is
continued by microbes that break down corpses and excrement.

However, industrial activity by human beings has disturbed this

cycle. Greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, are emitted because
of the use of fossil fuels in large amounts and hold the heat released
from the surface of the earth. The artificial material generated
through industrial activity may not be broken down naturally.
What should we do to recover the circulation of energy and
material?
Should we meet all our energy needs with solar power generation
and solar heat? The energy from the sun is enormous, but it is too
sparse to maintain human activities that have increased a lot.
We should use material that has a high energy density, does not
emit carbon dioxide and harmful gases, and is enough to support
industrial activity. In addition, after having extracted the energy, it
can be recycled by using only natural energy. It is necessary to build
such a system to make the new circulation of energy and material
happen.

The Material That Becomes the New Energy Source Is

Magnesium
Will it be really possible to make such a circulation happen? I think

that using a technology based on a new idea will enable it. Even
though nuclear fusion is considered new energy, we cannot expect its
realization because it is far from it. The necessary condition to make
it happen should be achieved by using todays available technology.
The society I have been envisioning is the one using magnesium
as an energy currency. No reader who hears about magnesium out of
the blue, perhaps, is convinced and agrees to say Indeed!
When we think of magnesium, what is known to us would
probably be magnesium chloridenigari (bittern)used for making
tofu. Magnesium in pure form is a lightweight metal, silver white in
color. Because of their high strength and light weight, magnesium
alloys are used for parts in cell phones, personal computers, cars,
and airplanes.
An elderly person might remember that magnesium was used in
flashbulbs of cameras. Metal magnesium can easily be oxidized and
emits strong light when it is burned, and because of this it was used
in flashbulbs of cameras. The reason magnesium in the flashbulb
burns is that the pure metal is powdered, but a cell phone will not
suddenly start a fire. Magnesium is an ideal material as fuel. The heat
release of coal is 30 MJ/kg, as I mentioned earlier; for magnesium, it
is 25 MJ/kg, slightly less than coal.
Carbon dioxide, sulfur oxide, and other gases are released when
you burn coal. Meanwhile, magnesium, when it reacts with oxygen,
only becomes magnesium oxide, which is harmless.
A tank of extraordinary size, 1 km 1 km 10 m, would be
necessary to store the energy for a power station with 1 million kW/
day capacity when generating energy with hydrogen at 1 atmospheric
pressure. However, if we use magnesium, the size of the tank will be
15 m 15 m 10 m.
Burning magnesium like coal and oil to generate energy is my
idea.

Because It Is Expensive, Magnesium Is Not Used as Fuel
Then a question that naturally comes to mind is, why has no one
been using it so far if it is that ideal as fuel?
It is because magnesium is precious. To smelt 1 ton of metal
magnesium, 11 tons of coal needs to be burned. There is not a single
person who merely burns the magnesium made this way as fuel
just like there is no one who burns paper money to warm his or her
body.
In our common sense, metal is a precious thing. Resource
deposits are limited, and it takes a great deal of energy and cost to
smelt magnesium. Magnesium exists in the form of compounds, such
as magnesium oxide and magnesium carbonate, in nature, and it is
necessary to smelt these to extract pure magnesium.
The price of metal magnesium was approximately 200 yen/kg
until around the year 2006, but it changed to 400600 yen since
then. Under the influence of the economic crisis of the latter half of
2008, most metal prices, except those of gold, dropped suddenly;
magnesium was not an exception, but it is still at 250 yen/kg. From
this point of view, magnesium cannot be used as fuel in a casual way.
Produce Laser with Sunlight to Smelt Magnesium
How would it be if there was cheap magnesium abundantly available

to generate fuel?

It was figured out recently that using a new smelting method

could make magnesium prices dramatically lower compared with
the current situation. For this purpose, solar energy is used.
Solar energy does not mean generating electricity with a solar
cell, and it is not solar heat either. Using just solar energy, which is
sparse as it is, is not sufficient for metal smelting.
It is laser that has a big role here. Using laser to smelt metal
magnesium from a magnesium compound is something that works
instantly.
However, it loses its meaning if the laser has been generated by
electricity. I use a technology called solar-energy-pumped laser,
which converts sunlight directly into laser energy.
Extract Magnesium from Seawater
Where are the materials to smelt with laser brought from?

Ores, including magnesium compounds, are common anywhere
on the earth and the sixth most common among the metallic elements
deposited in the earths crust. In fact, smelting metal magnesium
from these ores is mainstream today.
These ores can be smelted by using lasers, but there is another
place where you can find large amounts of magnesium a lot
cheaper.
It is the oceans. Approximately 1.29 g of magnesium is contained
in 1 kg of seawater. Because the earth has 1,400 1,015 tons of
seawater (1,400 quadrillion tons), the gross weight of magnesium
becomes 1,800 trillion tons. That is a vast quantity, equivalent to the
energy for approximately 100,000 years, because the fossil fuels used
as energy in the world per year is approximately 10 billion tons, by
oil conversion. It might be said that magnesium is an inexhaustible
resource.
By extracting a magnesium compound that is contained in
seawater unlimitedly and smelting it to metal magnesium with
lasers, we can use the metal magnesium as fuel for factories, homes,
and transportation.

Recycle Used Magnesium by Sunlight
In addition, using magnesium as fuel is not the end of the story.

Magnesium oxide is generated when magnesium is burned, and
returning this to metal magnesium by smelting with lasers would
make it usable as fuel again.
In other words, it is possible to establish a cycle by efficiently
converting energy from the sun into magnesium, a material of high
portability; using the energy it contains; and, after using that energy,
using sunlight to generate more energy from that.

The Magnesium Cycle, at a Stage Just Before Practical Use
Anyone who hears the story of this magnesium-recycling society

for the first time expresses surprise. It is a natural response. Most
people do not know that magnesium is usable as fuel. They have
never heard that solar light is directly convertible into laser energy.
Then there is the extraction of magnesium from seawater.
However, the story I propose is not science fiction, and it is not a
dream that will come true dozens of years later.
Solar-energy-pumped lasers and laser smelting, magnesium fuel
cells, and water conversion devices, which extract magnesium from
seawater at low cost, and research on these devices are very much in
progress, and some portions are already put into practical use.
The magnesium-recycling society is the story for tomorrow, not
for the far-off future.
Lets look into the details of the individual technologies needed
to realize the magnesium-recycling society in next chapter.
Summary
The supply of coal and oil resources is unstable and causes an

environmental problem.
The world annual energy consumption is more than 10 billion
tons in oil conversion.
Natural energies, such as solar power generation, are not enough
to substitute oil.
Hydrogen has transportation and storage difficulties.
The vision of the magnesium-recycling society is to extract
magnesium from seawater, smelt with lasers, use for fuel, and
smelt the magnesium oxide generated into magnesium again.

Chapter 2
Make Laser from Sunlight
It All Started with Laser
Smelting magnesium by using laser energy generated directly from

the sunlight . . .
Is this really possible? I will look into the smelting of magnesium
in the next chapter. For that, I will explain the solar-energy-pumped
laser, which converts sunlight into laser energy, in this chapter.
The magnesium-recycling society, I imagine, started with laser
research.
Laser Is Used in Every Field, from Information and

Communication to Medical Care
When you hear about laser, what does it remind you of?
A laser beam is often used as a classic tool in science fiction
movies, and we cannot think of our lives without lasers.
The most familiar examples of its use would be CDs, DVDs, and
laser disk players and recorders, including Blu-ray. By focusing a
laser into an extremely small place, it becomes possible to read data

By Takashi Yabe
www.panstanford.com

that are recorded over a small area. As the technology progresses, it

makes it possible to focus a laser into smaller and smaller places, and
it makes data recordable in large amounts.
The optical communication used for accessing the Internet is an
applied example of lasers. Laser light is transmitted in a transparent
optical fiber at the speed of light. We can pack a lot more information
on laser light than on an electric wave.
In the medical field, use of the laser surgical knife is widespread.
After the cut, bleeding stops instantly because of the heat of the
laser.
In the field of energy, one of the methods of realizing nuclear
fusion includes laser fusion.
In Nature, Light Is a Mixture of Various Types of Lights
Lasers are used in many fields, but in the first place, what is laser
anyway? What is the difference between normal light and laser?

Make Laser from Sunlight 23
At first, let us think about light that is not laser.

The natural world is filled with light. In addition to visible rays
that human can see, there are infrared rays and ultraviolet rays. X-
rays, microwaves used in a microwave oven, and radio waves used
for communication are all electromagnetic waves, which belong to
the family of light.
Light has the nature of a wave, and the period of this wave is
called wavelength. The characteristic difference between lights is
the difference in their wavelengths. In addition, the strength of light
is determined by the amplitude of the wave.

Light in the natural world is a mixture of lights with various

wavelengths, directions, and strengths. The light from a flashlight
or a fluorescent lamp looks like a single light, but it consists of
various kinds of lights with different wavelengths, amplitudes, and
directions. When the timings of the waves do not synchronize, even
if they have the same wavelengths and amplitudes, they might cancel
or strengthen each other.
Sunlight also consists of various lights. It includes many
wavelengths, from red to violet as visible rays, infrared rays, and
ultraviolet rays. The focus distance changes between different
wavelengths because the lens refractive index changes.
You may not notice a difference in the focus distance by wavelength
while you are collecting sunlight at a focus point with a magnifying
glass, because it appears as if sunlight is concentrated at the point.
But when you observe far-off heavenly bodies with an astronomical
telescope, differences in the focus distance by wavelength emerge as
a chromatic aberration. Therefore all large astronomical telescopes
adopt the reflection mirror system.

Laser Synchronizes the Wavelengths and Timing of Waves
Lets look into a laser. Laser, a light created artificially, does not exist in
the natural world. Unlike natural light, it synchronizes wavelengths,
in addition to the timing of the peaks and troughs of the waves. In
its original state the beam diverges as it propagates, but a narrow
low-divergence beam can be collected at a very small area by using
a convex lens.
To describe the advantage of laser in a word, it can concentrate

energy in space and time. It brings light with the same wavelength
to the same timing, and the light can be concentrated at a very small
area. Because of that advantage, laser can create a bigger impact than
natural light even if they both have the same energy.
Whenever I explain laser, I usually compare it to slapping your
own cheek.

When you push your cheek slowly with your full palm, you dont
feel even the slightest pain.
Next strike your cheek in one quick motion. Surely you feel
considerable pain this time. This explains what energy concentrated
in time is.
How do you feel when you push your cheek with a pointed pencil
instead of your full palm? Of course, it hurts. This explains what
energy concentrated in space is.
Furthermore, if someone sticks a pointed pencil to your cheek in
a quick motion, certainly you would be injured seriously.
Though the same amount of energy is added, the action will be
totally different because of the concentration of energy in time and
space.

This is why laser is used in various fields. An 80-watt white

fluorescent lamp is bright enough for reading, but it cannot be
sufficient for processing a material physically. However, an 80-watt
laser can easily makes a hole in an iron plate.
Creating Laser Beams
What kind of a system creates a laser beam?

It is a sudden departure from the subject of light, but please
imagine a ball, like a volleyball, hard baseball, or whatever you like.
On the earth, an object at a higher position has more potential
energy. This potential energy is converted into kinetic energy when
you roll a ball down from the high position and the ball gains speed.
On the contrary, a ball rolled down from a low position does not gain
so much speed.

The principle of light emission can be explained by this analogy

to some extent.
All substances are made of atoms, and an atom is made of a
nucleus and electrons orbiting the nucleus. When an electron absorbs
the energy of an electromagnetic wave, it moves into an orbit at a
high position that is further away from the atomic nucleus. This is
excitation of the atom.
This is equivalent to moving a ball to a higher position.

Later, the electron returns to its original ground state, and at

this time it emits the same amount of energy it absorbed earlier. This
is an electromagnetic wave; in other words, light. A phenomenon like
this is called spontaneous emission.
Each atom has a different electromagnetic wave and wavelength
it absorbs or emits.
When an atom absorbs an electromagnetic wave and is in the
excitation state and it is further hit by an electromagnetic wave,
a phenomenon called induced emission occurs. The emitted
electromagnetic wave is identical to the absorbed electromagnetic
wave (incident light), with the same wavelength, same direction, and
even the same phase.
Inside a laser generator, a material laser medium is stored
to maintain a suitable state for the excitation, and it emits an
electromagnetic wave of a specific wavelength. As a laser medium,
gas, liquid, and a semiconductor are used besides a ruby, a solid.

In the laser generator, mirrors are used to reflect light repeatedly

and produce the induced emission like a chain reaction to amplify
the light.
When laser research started, a solid-state laser was the
mainstream that used a ruby as a laser medium. It promotes induced
emission by bringing the ruby atom to an excited state by pumping it
with a strong flash lamp light.
The semiconductor laser, which uses a semiconductor as a laser
medium, is widespread today. We can easily generate a laser with
a specific wavelength, and we can downsize a device by using a
semiconductor. Meanwhile, the disadvantage of a semiconductor laser
is that it does not have good phase matching (coherence) of waves,
and because of this disadvantage we cannot use a semiconductor
laser for microprocessing.
Recently, the semiconductor-pumped solid-state laser, which
is based on generating light at a specific wavelength by using a
semiconductor lamp and illuminating a solid-state laser medium with
this light, is also being widely used. The white light from a flash lamp
includes light with broad wavelengths, but only light with extremely
limited wavelengths becomes laser. Then from the beginning, we
should produce only specific wavelengths to improve the conversion
efficiency, and for this reason the semiconductor-pumped solid-state
laser is made. It became quite outdated to pump a solid medium
with white light from a flash lamp. However, this outdated way will
have a significant meaning in smelting of magnesium. I will discuss
this later.
Days Spent for Realization of Laser Fusion
I have conducted research on laser fusion for 30 years. When I decided

my major in this field, I was a senior in college, in the first half of the
1970s. Although I was interested in space-related research, I was not
sure what I wanted to do and what the purpose was.

At that time I came across a paper on laser fusion, a totally new

technology. In those days the United States pushed forward, behind
closed doors, nuclear fusion research by using high-power laser,
but the classification was canceled in 1972. Dr. John Nuckolls of the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which led the research,
published a paper on high-power solid-state laser in the scientific
journal Nature. This is the paper I read.
Does a high-power laser make the dream energy nuclear fusion
possible?
At that time, we were right in the middle of the oil crisis. Because
a Middle Eastern oil-producing country raised crude oil prices
substantially, the world was in panic. Perhaps it was the first incident
that ordinary people were strongly conscious of an energy problem.
While the sense of an impending crisis spread in the world, I was
determined to make nuclear fusion solve the world energy problem
in one sweep.
In fact, another reason was that laser fusion research looked
cool somehow, to tell you the truth. Though I was an engineering
student, playing with a machine covered with oil was not suited to
my character. That meant devoting myself fully to laser and nuclear
fusion research using difficult quantum mechanics and facing the
challenges involved. Indeed, a serious research atmosphere attracted
me like something cool, and that I dont deny.
The Realization of Nuclear Fusion Fades Away
When I started my research life, world researchers had an optimistic

view toward the realization of nuclear fusion.
Even in Dr. Nuckollss paper published in Nature, the realization
of nuclear fusion could be possible if there was a laser generator of
1 kilojoule output.

However, a 1 MJ laser, which has 1,000 times the output of a

1 kJ laser, is currently going to be used in the most advanced nuclear
fusion research. Despite that fact, the realization of nuclear fusion is
still not in sight.
In laser fusion, laser irradiates deuterium and tritium, which
become the fuel and elevate the surface temperature rapidly. Then
an elevated temperature and pressure state is reached when the fuel
implodes by the plasma expansion reaction. However, this implosion is
unstable, and the condition it is generated in is not understood well.
Methods other than laser fusion also face many difficult problems.
In the magnetic confinement method, researchers tried to confine
high-temperature plasma by generating a magnetic field. Although it
was not easy, eventually the method was successful in confining the
plasma, but then another problem occurred. The coil for generating
the magnetic field became radioactive from a mass outbreak of
neutrons. Dangerous radioactive material was generated by nuclear
fusion, which should have been safer than nuclear power generation.
It can be said that in nuclear fusion research, currently, whenever a
difficult problem is solved, another new difficult problem appears,
and the future of nuclear fusion is hard to foresee.
There is also a problem with the nuclear fusion fuel. It uses as fuel an
isotope of hydrogen, called tritium, but that exists only in a very small
amount on the earth. We can make tritium from lithium, but lithium
deposits are not abundant either. Research that uses deuterium, which
is more abundant than tritium, is performed, but nuclear fusion with
deuterium is more challenging than the one with tritium.
Even by the shortest time estimates, it will take several decades
to realize nuclear fusion, but it can still be achieved one day. If a laser
several orders of magnitude more powerful than the present one is
developed, laser-driven nuclear fusion could very likely come true
one day.
But it is not nuclear fusion that can solve the energy problem we
face now.

I think nuclear fusion is the energy of the space travel era. Visiting
Mars or Jupiter or going to outer space in a spaceship might use
nuclear fusion for propulsion.
Flying a Rocket with Laser
At the early stages of nuclear fusion research, ideas from superior

individual researchers made a breakthrough and contributed to its
advance. Because of that I was feeling like I was the one to realize
nuclear fusion. However, for the current nuclear fusion research, I
think that time period is over.
Nuclear fusion became a huge project with a vast budget and an
enormous number of researchers. The International Thermonuclear
Experimental Reactor (ITER), with seven participating countries,
including Japan, has experiments in progress, and this is a happy
situation for a nuclear fusion researcher. As for Japan, nuclear
fusion research is relatively easy to get funds for. But it misses the
kind of excitement I was looking for as a researcher who was once
determined to be the one making nuclear fusion possible.
Around 2000, when I started feeling this way, I heard about
some interesting experiments from an American researcher at an
international laser nuclear fusion conference. He said that space
research that uses laser is progressing.
One such research is on plans for removal of a large amount of
trash, in other words, debris, including dying satellites, which are
scattered orbiting the earth.
When the debris is irradiated with a 30 kW solid-state laser, the
surface of the debris vaporizes and shoots out. The idea is to change
the debris orbit by using this power. Research for this plan, called the
Orion plan, is currently in progress.
Another plan is launching a rocket by using laser.

One of the promoters, Dr. Lake Myrabo, proposed a method of

irradiating a rocket from the ground with a laser. A reflecting mirror
is attached to the rear of the rocket, and only a specific spot is heated
when the laser irradiates, and the air nearby suddenly expands and
becomes the driving force for the rocket.
Because an engine is not necessary for the rocket to move in the
atmosphere, it can be produced at low cost, and the payload increases
because it uses the surrounding air as a propellant.
In 2000, the U.S. Army and Dr. Myrabo experimented with a
high-power laser (a pulse laser of 30 Hz, which means an average
output of 10 kW with a peak 30 times in one second) to launch an
experimental object to a 71 m altitude.

Because I was interested in space since childhood, I was excited

about the idea of flying a spaceship with laser, and I started feeling
like I wanted to try my own experiment.
However, the high-power laser Dr. Myrabo used in the experiment

was something that costs tens of millions of yens only for rent,
and the products were made for the Star Wars plan that President
Reagan proposed. Because there was neither a laser nor money in
our laboratory, we had to take a different approach.
Therefore I came up with the idea of a method that uses water.

We cannot swim in the air no matter how much we paddle the air
with our arms and legs. However, we can swim easily in water if we
move our arms and legs in the same way. In other words, pushing
away an object with a larger mass provides a larger reaction. In the
experiment of Dr. Myrabo, the rocket was propelled by dispelling air,
but the reaction should increase if I replace it with water, which has
more mass than air.
This does not mean to vaporize the water by laser to gush it out
as steam.
A water tank is attached to the rocket, and we irradiate the laser

from outside. Because water is transparent to laser, the laser is
concentrated at one point in the back of the tank. When the material
there is heated and expands, it pushes away the water in the tank by
an intense force and lets the water gush out from the rocket. In other
words, it is a flying water gun in the sky.
In theory, it enables a rocket to fly with laser that has an output

several orders of magnitude less than the rocket type that spouts
gas.
All we need now is an experiment. In 2002, I made a very small

airplane model, with 5 cm of wingspan, less than 300 mg in weight,
and equipped with a water tank. I attached an aluminum plate to the
tank to concentrate the laser at one specific point.

The laser output I used was weak, just 5 watts. When I irradiated
the laser toward the airplane tank, aluminum evaporated instantly
and pushed away the water in the tank vehemently. The speed of the
water gushing out reached 320 km/hr when I measured it.
It was a small airplane of 300 mg in weight, but what I was able
to make was accomplished with a 5-watt laser output, and that was
met with amazement. A 5-watt power is the same as what we have
in a flashlight, but it enables a model airplane to fly if laser is used.
The success of this experiment was published on the front page of
the New York Times.
Converting Sunlight Directly into Laser
Because the experiment with the model airplane succeeded, I was

beginning to think that a laser-propelled rocket is not a dream.
How much laser output would be needed to fly a practical rocket,
passenger airliner, or cargo?
A quick calculation results in 1 GW, that is 1 million kilowatts. This
is equivalent to the output of a large-scale power station. Although
it is far more efficient than a gas-propelled rocket, all this power is
necessary. It is impossible to produce such a high-power laser from
electricity.
I wondered in what way I could realize a 1-million-kilowatt
laser. It was the solar-energy-pumped laser, which converts sunlight
directly into laser, that came to my mind.

Perhaps it was totally unexpected to hear of a technology that

converts sunlight into laser. However, as I mentioned earlier,
white light of a flash lamp was used as incident light in the early
laser generator. The wavelength of light included in the flash lamp
resembles sunlight closely, but it is just stronger than sunlight.
That means that we should be able to convert natural sunlight

into laser directly if there is a laser medium with high conversion
efficiency.
I was not the first one who thought about converting sunlight
into laser directly. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory experimented
with laser oscillation by sunlight 40 years ago. The technology itself
continued to be there, but it was too inefficient for practical use.
The best public record is 0.7%, accomplished in Israel. An overall

efficiency of 0.7% means that even if we have 100% sunlight, in the
end we still have only 0.7% that becomes laser. This is not applicable
to industrial use.
However, I was very lucky to find out that a laser medium

with high conversion efficiency was already developed. Besides, it
happened in a place very near where I was. I will mention the details
later, but Dr. Kunio Yoshida, whom I had collaborated with earlier,
developed a laser medium by mixing chromium and neodymium in
1995. Before that the conversion efficiency of the laser medium itself
was around 7%, but Dr. Yoshida succeeded in raising that conversion
efficiency substantially.
You may wonder why such a terrific laser medium is not

discussed more widely. Even as laser experts, there are few people
who know about this laser medium, and everybody is surprised
when I introduce it. That is because the mainstream laser switched
to the semiconductor laser, as stated earlier.
The flash lamp light was converted into laser by using a solid-
state laser medium until the 1990s.

However, after that the semiconductor laser and semiconductor-

pumped solid-state lasers spread rapidly. Making laser from a specific
wavelength using a semiconductor became much more cost effective
than using white light made of various wavelengths.
When Dr. Yoshida developed a groundbreaking laser medium,
there was no researcher there to use it as a medium. I cannot help
feeling a destiny where a laser medium of such misfortune comes
under the sun, literally in solar-energy-pumped laser.
Use Laser for Metal Smelting
A prospect for generating a powerful laser at low cost was in sight

if I could convert sunlight using the laser medium developed by Dr.
Kunio Yoshida.
However, a large amount of funding is necessary for rocket or
airplane research, and there is no doubt that it would be considerably
long-term research. It is very difficult to obtain funding for a research
theme that cannot have industrial applications in a short time.
Therefore we decided to look for a more applied research theme
that could utilize high-power laser at low-cost and be more suitable
for industrial applications in the short term.
Laser is a technology that has a very wide application range. It
has the probability of replacing every existing process because of its
ability to concentrate energy at one point.
I thought metal smelting would be a promising application.
A complicated chemical reaction is used currently for metal
smelting. For example, in iron manufacturing, the reaction of carbon
monoxide, produced by burning coal, and iron oxide, included in iron
ore, is used to make pig iron. Furthermore, during the process, it is
necessary to clean the pig iron of impurities such as carbon, silicon,
manganese, and phosphorus in the process. Because of this process,
ironworks has to be at a large scale, and we take it granted that this
is the norm.

However, the reason such a process is necessary is because it is

the only way with low-level energy. Therefore there is no way besides
using a chemical reaction that takes place at low temperature.
Imagine how it will be if energy at a much higher level than the
current one is available. Even without using a complicated chemical
reaction, it could possibly cut the molecular bonds and pick only the
element needed.
The strength of laser, which can concentrate energy at one point,
is clear here.
Magnesium Has a High Market Price, and It Is a Good Target
Theoretically, laser is usable for any kind of metal smelting. However,

what I wanted was not just to replace an existing smelting method
but to be able to form the circulation smelting use recycling.
Then, it would be promising as a fuel.
What type of metal would satisfy a condition like this? Iron is a
metal in high demand but is inappropriate as fuel because it does
not burn if not powdered, and besides, iron powder is a dangerous
substance. Since sodium is unstable and difficult to handle, it is not
right as a candidate either.
In the case of aluminum, magnesium, and calcium, because
they are currently used and the deposits are abundant, they can
possibly be used as fuel. Aluminum has a higher energy density than
magnesium, and bauxite, the raw material of aluminum, is abundant.
Bauxite deposits are estimated to be 25 billion tons, but only around
100 million tons are consumed by humans.
When I was thinking this way, I got inspiration from a magazine
article I was reading by accident. It is said that freshwater resources
are scarce in many places in the world and that 3 billion people will
face freshwater shortage in 2025.
If you remove all the dissolved materials from seawater, what
remains is freshwater! While you are obtaining the materials for
metal smelting, you are converting seawater into freshwater. If this

comes true, it kills two birds with one stone.

There is 1,800 trillion tons of magnesium in seawater, and it is far
more abundant than aluminum (I will describe the details of water
conversion in Chapter 5).
It is also appealing that magnesium has a high market price. The
price per kilogram is 400600 yen (it dropped suddenly in the latter
half of 2008 and is around 250 yen now, in 2009). Though it is not
possible to reduce its price low enough to use it as fuel initially, it is
possible to establish a successful business if it costs lower than the
existing smelting method.
Magnesium is a very useful metal. It can be used for making an
alloy with aluminum and zinc that is lightweight and strong, and it
is good for using in electronic equipment because its heat radiation
characteristic is high. In addition, magnesium is almost limitless in
demand, for example, using it for smelting titanium.
Furthermore, it is proven to be usable as fuel. I will explain the
details in Chapter 4. The released energy of magnesium is 25 MJ/kg,
which is slightly less than the released energy of coal, 30 MJ/kg. If
20% of magnesium-released energy can be used for a fuel cell, it will
have approximately 7.5 times the output of the present lithium ion
battery.
Extracting magnesium from seawater and smelting it with solar-
energy-pumped laser generates metal magnesium, which can be
used as fuel. Smelting the remaining magnesium oxide by solar-
energy-pumped laser again gives usable fuel.
The vision of the magnesium-recycling society became clear in
my mind.
Is It Possible to Convert Sunlight into Laser?
Once I reached the point of having a clear vision, what I needed to do

was experiment. Is it really possible to convert sunlight into laser?
Because my laboratory emphasizes physics simulation, I should
have started detailed calculations with a computer first; instead

I decided to build a laser generator using familiar components at

hand. First I tested it with an experiment, and the calculation came
next. It is my style to elucidate a principle by computer simulation
after I try it experimentally and get a successful result.
The experiment began on a rooftop at Tokyo Institute of

Technology in June 2005.
It is the laser medium that is the most important for a laser

generator. The laser medium that we used for the experiment was
an improved version based on the technology of Dr. Yoshida, and
Dr. Shigeaki Uchidas group achieved a conversion efficiency of 42%
with a flash lamp in the laboratory.
Though the medium is smaller than the tip of the little finger, it is
transparent green and possesses beauty like a jewel.
Because a laser medium has a cylindrical shape, much of the

sunlight would be missed if it were just placed standing up. It
is necessary to efficiently collect the sunlight entering the laser
medium.
Following conventional wisdom, light could have been collected

with a high-precision reflecting mirror. As I mentioned earlier, light
with various wavelengths is included in sunlight, and a chromatic
aberration occurs when collecting light with a convex lens.
However, there was not enough money to prepare a full-scale

reflecting mirror, unfortunately. I decided to test it with a low-cost
lens. What was used was a single piece of Fresnel lens, 50 cm 50 cm
in dimensions and 5,000 yen in cost.
A Fresnel lens is a thin plastic lens that is used as a magnifying

glass, with concentric circular grooves. Large Fresnel lenses are used
in lighthouses and signals and were also used in overhead projectors
(OHPs), in the past.
The frame used for fixing the device was made from a broken
telescope that was already there.

We installed the laser generator that was built in this way on

the roof and adjusted it properly to get the sunlight into the laser
medium. At that time, this was done with the manual labor of
students because we did not have an automatic solar tracking device
that is so smart.
We kept on moving the device slowly along with solar
movement.
Undergraduates came to my laboratory hoping to learn physics
simulation and did not know about the solar-energy-pumped laser
at all. I persuaded them somehow and had them participate in the
experiment. The word laser makes a man's heart beat faster.
Sunlight Turned into Laser
Because it was the rainy season when we started the experiment,

there were few sunny days and the experiment did not progress
readily.
The rainy season was over before long, and summer arrived. In
the peak of the summer heat, the students, with Tomomasa Okubo,
an assistant professor, as their leader, were seminaked when they
were moving the device manually.
Even though they made a great effort, there was not a single sign
of laser oscillation at all. August passed with nothing happening, and
then it was September.
I still remember the excited students rushing into the laboratory,
on September 13, on a day of lingering summer heat. They said that
a weak infrared laser was oscillated by the laser medium.
The students, with their three-month effort rewarded, were
deeply moved and almost in tears. I was overwhelmed with joy,
too. Though I was able to convince myself that there is no problem
theoretically, because the laser was generated by white light in the
laboratory, I still prepared myself for the other possibility that a laser
might not be generated at all.

Funds Were Obtained, But Not the Laser
In the experiment of 2005, the output for the laser generated was
on the order milliwatts and that did not seem to be of any use, but
at least I figured out that the basic principle was not wrong, so I
gained confidence. Anyway, the initial stage of research is always
like this. That made me think that if I could manage increasing the
light collection performance and improving the laser medium, the
conversion efficiency could rise and a practical level of output would
be reached.
I applied to the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science
and Technology for funding in 2006 to make a bigger laser generator.
Fortunately, I was able to obtain 6 million yen in funding, so we could
have a Fresnel lens 1 m 1 m in dimensions and a laser medium
that is much bigger and longer. Furthermore, I had a device with a
sensor for automatic tracking of the solar movement. I started the
experiment with the high expectation that a 2030 W laser should

be generated with this new device.

However, when I began the experiment in summer, there was
no sign of a laser being generated at all. August passed, and finally
in September, a 1 W laser was generated. This number was far less
than I expected. There were many concerns from my university that
research like this was bogus, and I even became depressed.
To tell you the truth, we had many rainy days in 2006, and that
was not a good situation for the solar-energy-pumped laser, but such
an excuse did not work. They decided to cancel the funds for the next
fiscal year.
I should not have depended on the university for laser research
funds. To continue the experiment, we needed to raise funds by
ourselves. I called several research colleagues and established
Electra Co., Ltd., in January 2007 (with Dr. Eiichi Matsunaga, a Tokyo
Tech alumnus, as the president).
In March, while I was working on a new experiment plan, a 25
W output was produced by the laser generator that had been left on
the roof. A 25 W laser is insufficient for performing metalwork, but it
is an output level that can easily drill a hole, for example, in a wood
chip.
It was really bad timing that the level of laser output I estimated
was reached after the funds were cancelled. However, we discovered
that for a solar-energy-pumped laser, clear air without clouds and
low humidity are more important factors than the temperature or
the position of the sun. This is evident in the fact that we added no
improvements to the device itself since it generated a 1 W output in
September.
Building an Experiment Facility in Chitose, Hokkaido
Generating a 25 W laser with a Fresnel lens that is only 1 m 1

m in dimensions elevated the mood of the Electra members very
much. Looking back, it can be said that everybody became slightly
optimistic.

Originally, Electra, the company, was established by researchers

who invested their own savings. I was planning to build a small
experiment facility with about 15 million yen in personal funds.
Somehow it took an interesting turn. Mr. A, who became a member

of the company's board, proposed an attractive plan. He would raise
the funds needed to build a large-scale experiment facility.
Mr. A invited to Japan the chief director of a group and secured

from him a promise of financial support. In addition, Mr. A would visit
the Middle East to purchase a very large land for the experiments.
Actually, we visited one of the emirates of the United Arab Emirates
(UAE), where a grand ceremony was held with the participation of
the emir, and we were completely determined.
The conditions suitable for experiments with the solar-energy-

pumped laser are many days of fine weather, clean air, and low
humidity. The Middle Eastern desert was just ideal.
The plan that started in Japan suddenly became bigger, and the
original plan with 15 million yen in personal funds turned into a
large-scale plan with 50 million yen.
I decided the location of the experiment facility to be in Chitose,

Hokkaido, Japan, for simple reasons: I have an acquaintance, Prof.
Kiyoshi Kato, at the university nearby, and conditions for the laser
generation were favorable. We were able to rent the land at a low
price from the city of Chitose, and Chitose Institute of Technology let
us use its laboratory. It was very fortunate that so much convenience
and goodwill were offered to us. Everything seemed going great at
that point.
An 80 W Laser Was Oscillated in Hokkaido
An experiment facility was completed in July 2007, and I invited the

people involved and held a completion ceremony.

Three laser generators were installed in this experiment facility by

the cooperation of Okamoto, a leading Japanese optical-component
processing company.
It was equipped with an automatic solar tracking device and a
big Fresnel lens 2 m 2 m in dimensions. The frame had a strong
structure that could endure a sudden strong wind, and with a U-
shaped frame, it could change its direction freely.
Transparent plastic of 2 m 2 m is carved concentric circles,

which bend and focus sunlight to a spot.
Focus sunlight is led to laswer medium,
which generates intense infrared laster.
Tracking the sun movement,

transparent plastic changes
its direction.

When I think about that now, it was totally overspecified, but I

was proud of the laser generators that were shining in white brilliant
color.
The laser oscillation experiment advanced smoothly. Although we

had intense heat in the summer of 2007 in Honshu, the weather in
Hokkaido was so bad that I was worried, but we were able to oscillate
80 W of laser by October. I can easily make a hole in a stainless steel
plate 1 mm thick if I use an 80 W laser.
In fact, it produced only 80 W because the quality of the Fresnel
lens I ordered was much lower than I expected, but it would have
exceeded 100 W if it had the expected quality.
I Was at a Loss about the Fund-Raising for Laser Research
The laser experiment itself achieved fairly satisfactory results

without any difficulties, but it was the money that has become the
problem. I had a relentless series of troubles with fund-raising.
Mr. A, who promised to raise funds, pretended not to know
anything when we were at the stage of paying for the experiment
facilities. We also found out that he had canceled the purchase of the
Middle East land; our distrust toward him increased.

We decided to ask Mr. A to leave, but he made a totally

unreasonable monetary demand; he wanted back three times of
what he had invested. At that point, we finally realized that we were
trapped in, basically, a fraud.
Anyway, because there was no money, I spent my last savings
to increase the companys capital, pay for the vendor who built
the facilities, and pay Mr. A. Never before in my life was my mind
completely occupied every day with money concerns.
In addition, I was somehow able to complete the payment for the
experiment facilities with the financial support of Toyoda Tsusho
Corporation, but the fact that there was no money did not change.
Even just sending students to the experiment facilities in Hokkaido,
with round-trip airfare from Tokyo and daily expenses, became
a burden. I tearfully decided to have the experiment facilities in
Chitose closed for the time being and to devote myself to improving
the setup in Tokyo.
Because of the circumstances that I will explain in Chapter 5, I had
the possibility of raising funds for the research. I am now pushing
forward steadily with the preparations for the experiment on laser
oscillation in Mongolia. The Mongolian desert has many days of
fine weather and an ideal environment for the experiment. Just at
that time, Dr. Choijil Baasandash from Mongolia was studying in my
laboratory and served as a bridge of cooperation with Mongolian
University of Science and Technology, his alma mater, and helped
establish the research center for solar-energy-pumped lasers. And
we already established a corporation in Mongolia to plan for future
industrialization.
Making a Laser Medium with Ceramics, Not a Crystal
I explained the research process in general terms; now I would like

to explain the technical aspects of the laser generator with a little
more detail.

The most important aspect of oscillating a solar-energy-pumped

laser is the performance of the laser medium. A neodymium yttrium
aluminum garnet (YAG) laser medium is used traditionally in the
field of solid-state lasers, and solar-energy-pumped laser is based
on this, too.
YAG is a crystal of the garnet (G) consisting of yttrium (Y) and
aluminum (A), and you can think of it as a kind of jewel. Because it is
a crystal, we need to wait for its slow growth, taking dozens of days.
During this crystal growth, we add neodymium, which is used as a
material for magnets.
The neodymium YAG laser medium oscillates a laser with the
energy it receives when it is irradiated with a strong light such as a
flash lamp. Specifically, neodymium absorbs light with a wavelength
around 560600 nanometers (nm) (the middle of the orange-
to-green range) among incident lights; it activates excitation and
generates an infrared laser beam with a wavelength of 1,064 nm.

Naturally, light of various wavelengths is included in sunlight;

the conversion efficiency does not increase in this case because the
wavelength that neodymium absorbs is limited. The method to raise
the efficiency was known from olden days, and it was described in
laser textbooks written in the 1980s. The method is to add chromium.
A chromium atom absorbs light wavelengths such as blue and green
and passes the energy to a neodymium atom nearby. The energy
carried to the neodymium atom increases excitation and oscillates
an infrared laser.
However, neodymium YAG was a crystal and was created slowly

by growing it from liquid raw material that was melted at high
temperature, and it was not possible to include chromium in it.
In 1995, Dr. Yoshidas research group succeeded in including
approximately 0.1% chromium in neodymium YAG by using a totally
new technology for the first time in the world. In this technique,
the raw material powder for YAG and chromium powder are mixed,
compressed, and baked to harden to create ceramics. It did not take
as much effort as in creating a common YAG crystal, and it made
including chromium possible.
The medium chromium co-doped neodymium YAG that we used
was improved by Konoshima Chemical Co. Ltd. and achieves a 42%
conversion efficiency with a flash lamp in the laboratory. It is a
remarkable progress, considering that the conversion efficiency of
the conventional neodymium YAG laser medium was 7%. It reaches

a 20% conversion efficiency with actual sunlight. Because the

conversion efficiency of the neodymium YAG laser medium mixed
with chromium is theoretically 50%, there is more improvement
that can be made.
In terms of the cost, the ceramics medium is more suitable for
mass production than the crystal one. So far the price is high, 3
million yen for 10 pieces, because there is hardly any demand, but
the price will fall down remarkably if large amounts are ordered. A
quick calculation shows that it will be less than 30,000 yen apiece if
10,000 pieces are ordered.
A Reflecting Mirror Was Not Necessary for Collecting

Sunlight
Even if an efficient laser medium is made, it is not enough to oscillate

a laser. It is necessary to collect the actual sunlight in an effective way
and make it go through the laser medium.
It was commonsense for the experts to use a reflecting mirror for
collecting sunlight, because a reflecting mirror can avoid the problem
of chromatic aberrations caused by light of different wavelengths
having different focuses.
However, when I use a reflecting mirror, I have to bring a laser
medium in front of it. I will explain this later, but briefly, I need an
automatic solar tracking device and a device to cool the medium. But
if I place them in front of the reflecting mirror, they shade the mirror
from sunlight.
We used a thin Fresnel lens made of plastic, so we could place
the laser medium without blocking sunlight and simplify the device.
Actually, the main reason for adopting a Fresnel lens was because
there was no money.
Then what happened to the chromatic aberration problem? Did
a chromatic aberration occur when we used the lens for collecting
sunlight and ruin the experiment? After all it was just what the
experts believed.

Let me look into the phenomenon, chromatic aberration, once

again here.
It can be understood that a rainbow appears when sunlight goes
through a prismlight with different wavelengths have different
refractive indices. When sunlight goes though a convex lens, red and
blue lights focus at different points. There is no doubt about this.
Therefore light can be collected at one point if we use a reflecting
mirror. This is the commonsense of the experts, but is this true?
For example, I see an image of Saturn properly when I look at
Saturn through a reflecting telescope. The suns image is reflected
properly if I look at the sun in the same way. In other words, sunlight
never focuses at one point in the reflecting mirror; it appears as a
sun image.
When I collect sunlight with a 2 m reflecting mirror, the size of the

sun image becomes 2 cm. On the other hand, only a 2 mm chromatic
aberration occurs with a lens of the same size. From the beginning,
there was no need to worry about the chromatic aberration.

The chromatic aberration is an important subject in astronomical

observation, but it is not necessary to consider it at all when using
sunlight as energy. A low-cost Fresnel lens does the job.
Cooling a Laser Medium by Solar Energy
I mentioned earlier that the conversion efficiency of the chromium

co-doped neodymium YAG laser medium we are using is 20% with
sunlight and 42% with a flash lamp. Then where on earth does the
remaining light that is not converted go? It becomes heat.

When a medium is irradiated with light and laser oscillation goes

on, heat is steadily accumulated in the medium and it eventually
breaks down. Therefore the heat must be discharged somewhere.
A cooling device for the medium is attached to all laser
generators, and that is also how it is for our solar-energy-pumped
laser generator.
Energy is necessary to operate a cooling device, and we are going
to cool the device by using solar heat instead of electricity.
Cooling things off by using heat might sound strange because it is
counterintuitive. In fact, using heat for cooling is employed routinely.
For example, air conditioners operating with gas are used in offices,
and that is not a rare thing.
With our laser generator, a pipe with cold water circulating is
used around the laser medium. Because the heat of the medium
transfers to the water, the heat must be discharged somewhere. The
cooling device for this purpose is basically the same as an electric air
conditioner.
With an electric air conditioner, a compressor is run by electricity
and causes refrigerant vaporization/liquefaction to transfer the
heat. The cooling method using solar heat is basically the same,
but the difference is that heat is used for refrigerant vaporization/
liquefaction, not a compressor.
Electricity is used for cooling the laser generator for experiments,
but the solar heat is put to practical use. In recent years the cooling
system using solar heat has been attracting attention, for example,
Tokyo Gas is promoting the development of a high-efficiency solar
air conditioning system.
For Power Generation in Space, Weight Is a Problem
A laser device is not usable during the night. Then floating a power
station and a laser generator in the outer space where the sun
appears all the time might be a good idea. It sounds like science

fiction; however, research on power generation and laser oscillation

in space is actually in progress in Japan Aerospace Exploration
Agency (JAXA).
However, for power generation and laser oscillation in space, the
weight of the device seems to become a major problem. If you want
to obtain a 1 million kW output with a laser, it needs a light receiving
area of 1.8 km 1.8 km in case of 30% efficiency. It is equivalent to
3,200 tons of lens with 1 mm thickness. Even if it is made lighter
and thinner, it will still be 1,000 tons. By the way, the weight of the
International Space Station, which took nearly 10 years to complete,
is 500 tons.
If we want to supply 18 trillion kWh, which is the world annual
electricity consumption, with power generation in space, 2,000
stations of 1 million kW are necessary. It becomes 2 million tons in
total at 1,000 tons per station. A technology like a space elevator
(orbit elevator) that connects a satellite orbit to ground at low
cost will become indispensable for performing large-scale power
generation in space.
One Laser Generator Costs 500,000 Yen or Less
The improvement of the laser generator is continuing after the laser

research in Chitose was stopped. To use it for metal smelting, I have
to increase the output of the laser more and make the device itself
less costly.
I reflect on its overspecification in every aspect when I think
of the Chitose research facility today. Because it was the first full-
scale experiment, we definitely did not want to miss anything, so it
included overspecifications.
For example, it is a frame structure that supports the device.
Since we increased the strength to make it stable in strong winds,
the price of the whole device jumped and the device in Chitose cost 5
million yen. A major company, on the other hand, gave us an estimate

of 20 million yen. That is because, if we pursue the full specifications,

the price quoted by a manufacturing company will naturally reflect
that.
What I found out by actual experiments is that the laser generator
will function well enough even if it is made simpler than that.
On the basis of such an experience, I made a new laser generator
and installed it on the rooftop at Tokyo Institute of Technology. In
this device, I succeeded in cutting the cost to around 500,000 yen by
modifications such as making the frame from iron pipes for water.
The Realization of a 400 W Laser Output Is Getting Close
We achieved an 80 W output in Chitose, which has many fine days,

but even under worse conditions, on the rooftop at Tokyo Institute of
Technology, we can now steadily produce dozens of watts. When you

collect sunlight and make it go into a laser medium, conditions for

the laser output, such as where the focus should be placed to bring
out the maximum efficiency, the device settings, and the atmospheric
humidity, become clear.
Even if I bring to the Mongolian desert the current device without
making any changes, it will achieve 100 W easily.
However, we do not make profit when we use it for metal smelting,
if it does not generate around 400 W. Ideally, it is preferable to have
a 1 kW output. It is necessary to improve the conversion efficiency of
the laser medium more.
With the current laser generator, we collect sunlight with lenses

2 2 m in dimensions. Because the solar energy accumulating into
4 m2 is 4 kW, an 80 W output means that the general conversion
efficiency is 2%. It is our current aim to realize 400 W, making the
efficiency 10%, which is five times better. I expect that this can be
done by the end of 2010.
Will it be easy to improve the performance by five times?
For a higher conversion efficiency, it is necessary to have both

mechanical and laser medium improvements. There is 60% loss when
collecting solar energy with a Fresnel lens at this stage, and 75% is
lost before it gets from the lens into the laser medium. Because 0.4
0.25 = 0.1, from the original solar energy, only 10% goes into the
laser medium. The conversion efficiency of the laser medium (if it
uses sunlight) is currently 20%, which means 0.1 0.2 = 0.02, and
the actual laser conversion rate remains 2%.
How to improve the device and the medium is already in sight.
Increasing the Precision of the Fresnel Lens
At first, it is simply a problem of precision for the Fresnel lens,

considering that 60% of the loss is produced by the lens. We placed

a special order for large-sized Fresnel lenses. The one we currently

use has a higher rate of air bubble content than a commercial one; in
other words, it is opaque.
There might be those who wonder whether we can easily make a

lens 2 m 2 m in dimensions with high precision. However, our lens
is made from four pieces of 1 m2 lenses combined together. A quarter
arc is drawn by one piece, and combining the four pieces together
makes it function as one lens. Because we avoided making huge
lenses 2 m 2 m in dimensions at a time, the degree of difficulty in
the production is not so high.
But it is necessary to perform an optical design, because it
is different from the lenses used for reading. Reading lenses have
many carved, narrow grooves to magnify the size of the letters for
easy reading. But if a groove becomes too narrow, the scattered light
increases and reduces the conversion efficiency. We need lenses
with wider grooves. For a common Fresnel lens, the groove width
is several tenths of a millimeter, but it is several millimeters for our
lenses.
Simulation has already advanced how we determine the shape
of the grooves, and the most suitable pattern becomes clear. By
improving the Fresnel lens, it should hold down the energy loss to
one-third to half of the current one.
The Improvement of the Laser Medium Also Advances
The improvement of the chromium co-doped neodymium YAG laser

medium is advancing, too. The conversion efficiency for sunlight is
20% now, but it is understood that it could also be improved.
Our chromium co-doped neodymium YAG laser medium is
a ceramic made by baking and hardening, as I explained earlier.
Unevenness from baking can never be avoided, although it is possible
to produce steadily. In addition, there is the problem that the yield
is not good because of taking out only a really good part from a big

lump. This will be settled by using a new device in the manufacturing

process.
In addition, research on increasing the chromium ratios mixed
with neodymium YAG is ongoing. Because 50% is the theoretical
maximum for the conversion efficiency of chromium co-doped
neodymium YAG, there is still room for improvement.
I think making the general conversion rate five times higher is
not that hard by improvement of the lens precision, laser medium,
and mechanical improvement of the device.
Summary
A laser can concentrate energy in space and time.

A laser medium that can convert white light into a laser in high
efficiency has been developed.
The chromium co-doped neodymium YAG laser medium realizes
conversion efficiencies of 20% with natural sunlight and 42% in
a laboratory.
The output of the current laser generator is 80 W.
With improvements in the lens and the medium, an output level
of 400 W will be achieved soon.

Chapter 3
Making Magnesium with Laser
Is It Possible to Smelt Magnesium with Laser as Expected?
I introduced in Chapter 2 the research on high-power laser generation

by converting sunlight. However, if a high-power laser output is
achieved, will it make smelting of magnesium possible? In addition,
will it be superior to existing smelting methods? Is it sufficiently
low-cost for smelting to make usable fuel?
In our laboratory, we are conducting research on magnesium
smelting using an experimental carbon dioxide gas laser generator.
Let me explain briefly how magnesium is smelted before I start
describing the smelting method using laser.
Electrolysis, Once a Mainstream Method, Is Hardly Used

Now
The smelting methods currently used for metal magnesium can

mainly be categorized into two, electrolysis and thermal reduction.
Electrolysis comprises electrolyzing the magnesium chloride
included in seawater and extracting the metal magnesium. The
magnesium chloride in seawater exists as hydrous magnesium

By Takashi Yabe
www.panstanford.com

chloride (bischofite) and is not suitable to electrolyze as it is.

Therefore hydrous magnesium chloride is heated at around 600
700C. In this way hydrous magnesium chloride is separated into
magnesium oxide and hydrochloric acid.
Anhydrous magnesium chloride is generated when chlorine is
added to the separated magnesium oxide. You can finally extract
metal magnesium by electrolyzing this anhydrous magnesium
chloride.
The electrolysis process is complicated because it involves
turning magnesium chloride into magnesium oxide and then turning
it back into magnesium chloride. In addition, an advanced chemical
technology is necessary for adding and removing chlorine.
Electrolysis was once the lowest-cost method for magnesium
smelting. Until the 21st century the main countries producing
magnesium were the United States, Norway, and Russia (the Soviet

Making Magnesium with Laser 63
Union), and they used electrolysis. However, electrolysis mostly

disappeared by the beginning of the 21st century.
The Pidgeon Method: Magnesium Smelting with Large

Amounts of Coal
Instead of electrolysis, thermal reduction, especially the Pidgeon

method, is the mainstream smelting method now. In the Pidgeon
method, dolomite is used as the main raw material. Dolomite is an
ore that resembles limestone and is found in almost the same places
as limestone. Rich in magnesium carbonate and calcium carbonate,
dolomite is used as a cement ingredient.
The carbon dioxide in dolomite leaves when it is burned at high

temperatures of around 1,000C and becomes burnt dolomite. When
the reducing agent ferrosilicon (an alloy of iron and silicon) and
burnt dolomite are put in a furnace for reaction in a high-temperature
vacuum state (12001500C), magnesium vapor is produced by the
reduction action of silicon. Cooling the magnesium vapor, you can
extract the metal magnesium.

Magnesium smelted by the Pidgeon method comes with a higher

purity compared with the one smelted by electrolysis.
It is clear from this explanation that the Pidgeon method needs a
large amount of thermal energy. It is said that approximately 11 tons
of coal is used for making 1 ton of magnesium, and the reducing agent
ferrosilicon cannot be collected. Therefore the Pidgeon method was
believed to be more expensive than electrolysis.
However, China lowered smelting cost markedly by introducing
low-cost coal into the Pidgeon method. As a result, the list of the main
countries producing magnesium changed completely. In place of the
former main countries, the United States, Norway, and Russia, China
is the country with the highest magnesium production now. The
world annual production of magnesium is approximately 600,000
tons, and 80% of that is from China.
The magnesium factories using electrolysis were closed one after
the other, and hardly any are left now. Because the Pidgeon method
produces magnesium with high purity and at low cost, other methods
cannot compete with it.

Until about 2006, the going price for magnesium in the world
was stable at around 200 yen/kg. However, the prices soared in 2007
because of higher demand and growing Chinese monopoly. It saw a
sudden drop with the world recession of the latter half of 2008, but
it is still at around 250 yen/kg.
It is not possible to use magnesium as fuel with this price and

at this production rate. The world energy consumption is 10 billion
tons by oil conversion. In addition, a large amount of carbon dioxide
is released by coal if the production scale is extended for the existing
process. The energy needed to produce catalysts is also enormous.
Furthermore, suppose a similar process is applied to recycling used
magnesium. In this situation, it would be a dream within a dream for
the recycling society to come true. To use magnesium as fuel, stable
supplies of magnesium and a smelting method that costs remarkably
lower than the existing one are required. Laser is the key to that. If
only there were a powerful laser, not only magnesium but all kinds of
metal smelting would be enabled.
We Use Chemical Reaction Because There Is No Method

to Obtain High Energy
Metals we need do not exist in the natural world in pure form. Iron
exists as iron oxide in iron ore, and aluminum exists as aluminum

oxide in bauxite. A chemical reaction is used for extracting the

desired metal from compounds like these. For example, iron oxide
is composed of iron and oxygen tied together firmly. In a reaction
with carbon to separate oxygen from iron oxide, carbon gets in,
and consequently a process called decarbonization is needed.
Furthermore, a process for removing impurities such as phosphor,
sulfur and silicon is necessary.
Metal smelting requires very large-scale facilities. This is
inevitable when you are repeating a complicated chemical reaction
many times to extract a specific element. Temperature in ironwork
furnaces is not more than one thousand and several hundred degrees.
It is not possible for a business to make profit if it has to generate
higher temperatures, because that costs too much.
The same thing can be said about magnesium. Magnesium oxide
is composed of oxygen and magnesium tied together firmly, and they
cannot be separated so easily. When you forcefully try to separate
things that do not want to be separated, you must add a tremendous
amount of energy, in other words heat.
To extract the metal magnesium directly from a magnesium
compound, an energy of approximately 20,000C equivalency is
needed as latent heat (to be described later) of evaporation and
as interatomic binding energy. When all this energy is supplied,
magnesium oxide is separated into oxygen and magnesium atoms,
but there was no method in the past to provide such a large amount
of energy. Even if such an amount of energy were available, the
smelting furnace would not tolerate it. Therefore smelting furnaces
at low temperatures of one thousand and several hundred degrees
use troublesome chemical reactions.
The Laser Smelting Method That Breaks the Ties of the

Atoms
The circumstances change completely if we use a laser. In Chapter

2, the advantage of laser was stated as being able to concentrate

energy in time and space. It is possible to focus energy at a small

point instantly and create big action. Suppose around 200C can be
generated by a laser that irradiates a point that is 1 cm in diameter.
Focusing the same laser with a lens to a point that is 1 mm in diameter
makes it possible to generate a hot spot of 20,000C equivalency by
concentration of energy.
In electrolysis, heating hydrous magnesium chloride to turn it
into magnesium oxide and adding chlorine to make it anhydrous
magnesium chloride were necessary. However, in the laser smelting
method, an energy of 20,000C equivalency can be given to
magnesium oxide to vaporize it and separate it into magnesium and
oxygen.
By the way, the technique for extracting a specific element or

molecule with laser is already employed in various fields. The research

of Dr. Koichi Tanaka, who won the Nobel Prize, is especially famous.
With a laser, Dr. Tanaka, for the first time in the world, succeeded in
the ionization and analysis of protein without breaking it.
We found that the laser output needed to break down magnesium

oxide should be enough if it is more than 400 W. Because the output
of solar-energy-pumped laser that we are developing is still 80 W,
we use a carbon dioxide laser of 4001000 W for an experimental
smelting of magnesium oxide.
I wrote that an energy of 20,000C equivalency would be necessary
to break down magnesium; I will briefly explain this further.
I used the word equivalency because most of this temperature
is latent heat. The latent heat refers to the thermal energy needed to
transform a material from solid to liquid and liquid to gas.
Water boils at 100C, but it does not boil just by adding heat to
bring its temperature to 100C. You must add a much higher thermal
energy, an energy of 500C equivalency, to change water into gas.
Water does not evaporate if the heater is turned off after the water
is heated to 100C. It is necessary to continue adding heat after the
temperature of the heated water reaches 100C. All the heat added
to the water after it starts boiling is used for evaporation and does
not elevate the water temperature beyond 100C.

In the case of magnesium smelting, the situation is similar:

20,000C equivalency does not mean that the temperature of
magnesium itself reaches 20,000C. The boiling point of magnesium
oxide itself is 3,600C, but the thermal energy of 20,000C
equivalency is necessary to further vaporize it and break the atomic
bond between magnesium and oxygen.
With a Laser That Focuses at One Point, the Whole

Furnace Does Not Become Hot
It is possible to extract only a specific element by concentrating

enormous thermal energy with laser. Some might raise the question,
Does a smelting furnace that can tolerate thermal energy of 20,000C
equivalency exist?
Let me say upfront that it does not have any problem with high
temperature at all. This is a great advantage of a laser. Let me repeat:
it is a big advantage of a laser that it can concentrate energy at one
point. Even if I concentrate a laser at a point that is 1 mm in diameter
to make it 20,000C, it reaches only around 200C 1 cm away from
there.
Of course heat certainly accumulates in a smelting furnace, but the

heat that you should deal with is at most around 100C, not several
thousand degrees. From this point of view, large-scale facilities such
as a conventional smelting factory are not necessary.

When the Laser Is Irradiated, Magnesium Oxide Vaporizes

Instantly
Let me introduce the magnesium smelting experiment that is actually

conducted in our laboratory.
The first step is putting the ingredient, 250 g of magnesium oxide,
into a pipe-shaped container, and aiming at the container, we irradiate
a carbon dioxide laser of 400 W. Because we use a laser of infrared
wavelength, it is not visible, but when it hits the magnesium oxide
it flashes light for a second. Though bystanders do not understand
what is happening at all, around dozens of milligrams of magnesium
oxide is vaporizing from the laser irradiation lasting several tenths
of a second.
Because, naturally, oxygen is included in the gas when we
vaporize the magnesium oxide, it combines with magnesium again
if left alone. Therefore we established a technique to cool down the
magnesium by spraying an inert gas such as argon and make such
vapor stick to a copper plate placed in the reduction chamber.
The copper plate becomes black when we irradiate laser, and this
black substance is the metal magnesium.

When the copper plate is soaked in hydrochloric acid, a gas

bubble appears. This gas bubble is actually hydrogen. Magnesium
and hydrochloric acid react and become magnesium chloride, and
the hydrogen bubble is created. This confirmed that smelting of
magnesium is possible with laser.
It takes about 30 minutes for all 250 g of magnesium oxide to be
reduced with a 400 W laser.
We are now advancing our research to improve the smelting
efficiency of laser irradiation. We can extract 6080% of the metal
magnesium from the magnesium that vaporizes, but the smelting
efficiency rises as this number gets closer to 100%.
The problem is how to efficiently remove the magnesium stuck
to the copper plate, and we have some idea about that. One method
is to simply scrape it off, but it is better to again use solar energy
to remove magnesium because we are already using sunlight with a
laser. Because the melting point of metal magnesium is 650C, I just
use solar heat to remove it after melting it first.
Taking the cycle to extract the magnesium in seawater as a
premise, I use magnesium oxide powder in the experiment, but
other kinds of magnesium compounds can be smelted in the same
way. Because a lot of magnesium carbonate is included in dolomite
that is used in the Pidgeon method, it requires an extra procedure to
separate carbon before smelting with laser.
In fact, there is not much magnesium oxide on the land, because
magnesium oxide absorbs carbon dioxide quickly and becomes
magnesium carbonate. This means that magnesium oxide is an
excellent adsorbent of carbon dioxide. When magnesium carbonate
is heated to around 200C, carbon dioxide is separated and
magnesium oxide is obtained. It might be a possible way of thinking
that the collection of carbon dioxide and supply of magnesium oxide
for smelting are achieved at the same time.
By the way, when you irradiate magnesium carbonate with laser,
carbon comes off earlier than oxygen and soot appears. In the future
the disintegration of carbon dioxide with laser may come true, too.

Smelting Magnesium with an Arrangement of 300 Lasers
It was confirmed that one could smelt magnesium by using laser.

However, smelting with one small laser of 400 W is an unreliable
situation. It is too inefficient and cannot be used in business.
In an actual laser-smelting furnace, the scale would be much
larger, and I expect to arrange 300 lasers together and irradiate
them. This is also a big advantage of laser; it can be transmitted over
long distances via optical fibers. The optical fiber would melt in the
case of a laser at scales used for nuclear fusion research, but there is
no problem if it is a laser of 400 W or 1 kW.
I expect to arrange 300 solar-energy-pumped laser generators
in a row and transmit the laser that each device oscillates via optical
fibers to the smelting furnace.
Whether the magnesium oxide carried by a conveyor belt is

moved or the laser is moved is an issue of future machine design.
But the furnaces reaching high temperatures can be prevented by
irradiating with proper intervals of laser.
As for the heat that still remains in the furnace, we can cool the
furnace down without any problem by using the solar-energy cooling
device that I introduced in Chapter 2.

How Much Magnesium Can You Smelt?
Our quick calculation shows that by using 300 lasers, we can smelt
approximately 50 tons of metal magnesium a year. Now, 50 tons a
year is a small amount, but I think a smelting facility of this scale can
be built for 100 million to 200 million yen (i.e., 1 million to 2 million
U.S. dollars). Because the solar-energy-pumped laser generator that I
introduced in Chapter 2 costs 500,000 yen at the trial manufacturing
stage, 100 million to 200 million yen for 300 lasers will not be such
an unrealistic aim.
However, the smelting facility must be on a larger scale to succeed
as a business. We install 300 solar-energy-pumped laser generators
altogether as one smelting furnace and expect to make 200 of this. In
other words, 60,000 laser generators in total will be built with 300
200 laser generators. Then, the annual metal magnesium production
will be 10,000 tons. Because the mass production effect comes into
play if it is 60,000 laser generators, it would be around 6 billion yen
for the construction cost.
You might think that it is large scale when you hear 60,000 laser
generators, but the area necessary for one laser generator is around
4 m2. The land necessary for 60,000 lasers would be only 500 m
500 m.
For the smelting facility, the desert, which has so many sunny
days, is suitable as the construction site to oscillate the lasers
efficiently. Japan will import magnesium smelted at an overseas
smelting facility.
Overcoming the Pidgeon Method at a Price
I think that I let you understand that smelting of magnesium with

laser is possible in principle. However, to establish that as a business,
it must have some superiority in terms of the price compared with
other smelting methods. In the current magnesium market, the
Pidgeon method remains unrivaled. Will it be possible that with the
laser smelting method?

For each method, I will compare the price of a smelting facility

of 10,000 tons. Electrolysis, which was once a major method, costs 5
billion yen for the construction of a smelting facility. The cost price
of magnesium becomes 17 yen/kg if the construction expense is
to be recouped in 30 years. Because an electricity bill is added to
electrolysis, the final cost price of magnesium becomes more than
300 yen/kg.
On the other hand, the smelting facility of the Pidgeon method,
because of the nature of the construction, has a construction
expense that is very low. The construction expense for the smelting
facility is only 100 million yen, with annual production of 10,000
tons. The price of magnesium is 0.3 yen/kg, and that is almost
free if we consider only the construction expense (recouped in 30
years). However, the Pidgeon method involves fuel cost because it
burns large amounts of coal as fuel. It can be said that almost all of
the cost price of magnesium made with the Pidgeon method is the
price of coal. Eleven tons of coal (coke) is necessary to make 1 ton of
magnesium, and if the price of coke is 2030 yen/kg, the cost price of
the final magnesium, including the fuel cost, is around 300 yen/kg.
Then how about the laser smelting method? It costs 6 billion yen,
as I mentioned earlier, to build a smelting facility with an annual
production capacity of 10,000 tons. This is more expensive than
electrolysis, and the construction expense part of the cost price
becomes 21 yen/kg according to a quick calculation.

However, with the laser smelting method, there is almost no

running cost. The laser oscillated directly from sunlight is used for
smelting, and solar energy is used for cooling the device. In our test
calculation, the final cost price would be one-tenth of that of the
Pidgeon method, 2040 yen/kg, even if the running cost is included.
If we have a small number of smelting facilities, the construction
expense increases, and it would be difficult to immediately realize
low price at this level. Although it cannot in the beginning realize a
one-tenth price compared with the Pidgeon method, I think it can
maintain a sufficient level of price superiority.
If the cost price for the laser smelting method became 100 yen,
it would be markedly lower than the price of the Pidgeon method,
which is 300 yen/kg. At a selling price of 300 yen, 200 yen would be
collected as profit. If that came true, the construction cost would be
recouped in three years.
Laser Can Smelt Any Kind of Metal
Up to here, I explained laser magnesium smelting. But laser smelting

is not a method that can be used for only magnesium. Since it
disintegrates metals at the atomic level, basically it can be used for
any kind of metal.
The same technique, in addition to aluminum, silicon, and
titanium, can be applied to the smelting and recycling of precious
rare metals. The details and techniques are different for each metal,
such as the vaporization temperature, how to make the vapor stick
to the plate, and how to scrape it off, but the principle is basically the
same.
Iron is also one of the metals that can be smelt with laser. The
current iron production involves processes that take a lot of work,
but laser smelting might possibly reduce the energy consumption
and lower the cost considerably. In fact, because laser smelting is
not possible in Japan, companies would build the smelting facilities

abroad and import the product. It seems that in the future most of
the metal smelting would not be performed in Japan.
In Chapter 2, I wrote that I was going to conduct a solar-energy-
pumped laser experiment in Mongolia because it has many sunny days,
but that was not the only reason. In the Mongolian desert, precious
mineral resources remain abundantly unexploited. Including copper
and molybdenum, it is just a gold mine of rare metals.
For extracting these mineral resources, it would be behind the
times to use a conventional smelting facility that consumes large
amounts of coal. There would be tremendous benefits for the
producing country if it can perform low-cost metal smelting that
uses only the energy from the sun.
Laser Research Continuously Produces Important By-

products
Originally I conducted laser fusion research, but now I also deal with
metal smelting and fuel cells as well as solar-energy-pumped laser.
At first look, these research areas seem to have nothing to do with
each other, but in fact they are connected through laser research.
Not only the laser generator but also the related technologies
were advanced by laser research. For example, Dr. Yoshida, mentioned
in Chapter 2, developed many important technologies as well as a
chromium co-doped neodymium YAG laser medium.
In the past, at research institutes in the United States, irradiating
no more than 100 times was the limit for high-power laser. The laser
medium did not have any problem, but the soot attached to the flash
lamp that generates the pumping light shortened the life of the device.
You might think that this is a small matter, but this was the problem
that made the worlds solid-state laser researchers suffer for many
years. Dr. Yoshida improved the electrode of the flash lamp with his
original idea and developed a flash lamp that endures 10,000 times
of irradiation and named it the Osaka trigger method. Research

institutes in the Unites States adopted this method all at once and
made global high-power laser research advance remarkably.
A by-product of laser research is applied to a field that seems
irrelevant to laser. Dr. Yoshida and I developed a technology called
anti-reflection coating. Using this technology if we coat the surface
of glass such as a lens, the surrounding view is not reflected on the
glass, and we can watch the screen more easily. A major car company
is going to adopt this anti-reflection coating in their dashboards. I
was told that Subaru Telescope might adopt it, too. Furthermore,
there is a possibility of its being adopted in future for cell phones
and large-screen televisions.
In fact, this anti-reflection coating was developed for the lenses
of high-power lasers. For a lens that has to concentrate laser at one
point, anti-reflection coating is necessary to pass through an oscillated
laser as much as possible. With conventional coating, small pieces of
debris that get trapped between the coat and the lens surface burst
when they are irradiated with laser and damage the lens. The anti-
reflection coating that we developed is porous, and even if the debris
bursts by irradiation the lens is not damaged, because air escapes
through the holes.
The Simulation Technique, the CIP Method, Is Now

Used Worldwide
The CIP method, the physics simulation technique that I developed,

came out from research on laser fusion. In laser fusion, deuterium
and tritium are used as fuel and are made into spherical pellets at
very low temperatures, not in a gaseous state. The surface instantly
becomes plasma when the pellet is irradiated with a powerful laser,
and an implosion occurs as a reaction. That way, a state of super-
elevated temperature and pressure is created. However, how to
uniformly irradiate this pellet with laser is a very difficult problem,
because the pellet needs to be imploded quickly and spherical-
symmetrically from all the directions.

A solid fuel pellet undergoes a phase change to become plasma

in an instant. With conventional techniques of physics simulation,
totally different equations are used in the solid, liquid, and gas phases,
and it was not possible to accurately simulate a phenomenon in a
continuous phase change. That is why I developed the CIP method
from 1984 through 1995. It became possible to perform simulations
extended to multiple phases by using the CIP method.
I developed the CIP method for simulating the phase change that
happens in laser fusion, but besides nuclear fusion research it is
applicable to other difficult problems in various fields that could not
be solved in the pastfor example, problems such as what happens
at the instant a bullet penetrates an iron plate or how to reduce noise
when objects moving at high speed pass each other. At first look, it
seemed to be easy to simulate the transformation from solid to liquid
to gas, but that became possible for the first time by using the CIP
method.
In addition, the CIP method solved difficult problems one after
another, such as the printer ink jet or the solder defectiveness
lowering the production yield of electronic circuits, which many
companies had trouble dealing with. I also applied the CIP method
to a unique area: the simulation of heavenly bodies. The Shoemaker
Levy comet collided with Jupiter in 1994; I was able to elucidate with
the CIP method what phenomenon was happening at the time of the
collision. It was an unexpected benefit that many companies visited
me for consultation thanks to the CIP method, and I was able to learn
about the advanced information in various fields. It can be said that
I was able to come up with the vision of the magnesium-recycling
society by connecting the research in different fields together, thanks
to the CIP method.
In the United States, the CIP method seemed to be spread mainly
by an atomic reactor physics research organization, but the initial
reputation of the method at Japanese universities was terrible. They
said that it was strange mathematically and that obtaining the result
was an accidental success, and I was subjected to backbiting and felt
very unfortunate.

However, the domestic reputation changed after I gave an invited

talk in 1999 on the CIP method at the British Royal Institution at
its bicentenary anniversary ceremony. The method is now used in
all laboratories, and it is adopted as a calculation technique for the
Earth Simulator.
Summary
The Pidgeon method is currently the mainstream method for

smelting magnesium.
Breaking the bond between molecules without a complicated
chemical reaction is possible by using laser.
Smelting 50 tons of magnesium in a year is possible by using 300
solar-energy-pumped lasers together.
The laser smelting method has a high construction cost, but is
advantageous in price because the running cost is almost zero.

Chapter 4
Burning Magnesium
If the Price of Magnesium Becomes Less Than 150 yen/kg,

It Will Be Usable as Fuel
With practical use of solar-energy-pumped laser, introduced in

Chapter 2, and the laser smelting method, introduced in Chapter 3,
the price of magnesium should fall markedly compared with what
it is at present. The price is now 250600 yen/kg, but it will not
be difficult to bring it down to 100150 yen range with the laser
smelting method. I expect that the demand for magnesium as fuel
source will rise rapidly in the market if its price falls to the range
100150 yen/kg, and it will be competitive enough with gasoline.
Then in what way will magnesium be usable as fuel? I assume
that research on turning magnesium into fuel has been rarely heard
of. In this chapter I will introduce a technology to use magnesium as
fuel.
The Overheated Competition for the Development of the

Next-Generation Car
First I will summarize the trends for the development of the next-
generation car. All of you already know how intense the competition
is for the development of the next-generation car, which is expected

By Takashi Yabe
www.panstanford.com

to replace the current gasoline car. The hybrid car Prius from Toyota
was quite brisk to reach the top of the sales ranking. News about the
electric vehicle (EV) often appears in newspapers and the television,
although the overall automobile sales are falling.
The next-generation car is often called an eco car. Whatever
the type, the eco car positively emphasizes lighter load on the
environment by reducing the consumption of fossil fuel. The
consciousness of the consumer has also changed greatly because of
environmental awareness and concern about stable supply of oil.
The Current Car Powered by an Internal Combustion

Engine
When classifying cars on the basis of engine type, the categorization

will roughly be internal combustion engine car, electric car, and
hybrid car, a mixture of the two.
The current gasoline engine car, diesel engine car, and natural gas
car all have an internal combustion engine that burns fossil fuel.
The gasoline engine has been improved in the past 100 years,
and you can say that it is a technology that has matured, but it is
theoretically inevitable that carbon dioxide and other gases will be
released. This basic fault will still remain even if the improvement of
the gasoline engine continues for better gas mileage.
The diesel engine car is superior to the gasoline car in mileage,
but it has to deal with the emission control policy of each country,
and it will be difficult to be superior in the future.
The natural gas car has a big merit compared with the diesel engine
car because it has markedly fewer toxic substances in its exhaust
gas. However, compressed natural gas has the disadvantage of being
more difficult to store and transport than gasoline. Furthermore, gas
stations exclusively for natural gas car will be necessary.
As oil prices soar, natural gas and liquefaction coal will be
secondarily used as alternative fuels. However, many of the developed
countries have greenhouse gas control policies. It does not look as

Burning Magnesium 83
though they will build a new large-scale infrastructure for fossil

fuels.
Bioethanol is made from plants and is not a fossil fuel. It is
believed to be carbon-neutral, because when it is burned bio-ethanol
generates the carbon dioxide that is originally included in the plants.
Therefore, it does not affect the carbon circulation of the earth.
However, there is a deep-rooted opinion that we should use
the cultivated land for food production, not for fuel production.
In addition, development of new cultivating land will lead to
environmental destruction. Fossil fuel is used in the process of
bioethanol production and in its transportation. In the first place, it
is impossible to meet the current gasoline demand with bioethanol
only.
For cars with an internal combustion engine, research on the
hydrogen engine car is also being performed. Because hydrogen
releases only water when it burns, it has the merit of reduced load
to the environment. However, I dare to say that the practical use of
the hydrogen engine car is difficult because, as I stated in Chapter 1,
hydrogen has a major problem in transportation and storage.
The Hybrid Car with a Gasoline Engine and an Electric

Motor Is a Realistic Solution
As for a realistic eco car solution, it will be the hybrid car for the time
being.
The hybrid car has several types. For example, the main power
source for Prius is a gasoline engine, and it uses an electric motor
secondarily. Hybrid cars refuel at a service station as other gasoline
engine cars do. The gasoline consumption of hybrid cars is 2030%
less compared with gasoline engine cars because the former have
adopted a mechanism that converts kinetic energy into electric
energy when the car is slowing down. Prius possibly runs using only
a motor when it is at low speed.
The plug-in hybrid is a hybrid car that was developed to be closer
to the electric car. It can be charged from a power outlet at homes and

runs only with the electric motor for short distances. The problem
with a pure electric car is that it can run only short distances, and for
long distances we need a gasoline engine.
The hybrid and plug-in hybrid cars realize a gas mileage increase
that cannot be achieved by a gasoline engine car. On the other hand,
a high production cost is inevitable. Because the hybrid car carries
both an internal combustion engine, like the gasoline engine car, and
an electric motor, the vehicle weight will be high. Because of that,
developing hybrid and plug-in hybrid cars is limited to a few major
car companies.
The Shift from an Internal Combustion Engine to an

Electric Motor
The internal combustion engine car, including the hybrid car, has
problems with both the supply of fossil fuel and the exhaust gas.
The shift to cars with an electric motor would be unavoidable in the
future.
Controlling an electric motor is a lot easier than controlling a
gasoline engine. An exhaust system is not necessary, as is the case
for the gasoline engine car.
Various companies, including electrical equipment manufac-
turers, will join in the development and production of cars with an
electric motor, and I predict that we will see a totally different indus-
try map compared with what we have now.
The only reason for the shift to the electric motor car not
happening so easily is that the performance of the power supply
parts is still insufficient.
The Electric Car Has Problems with the Battery and

Infrastructure
In terms of the power supply method, cars with an electric motor are
categorized into two: a battery car, which is charged with electricity

for running, and a fuel cell car, which generates electricity by using
fuel.
If all the electricity necessary for electric cars to run is generated
by thermal power stations, the overall energy efficiency of these cars
would be around three to four times that of gasoline engine cars.
Output control for an electric motor is easy, and complicated systems
such as a gearbox are unnecessary.
It is the battery that becomes the problem for the electric car.
Because the performance of the battery that stores electricity has
traditionally been bad, the mileage was low and the car could not run
long distances. However, as the hybrid car becomes more widespread,
battery performance will advance largely, so that practical use is
within reach. A nickel hydride battery is used for the current hybrid
car, but a lithium ion battery, which has higher energy density, will be
adopted for the electric car.
The electric car has many advantages, but at the same time it has
many problems. Although the performance of the lithium ion battery
is improving, the driving mileage remains around 160 km. It requires
several hours for a lithium ion battery to be charged, and it still takes
30 minutes even when a special rapid battery charger is used.
The infrastructure for battery charging must be expanded in
order to realize the convenience that the gasoline engine car has.
Even if the entire country were saturated with infrastructure for
battery charging, charging an electric car would take a lot more time
compared with refueling a gasoline car.
In addition, even if the body of the car becomes low in cost, the
battery itself will still be expensive. The battery has a shorter life
than the car body and needs to be changed frequently.
Although the performance of the battery is getting better for
practical use, this scenario works for a regular-size car. If a large-
size truck or bus were replaced by an EV, most of the body would be
occupied by the battery. A bus might run with electricity by using a
grid as a trolley bus does, but it would be difficult for a truck to run
with electricity.

Development of the Fuel Cell Car Is Not Making Progress
One heard frequently of the fuel cell car a while ago, but hardly hears
of it these days. Why?
First I will explain the structure of a fuel cell car.
Even though it is called a battery, a fuel cell does not store
electricity like a dry battery or a rechargeable battery. It is rather
a kind of generator that produces electricity by a chemical reaction
when fuel is added.
As for the fuel cell, a hydrogen fuel cell, which uses hydrogen, is
the most typical. Electricity is generated by the reaction of hydrogen
and oxygen. The reaction used is the opposite of the one used in
electrolyzing water, and it releases only water. It has the merit of
having a lighter load on the environment.
Among hydrogen fuel cells, a type called polymer electrolyte
fuel cell is advancing toward practical use. This method involves a
design for holding an ion-exchange membrane with a pair of catalyst
electrodes. An oxidizer (oxygen) is supplied at the positive electrode
(the air electrode), and hydrogen, which serves as fuel, is supplied at
the negative electrode (the fuel electrode). Electricity is generated
from the reaction of oxygen and hydrogen. Platinum is used as an
electrode. Platinum is superior to other metals in both catalyst
performance and durability.
The hydrogen fuel cell is superior in terms of environmental
performance, but it will be no exaggeration to say that most car
manufacturers have lost interest in it. This is because the hydrogen
used as fuel becomes the obstacle in the same way as it does in a
hydrogen engine car. Fundamentally, the problems in transportation
and storage are not easily solved.
The problems related to engineering and safety cannot be ignored
either. A hydrogen molecule is very minute and has the nature of
permeating metals and making materials fragile.
Moreover, platinum, which is used in a hydrogen fuel cell, is
expensive. Ladies might feel indignant hearing that the precious

platinum is used in a car, but platinum is most suitable for ionizing

hydrogen for easy reaction with oxygen.
Natural resources of platinum are estimated to be 80,000 tons,
and the cumulative production weight is around 4,000 tons. It is said
that these resources will dry up quickly if hydrogen fuel cell cars are
produced on the scale of 10 million cars. By the way, the number of
cars running in the world is 900 million now.
Therefore, research on searching for a substitute catalyst to
platinum and on reducing platinum consumption is in progress, but
a definite replacement has not been found yet.
Use Magnesium as Fuel for Cars
I mentioned the types of the next-generation car, but each has its
advantages and disadvantages. The shift from an internal combustion
engine to an electric motor is not stoppable anymore, but there is
uneasiness with the electric car in terms of the performance of the
battery, cost, and infrastructure maintenance.
How can I realize the next-generation car that rates high in
running performance and low in infrastructure maintenance and
does not release greenhouse gases? I think I can realize the car that
meets the conditions mentioned above by using magnesium as fuel.

The Hydrogen Fuel Cell Is No Good
What on earth will a car using magnesium as fuel be like?

I proposed the magnesium-recycling society simply because
magnesium is promising as fuel, but initially I was thinking about
using magnesium as a source of hydrogen.
Magnesium oxide and hydrogen are generated when water is
sprinkled on a heated plate of metal magnesium. The hydrogen gas
reacts with oxygen, and electricity can be extracted from the reaction,
as explained above. What remains is water and the magnesium
compound.
However, this method inherits the same shortcoming that the
hydrogen fuel cell has. The issues that hydrogen makes metals fragile
and that the hydrogen gas itself is dangerous cannot be resolved
at all. Naturally, the expensive platinum becomes necessary for
electrodes.
Air Battery That Does Not Generate Hydrogen
Then what should we do? The biggest problem is hydrogen. Is there

a way to extract electricity without generating hydrogen?
The answer is simple: the reaction of magnesium with oxygen.
The air battery, which uses metal and air oxygenation, existed for
a long time, and for example the zinc air battery is used for hearing
aids.
In a regular battery, the active material of the negative electrode
(a material causing generation of electricity) releases electrons
(oxidation), and the active material of the positive electrode receives
the electrons and deoxidizes. In the air battery, on the other hand,
oxygen in the air is used as the active material of the positive
electrode. Because no material of the positive electrode is needed,
it is obvious that the energy density becomes overwhelmingly high
compared with a conventional battery.

Naturally, magnesium is used as the active material of the

negative electrode in a magnesium air battery. When the oxygen of
the positive electrode and magnesium of the negative electrode react,
oxygenation occurs and electric energy is obtained. What remains is
magnesium oxide.
Separating the magnesium at the negative electrode from the
main body of the battery makes it exchangeable. In other words,
the fuel called magnesium is replaceable. That way, an air battery
becomes the fuel cell.

This may seem simple, but is a very important point. In general,

the performance of the battery is judged by its output divided by
its weight, including that of the main body. As a disposable battery,
the metal air battery does not perform well, because it has a heavy
main body, including the electrodes. But what if you can replace the
electrode?
If you use the electrode once, the efficiency of the battery is
(energy output 1 time)/(weight of the electrode

1 + weight of the main body of the battery).
However, if you use the electrode 100 times, the efficiency of the
battery is
(energy output 100 times)/(weight of the electrode

100 + weight of the main body of the battery).
The more you use it, the closer it gets to the amount of energy
that the metal (the electrode) itself has.
The amount of energy contained in the magnesium will determine
the performance of the car, in the same way as the performance of
the gasoline engine car is determined by the energy of the gasoline
itself.
It is possible to make a car that runs with magnesium as fuel by
replacing the magnesium as if it is the same as pouring gasoline into
the car.
A Zinc Air Battery Car Succeeded in Running 524 km
I have understood the theory of the magnesium air battery, but is it

possible to realize such a car in an actual sense? Perhaps you have
such a question in your mind.

Although not with magnesium, the testing of an air battery car

using a similar reaction has already been performed and achieved
results.
In 2003, Sadeg Faris, an American inventor, remodeled Insight
from Honda and made a zinc air battery car experimentally.
Separating the electrode from the main body of the battery and
enabling its replacement, the idea I described earlier, was his.
Faris had a test run in Malaysia and succeeded in a continuous
run of 524 km.
Because it was an experimental car, it was loaded with almost

a hundred plus several tens of kilograms of zinc. In practical use,
the mileage will be about half of this, and it will work fine with less
amount of zinc as fuel. There will not be a person who makes a round
trip between Tokyo and Osaka (about 550 km) without refueling on
the way.
This zinc air battery has an output that is 2.5 times the output of
the current lithium ion battery. The market price of zinc is low, about
160 yen/kg, but the zinc deposits are a problem. The zinc deposits
of the whole world are estimated to be approximately around 460
million tons, and it is not enough as an alternative fuel for oil and
coal, which have 10 billion tons of annual consumption. But because
oxidized zinc can be deoxidized by using electricity at low cost, Faris

seems to be planning to promote the recycling of the zinc fuel in this

way.
How about magnesium? Although the price of magnesium is a lot
higher than that of zinc, it has an energy density that is 3 times that
of zinc, and its estimated output is 7.5 times the output of the lithium
ion battery. Very roughly speaking, if the zinc air battery car runs
600 km, the magnesium air battery car would run 1,800 km with the
same weight.
In fact such a mileage is not necessary for practical use. If a
mileage of 300 km were to be achieved by one refueling, around 20
kg of the magnesium fuel would be enough.
The Proof Experiment for the Magnesium Air Battery
We had a proof-of-concept experiment at Tokyo Institute of

Technology to see if magnesium was usable in an air battery in the
same way as zinc.
We found out in the experiment that if we made metal magnesium
in a grainlike shape, around 2 mm, it could generate electricity
efficiently. If we can make fuel in this fashion, special fuel stations
would not be necessary, for a package of the fuel could be sold in
convenience stores.
The magnesium air battery cannot be in practical use as long as
the prospect of supplying magnesium at low price is not in sight.
After all, this research has stopped, and we save our resources for
research on the solar-energy-pumped laser and on the desalination
device that I will describe in Chapter 5. Nevertheless, the magnesium
air battery just does not have as many technical problems as the
hydrogen fuel cell does.
An article that made us aware of the competition we are facing
rather than cheering us up was carried by the Nikkei Weekly in July
2008. It said that Toyota had started the development of the next-
generation battery. The article included the following:

We will setup a specialized battery research department in June

to work on the realization of a new battery called air battery.
... We would like to start the development of an innovative next
generation battery with performance far beyond that of the lithium
ion battery. ... Theoretically, the energy density is 1350 watt-hours
per kilogram of battery. It greatly exceeds the 250 watt-hours of
the lithium ion battery.
The energy density of the zinc air cell is 500 Wh/kg, and therefore
the article is not referring to that. Because the energy density of
magnesium is 1,500 Wh/kg, the article indeed points to a magnesium
air battery.
Electric Car versus Magnesium Air Battery Car
The candidates for the next-generation car with the electric motor
drive have been considerably narrowed down. The hydrogen fuel
cell will not be a candidate for reasons I stated earlier. It would just
be a contest between the electric car and the magnesium air battery
car.
Here, I will compare both categories by assuming that magnesium
prices fall to a level that makes its use as fuel affordable.
Because they both use an electric motor, the running performance
will be about the same except for the battery weight.
According to the roadmap of New Energy and Industrial
Technology Development Organization (NEDO), in 2020 the mileage
of the lithium ion battery car will reach around 200 km at 80 kg
weight.
The magnesium air battery has more than 7 times the mileage
of the lithium ion battery. Conversely, with the mileages being the
same, the weight of the magnesium air battery will be one-seventh
of that of the lithium ion battery. This fact can be used for increasing
passenger or load capacity. Judging from the weight of the battery,
it is not realistic to put a lithium ion battery in large-size vehicles

such as a truck or a bus, but upsizing is easy if it is a magnesium air

battery.
Neither type of car releases carbon dioxide or other harmful gases,
but the magnesium air battery car has overwhelming superiority in
terms of refueling.
The infrastructure for battery charging is a problem for the
electric car. It is necessary to have charge stands everywhere to
enable a long-distance run, but the charging would not be completed
in a few minutes as refueling would be at a gasoline service station.
It would perhaps take at least 1213 minutes.
On the other hand, the magnesium air battery car does not need
an exclusive refueling infrastructure. Magnesium as fuel can be sold
at convenience stores and can be replaced in about the same amount
of time it would take for refueling at a gas station.
Magnesium oxide is generated when the magnesium air battery
is used. It would be nice to have a system to receive this magnesium
oxide when you buy a new fuel pack. Because magnesium oxide can
be returned to metal magnesium with solar-energy-pumped laser, as
I mentioned in Chapter 3, there are fewer problems with recycling.
Furthermore, the lithium ion battery has a disconcerting aspect
in terms of supply of raw materials. Cars usually need 100 kWh (=
360 MJ) of energy to run 500 km. Supposing that the gas mileage is
10 km/L, 50 L (at a density of 0.9 kg/L, 45 kg) of oil is necessary for
a run of 500 km.
The combustion energy of oil is 44 MJ/kg, and the energy that
45 kg of oil generates is 1,980 MJ. Because 360/1,980 = 0.18, the
efficiency is 18% when the combustion energy of the oil is used for
a run.
How much lithium will be necessary to generate 100 kWh of energy
with a lithium ion battery? Because lithium has a specific capacity of
3.83 Ah/g and the output voltage is around 3 V, its energy is 3.83 3
= 11.5 Wh/g. Therefore, 8.7 kg of lithium is necessary to generate 100
kWh (assuming 100% of the lithium energy is usable).

Because more than 900 million cars are running in the world
now, 7,800,000 tons of lithium would be necessary to equip every
car with a lithium ion battery. However, the lithium reserves are 11
million tons (proven reserves are 4,100,000 tons), and that is not
enough even if lithium is used only in cars (data from the United
States Geological Survey).
The annual production of lithium ore is 25,000 tons, but it is
expected that the demand will increase rapidly in future, and an
intense competition has already begun in production sites of the
world, such as South America and China. If the lithium ion battery
becomes more common, lithium will certainly become a more limited
resource than oil.
In addition, they say that recovering lithium from used lithium
ion battery costs more than producing it from scratch.
Lithium is contained in seawater, and research on lithium
extraction is in progress, but the fact that the amount is less compared
with magnesium is problematic. The concentration of magnesium in
seawater (3.5% salt) is 1.29 g/kg, but that of lithium is 1.7104 g/
kg. The amount is only around 1/10,000 of the magnesium amount.
Currently, the cost of extracting lithium from seawater is estimated
to be 10,00020,000 yen/kg, and it is necessary to lower this cost
substantially to enable practical use of lithium.
Actually, research on the metal air battery has been progressing
not only with zinc, which I mentioned earlier, but also with aluminum
and lithium, and magnesium had a late start in this field. In addition,
because the energy density of lithium itself is higher than that of
magnesium, if the lithium air battery were able to be realized, it
would certainly have a higher output than a magnesium air battery.
But the lithium reserves become the limiting condition for the
lithium air battery as well as the lithium ion battery, and a large
amount of electricity would be necessary to recover the metal lithium
from used lithium compounds. With the magnesium air battery, fuel
can be recycled at low cost with the solar-energy-pumped laser, and
we deal with resources that are easy to obtain. I think magnesium is

superior to lithium when one considers its demand as a material and

its use at power stations (described later).
While we immediately think of a gasoline engine car when
someone mentions a car, we cannot readily imagine a car running in a
city with anything other than gasoline. However, only approximately
100 years have passed since the gasoline engine cars have been
around. By the way, it was an electric car that was developed first
at the end of the 19th century, not a gasoline engine car. The electric
car was regarded as more promising until Ford Model T 1908
appeared.
I think the magnesium air battery car will sweep over the
automotive industry in the next 100 years.
The Train Also Runs Using a Magnesium Air Battery
It is not only for a car that a magnesium air battery is available. There
is a possibility that it can be used in all transportation modes that
currently use electricity or oil.
The present railroad supplies electricity with a power transmis-
sion line and drives the motor, but the magnesium air battery can
replace this. The railroad in the past used a fuel that could be carried,
as it can be in a steam or diesel locomotive. Transformation from a
system supplying electricity with a power transmission line to mag-
nesium feels like returning to the old basics.
If trains start running with the magnesium air battery, the
familiar power transmission lines and pantographs will disappear.
The difference from a steam locomotive is that the magnesium air
battery or a steam locomotive driven by magnesium combustion
does not release carbon dioxide or other gases.
Because the train would have its own fuel and power source,
large-scale infrastructure, including a national grid, would become
unnecessary, and this can largely lower the construction cost of
the railroad. I think that it can be an effective solution for mass

transportation in an area or a country that is not yet equipped with

transportation infrastructure.
As for a city with a railway network that has already been built
tightly, it might be run with electricity from a thermal power station
using magnesium as fuel (I will explain this later).
The Future Ship Goes to Sea with Laser and Magnesium
Similarly, we can use the magnesium air battery in a ship. Of course

the advantage of having clean exhaust gases is an important issue,
and furthermore using also the laser technology, a ship can move
long distances at high speeds.
As mentioned in Chapter 3, magnesium oxide can be smelt to
obtain metal magnesium instantly by using laser. Putting this smelting
furnace on a ship is our idea. We run the ship with the magnesium
air battery, and the magnesium oxide produced is deoxidized to
metal magnesium with a laser. If we have a laser, it is not necessary
to refuel on the way.
Then, some naturally would have a question about how we can
manage a laser that can be used for smelting to get fuel. The answer is
converting sunlight to laser with a device on the ground, irradiating
it toward a satellite, and reflecting it on the satellite mirror to hit the
lens on the moving ship.
It sounds like an extremely strange idea, but in fact technically it
is not that challenging.
Lets first look at the output necessary for the laser by doing some
quick calculations. For a laser with 1 million kW output, it would
take only a few hours to smelt a sufficient amount of magnesium for
running a cargo ship, several hundred thousand tons class, for one
week.
Although 1 million kW is an enormous output, it can be achieved
by spreading a laser generator with 40% conversion efficiency all
over an area of 2.5 km2. The laser generated is irradiated toward the
satellite, reflected on the satellite mirror, and received by the lens on
the ship.

Some people might be concerned that an airplane crossing

between the laser generator and the satellite might be shot down,
but there is no need to worry. Laser shows its frightful power only
when it is focused with a lens into a thin beam. A laser beam with
a diameter of around 10 m does not cause any problem if it hits an
airplane.
Furthermore, a very interesting thing can be realized by using a
magic mirror with the laser technology. A regular mirror reflects
the incident light in an opposite direction. This sounds natural;
however, the magic mirror, or phase conjugation mirror, reflects
light on a route identical to the incident light. Even if the route of the
incident light is curved, the light reflects with an identical route and
returns.
What will happen if we apply this to a ship?
It is possible to send an induced laser from a ship, and it can be
amplified and sent back.
After a weak laser is irradiated from a ship, it will reach the laser
facility, where the laser is amplified to 1 million kW, and the amplified
laser returns to the ship through a route identical to the one it came
through. When some object crosses the path of the guiding beam, no
amplified beam returns through this path. A system that is extremely
high in safety can be realized because the laser is oscillated only
when responding to a demand from the receiver.
With this system, it might be the laws rather than the technology
that we would be most concerned about. Because we cannot irradiate
a high-power laser in the atmosphere in Japan, changes in the law
would be necessary.
Magnesium Can Be Put into Electronic Equipment
The magnesium air battery can be put on a smaller apparatus.

Led by personal computer companies, the development of the
fuel cell for electronic equipment is advancing. Most of such fuel cells
use methanol as fuel generating hydrogen to extract electricity, and

they can realize capacities more than double the lithium ion battery
capacity. The inflammability of methanol was a problem, but its
portability was improved by solidifying it and making a cartridge.
The magnesium air battery has higher energy density than the
methanol fuel battery, and if the weights are the same, it has an output
that is 7.5 times that of the lithium ion battery. If battery operation
time becomes 7 times longer, the use of the electronic equipment
would spread more, and it would be reasonable to expect that cell
phone units would evolve more.
If metal magnesium is made in the shape of a replacement
cartridge, the same convenience we have with a current dry battery
can be obtained. If the used cartridge is returned to the battery store,
it is possible to recycle magnesium oxide.
For the cell phone business, zinc air batteries with a capacity
larger than conventional batteries are expected. With a principle that
is different from the air battery, the development of a small fuel cell,
where the reaction of aluminum and water produces electricity by
generating hydrogen, is in progress. Such batteries are not popular
yet, but it is not so difficult to make a low-cost battery with high
output if metal prices become lower.
Coutesy of Hitach: Maxwell Ltd.

Make Fuel from Magnesium for Thermal Power Stations
Until now, I described methods for using magnesium as fuel for

transportation and electronic equipment.
What would it be like if we could produce magnesium more
abundantly, such as 1 million or 10 million tons?
We can use magnesium as an alternative fuel for oil and coal.
Because a thermal power station is the biggest source of carbon
dioxide emission, switching its fuel to magnesium would be the most
effective way of reducing the carbon dioxide.
Then how will we use magnesium at a thermal power station? In
this case we will use a chemical reaction that is different than the one
in the air battery.
As you already know, hydrogen is generated if powdered metal
magnesium and water react. The reaction speed becomes remarkably
higher if we make the magnesium grain small.
Hydrogen starts burning when the reaction speed becomes
higher. Magnesium and water react, hydrogen comes out and reacts
with oxygen, and we get water coming out as steam. Turning a turbine
with steam at an elevated temperature and pressure to generate
electricity is the principle of the magnesium thermal power station.

In this case, because it is magnesium oxide that is finally produced,

as it is in the air battery, it can be deoxidized to metal magnesium
by laser smelting. By the way, it was experimentally confirmed that
magnesium hydroxide is produced if magnesium and water react
at less than 100C, but only magnesium oxide is produced if they
react at more than 100C and no magnesium hydroxide is generated
at all.
The construction cost of a thermal power station is enormous,
but the magnesium thermal power station does not have this
problem. The current thermal power station, using coal or oil, makes
steam with the heat of the burnt fuel to turn a turbine that generates
electricity. In other words, it is not necessary at all for the existing
infrastructure to be changed, and the only thing required is switching
the fuel from coal or oil to magnesium. I would like you to know
that provided abundant magnesium supply becomes possible, the
reduction of the greenhouse gases can be achieved with the existing
infrastructure unchanged.

Summary
The strongest candidate for the next-generation car is thought

to be an electric car, but there is a problem with the battery-
charging infrastructure.
The magnesium air battery car does not need an exclusive
infrastructure and its performance is the same as that of the
electric car.
The magnesium air battery is usable as a power supply for
electronic equipment.
The existing thermal power station facilities do not need to be
changed; replacing just the fuel with magnesium is possible.

Chapter 5
Extracting Freshwater and

Magnesium from Seawater
Where Can We Find the Material for Metal Magnesium?
Smelting magnesium with a solar-energy-pumped laser gives us

the magnesium we can use as fuel for transportation, including
automobiles. After usage as fuel, magnesium oxide is generated, and
this can be smelt with a solar-energy-pumped laser again, returning
it to metal magnesium. The cycle of magnesium is completed at this
point for the time being.
When I was thinking about this vision, I got inspiration from a
magazine article about the crisis of water resources and came up
with the idea of extracting magnesium from seawater, as I wrote in
Chapter 2.
The earth is covered by a vast amount of seawater, 1400
10 tons (1,400 quadrillion tons). What elements are included in
15
seawater?
Let me try to list starting from the top. In 1 kg of seawater with
3.5% salt, there is 19.35 g of chlorine, 10.77 g of sodium, 1.29 g of
magnesium, 0.904 g of sulfur, 0.412 g of calcium, 0.391 g of potassium,
and so on. We can see that the magnesium content is large.

By Takashi Yabe
www.panstanford.com

The gross weight of magnesium in all the seawater in the world is

approximately 1,800 trillion tons.
Can you imagine how large this amount is? The energy density
is 25 MJ/kg for magnesium and 44 MJ/kg for oil, which means that
1,800 trillion tons of magnesium is equivalent to 1 quadrillion tons
of oil.
Since the world annual energy consumption is 10 billion tons
in oil conversion, 1 quadrillion tons/10 billion tons = 100,000.
This means that if all of the energy consumption is supplied with
magnesium, it will be enough for 100,000 years.
Even if humans extract magnesium from seawater for several
thousand years, the density of seawater would not be affected and
the recycling of magnesium would occur at the same time. It may be
said that magnesium is an inexhaustible resource.
Extracting minerals from seawater is basically desalination. As I
will explain next, the water shortage in the world is now in a serious
state. Extracting magnesium from seawater can solve the water

Extracting Freshwater and Magnesium from Seawater 105
shortage and secure metal resources. It will result in killing two

birds with one stone.
The World Will Face a Serious Crisis of Water Resources in

2025
In Japan safe and good-tasting water is available almost free when

you turn on the water faucet. Because of this, the Japanese do not
readily realize how precious water is. But in many places in the
world, water is a very precious resource.
The surface of the earth is covered 70% by water, and the total
weight of the water is 1,400 quadrillion tons. However, freshwater,
which is indispensable for human life activities and agriculture, is
approximately 1.7% only. Because most of that freshwater is the ice
of the North Pole and South Pole, freshwater in liquid form is only
0.037% of the earths surface water, and only 0.01% is said to be
available for practical use.
Since the ancient times humans had bloody fights over precious
freshwater resources. According to the Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) of the United Nations reports, currently about
1,200 million people live in areas with water shortage.
The water consumption will increase as the population increases,
because irrigation water and water for industrial use will be needed
in large amounts to feed the increased population.
The influence of environmental damage accelerates this situation.
Especially in rapid-growth developing countries, exhaust gases from
cars and sewage from factories are accelerating river pollution.
Because antipollution measures and sewerage are not enough, many
people are obliged to use polluted water.
Deforestation also has a significant influence on the shortage of
water. When forests are cut down for cultivating land or building
factories, soil loses its ability to preserve and purify water and lets
the water flow into the sea, before human beings can use it.

And global warming is the keyword here again. It is possible that

climate change accelerated by global warming makes precipitation
and snowfall fluctuate greatly, and some areas have frequent floods,
while other areas have water shortage. According to the FAO report
mentioned earlier, two-thirds of the worlds population might
experience water shortage by 2025.
Entering an Intensifying World Water Business
Global water shortage makes the market for the water business
develop rapidly. The water business includes making freshwater from
seawater by desalination, recycling the drainage, and maintaining the
water service infrastructure. It is estimated (by Toray Industries, Inc.)
that the market for the water business will increase from 60 trillion
yen currently to about 100 trillion yen by 2025. In Arab countries, a
large number of seawater desalination plants are already operating,
and China invests trillions of yen for sewage water treatment and
desalination.
If I enter the business of desalination of seawater, it would be
quite profitable and at the same time could secure the material
for metal magnesium. That is my estimation. However, it does not
make sense if desalination of seawater costs a great deal. In the
first place, the electrolysis method (refer to Chapter 3) of smelting
the magnesium in seawater is not cost effective compared with the
Pidgeon method.
If I am a newcomer to the desalination business, will there be a
winning chance as I expect?
Current Desalination Techniques Consume a Vast Amount

of Energy
Currently the mainstream desalination methods are multistage

flash distillation and reverse osmosis membrane methods.

The multistage flash distillation method makes freshwater by

evaporating seawater using the heat released from a thermal power
station or an oil well. A large amount of energy is needed in this
method because it has low thermal efficiency.
In areas where energy is scarce, the reverse osmosis membrane
method is common. Currently, the reverse osmosis membrane
method has the highest energy efficiency among the desalination
methods that are already in practical use, and the spread is now
increasing worldwide.
Let me briefly explain the principle of the reverse osmosis
membrane method.

The characteristic of the reverse osmosis membrane method is

to use a filtration membrane. There are innumerable small holes in
this filtration membrane, and water molecules can go through but
salt and other impurities bigger than water molecules cannot. When
you have seawater on one side of the membrane and freshwater
on the other side, water molecules move from the freshwater side
to the seawater side to make the densities equal. This is osmotic
pressure.
However, we apply pressure on the seawater side (around 60
atmospheric pressure), greater than the osmotic pressure, and the
water molecules move from the seawater side to the freshwater side.
Simply, the filtration membrane can filter the salt and impurities.
In the actual use of the reverse osmosis membrane method,
the seawater passes though the center of a spinning device with a
cylinder-shaped filtration membrane. The centrifugal force created
by the spinning extracts the freshwater.
The advantage of the reverse osmosis membrane method is that

it has low energy consumption compared with other methods, and

rather small facilities are enough for it. The Japanese are superior in
the technology for the reverse osmosis membrane method, and in
membranes Japan has the top share in the world.
The Reverse Osmosis Membrane Method Cannot Meet

the Demand for Freshwater
If the number of plants for the reverse osmosis membrane method

increase, will the freshwater supply become sufficient?
Suppose 3 billion people in the world face water shortage in 2025.
It is said that the minimum amount of water resources necessary per
person is 500 m3 a year (approximately 1,370 L/day), including the
water for industrial and agricultural use.
500 m3 3 billion = 1,500 billion m3
That means 1,500 billion tons annually, and that is 4,100 million
tons of a new daily demand for freshwater. We must build 20,000
desalination plants with a capacity of 200,000 tons per day to meet
this demand.
We would need 9 trillion kWh of electricity in a year to operate
20,000 plants of 200,000 tons per day. This is an enormous amount
of electric energy, equivalent to half of the worlds electricity
consumption in 2005, 18 trillion kWh (Ministry of Internal Affairs
and Communications Statistics Bureau).
The reverse osmosis membrane method needs electricity to
generate the reverse osmotic pressure of 60 atmospheric pressure.
Furthermore, there are disadvantages in the reverse osmosis
membrane method. Additional energy is needed for frequent
prefiltering to remove the debris before the actual filtration, and
this procedure enlarges the facilities (still smaller than the other
methods). Even with the reverse osmosis membrane method, which
has the highest energy efficiency among desalination technologies,
I have to say that realistically it is difficult to solve the future water
shortage.

The desalination devices with solar heat proposed now are

the hybrid type, combining the reverse osmosis membrane and
evaporation methods, the evaporation method with vacuum, and so
on. These devices cost more than 10 times the cost of the device for
the reverse osmosis membrane method.
Is it possible to make a desalination device that has extremely
low energy consumption and low price? If there were such a device,
it would be profitable in the desalination device business and could
also smelt the extracted magnesium.
Perhaps everyone would think that there is no hardship if one
can easily make such an innovative desalination device.
A Desalination Device Inspired by Fish-Farming Device
I had a rough idea. When I heard of desalination devices, I remembered

the research I conducted a long time ago. The research was the
development of a device for fish farming, which was irrelevant to
magnesium and laser.
When I was an undergraduate student, one of my advisers
acquaintances was the president of a fish-farming company. It is
necessary for fish farming to dissolve an appropriate amount of
oxygen into the water so that fish can breathe. For this purpose, an
unglazed porcelain pipe was used as a device.
The unglazed porcelain pipe has small holes, and when air goes
through it, small air bubbles are generated, which mix into the
water.
However, this device had the problem that in a short period
impurities in water accumulated and blocked the holes. One had to
change the pipes frequently, and that was costly.
The president of the fish-farming company asked us to make an
air supply device that did not require frequent changing of pipes.
A roller was used for solving this problem. Big bubbles were
crushed into smaller bubbles by sending air from the bottom to the

roller spinning at high speed. The roller was a common technique

used in various fields, yet it was quite effective, and the cost was cut
down. I remember conducting research on the spinning speed and
on how to send air to the roller, and I wrote a paper about this.
The same way can work in desalination. In fish farming I made
the air bubbles smaller, and if I made the seawater drops smaller, it
would be easier to evaporate seawater with less amount of energy.
That was what I thought.
A solar heat collector heats up seawater to 8090C, and the roller
makes small drops of water from the seawater to evaporate and
generate distilled water. In this way the expensive reverse osmosis
membrane method is not necessary, and maintenance is easy.
I made several improvements in collecting and recycling the
latent heat generated when water evaporates and created a system
named Pegasos water purification system.
Pegasus was a fine steed in Greek mythology, who with a hoof
caused a spring to come out from the ground. There is no better
name for a device producing freshwater.
The device is already completed and has a desalination capacity
of 10 tons per day. Compared with the reverse osmosis membrane
method, for the same price, it has nine times the water production.
The reverse osmosis membrane method has the disadvantage of
high electricity bills, but the Pegasos water purification system can
do without most of that running cost since it uses solar heat and
released heat.
Another advantage of the Pegasos water purification system
is that it can avoid the boron problem of the reverse osmosis
membrane method.
A liter of seawater contains 47 mg of boron. It is known
that boron causes reproductive function disorder if ingested in
significant amounts. Therefore the World Health Organization
(WHO) recommends the boron density in drinking water to be less
than 0.5 mg/L.

However, the regular reverse osmosis membrane method cannot

remove the small boron molecules, and the boron can at most be
reduced to a level of 13 mg/L. Even the most advanced reverse
osmosis membrane method leaves behind half of what a regular one
does, and that still does not meet the WHO standards.
The Pegasos water purification system evaporates the seawater,
and therefore boron does not get into the freshwater.
Besides boron, other kinds of the volatile toxic substances
contained will evaporate at the time of the preprocessing heating.
I Challenge the World Water Business with the

Desalination Device
I cannot explain the principle of the Pegasos water purification

system in detail because of the patent. The product is now sold
by Pegasos Electra Co., Ltd., (Motohiro Yoshikawa, President),
established recently for the desalination business, and it has already
received orders from several countries in Asia.
Originally the Pegasos water purification system was developed
for desalination, but among these customers there is a country
targeting sewage water treatment. In fact, sewage water treatment
is simpler than desalination of seawater. Since there is no salt in
sewage water, little erosion of the device happens.
In the first facility that used this system, to run the device, they
use the heat released by a garbage incinerator. The heat released
by burning 480 tons of garbage can process 1,500 tons of sewage
water.
The daily processing capacity becomes 100,000 tons if you install
10,000 desalination devices. It would fully purify 90 million tons of
water from a lake in two to three years of operation with almost no
running cost.
The production of the desalination device led by Dr. Yuji Sato is
now advancing at a fast pace, and we plan to produce and sell around
1,000 devices by the end of 2010.

A dozen medium and small-sized companies, subcontractors

of major companies, undertook the production of the Pegasos
water purification system. In 2008, I gave a talk on the magnesium-
recycling society vision in Mizuho-Town, Tokyo, where medium and
small-sized businesses are located. I am developing the desalination
device business with the companies owners who follow the vision.
It is their cooperation that has made the production of the solar-
energy-pumped laser generator possible at a reasonable price, the
laser generator I introduced in Chapter 2.
Japan Is Starting Late in the World Water Business
Newspapers and television stations cover news about the water

business market often. Reports on a Japanese business firm
participating in a large-scale water processing business in many
parts of the world or Japan being superior because of its superb
reverse osmosis membrane technology, especially, stand out.
However, while we were trying to sell the desalination device
abroad by ourselves, we figured out that the Japanese competitiveness
was overwhelmingly inferior in the water business.
To be sure, the Japanese reverse osmosis membrane technology is
excellent. However, as a bad habit of Japanese companies, the device
itself is overspecified and is losing its price competitiveness. For
the user, what is important is the cost-effectiveness of the facilities
overall. I can hardly think from this point of view that the Japanese
desalination devices have international competitiveness.
Hopeful candidates in the bid for the desalination device are
mostly Italian, German, and Korean companies. Although its energy
efficiency is not good, the desalination device made in Iran attracts
customers because of the low price. There are ongoing desalination
projects of trillions of yen in the Middle East, but Japanese companies
can hardly join there.
Whenever I hear the news that the Japanese water business
is doing fine, I feel uneasy; I feel as if these are like the Imperial
Headquarters announcements during World War II.

Summary
1,800 trillion tons of magnesium is contained in seawater.

It is estimated that two-thirds of the worlds population will
experience water shortage in 2025.
The demand for freshwater cannot be met with the current
desalination technology.
A desalination device with overwhelmingly excellent energy
efficiency is needed.
For a desalination device with solar heat, the running cost is
almost negligible and the price is low.

Chapter 6
The Magnesium-Recycling Society

Is Coming!
Realization of the Magnesium-Recycling Society: A Road

Map
Up to here I explained the technologies necessary to realize the

magnesium-recycling society. I will summarize this vision as
follows:
1. Extract magnesium chloride from seawater with a desalination
device using solar heat.
2. Convert the magnesium chloride into magnesium oxide by
heating.
3. Smelt the magnesium oxide to metal magnesium with solar-
energy-pumped laser.
4. Use the magnesium as fuel for transportation and power
stations.
5. After usage as fuel, what remains is magnesium oxide.
6. Return to 3, and smelt again the magnesium oxide to metal
magnesium with solar-energy pumped laser.
The point in this cycle is not just replacing oil and coal as fuel with
magnesium. It collects sparse solar energy at lower cost than regular

By Takashi Yabe
www.panstanford.com

solar power generation, circulates the solar energy with minimal

loss, and uses magnesium as an energy currency, the medium that
captures solar energy.
I understand its principle, but is it really possible to realize such
a magnificent vision?
It is very natural to think that way. However, I will not leave this
vision as just an idea; I have already taken steps for its realization.
It is not government subsidy that is necessary for the realization of
the vision of the magnesium-recycling society. Economic rationality
is the most important thing.
If there are incentives for business owners, such as making
profit and creating jobs, and consumers, such as getting a product
more attractive than others, I do not think the realization of the
magnesium-recycling society would be difficult.
Make Profit by Selling Desalination Devices

The Magnesium-Recycling Society Is Coming! 117
How will we specifically proceed to the magnesium-recycling society?

I introduce the road map we have as follows:
The water business is the first key to our business plan. The
water business market is growing rapidly and is expected to become
a 100 trillion yen market in 2025. It is an obvious fact that water
shortage is seen in many parts of the world, and this is not simply a
temporary situation.
Our Pegasos water purification system is superior to the
reverse osmosis membrane method in processing capacity per price
and in having almost no running cost because of using solar heat and
exhaust heat. Since it also does not emit carbon dioxide, it should
have high competitiveness in the desalination device market.
Actually, introducing the device to Asian countries is in progress,
and 1,000 of them are expected to be sold by the end of 2010. Because
one device has a processing capacity of 10 tons per day, 10,000 tons
of water per day will be produced with 1,000 devices.
In our original plan, I assumed to achieve 10,000 tons of water
per day by 2015, but it looks like we will be able to accomplish that
earlier because we have already received orders for 1,000 devices.
Now I would like to raise the freshwater-processing capacity to
100,000 tons per day by 2015.
The desalination plant with the reverse osmosis membrane
method in Chatan-cho, Okinawa, has a processing capacity of 40,000
tons per day, and 34,700 million yen was spent on its construction.
Assuming that we need 25,000 kilowatts to have 60 atmospheric
pressure at a desalination plant that processes 100,000 tons per day
with the reverse osmosis membrane method, the annual electricity
consumption will be 220 million kWh. If electricity costs 10 yen/
kWh, it will be 2,200 million yen in one year. In contrast, with the
Pegasos water purification system, the construction cost for a plant
with a processing capacity of 100,000 tons per day is less than 10
billion yen, and there is almost no running cost. There is a good
winning chance.

I Will Push Forward with the Construction of the Solar-

Energy-Pumped Laser Generator
While we are selling these desalination devices, I will push forward

with the development of the solar-energy pumped laser.
Currently the output of the solar-energy-pumped laser is 80 W,

but it might soon achieve 400 W with the improvement of the device
and the laser medium. I estimate that we will be able to accomplish
that goal by the end of 2010.
The 400 W laser will be enough for magnesium smelting, and I

will build an experimental smelting facility in the Mongolian desert
or the Middle East. I estimate the construction cost for a smelting
facility equipped with 300 solar-energy-pumped laser generators to
be 150-200 million yen. This quick calculation is realistic because
I can make an experimental device with an automatic sun-tracking
device for 500,000 yen.
We target smelting 50 tons of magnesium annually at the

experimental smelting facility. That level of production is not enough
for a successful business because, with the price of magnesium at
600 yen per kilogram, the sales will be only 30 million yen.
Therefore we will build 200 sets of laser generators, with one

set consisting of 300 laser generators, smelting 10,000 tons per
year. If I make 200 sets, because of the mass production effect, the
construction cost would be around 6 billion yen, according to my
quick calculations. As mentioned in Chapter 3, 300 200 = 60,000
laser generators could be installed in an area of approximately 500
m 500 m.
The construction cost for laser smelting is higher compared

with the Pidgeon method, but the running cost is almost negligible
because sunlight provides laser oscillation and that also cools the
device. With an annual production level of 10,000 tons, it is highly
possible to smelt at a cost price less than 100 yen per kilogram.
If magnesium can be produced at a price less than 100 yen/

kg, when its market price is 400 yen/kg, the annual profit will be

3 billion yen. The construction cost can be recouped in two years.

Though there will be some changes in the magnesium market and
other costs might be involved, because the running cost is low, it will
not take that long to start making profit.
Magnesium alloys are widely used, such as in precision
instruments and cars, and magnesium is necessary to remove sulfur
in steel mills. The demand for magnesium will never disappear.
With all that, the magnesium smelting business will gain
momentum naturally. Building new smelting facilities with the
profit will possibly bring down the price of magnesium even lower.
It should be an attractive choice for a country that intends to reduce
pollution and carbon dioxide emission, because laser smelting does
not exhaust any toxic substance.
The demand for magnesium alloys will increase with the price
of magnesium falling. It is highly possible that electronic equipment
that uses plastic will start using magnesium, which is superior in
heat radiation.
Magnesium Use as Fuel Will Come True
As the price of magnesium falls, the laser-smelting method will

overwhelm other methods like the Pidgeon method overwhelmed
the electrolysis method.
I estimate that if the market price of magnesium becomes less
than 150 yen per kilogram, its full-scale use as fuel will begin. Prior
to that, car companies would actually start the development of a
magnesium air battery.
It is almost certain that the next-generation car will be powered
by electricity. Besides the battery, the electric car and the magnesium
air battery car both have the same structure. It will not be a new
development from scratch for the magnesium air battery car, because
the development of the electric car has already accelerated on many
fronts.

The development of the magnesium air battery is just beginning

now, but technically it is not as challenging as the hydrogen fuel cell
car that has fundamental problems in transportation and storage of
hydrogen and highly expensive platinum.
If magnesium comes to be used as fuel for cars, the next stage
will be usage at factories and power stations. Replacing the fuel
used at power stations and steel mills that are large carbon dioxide
emission sources will be inevitable to reach the reduce the amount
of carbon dioxide emission 25% by 2020 target(based on 1990
ratio) proposed by the government of Japanese Prime Minister Yukio
Hatoyama.
In the Magnesium-Recycling Society, What Changes?
Up to here, I have described how the magnesium-recycling society

would be realized.
Then what kind of life will the magnesium-recycling society bring
to us? What kind of changes will happen around us?
The first change will begin with the desalination device. I am
certain that our device, which is low in price and free from using
fossil fuel, will make a big impact on the water business market.
Other companies will be obliged to shift to some kind of method using
solar energy because the conventional reverse osmosis membrane
method will lose its cost competitiveness.
If a desalination device is made at sufficiently low price, it should
be able to contribute to the solution of the health problems in Africa,
where safe water is in short supply. Freshwater would be supplied
abundantly for irrigation, increasing the yield of farm products.
You might think that one has to be close to the sea to benefit from
desalination of seawater, but that is not the case. A change in the way
we think is needed here.
Will an enormous construction expense be necessary to have a
pipeline carrying freshwater inland from a desalination facility near
the sea?

No, a desalination device does not have to be built close to the

sea. If it is 200 km away from the sea, all we need to do is build a
canal.

It costs hundreds of billions of yen in construction expenses to

build 200 km of pipeline, but a canal can be built for much less. We
do not need to carry freshwater at an enormous cost; we just bring
the seawater inland to convert it into freshwater.
Even if it is a narrow canal, it will bring a huge benefit. First,

if sufficient amount of freshwater is supplied inland, we can have
more cultivated land and raise the yield of farm products. The farm
produce can be carried on a ship in the canal. The effect will be killing
two birds, even three, with one stone.
About the economic effect of the canal, you should look at an

example in China. The full length of Hangyong Canal, inaugurated at
the end of 2007, is 239 km, linking Ningbo to Hangzhou. The total
construction cost for the canal was 7.4 billion yuan (approximately
98,400 million yen), but it is anticipated that the cost of freight
transportation can be reduced by more than 3 billion yuan a year.
There are advantages of a canal only in terms of transportation.

If an area has many fine days and is suitable for laser smelting,
we could build the smelting facility there to smelt the magnesium
extracted with the desalination process.
Laser Smelting Changes the Ways in the Metal Industry
If the laser-smelting method using solar-energy-pumped laser

becomes widely used, the price of magnesium will fall and that will
encourage its use in many more fields than before. The advantages of
magnesium are its light weight, strength, and superior heat radiation,
as I mentioned earlier. It is a highly possible scenario that products
currently made from plastic might be made from magnesium.
Magnesium is superior from the viewpoint of recycling. The
recycling technology of magnesium is considerably advanced now,
and laser smelting will accelerate this movement even more. In

addition to magnesium, laser smelting can bring down the cost of

smelting and recycling of other metals.
Consequently the price of many industrial products might be
largely reduced, so much so that overproduced metal products might
be a problem.
If Magnesium Comes to Be Used as Fuel
Furthermore, how would our lives change if magnesium becomes

cheap enough to be used as fuel?
Perhaps there will be almost no changes in the way things appear.

We will use cars and railroads for transportation. But carbon dioxide
and other gases will not be emitted from these transportation
modes.
When we use a car, we will purchase a pack of magnesium at a

convenience store instead of buying gasoline at a service station. The
convenience store will accept a waste fuel pack, magnesium oxide,
and send it to the laser-smelting facility.
If the magnesium air battery comes to be used, the running time

of electronic equipment will be largely prolonged compared with the
current lithium ion battery. The current model of a laptop computer
that runs for 5 hours might run continuously for 30 hours. When the
battery goes dead while you are away from home, you can simply buy
a cheap magnesium pack and start to use the computer immediately
without charging the battery. It is possible to affect your lifestyle
because it becomes easier to carry around a powerful information
terminal.
You might feel that you do not see a drastic change. However, the big
advantage of the magnesium-recycling society is that it only requires
us to change the fuel we use, not the current infrastructure.

Life in Developing Countries Will Be Influenced Drastically
The magnesium-recycling society will have much more influence on

developing countries, where the energy infrastructure is not well
equipped.
Areas that cannot currently be cultivated because of water
shortage will be able to produce crops if low-price desalination
devices spread.
This will have an even more significant impact on poor countries
because they will have an increased chance for raising their own
industry. Magnesium-smelting facilities and desalination plants
will possibly generate new industries. In regions that do not have
infrastructure such as power transmission lines, usage of electric
appliances will be possible with magnesium air batteries. When the
electricity for raising an independent industry becomes available,
poor countries will possibly be able to participate in the world
economy. By accomplishing that, I think issues like the poverty in
Africa could be solved for the first time.
Promotion of High-Level Use of Solar Heat Accelerates

Recycling
If magnesium were used as a fuel source, the importance of oil and

coal would no doubt decline.
However, oil and coal are important as the ingredients for
plastics, and oil and coal-mining industries will never disappear. The
discarded plastic garbage will be burned or buried in the same way
as before.
However, more common usage of solar heat might possibly
promote recycling, including plastics.
For example, PET bottle recycling cannot make a profit now
because completely returning to the raw material state needs a large
amount of energy. But promotion of efficient usage of solar heat
could make low-cost recycling possible.

How Much Carbon Dioxide Can We Reduce by Replacing

Oil with Magnesium?
If the dream of a magnesium-recycling society comes true, it would

largely reduce greenhouse gases coming from transportation and
power stations. But how much can we really reduce that?
In September 2009, Prime Minister Hatoyama promised to the
world that Japan would reduce its greenhouse gas emission by 25%
compared to 1990.
Because greenhouse gas emission in 1990 was 1,261 million
tons, with a 25% reduction, it would be reduced to 946 million tons.
A 25% reduction compared to 1990 does not solve the problem
because greenhouse gas emission became 1,374 million tons in 2007,
a 9% increase. The amount of greenhouse gases we need to reduce is
1,374 million tons 946 million tons = 428 million tons.
In other words, lets think about the amount of oil that will emit
428 million tons of carbon dioxide.
The main components of oil are hydrocarbons, and 83%-87% of
the mass is carbon (the rest comprises hydrogen, sulfur, and others).
Because the ratio of carbon in carbon dioxide is 12/44 (the atomic
weight of oxygen is 16, the atomic weight of carbon is 12, and the
molecular weight of carbon dioxide is 44), 12 g of carbon makes 44
g of carbon dioxide.
In other words, when 1 ton of oil burns, the amount of carbon
dioxide generated is 1 ton 0.85 (44/12) 3.1 tons.
Then, the amount of oil that emits 428 million tons of carbon
dioxide is 428 million tons/3.1 138 million tons.
The energy content for magnesium is 25 MJ/kg and for oil 44 MJ/
kg. This means that 240 million tons of magnesium is equivalent to
138 million tons of oil. If we can use all this magnesium as fuel, we
might be able to reach the 25% reduction (compared to 1990) target
Prime Minister Hatoyama announced.

Smelting facilities equipped with 1,500,000 laser generators (2.5

2.5 km of sunlight collectors) will be necessary in 960 places to
produce 240 million tons of magnesium. It would be considerably
hard to realize a 25% greenhouse gas reduction by 2020, though it
is not impossible.
A Desalination Device That Does Not Use Electricity Can

Easily Achieve This Carbon Dioxide Reduction
However, this is the scenario if we simply replace the oil consumed in

Japan with magnesium. Prime Minister Hatoyamas announcement
of a 25% greenhouse gas reduction includes the reduction abroad by
using Japanese technology. If a desalination device were included in
that, the aim can easily be achieved.
In Chapter 5, I stated that 4,100 million tons of freshwater per
day would be necessary to solve the water shortage for 3 billion
people. Even though we use a reverse osmosis membrane method
with the highest energy efficiency at present, it would take half of the
worlds electricity to meet the freshwater demand.
Just reducing the electricity used in desalination would realize
a large reduction in the fossil fuel usage (necessary for power
generation).
We have to reduce the consumption of oil by 138 million tons
to realize a 25% carbon dioxide reduction, as I mentioned earlier.
Because the energy content of oil is 44 MJ/kg, 138 million tons of oil
supplies 138 million tons (138 billion kg) 44 MJ/kg = 6 trillion MJ
= 1,600 billion kWh.
Next, let's look at the energy consumed by a desalination plant
using the reverse osmosis membrane method. A reverse osmotic
membrane method plant that has a production level of 100,000 tons
per day needs 25,000 kW. If it operates 24 hours for 365 days,
25,000 kW 24 hours 365 days = 219 million kWh.

Suppose the generation efficiency of the thermal power station is

40%. Then, 219 million kWh/40% = 550 million kWh.
Therefore if there is a plant with a production capacity of
100,000 tons per day that neither uses electricity nor fossil fuel, we
can annually save an amount of oil that is equivalent to 550 million
kWh.
To reduce the targeted amount, 1,600 billion kWh/550 million
kWh 3,000.
Building 3,000 desalination plants, each with a capacity of
100,000 tons per day, will work.
Naturally we have to consider the carbon dioxide emission of
the plant construction. It is the steel mill that emits carbon dioxide
most during the construction process after all. For our system, we
found out that most of the carbon dioxide emission during plant
construction is negligible because our system consumes little iron
and steel.
And if 3,000 plants were built from modules with a capacity of
10 tons per day, we would need a total of 30 million modules. This
production volume is comparable to the car production volume since
the price of one module is approximately the same as the price of one
car. If our production system were established the same way as it is
for cars, it could build these desalination plants in six years because
the Japanese annual production level for regular cars is around 5
million.
It is hard to believe that cars, which are considerably more
complicated than our device, are produced at the rate of 10,000-
20,000 cars a day at 1 million yen each. Desalination devices could
support the Japanese economy instead of cars and can contribute to
greenhouse gas reduction.
In the future other companies will surely introduce desalination
devices to the market that use natural energy with low energy and
at low cost. This will activate the market mechanism and a mass
production effect, and we might be able to achieve our target with
less budget.

The Japanese Should Enjoy Science More
I think if the magnesium price becomes less than 150 yen per
kilogram, the magnesium-recycling society would be realized
naturally by economic rationality.
However, the low birthrate of Japan will continue in the future,
and China and India are gaining strength in science technology, too.
What should Japan do in the future to keep the country comfortable
to live in and at the same time maintain its competitiveness in the
world?
The problem of staying away from science is pointed out in the
field of education, and voices demanding the expansion of the science
education system are often heard. An education environment that
does not crush the talents of excellent researchers and encourages
them to grow is surely important.
At the same time it seems like what Japan is missing today is
getting all people to become interested in and to enjoy science.
It does not mean unnecessarily increasing math and science
classes and teaching more advanced classes. The math and science
classes taught now at school already have enough high-level content.
In fact they are rather difficult. I think it is not necessary to force
everybody to study such high-level material. If they feel that they will
have to learn things that are too difficult, most people would just
refuse science education.
In addition, I think people reach high positions in research
organizations or in scientific administration because they merely
had good grades in math and science, not because they liked these
topics.
I conducted research for a while at a research institute in the
United States, and the attitudes of the researchers were impressive.
Sometimes they played with science.
For example, when I visited the nuclear fusion research facility, the
control room was designed just like the bridge deck of the Enterprise

(a spaceship in the science fiction series Star Trek), and a researcher

wearing the costume of Captain Kirk welcomed me. There are many
Star Trek fans among U.S. researchers, and you can find many of them
who became researchers because of that influence.
It is not necessary for anyone to decipher a difficult numerical
formula or perform a complicated experiment. Even Doraemon is
good enough to get you motivated.
In the 1970s, everyone got excited with the Osaka World Exposition
and dreamt of science bringing along a bright future. People dreamt
of the things they could do with science and technology. It looks like
such dreams are diminishing in Japan compared to the old times.
I hope students of liberal arts do not cut off their ties to science
totally or lose interest in it but explore what kind of possibilities the
current technology offers and what can be done with it.
Another suggestion I would like to make to the Japanese is to
be interested in a wide range of fields. For example, if the media
begins to say that solar power generation is promising, all the public
attention goes to that. However, research development does not
proceed in a straightforward way, and nobody can fully predict if and
when it will really come true or how much it will cost. For example,
nuclear fusion still cannot be realized.
Therefore I hope that everyone take an interest in science and
the various kinds of research be recognized. Epoch-making research,
such as induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, might have ended
without being recognized had they not been recognized in the United
States.
Sometimes there was trickery, but there were many cases of truly
great research being criticized by experts without hard evidence.
Just before the Wright brothers flew an airplane for the first time in
the world, famous scientists theoretically proved that an airplane
could not fly.

Epilogue
I wonder what kind of impression you had after reading this book.
Many of you might have thought, Is it true? or I have never heard of
this; besides, it sounds like it is fake, or How come other countries
are not doing this? or Why does the government not pay attention
to this if it is that good? and so on.
Strangely, we have a habit of labeling things that nobody did
before fishy. A famous Japanese scholar once grieved that in our
country there are excellent horses but no horse dealers. A horse
dealer is a person who raises horses. In terms of science, it means
that there are advanced researchers who have the potential to be
scientific leaders in the world, but there is no environment available
for nurturing them.
A new idea does not look so good at first. Therefore new research
is an easy target if someone is trying to criticize it because it might
have many weak points. However, incremental research looks fine
because the base research has already been improved by many
people.
When a young scholar gives a research talk, influential figures,
who brag about being scientific leaders in Japan, ask trick questions
that the young scholar cannot answer, so that they can show what
great scholars they are. For the influential scholar things are over
at that point and nothing is left behind from this experience, but the
shock the young scholar experiences is great and spoils his or her
potential.
In that respect I have a strong and rare nature; no matter how
I am criticized, I can forget it in a few days. What I experienced
30 years ago is a good example. I developed a new computational
technique, but the response was exactly the same as what I wrote at
the beginning of this epilogue. I heard from a scholar overseas that

when he asked a Japanese scholar, What do you think about Yabes

method? the answer was, I do not have a particular reason, but I
just do not like it.
After that kind of response continued for more than 10 years, in
1999, I was asked to deliver the commemorative invited lecture of
the British Royal Institution at its 200th anniversary. The response
in Japan has changed completely since then. Gradually people critical
of the method disappeared, and now my technique can always be
found in numerical computation books.
The response I received when I announced in public the idea of a
magnesium society is very similar to the one I had 30 years ago, and
I feel as if I went back in time. At the same time I feel that recognition
from foreign countries is indispensable for the realization of this
vision.
However, things are different from how they were 30 years ago,
and the time for change seems to have come unexpectedly early. One
of the reasons is that I was introduced by magazines known globally,
such as Nature and Time, with very good comments. But even more
significantly, the completion of the device came true and we were
able to show it in a visible form.
In my mind, the magnesium society is a society that has already
been established, anyway. There will still be some problems with
small technical issues or production methods. But they will not
amount to much. The machine for practical use has already been
completed as a desalination/water purification device. It has exactly
the performance we estimated, and if this spreads, it could change
the world dramatically.
The solar-energy-pumped laser and magnesium smelting are
closer to completion. In addition, magnesium smelting has reached
as high as 70% purity. This should be enough for fuel.
Because of the patent protection, I allow students to talk, at the
university or outside, only about the results that do not look so good.
As easily expected, the other instructors criticize the students: Is

Epilogue 133
the cycle possible with such low efficiency? meaning, I told you
so. In the current Japanese environment, this is a typical example of
denying an idea of a student in the middle of research.
That reminds me of an example from more than 20 years agothe
opinion of a group of professors from a famous university: The solar
battery will never work because the large amount of energy needed
to make it cannot be collected from the sun during the lifetime of
the battery. I remember that I said at that time, We do not need
to be that pessimistic, because the technology will advance. This
became true; they say that in three years a solar battery can collect
the energy that was needed to make it. This is a good example that
we should keep in mind. Unless a technological problem is related to
an absolute limitation, such as solar light not being able to generate
more than 1 kW/m2, it will one day be solved.
Furthermore, we are receiving domestic and international
business proposals and support, and the funding is becoming
abundant. Some pieces of the whole system have already become
part of the business world, and the disagreeable comments are
becoming meaningless.
In this case, the encounter with Tatsuya Yamaji, a writer/editor,
was good fortune. I found the perfect partner who can describe
our technology to the world from the viewpoint of liberal arts. In
addition, Shoichiro Kishi, of PHP Publisher, offering to publish the
book just at the right time is something more than a coincidence.
Besides I felt a mysterious connection when I found out later that
the logo of PHP Publisher is Pegasus, the same as the symbol of our
desalination device (Pegasos in Greek).
I had many such lucky encounters in the past. This is greatly
related to the career path I had chosen.
I graduated from Tokyo Institute of Technology and became an
assistant. If I had stayed there, I might not have had any hardship in
my career. At that time, I was attracted to the laser fusion research
performed at Osaka University, and during a conference I said to

Professor Chiyoe Yamanaka, director of the Laser Fusion Research

Center, I would like to be your assistant. I left Tokyo Institute of
Technology and went to Osaka University. The research at this center
built the foundation of the magnesium cycle research that I conduct
today.
In addition, after the director Yamanaka retired I applied, at age
38, for a professors position at Gunma University. It is common to
wait for a professor position until around age 45. A colleague at
Osaka University wondered why I was leaving an imperial university
for a local university. I was trying to be free from being one of the
gears in a huge project, laser fusion, because I wanted to concentrate
on the computational method that I had devised.
I intended to keep on living in Gunma, but I received an offer
to return as a professor to Tokyo Institute of Technology, my alma
mater, and this is how I reached where I am today.
Let me mention some names here, even though the list is long,
because the relationship with these people is significant in my
history.
I have friendship for 30 years, both officially and privately, with
Professor Kunio Yoshida, who was a colleague during my time at
Osaka University. I feel the wonder of the encounter that Professor
Yoshida was the one who prepared the laser medium for solar-
energy-pumped laser and nonreflective coating technology.
At Tokyo Institute of Technology, the CIP method was completed
with the collaboration of my former students, Associate Professor
Xiao Feng, Tokyo Institute of Technology; Associate Professor Yoichi
Ogata, Hiroshima University; Associate Professor Takashi Nakamura,
Tokyo Institute of Technology; and Dr. Kenji Takizawa (now a key
research scientist at Rice University, Houston, Texas). Because
of the completion of the CIP method, I could have a productive
relationship with industry and was able to get advanced information
and brush up my business sense. In recent years, Shigeaki Uchida,
special appointment professor, and Eiichi Matsunaga, Tomomasa
Okubo, Choijil Baasandash, Yuji Sato, and Yasutaka Sakurai,

Epilogue 135
postdoctoral researchers, stayed at the university to complete the

basic technology for the magnesium cycle. In addition, the secretary,
Mamiko Shinohara, dealt with the university office work swiftly so
that we could concentrate on our research. I should not forget that
many students willingly participated in difficult experiments.
I received great fiscal and technical support from collaborators
in the business world, Takayuki Okamoto, president of Okamoto
Optics Work, Inc., and Yoshiaki Okamoto, managing director of
Okamoto Optics Work, Inc. We have known one another since my
days at Osaka University. Without their world-eminent technology,
the improvement of the laser would have been impossible.
Toyota Tsusho Corporation gave us generous funding, and there
was much support from those, including Akitoshi Morita (currently
at Toyotsu Material), who served as a bridge in obtaining a large
amount of funding.
For the experiments, I received great cooperation from chief
director at Chitose Institute of Technology, Takaaki Koyatsu,
President Hiroyuki Sasabe, Professor Kiyoshi Kato, and Chitose City
Hall and from people at Takenaka Corporation. For the next plan,
the Kochi prefecture harbor section, citizens of Miyako-jima Island,
and city hall workers offered a warm invitation to us, and we are
examining that now.
Media reporters, Sankei Shimbun (newspaper), Nikkei Shimbun,
Nikkan Kogyo Shimbun, Tokyo Shimbun, Kyodo News Enterprise
and NHK, TV Tokyo, and others covered our research. Especially
Shigehiko Nakajima had a good relationship with us for 20 years
through Nikkei Shimbun and Nikkei Science.
The companies that set desalination as their main business are
strongly promoting the magnesium-related business and are growing
now. The top runner is President Motohiro Yoshikawa of Pegasos
Electra Co. Ltd., Hozumi Yagioka, Michikazu Kumada, and Yutaka
Koide are supporting him, and great helper Toshihiro Hirosaki,
president of Ask Planning Center Inc. is supporting the construction
business in foreign countries.

Like a speech at an Oscar ceremony, I listed the people who took

care of us, and without their support the magnesium cycle business
might not have been realized and we could not have expected the
development for the next 20 years.
Finally, I should not forget Setsuko, my wife, who always looked
after me gently and gave me the driving force to rebuff the criticism
in the world; my two daughters, Kyoko and Eriko; my granddaughter
Hinako, whose lovely smile makes my heart warm; Kotaro, our dog,
who is always next to me; and our first dog, the late Rintaro. This
family support nurtured the new idea that is unique in the world and
helped me establish an enterprise. Thank you all.

Afterword
After the original Japanese book was published, various changes

took place.
The development of the magnesiumion battery is now growing
in various places over the world, and a new type of magnesium
air battery has appeared demonstrating 9096% efficiency. The
magnesium air battery was abandoned because the surface of the
magnesium is soon oxidized and only a thin surface layer can be
used. This prevented a high-efficiency battery from coming into
effect. Then appeared the technology to automatically get rid of the
oxidized layer, and a long-time obstacle was removed.
The efficiency of the solar-energy-pumped laser is greatly
improved, and we are able to get 100 W class output even with a size
that is 4 mm in diameter and 5 cm in length, which is one-tenth of
what was used in 2008. The output is transported through an optical
fiber for a long distance from the laser device, and the laser from the
fiber cuts the steel plate. A very high-quality Fresnel lens of large
size is now ready for experiment in collaboration with Dr. Hitoshi
Oomori at the Physico-Chemical Laboratory, and we expect a two
times larger solar input to the laser medium.
The project is now strongly supported by Recep Ozkan (president
of JIG Corporation) and Muratbek Rustambekov (representative in
Uzbekistan of Technopian Corporation) toward the construction of
large-scale pilot plants in both Turkey and Uzbekistan.
Takashi Yabe

Index
cameras, flashbulbs of 16
canal 12122
capacity 11, 94, 99, 109, 127
carbon 38, 66, 71, 125
agent ferrosilicon, reducing 6364 carbon dioxide 6, 10, 1516, 63,
air 3435, 88, 110111 65, 71, 8283, 100, 123, 125
air battery 8889, 9193, 99101 million tons of 125
airplane 16, 98, 129 carbon dioxide emission 100,
aluminum 36, 3940, 49, 65, 75, 11920, 127
95, 99 carbon dioxide laser 68, 70
amplitudes 2324 carbon dioxide reduction 126
atmospheric pressure 1112, 16, cars 11, 16, 8385, 87, 9495, 105,
1089, 117 11920, 123, 127
atoms 2829, 66 electric 82, 85
automatic solar tracking device 42, hybrid 8284
46, 51 cathode-ray tube 12
cell phones 16, 77
cells, solar 79, 18
ceramics 48, 50
chemical reaction 39, 6566, 86,
baking 58 100
battery 7, 8491, 9394, 99, 119, complicated 3839, 66, 79
123, 133
China 35, 64, 106, 122, 128
magnesium-ion 137
Chitose 4445, 48, 5556
methanol fuel 99
chromatic aberration 24, 41,
rechargeable 9, 86 5153
solar 133 chromium 5051, 53, 5859, 76
battery car, magnesium air 93 CIP method 7779, 134
battery research department, circulation 1416
specialized 93
climate 5
bioethanol 83
coal 13, 57, 10, 1314, 1617,
boron 11112
20, 40, 6365, 74, 76, 91,
bus 85, 94 100101, 115, 124
business 40, 66, 7273, 118 heat release of 6, 16
magnesium-related 135 coating, anti-reflection 77
coke 74
companies, fish-farming 110
compressor 54
construction 74, 11718, 137
calculations 4041 construction cost 73, 75, 96, 101,
quick 51, 7374, 97, 118 11719

140 Index
construction expense 7475, 120, device

122 cooling 54
consumption, annual electricity experimental 118
55, 117 new 44, 59
conversion efficiency 7, 30, 37, 41, diameter 67, 69, 98, 137
43, 5051, 53, 5759, 97 dimensions 41, 4344, 46, 5758
conversion rate, actual laser 57 distances
cooling 5354, 63, 75 long 10, 72, 8485, 97, 137
copper plate 7071 short 9, 84
cost price 7475, 118 dolomite 63, 71
costs 10, 17, 35, 38, 4041, 51, 56,
6566, 7375, 85, 87, 95, 106,
110111, 119, 12223
running 75, 79, 11112, 114,
11719
crystal 4851 earth 5, 1315, 18, 27, 3233, 53,
83, 88, 103, 105
efficiency 37, 50, 55, 57, 90, 94,
137
high conversion 37
Electra Co., Ltd. 42
debris 33, 77, 109
electric air conditioner 54
desalination 104, 106, 11112,
electric appliances 12, 124
126
electric motor 8385, 87, 93
desalination business 106, 112
electric vehicle (EV) 82, 85
desalination device business 110,
113 electricity 1, 911, 18, 36, 54,
8486, 88, 92, 9597, 99101,
desalination device market 117
109, 119, 124, 12627
desalination devices 92, 110, 112
electricity costs 117
15, 118, 120121, 12627,
133 electrode 76, 86, 88, 9091
innovative 110 negative 86, 8889
low-price 124 positive 86, 8889
selling 116 electrolysis 11, 6164, 67, 74
desalination plants 109, 117, 124, electromagnetic wave 23, 2829
12627 electronic equipment 40, 98100,
desalination technologies 109, 114 102, 119, 123
desalination/water purification electrons 2829, 88
device 132 emission, induced 2930
deuterium 32, 77 energy 1, 519, 2122, 2526,
developing countries 5, 124 2829, 33, 3839, 4950,
5354, 59, 61, 6569, 90, 94,
development 54, 81, 8384, 86,
1067, 133
9293, 9899, 110, 11820,
13637 atomic 10

Index 141
combustion 94 evaporation 66, 68

concentration of 26, 67 evaporation methods 110
consumed 5 excitation 2829, 4950
converting 19 exhaust gases 82, 84, 105
dream 13, 31 experiment, laser oscillation 47
electric 83, 89, 109 experts 13, 5152, 129
generating 16
interatomic binding 66
kinetic 27, 83
lithium 94
low 127 facilities, laser-smelting 123
low-level 39 filtration membrane 108
magnesium-released 40 fish farming 110111
nuclear 2 flash lamp 30, 37, 41, 4950, 53,
potential 27 76
released 40 flashlight 24, 36
renewable 6 focus distance 24
total 8 Food and Agriculture Organization
energy alternatives, short-term 10 (FAO) 1056
energy consumption 4, 75, 104 fossil fuel usage 126
annual 20, 104 fossil fuels 12, 57, 10, 15, 18,
large 7 8284, 127
low 108, 110 freshwater 39, 1059, 112, 114,
energy consumption per capita 4 120, 122, 126
energy content 12526 Fresnel lens 41, 4344, 4647, 51,
5758
energy currency 16, 116
fuel 1, 13, 1620, 32, 3940,
energy density 6, 8, 15, 39, 85, 88,
65, 74, 77, 8182, 8698,
9293, 95, 99, 104
100103, 115, 11920, 123,
energy efficiency 85, 107, 109,
125, 132
11314, 126
burnt 101
energy infrastructure 124
usable 40, 61
energy loss 58
fuel cell 11, 40, 76, 86, 89, 98
energy output 90
polymer electrolyte 86
energy problem 13, 3132
small 99
energy-saving measures 6
fuel cell car 8586
energy source 67
fuel cost 74
ideal 11
fuel electrode 86
engine, diesel 82
fuel production 83
environment 56, 8283, 86, 131
fuel source 81, 124
equivalency 6669
funding 38, 43, 133, 135
EV (electric vehicle) 82, 85

142 Index
funds 33, 4345, 47 hydrogen tanks 1213

personal 45
furnace 63, 69, 72
actual laser-smelting 72
gas bubble 71
gas mileage 82, 84, 94 impurities 38, 108
gases 11, 13, 1516, 29, 54, 68, 70, India 34, 128
78, 82, 94, 96, 123 industrial activity 15
gasoline 8182, 85, 90, 96, 123 industrial applications 38
gasoline engine 8285, 90, 96 Industrial Technology Development
gasoline engine cars 83, 85, 96 Organization 93
generator infrared laser 50
bigger laser 43 weak 42
early laser 37 infrastructure 8485, 94, 12324
experimental carbon dioxide gas existing 101
laser 61 infrastructure maintenance 87
new laser 56 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
solar-energy-pumped laser 118 Change (IPCC) 5
glass 77 internal combustion engine 8284,
greenhouse gas emission 125 87
greenhouse gases 5, 15, 101, 125 International Thermonuclear
growth 56 Experimental Reactor (ITER)
33
iron 39, 63, 6566, 75, 127
pig 38
iron oxide 38, 6566
heat 5, 7, 1415, 22, 5354, 6869, irradiation 7677
72, 101, 107, 112 ITER (International Thermonuclear
heat release 6 Experimental Reactor) 33
high-power laser 31, 3436, 38,
7677, 98
human beings 1, 5, 15, 105
humidity, low 4445
hydrogen 1113, 16, 20, 71, 83, 86, Japan 710, 12, 33, 45, 73, 7576,
88, 100, 120, 125 98, 105, 113, 12526, 12829,
hydrogen engine 83, 86 13132
hydrogen fuel cell 11, 86, 88, energy consumption of 89
9293, 120 Japanese companies 113
hydrogen fuel cell cars 87 Japanese desalination devices 113
hydrogen gas 88 Japanese reverse osmosis
Hydrogen Society 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, membrane technology 113
13, 15, 17, 19 Japanese water business 113

Index 143
laser 1723, 25, 27, 2945, 47, 49, laser output 36, 44, 5657, 68
51, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 6573, high-power 61
75, 77, 9798 laser research 21, 30, 47, 55,
amplified 98 7677
induced 98 laser research funds 44
mainstream 37 laser smelting 20, 75, 101, 11819,
oscillated 77 12223
pulse 34 laser smelting method 6667,
pumped 115, 118 7375, 79, 81, 119, 122
semiconductor 30, 3738 laser surgical knife 22
small 72 laser technology 9798
weak 98 laws 98
laser beam 21, 27, 98 leaders, scientific 131
infrared 49 lenses 5152, 55, 5759, 67, 77,
laser device 54, 137 9798
laser disk players 21 light 5, 2225, 27, 2930, 37, 41,
laser energy 18, 2021 4955, 98
laser experiment 47 incident 29, 37, 49, 98
solar-energy-pumped 76 natural 25
laser experts 37 strong 16, 49
laser facility 98 light wavelengths 50
laser fusion 13, 22, 3032, 7778, limestone 63
134 lithium 1314, 32, 9496
laser fusion research 31, 133 lithium air battery 95
Laser Fusion Research Center 134 lithium ion battery 40, 85, 9195,
laser generators 2931, 4142, 99, 123
44, 4648, 5457, 59, 73, 76, lithium ion battery costs, used 95
9798, 113, 118, 126 lithium reserves 13, 95
laser irradiation 7071
laser magnesium smelting,
explained 75
laser medium 2930, 3738, 41
43, 4849, 51, 5354, 5759, magic mirror 98
76, 118, 134, 137
magnesium 1621, 30, 3940, 61,
co-doped neodymium YAG 53, 6471, 7375, 79, 81, 8798,
5859, 76 100107, 10911, 113, 115
efficient 51 16, 11820, 12226, 137
groundbreaking 38 cheap 17
neodymium YAG 4951 cost price of 74
solid-state 30, 37 extracted 110
laser medium improvements 57 final 74
laser oscillation 37, 42, 48, 5455, gross weight of 18, 104
118

144 Index
hydrous 61 magnesium smelting experiment

powdered metal 100 70
smelting metal 18 magnesium-smelting facilities 124
supplying 92 magnesium society 132
used 65 magnesium vapor 63
magnesium air battery 8990, magnetic field 32
9299, 102, 11920, 12324, medium 38, 41, 51, 54, 57, 59, 113,
137 116
magnesium alloys 16, 119 metal magnesium 1619, 40, 61,
magnesium atoms 66 63, 66, 7071, 73, 88, 92, 94,
97, 99, 101, 103, 106, 115
magnesium carbonate 17, 63, 71
metal smelting 18, 3839, 55, 57,
magnesium chloride 16, 6162, 6566, 76
71, 115
metals 1617, 3940, 6566, 75,
anhydrous 62, 67 86, 88, 90, 123
heating hydrous 67 rare 7576
hydrous 62 methanol 9899
magnesium combustion 96 mileage 82, 85, 9193
magnesium compounds 71 model airplane 36
magnesium content 103 modules 127
magnesium cycle 20, 103, 135 Mongolia 48, 76
magnesium cycle business 136 movement, solar 4243
magnesium cycle research 134
magnesium factories 64
magnesium fuel 92
magnesium fuel cells 20
magnesium grain 100 natural energy 1, 1011, 15, 20,
magnesium hydroxide 101 127
magnesium market 73, 119 renewable 7
magnesium oxide 1617, 1920, natural gas 23, 7, 1011, 82
40, 62, 6672, 8889, 94, 97, natural world 2325, 65
101, 103, 115, 123 neodymium 37, 4950
magnesium oxide powder 71 neodymium atom 50
magnesium-recycling society neodymium YAG 50, 59
2021, 40, 78, 88, 11517, Norway 62, 64
11921, 12325, 12729 nuclear fusion 13, 16, 22, 3133,
magnesium-recycling society vision 129
113 realization of 3132
magnesium smelting 21, 30, nuclear fusion fuel 32
6163, 69, 7173, 79, 103,
nuclear fusion research 13, 3133,
118, 132 72, 78
magnesium smelting business 119 advanced 32

Index 145
nuclear fusion research facility platinum 8687

128 plug-in hybrid 8384
nuclear fusion researcher 33 portability 7, 9, 99
nucleus 28 power 4, 33, 36
power generation 5455, 126
geothermal 10
power stations 910, 16, 54, 96,
115, 120, 125
magnesium thermal 100101
oceans 5, 18 power transmission line 10, 96
oil 13, 58, 10, 1314, 16, 21, 31, price of magnesium 18, 74, 81,
61, 8182, 91, 9496, 100101, 9293, 11819, 122, 128
1034, 107, 115, 12427 Prius 8283
peak 3 problem, technological 133
oil civilization 12 processing capacity 117
oil conversion 18, 20, 65, 104 production
optical fibers 72, 137 annual metal magnesium 73
ores 18, 63 highest magnesium 64
osmotic pressure 108 production volume 127
oxide products, farm 120, 122
profit 57, 66, 75, 116, 119, 124
recycle magnesium 99
separated magnesium 62
oxygen 11, 16, 6667, 6971,
8689, 100, 110, 125
railroads 96, 123

rainy season 9, 42
rays
pack infrared 2324
cheap magnesium 123 ultraviolet 2324
new fuel 94 recycling 39, 65, 75, 92, 94, 104,
106, 111, 12224
waste fuel 123
reduction 101, 12526
Pegasos water purification system
11113, 117 greenhouse gas 12627
pellet 77 thermal 61, 63
solid fuel 78 reflecting mirror 34, 5152
phase change 78 refueling 85, 9192, 94
Pidgeon method 6364, 71, 7375, research institutes 76, 128
79, 106, 11819 reserves 3, 9, 95
pipeline 120, 122 reserve-to-production ratio
pipes 54, 110 (RPR) 3
unglazed porcelain 110 reverse osmosis membrane method
plants 14, 83, 109, 117, 127 10611, 117, 120, 126
plasma 32, 7778 rocket 3336, 38
plastic 51, 119, 122, 124 laser-propelled 36

146 Index
roller 110111 solar light 7, 20, 133

ruby 2930 solar power generation 7, 9, 15,
Russia 62, 64 20, 116, 129
solid-state laser researchers 76
solid-state lasers 30, 33, 49
high-power 31
semiconductor-pumped 30, 38
sources
salt 95, 103, 108, 112
main energy 2
satellite 33, 9798 superior energy 6
satellite mirror 97 sustainable energy 2
Saturn 52 worlds energy 2
science 43, 48, 54, 12829, 131 space 14, 2526, 33, 35, 5455,
seawater 5, 14, 18, 20, 3940, 61, 59, 67
71, 95, 1039, 11115 spaceship 33, 35, 129
desalination of 112, 120 Star Trek 129
seawater costs 106 stations
seawater desalination plants 106 service 11, 83, 123
semiconductor 2930, 38 special fuel 92
sewage water treatment 106, 112 steam 1, 35, 96, 100101
silicon 38, 63, 66, 75 steel mills 11920, 127
simulations 58, 78 sun 5, 1415, 19, 38, 44, 52, 54,
physics 40, 42, 78 76, 133
smelting 1819, 40, 61, 7172, 75, sun image 52
79, 97, 106, 118, 123 sunlight 7, 14, 1819, 21, 2325,
smelting efficiency 71 27, 29, 31, 33, 3543, 45, 47,
smelting facility 7376, 118, 122, 4953, 55, 5759, 75
126 actual 51
experimental 118 all-weather 8
smelting furnace 66, 69, 7273, 97 converting 3637, 61, 97
smelting methods 61, 65, 73 natural 37, 59
existing 3940, 61 sunlight collectors 126
solar cell panels 910
solar energy 6, 9, 18, 53, 57, 71, 75,
11516, 120
solar-energy cooling device 72
solar-energy-pumped laser 18, technology 16, 18, 20, 22, 3738,
2021, 36, 38, 40, 42, 4445, 41, 43, 45, 48, 5556, 7677,
4849, 68, 76, 79, 81, 92, 8182, 92, 98, 129, 13335
9495, 103, 115
Japanese 126
solar-energy-pumped laser
generators 54, 7273, 113, new 31, 50
118 temperature 10, 13, 44, 50, 63, 66,
solar heat 15, 18, 54, 71, 110111, 6869, 72
11415, 117, 124 thermal energy 64, 6869

Index 147
thermal power station 85, 97, water molecules 108

100101, 107, 127 water resources, crisis of 103, 105
Tokyo Institute of Technology 41, water shortage 1046, 109, 117,
56, 92, 13334 124, 126
train 96 experience 106, 114
transmission, long-distance 10
watt-hours 93
transportation 7, 18, 20, 83, 86, 97,
wavelengths 7, 2325, 2930,
100, 103, 115, 120, 12223,
125 3738, 4952
tritium 13, 32, 77 waves 2325, 30
turbine 100101 weather 9, 45, 4748
weight, atomic 125
white light 30, 37, 42, 59
wood 6
world energy consumption 7, 65
United Arab Emirates (UAE) 45 world energy problem 31
United States 31, 62, 64, 76, 78,
12829
YAG (yttrium aluminum garnet)

4950
water 11, 14, 3536, 54, 56, 68,
83, 86, 88, 99100, 1045,
10912, 117
electrolyzing 11, 86
sewage 112 zinc 40, 9192, 95
water business 106, 113, 117 zinc air battery 88, 9192, 99
water business market 113, 117, zinc deposits 91
120 zinc fuel 92
water conversion devices 20

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Copyright 2011 by Pan Stanford Publishing Pte. Ltd.

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Copyright 2011 by Pan Stanford Publishing Pte. Ltd.

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