Six specialised teams, each with a doctor, will criss-cross the Netherlands as of Thursday to carry out euthanasia at the home of patients whose own doctors refuse to do so, a pro-mercy killing group said.
"From Thursday, the Levenseindekliniek (Life-end clinic) will have mobile teams where people who think they comply with the criteria for euthanasia can register," Right-to-die NL (NVVE) spokeswoman Walburg de Jong said.
"If they comply, the teams will carry out the euthanasia at patients' homes should their normal doctors refuse to help them," she said.
Made up of a specially-trained doctor and nurse who will work part time for the group, called the Life-end clinic, teams will be able to visit patients all over the Netherlands, De Jong said.
The Netherlands became the first country in the world to legalise euthanasia in April 2002 and strict criteria regulates how such mercy killings can be carried out. Patients must be mentally alert when making the request to die.
Patients also have to face a future of "unbearable, interminable suffering" and both the patient and the doctor -- who have to obtain a second opinion -- before euthanasia is carried out, must agree there is no cure.
Each euthanasia case is then reported to one of five special commissions, each made up of a doctor, a jurist and an ethical expert charged with verifying that all criteria had been observed.
But the plan, which received the thumbs-up from Dutch Health Minister Edith Schippers in the Dutch parliament, has met with scepticism from one of the Netherlands' largest medical lobbies.
The Royal Dutch Society of Doctors (KNMG) said it doubted whether the "euthanasia doctors" would be able to form a close-enough relationship with a patient to make a correct assessment.
Yearly, some 3,100 mercy killings are carried out in the Netherlands said De Jong, adding that the NVVE have already been phoned by 70 potential patients since the plan was announced in early February.
The NVVE said its teams were expected to receive around 1,000 assisted suicides requests per year. (c) 2012 AFP
Battery building: Aquion Energy recently announced plans to
retrofit this factory—which used to make Sony televisions—to make large
batteries for use with solar power plants.
RIDC Westmoreland
Energy
Aquion Energy says its batteries could make the power grid unnecessary in some countries.
Aquion Energy,
a company that's making low-cost batteries for large-scale electricity
storage, has selected a site for its first factory and says it's lined
up the financing it needs to build it.
The company hopes its novel battery technology could allow some of
the world's 1.4 billion people without electricity to get power without
having to hook up to the grid.
The site for Aquion's factory is a sprawling former Sony television
factory near Pittsburgh. The initial production capacity will be
"hundreds" of megawatt-hours of batteries per year—the company doesn't
want to be specific yet. It also isn't saying how much funding it's
raised or where the money comes from, except to mention that some of it
comes from the state of Pennsylvania and none from the federal
government.
The first applications are expected to be in countries like India,
where hundreds of millions of people in communities outside major cities
don't have a connection to the electrical grid or any other reliable
source of electricity. Most of these communities use diesel generators
for power, but high prices for oil and low prices for solar panels are
making it cheaper to install solar in some cases.
To store power generated during the day for use at night, these
communities need battery systems that can handle anything from tens of
kilowatt-hours to a few megawatt-hours, says Scott Pearson, Aquion's
CEO. Such a system could make long-distance transmission lines
unnecessary, in much the same way that cell-phone towers have allowed
such communities access to cellular service before they had land lines.
Eventually Aquion plans to sell stacks of batteries in countries that
have electrical grids. They could provide power during times of peak
demand and make up for fluctuations in power that big wind farms and
solar power plants contribute to the grid. Those applications require
tens to hundreds of gigawatt-hours' worth of storage, so to supply them,
Aquion needs to increase its manufacturing capacity. Competing with
natural-gas power plants—especially in the United States, where natural
gas is so cheap—will mean waiting until economies of scale bring costs
down.
The company has said that it initially hopes to make batteries for
under $300 per kilowatt-hour, far cheaper than conventional lithium-ion
batteries. Lead-acid batteries can be cheaper than Aquion's, but they
last only two or three years. Aquion's batteries, which can be recharged
5,000 times, could last for over a decade in situations in which
they're charged once a day (the company has tested the batteries for a
couple of years so far).
Jay Whitacre,
a Carnegie Mellon University professor of materials science and
engineering who developed Aquion's technology and founded the company,
says the cost will need to drop to less than $200 per kilowatt-hour for
grid-connected applications. Reaching this price, and production
capacity on the scale of gigawatt-hours, "will take a long time," he
says. "But you have to start somewhere."
Whitacre developed the batteries with low cost and durability in mind
from the start. In searching for potential electrode materials, he
limited himself to cheap, abundant elements, settling on sodium and
manganese. He also picked a water-based electrolyte that's safer and
cheaper than the organic ones used in lithium-ion batteries. In turn,
this allowed him to use cheap manufacturing equipment to make them. To
keep costs down, the company is making the batteries with equipment
that's normally used to make food or aspirin. Construction on the
factory in Pennsylvania will begin immediately, and the first stage is
expected to be finished next year.
The current battery technology of choice for electric buses is lithium-ion, the price of which has dropped in nearly 40 percent since 2010, and is projected to drop another 50 percent by 2020 or 2025. A lithium-ion battery provides enough energy to operate a bus for about 150 miles (in most conditions) before needing to be recharged. For hilly cities or cities where air conditioning must be used a lot, that range is significantly reduced. Charging can be done in a few different ways: slowly overnight (which causes the least wear to the battery and other components), by using an overhead charging system, or by using a system that is embedded under the pavement. The latter two methods are much quicker than the first method, but tend to degrade the bus components more quickly.
"Some papers proposing new battery materials look great until you
read the fine print about how they're made," Whitacre says. "We focused
on manufacturing from the beginning."
