Collegiate Times

As reported in this Richmond Times-Dispatch article, Virginia Tech and Dominion Virginia Power are collaborating to begin a carbon-capture project at a power plant under construction in Wise County.

The plant, Virginia City Hybrid Energy Center, will burn coal and biomass. Tech’s role in the plant would be designing and building a carbon-capture system to remove carbon-dioxide from the plant waste and send it through miles of underground pipeline to a designated waste site.

Dominion and Tech have applied for federal stimulus dollars to fund the project, which the Times-Dispatch says could begin by mid-2010 should funding be received.

The project is estimated to cost $580 million. Zc

According to a press release, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke has awarded a $1.9 million Economic Development Administration grant to Blacksburg and the Virginia Tech Foundation, with a goal of expanding the Virginia Tech Corporate Research Center.

The release says the project will bring 2,000 jobs and $140 million in private investments to the CRC.

Congressman Rick Boucher said in the release that the CRC is expected to double in size.

More coming on this. Zc

Virginia Tech engineering students have built a dirt buggy that assists the blind in driving.

It sounds nearly impossible, but the project, as described in this news release, has certainly taken some steps in the right direction.

The Blind Driver Challenge, as it is called, will be featured at the National Federation of the Blind’s Youth Slam in College Park, Maryland later this month. Zc

This interesting and relevant piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education says the Association of American Universities is asking government bodies to explore trimming down the number of research universities.

While they have not made a formal push for the measure, they have asked for a study on the matter, citing financial constraints of the country. They say there should be fewer, but better research universities.

Of course, the group is made up of 62 schools that claim to be the finest research universities, and would like to simply better themselves instead of share funding with the rest of the country’s similar institutions.

Now, as the stats in the article show, the groups’ universities “together award more than half of all doctoral degrees and 55 percent of science and engineering degrees in the country.”

So they have a legitimate argument.

However, as their website shows, Virginia Tech is not a member.

Opposition is expected, and Tech will almost certainly be a school that has a problem with the idea. Tech has lofty goals related to research and is only expanding its research horizons.

Faculty and students are pushed strongly in the direction of research in hopes of becoming one of the front running research institutions. If the AAU’s ideas are accepted, Tech may need to move in the direction of research faster for funding to continue. Zc