From the excellent Deutsche Welle Planet A series Good, balanced (no, really!) report on the prospects and challenges for Small Modular Reactors above.
Deutsche Welle is like Germany’s NPR or BBC – reports in English, and usually very high standards.
Below, there is a cottage industry on the internet in support of Thorium reactors. This explainer is by far the best I have seen.
The coalition of allies who understand the need to decarbonize is a broad one, and many of those invaluable players, honestly, and fairly, have come to the conclusion that some kind of nuclear component will be necessary to meet climate goals in the coming 2 decades.
In this time of emergency, the last thing in the world we need is another classic circular firing squad among progressives over the issue of nuclear.
In my state of Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer has been an indispensable leader in setting world-leading climate goals, and has also been a proponent of re-powering the closed Palisades nuclear reactor, as well as building two Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) at that site. There are other big industrial players looking at soon-to-close fossil fuel power plants as sites for SMRs.
I have reservations, but I wish them all the luck in the world. Given the history of nuclear development in the US, they will need it.
I push back only on the idea that nuclear is some kind of panacea, or easy slam dunk. I caution my anti-nuclear friends that the nuclear industry has never stumbled due to hippies carrying signs and demonstrating, but rather due to its own technical and economic ineptitude, and the merciless logic of markets.
Worth remembering, there is no decarbonization scenario that does not include large buildouts of solar, wind, battery storage, and transmission.
If you are pro-nuclear, join me in working to site solar, wind, transmission and batteries as quickly as possible. If you are anti-nuclear, leave the signs at home and show up at local meetings in support of siting clean energy and transmission.
If the nuclear ambitions pan out, great, that money will not have been wasted. If nuclear remains true to the worst historical precedents, we are going to need all the clean energy steel in the ground we can muster, and then some.
Atomic power’s potential as a clean-energy source forestalling climate change is increasingly at risk, with new data suggesting nuclear growth could be threatened by spreading geopolitical instability and war.
While bankers balk at the $5 trillion price tag to triple atomic generation by 2050, researchers at George Washington Universityreported this week that deteriorating security inside key growth markets may also threaten the next nuclear-energy renaissance before it begins.
“It is hard to see how a tripling of nuclear energy could occur without exacerbating the risk of proliferation, nuclear terrorism, sabotage, coercion and weaponization,” said ex-US State Department diplomat Sharon Squassoni, who led the study. “Approaches to reducing carbon emissions really need to consider national security implications.”
The report authored by GW professor Sharon Squassoni, “New Nuclear Energy: Assessing the National Security Risks,” comes as drone strikes against Ukrainian nuclear power plants highlight nuclear reactor vulnerabilities. Other risks will accompany nuclear growth as renewed interest in nuclear energy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions sparks programs across the globe, according to the report.
An attempt to reduce dependence on foreign suppliers using nuclear energy could worsen the risk of proliferation by motivating fuel cycle independence, the report states.
Many SMRs are still in development, with few restrictions on designs. Reactors fueled with highly enriched uranium or plutonium will increase risks of proliferation and terrorism because those materials are weapons usable, according to the report.
Continue reading “Reactor Buildout Assumes Stability in an Unstable World”I never understood the dynamics of events like the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or the Cambodian Holocaust, where intellectuals and academics were targeted and persecuted by mobs.
Sadly, I think we all do now.
A new Trump administration’s answer to climate change would be to gag scientists, and put on blinders.
Climate experts fear Donald Trump will follow a blueprint created by his allies to gut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), disbanding its work on climate science and tailoring its operations to business interests.
Joe Biden’s presidency has increased the profile of the science-based federal agency but its future has been put in doubt if Trump wins a second term and at a time when climate impacts continue to worsen.
The plan to “break up Noaa is laid out in the Project 2025 document written by more than 350 rightwingers and helmed by the Heritage Foundation. Called the Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, it is meant to guide the first 180 days of presidency for an incoming Republican president.
The document bears the fingerprints of Trump allies, including Johnny McEntee, who was one of Trump’s closest aides and is a senior adviser to Project 2025. “The National Oceanographic [sic] and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) should be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” the proposal says.
That’s a sign that the far right has “no interest in climate truth”, said Chris Gloninger, who last year left his job as a meteorologist in Iowa after receiving death threats over his spotlighting of global warming.
Continue reading “A New Trump Admin would Trash NOAA, Gag Scientists, Charge for Weather Data”Short version. No, it won’t work.
Circumstantial evidence points to climate change as worsening the deadly deluge that just flooded Dubai and other parts of the Persian Gulf, but scientists didn’t discover the definitive fingerprints of greenhouse gas-triggered warming they have seen in other extreme weather events, a new report found.
Between 10% and 40% more rain fell in just one day last week — killing at least two dozen people in the United Arab Emirates, Oman and parts of Saudi Arabia — than it would have in a world without the 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) warming that has come from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas since the mid-19th century, scientists at World Weather Attributionsaid Thursday in a flash study that is too new to be peer-reviewed.
In at least one spot, a record 11 inches (28.6 centimeters) of rain fell in just 24 hours, more than twice the yearly average, paralyzing the usually bustling city of skyscrapers in a desert.
One of the key tools in WWA’s more than 60 past reports has been creating computer simulations that compare an actual weather event to a fictional world without climate change, but in the Dubai case there wasn’t enough data for those simulations to make such a calculation. But analysis of decades of past observations, the other main tool they use, showed the 10% to 40% bump in rainfall amounts.
Even without computer simulations, the clues kept pointing at climate change, scientists said.
“It’s not such a clear fingerprint, but we have lots of other circumstantial evidence, other lines of evidence that tell us that we see this increase,” said Imperial College of London climate scientist Friederike Otto, who coordinates the attribution study team. “It’s what we expect from physics. It’s what we expect from other studies that have been done in the area, from other studies around the world, and there’s nothing else that’s going on that could explain this increase.”
Making a battery for an electric vehicle typically requires mining hundreds of pounds of hard-to-extract minerals. That’s put a spotlight on batteries’ heavy environmental toll, at least upfront.
But the latest advances in battery recycling, including by leading US battery recycler Redwood Materials, are shrinking EVs’ footprint.
Traditional methods of ripping materials out of the ground and refining them for battery packs requires enormous amounts of energy. As a result, the initial carbon footprint of an EV is higher than a comparable internal combustion engine vehicle. Those upfront emissions are paid back over time with the superior efficiency of electric motors, leading to a 70% reduction in total emissions over the average life of the vehicle.
In the US, it takes about 25,500 miles (41,000 kilometers) of driving for an EV to break even, according to a BloombergNEF analysis. That payback figure, however, assumes that every EV is made with newly mined lithium, nickel and cobalt — as if all the materials will end up in a landfill at the end of a vehicle’s life. But that’s not what’s happening. EV batteries are simply too valuable to toss out, and a new industry of recyclers is busy snatching them all up.
Though still in its infancy, EV recycling is already profitable and capable of recovering more than 95% of the key minerals. A new analysis by Stanford University researchers, which is still under peer review, found that Redwood Materials’ recycling process produces up to 80% fewer emissions than the traditional supply chain using CO2 belching refineries. That’s enough to shorten an average EV’s environmental breakeven time with an internal combustion vehicle to less than 15,000 miles. Every mile thereafter is a carbon win against the internal combustion engine.
Continue reading “Battery Recyclers Close the Resource Loop for EVs”Jeff Berardelli killing it this week.
“No you didn’t! Oh yes, I did. I went there! In today’s Berardelli Bonus we discuss contrails or chemtrails?? Is it a toxic conspiracy? Folks, you wouldn’t believe how many of these questions us weather people get. So today I went there for all of us”
Jeff Berardelli shares the graph above:
Comparing March 2024 SST’s in the Tropical Atlantic with other active hurricane seasons. SST’s can change quickly – and we will still see changes as we head into hurricane season – but these years ultimately produced large numbers of storms. (Season named storm # on right).
Below, Michael Mann’s group at the University of Pennsylvania is now out with their well respected forecast for the coming hurricane season. It’s daunting.
For more than a decade, climate scientist Michael Mann of School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues have annually combed through historical weather data, reviewed current oceanic and atmospheric conditions, and applied computational modeling to forecast of coming hurricane seasons.
The team, comprising Shannon Christiansen, a senior research coordinator in the Mann Group, and Michael Kozar, a former graduate researcher in the Mann Research Group, today released their prediction for the 2024 North Atlantic season, which spans from June 1 to Nov. 30. They forecast an unprecedented 33 named tropical cyclones, potentially ranging between 27 and 39.
“We’ve seen many hyperactive seasons over the past decade, and in just about all cases, like our prediction for this year, the activity is substantially driven by ever-warmer conditions in the tropical Atlantic tied to large-scale warming,” says Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science and director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media.
Mann says the annual prediction originally started out as a scientific exercise. It began as an undergraduate research project that Michael Kozar, then a Pennsylvania State University student, was doing under Mann’s guidance to improve the predictions other groups were making through a more appropriate statistical framework.
Continue reading “New Hurricane Forecast is Highest Ever”
Last Saturday, as 39 million Californians went about their daily lives—taking showers, doing laundry, or charging their electric cars—the whole state ran on 100% clean electricity for more than nine hours.
The same thing happened on Sunday, as the state was powered without fossil fuels for more than eight hours. It was the ninth straight day that solar, wind, hydropower, geothermal, and battery storage fully powered the electric grid for at least some portion of the time. Over the last six and a half weeks, that’s happened nearly every day. In some cases, it’s just for 15 minutes. But often it’s for hours at a time.
California first hit the milestone of running on 100% clean power in 2022, but it was only temporary. “In past years, it was only for one or two days, and not consecutively,” says Mark Jacobson, a Stanford professor who has been posting updates about the state’s grid each day on X. “And all of a sudden we’re having now 37 of the last 45 days, and the last nine days straight.”
There’s a caveat: California also has natural gas plants that keep running at low levels in case backup power is needed. Even when the state is producing more than enough renewable energy to cover all of its needs, it’s still exporting some gas power to other states. But it also exports solar power, helping make other grids cleaner. And it keeps getting closer to its overall goals for renewable energy. By 2030, the state plans to run on 60% renewable energy. It’s likely to hit that goal early. By 2045, the state plans to run on 100% zero-carbon energy, and Jacobson argues it’s technically possible to also accomplish that goal faster.
Continue reading “California’s Solar Roll Continues”