Starbucks workers in Buffalo, N.Y., vote to unionize: a 1st for the company in the U.S.

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The 19-8 vote in favour of a union must be certified before taking effect

Thomson Reuters · Posted: Dec 09, 2021 

Starbucks employees celebrate as votes are read during a viewing of their union election on Thursday in Buffalo, N.Y. Starbucks workers at at least one Buffalo location have voted to unionize over the company's objections, pointing the way to a new labor model for the coffee giant. (Joshua Bessex/The Associated Press)

Starbucks workers have voted to unionize at a store in Buffalo, N.Y. over the company's objections, pointing the way to a new labour model for the 50-year old coffee giant.

The National Labour Relations Board said Thursday that workers voted 19-8 in favour of a union at one of three locations. The board is still counting votes for two other stores.

If the labour board certifies the vote — a process expected to take about a week — it would be the first for any Starbucks-owned store in the U.S. to unionize. Starbucks has actively fought unionization at its stores for decades, saying its stores function best when it works directly with employees. 

Workers watching the vote count over Zoom on a big screen at a union office in Buffalo erupted into cheers and chants of "Elmwood, Elmwood, Elmwood!" when the results of that location was announced. They jumped up and down and hugged. 

Roughly 100 workers at three Starbucks near Buffalo, N.Y. are voting on whether or not to form a union. If it passes, it would be the first at the chain, which employs about 220,000 people in the U.S. (Colin Butler/CBC)

Workers at all three stores began voting by mail last month on whether they wanted to be represented by Workers United, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union.

Baristas waging the campaign have said they are organizing in part to have more of a say in the workload created by the company's mobile app, which has left them struggling to keep up with surges in orders for Frappuccinos and other custom coffee drinks.

The pandemic has created a surge in mobile orders at Starbucks and other restaurant chains. The baristas in Buffalo and elsewhere complain that they cannot limit the number of mobile orders per hour, leading to unexpected surges they struggle to fulfil.

Individual stores can turn off mobile orders completely for their locations temporarily, but that requires a manager's approval, the company confirmed, and customers can then order from other nearby locations.

Baristas said that adds to those other stores' burdens, but the company said such shifts do not necessarily lead to overflows in other stores.

100 workers voting out of 220,000 in U.S.

The union vote involves about 100 workers, a tiny fraction of the roughly 220,000 Starbucks employees in the U.S. But a win in Buffalo could catch fire as baristas who have also complained about thin staffing and little control over workplace conditions enjoy more power in a tight labour market.

Since the Buffalo campaign was announced in August, three other nearby locations and one store as far away as Arizona have sought to follow its lead.

"We respect the process that is underway and, independent of any outcome in these elections, we will continue to stay true to our mission and values," Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson told employees in a letter on Tuesday.

• After starting in Edmonton, Teamsters seeking to unionize 8 other Canadian Amazon facilities

Employees who spoke with Reuters said they want higher wages, seniority pay and better staffing levels. But burnout from mobile orders and frustration with other tech systems has been an important driver in the campaign, interviews with five workers suggest.

"Technology was made for customers and not for employees," said Casey Moore, a barista at one of the Starbucks locations whose votes are being counted on Thursday.

"Without a union, we haven't been able to voice how the technology could also work for us."

A Starbucks spokesman said the company is constantly updating its app based on employee and customer feedback.

Reward memberships increased in pandemic

Moore and other employees interviewed by Reuters said they are not opposed to integrating technology into their work in principle but want more of a say in how it is developed and deployed in stores.

When Starbucks launched seasonal holiday drinks and gave out free tumblers in November, the mobile ordering system was so inundated with orders at one Buffalo area store that staff fell behind by as much as 40 minutes and threw away at least 30 drinks abandoned by customers, said James Skretta, a barista there.

The Seattle-based chain has about 20 stores in and around Buffalo. It launched its app in 2009 but added new ways to pay and earn points in 2020 as reward memberships soared during the pandemic.

The mobile order app "completely changed what it means to be a barista," said Danka Dragic, a shift supervisor at one Buffalo area store.

Starbucks baristas are not the only workers who have balked at stores' high-tech makeovers. Five workers at a Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. location in Austin, Texas, quit after becoming overwhelmed with mobile orders, according to media reports.

• John Deere reaches tentative labour deal with UAW union

Walmart Inc. in June rolled out an app that it said enables employees to complete various tasks from their phones, but labour advocates warned the technology could open the door to more-stringent productivity quotas.

Union warns of 'the creep of punitive technology'

A Walmart spokesperson said the app eases aspects of work, including scheduling, clocking in and communication for employees.

"Workers across industries are challenging the creep of punitive technology in the workplace," Bianca Agustin, corporate accountability director at labour non-profit group United for Respect, said in a statement.

• Starbucks to roll out order-ahead service in GTA stores next week

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters has fought to ensure sensors and other technology installed in United Parcel Service trucks are not used to punish drivers, and hospitality union Unite Here has pushed for tech aimed at boosting worker protection, including panic buttons for hotel cleaners.

Starbucks baristas also chafe at a performance management program that rates their customer service — especially because they are under pressure by other technology that tracks how fast they process drive-thru orders.

"It's as though you are making drinks under the pressure of trying to defuse a ticking time bomb," Skretta said.

Fall on walk from bed to desk is workplace accident, German court rules


Man who slipped and broke his back while working from home was commuting, it is decided

The court suggested that an injury on the way to get breakfast after already being in the home office could be rejected. Photograph: Getty Images

Oliver Holmes
Thu 9 Dec 2021

A German court has ruled that a man who slipped while walking a few metres from his bed to his home office can claim on workplace accident insurance as he was technically commuting.

The man was working from home and on his way to his desk one floor below his bedroom, the federal social court, which oversees social security issues, said in its decision.

While walking on the spiral staircase connecting the rooms, the unnamed man slipped and broke his back.

The court noted that the employee usually started working in his home office “immediately without having breakfast beforehand”, but did not explain why that was relevant to the case. However, later it said that statutory accident insurance was only afforded to the “first” journey to work, suggesting that a trip on the way to get breakfast after already being in the home office could be rejected.

The employer’s insurance refused to cover the claim. While two lower courts disagreed on whether the short trip was a commute, the higher federal social court said it had found that “the first morning journey from bed to the home office [was] an insured work route”.

It ruled: “The plaintiff suffered an accident at work when he fell on the way to his home office in the morning.”


Employers warned over health and safety amid Covid-19 workers’ compensation claims

In many countries, firms have a duty of care to their employees, regardless of where they work.

The German federal court said: “If the insured activity is carried out in the household of the insured person or at another location, insurance cover is provided to the same extent as when the activity is carried out at the company premises.”

It is not clear if the man was working from home due to the pandemic or had done so previously. The ruling said the law applied to “teleworking positions”, which are “computer workstations that are permanently set up by the employer in the private area of ​​the employees”.

A residential school system in China is stripping Tibetan children of their languages and culture, report claims

Staff Reporter

December 8, 2021

-The Globe And Mail 

“When you are cut off from your language and culture and history, you lose a sense of who you are, and eventually it feels like you’re losing the very fabric of your humanity,”

Almost 80 per cent of Tibetan children in China have been placed in a vast system of government-run boarding schools, where they are cut off from their families, languages and traditional culture, according to an analysis of official data by researchers at Tibet Action Institute.

The U.S.-based NGO found more than 800,000 Tibetan children between the ages of 6 and 18 “are now housed in these state-run institutions.”

“The colonial boarding school system in Tibet is a core element of the Chinese Communist Party’s systematic effort to co-opt, undermine, and ultimately eliminate Tibetan identity in an attempt to neutralize Tibetan resistance to Chinese rule,” the group said in a report published Tuesday.

For years, Tibetans have been sounding the alarm over what they see as assimilationist policies from Beijing. Scholars agree that the implementation of such policies escalated in the wake of large-scale unrest in parts of Tibet in 2008 and the coming to power of Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2012. Spiking repression in Tibet has coincided with a crackdown in China’s neighbouring Xinjiang region in recent years, which has seen an estimated two million ethnic Uyghurs pass through a system of “re-education” or “de-radicalization” camps. Click here to read more.

Robots Evolve Bodies and Brains Like Animals in MIT’s New AI Training Simulator

By Edd Gent
-Dec 06, 2021

In their efforts to create smart robots, AI researchers have understandably tended to focus on the brains. But a group from MIT say AI can help us design better bodies for them too, and we should be doing both in parallel.

For a robot to solve a task, its brain and its body have to sync up perfectly to get the job done. That means that an effective AI controller that’s good at piloting one kind of body won’t necessarily work well for one that’s very different.

The standard approach is to simply design a robot body—either by hand or using AI design tools—and then train an AI to control it. But an even better solution is to carry out both processes simultaneously so that the control AI can give feedback on how changes to the body make it easier or more difficult to solve the problem.

This is known as co-design, and it’s not entirely new. But running these two optimization processes in parallel is very complicated, and it can take a long time to reach a useful solution. Because the design algorithm has to try out thousands of different configurations, the approach only works in simulation, and typically, researchers have to build a testing environment from scratch or heavily adapt existing robot training simulations.

All this takes a lot of work, which has led to most co-design environments focusing on a small number of simple tasks. And because most have been developed by separate groups, it’s not easy to compare results across them.

In an attempt to solve these problems, a team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has created a co-design simulator called Evolution Gym that allows researchers to test out their approaches on a wide range of tasks and terrains using a highly customizable robot design framework. The simulator has also been designed so that groups with fewer computing resources can still use it.

“With Evolution Gym we’re aiming to push the boundaries of algorithms for machine learning and artificial intelligence,” MIT’s Jagdeep Bhatia said in a press release. “By creating a large-scale benchmark that focuses on speed and simplicity, we not only create a common language for exchanging ideas and results within the reinforcement learning and co-design space, but also enable researchers without state-of-the-art compute resources to contribute to algorithmic development in these areas.”

For simplicity the simulator, which will be presented at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems this week, only works in two dimensions. The team has designed 30 unique tasks, which include things like walking, jumping over obstacles, carrying or pulling objects, and crawling under barriers, and researchers can also design their own challenges.

The environment allows design algorithms to build robots by linking together squares that can be soft, rigid, or actuators—essentially muscles that enable the rest of the robot to move. An AI system then learns how to pilot this body and gives the design algorithm feedback on how good it was at different tasks.

By repeating this process many times the two algorithms can reach the best possible combination of body layout and control system to solve the challenge.

To set some benchmarks for their simulator, the researchers tried out three different design algorithms working in conjunction with a deep reinforcement learning algorithm that learned to control the robots through many rounds of trial and error.

The co-designed bots performed well on the simpler tasks, like walking or carrying things, but struggled with tougher challenges, like catching and lifting, suggesting there’s plenty of scope for advances in co-design algorithms. Nonetheless, the AI-designed bots outperformed ones design by humans on almost every task.

Intriguingly, many of the co-design bots took on similar shapes to real animals. One evolved to resemble a galloping horse, while another, set the task of climbing up a chimney, evolved arms and legs and clambered up somewhat like a monkey.

The simulator has been open-sourced and is free to use, and the team’s hope is that other researchers will now come and try out their co-design algorithms on the platform, which will make it easier to compare results.

“Evolution Gym is part of a growing awareness in the AI community that the body and brain are equal partners in supporting intelligent behavior,” the University of Vermont’s Josh Bongard said in the press release. “There is so much to do in figuring out what forms this partnership can take. Gym is likely to be an important tool in working through these kinds of questions.”

Image Credit: MIT CSAIL via YouTube

In a First, Physicists Glimpse a Quantum Ghost

Deneen Broadnax1 day ago

 

The wave function—an abstract concept used to predict the behavior of quantum particles—is the bedrock on which physicists have built their understanding of quantum mechanics. But this bedrock itself is not something physicists have a perfect grasp of, literally or philosophically. A wave function is not something one can hold in their hand or put under a microscope. And confusingly, some of its properties simply seem not to be real. In fact, mathematicians would openly label them as imaginary: so-called imaginary numbers—which arise from seemingly nonsensical feats such as taking the square roots of negative integers—are an important ingredient of a wave function’s well-proved power to forecast the results of real-world experiments. In short, if a wave function can be said to “exist” at all, it does so at the hazy crossroads between metaphysical mathematics and physical reality.

Now researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and their colleagues have made big strides in bridging these two realms: for the first time, they reconstructed a wave function from a measurement of how a semiconductor material responds to an ultrafast pulse of light. Appearing in Nature in November, the team’s work may help take electronics engineering and quantum materials design into a new era of fine-tuned understanding and precisely controlled innovation.

For real-world applications, such as modern electronics, the somewhat mysterious wave function is physicists’ best source of information about what actually happens inside of some new gadget. To predict how fast an electron moves inside a material or how much energy it can carry, they must start their calculations with the so-called Bloch wave function—named for physicist Felix Bloch, who devised it in 1929. This is especially important for engineering quantum devices, says Joe Costello, a physics student at U.C.S.B. and co-lead author of the recent study. “If you’re thinking about building any sort of device that takes advantage of quantum mechanics, you’re going to need to know its [wave function’s] parameters really well,” he emphasizes.

This includes the wave function’s so-called phase, a fully imaginary parameter that is nonetheless often crucial for designing quantum computers. “What has been characterized for a long time is the energies [of the electrons]. That’s the basis for all electronics,” says Mackillo Kira, a physicist at the University of Michigan, who read an earlier draft of the study but was not directly involved in the work. “But now, with quantum information technology, the next level is to go beyond that and eventually get these [wave function] phases.”

To make it to that next level, the team used two lasers and the semiconductor material gallium arsenide. Their experiment consisted of three steps: First, they hit the electrons inside the material with a pulse of near-infrared laser light. This gave those particles extra energy so they would start to quickly race through the semiconductor. When each negatively charged electron started its race, a so-called hole, something like its shadow particle—identical to the electron but positively charged—moved with it. Next, the researchers used another laser pulse to tear the hole and the electron apart, then quickly allowed them to reunite—a sort of quantum version of Peter Pan losing his shadow and having it reattached. When the hole and the electron recombined, the extra energy each accumulated while running solo was released as a burst of light.

Ten years ago a team of physicists led by Mark Sherwin of U.C.S.B. noticed something curious about these bursts: their properties were inexplicably sensitive to the properties of the laser pulses that started the particle run in the first place. Sherwin and his colleagues realized that there was significant and largely unexplored nuance to how a semiconductor’s electrons react to light. “This was unexpected,” he recalls. “But we decided to explore it further and started systematically looking at it.” In the new work, calculations done by postdoctoral scholar Qile Wu, a member of Sherwin’s team and co-lead author of the study, proved that this telltale sensitivity is more than a mere curiosity because it can be used to reconstruct the Bloch wave functions of holes in a semiconductor.

The connection between the absorbed laser light and the emitted flash revealed itself in measurements of a property called polarization, or the direction in which light waves oscillate as they travel. In the experiment, the polarization of laser light influenced the phases of the wave functions of the running electrons and of their shadowy partners, the holes. When the reunion of the two produced light at the end of the experiment, the polarization of that flash was determined by these two wave function phases. Because such phases are typically represented as imaginary rather than real numbers in physicists’ equations, relating them to the very real and measurable polarization of light was a breakthrough for Wu and his collaborators. Shambhu Ghimire, a physicist at Stanford University, who was not involved with the work, underscores exactly this feature of the new study: it used light to obtain information that was previously seen as purely mathematical. “These [light-based] methods can sometimes be difficult or really conceptually challenging, but most of the time, they provide access to this imaginary part of the complex number [wave function] that you do not have access to with other, conventional methods,” he says. Further, the team managed to reverse engineer whole Bloch wave functions from those same polarization measurements.

Ghimire further notes that the kind of laser light the U.C.S.B. researchers used is important beyond its polarization. They employed ultrafast laser pulses, hitting the electrons with light for as little as a trillionth of a second. Electrons in solids tend to bump into atoms instead of moving uninterrupted, so being able to control them with such celerity was crucial for the team to carry out its Peter-Pan-and-his-shadow manipulation of the electron and the hole. Otherwise, in any given run of the experiment, one or the other would likely slam into some atomic obstacle, preventing reunification. Seamus O’Hara, another co-lead author of the study and a Ph.D. student in Sherwin’s group, credits some of that technical advantage to the team’s use of U.C.S.B.’s state-of-the-art Free-Electron Lasers facility.

But the impact of the work will likely extend beyond specialized facilities and simple semiconductors. In gallium arsenide, Wu’s theoretical research showed, very few properties of the reemitted light have to be known for a mathematical reconstruction of Bloch wave functions. Other semiconductor materials may require more complete—and perhaps elusive—knowledge, however. “This work is fascinating as a very fundamental demonstration of something you can do where the answer is really well defined,” says Mette Gaarde, a physicist at Louisiana State University, who was also not part of the study. “But the implication is that you could potentially use this to learn something about more complex structures.”

The U.C.S.B. team is already making ambitious plans for next steps. Going forward, the researchers are interested in applying their technique to materials in which electrons strongly interact with one another or where laser light would excite particles more exotic than electrons and holes. “We’re looking for new materials. If people have semiconductors that they would like to have looked at, we’re excited to try,” Costello says, eager for more opportunities to glimpse the intangible world of wave functions many more times.

By Ryan Whitwam on December 8, 2021

Fusion Experiment Reaches Vital Power Generation Milestone

• By Ryan Whitwam on December 8, 2021 

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The world struggles to produce enough power as it is, but there’s a real possibility we will have to phase out fossil fuels in the coming decades. And what’s left then? Wind? Solar? We might be able to skip the middleman and make our own solar energy via fusion, but the technology to make that a reality is still evolving. However, researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) say they’ve reached an important milestone in fusion power generation. For the first time, a fusion reaction has generated more power than the fuel absorbed. This puts humanity on the verge of creating usable energy by harnessing the power of the sun. 

The team conducted this experiment at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) back in August, and the results have not yet been peer reviewed. LLNL will submit a paper soon. The news initially broke in August, but interest has been trending upward as the team gets ready to try again. LLNL has also been talking more about how it improved fusion efficiency in the NIF, which it has by a huge margin. For example, the fuel in the experiment was contained inside a new high-density carbon (i.e. diamond) target capsule. 

The NIF is the size of three football fields, and it’s equipped with 192 high-powered lasers. The lasers focus on a small capsule of deuterium and tritium (hydrogen isotopes). The lasers hit an object called a hohlraum, which converts the laser into X-rays that bombard the fuel and approximate the heat and pressure of a star, but only for a moment. Initial analysis of the August experiment shows that the reaction generated more than 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power for 100 trillionths of a second. That’s a big achievement, but some of the initial reports of success conflated fuel absorption with ignition, and that’s not where we are. 

While this is an important step forward, it’s still short of ignition — the point at which a sustained fusion reaction can generate net energy. This experiment achieved a record 1.3-megajoule energy output, the NIF used a total of 1.9 megajoules. That’s not to take away from the importance of this achievement. “Gaining experimental access to thermonuclear burn in the laboratory is the culmination of decades of scientific and technological work stretching across nearly 50 years,” said Los Alamos National Laboratory Director Thomas Mason. Even though we can’t yet generate energy from fusion, the efficiency of these techniques is improving rapidly. In 2013, the NIF was managing a mere 14 kilojoules, and now it’s two orders of magnitude higher.  

It will take time for the scientific community to dissect this latest work, but the LLNL team reports improvements in laser focusing, hohlraum efficiency, and target fabrication boosted energy production by more than eight times compared to experiments just a few months earlier, and 25 times higher than NIF’s 2018 record. LLNL also plans to repeat the experiment to confirm its results. It began setting up the experiment after the initial success, so it shouldn’t be much longer before the team is ready to fire up the NIF again. 

Now read:

• China’s Fusion Reactor Sets World Record by Running for 101 Seconds
• MIT Plans New Fusion Reactor That Could Actually Generate Power
• The Navy Just Patented a Compact Fusion Reactor, but Will It Work?

Will fusion energy define our clean energy future? | The Stream

Fusion energy - a non-polluting, limitless form of power - has long been thought of as a technological fantasy. But now scientists say they are closer than ever to making it a reality. Fusion energy comes from the process of nuclear fusion, which is how the sun continuously converts small amounts of hydrogen into incredible amounts of energy. For decades, scientists have been trying to recreate this process using a combination of experimental reactors, hydrogen, and heating plasmas to temperatures hotter than the sun. Other scientists are working to prove that a self-sustaining fusion reaction can be generated using high-powered lasers. Recent advances have led to a rise in interest and funding from investors who want to see the first energy-creating fusion machine and eventually the first fusion power plant to generate power that is safe and free of carbon emissions. In this episode of The Stream, we'll ask: Could fusion energy be the clean energy answer to the climate crisis?

#aljazeeraenglish #ajstream #fusionenergy

Fusion Reaction Creates More Energy 

Than Absorbed By Fuel For First Time

BY : EMILY BROWN ON : 06 DEC 2021 

LLNL

Physicists have made history with an experiment that saw a fusion reaction create more energy than the amount absorbed by the fuel used to trigger it. 

Described by scientists at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a ‘historic step forward for inertial confinement fusion research’, the fusion reaction achieved a record energy output of 1.3 megajoules.

The output, achieved in August, proved to be eight times greater than experiments conducted just a few months prior, and 25 times greater than experiments performed in 2018.

The ultimate goal of the inertial confinement fusion experiment was to achieve ignition; a point at which the energy created by the fusion process proves greater than the total energy input.

Though the experiment did not quite succeed in achieving ignition, its results proved noteworthy as the fuel capsule used generated more than five times as much energy as it absorbed in the fusion process, Science Alert reports.

Kim Budil, director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, said in a press release the experiment opened ‘a fundamentally new regime for exploration and the advancement of our critical national security missions’.

Budil continued:

It is also a testament to the innovation, ingenuity, commitment and grit of this team and the many researchers in this field over the decades who have steadfastly pursued this goal.

For me, it demonstrates one of the most important roles of the national labs – our relentless commitment to tackling the biggest and most important scientific grand challenges and finding solutions where others might be dissuaded by the obstacles.

Following the experiment earlier this year, the team planned to perform more studies to see if they could replicate their results and study the process in greater detail, as well as to work out how to further increase energy efficiency.

The physicists will be submitting a paper on their results for peer review.

Viewpoint: Nuclear, the auctions and the grid

09 December 2021

US electricity grids, especially deregulated grids with auctions, have become fragile and unreliable due to over-dependence on intermittent renewables and just-in-time delivery of natural gas, together with a reliance on imports, writes Meredith Angwin. Nuclear energy, she says, could break the trifecta and prevent rolling blackouts.

I have been a nuclear supporter for many years, ever since I moved from the renewable group at Electric Power Research Institute to the nuclear group. When I moved to Vermont in semi-retirement, I noticed that Vermont Yankee was constantly attacked in the press and with demonstrations. Some friends and I began to defend Vermont Yankee with letters to the editor and counter-demonstrations. I also started a blog: Yes Vermont Yankee. My blog covered many electricity issues in New England, such as Vermont utility contracts for Hydro-Quebec power.

While blogging, I realised I was out of my depth about the grid. Sometimes, I couldn’t even understand announcements about grid decisions that affected the nuclear plant - for instance, what did "not allowed to delist from forward capacity auction" even mean? I began my studies of the grid, in order to write reasonable blog posts.

Since I was covering the grid, one blog reader suggested that I join the Consumer Liaison Group of our grid operator, ISO-NE. I did, and it was a revelation. I knew that power plants bid into an auction. In the Consumer Liaison Group, I was able understand the auction rules, and to see how different groups succeed in changing the rules.

Our New England grid has two main auctions: energy and capacity. The energy auctions are auctions for kWh, and they run every five minutes. In this auction, low-priced units get chosen first, but all the units get paid the “clearing price,” that is, the kWh price of the highest-priced unit chosen. Reliability is not valued in these auctions, and that is putting the matter mildly.

In a capacity auction, the plant is paid for its “capacity,” that is, for being available if the grid needs its output. However, receiving capacity payments does not mean that the plant is available, because it does not guarantee that the plant can get fuel. In cold weather, gas-fired plants are often not available, because homes are using more gas, and the power plants can’t get fuel.

Our local grid operator set up the Winter Reliability programme, which provided oil for some plants which could burn either oil or gas. Thirty percent of the electricity on our grid was provided by this oil during the 2017-2018 winter holiday cold snap. Fuel stored on site is valuable! However, the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission shut down the Winter Reliability programme as not being market-based and giving an advantage to one fuel: oil.

Basically, I came to the conclusion that grid after grid, especially "deregulated" grids with auctions, are going down the path to the fatal trifecta. With auctions, it is easier and quicker to go down this path: overdependence on 1) renewables, 2) just-in-time natural gas, and 3) imports from your neighbours.

It works this way. First, renewables that get subsidy payments can "outcompete" other plants, because of the subsidies. Wind especially can bid into the energy auctions at zero cents or below, and it will usually be chosen first, as the least expensive set of plants. Meanwhile, the wind turbines get their subsidy payments, so they are profitable. Consequently, many wind turbines are built.

However, wind and solar are intermittent, and they need to be backed up by "fast acting resources". This is not about load following, which tends to be a rather smooth process. This is about "fast acting when the wind dies down or the sun sets". Gas-fired plants can provide this service and they do.

So far in this story, the grid has become dependent on intermittent renewables and just-in-time delivery of natural gas. Just-in-time gas delivery failed in bad weather in Texas and in New England. It is now in trouble in Europe. Two legs of the fatal trifecta are in place. In the final part of the trifecta, the grid operator says: we can always get electricity from neighbouring grids (import electricity). But the neighbours are having the same weather you are having. In bad weather, the neighbouring grids are not going to export power when they need it themselves.

The outcome of this process is a fragile, unreliable grid, deep in the fatal trifecta, and subject to rolling blackouts.

To break this scenario, we need to take grid reliability seriously, including by planning. Before the auction systems were implemented, Integrated Resource Planning was important. It is still done in many areas, but it is almost irrelevant if the area has the auctions. Also, fuel stored on site should be encouraged and subsidised by the grid operator. Since wind turbines can be subsidised, on-site fuel could also be encouraged. On-site fuel includes the nuclear fuel that can keep a plant going for 18 months without refuelling, but it would also include oil to be stored at dual-fired gas plants.

Unfortunately, many areas of the USA and Europe are pushing toward 100% renewables. They are launching themselves at the fatal trifecta, and basically doing everything to encourage it. This path will not end well, and we can see the beginning of the end already.

Grid reliability is absolutely key to people's health and prosperity. In many areas of the world, people have forgotten that, and instead are putting their faith in renewables and supposed markets. When all is said and done, I consider my book - Shorting the Grid, the Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid - to be an exposé of what is actually happening on the grids.

It is hard for ordinary people to find out what is happening on the real grids. In contrast, it is easy to find out about the grids we "could" have. Many popular articles and academic papers describe what I call the "Could Grid". In the Could Grid, we have huge batteries available, plus carbon capture, plus green hydrogen. And so forth. Not many articles describe the grids we have, or the way the auctions work, or the path of the fatal trifecta.

Supporting nuclear energy could break the trifecta and prevent rolling blackouts. Nuclear supplies steady, reliable energy. Claiming that reliability doesn't matter and all we need is flexibility - that assumes that we keep building more and more intermittent renewables, and therefore must build "flexible" gas plants to back them up.

If our aim is low-emission power, nuclear will provide that. If our aim is steady power, nuclear can provide that without overbuilding gas-fired plants to back up the overbuilding of renewables. If our aim is reliable power in cold weather, nuclear has fuel on site, without forcing the grid operator to set up complex Winter Reliability programmes. However, for nuclear to survive in auction areas, some of the auction rules must change to value steady power that is available when needed. Payment for reliable power is currently undercut by intermittent plants that receive so many subsidies that they don’t actually need to be paid for kWh. Encouraging nuclear will take some changes to grid auction rules, but that is not impossible.

The first step is knowing about the auctions, and how they work. The second step is changing some aspects of the auctions. In my opinion, all citizens need to know about the real grids, not just the Could Grid. We need to work to keep our real grids reliable.

Meredith Angwin is a physical chemist and a former project manager at the Electric Power Research Institute. Her most recent book is Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid.

Virtual reality used to train nuclear staff

08 December 2021

GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) is using immersive virtual reality to help nuclear power plant operators train personnel for outage, operations and maintenance work ahead of the spring 2022 outage season. The Nuclear Virtual Reality Solution (VRS) at the company's Wilmington, North Carolina, headquarters is also being used to provide plant-specific technical training.

(Image: GEH)

The solution helps plant personnel train for operational scenarios encountered during maintenance and refuelling outages including vessel disassembly and reassembly, fuel movement and inspections, the company said.

"The Nuclear Virtual Reality Solution is a powerful tool for collaboration and advanced plant outage training," said John Mackleer, GEH senior vice president, Field Services. Virtual reality immersive rooms enable personnel to gain realistic, practical experience including training for scenarios that cannot be recreated in physical mock-ups or during plant power run cycles, he added.

The Nuclear VRS can replicate the layout of different plants, including boiling water reactors and pressurised water reactors, and fuel movement technologies. The technology also provides an immersive and interactive look at GEH's BWRX-300 small modular reactor, which has recently been chosen by Ontario Power Generation for deployment at its Darlington site in Canada.

"GEH is working to deploy a VR immersive room at its Canadian SMR headquarters in Ontario to enable stakeholders and others to see this technology up close through walkable simulations of plant design including the refuel floor and drywell," the company said.

Researched and written by World Nuclear News