Are we really made of star stuff?



1. How did matter come together to make planets and life in the first place?
1.1. Are we really made of star stuff?

← Astrobiology Learning Progressions Table of Contents

Lower Grade
Grades K-2 or Adult Naive Learner
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NGSS Connections for Teachers
Concept Boundaries for Scientists
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Have you ever wondered what we’re made of? Would you believe that you and me and all of the plants and all of the animals that we can see are all made of the same kind of stuff that makes up books and rocks and mountains and the ocean? We’re all made from the same kind of stuff, and we call that stuff “matter”.

Can you guess where all of that matter came from? It was all made in space! A lot of that stuff, that matter, that makes up you and me and the place we live was made inside of stars long, long ago. So long ago that it’s older than your parents, it’s older than the dinosaurs, and it’s even older than the Sun!

We’re all made of the stuff from stars!

Grades 3-5 or Adult Emerging Learner
Storyline
NGSS Connections for Teachers
Concept Boundaries for Scientists
Resources

The story of where we came from begins in space, a long time ago, even before the Sun and the planets in our solar system formed. A lot of the stuff, the matter, that makes up you and me and everything we see on Earth was formed inside of stars long ago.

Sometimes when we talk about stars, we talk about them as if they’re living things. So, we’ll say that a star is born, it has a life, and then it dies, and we call this a “lifecycle.” A star can be born and start its lifecycle when a bunch of dust and ice in space comes together. Just like when you drop something and it falls because of gravity, when there’s a lot of ice and dust together in space, it can fall together because of gravity and make up an entire star. Once a star is born, it starts to make light and heat, just like our Sun, and, when that happens, it starts creating different kinds of matter inside. Even right now, our own Sun is making new kinds of matter inside of it from the other stuff that’s there.

So, how does all of that new matter that’s created inside of stars get out and end up inside of you and me and other stuff? Well, some stars, when they get old and are at the end of their life cycles, will explode and send all of that new matter out into space. Then, later on, when new stars and new planets are forming, some of that new matter ends up in them. So, a lot of the matter that’s inside of our Sun and inside of our planet and even inside of us was made within stars long, long ago. That means that you are made of star stuff!

Grades 6-8 or Adult Building Learner
Storyline
NGSS Connections for Teachers
Concept Boundaries for Scientists
Resources

The story of where we came from begins in space. All of the matter that makes up you and me and everything we see on Earth is composed of the chemical elements. If you think about all of the elements on the periodic table, things like oxygen and carbon and iron, almost all of those elements that we see and that make up the stuff around us formed inside of stars long ago.

When the universe was young, before there were any galaxies or stars or planets, the only elements that existed were hydrogen and helium and a little bit of lithium. These are the first and lightest elements on the periodic table. As time passed in the universe, some of the earliest matter, the hydrogen and helium and lithium, started to clump together. When this happened, it made the first stars.

Something really cool can happen inside of stars, where nuclear fusion causes some of the lighter elements to come together, or fuse, and make heavier elements. So, things like hydrogen and helium were fused together to make heavier elements, like carbon, and then those heavier elements could make even heavier elements. Stars are like big chemical element factories! Even our Sun is currently making new elements inside of it.

All stars will eventually burn out, but, for some of the stars, when they burn out, or reach the end of their “life cycles” they can explode and blow out all of the heavy elements that were inside. These explosions can also make new, even heavier elements. Then, later on, when new stars and new planets are forming from the matter in space clumping together, some of these heavier elements end up in them. So, a lot of the matter that’s inside of our Sun and inside of our planet and even inside of us was made within stars long, long ago. That means that you are made of star stuff!

Grades 9-12 or Adult Sophisticated Learner
Storyline
NGSS Connections for Teachers
Concept Boundaries for Scientists
Resources

Our planet and all of the living things on it are made from matter. Most of that matter was created during the big bang and the rest was mostly created within the cores of ancient stars. During the big bang, all of the hydrogen, most of the helium, and some of the lithium in our universe was created from subatomic particles, like protons and neutrons. Protons and neutrons are sometimes called “nucleons”, since they are in the nuclei of atoms. Since protons and neutrons came together to make the nuclei of these lighter elements during the big bang, we call this process “big bang nucleosynthesis.”

It was this earliest matter, composed of the three lightest elements on the periodic table, that made the very first stars. And these stars were big and bright and they burned out really fast. We call them the “first generation stars”. It was within the cores of these first stars that the process of nuclear fusion first started creating elements heavier than lithium. The hydrogen and the helium inside were squeezed so tightly and with so much energy, that they started forming things like carbon and nitrogen and oxygen. Much like big bang nucleosynthesis, where new elements had been formed, we call this process of forming new elements from nuclear fusion within stars “stellar nucleosynthesis.”

When those first stars “burned up” their elemental “fuel,” they went through a process called “supernova”, where the stars explode and send a lot of their matter out into space. Then, new stars were able to form from the matter that had clumped up in space, including these heavier elements that were made from stellar nucleosynthesis. In this way, each new generation of stars will have more and more of the heavier elements inside of them.

Something really interesting is that the process of stellar nucleosynthesis can make all of the atoms on the periodic table up to iron (element number 26), but it actually takes too much energy to make the elements that are heavier than iron inside of stars. Can you guess where the energy might come from, then, to make all of those other elements we see in nature that are heavier than iron? When a star goes supernova and explodes, there’s actually enough energy to make those heavier elements! We call this process of nucleosynthesis “supernova nucleosynthesis”. Together, all of the various nucleosynthesis reactions explain how all of the matter that makes up our world and living things came to be. That’s why you’ll often hear people exclaim that we are made of star stuff!

Organic molecules are made in space:

Simple organic molecules, some of which are the building blocks in the biochemical pathways of life, can be produced in space! Astrochemists can use telescopes to observe a large variety of organic molecules within the dusty clouds in our galaxy. Researchers have discovered organic molecules on the surfaces of asteroids and comets. Even some meteorites have a large number of organic molecules within them, showing us that they formed in space. Also, some astrobiologists working in laboratories can emulate the energetically dynamic conditions in interstellar space. For instance, they can take icy mixtures of water, methanol, carbon dioxide, ammonia, and other simple compounds and expose them to UV radiation (as they would be exposed to from stars in space). What such scientists observe is the production of simple amino acids, which are the basic unit of proteins. Proteins are large biological molecules which serve as structural components in all life forms, as well as perform the majority of life’s functions including DNA replication and repair, metabolism (how a life form makes energy from food), and responding to stimuli: all of which are fundamental to an organism’s daily life. This work shows that chemistry that naturally occurs in space can lead to the production of biologically-relevant molecules. Since these reactions are thought to be occurring wherever new stars and planets are formed, this implies amino acids could be introduced to the surfaces of all newly formed planets, and this process could have played a key role in the origin of life on Earth.

We’re still learning about how nucleosynthesis works:

For a long time, it was thought that the only way to make elements heavier than iron was in supernova nucleosynthesis of the largest stars, but new research is suggesting that other types of supernovae and other types of stellar processes may also form many of the heavier elements. For instance, when neutron stars bounce into each other and merge (something we can observe using gravitational waves), the energy should be enough to form many of the larger elements as well. The astronomer Jennifer Johnson has recently updated a version of the periodic table of elements to show the potential stellar environments where elements form based on our current knowledge (The Origin of the Elements [ohio-state.edu]). However, as she points out, “we still don’t know everything.”

On top of other stellar ways to make heavy elements besides supernovae, we also know that some of the matter in our bodies and in rocks was formed more recently. For instance, cosmic ray spallation (or cosmic ray nucleosynthesis) is when cosmic rays bombard elements and cause them to make new elements. This is how a lot of our carbon-14 is formed. Cosmic rays that hit atoms of nitrogen-15 in our atmosphere can make carbon-14. Sadly, there’s also a lot of carbon-14 in our bodies and our atmosphere that came from nuclear weapons testing. This carbon is sometimes called “bomb carbon”.

Most of the hydrogen and helium in the universe was created in about 5 minutes:

Our current models of how the first elements formed tell us that all of the hydrogen and almost all of the helium in our known universe was all formed (in nuclei form) within about the first five minutes after the Big Bang and as the universe cooled, the nuclei gained their electrons and formed into atomic H and He. Even though nucleosynthesis inside of stars and from supernovae (and probably from other stellar events) has formed a lot of other elements since the Big Bang, most of the matter that we see in all of the stars and the galaxies we can observe is composed of those primordial atoms of hydrogen and helium.

 

An artist's impression of a black hole accretion disk. (Mark Garlick/Science Photo Library/Getty Images)
SPACE

Black Holes Could Be Inadvertently Making Gold, Astrophysicists Say

MICHELLE STARR

16 NOVEMBER 2021

The Universe may have more ways of forging heavy elements than we thought.

The creation of metals such as gold, silver, thorium, and uranium require energetic conditions, such as a supernova explosion, or a collision between neutron stars.

However, a new paper shows that these elements could form in the swirling chaos that rings an active newborn black hole as it swallows down dust and gas from the space around it.

In these extreme environments, the high emission rate of neutrinos should facilitate the conversion of protons to neutrons – resulting in an excess of the latter, required for the process that produces heavy elements.

"In our study, we systematically investigated for the first time the conversion rates of neutrons and protons for a large number of disk configurations by means of elaborate computer simulations, and we found that the disks are very rich in neutrons as long as certain conditions are met," said astrophysicist Oliver Just of the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Germany.

In the beginning, after the Big Bang, there weren't a lot of elements floating around. Until stars were born and started smashing together atomic nuclei in their cores, the Universe was a soup of mostly hydrogen and helium.

Stellar nuclear fusion imbued the cosmos with heavier elements, from carbon all the way up to iron for the most massive stars, seeded through space when the star dies.

But iron is where core fusion hits a snag. The heat and energy required to produce iron via fusion exceeds the energy the process generates, causing the core temperature to drop, which in turn results in the star dying in a spectacular kaboom – the supernova.

It's that spectacular kaboom (and the kabooms of colliding neutron stars) where the heavier elements are fused. The explosions are so energetic that atoms, colliding together with force, can capture neutrons from each other.

This is called the rapid neutron capture process, or r-process; it needs to happen really quickly, so that radioactive decay doesn't have time to occur before more neutrons are added to the nucleus.

It's unclear whether there are other scenarios in which the r-process can take place, but newborn black holes are a promising candidate. Namely, when two neutron stars merge, and their combined mass is sufficient to tip the newly formed object into the black hole category.

Collapsars are another possibility: the gravitational collapse of the core of a massive star into a stellar-mass black hole.

In both cases, the baby black hole is thought to be surrounded by a dense, hot ring of material, swirling round the black hole and feeding into it, like water down a drain. In these environments, neutrinos are emitted in abundance, and astronomers have long hypothesized that r-capture nucleosynthesis could be taking place as a result.

Just and his colleagues undertook an extensive set of simulations to determine if this is indeed the case. They varied the black hole mass and spin, and the mass of the material around it, as well as the effect of different parameters on neutrinos. They found that, if conditions are just right, r-process nucleosynthesis can take place in these environments.

"The decisive factor is the total mass of the disk," Just said.

"The more massive the disk, the more often neutrons are formed from protons through capture of electrons under emission of neutrinos, and are available for the synthesis of heavy elements by means of the r-process.

"However, if the mass of the disk is too high, the inverse reaction plays an increased role so that more neutrinos are recaptured by neutrons before they leave the disk. These neutrons are then converted back to protons, which hinders the r-process."

This sweet spot in which heavy elements are produced most prolifically is a disk mass between 1 and 10 percent of the mass of the Sun. This means that neutron star mergers with disk masses in this range could be heavy element factories. Since it's unknown how common collapsar disks are, the jury is still out for collapsars, the researchers said.

The next step will be to determine how the light emitted from a neutron star collision can be used to calculate the mass of its accretion disk.

"These data are currently insufficient. But with the next generation of accelerators, such as the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR), it will be possible to measure them with unprecedented accuracy in the future," said astrophysicist Andreas Bauswein of the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research.

"The well-coordinated interplay of theoretical models, experiments, and astronomical observations will enable us researchers in the coming years to test neutron star mergers as the origin of the r-process elements."

The research has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Modelling the Metaverse: The Fight to Profit from the Next Big Thing

By Pengana Capital 
November 26, 2021

Key Takeaways

• The hardware required for teleporting into the Metaverse is still clunky and the content scant, but the remaining technological hurdles would seem to have reached the stage where they can be solved with time and money.

• A concert in 2020 attended by 27 million avatars already suggests how some experiences could be just as good, if not better, experienced in the Metaverse.

• Valuing technology companies has always involved trying to get a firm handle on the future rewards that will come to those that succeed in exploiting totally new platforms.

• For Apple, the business model is straightforward: replicate in 3-D the experience of using the iPhone. For Facebook, the model involves using its own hardware as a cudgel for keeping a larger share of the advertising spoils.

CEOs spend a lot of time communicating their visions for their companies to a naturally skeptical public. Traditionally, this involves traveling around the country or world to interact face-to-face in conference rooms or auditoriums, or, over the past two years, logging into an endless series of video calls. But recently the top executive at a Prague-based technology startup tried presenting in another realm altogether.

This presentation came during a virtual conference hosted by JPMorgan titled “Ready Player One,” after the science-fiction novel by Ernest Cline about a society in the near-future when all of humanity uses a virtual simulation to escape the drab reality of their lives. The speaker was Artur Sychov, CEO of Somnium Space, one of the first open-source platforms designed specifically for virtual-reality users. Instead of wearing the usual business suit, Sychov appeared as a black-clad superhero-like avatar. Behind his avatar, you could see the sparse expanse of the Somnium landscape extending in every direction. The sun was just starting to peek over a virtual horizon, and a handful of buildings rose nearby including the dome of a planetarium.


Artur Sychov, CEO of Somnium Space. Source: PodFest Asia

For those logging in from home laptops and office workstations, Sychov provided an opportunity to experience a concept which has been a key talking point for many tech industry CEOs in 2021. That concept—now commonly called the Metaverse—is a totally immersive version of the internet where, instead of just viewing and listening to content, users feel as if they are in it. Initially built atop the existing internet, the Metaverse could eventually become so pervasive and so absorbing that it subsumes the current 2D web (at least that’s the idea), offering compelling facsimiles for almost every activity people can experience in the physical world, with the possible exceptions of eating and sleeping.

Recent evidence of tech companies’ intense focus on the Metaverse abounds. At a Microsoft conference in May, CEO Satya Nadella spoke at length about his company’s new “Azure Digital Twins” that allows its enterprise customers to create live always-on simulations of their products, facilities, processes, and people. Google has gone on a major hiring spree to beef up its engineering staff for augmented reality (AR)1 search. Apple has quietly been buying up early-stage AR and virtual reality (VR) startups in areas from advanced optics to virtual events.

Of the large-cap players, Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg have publicly been the most all-in on the concept, declaring that in the future people will associate Facebook more with the Metaverse than with social media, and pledging a major increase in capital expenditures to ensure that they do. In October 2021, the company even went so far as to change its name to Meta to reflect the seriousness of that ambition (and to try to move on from the controversies stirred by a whistleblower’s release of internal documents about the potential harmful effects of its current products). A time when the physical and virtual worlds blend into one has never felt more possible.

To a point anyway. Teleporting into the Metaverse currently requires bulky devices that resemble inches-thick blindfolds—not something many people would be comfortable wearing while working, even from home. The hardware problem was demonstrated by Sychov’s presentation: no one else on the call was wearing a VR headset. When he said that it was “hard to explain the degree to which my brain believes that I’m here, the beauty of that sunrise,” everyone had to take his word for it. His comments that “we will have cities, maybe whole countries” developing in virtual reality where people will work full time sounded even more fantastical.

However, there is another more-grounded perspective to consider on the Metaverse’s progression from science fiction to viable business model. Igor Tishin, an Information Technology analyst at Harding Loevner, has thought a lot about the Metaverse and its implications for big technology companies—Facebook, Apple, Google, and Amazon as well as chipmakers and related equipment suppliers like NVIDIA, TSMC, and ASML—whose growth depends on continually expanding the applications of their technology. Still-evolving areas of technology like the Metaverse may be highly speculative, but these companies’ share prices already reflect an expectation that such growth opportunities will become a reality, and not in a too-distant timeframe. “A lot of people get hung up on how we’re going to get from where we are today to there,” Tishin says. By “there,” he means the Metaverse. “I’m more sanguine about the ability, and motivation, of these companies to figure it out.”


A Brief History of the Metaverse

The concept of the Metaverse has been a source of fascination, and hype, since before there was a commercial internet. Neal Stephenson originally coined the term in his 1992 novel Snow Crash. In the novel, considered a classic by tech professionals, users entered this original “Metaverse” via a pair of goggles onto which a 3-D world was holographically projected with a blueish beam of light. So, in 2012, when Google co-founder Sergei Brin arrived at a charity event in San Francisco wearing a pair of goggles with an eerie bluish, laser-like spot covering his right iris, it sent shockwaves through the tech industry. Within two years, however, Google’s consumer AR goggle product, Google Glass, would become the company’s highest-profile failure. Other companies’ stumbles have followed. Magic Leap, a much-hyped AR company, has repeatedly fallen short of its soaring ambitions to, among other things, create a humanlike virtual assistant or city-sized holographic overlay. And forecasters have continued to overshoot. In 2016, one industry group declared the market for AR and VR would reach US$150 billion in 2020—they were off by US$117 billion.2

Yet there is still an undeniable feeling that something must eventually replace the handheld screen. The exact next step for consumer tech is still up in the air, but many futurists in Silicon Valley believe it will be some combination of devices and platforms that delivers the sense of “presence” described by Sychov. To date, VR has mainly been applied to gaming. But recently tech captains have talked up VR’s practical applications like remote work. In interviews, Zuckerberg has reported conducting more of his meetings via the company’s new Horizon Workrooms VR platform and how helpful it is not only to meet remotely but also to share a sense of space with other people that allows a better read on body language or wheeling around to the same side of a table when working through a problem with a colleague.

At this point, anyone able to join Mark Zuckerberg in the Metaverse will be doing it as an avatar—interacting cartoon-to-cartoon, as it were. Achieving the body scanning, processing speeds, high-resolution cameras, and lens/displays capable of real-time photo-realistic image generation is an essential precondition of the next stage of the development of the Metaverse. Streaming capacity will also need to expand. In April 2020, Fortnite developer Epic Games co-produced a Travis Scott concert attended by more than 27 million avatars, all putatively beamed into the same venue in the Metaverse. In actuality, current technology can only handle a hundred or so avatars meeting at once; a technique called “sharding” is required to bring together thousands of these avatar groups to create a mostly identical and near-simultaneous communal digital experience. For billions to move about freely together in the Metaverse, the shards will somehow need to fuse.

Overcoming such hurdles is not a trivial endeavor. Nevertheless, Tishin says, “my suspicion is that we’re solidly in the realm of an engineering problem as opposed to a scientific problem.” The latter, like commercially viable nuclear fusion, cannot be solved without some fundamental breakthrough. With an engineering problem, the breakthroughs have already occurred, and the remaining challenges can be solved with time and money.


Next Steps

For now, the Metaverse is not a unified phenomenon, but a loose collection of devices, digital environments, and related technologies. Microsoft has spoken of its Digital Twins as an “enterprise Metaverse.” Google, as it happens, never fully abandoned Google Glass. It has continued to develop and sell the eyewear for enterprise customers, including the shipper DHL, whose workers use the glasses for item picking at its warehouses. The data and images that appear in the pickers’ field of vision, too, form an emerging Metaverse. Somnium Space is clearly a Metaverse, but so is Decentraland, where, earlier this year, parcels of digital land were going for the cryptocurrency equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Some users experience Decentraland in VR, but most simply choose to use the 2-D interface of their tablet or smart phone.

There will come a time, however, when all these individual platforms will merge to form the Metaverse. At least, that’s the vision articulated by venture capitalist Matthew Ball in a pair of widely circulated essays in May 2020 and June 2021.3 Ball elucidated some half dozen different developments (beyond the required engineering advancements) that need to occur before an all-encompassing Metaverse can be realized. One of them is a set of standard programming protocols—like HTML with which the web is built—to provide interoperability between platforms. Another is an integrated, functioning economy within the Metaverse that matches the freedom from the physical world’s constraints with a system— presumably relying on some version of blockchain—that establishes immediate and immutable provenance over economic goods and services.

No one can say with precision how long it will take for these pieces to fall into place or how big the economic opportunity could be. “The entire global economy is roughly US$84 trillion now,” Tishin observes. “In 10 years, it will be way over US$100 trillion. What percentage of that will have moved into the Metaverse? It’s clearly not all of it, or probably even most of it, but if it’s even one-tenth, you’re talking several trillions of dollars.”

During his “Ready Player One” conference presentation, Sychov tried to give a sense of how he sees the business opportunity unfolding in his corner of the Metaverse. Currently, Somnium Space generates most of its revenue from “primary” sales, including plots of virtual land as well as the commissions it charges on avatars,4 virtual cars, and other non-fungible tokens (NFTs). However, he projects the company’s revenues will increasingly come from the cut it takes on transactions between users when they exchange goods, services, games, and even whole sub-worlds created within its platform. As the user base grows from the couple thousand avatars a month who interact inside its virtual world now, he expects advertising naturally to follow. Already, Sony has erected a pop-up shop in Somnium Space to advertise its VR headsets.

Sychov predicts that it won’t be long before major brands catch on to the possibilities of taking things a step further. While commerce in the Metaverse at the early stages is likely to focus on virtual advertising for physical goods (a glorified extension of the internet, in other words), the next stage will be a shift to advertising for and selling virtual ones.

At one level, it is a preposterous (and deeply unsettling) idea that eventually many of us will be spending so much of our time inside the Metaverse that a company like Nike, for example, could be earning a significant portion of it profits producing shoes for avatars instead of physical sneakers. Tishin, however, isn’t ready to dismiss the possibility outright. “We’ve already seen with these concerts how some types of experiences could be just as good, if not better, experienced in the Metaverse. Travel could be another. Theme parks. The thrill of driving a really fast car. So, you’re likely to see the virtual economies working in parallel with the real ones.” There are important environmental and societal implications to what he is saying. With billions of people around the world rising into the middle class or else demanding more equal access to goods, services, and lifestyles, it may be more preposterous to assume the physical world can continue housing all those hopes and desires on its own.


Modeling the Metaverse

Of course, for the Metaverse to become the grand parallel economy Tishin describes, the devices will need to be so capable that, like smartphones today, they become essential tools to most consumers. Companies, meanwhile, will need to demonstrate the power of the platforms so they can attract developers to build experiences that draw in customers. As Tishin points out, the incipient Metaverse is at a common juncture in the development of new technology. Software like Netscape and Internet Explorer had to be written and proven useful for web browsing before they triggered the content explosion upon which our current 2-D internet is based. Amazon had to spend vast sums making the Kindle into a capable device before publishers took e-books seriously. Once they did, Amazon was able to cash in on the real prize, which was selling e-book content, not Kindles.

The history of technological development is important context for assessing the value of tech companies. Investors generally value companies based on projections for the rate of growth of their current businesses, but valuing tech companies also involves trying to get a financial handle on just this process: the future rewards that will come to those companies that succeed in exploiting totally new platform paradigms.

According to Tishin, two of the Metaverse’s biggest winners will likely be Facebook and Apple. Compared to Facebook, Apple has been relatively silent about its plans, “which suggests how serious they are,” says Tishin. Apple is the one company with the expertise and control over the entire technology stack to solve the engineering challenges in creating a viable Metaverse. The company has powerful, well-designed proprietary hardware, from chips to the devices themselves. These devices, running on Apple’s own operating system, form an ecosystem with over one billion users. And Apple has a straightforward business model for the Metaverse: to replicate in 3-D the experience of using an iPhone.

Tishin estimates what the impact of the Metaverse should be on Apple’s valuation by starting with the iPhone. Today, the iPhone alone generates about US$200 billion in revenue annually. In Tishin’s valuation model, he projects that in five years Apple will have an additional business selling goggles and glasses with AR/VR augmentation whose revenues will be just short of what the iPhone generates today—call it US$150 billion a year. To back the impact of that new business into his current estimation of Apple’s fair value, Tishin multiplies US$150 billion by Apple’s 37% gross margins, then multiplies that number by 10 (a conservative stock price multiple), and then again by his ballpark 75% probability that the whole effort actually materializes. When he divides that number (US$416 billion) by Apple’s 16.5 billion outstanding shares, he comes up with an added value from the hardware for accessing the Metaverse of US$25 per share by mid-decade. That’s one reason that Apple’s recent share price of around US$140 a share, at 28 times trailing earnings, actually strikes Tishin as pretty reasonable, even with the potential for some cannibalization of its existing hardware business.




An artist’s rendering of Apple’s planned VR/AR headset based on leaked documents and insider reports. It reportedly will hit the market in 2022 at a price of US$3,000. That compares to US$300 for the bulkier Facebook Oculus, suggesting the device will largely be used as a proving ground for even sleeker glasses. For its part, the company has only acknowledged it’s working on both projects. Source: Antonio DeRosa (aderosa.myportfolio.com)

Modeling the value of Facebook’s future in the Metaverse is a little more complicated. In a recent earnings call, Zuckerberg suggested that the company will spend over US$10 billion on Metaverse development in 2021. The only significant revenue those efforts are generating so far (annualized at US$3 billion in sales) is from its Oculus headset, widely regarded as the leading VR gadget on the market. In partnership with Ray-Ban, Facebook also recently unveiled its “smart glasses,” which are presently only smart enough to take photos, record videos, play music, and answer phone calls, but according to Facebook could soon deliver on some rudimentary aspects of the Metaverse in a stylish, user-friendly form factor. Zuckerberg has been careful to note, though, that none of the new hardware will necessarily change the way the company earns its profits—through advertising.

For a glimpse of how the company’s future advertising profits may play out, Facebook insiders have directed Tishin to Facebook Shops. This initiative, launched in partnership with the e-commerce platform Shopify, is Facebook’s attempt to build a marketplace that can rival Amazon, particularly for the new mode of “inspirational” shopping that is driven by social interactions and recommendations from friends. The Shops platform lets you use your phone’s video function to view a selfie of your face and “try on” a shade of lipstick that’s caught your eye to see how it looks with your skin tone. The company envisions a time when the lipstick—or your old college roommates, or your dermatologist—will appear with a simple wave of everyone’s wrist. In any event, all are more value-added ways to pull people into the company’s orbit so it can keep serving them ads.



AR lipstick on Facebook Shops. Source: Facebook

So how much is the Metaverse potentially worth to Facebook? Applying the same logic that he does to Apple—that in time the company will have a separate Metaverse-related business comparable to the size of its core business today—and accounting for a similar level of cannibalization, Tishin figures that in five years Facebook could be generating 50% more in ad revenues than it would be without the Metaverse. But he also thinks Facebook may be playing down the full scope of its monetization plans. “What if its platform becomes one of the main places where hundreds of millions of people around the planet are working, buying virtual tennis shoes, spending the afternoon in Paris. Wouldn’t it want to start taking a cut of developers’ revenue for bringing those experiences to people? In which case, the revenue opportunity could increase by an order of magnitude.”

This raises the question of why Facebook would spend time and money fiddling around with headsets. Although Facebook pulls in a fraction of Apple’s top line, its gross profit margins, which top 80%, dwarf those of its Cupertino rival. And Apple is the most efficient hardware maker in the world. But, Tishin says, Facebook could face a problem. If Apple does succeed in building the world’s best Metaverse hardware and operating system, it could also be able to set the fee structure for those who want to use its enabling platform.

Apple’s track record in that area can’t give Zuckerberg much peace of mind. The up to 30% commissions Apple charges on sales in its App Store have long been decried by developers as usurious. Recent concessions to app developers and a September court decision in a lawsuit by Epic Games suggest that Apple’s commission policies may be on the wane. But Apple has found a clever way both to deflect attention from its usurious practices and to create an alternative source of revenue: supporting the push for greater privacy protections. The safeguards it has implemented to prevent the data of iPhone users’ from being shared with third-party advertisers have severely crimped the ability of Facebook and Google to serve those users ads, effectively siphoning a not-insignificant portion of ad revenue to … Apple. “I don’t think every company is going to have exactly the same vision here,” Zuckerberg said recently, clearly a veiled reference to the potential for Apple’s current walled garden to carry over into the Metaverse. “I think some are going to have more siloed visions, and I, at least, believe that in order for this to work really well, you want it to be very portable and interconnected.”

Tishin sees Facebook’s hardware efforts (and the implicit threat that it could build out its own operating ecosystem that competes directly with Apple’s future Metaverse i-wearables business) as chiefly a form of leverage. “I could easily see Zuckerberg going to Apple CEO Tim Cook at some point and saying, ‘Look, we don’t want to keep making headsets and sunglasses, we’d much rather stick to selling ads, but you need to give us a break on the cut you take from people and businesses having entered the Metaverse through your wormhole.’”

As Tishin watches the Big Tech players arming themselves with the technology and strategies they believe will help them win, he is reminded of massively multiplayer online games (which, by the way, would be awesome inside the Metaverse). “All those warriors show up for the ultimate battle and, at first, there’s 2,000 of them. But then when it’s down to, like, six, they have to say to one another: Let’s stop. We can have a really nice life if we compromise instead of try to fight.”


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Contributors

Analyst Igor Tishin, PhD contributed research and viewpoints to this piece.

Endnotes

1 Where VR refers to a wholly virtual experience, AR involves the layering of the virtual atop the physical.

2 “Augmented Reality Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis Report by Component, by Display (HMD & Smart Glass, HUD, Handheld Devices), by Application, By Region, and Segment Forecasts, 2021-2028,” Grand View Research, February 2021.

3 “The Epic Games Primer: Parts I-VI Directory” (May 22, 2020); “The Metaverse Primer” (June 29, 2021), MathewBall.vc.

4 Artur Sychov reports having paid a creator US$2,000 for his avatar.

The dubious track record of ‘new’ nuclear technology

Will safety and economic problems that shut down similar reactors follow the industry to Wyoming?

Opinion
by Kerry Drake

November 30, 2021


A friend of mine says he has no problem with nuclear energy or “experimental” projects, but not when they are combined and linked to Wyoming.

I think it’s a sentiment many share. Residents know the state must find a replacement for fossil fuels to drive its economy, but offering the Equality State as the proving ground for new, “advanced” nuclear technology feels too risky.

Count me as a member of this group. That puts me at odds with advocates for the Natrium nuclear demonstration project — like state executives or Kemmerer officials anxious to save their town, which was chosen for the $4 billion facility. They say Wyoming needs to roll the dice and rake in the riches.

Such unfettered optimism is alluring. It’s easy to admire the vision of TerraPower founder Bill Gates: nuclear power plants replacing coal-fired facilities across the country and thus cutting planet-destroying carbon emissions. I understand why many want to jump on this bandwagon.

I don’t generally view myself as a “not-in-my-backyard” kind of guy. In this instance, though, I think it’s imperative to scrutinize the project at every stage.

There are myriad reasons for this cautious approach. Yet federal and state officials want to remove regulatory barriers and go full-speed ahead.

Safety heads the list. Yes, nuclear energy has been part of the nation’s electrical generation mix for decades, but Gates claims the Natrium sodium-cooled fast reactor, with molten salt-based energy storage, will produce less nuclear waste and be safer than a conventional light-water reactor.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, however, issued a report in March that sharply questions such assertions.

Sodium-cooled fast reactors, the report said, would likely be less “uranium-efficient” and not reduce the amount of waste that requires long-term isolation in a geologic repository. Sodium coolant can burn when exposed to air or water, and the organization said a demonstration project like the one proposed in Kemmerer “could experience uncontrollable power increases that result in rapid core melting.”

Gulp. If that scary scenario doesn’t warrant pumping the brakes in Wyoming, I don’t know what would.

But there are other important safety factors that also deserve attention. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, under pressure to find carbon-free solutions to combat climate change, has been pushing to streamline safety and environmental reviews for advanced nuclear projects. The Wyoming Outdoor Council noted that the NRC is considering using a “generic” environmental impact statement, instead of detailed reviews of specific sites.

“We shouldn’t be cutting corners on health and safety to rush through an untested technology, and Wyoming’s harsh climate and seismic activity underscore the need for site-specific reviews,” WOC warned.

Wyoming officials, led by Gov. Mark Gordon, have enthusiastically endorsed the Natrium project, treating it purely as an economic windfall. But not only is there no guarantee such a boom will happen. In fact, other states’ and nations’ experiences strongly suggest it won’t.

In an open letter to Gates, Arnie Gunderson, a nuclear engineer who has spent 50 years working in the industry, called out the billionaire for leveraging his fortune “to siphon precious taxpayer funds supporting your latest atomic contrivance in Wyoming.”

TerraPower has a huge financial stake in the Kemmerer project, committing a total of $2 billion. It’s money that the corporation won’t recoup unless Natrium proves to be a reliable, safe alternative to fossil fuels that can be efficiently replicated at other facilities.

What happens to Kemmerer and Wyoming if TerraPower’s critics are right and the plug is ultimately pulled for safety or economic reasons?KERRY DRAKE

But without the backing of the federal government, Gates likely wouldn’t be in the game. That’s because nuclear reactors typically run way over budget, if they’re completed at all. The 345-megawatt Natrium project was originally announced as a $1 billion facility, but the price tag has quickly quadrupled.

President Joe Biden’s administration, anxious to meet international goals to halt climate change, is all-in on Natrium. The Department of Energy is matching Gates dollar-for-dollar to develop “new” sodium-cooled reactor technology that has failed since it was first introduced on the U.S. submarine Seawolf in the 1950s.

Other attempts include the privately financed Fermi 1 site near Lake Erie, which was shut down in 1966 after a partial meltdown; and at Clinch River in Tennessee. The latter, a publicly funded project, was plagued by delays and huge cost overruns, and Congress finally shut it down in the mid-1980s due to serious safety concerns.

In his letter to Gates, Gunderson detailed the epic failure of the Monju sodium-cooled fast breeder reactor in Japan. It took a decade to build and was shut down in 1995 after four months due to a sodium leak and fire. Monju wasn’t reopened until 2010, and permanently halted a year later after a refueling accident.

The cost to the Japanese government? More than $11 billion. Meanwhile, after decades of expensive research, France’s nuclear agency has shelved plans to build a prototype sodium-cooled nuclear reactor.

“So now is the time to stop the Natrium marketing hype and free up those precious public funds to pursue low-cost and dependable renewable energy during the time frame necessary to help prevent catastrophic climate crises!” Gunderson concluded.

Many scientists agree. “The recent attention on nuclear energy is fully driven by the declining industry’s desperation for capital and its related lobby depicting it as a solution for climate change,” Jan Haverkamp of Greenpeace told Deutsche Welle, a German news organization. “… It does so too late and at a far too high cost.”

The Kemmerer project at the Naughton coal-fired plant, owned by Rocky Mountain Power, has a timeline that will be difficult to meet unless every phase goes off without a hitch — something that’s nearly unheard of in the nuclear industry. If the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approves permits, construction would begin in 2024, with the reactor in service only four years later.

PacifiCorp, Rocky Mountain Power’s parent company, estimates that it will take about 2,000 workers to build the plant in Kemmerer and 250 to operate it. It presents the ultimate lottery ticket for a small mining community whose future looked mighty bleak when PacifiCorp announced plans to close the coal-fired plant.

So, here’s today’s $4 billion question: What happens to Kemmerer and Wyoming if TerraPower’s critics are right and the plug is ultimately pulled for safety or economic reasons?

Wyoming will survive, but not without cost. It will have lost all the time and energy the state could have devoted to finding long-term solutions to diversify its economy and stop relying on fossil fuels.

And Kemmerer? The town has experienced so much uncertainty in recent years, I hope it would use any reprieve from the nuclear industry to its advantage. State government must step in and require TerraPower to pay enough for mitigation to ensure that Kemmerer won’t be left in the lurch.

If Gates is going to ride into town promising to be its economic savior, Wyoming needs to hold him to it. Don’t make us sic the posse on you, pardner.

KERRY DRAKE
Veteran Wyoming journalist Kerry Drake has covered Wyoming for more than four decades, previously as a reporter and editor for the Wyoming Tribune-Eagle and Casper Star-Tribune. He lives in Cheyenne and... More by Kerry Drake

Nuclear energy "is not safe”

Portuguese Minister for Environment and Climate Action, João Pedro Matos Fernandes, has defended that the European Union (EU) should not finance nuclear energy projects because “it is not safe, it is not sustainable and costs a lot of money”.

By TPN/Lusa, in Environment, Portugal, Europe · 14 Nov 2021 · 

"We are not here to define the energy policies of any country. We are here to emphasise that it is really a bad decision to place nuclear within the European taxonomy. It is not safe, it is not sustainable and it costs a lot of money", he argued.

European financing, stressed Matos Fernandes, should be directed towards other options, mainly wind and solar energy, and he added that they are in contact with the private sector to take this same position.

“All the money that goes into nuclear energy is definitely money that should be put into renewable energy and that's what the world needs. We need energy, but it doesn't come from fossil [fuels]. And we need energy that does not contain nuclear waste”, he insisted.

In an intervention before Matos Fernandes, the German Environment Minister, Svenja Schulze, stated that “nuclear energy cannot be a solution to the climate crisis” because it is too risky, too slow and not sustainable.

Currently, around 12% of Germany's electricity comes from nuclear and half from renewable sources.

In 2011, after the accident at Japan's Fukushima nuclear power plant, German Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that it would end the country's 17 nuclear power plants by 2022, despite fears that this would lead to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions due to the use of gas and coal.

France is the third largest producer of nuclear energy in the world, behind the United States and China.

Nuclear energy 'can't solve' global warming, will 'strain' financial, natural resource
Thursday, November 25, 2021
 

Counterview Desk

 
Taking strong exception to Rafael Mariano Grossi, Director General, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), who has favoured nuclear energy as a solution to global warning, well-known power and policy analyst Shankar Sharma has said that the IAEA chief's “unsubstantiated advocacy” of nuclear power is associated with “diversion of considerable amounts of scarce resources, both financial as well as natural, of many developing countries, such as India.”

In a letter to Grossi, Sharma, who is based in Sagar, Western Ghats, Karnataka, said, “The proposed Jaitapur Nuclear Power Project (6 reactors of 1,650 MWe each) in Maharashtra, the estimated cost per MWe is between INR 300 million to 400 million, whereas the lowest cost is for renewable energy sources of wind and solar backed by storage batteries, which is in the range of INR 80 million to 100 million per MW.”

Text:May I draw your kind attention to a few news articles, carried in the electronic media, in recent days on the relevance of nuclear energy in the context of Climate Change? These include one news report attributing a statement to you: "Nuclear energy is part of the solution to global warming, there's no way around it…"

An AFP report of November 7, 2021 says: "...For more than two decades, promoters and purveyors of nuclear energy felt shunned at UN climate change conferences. At the COP26 summit underway in Glasgow, however, they have been welcomed with open arms, the UN's top nuclear regulator told AFP. ‘Nuclear energy is part of the solution to global warming, there's no way around it,’ said Rafael Mariano Grossi, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in an interview. It already accounts for a quarter of ‘clean’ -- that is, carbon-free -- energy worldwide, and Grossi said this COP is the first where it has ‘had a seat at the table’."

At around the same time, a few more news articles have also appeared advocating the increased usage of nuclear energy. These articles, as well as your own views (as carried in AFP report of November 7, 2021), have shocked many rational observers of the electricity sector from around the world, while also surprising many more observers of the global energy sector with the audacity of such advocacies even towards the end of 2021.

Your own statement, coming as the head of IAEA, may not surprise most observers of the nuclear power industry since IAEA has taken upon itself, for the last six decades, the role to relentlessly to promote the interest of nuclear power industry without satisfactorily addressing many associated serious concerns for the global communities.

But what is shocking is that even after scores of costly and bitter experiences associated with nuclear power, such as three major nuclear disasters at 3-mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, many other advocates are continuing to ask for much wider usage of nuclear power without diligently considering various legitimate concerns associated with technical, economic, social, environmental, logistics, intergenerational issues. It is hard to accept that such a stubborn advocacy for nuclear power has borne out of honest consideration of true welfare of all the concerned global communities.

Such an unsubstantiated advocacy for nuclear power has also been associated with the diversion of considerable amounts of scarce resources, both financial as well as natural, of many developing countries, such as India, to artificially prop up an electricity generation technology which has not only humongous costs and risks, but also has negligible relevance to the energy security of such countries with low per capita electricity need/ demand.

Despite many intractable problems associated with nuclear power industry, such as calamitous risk of uncontrolled radiation leakage, non-existent nuclear waste management technology, nuclear terrorism risks etc., the consumer end price of nuclear energy may be acceptable to rich countries which also may have high per capita electricity demand.

But for poor and populous countries such as India, Bangladesh, Pakistan etc. which have some of the lowest per capita electricity need/ demand, nuclear power cannot be acceptable not only due to the high price at consumer end, but also due to many other concerns such as the ever growing constraints of resources (land, water, nuclear fuel etc.), unacceptable costs associated with nuclear accident risks for their densely populated communities, intergenerational health issues because of nuclear radiation, irrelevance of nuclear power in the context of Climate Change, enormous potential of locally available renewable energy sources etc.

In this larger context, what has been of very serious concern is that the gullible policy makers of these poor countries have fallen prey for the unsubstantiated advocacy by nuclear power advocates such as IAEA, and are committing the communities in these poor countries to all the associated costs/ risks/ concerns for many decades (or even centuries) to come.

Because of this grave scenario, IAEA, even if it honestly believes that "nuclear energy is part of the solution to global warming, there's no way around it," it should consider rendering truly a great service to the billions in these poor countries by clarifying the fact that nuclear power may not be suitable to many of the developing countries because of the poverty, population density, and the availability of suitable alternatives such as renewable energy sources.

In the case of India, I would like to point out the fact that despite massive financial support and the continued patronage given to nuclear power sector since seven decades, the aggregate nuclear power capacity in the country is only 6,780 MW, which is only about 1.7% of the total electric power generating capacity (as on 20.9.2021), and that this percentage of nuclear power to the total power capacity can only come down further in view of the national target to have 500 GW of renewable power by 2030, and the fact that lot more coal and hydel power capacities are also being planned.

Whereas India could commission only 6,780 MW capacity of nuclear power in about 70 years, its planners have unrealistically ambitious targets such as increasing the same to about 250,000 MW by 2070. Whereas such targets can easily be seen as ‘a pie in the sky’ due to the sheer physical impossibility linked to various obstacles in mobilisation of enormous resources needed, what is of even more concern to its communities is that a considerable share of country’s meagre resources will have to be diverted to such unrealistic dreams, while starving various other welfare activities including the development of renewable energy sources, which is lot more suitable to Indian conditions.

In this background, may I hope that IAEA will see it as a fundamental obligation to the global community to come out with satisfactory clarification to some of the major concerns as below immediately?

1. Can nuclear energy be an important part of the solution to global warming?In 2019, the total electricity generating capacity at the global level was 9,773 GW out of which nuclear capacity was only 369 GW, which amounts to only about 3.8%.

Actual electricity generated in 2019 reveals that only about 10.3% of total electricity came from nuclear power technology, whereas renewable energy (excluding hydro power) was 10.8%. This percentage of renewable energy capacity has been achieved only in about a decade to decade and half period, whereas nuclear energy has taken more than 7 decades.

Hence, nuclear power cannot be seen as making a substantial impact on the GHG emissions scenario at least in the near future. One global estimate indicates that in order to have any discernible benefit from the Climate Change perspective, nuclear power needs to be about 33% of the total installed power capacity at the global level.

This estimate also indicates that about 2,500 nuclear reactors of average capacity of 1,000 MW would be required, and nearly four new reactors would have to begin construction each month until 2075. If nuclear power were to play more than a marginal role in combating global warming, then some nuclear-power reactors would have to be operated even in those countries, where there is no nuclear power as of now.

Looking at the recent past experience of slow electricity demand growth, the increasing public opposition, the safety issues, and the threat of nuclear terrorism etc. such a huge addition of installed capacity is impossible.

For a resource constrained and densely populated country like India, diversion of thousands of Sq. km of its agricultural/ forest lands for setting up hundreds of nuclear reactors, including the safety zones, can be said to be next to impossible.

In such a scenario, why should the most costly and risky technology of electricity generation be a part of our energy basket, when we have many benign options available?

2. Can nuclear energy ever be competitive with other sources of electricity?For a developing country like India, the capital cost and hence the consumer end price of nuclear power should be a critical factor in choosing the energy technology option. As of today, nuclear power is evidently the costliest option for India (as is elsewhere), and is only likely to be the costliest option by a huge margin even in future.

For the proposed Jaitapur Nuclear Power Project (6 reactors of 1,650 MWe each) in Maharashtra state in the country, the estimated cost per MWe is between INR 300 million to 400 million, whereas the lowest cost is for renewable energy sources of wind and solar backed by storage batteries, which is in the range of INR 80 million to 100 million per MW.

This stark contrast in capital costs is corroborated by a recent LCOE analysis by Investment bank Lazard (15th edition of its highly regarded Levelised Cost of Energy Analysis). It goes to show that wind and solar don’t just beat new installations, they are by and large competitive with even existing coal, gas and nuclear plants, even after the huge capital costs of those plants have been amortised.

In all cases, they are five times cheaper than nuclear power plants. Even storage and network costs don’t come close to making up the difference. Such a contrast in capital costs can only become much starker in the future because of the continued efficiency increases in solar, wind power, and energy storage battery technologies on one hand, and the continued escalation of capital costs of nuclear power on the other hand. It is reasonable to assume that these issues will be similar to all other poor/ developing countries also.

Under the title “List of cancelled nuclear reactors in the US”, Wikipedia has provided the details of about 200 cancelled reactors, including many in the construction stage, stating that: “Of the 253 nuclear power reactors originally ordered in the United States from 1953 to 2008, 48 percent were cancelled, 11 percent were prematurely shut down, 14 percent experienced at least a one-year-or-more outage, and 27 percent are operating without having a year-plus outage. Thus, only about one fourth of those ordered, or about half of those completed, are still operating and have proved relatively reliable.”

What a journey for the nuclear power industry: from the tall claims of ‘endless and cheap even to meter energy’, to never ending claims of innovations (such as Magnox, AGR, PWR, BWR, CANDU, RBMK, gas cooled reactors, fast breeder reactors etc.), to Fusion reactors and Small Modular Reactors etc.; to a large number of cancelled reactors in the US, to cost and time over-runs etc.; but totalling only about 3.8% of the global electricity capacity; and now to the tagline of ‘costliest and riskiest power generation technology’, and associated with concerns on global nuclear terrorism and intergenerational waste management issues.

The unsubstantiated and exaggerated claims of nuclear power establishment can also be highlighted by the turnaround from its initial advocacy for large size nuclear reactor units and multiple units in a single location (for the sake of economy) a few decades ago, to Small Modular Reactors which are in the experimental stage now.

In the context of these evidently glaring facts, it should become obvious that a poor country like India should not waste its meagre resources on nuclear power technology, which evidently has no true relevance to its energy future, and also because it has humongous potential in renewable energy.

Whereas, the above discussed two main considerations alone can be seen as ‘the necessary and sufficient factors’ for poor countries like India to shun nuclear power technology for their future, a host of other concerns such as cost and time overruns (such as Flamanville, France; Olkilouto, Finland; Hinkley Point C in UK; Vogtle in US), over-reliance on imported technology/ nuclear fuel, calamitous threats of nuclear accidents, public opposition etc. will be very serious, if not unsurmountable, hurdles.

The PDF version of a representation to the Indian government (as attached) highlighting enormous societal concerns on the approval given to a capacity extension plan of an existing nuclear power plant in the state of Karnataka, has listed a large number of such costs/ risks to the local communities.

If IAEA, being a high profile and influential global entity, chooses to continue to push for the wider acceptance of nuclear power technology, the minimum obligation it should take upon itself is to provide adequate clarification to each of the concerns as discussed above, as contained in the enclosed file, and as applicable to India and other developing countries.

a) Despite enormous investment and political patronage since the 1950s why the nuclear power capacity at the global level has not lived up to the tall claims of its captains, and why it has remained at a very low production capacity; even as compared to the recent technologies such as solar and wind power?

b) In the background of the fact that USA, USSR/Russia, and Japan, which were all known to be the leaders in technological issues, and which are also generally associated with quality and safety issues, have experienced one or more major nuclear accidents, how can IAEA assure the global community in averting nuclear accidents?

c) In the background of three major nuclear accidents, and many near misses, can we afford to ignore the “precautionary principle” as enunciated by the international convention on biodiversity?

d) Can IAEA provide the necessary details of one or two locations and the technology deployed for the long-term storage of nuclear wastes (nuclear waste depository), and confidently state that the same are cost effectively replicable anywhere else?

e) Can we afford to ignore the caution by many reports/ articles which have appeared in the media and by leading personalities such as Mikhail Gorbachev, UN Secretary General, Japanese Prime Minister at the time of Fukushima disaster, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Dr A Gopala Krishnan (of AERB, India), Dr Balram (of IISc, India) etc.?

f) What are the recommendations by IAEA to effectively address the threats of global nuclear terrorism w.r.t the concerns expressed by many political leaders?

g) Whether the costs, which we need to pass on to the future generations (in safeguarding the nuclear waste for thousands of years), are justifiable since there will be no benefits to these generations? How many times more electricity will the nuclear fuel cycle consume (including that of safety of nuclear waste) as compared to the electricity it can generate in its economic life cycle of about 40 years?

h) What are all the direct and indirect costs to the society of nuclear power as compared to the benefits in a poor country such as India? Are such benefits unquestionably higher than the costs? Through an objective study of Costs & Benefits Analysis, as a decision-making tool, can IAEA establish beyond reasonable doubt that every nuclear power plant has more benefits than costs to society?

i) What is the typical Life Cycle Cost of a nuclear power plant (such as one in the US, including the nuclear ore mining and nuclear waste management stages); and what is the volume of associated life cycle emission of CO2/MWh of energy produced?

j) In view of the fact that renewable energy sources have become so competitive not to require subsidies, can the nuclear establishment shun all kinds of subsidies, including the claim for exemption from civil nuclear liability clauses?

k) Can the nuclear establishment take the public at large for complete confidence by sharing all the relevant information asked for?

l) How will IAEA ensure that all the stakeholders are party to the carefully considered decisions on setting up nuclear power plants in each country?

IAEA’s continued advocacy on nuclear power can be seen as a clear parallel to the relentless and dangerous advocacy on fossil fuels by the International Energy Agency (IEA) till recently (despite repeated concerns the concerned individuals and NGOs), which has led to the UN's clarion call to move away from fossil fuels urgently to save humanity. In this larger context, your statement that "Nuclear energy is part of the solution to global warming, there's no way around it…" will need a lot of explanations to substantiate the same.

May I hope that IAEA will come out with these and many other clarifications soon?
Your acknowledgement of this mail will be deeply appreciated.

Diablo’s Planet-Killing Nuke Insanity Keeps Escalating

December 11, 2021

Opinion – Harvey Wasserman

Amidst our ever-escalating climate Apocalypse, the viral insanity of atomic power gets ever worse. Now it’s spread deep into the Biden Administration, with no apparent cure in sight.

Nowhere is the atomic disease more potentially lethal than at California’s ancient, aging, embrittled reactors at Diablo Canyon.

Throughout the US there are now 93 big licensed commercial reactors. Except for one, they are all more than 30 years old. Many are more than 40.

Worldwide there are more than 400.

After more than 60 years of uneven operation, the US nuke industry still can’t get private insurance. Any American reactor could be blowing up as you read this, taking down your health, your family, your home.

Since there’s no private insurer (your homeowner’s policy explicitly excludes liability from any reactor disaster) you’ll have no recourse beyond a very limited federal taxpayer fund…if that.

Over the decades the industry has touted one “Nuclear Renaissance” after another. Each time, with a few pliant “environmentalists” in tow, they declare atomic energy’s time has really really come.

At least such two such “green advocates” have turned out to be big-time climate deniers.

But never mind.

Atomic reactors burn at 571 degrees Fahrenheit. They trash every ecosphere they encounter. Billions of marine creatures die daily from their heat, chemical and radioactive emissions. Thousands of birds crash into their cooling towers. Countless humans die from the radiation they constantly pour into our air and water.

When reactors open, the nearby downwind human infant death rates rise. When they close, those rates drop.

The human death toll at Three Mile Island was significant (I went there in 1980 and interviewed stricken families; it was the worst week of my life). The death toll from Chernobyl exceeds a million. Fukushima emitted more than 100x the radioactive cesium than did the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

All of them racked up gargantuan economic and opportunity costs that can never be repaid.

With no solution to the nuclear waste problem, Fukushima is poised to dump millions of gallons of heavily irradiated liquids into the Pacific Ocean. At Pilgrim, south of Boston, the industry wants to dump huge quantities of radioactive water from the long-shut Pilgrim reactor into Cape Cod Bay.

In South Carolina, two reactors at V.C. Summer shut without opening, wasting $10 billion that could have solarized much of the state. At Vogtle, Georgia, a twin reactor project has just crossed the $30 billion mark, and can’t open at least until 2022—if ever.

Endless happy talk about small reactors, thorium reactors, fusion reactors, breeder reactors and whatever else Bill Gates perpetrates studiously ignore the fact that even their most wide-eyed projections show they can’t compete now with renewables, and never will.

Solar, wind, battery and efficiency technologies have so far outstripped initial projections in terms of cost, safety and availability that no nuclear technology—on line now or at some point in the mythological future—can ever hope to compete.

But somehow the mandates of the “free market” disappear as corporate cash buys the gerrymandered legislatures needed to scam public money to keep these dinosaurs alive.

And that’s where the real danger comes in. Future reactors are wasteful but perfectly harmless as long as they’re not built.

It’s the ones now terminally hot that hang like over our heads like swords on strings.

The 93 operating US nukes are falling apart. They’re allegedly kept safe by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. But anyone familiar with the industry knows the NRC really stands for Nobody Really Cares. Some of its staff is competent and caring. But the five Commissioners are historically corrupt, Soviet-style puppets who mostly take their marching orders straight from the industry they’re supposed to regulate.

That means our aging nukes — every one of them without private accident insurance — are each incredibly dangerous.

It’s one thing to debate the broad issue of nuke power — the waste, the surety of more melt-downs, the emissions, the costs, the health disasters.

But it’s quite another to realistically deal with each of these reactors on a case-by-case basis. In fact, every US nuke is its own terrifying likely-to-blow reality.

Take Ohio’s Davis-Besse, near Toledo. Its astonishing history of neglect, decay, near-misses and on-going corruption boggle the mind. To gorge on a proposed billion-dollar public bailout, its owners slipped a $61 million bribe to Larry Householder, then the Speaker of the Ohio House.

Householder is gone, but the slipshod, corner-cutting Chernobyl-style non-maintenance at Davis-Besse goes on.

Alabama’s Browns Ferry was set on fire with a candle. Arizona’s Palo Verde daily turns millions of gallons of precious water into steam. Nebraska’s Fort Calhoun and Cooper have both been flooded. Sea- and lake-side reactors will soon be under water. Many could be swamped by dam breaks.

The code red list goes on. But none exceed Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo. And it’s the two reactors there that the Biden Administration now insanely wants to save.

More Americans have been arrested at Diablo than at any other nuke. Badly built just 45 miles from the San Andreas fault, and just 180 miles from Los Angeles, the seaside reactors could easily lose their cooling systems to a Fukushima-style quake/tsunami.

More than 30 years old, their radioactive clouds would reach the ten million people in LA County within five hours. Evacuation is inconceivable, the death toll unfathomable.

Most critically, Diablo’s ancient Unit One is severely embrittled. As a nuke’s interior metals are subjected over the decades to intense heat, pressure and radiation, their resilience disappears. As they become brittle they grow vulnerable to the kind of intense shock that could come when emergency cooling water is poured into a melting reactor.

Should that happen in the middle of a melt-down, the nuke’s interior metals would shatter. The resulting steam explosion would blow the structure apart, throwing apocalyptic clouds of radioactive gases, metals and structural concrete into the sea and atmosphere.

Yet Diablo is operated by Pacific Gas … Electric, which has been twice convicted of criminal manslaughter (involving up to a hundred human deaths) and which has burned down much of northern California. To say PG…E has zero credibility as a reactor operator is to vastly understate the case.

A series of intense negotiations has led to a plan to shut Diablo Unit One in 2024, followed by Unit Two in 2025. A broad coalition of communities, unions, environmental, regulatory, citizens and other groups deemed that California would emerge safer, more prosperous and more ecologically sound once those reactors were shut.

But now Team Biden wants to trash all that. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and the usual industry stooges are attacking the shut-down deal and fighting to keep Diablo open.

A petition calling for an independent Diablo embrittlement inspection has been signed by more than two thousand Californians, including Hollywood A-Listers Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Martin Sheen, Eric Roberts, Jodi Evans, Mimi Kennedy, Graham Nash and many more. Governor Gavin Newsom has ignored the request, as has Biden’s Department of Energy.

The idea that Diablo’s operations could be prolonged without an independent investigation is beyond insane. The one thing the site has to offer of long-term value is its transmission switching station, which could easily handle major megawatts of juice coming in from the offshore wind turbines that should be built to power California’s future.

The idea that Diablo’s operations could be prolonged without an independent investigation is beyond insane. The allegedly “green” administration is pushing the envelope on the incredibly dangerous, wasteful, uninsured and ecologically catastrophic engine of mass death.

Can we stop them before Diablo or some other errant nuke blows up and terminally irradiates millions of innocent downwinders along with our planetary eco-systems?

The answer must come VERY soon.

Harvey Wasserman co-convenes the weekly Election Protection 2024 ZOOM. His People’s Spiral of US History is at www.solartopia.org.

Content Sourced from scoop.co.nz
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The Theranos Trial Shows Why We Should Be Suspicious of Nuclear Fusion

BY CHARLES SEIFE

DEC 08, 2021

Former Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes. 

Amy Osborne/Getty Images

The Theranos story is an epic tale of folly with lots of twists and turns, but it’s by no means unique. At the very same moment the play-by-play of the Elizabeth Holmes trial sprawls across the drama section of your daily paper, the pages of the business section are filled with adulatory copy regarding other science-techy startups. Inevitably, some of them will end up with financial losses that are even bigger, thanks to technology that is even shakier, business models that are more delusional, and exaggerations that are nearly as bold as anything associated with Holmes’ fiction-enhanced blood-testing company. These “startups” all promise limitless clean energy: power from nuclear fusion and a rapid transformation of our energy supply away from fossil fuels.

At this point, nobody’s claiming that there’s fraud in the fusion sector, though the exaggerated claims coming from the companies and the media are rapidly becoming as detached from reality as a Tucker Carlson monologue. Read the papers and it seems like a fusion power plant is imminent—we’re just a few years away from our first fusion generator and then to widespread commercialization. After all, that’s what the fusion companies themselves are saying. Tokamak Energy: A working power plant connected to the grid by 2030. General Fusion: Demonstration power plant beginning operations in 2025. Helion Energy: We’ll do it in 2024. First Light Fusion: Yeah, 2024. Zap Energy: 2023—so there! But if we’ve learned anything from the Theranos debacle, it’s that we can’t take any company’s claim at face value when “fake it till you make it” is a standard corporate motto.

There’s one key distinction, though. The fusioneers don’t really even have to fake anything. Unlike Theranos, which built (terribly flawed) hardware that was used to analyze patient samples, not a single one of the nuclear fusion “startups” has produced a prototype machine that they propose to base their business upon. Nobody has demonstrated that they’re even close to building a fusion device that produces—rather than consumes—energy. Luckily for them, assurances of honorable intentions have been sufficient for investors. These companies are able to trade on promises, not products. Yet despite the short history of purely commercial fusion, those promises already have a history of being broken. In 2016, Tokamak Energy promised energy production in five years. General Fusion: prototype plant within a decade—and that was in 2009. Most recently, the press went gaga in November over Helion Energy’s raising $2.2 billion in venture capital to build a working reactor by 2024. Almost none of that coverage mentioned Helion Energy’s business plan of building “a useful reactor in the next three years” way back in 2015, when it had only raised some $10 million. It’s the exact same promise, resold six years later at 200 times the price.

That’s the one real, concrete success of the fusion startups that you can point to: not extracting energy from seawater, but extracting money from speculators. If you measure scientific progress by venture capital raised, then, yes, the industry has been making huge strides. In just the past few weeks, Helion’s $2.2 billion and Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ $1.8 billion each surpassed Theranos’ estimated $1.3 billion capitalization at its peak. (And Theranos had a deal with Walgreens to show investors.) Speculators can now lose far more money chasing after fusion than they ever could by falling in thrall to Elizabeth Holmes.

Of course, fundraising isn’t a valid measure of scientific progress; however, you wouldn’t be able to tell that by reading press coverage. We now realize that media credulity helped build Theranos’ fortunes. A good, hard look at Theranos’ claims should have brought the house of cards tumbling down far earlier. Oddly, none of that seems to motivate journalists to cast a skeptical eye at the viability of the fusioneers’ technology (which ranges from the moderately plausible to the ridiculous) or their business models for making money if they are eventually able to prove their technology works (which range from the nonexistent to the nearly nonexistent).

Imagine that, against the odds, one of these startups succeeds. It manages to achieve fusion “breakeven” and get more energy out of a reaction than it puts in. Say that the excess energy is so great that all the inefficiencies of getting the reaction going (which haven’t been overcome) or capturing the energy and turning it into electricity (which most companies haven’t started to address seriously) are not a problem. Imagine, too, that the startup somehow has a patent on a key MacGuffin in the reactor that other companies with expertise in high-tech and power plant manufacturing can’t match. Then, and only then, can the company be reasonably assured of making money from energy production—if its plants bring energy to the market at a competitive price.

This last bit is far from easy. Given the overhead of building a high-tech plant that produces low-level nuclear waste that needs to be disposed of (yes, fusion produces nuclear waste!), it’s a good guess that the cost per megawatt will be at least as great as the cost of traditional fission nuclear power plants—which is quite a bit more expensive than gas- or coal-fired plant power. This isn’t to say that it won’t contribute to the nation’s energy-generating portfolio, but it’s not likely to be a game-changer or the stuff of an energy unicorn.

Yet if you listen to the rhetoric coming out of some of those fusion startups, you’re led to believe that it will be much cheaper to build, maintain, run, and decommission super-high-tech fusion plants than an equivalent coal plant. That is, it’s easier to set up a nuclear magnetic bottle and mimic the inner workings of the sun than it is to throw a rock into a raging fire. That, my friends, is bat-guano insane. As the Theranos trial is making clear, it’s not so easy to tell the difference between puffery and outright fraud. In my opinion, anyone telling investors that they’re going to produce energy at a third of the price of coal should brush up on the George Costanza defense: “It’s not a lie if you believe it.”

One of the strangest distortions about the whole fusion-energy-sector brouhaha is the way funders and business journalists treat all these fusion companies as startups. Some of them, such as Commonwealth Fusion Systems (founded 2018), aren’t too far off the mark. But others like Tokamak Energy (2009), General Fusion (2002), and TAE—the company formerly known as Tri Alpha Energy (1998)—are startups in the same sense that Cher is fresh new talent. After five, or 10, or 20 years of riding on potential, it’s time to admit that the potential wasn’t really there in the first place—at the very least, not in the way that the “startup” envisioned.

So who cares if a company sponges off VC and pretends to be a pre-IPO ingenue until it’s old enough to be drafted? Not long ago, it wouldn’t matter at all to your average investor. Only venture capitalists, angel investors, and other folks with very big wallets and a high tolerance for risk would lose money by putting cash down on a decade-old pseudo-startup without even a fully developed product to put on the market. After all, they’re supposed to be sophisticated investors who know the risks that they’re taking, and if they didn’t do due diligence, well, that’s the downside of capitalism. But the rules have changed, and now we’re all targets.

For years, only “accredited” investors—people who have high incomes or net worth, and are presumed to have a decent understanding of securities trading—were allowed to invest in unregistered securities, such as stocks in a pre-IPO company. But that changed about a decade ago, when Congress decided to allow ordinary citizens to invest in these companies via crowdfunding. There were some protections built into the law: Companies could only raise a certain amount of money through crowdfunding, limiting the public’s exposure to risk. (Of course, those protections are steadily dissolving.) So it’s no surprise that the naïve investor has become a target for fusion boosters. Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (founded in 2003 by a big-bang denialist) has been living crowdfund-to-mouth since 2014 when it raised about $200,000 with the promise of a working fusion machine by the year 2020. Its latest “stock” sale, which happened a few months ago, raised more than $2.2 million, while suggesting to investors that it would have a functional prototype within three years.

Fusion companies are giving Theranos a run for its money, yet the news coverage of them seems to be almost universally uncritical. Huge sums of money have flowed into their coffers—making Theranos’ mere billion and change look like small potatoes—in return for vague, often obviously broken promises of prototypes that fail to appear despite decades of trying. Despite the total void where a product should be, these companies are successfully convincing investors both big and small to part with their money.

Caveat empty.

Future Tense is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University that examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.