Sunday, March 19, 2023

Mind-Bending Animation Shows How The Universe Would Look if We Could See Gamma Rays

SPACE20 March 2023

An animation representing a year's worth of Fermi observations of the gamma-ray sky. (NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center/Daniel Kocevski)

Most of the light streaming through the Universe is invisible to human eyes. Beyond the mid-range wavelengths we can see, there's a whole cosmos shining in high- and low-energy radiation.

But we humans are clever little animals and have managed to build instruments that can see the light we cannot. One of these is NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, an observatory hanging out in low-Earth orbit, monitoring the sky for gamma rays, the highest-energy light in the Universe.

Fermi constantly surveils the entire sky, observing gamma-ray sources and how they change over time, providing astronomers with a map of the various producers of gamma radiation that we can detect. This data is compiled into a catalog that scientists can use to probe the production of gamma radiation.

The animation represents a year of fluctuating gamma radiation from 1,525 sources, represented by pulsing purple circles, collected between February 2022 and February 2023, with each frame representing three days' worth of observations. The larger the circle, the brighter the gamma radiation.

The yellow circle, meanwhile, represents the apparent path of the Sun across the sky for that time period.

"We were inspired to put this database together by astronomers who study galaxies and wanted to compare visible and gamma-ray light curves over long time scales," says astrophysicist Daniel Kocevski of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville.

"We were getting requests to process one object at a time. Now the scientific community has access to all the analyzed data for the whole catalog."

Fermi's field of view, with the plane of the Milky Way stretching across the center. (NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center/Daniel Kocevski)

Most of the flashing lights you see come from a type of galaxy known as blazars. These are a subset of quasar galaxies. A quasar is a galaxy with an extremely active nucleus, meaning the supermassive black hole is guzzling down material at a tremendous rate. This material is heated up by the extreme activity around the black hole so that it blares across space. Quasars emit the brightest light in the Universe.

Some of these quasars have jets of plasma launched from the galactic nucleus. As the black hole feeds, some of the material swirling around it is diverted and accelerated along the magnetic field lines outside the event horizon. When it reaches the poles, this material is launched into space at high speeds, often approaching the speed of light in a vacuum.

A blazar is a quasar whose jet is pointed at, or nearly at, Earth. Because of this orientation, the light appears even brighter across the entire spectrum. Blazars are known sources of gamma radiation, but their light fluctuates on pretty short timescales; their fluctuations can help astronomers study how these giants feed.

Combined with other data, they can also help answer questions about the Universe. For instance, only recently have detections of neutrinos made by observatories such as IceCube in Antarctica been traced back to blazar galaxies.

Blazars represent over 90 percent of the gamma-ray sources in the new addition to the Fermi gamma-ray catalog. The other objects emitting gamma radiation include a type of neutron star called pulsars, the tattered remnants of material leftover by supernova explosions, and binary systems such as binary neutron stars.

And there's the gamma-ray glow of the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, represented in the animation by a blobby orange band stretching across the center of the image. There, brighter color represents a more radiant glow.

The long-period observations will hopefully provide deeper insight into some of the phenomena associated with gamma-ray sources. For instance, tracing a neutrino to a brighter period of a blazar's activity could help narrow down the processes that produce these mysterious particles.

"Having the historical light curve database," says astrophysicist Michela Negro of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, "could lead to new multimessenger insights into past events."

And we get a hint of how we might see the Universe if we had alien eyes.

The newly updated catalog is freely available from The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.

In Israel, TV's dystopian 'Handmaids' is protest fixture

ISAAC SCHARF AND TIA GOLDENBERG
Fri, Mar 17, 2023,

Israeli women's rights activists dressed as characters in the popular television series, "The Handmaid's Tale," protest plans by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government to overhaul the judicial system, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Saturday, March 11, 2023. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg, File)

ASSOCIATED PRESS

TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — It's become an ominous fixture of the mass anti-government protests roiling Israel: a coil of women in crimson robes and white caps, walking heads bowed and hands clasped. They are dressed as characters from Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel, “The Handmaid's Tale,” and the eponymous TV series.

The women, growing in numbers as the demonstrations against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies intensify, say they are protesting to ward off what they believe will be a dark future if the government follows through on its plan to overhaul the judiciary.

“This display is a representation of the things that we fear," said Moran Zer Katzenstein, founder of the women's rights advocacy group Bonot Alternativa, or “building an alternative,” which is behind the Handmaid's protest.

"Women are going to be the first to be harmed” under the overhaul, she added.

In a move that has sparked widespread opposition, Netanyahu's government is pushing to weaken the Supreme Court and limit the independence of the judiciary, steps they say will restore power to elected legislators and make the courts less interventionist. Critics say the move upends Israel’s system of checks and balances and pushes it toward autocracy.

The overhaul has sent tens of thousands of people into the streets in protest each week.

Unmissable in the crowd are the women in red robes, turning otherwise usual protest scenes into an otherworldly sight.

Ahead of one demonstration, a group of women rode the train from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in costume, transforming the cars and the platform into what could have been a scene from the Hulu series. Another time, they encircled a central fountain in the seaside metropolis of Tel Aviv, a site that's typically home to kids in strollers and dogs on leashes. They have also blocked intersections, staying in character during the protests, keeping quiet as they walk in formation.

Their jarring appearance is meant to drive home the notion that Israel, which portrays itself as the Middle East’s lone democracy, could morph into a chilling dystopia where women are stripped of their rights.

Atwood’s 1985 novel about a futuristic patriarchal society where the robed handmaids are forced to bear children for leaders, has reemerged in recent years as a cultural touchstone thanks to the popular TV series. Its themes of female subjugation and male domination have resonated with women today who see threats in limits on abortion rights, or in Israel’s case, in the rise of its conservative, religious government.

The government, Israel's most right-wing ever, is overwhelmingly male. Only nine out of 64 members of Netanyahu’s coalition are women. Ultra-Orthodox parties, which are key components of the coalition, deny inclusion to women members entirely.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has said men and women should not be permitted to serve together in military combat units, while his governing partners have voiced support for discrimination against LGBTQ people and Palestinian citizens of Israel.

The costume, which has come to embody globally the threat to women under the patriarchy, has been used in protests elsewhere. American women opposing former President Donald Trump’s conservative Supreme Court nominees have donned the garb, as have Iranian women demonstrating in Britain in support of the protests in Iran, and Polish women calling to preserve abortion rights.

But with the crisis in Israel showing no sign of abating, the women in red have become a mainstay at protests around the country and their numbers are growing. About 1,000 women wore the robes at a recent Tel Aviv rally.

They're also getting noticed. Atwood herself has retweeted several posts about the women. And Simcha Rothman, the lawmaker and parliamentary committee head spearheading the overhaul, has criticized them, while claiming the legal changes will only strengthen women's rights in Israel.

“I am attentive to the protests and demonstrations and happy to give a response to any concern regarding the legal plan. What do I not accept? A scare campaign that incites falsely that Israel will become ‘The Handmaid’s Tale,'” he tweeted earlier this month. “The reform will not harm the protection of women.”

Zer Katzenstein, who left a career in marketing for international brands to steer the protest, said that she wouldn't count on Rothman, a religious Jew and conservative ideologue, to protect her rights.

The protest is not an exaggeration of where Israel might be headed as some have charged, but rather a warning light, she said.

“We don’t think that we (will) wake up and realize that we live in Gilead," she said, referring to the name of the fictional republic in Atwood's book.

"But we fear that it’s going to be something evolving. First here and then there and another one and another one," she added. "Our message is that we are drawing a red line and we will not let this happen, not even a bit.”

Protesters supporting women's rights dressed as characters from The Handmaid's Tale TV series attend a protest against plans by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's new government to overhaul the judicial system in the old port of Acre, north Israel, Thursday, March 16, 2023.

AP Photos/Ariel Schalit

The Future of Recycling? New Catalyst Transforms Waste into Valuable and Eco-Friendly Products

By DOE/AMES LABORATORY MARCH 18, 2023

Photo of a plastic bag underwater

A team of scientists, led by Aaron Sadow, a researcher at Ames National Laboratory, Professor of Chemistry at Iowa State University, and Director of the Institute for Cooperative Upcycling of Plastic (iCOUP), have developed a new catalyst that transforms hydrocarbons into higher-value chemicals and materials that are more recyclable and environmentally friendly. This catalyst can convert materials such as motor oil, single-use plastic bags, water or milk bottles, caps, and even natural gas into more sustainable substances.

The new catalyst is designed to add functional groups to aliphatic hydrocarbons, which are organic compounds consisting solely of hydrogen and carbon. These hydrocarbons usually do not mix with water and form separate layers due to their lack of functional groups. By incorporating functional groups into these hydrocarbon chains, the properties of the materials can be significantly altered and made more recyclable.

“Methane in natural gas is the simplest of hydrocarbons with nothing but carbon-hydrogen (CH) bonds. Oils and polymers have chains of carbon atoms, linked by carbon-carbon (CC) bonds,” Sadow explained.

Aliphatic hydrocarbons make up a lot of petroleum and refined petroleum products, such as plastics and motor oils. These materials “don’t have other functional groups, which means they are not easy to biodegrade,” Sadow said. “So, it has long been a goal in the field of catalysis to be able to take these kinds of materials and add other atoms, such as oxygen, or build new structures from these simple chemicals.”

Unfortunately, the conventional way to add atoms to hydrocarbon chains requires considerable energy inputs. First petroleum is “cracked” with heat and pressure into small building blocks. Next, those building blocks are used to grow chains. Finally, the desired atoms are added at the end of the chains. In this new approach, existing aliphatic hydrocarbons are converted directly without cracking and at low temperatures.

Sadow’s team previously used a catalyst to break the CC bonds in these hydrocarbon chains and simultaneously attached aluminum to the ends of the smaller chains. Next, they inserted oxygen or other atoms to introduce functional groups. To develop a complementary process, the team found a way to avoid the CC bond-breaking step. “Depending on the starting material’s chain length and the desired properties of the product, we might want to shorten chains or simply add the oxygen functional group,” Sadow said. “If we could avoid the CC cleavage, we could, in principle, just transfer the chains from the catalyst to aluminum and then add air to install the functional group.”

Sadow explained that the catalyst is synthesized by attaching a commercially available zirconium compound onto commercially available silica-alumina. The substances are all earth-abundant and inexpensive, which is beneficial for potential future commercial applications.

Additionally, the catalyst and reactant are advantageous in terms of sustainability and cost. Aluminum is the most abundant metal on earth, and the aluminum reactant used is synthesized without creating waste by-products. The zirconium alkoxide-based catalyst precursor is air-stable, readily available, and activated in the reactor. “So unlike a lot of early organometallic chemistry that’s extremely air sensitive, this catalyst precursor is easy to handle,” Sadow said.

This chemistry is a step towards being able to affect the physical properties of a variety of plastics, such as making them stronger and easier to color. “As we develop the catalysis more, we expect that we’ll be able to incorporate more and more functional groups to affect the physical properties of the polymers,” Sadow said.

Sadow credited the success of this project to the collaborative nature of iCOUP. Perras’ group at Ames National Laboratory studied catalyst structures using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. Coates’, LaPointe’s, and Delferro’s groups from Cornell University and Argonne National Laboratory investigated polymer structure and physical properties. And Peters’ group at the University of Illinois statistically modeled polymer functionalization. “Project successes in the center build on contributions of many groups’ expertise,” Sadow said. “This work highlights the benefits of team science.”

Reference: “Zirconium-Catalyzed C–H Alumination of Polyolefins, Paraffins, and Methane” by Uddhav Kanbur, Alexander L. Paterson, Jessica Rodriguez, Andrew L. Kocen, Ryan Yappert, Ryan A. Hackler, Yi-Yu Wang, Baron Peters, Massimiliano Delferro, Anne M. LaPointe, Geoffrey W. Coates, Frédéric A. Perras and Aaron D. Sadow, 25 January 2023, Journal of the American Chemical Society.
DOI: 10.1021/jacs.2c11056

The work has also been featured in JACS Spotlight, “A Versatile New Tool for Making Commodity Chemicals.”

The research was conducted by the Institute for Cooperative Upcycling of Plastics (iCOUP), led by Ames National Laboratory. iCOUP is an Energy Frontier Research Center consisting of scientists from Ames National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, UC Santa Barbara, University of South Carolina, Cornell University, Northwestern University, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Northern Ont. First Nation celebrates mining agreement, water treatment plant

Published March 17, 2023

Biigtigong Nishnaabeg -- a northern Ontario First Nation community situated between Wawa and Thunder Bay near Highway 17 – has much to celebrate on a snowy winter Friday.

A hybrid event hosted at the reserve and online through Zoom due to inclement winter weather was attended by band members, mining and government officials.

NEW WATER TREATMENT PLANT

Unlike the 28 First Nation communities in Canada still under long-term drinking water advisories, Biigtigong Nishnaabeg has never been without clean drinking water.

However, a new raw water intake and treatment plant is being constructed on the northern Ontario territory, the First Nation announced Friday by Chief Duncan Michano and federal Indigenous services minister Patty Hajdu.

The new plant will provide a safe and reliable source of potable water for more than 168 homes and many non-residential buildings. It will be capable of meeting the community's current and future needs.

It is expected to cost about $58 million and should be operational by November 2024.

"Biigtigong Nishnaabeg is very pleased to see the beginning stages of our water project come to life," Michano said.

"It is also essential infrastructure for the future growth of our community. This project has allowed our community to secure a basic need for many generations to come."

Also sometimes known as Ojibways of the Pic River First Nation, it has 1,279 registered members as of December with 530 living on reserve.

COMMUNITY BENEFITS AGREEMENT

The community has come to an agreement with Generation Mining on the Marathon palladium-copper project located nearby detailing the benefits the First Nation will receive and how the impacts will be mitigated.

"It includes commitments from the Company regarding environmental management, employment, training and education, business opportunities, social and cultural support, and financial participation," the mining company said in a news release in January.

A ratification vote was held Nov. 12 on the agreement and 251 members voted "yes," while 30 voted no.

The approval from both federal and provincial governments allowing the project to proceed was announced at the end of November.

"The government decisions validate the work done to date to develop the Marathon Project as a sustainable, environmentally sensitive, low-cost producer of critical metals that are needed to support emissions controls and the transition to a greener economy," Generation Mining said.

Jamie Levy, the CEO of Generation Mining, said the mine will supply the critical minerals needed for the electric vehicle industry, bringing jobs and prosperity to the region.

Biigtigong Nishnaabeg

38 years after standing up to a logging company, this First Nation is still fighting for old-growth forests

The Tla-o-qui-aht took stewardship of their territory back and are protecting it for the future

Stephanie Kwetásel’wet Wood · CBC Docs · Posted: Mar 17, 2023

A misty scene of a lake surrounded by mountains. — Kennedy Lake resides in the Tla-o-qui-aht territory. (Steph Kwetásel'wet Wood / The Narwhal)

Saya Masso stands in front of a culturally modified tree, looking up into the canopy that disappears into the sky above us. It has two massive crevices down its trunk, leaving a large smooth block in the middle of otherwise bumpy bark. This smooth block was left after Tla-o-qui-aht (ƛaʔuukʷiʔatḥ) people cut planks from the tree for a longhouse hundreds of years ago — a way of harvesting the wood they needed while preserving a living tree for centuries to come.

"I really wanted to show you this tree as an example of the traditional laws that led to our system of abundance and the vibrancy of our people," says Masso, a husband, father of three, and the lands and resource director for the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation.

Masso is just one of the people I met while filming War for the Woods, a documentary from The Nature of Things.

Tla-o-qui-aht ḥaḥuułi (territory) is on the west coast of Vancouver Island, facing the wide expanse of the Pacific Ocean. The area, with its ancient forests and sweeping beaches, draws thousands of tourists every year, many flocking to the tourism hub of Tofino. Tla-o-qui-aht people have lived there for about 10,000 years.

But it's not just tourism this area is known for. Logging has shaped — and decimated — much of the landscape, threatening the livelihoods of the Tla-o-qui-aht and other Nuu-chah-nulth people. As the trees vanished, so did their ability to access food, engage in spiritual practices, and maintain connections with cedar, salmon and other relations.

An Indigenous man wearing a green shirt and a hat stands in a forest, smiling. — Saya Masso is the lands and resource director for the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation and helped to create the tribal park guardians program. (Jeffrey Burnett)

So they fought back. In 1984, Nuu-chah-nulth people famously turned away B.C.-based logging company MacMillan Bloedel, which planned to clear cut old-growth forests — including trees that were estimated to be over 1,000 years old on Wah-nuh-jus–Hilthoois (Meares Island). It was the first major logging blockade in Canadian history and the beginning of a series of blockades in Clayoquot Sound known as the war in the woods.

While the media's attention turned away after the conflict ended in the 1990s, the story continued. The Tla-o-qui-aht have spent the years since grappling with how to approach logging and push for conservation amid the provincial government's restrictions. They are advocating for logging strategies that preserve old-growth and avoid clear cutting while still providing wealth and abundance.

Pushing toward a conservation economy instead of an extractive one

The Meares Island blockade led to the Tla-o-qui-aht establishing Wah-nuh-jus–Hilthoois Tribal Park in 1984. Every Indigenous government that has tribal parks may have its own definition, but to the Tla-o-qui-aht, it means lands and waters that are "protected by ƛaʔuukʷiʔatḥ laws, rights and title," and stewarded and cared for by tribal park guardians.

By 2014, Tla-o-qui-aht declared all of its territory protected within four tribal parks, and Masso helped to create a robust guardians program so their people could be out on the land stewarding their homelands.

Terry Dorward was 12 years old when the Ahousaht and Tla-o-qui-aht First Nations stood up against MacMillan Bloedel. He remembers marching in Victoria with his late uncle Ee-wah-nulth, or Ray Seitcher Sr., as a formative experience for his political growth. They marched in 1984, only shortly after Christie Student Residence closed in 1983.

"We were really defying Canadian law. I think that really instilled an awareness, [a] consciousness of, 'I have a role to do in life,'" Dorward said.

"What I remember is just … feeling extremely proud of being Nuu-chah-nulth."

Dorward is the Tla-o-qui-aht's former tribal parks project coordinator. The tribal park guardians are out on the territory almost every day. Their work is grounded in the Nuu-chah-nulth principle of hishukish ts'awalk: everything is one.

Terry Dorward stands in a grove of small trees wearing a shirt with "Guardian" written on the back. — Terry Dorward is the Tla-o-qui-aht’s former tribal parks project coordinator. He hopes the guardian program provides opportunities for young people to work on the land. (Stephanie Kwetásel'wet Wood / The Narwhal)

The funding for their work comes from Tla-o-qui-aht's Tribal Park Allies program. Businesses that join the program agree to be good stewards, and ask for a one per cent fee from their clients that goes to Tribal Park Regional Services, known as an ecosystem service fee. The fee allows the guardians to maintain a functioning ecosystem, which also supports a robust local economy.

Tourism in Tofino is propelled by its cultivated reputation for pristine beaches, forests and wildlife, and the town generates millions in revenues each year. Tla-o-qui-aht has spent years explaining to the public how Tofino profits off Indigenous land, and the tribal parks team has had some success encouraging locals to pay their share, Dorward said.

According to Masso, about a quarter of Tofino businesses participate in the Tribal Park Allies program, and in 2021, they contributed $277,260 to support the guardians' stewardship. The nation aims to get 100 per cent of businesses on board to keep the land healthy for everyone.

As the guardians program grows, Dorward hopes it will open up opportunities for young people to work on the land in roles like tree planting, restoration and education. The programs' funds also will support language and youth programs, he said. Masso hopes the funds will also go toward improved health-care, a language program and a longhouse.

"Our people understand that in order to be politically sovereign, with no strings attached with the government, we have to be economically independent," Dorward said.

Stephanie Kwetásel'wet Wood is a Sḵwx̱wú7mesh journalist who reports on Indigenous rights, sustainability and social justice for The Narwhal.

US utility firms spent big preparing power grid for storms – and still failed

Electric utilities spent billions after 2014’s polar vortex to ensure power plants and the grid could handle extreme cold, but this winter it still wasn’t enough

Kristi E Swartz for Floodlight
Sun 19 Mar 2023

The warnings to residents in the south-east US came right before Christmas: delay washing clothes or running the dishwasher, and curb hot water use until the bitterly cold temperatures eased up.

It still wasn’t enough for two of the nation’s largest electric utilities.

As temperatures plummeted to 40F (4.4C) in a few hours and gale force winds swept across the region between 23 and 24 December, the pre-holiday preparations were put on pause as Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and Duke Energy implemented historic rolling blackouts lasting about 30 minutes to an hour.

By some accounts the utilities’ inability to supply power during the extreme weather almost plunged the entire eastern US into darkness. And in some parts of the country, as much as 63% of the outages came from natural gas plants, according to the PJM Interconnection, an organization that operates the largest regional power grid in the US.

The near miss came after those two utilities, among others, spent billions preparing the grid for such a storm after the 2014 polar vortex, when record cold weather exposed vulnerabilities in the power grid. Yet, despite those investments, when the cold hit again last year, equipment at natural gas and coal-powered plants throughout the south-east still froze.

Clean energy advocates and grid experts argue the December weather proved the growing number of natural gas plants, which now supply more than one-third of the nation’s electricity, are not the right choice to deal with extreme weather and are delaying a move to less climate-polluting alternatives.

Despite that, Duke, Southern Company, TVA and others are looking past that argument and building more gas plants anyway. “They don’t seem to see the writing on the wall that gas is not this [dependable], reliable resource,” said Maggie Shober, research director at the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

Yet, some say natural gas is the best option for right now, as utilities close older power plants and add more renewables, steps that upend the traditional power grid.

“Gas, nuclear, coal are sometimes less reliable, but they are more reliable than renewables,” said Paul Patterson, a financial analyst with Glenrock Associates LLC who follows utilities.

Elected officials and industry experts have formed a blue-ribbon panel to study what went wrong across TVA’s seven-state territory during the storm, and Duke officials told its state regulators in January it has started an internal review.

What happened?

Because the demand for electricity was so high compared to the supply of electricity, a wide swath of the nation’s power grid was at risk for extensive blackouts that could have been as severe as the north-east blackout in August 2003, one Duke Energy executive told a hearing.

Had Duke not purposely reduced the amount of energy demand pulling on its grid, the stability of the Eastern Interconnection – the bulk electric system that stretches from central Canada to Florida and west towards the Rockies – was at risk, said Sam Holman, Duke’s vice-president of transmission and system operations at a January hearing of North Carolina’s utility regulator.

He compared the possible outcome to what did happen during the north-east blackout in August 2003. “Allowing the physics to solve the problem was what we were defending against in [Duke’s territories] when we made the decision to shed load,” he said.

Steam rises from the cooling towers of Duke Energy’s coal-fired power plant in Crystal River, Florida.

Photograph: Dane Rhys/Reuters

If Duke and others had not done rolling blackouts, they put the grid at risk, “and that risk comes in the form of an uncontrolled loss of the system,” Holman said. “We weren’t the only ones, there were others that were struggling during this same period of time,” said Holman, “Everybody was tight [on electricity supplies]. There were just no purchases to make.”

Like Duke, TVA said it proactively implemented a multi-step plan to ensure grid stability that included asking customers to conserve electricity and cut power to large industrial companies before turning to rolling blackouts, a spokesperson said.

“TVA and the local power companies were extremely successful in implementing the plan to safeguard the bulk electric grid,” TVA spokesperson Scott Fiedler said.

Southern did not comment on whether the severity of the challenges to the power grid threatened the Eastern grid as a whole.

The plants that were running used so much natural gas that pressure declined in the pipelines, causing problems for other utilities that needed gas. “I don’t think (the electric companies) have really taken into consideration how extreme cold and extreme heat is going to put a stress on their gas plants or the coal fleet,” said David Neal, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center.

As plants began to fail, south-east utilities looked to purchase additional power from the north-east and Midwest. But that demand exceeded the supply as Christmas neared and temperatures dropped.

The problems were on top of a hi-tech software failure that miscalculated how much electricity would be needed. The software’s computer models told utilities they had plenty of power for the storm. But utilities now say the software’s predictions were off by as much as 10%, leaving them with a demand they were unaware of and unable to fill.

“It was a mess,” said Simon Mahan, executive director of the Southern Renewable Energy Association (SREA), who closely followed the storm’s effect on the power grid and collected data from government and other sources to show its impact.

With electricity demand higher than expected and power plants not working, utilities had limited – and few cheap – options. So, some utilities started running their power plants on another type of fossil fuel: oil. “They end up running even more polluting fuel to try to mitigate those price spikes,” said Neal, of the Southern Environmental Law Center.

Polar vortex lessons

This wasn’t the first time such a systemic failure occurred because of extreme weather. The 2014 polar vortex similarly caused the system to freeze and knocked dozens of plants offline. After that, utilities said they needed two things to prevent a repeat: a more resilient power grid and more power plants.

With the blessing of state regulators, the companies spent or are spending billions on the electric system to improve it: $75bn for Duke Energy to create a stronger grid, $17bn for Southern Company to improve older power lines and $18bn for TVA to upgrade its power plants and fix older power lines.

“Our commissions expect us to plan to these extremes,” said Stan Connally Jr, chief executive of Southern Company Services, a unit of Southern Company that, among other things, oversees the utility’s entire power grid.

After utilities build new plants, they keep some older plants, including older coal or oil plants, to operate when demand is highest. After the polar vortex, the industry said they needed more “just in case” plants, with some electric companies in the south-east asking to have at least one-quarter of their power plants on backup.

Following the storm, Alabama Power, owned by Southern Company, decided to build one huge power plant, buy two others and purchase electricity from a third to increase the amount of “just in case” power. All of the plants are powered by natural gas.
Leaning on gas

While advocates argue over-reliance on gas is a big problem with the grid, utilities and regulators say gas plants have fewer emissions than coal plants, cost billions less to build than nuclear, and can run more often than renewable energy.

Over the last seven years, gas has replaced coal as the dominant source of power across the nation, and utilities are adamant it must remain a significant fuel source for the power grid for decades to come.

“Natural gas has to have a place in this conversation,” Connally said.

Indeed, people are talking about natural gas after the December freeze – but not in the way the utility industry would like. More than two dozen gas plants didn’t work as expected across the eastern half of the US, which contributed to the rolling blackouts.

Utilities like TVA are staying the course. TVA has plans for a large natural gas plant to replace an old coal plant, a proposal the Environmental Protection Agency argues is in opposition to Joe Biden’s climate goals.

“It’s the best overall solution,” said Jeff Lyash, TVA’s CEO.

The storm highlighted the risk of significant weather events – and the need for the utility industry to adapt
Jeff Lyash, TVA’s CEO

Grid experts want utilities and their regulators to look at other options before immediately turning to more natural gas plants.

Mahan at SREA said if there had been more solar on the grid in December, it would have shortened the length of the blackouts or reduced the number of people impacted.

Electric utilities disagreed: electricity demand was at its highest in the early morning before the sun came up, which meant it was too dark for solar to work.

But observers say utilities must find another solution.

“I think that’s just a Band-Aid,” said Ari Peskoe, Electricity Law Initiative director at the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law program, of the natural gas plants.

Lyash at TVA said he hopes investigations highlight new ways utilities can work with agencies on how to make the grid even stronger.

“The storm highlighted the risk of significant weather events – and the need for the utility industry to adapt,” he said.

TVA immediately identified 240 steps it could take to make its power grid stronger and completed roughly 80 percent of them immediately, Lyash said at a February meeting. There are still long-term, more complicated questions to answer, Lyash said, such as whether the utility relies too much on importing power from its neighbors.

“We want to take immediate action to ensure that in the same event we wouldn’t have the same problem,” Lyash said. “That’s not to say there’s not work left to be done … this falls into a resiliency category.”

3M
Residents of Belgian town living through nightmare of 'forever chemical' pollution

By Gregoire Lory • Updated: 13/03/2023

3M factory in Zwijndrecht, Antwerp - Copyright DAVID PINTENS/fotodp.be

Residents of a small town in Belgium are experiencing a living nightmare, as they deal with the knowledge that the land around them is contaminated with so-called "forever chemicals", otherwise known as Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs).

Zwijndrecht, situated in a Flemish district near the city of Antwerp, is one of Europe's main hot spots for areas contaminated with PFAS chemicals - notorious for their indestructible nature and extremely slow degradation rates.

Local inhabitants say that the multinational company 3M is responsible for the contamination, given that they have a chemical plant in the area that processes PFASs. The area's residents have been advised to stop eating the fruit, vegetables and eggs produced there.

But this caution goes beyond just food, according to Vincent Deleu, a resident of Zwijndrecht.

"We are asked not to work with our bare hands in the soil," Deleu said in an interview.

"There are people, like my wife, who work the land with gloves. We are also asked to 'be careful, [for] grandchildren [to] play in the grass. Don't overdo it. Climb trees. Be careful!' In the end we can't do anything else."

He no longer sells his eggs, but does not want to sacrifice his 300 fruit trees and three vegetable gardens.

This is despite the fact that PFAS, which are found in water and soil, can lead to an increased risk of cancer and thyroid disease and can also lead to a reduced immune response to vaccines in children.

Deleu even speaks of some residents discussing suicide.

"Other people who have a beautiful garden say: 'Listen, I don't go out in my garden anymore. I don't go out at all - at all," he said.

"There are people who have had a burnout. There are people who have sometimes used the word 'suicide'. There hasn't been a case of suicide, let's be honest. But there are people who are really scared."

PFAS chemicals are used in the textile, automotive and electronics industries for non-stick coatings on stoves, fire-fighting foams and rainwear.

Toon Penen, another resident of Zwijndrecht, described to Euronews how bad the situation really is.

"The site of 3M is indeed the biggest polluter - I think even in Europe, I think for PFAS, even worldwide has the most concentration," Penen said.

"The concentrations here are never seen ever again. It's the same like the concentrations in the blood of the people in Zwijndrecht - it's also the highest that scientists have ever seen in a human being."

When contacted by Euronews, 3M said that it will "work to discontinue the use of PFAS across its product portfolio by the end of 2025", adding that it "does not change 3M’s long-standing position that the company has and continues to act responsibly".

The American group reached an agreement last year with the Flemish government to invest €571 million in the area, including €250 million to identify priority remedial actions.

Just last month, the European Chemical Agency, the EU body responsible for managing such substances, laid out proposals that would effectively ban the use and production of around 10,000 PFAS chemicals.

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Do universes pop up as bubbles from a multiverse?

The multiverse: our universe is suspiciously unlikely to exist – unless it is one of many

arda savasciogullari/Shutterstock

THE CONVERSATION
Published: March 15, 2023 7.31am EDT

It’s easy to envisage other universes, governed by slightly different laws of physics, in which no intelligent life, nor indeed any kind of organised complex systems, could arise. Should we therefore be surprised that a universe exists in which we were able to emerge?

That’s a question physicists including me have tried to answer for decades. But it is proving difficult. Although we can confidently trace cosmic history back to one second after the Big Bang, what happened before is harder to gauge. Our accelerators simply can’t produce enough energy to replicate the extreme conditions that prevailed in the first nanosecond.

But we expect that it’s in that first tiny fraction of a second that the key features of our universe were imprinted.

The conditions of the universe can be described through its “fundamental constants” – fixed quantities in nature, such as the gravitational constant (called G) or the speed of light (called C). There are about 30 of these representing the sizes and strengths of parameters such as particle masses, forces or the universe’s expansion. But our theories don’t explain what values these constants should have. Instead, we have to measure them and plug their values into our equations to accurately describe nature.

This is article is accompanied by a podcast series called Great Mysteries of Physics which uncovers the greatest mysteries facing physicists today – and discusses the radical proposals for solving them.

The values of the constants are in the range that allows complex systems such as stars, planets, carbon and ultimately humans to evolve. Physicists have discovered that if we tweaked some of these parameters by just a few percent, it would render our universe lifeless. The fact that life exists therefore takes some explaining.

Some argue it is just a lucky coincidence. An alternative explanation, however, is that that we live in a multiverse, containing domains with different physical laws and values of fundamental constants. Most might be wholly unsuitable for life. But a few should, statistically speaking, be life-friendly.
Impending revolution?

What is the extent of physical reality? We’re confident that it’s more extensive than the domain that astronomers can ever observe, even in principle. That domain is definitely finite. That’s essentially because, like on the ocean, there’s a horizon that we can’t see beyond. And just as we don’t think the ocean stops just beyond our horizon, we expect galaxies beyond the limit of our observable universe. In our accelerating universe, our remote descendants will also never be able to observe them.

Most physicists would agree there are galaxies that we can’t ever see, and that these outnumber the ones we can observe. If they stretched far enough, then everything we could ever imagine happening may be repeated over and over. Far beyond the horizon, we could all have avatars.

This vast (and mainly unobservable) domain would be the aftermath of “our” Big Bang – and would probably be governed by the same physical laws that prevail in the parts of the universe we can observe. But was our Big Bang the only one?

The theory of inflation, which suggests that the early universe underwent a period when it doubled in size every trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second has genuine observational support. It accounts for why the universe is so large and smooth, except for fluctuations and ripples that are the “seeds” for galaxy formation.

But physicists including Andrei Linde have shown that, under some specific but plausible assumptions about the uncertain physics at this ancient era, there would be an “eternal” production of Big Bangs – each giving rise to a new universe.

String theory, which is an attempt to unify gravity with the laws of microphysics, conjectures everything in the universe is made up of tiny, vibrating strings. But it makes the assumption that there are more dimensions than the ones we experience. These extra dimensions, it suggests, are compacted so tightly together that we don’t notice them all. And each type of compactification could create a universe with different microphysics – so other Big Bangs, when they cool down, could be governed by different laws.

The “laws of nature” may therefore, in this still grander perspective, be local by-laws governing our own cosmic patch.

We can only see a fraction of the universe.

NASA/James Webb telescope

If physical reality is like this, then there’s a real motivation to explore “counterfactual” universes – places with different gravity, different physics and so forth – to explore what range or parameters would allow complexity to emerge, and which would lead to sterile or “stillborn” cosmos. Excitingly, this is ongoing, with recent reseach suggesting you could imagine universes that are even more friendly to life than our own. Most “tweakings” of the physical constants, however, would render a universe stillborn.

Read more: Great Mysteries of Physics 2: is the universe fine-tuned for life?

That said, some don’t like the concept of the multiverse. They worry it would render the hope for a fundamental theory to explain the constants as vain as Kepler’s numerological quest to relate planetary orbits to nested platonic solids.

But our preferences are irrelevant to the way physical reality actually is – so we should surely be open minded to the possibility of an imminent grand cosmological revolution. First we had the Copernican realisation that the Earth wasn’t the centre of the Solar System – it revolves around the Sun. Then we realised that there are zillions of planetary systems in our galaxy, and that there are zillions of galaxies in our observable universe.

So could it be that our observable domain – indeed our Big Bang – is a tiny part of a far larger and possibly diverse ensemble?

Physics or metaphysics?

How do we know just how atypical our universe is? To answer that we need to work out the probabilities of each combination of constants. And that’s a can of worms that we can’t yet open – it will have to await huge theoretical advances.

We don’t ultimately know if there are other Big Bangs. But they’re not just metaphysics. We might one day have reasons to believe that they exist.

Specifically, if we had a theory that described physics under the extreme conditions of the ultra-early Big Bang – and if that theory had been corroborated in other ways, for instance by deriving some unexplained parameters in the standard model of particle physics – then if it predicted multiple Big Bangs, we should take it seriously.

Critics sometimes argue that the multiverse is unscientific because we can’t ever observe other universes. But I disagree. We can’t observe the interior of black holes, but we believe what physicist Roger Penrose says about what happens there – his theory has gained credibility by agreeing with many things we can observe.

About 15 years ago, I was on a panel at Stanford where we were asked how seriously we took the multiverse concept – on the scale “would you bet your goldfish, your dog, or your life” on it. I said I was nearly at the dog level. Linde said he’d almost bet his life. Later, on being told this, physicist Steven Weinberg said he’d “happily bet Martin Rees’ dog and Andrei Linde’s life”.

Sadly, I suspect Linde, my dog and I will all be dead before we have an answer.

Indeed, we can’t even be sure we’d understand the answer – just as quantum theory is too difficult for monkeys. It’s conceivable that machine intelligence could explore the geometrical intricacies of some string theories and spew out, for instance, some generic features of the standard model. We’d then have confidence in the theory and take its other predictions seriously.

But we’d never have the “aha” insight moment that’s the greatest satisfaction for a theorist. Physical reality at its deepest level could be so profound that its elucidation would have to await posthuman species – depressing or exhilarating as that may be, according to taste. But it’s no reason to dismiss the multiverse as unscientific.

Author

Martin Rees
Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics, University of Cambridge

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Sunday, March 19, 2023

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