It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Monday, July 10, 2023
OMERS PENSION IS THE SHAREHOLDER
Thames Water secures £750 million cash injection from shareholders By Peter Davison 10 July 2023 Thames Water workers using high pressure water jets to clear a blockage
Thames Water has secured £750 million from its shareholders as it fights to fight off nationalisation.
The news came in an announcement to the London Stock Exchange today (Monday). The company said it aims to raise a further £2.5 billion between 2025 and 2030.
Thames Water's future came under the spotlight in June when its chief executive Sarah Bentley unexpectedly stepped down after just two years in the role.
There was speculation that the Reading-headquartered utilities giant – which serves 15 million customers in Swindon & Wiltshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, and in London – could be taken into temporary nationalisation if it could not service its £14 billion debts.
In annual results published today, the firm reported an underlying pre-tax loss of £82.6m for the year to 31 March.
4 days ago ... The Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS) and British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (BCI) own 31.8 per cent and and ...
3 days ago ... As well as owning a direct stake in Thames Water, the Canadian pension fund also manages stakes in the water company owned by several large ...
By Jessie Yeung, CNN Published 12:00 AM EDT, Tue July 11, 2023 A volcanic eruption emits smoke and flowing lava south of Reykjavik, Iceland on July 10, 2023.
Kristinn Magnusson/AFP/Getty Images CNN —
A volcanic eruption south of Iceland’s capital Reykjavik is sending plumes of smoke across a region known for its sweeping lava fields, volcanoes and geothermal activity.
The Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO) said the “minor” eruption began Monday in Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula but no ash has been emitted and so far no disruption has been reported at the country’s Keflavik Airport.
The IMO said there was a 200-meter (656 feet) long fissure on the slopes of the Litli Hrútur mountain, “from which lava is emerging as a series of fountains.”
Scientists had warned of possible eruptions after hundreds of minor earthquakes were detected in recent weeks.
Streams of lava near Litli Hrutur, Iceland, on July 10, 2023.
Kristinn Magnusson/AFP/Getty Images
Photos show streams of lava flowing along the dark fields, with small fires in the distance and thick smoke billowing in the air.
Since the eruption took place in an uninhabited area, there were no “immediate risks” to communities or infrastructure, the IMO said – but it warned people not to venture near the area, saying there will be an accumulation of “dangerously high levels of volcanic gases.”
The wind will carry some of these gases north, potentially affecting several areas including the Icelandic capital, the IMO said.
Observers from the University of Iceland watch a volcanic eruption near Litli Hrutur, Iceland on July 10, 2023.
Kristinn Magnusson/AFP/Getty Images
The Reykjanes Peninsula regional destination management office also issued a warning about gas levels on Monday.
In a statement, the office said the peninsula’s police chief ordered the closure of all trails to the volcano due to “massive gas pollution that is life-threatening,” after speaking with scientists.
Authorities are working to restore access to the volcano once the pollution dies down, it added.
Several days ago, the management office warned hikers in the region to be careful, noting that the recent seismic activity looked similar to the lead-up to another volcanic eruption last year.
Volcano Begins Erupting In An Uninhabited Valley In Southwest Iceland The area, known broadly as Fagradalsfjall volcano, has erupted twice in the last two years without causing damage or disruptions to flights despite being near Keflavik Airport, Iceland's international air traffic hub.
Volcano Begins Erupting In Southwest Iceland
Photo: AP/PTI
LAILA TYABJI
AP UPDATED: 11 JUL 2023 10:38 AM A volcano in southwestern Iceland began erupting Monday, the country's meteorological authorities said, 11 months after its last eruption officially ended. The eruption is in an uninhabited valley near the mountain Litli-Hrútur, some 30 kilometers (19 miles) southwest of the capital, Reykjavik. The area, known broadly as Fagradalsfjall volcano, has erupted twice in the last two years without causing damage or disruptions to flights despite being near Keflavik Airport, Iceland's international air traffic hub. The airport remained open Monday and no flights were affected. “The lava fissure appears small at first sight,” television reporter Kristjan Unnarsson, who was aboard a helicopter about an hour after the eruption began Monday afternoon, told viewers. Authorities urged people not to trek to the volcano. “It is not a little hike,” Kristin Gudmundsdottir, a natural hazard specialist at the Met Office, told The Associated Press. “We need to wait and see how the eruption develops.” A 2021 eruption in the same area produced spectacular lava flows for several months. Hundreds of thousands people flocked to see the spectacular sight. Iceland, which sits above a volcanic hotspot in the North Atlantic, averages an eruption every four to five years. The most disruptive in recent times was the 2010 eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano, which spewed huge clouds of ash into the atmosphere and led to widespread airspace closures over Europe. More than 100,000 flights were grounded, stranding millions of international travellers and causing air travel for days because of concerns the ash could damage jet engines.
Iceland Monitors New Volcanic Eruption
Larger eruptions have disrupted European air travel, but officials said this small one, in an uninhabited area that until recently had been dormant for centuries, posed no immediate risks.
This image provided by the government of Iceland shows lava flowing as a volcano erupts on the Reykjanes peninsula in southwest Iceland, near the capital Reykjavik on Monday.
Credit...Icelandic Meteorological Office via Reuters
By Orlando Mayorquin July 10, 2023,
A minor volcanic eruption began on Monday afternoon in an uninhabited area on Iceland’s Reykjanes Peninsula, the country’s weather officials said.
The eruption, which began at 4:40 p.m. U.T.C., was described as small and posing “no immediate risks to communities or infrastructure,” the Icelandic Met Office said.
It is in a zone that rests between the Fagradalsfjall and Keilir volcanic mountains, roughly 20 miles from the country’s coastal capital, Reykjavik, the office said.
Lava was emerging as “a series of fountains” and flowing south from a fissure on the slope of a hill called Litli Hrútur, officials said. Toxic gas and steam emissions from the fissure were drifting to the northwest, according to officials.
The public was warned to stay away from the eruption as officials continue to assess its development in the coming days.
Situated on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the sparsely populated island nation, home to 370,000 people, has a large quantity of volcanic features. Major eruptions have caused havoc far beyond Iceland in the past.
In 2010, ashes from a volcanic eruption there shrouded much of Europe’s skies, causing a major disruption of air travel over much of the continent. And in 1783, an eight-month-long eruption of a volcanic fissure sent haze as far away as Syria and triggered a famine.
Scientists at the Icelandic Met Office had warned of a potential eruption as the area became a hotbed of seismic activity over the past week. Officials reported thousands of earthquakes in the region, with some reaching magnitudes of 4 and 5. Iceland has now seen eruptions on the Reykjanes Peninsula three years in a row.
Earthquake activity also preceded eruptions in 2021 and 2022, officials said. Last year, three tourists were injured when they tried to hike near the site of the eruption to catch a glimpse of the lava.
Volcanic activity in the Reykjanes Peninsula had been “pretty quiet for hundreds of years before these eruptions started,” according to Egill Hauksson, a research professor of geophysics at Caltech who has studied Icelandic seismic activity.
“So this may be a new cycle of activity that may continue for decades,” he added.
Officials said the fissure in this eruption was roughly one kilometer long.
It was unclear Monday if the eruption was expected to grow or how long it would last. They often peak after the first few days, Mr. Hauksson said.
The eruption last year fizzled out after about three weeks. But another eruption that began in March 2021 dragged on for months, according to the United States Geological Survey.
Icelandic volcano erupts near capital Reykjavik
Volcanologists believe the site's new cycle of increased activity could last years The volcanic eruption near Litli Hrutur, south-west of Reykjavik, Iceland, on July 10. AFP Soraya Ebrahimi
Jul 10, 2023 A volcano erupted about 30km from the Icelandic capital of Reykjavik on Monday, the country's meteorological office said. It is the volanco's third eruption in two years, with local media footage showing a massive cloud of smoke rising from the ground and a substantial flow of lava at the site. The smoke can be seen from the road connecting the capital to the international airport, with cars pulled over and people taking pictures, AFP reported. UAE sends aid to Philippines after Mayon volcano displaces thousands "The eruption is taking place in a small depression just north of Litli Hrutur ['Little Ram' in Icelandic] from which smoke is escaping in a north-westerly direction," the meteorological office said. Thorvaldur Thordarson, professor in volcanology at the University of Iceland, told AFP: "There are three fissures with lava basically running in all directions. Prof Thordarson said the fissures were in total about 200 to 300 metres long. "It is a low-intensity, effusive eruption," he said. This means "it's not causing widespread threats due to explosive activity" but "if the eruption continues for long enough it could be a threat to infrastructure". Thousands of small earthquakes were recorded in the area in the week leading up to the eruption, indicating that the magma below the ground was moving and an eruption was imminent. The Icelandic authorities advised against going to the site, which is in difficult terrain without road connections, before they have assessed the situation. The magma broke through the ground about 4.40pm, just a few kilometres from two previous eruptions in the past two years. The first was on March 19, 2021, in the Geldingadalur valley and lasted six months, while the second occurred on August 3, 2022, in the Meradalir valley, lasting three weeks. Before the 2021 eruption, the region had remained dormant for eight centuries, but volcanologists believe the new cycle of increased activity could last several years. The effusive eruptions that have occurred in this area so far have not been very dangerous, and they have not had any effect on air traffic. The 2021 and 2022 eruptions attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors hoping to catch a rare glimpse of an active volcano. Prof Thordarson said the eruption could last from "a few days" to more than half a year like in 2021, or even longer. Iceland has 33 volcanic systems considered active, the highest number in Europe. It has an eruption every five years on average. The North Atlantic island straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a crack in the ocean floor separating the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates. In April 2010, about 100,000 flights were cancelled, leaving more than 10 million travellers stranded, after the massive eruption of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano. Other volcanoes, such as Askja in the uninhabited highlands of central Iceland, have recently shown signs of activity. One of the country's most dangerous volcanoes is Katla, near the south coast. It last erupted in 1918, with an unusually long pause suggesting an imminent reawakening. The 1783 eruption of the Laki volcanic fissure in the south of the island is considered by some experts to be the most devastating in Iceland's history, causing its biggest environmental and socio-economic disaster. Between 50 to 80 per cent of Iceland's livestock was killed, leading to a famine that left a quarter of the country's population dead. The meteorological impact of the eruption also had repercussions for years, with some experts suggesting it may have played a part in starting the French Revolution.
Volcano eruption begins in Iceland after earthquakes
Ragnhildur SigurdardottirJul 11 2023
STUFF
The uninhabited area, on the Reykjanes Peninsula, is near the spot of previous
eruptions in 2021 and 2022, around 30 kilometres from the country's capital.
A volcanic eruption has begun near Iceland's capital following days of seismic activity, the Met Office says.
Lava is emerging from ruptures that are estimated to be at least 500 metres long, Benedikt Ofeigsson, geophysicist at the Met Office, said by phone. The eruption "does not seem very powerful" but is generating visible steam, he said.
The uninhabited area, on the Reykjanes Peninsula, is near the spot of previous eruptions in 2021 and 2022, around 30 kilometres from the country's capital.
Iceland, which has 30 volcanic systems and more than 600 hot springs, is one of the most geologically active places on earth, due to its position on the mid-Atlantic ridge where the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates meet.
One of the most disruptive volcanic eruptions in Iceland's recent history occurred in 2010, when Eyjafjallajokull in the southern part of the country erupted in an explosion that released a plume of ash so vast that it grounded air traffic across Europe for weeks, resulting in the cancellation of 100,000 flights and affecting over 10 million people.
The eruption that started on Monday is "effusive and will remain that way," said Ofeigsson. "It's not an explosive ash eruption and it's very unlikely it will become explosive."
The main airport, Keflavik, said there are no disruptions to arrivals or departures, according to its website.
It's possible that volcanic activity on the peninsula takes years or decades to conclude, according to Iceland's Met Office.
Smoke billows and lava spurts after the eruption of a volcano, on the Reykjanes peninsula. Photo: Juergen Merz via Reuters
Astronomers see ancient galaxies flickering in slow motion due to expanding space
According to our best understanding of physics, the fact space is expanding should influence the apparent flow of time, with the distant Universe appearing to run in slow motion.
But observations of highly luminous and variable galaxies, known as quasars, have failed to reveal this cosmic time dilation – until now.
In a new study published in Nature Astronomy, we use two decades of observation to untangle the complex flickering of almost 200 quasars. Buried within this flickering is the imprint of expanding space, with the Universe appearing to be ticking five times slower when it was only a billion years old.
This shows quasars obey the rules of the cosmos, putting to bed the idea they represented a challenge to modern cosmology.
Time is a funny thing
In 1905, Albert Einstein, through his special theory of relativity, told us the speed of clocks’ ticking is relative, dependent on how the clocks are moving. In his 1915 general theory, he told us gravity too can influence the relative rates of clock ticks.
By the 1930s, physicists realized the expanding space of the cosmos, which is described in the language of Einstein’s general relativity, also influences the universe of ticks and tocks.
Due to the finite speed of light, as we look through our telescopes, we are peering into the past. The further we look, the further back into the life of the Universe we see. But in our expanding Universe, the further back we look, the more time space has had to stretch, and the more the relative nature of clock ticks grows.
The prediction of Einstein’s mathematics is clear: we should see the distant universe playing out in slow motion.
Tick-tock supernova clock
Measuring this slow-motion universe is difficult, as nature does not provide standard clocks across the cosmos whose relative ticks could be compared.
It took until the 1990s for astronomers to discover and understand the tick of suitable clocks: a particular kind of exploding star, a supernova. Each supernova explosion was surprisingly similar, brightening rapidly and then fading away over a matter of weeks.
Supernovae are similar, but not identical, meaning their rate of brightening and fading was not a standard clock. But by the close of the 20th century, astronomers were taking another look at these exploding stars, using them to chart the expansion of the Universe. (This expansion turned out to be accelerating, leading to the unexpected discovery of dark energy.)
To achieve this goal, astronomers had to iron out peculiarities of each supernova, putting them on an equal footing, matching them to a standard intrinsic brightness and a standard clock.
They found the flash of more distant supernovae was stretched precisely in line with Einstein’s predictions. The most distant observed supernovae, exploding when the Universe was half its present age, brightened and faded twice as slowly as more recent supernovae.
The trouble with quasars
Supernovae are not the only variable objects in the cosmos.
Quasars were discovered in the 1960s, and are thought to be supermassive black holes, some many billions of times more massive than the Sun, lurking at the hearts of galaxies. Matter swirls around these black holes on its journey to oblivion inside, heating up and glowing brightly as it does so.
Quasars are extremely bright, some burning furiously when the Universe was an infant. Quasars are also variable, varying in luminosity as matter turbulently tumbles on its way to destruction.
Because quasars are so bright, we can see them at much greater distances than supernovae. So the impact of expanding space and time dilation should be more pronounced.
However, searches for the expected signal have turned up blank. Samples of hundreds of quasars observed over decades definitely varied, but it seemed that the variations of those nearby and those far away were identical.
Some suggested that this demonstrated that the variability of quasars is not intrinsic but is instead due to black holes scattered through the Universe, magnifying some quasars by the action of gravity. More outlandishly, others have claimed that the lack of the expected cosmological signal is a clear sign that we have cosmology all wrong and need to go back to the drawing board.
New data, new approaches
In 2023, a new set of quasar data was published. This presented 190 quasars originally identified in the highly successful Sloan Digital Sky Survey but observed over two decades in multiple colors – green, red and infrared light.
The data sampling was mixed, with lots of observations over some times, and less over others. But the wealth of this data meant the astronomers, led by graduate student Zachary Stone at the University of Illinois, could statistically characterize each quasar’s variability as what is known as a “damped random walk”. This characterization assigned a time scale, a tick, to each quasar.
Like each supernova, each quasar is different, and the observed variability can depend upon their intrinsic properties. But with this new data, we could match similar quasars with each other, removing the impact of these differences. As had been done for supernovae before, we had standardized the tick-tock of quasars.
The only remaining influence on the observed variability of quasars was the expansion of space, and we unambiguously revealed this signature. Quasars obeyed the rules of the Universe exactly as Einstein’s theory predicted.
Due to their brightness, however, the influence of this cosmic time dilation could be seen much further. The most distant quasars, seen when the Universe was only a tenth of its present age, were ticking away time five times more slowly than today.
At its heart, this is a story about how Einstein is right again, and how his mathematical description of the cosmos is the best we have. It puts to rest ideas of a sea of cosmic black holes, or that we truly inhabit a static, unchanging universe. And this is precisely how science advances. Geraint Lewis, Professor of Astrophysics, University of Sydney
A subtle symphony of ripples in spacetime – astronomers use dead stars to measure gravitational waves produced by ancient black holes
The Conversation July 4, 2023 Black holes and other massive objects create ripples in spacetime when they merge. Victor de Schwanburg/Science Photo Library via Getty Images
An international team of astronomers has detected a faint signal of gravitational waves reverberating through the universe. By using dead stars as a giant network of gravitational wave detectors, the collaboration – called NANOGrav – was able to measure a low-frequency hum from a chorus of ripples of spacetime.
Though members of the team behind this new discovery aren’t yet certain, they strongly suspect that the background hum of gravitational waves they measured was caused by countless ancient merging events of supermassive black holes.
Pulsars are spinning dead stars that emit strong beams of radiation and can be used as accurate cosmic clocks.
Using dead stars for cosmology
Gravitational waves are ripples in spacetime caused by massive accelerating objects. Albert Einstein predicted their existence in his general theory of relativity, in which he hypothesized that when a gravitational wave passes through space, it makes the space shrink then expand periodically.
The NANOGrav collaboration is also trying to detect spacetime ripples, but on an interstellar scale. The team used pulsars, rapidly spinning dead stars that emit a beam of radio emissions. Pulsars are functionally similar to a lighthouse – as they spin, their beams can sweep across the Earth at regular intervals.
The NANOGrav team used pulsars that rotate incredibly fast – up to 1,000 times per second – and these pulses can be timed like the ticking of an extremely accurate cosmic clock. As gravitational waves sweep past a pulsar at the speed of light, the waves will very slightly expand and contract the distance between the pulsar and the Earth, ever so slightly changing the time between the ticks.
Pulsars are such accurate clocks that it is possible to measure their ticking with an accuracy to within 100 nanoseconds. That lets astronomers calculate the distance between a pulsar and Earth to within 100 feet (30 meters). Gravitational waves change the distance between these pulsars and Earth by tens of miles, making pulsars easily sensitive enough to detect this effect.
The NANOGrav team used a number of radio telescopes, including the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, to listen to pulsars for 15 years.
The first thing the NANOGrav team had to do was control for the noise in its cosmic gravitational wave detector. This included noise in the radio receivers it used and subtle astrophysics that affect the behavior of pulsars. Even accounting for these effects, the team’s approach was not sensitive enough to detect gravitational waves from individual supermassive black hole binaries. However, it had enough sensitivity to detect the sum of all the massive black hole mergers that have occurred anywhere in the universe since the Big Bang – as many as a million overlapping signals.
In a musical analogy, it is like standing in a busy downtown and hearing the faint sound of a symphony somewhere in the distance. You can’t pick out a single instrument because of the noise of the cars and the people around you, but you can hear the hum of a hundred instruments. The team had to tease out the signature of this gravitational wave “background” from other competing signals.
The team was able to detect this symphony by measuring a network of 67 different pulsars for 15 years. If some disruption in the ticking of one pulsar was due to gravitational waves from the distant universe, all the pulsars the team was watching would be affected in a similar way. On June 28, 2023, the team published four papers describing its project and the evidence it found of the gravitational wave background.
The hum the NANOGrav collaboration found is produced from the merging of black holes that are billions of times more massive than the Sun. These black holes spin around one another very slowly and produce gravitational waves with frequencies of one-billionth of a hertz. That means the spacetime ripples have an oscillation every few decades. This slow oscillation of the wave is the reason the team needed to rely on the incredibly accurate timekeeping of pulsars.
These gravitational waves are different from the waves LIGO can detect. LIGO’s signals are produced when two black holes 10 to 100 times the mass of the Sun merge into one rapidly spinning object, creating gravitational waves that oscillate hundreds of times per second.
If you think of black holes as a tuning fork, the smaller the event, the faster the tuning fork vibrates and the higher the pitch. LIGO detects gravitational waves that “ring” in the audible range. The black hole mergers the NANOGrav team has found “ring” with a frequency billions of times too low to hear.
The James Webb Space Telescope has allowed astronomers to peer back in time and study the first galaxies to form after the Big Bang.
Astronomers have long been interested in studying how stars and galaxies first emerged in the aftermath of the Big Bang. This new finding from the NANOGrav team is like adding another color – gravitational waves – to the picture of the early universe that is just starting to emerge, in large part thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope.
A major scientific goal of the James Webb Space Telescope is to help researchers study how the first stars and galaxies formed after the Big Bang. To do this, James Webb was designed to detect the faint light from incredibly distant stars and galaxies. The farther away an object is, the longer it takes the light to get to Earth, so James Webb is effectively a time machine that can peer back over 13.5 billion years to see light from the first stars and galaxies in the universe.
It has been very successful in the quest, having found hundreds of galaxies that flooded the universe with light in the first 700 million years after the big bang. The telescope has also detected the oldest black hole in the universe, located at the center of a galaxy that formed just 500 million years after the Big Bang.
These findings are challenging existing theories of the evolution of the universe.
The problem is that the objects James Webb has been finding are far bigger than current theory says they should be.
These new results from the NANOGrav team emerged from astronomers’ first opportunity to listen to the gravitational waves of the ancient universe. The findings, while tantalizing, aren’t quite strong enough to claim a definitive discovery. That will likely change, as the team has expanded its pulsar network to include 115 pulsars and should get results from this next survey around 2025. As James Webb and other research challenges existing theories of how galaxies evolved, the ability to study the era after the Big Bang using gravitational waves could be an invaluable tool.
Nuclear fusion breakthrough: Decades of research are still needed before fusion can be used as clean energy
The Conversation June 29, 2023, Nuclear fusion is what generates the energy of the sun: scientists are getting closer to controlling a sustained fusion reaction on Earth. Marko Aliaksandr/Shutterstock
While this achievement is indeed historic, it’s important to pause and reflect on the way ahead for fusion energy.
We are professors of sustainable and renewable energy engineering at Carleton University, where we research alternative energy technologies and systems that can move us to a low-carbon future.
We also teach our students how to navigate the treacherous terrain from lab-based findings to real-world applications.
Defining system boundaries
The efficiency of a potential fusion energy power plant remains to be seen. The reported fusion net gain actually required about 300 megajoules of energy input, which was not included in the energy gain calculation. This energy input, needed to power 192 lasers, came from the electric power grid.
In other words, the experiment used as much energy as the typical Canadian household does in two days. In doing so, the fusion reaction output enough energy to light just 14 incandescent bulbs for an hour. ADVERTISEMENT
The same is true of nuclear fission, which is the reaction inside current nuclear power plants. The complete fission of one kilogram of Uranium-235 — the fissile component of nuclear fuel — can generate about 77 terajoules. But we cannot convert all of that energy into useful forms like heat and electric power.
Instead, we have to engineer a complex system that can control the nuclear fission chain reaction and convert the generated energy into more useful forms.
Kim Budil, director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, center, is flanked by Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, left, and Arati Prabhakar, the president’s science advisor, as they announce a major scientific breakthrough in fusion research at the Department of Energy in Washington on Dec. 13, 2022.
(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
This is what nuclear power plants do — they harness the heat generated during nuclear fission reactions to make steam. This steam drives a turbine connected to an electric power generator, which produces electricity. The overall efficiency of the cycle is less than 40 per cent.
In addition, not all of the uranium in the fuel is burned. Used fuel still contains about 96 per cent of its total uranium, and about a fifth of its fissile Uranium-235 content.
Increasing the amount of uranium spent in our current fleet is possible — it’s an ongoing sphere of work — but it poses enormous engineering challenges. The huge energy potential of nuclear fuel is currently mitigated by the engineering challenges of converting that energy into a useful form. From science to engineering
Until recently, fusion has been seen primarily as a scientific experiment, not as an engineering challenge. This is rapidly changing and regulators are now investigating how deployment might unfold in the real world.
Regardless of the efficiency of a future fusion power plant, taking energy conversions from basic science to the real world will require overcoming a multitude of challenges.
Because fission faced many of the same challenges as fusion now does, we can learn a lot from its history. Fission also had to move from science to engineering before the commercial industry could take off.
The science of fusion energy, as with nuclear fission, is rooted in efforts to develop nuclear weapons. Notably, several nuclear physicists who helped develop the nuclear bomb wanted to “prove that this discovery was not just a weapon.”
The early history of nuclear power was one of optimism — of declarations the technology would advance and be able to meet our need for ever-increasing amounts of energy. Eventually, fusion power would come along and electricity would become “too cheap to meter.”
Lessons learned
What have we learned over the past 70 years since the onset of nuclear power? First, we’ve learned about the potentially devastating risk of technology lock-in, which occurs when an industry becomes dependent on a specific product or system.
Today’s light-water fission reactors — reactors that use normal water as opposed to water enriched with a hydrogen isotope — are an example of this. They were not chosen because they were the most desirable, but for other reasons.
These factors include government subsidies that favored these designs; the U.S. Navy’s interest in developing smaller-scale pressurized water reactors for submarines and surface warships; advances in uranium enrichment technology as a result of the U.S. nuclear weapons program; uncertainties regarding nuclear costs that led to the assumption that large light-water reactors are simply scaled-up versions of smaller ones; and conservatism regarding design choices given the high costs and risks associated with nuclear power development.
We have been struggling to move to other technologies ever since.
Second, we’ve learned that size matters. Large reactors cost more to build per unit of capacity than smaller units. In other words, engineers misunderstood the concept of economies of scale and doomed their industry in the process.
Large infrastructure projects are extremely complex systems that rely on enormous work forces and co-ordination. They can be managed, but they usually go over-budget and fall behind schedule. Modular technologies exhibit better affordability, cost control and economies, but micro and small nuclear reactors will also be economically challenged.
A worker walks at the construction site of a nuclear reactor at Hinkley Point C nuclear power station in Somerset, England, on Oct. 11, 2022.
(AP Photo/Kin Cheung)
Third, regulatory regimes must be developed for fusion. If the industry coalesces too quickly around a first-generation design, the consequences for the regulation of future reactors could be severe.
Fourth, choosing locations for new power plants and societal acceptance are key. Fusion has an advantage because its technology is more of a blank slate than fission when it comes to public opinion. The positive associations the public has with fusion must be maintained by prudent design decisions and adopting best practices for community engagement. The same is true of how the industry will choose to handle the waste challenge. Fusion reactors generate large amounts of waste, though not the same kind fission does.
A call to action
Our research on nuclear energy innovation reveals that challenges facing nuclear fusion can be overcome, but they require prudent leadership, decades of research, significant amounts of funding and focus on technology development.
Billions of dollars are needed to advance nuclear fission technology, and we have far more experience with fission than with fusion. An appetite for funding must be demonstrated by governments, electric utility companies and entrepreneurs.
Fusion’s promise is vast and there is exciting work being done to advance it outside of this recent breakthrough, including by private companies. Decades of research and development are needed before fusion can meaningfully contribute to our energy system.
Our central message is a call to action: fusion engineers, researchers, industry and government must organize to investigate and mitigate the challenges that face fusion, including in the design of the first generation of power plants.
There is no substitute to deep and rapid decarbonization of the energy system if we want to save our planet from climate catastrophe. We are proud to be training the next generation of energy engineers to design new and better energy solutions.
Recent archaeology emerging from ancient Mesoamerica is flipping the script of public understanding about the people and institutions that inhabited this world: the evidence tells us that cooperative and pluralistic government was at least as common as and more resilient than despotic states.
This more complex picture and the achievements of Mesoamerica’s peoples are all the more impressive given the area’s rugged terrain and resource constraints. Compared to ancient Eurasia, the inhabitants of Mesoamerica—the region stretching from Costa Rica to central Mexico—lacked beasts of burden and wheeled transport, and the use of metals was generally limited.
Until recently, our understanding of how most societies and early states developed was heavily grounded in interpretations of urban societies in Eurasia. Despotic, coercive rule was assumed (except for ancient Athens and republican Rome), the actions of the elite were ascribed great importance, and core functions of the economy were presumed to be in the hands of the ruler.
Precolonial Mesoamerica doesn’t fit this cookie-cutter framework: neither was economic production or distribution centrally controlled by despotic rulers, nor was governance in societies with very large populations universally coercive.
This new perspective is the outgrowth of a decades-long shift in archaeological research’s focus from temples and tombs to regional settlement patterns, urban layouts, house excavations, domestic economies, and agricultural production.
By concentrating on the archaeological record, recent generations of researchers have brought fresh attention to features of precolonial Mesoamerica that did not fit entrenched stereotypes, many of which had their roots in the 19th century. Mesoamerica’s cities and large-scale societies arose independently of other global regions, spawned by their own regional populations. Mesoamerican technological development never experienced the centralizing impact of the monopolization of bronze weaponry through control of scarce tin deposits, nor the “democratizing” or “decentralizing” effects of the adoption of more widely available iron.
Mesoamerica was also spared the stark inequalities in military and transportation technology that appeared in Eurasia when some societies developed the chariot, serious naval capabilities, and fortified palaces while others lagged behind. In Mesoamerica, military might came through the control of large infantries using weapons crafted primarily from widely available stone, all of which made for generally more balanced political relations than in Eurasia.
Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica is therefore emerging as an ideal place to examine the different ways that humans coalesced in urban contexts, in both collective and autocratic political formations, without some of the key factors that earlier scholars have traditionally seen as necessary or transformative for the rise of premodern societies.
How were these large, preindustrial urban centers in Mesoamerica organized? Were they long-lasting? And if so, what accounts for their comparative degrees of resilience across time?
In a 2018 study, we coded data from a carefully selected sample of 26 precolonial Mesoamerican cities and prominent political centers. We found that more than half of them were not despotically ruled and that the more collective political centers had greater resilience in the face of droughts and floods, and warfare or shifts in trade. Cities that addressed their social challenges using more collective forms of governance and resource management were both larger and somewhat more resilient than the cities with personalized rulership and more concentrated political power.
In general, collectively organized political centers relied more heavily on internal finance generation, such as taxes, as compared to the more autocratic centers that relied more on external financing, such as monopolized trade networks and war booty. The more that political elites can support themselves without relying on financing from the general population, the less they face accountability from the people, and the greater the likelihood that governance and power are hoarded. Additionally, higher levels of internal financing and communal resources often corresponded with evidence of the wider circulation of public goods and the bureaucratization of civic offices. Collectively organized centers with these features as well as spatial layouts, such as large open plazas and wide streets, that provided opportunities for householders and urban dwellers to communicate and express themselves seem to have fostered community persistence as major centers.
In a later study that included an updated and expanded sample of 32 well-researched Mesoamerican cities, we found that centers that were both more bottom-up and collective in their governance were more resilient. While some of these cities had palaces and monuments to rulers as their focal points, others featured more shared and equitably distributed forms of urban infrastructure. This includes apartment compounds, shared terraces or walls within neighborhoods, neighborhood plazas, temples and other civic buildings, and shared roads and causeways, all of which required cooperation and collective labor for their construction and maintenance and would have facilitated more regular face-to-face interaction and periodic public gatherings.
The implications of this archaeological research are too informative and powerful to stay put in textbooks. They resonate with evolving views of our present world, which are finding that public space, open communication, fair taxation, and effective bureaucracy can be cornerstones of well-being. These parallels with and understandings from the past can be insightful for us today as models to guide our future planning and identify the social models that best position us to survive the tests of time. This article was produced by Human Bridges, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Author Bios:
Gary M. Feinman is an archaeologist and the MacArthur curator of anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. David M. Carballo is a professor of archaeology, anthropology, and Latin American studies and assistant provost for general education at Boston University.
The EPA was on the cusp of cleaning up ‘Cancer Alley.’ Then it backed down.
Lylla Younes, Grist July 2, 2023, Chemical plants and factories line the roads and suburbs of the area known as 'Cancer Alley' October 15, 2013. 'Cancer Alley' is one of the most polluted areas of the United States and lies along the once pristine Mississippi River that stretches some 80 miles from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where a dense concentration of oil refineries, petrochemical plants, and other chemical industries reside alongside suburban homes. Giles Clarke/Getty Images
Pastor Philip Schmitter waited more than 20 years for the Environmental Protection Agency to do its job. In 1992, he’d filed a civil rights complaint to halt the construction of a power station that would spew toxic lead into the air of his predominantly Black community in Flint, Michigan. Decades passed without a response, so he joined four other groups around the country in a lawsuit to compel the agency to address their concerns.
The case hinged on the EPA’s duty to enforce Title VI, a provision of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VI allows federal agencies to take action against state policies that discriminate by disproportionately harming groups protected by the Act — the discriminatory policy being, in this case, Michigan’s permitting of a plant that would pollute Black neighborhoods. After the EPA lost the suit in 2020, agency officials finally began timely investigations of civil rights complaints and made some of the EPA’s first-ever findings of discrimination.
That progress, however, could be short-lived.
Last week, the EPA abruptly terminated three of its highest-profile open civil rights complaints. The move deals a major blow not only to the majority-Black communities that filed them but also to the EPA’s own authority to enforce Title VI in places with some of the nation’s worst air quality. The cases originated in the region widely known as “Cancer Alley,” an 85-mile industrial corridor in southeast Louisiana, and were voluntarily closed after the state’s Republican attorney general sued the federal government for alleged abuses of power during the complaint negotiations.
Smoke billows from one of many chemical plants on October 12, 2013, in Louisiana. 'Cancer Alley' is one of the most polluted areas of the United States and lies along the once pristine Mississippi River that stretches some 80 miles from New Orleans to Baton Rouge.
Giles Clarke/Getty Images
Grist obtained copies of two draft agreements from the now-defunct negotiations, which reveal efforts by EPA officials to institute profound changes to Louisiana’s permitting process, which has historically concentrated chemical plants near Black communities. One of the most substantial terms of the resolution would have required state regulators to assess whether a community is already exposed to disproportionately high levels of pollution before permitting new plants there. With the cases closed, the prospect of those changes has all but vanished.
“This is basically the EPA not using the full power of its environmental laws,” said Adam Kron, a senior attorney at Earthjustice who worked on the case. He described Title VI as one of the clearest ways to advance environmental justice, a goal that Biden EPA has repeatedly called a priority. “It’s disappointing to see EPA acquiesce to what seems like a lawsuit that really doesn’t have much grounding to it.”
The Title VI statute states that no person should, on the basis of race, color, or national origin, be subject to discrimination under any program that receives federal funding. The provision is wide-reaching, covering hundreds of thousands of programs across the country and governing decisions as diverse as where a road can go or who can get treatment at a hospital. But in the environmental space, it’s been largely underutilized, with the EPA routinely failing to respond to dozens of cases within the 180-day period required by the law.
The 2020 federal court ruling on Schmitter’s case gave communities in Louisiana’s St. James and St. John the Baptist parishes hope that Title VI could finally help limit pollution in their backyards. Together, their complaints alleged a number of negligent actions by state regulators, including a failure to curb cancer-causing emissions that violate federal safety standards and to consider pre-existing pollution when permitting new industrial plants. A formal resolution of their cases would have likely addressed these concerns.
The draft agreements that Grist obtained include sweeping measures to change the way the state of Louisiana approves new industrial facilities, like folding community involvement into critical moments of the decision-making process and requiring officials to prove, both before and after plants begin operating, that their emissions will not disproportionately harm people of color. In Louisiana, majority-Black communities are exposed to at least 7 times the emissions, on average, as predominantly White communities in industrial areas.
“We were hoping to get systemic change,” said Kimberly Terrell, a research scientist at the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, who worked on the complaints. “For decades, people have been fighting against individual polluters and individual facilities, but when the decision-making process itself is flawed, you need something that seeks to improve it.”
Louisiana officials did not respond to a request for comment.
Despite progress with the agreements, testimony in Louisiana’s legal filings suggests that, at some point during the negotiation process, things between state and federal officials began to sour. Then, in late May, the state’s attorney general, Jeff Landry, sued the EPA.
The case hinged on the EPA’s ability to pursue actions based on “disparate impacts,” or the idea that a policy or agency decision can disproportionately harm a specific group of people, regardless of whether or not that harm is intentional. These standards have always been unpopular with some state officials who view them as evidence of federal agencies meddling in matters beyond their authority. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority is sympathetic to these concerns, ruling in numerouslandmark cases over the past few years to vastly restrict the powers of federal regulators.
But multiple lawyers that Grist interviewed argued that Louisiana’s legal arguments would have ultimately been unlikely to undermine Title VI, raising the question of why the EPA appears to have preemptively conceded on the matter.
“It was unripe — there was no action by the EPA that Louisiana could challenge,” said Kron. “So it seems like a strange lawsuit for [the federal government] to take as a serious enough threat to just undo this whole process that’s been going on for over a year.”
Environmental advocates and residents in Louisiana also decried the decision to close the complaints.
“I often feel like our communities are left to fight on our own,” said Joy Banner, an activist and long-time resident of the region. “It’s disappointing when we have organizations at the federal level who aren’t willing to step in to fight along with us for our basic human right to survive.”
EPA spokesperson Khanya Brann told Grist that the agency remains “fully committed” to improving the environmental conditions in the communities that filed the complaints.
“Community participation has been critical to identifying both problems and solutions, and we look forward to our continued partnership with the residents in both parishes as we continue our joint efforts to improve public health and the environment,” she said.
The EPA wrote in its letters announcing the closure of the complaints that it would address residents’ concerns through other means, like its pending litigation against one of the region’s most infamous chemical plants and its proposed rules for tightening standards for certain types of facilities operating in the region. But residents told Grist that those measures do not cover the totality of their concerns, and that a major benefit of the Title VI process is its speedy timeline: While court cases can drag on and emissions standards can take years to implement, a resolution of the complaints may have granted communities much faster relief from toxic emissions.
Claire Glenn, a criminal defense attorney with a background in civil rights law, compared EPA’s use of Title VI to other federal agencies’ more robust implementation of the law. The Department of Transportation, for example, requires regulators to consider whether a project will disproportionately impact a group of people before it’s ever constructed. However, she added, deciding where a transit line goes is often less controversial than approving a multi-billion dollar company’s new industrial complex.
“I think the reason EPA’s Title VI program is so hamstrung is because it is so directly butting up against corporate interests,” she said.
Advocates told Grist that they are exploring other options to advance residents’ concerns, and called the EPA’s actions this week a setback but not a roadblock. Residents said that they are determined not to give up.
“We come from a long line of people who fought,” said Banner. “This is just one little hill that we have to overcome — but ultimately I see us heading to the mountain, and victory is the mountain.”
Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org
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