Argonne releases small modular reactor waste analysis report

Reports and Proceedings

DOE/ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY

Study one of the first to address nuclear waste production of small modular reactors.

Nuclear energy is a key component of decarbonizing our economy, but large nuclear reactors are often complicated and expensive to build. To make nuclear energy more available and attractive, developers have put forward multiple designs of small modular reactors (SMRs) that have greater flexibility and offer lower up-front costs. Different types of SMRs with advanced reactor design features are currently under development in the United States and worldwide.

Researchers believe SMRs could be deployed at a variety of scales for locally distributed electricity generation. SMRs have approximately a tenth to a third of the power output of large light water reactors, which are the most common kind of nuclear reactor in commercial operation in the United States. The technologies and economics of SMRs have been widely studied; however, there is less information about their implications for nuclear waste. ​“We’ve really just begun to study the nuclear waste attributes of SMRs,” said senior nuclear engineer Taek Kyum Kim of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory.

Kim and his colleagues from Argonne and DOE’s Idaho National Laboratory have recently published a report that endeavors to measure the potential nuclear waste attributes of three different SMR technologies using metrics developed through an extensive process during a comprehensive assessment of nuclear fuel cycles published in 2014. Although SMRs are not yet in commercial operation, several companies have collaborated with the DOE to explore different possibilities for SMRs, and the three designs studied in the report are all scheduled to be constructed and operational by the end of the decade.

One type of SMR, called VOYGR and in development by NuScale Power, is based on a current conventional pressurized water reactor design but scaled down and modularized. Another type, called Natrium and being developed by TerraPower, is sodium-cooled and runs on a metallic fuel. A third type, called the Xe-100 and developed by X-energy, is cooled by helium gas.

In terms of nuclear waste, each reactor offers both advantages and disadvantages over large LWRs, Kim said. ​“It’s not correct to say that because these reactors are smaller they will have more problems proportionally with nuclear waste, just because they have more surface area compared to the core volume,” he said. ​“Each reactor has pluses and minuses that depend upon the discharge burnup, the uranium enrichment, the thermal efficiency and other reactor-specific design features.”

One notable factor that influences the amount of nuclear waste produced by a reactor is called burnup, and it refers to the amount of thermal energy produced from a certain quantity of fuel. The Natrium and Xe-100 reactors have significantly higher burnup than LWRs, Kim said. A higher burnup is correlated with lower nuclear waste production because fuel is converted more efficiently to energy. These designs also have higher thermal efficiency, which refers to how efficiently the heat produced by the reactor is converted into electricity. The VOYGR pressurized water reactor design, due in part to its small size, has a slightly lower burnup and thermal efficiency compared to a larger pressurized water reactor.

The spent fuel attributes vary somewhat between the designs, with VOYGR being similar to LWRs, Natrium producing a more concentrated waste with different long-lived isotopes, and Xe-100 producing a lower density but larger volume of spent fuel.

“All told, when it comes to nuclear waste, SMRs are roughly comparable with conventional pressurized water reactors, with potential benefits and weaknesses depending on which aspects you are trying to design for,” Kim said. ​“Overall, there appear to be no additional major challenges to the management of SMR nuclear wastes compared to the commercial-scale large LWR wastes.”

The funding for the research was provided by DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy through the Systems Analysis and Integration Campaign.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation’s first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America’s scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://​ener​gy​.gov/​s​c​ience.

Scientists solved a 500-million-year-old mystery about strange Cambrian structures found in China

By Joanna Thompson

Extremely detailed Cambrian fossils show that enigmatic skeleton tubes belonged to ancient ancestors of modern jellyfish

Artist's reconstruction of Gangtoucunia aspera as it would have appeared in life on the Cambrian seafloor, around 514 million years ago. The individual in the foreground has part of the skeleton removed to show the soft polyp inside. (Image credit: Reconstruction by Xiadong Wang )

Over 500 million years ago, sea-dwelling invertebrates pioneered a new evolutionary experiment: skeletons. But while those durable, tubelike structures stood the test of time as fossils, the animals' soft bodies decayed and vanished, erasing all evidence of what these ancient animals may have looked like. Now, a recent reexamination of those ancient skeletal tubes has finally unveiled the identity of one of these mysterious organisms.

These early calcium-reenforced "skeleton" tubes date to a period known as the Cambrian explosion (541 million to 510 million years ago) and seem to have been an effective survival strategy, as they cropped up in multiple groups across a relatively short span of geologic time (about 50 million years). During this period, everything from the segmented ancestors of earthworms to the bizarre ancient relatives of tardigrades created tubelike protective structures.

However, tracing the evolutionary history of these early exoskeletons has proved tricky. "Soft tissues tend to decay away," Xiaoya Ma, an invertebrate paleontologist at Yunnan University in China and co-author of a study describing the findings, told Live Science. For this reason, identifying fossil Cambrian tubes has been a little like trying to guess the contents of an empty, unlabeled can based on the shape of the tin alone — most could just as easily have held chicken soup as creamed corn.
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But scientists are shedding light on these enigmatic skeleton makers. In the new study, published Nov. 2 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, an international team of researchers described four incredibly well-preserved Cambrian specimens from China's Yunnan province. These 514 million-year-old fossils of the tube-dwelling creature Gangtoucunia aspera include soft tissue impressions left behind by the animals' bodies. By studying these impressions closely, the scientists determined that the tubes belonged to, of all things, an ancient skeleton-making jellyfish.

Soft-bodied invertebrates are hard to find in the fossil record, and jellyfish in particular are almost never preserved. "This fossil was a double whammy in terms of rarity," Luke Parry, a paleobiologist at the University of Oxford and co-author of the study, told Live Science in an email.

Related: Ancient armored 'worm' is the Cambrian ancestor to three major animal groups

Normally, when a marine organism dies, scavengers and bacteria make quick work of its soft tissues. But very occasionally, a wave of fine sediment covers the remains quickly enough to prevent aerobic bacteria from settling in. This is how the famous North American Burgess Shale fossil deposit formed, according to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and it is likely how the Yunnan site formed, as well.

The newfound fossils, which were discovered by lead study author Guangxu Zhang, Ma's graduate student at Yunnan University, were preserved in such detail that the paleontologists could even make out the animals' internal organs. The creatures' mouths were surrounded by a ring of tentacles, each measuring about 0.2 inch (5 millimeters) long. And they had a saclike gut with just one opening (unlike the separate mouth and anus that vertebrates are blessed with).

Fossil specimen (left) and diagram (right) of Gangtoucunia aspera. Preserved soft tissues include the gut and tentacle. (Image credit: Luke Parry and Guangxu Zhang)

These characteristics led the team to conclude that G. aspera likely belonged to the phylum Cnidaria, which includes modern-day jellyfish, corals and sea anemones. It also laid to rest an older theory that the creature was an annelid worm, which is defined by its segmented body and gut with two openings.

G. aspera likely hung out in ancient oceans with one end of its tube anchored to other members of its species or to mobile creatures such as trilobites, retracting into its shell when predators swam by. It probably fed much like modern jellyfish polyps do, extending its stinging tentacles when prey was near.

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Only the larvae of one jellyfish group, Scyphozoa, create exoskeletons today. Some other cnidarians, such as corals, retain their skeletons into adulthood. However, today's corals build their skeletons from calcium carbonate; in contrast, G. aspera crafted its tubes out of calcium phosphate, the same tough compound that makes up our tooth enamel and bones.

Why modern cnidarians switched from calcium phosphate to calcium carbonate exoskeletons remains a mystery. "One potential reason is that the environment before our current time was phosphorus rich," Ma said. But the answer could be found in cnidarian genetics as well. Ma and her team hope to answer this and other questions as their research continues. "Hopefully, we'll have more for everyone in the near future," she said.

Energy requirements and carbon emissions for a low-carbon energy transition

• Aljoša Slameršak, 
• Giorgos Kallis & 
• Daniel W. O’ Neill 

Nature Communications volume 13, Article number: 6932 (2022) Cite this article

• Article
• Open Access
• Published: 14 November 2022

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Abstract

Achieving the Paris Agreement will require massive deployment of low-carbon energy. However, constructing, operating, and maintaining a low-carbon energy system will itself require energy, with much of it derived from fossil fuels. This raises the concern that the transition may consume much of the energy available to society, and be a source of considerable emissions. Here we calculate the energy requirements and emissions associated with the global energy system in fourteen mitigation pathways compatible with 1.5 °C of warming. We find that the initial push for a transition is likely to cause a 10–34% decline in net energy available to society. Moreover, we find that the carbon emissions associated with the transition to a low-carbon energy system are substantial, ranging from 70 to 395 GtCO2 (with a cross-scenario average of 195 GtCO2). The share of carbon emissions for the energy system will increase from 10% today to 27% in 2050, and in some cases may take up all remaining emissions available to society under 1.5 °C pathways.

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Murdoch v Trump: Rupert’s papers kick Donald, but Fox won’t play ball

Some think the media mogul has made a clean break with ‘Trumpty Dumpty’, but his TV channel may find it hard to let go

Murdoch ‘has always detested Trump’, according to the media commentator Michael Wolff. 

Photograph: Carlo Allegri/Reuters


Jim Waterson
THE GUARDIAN

Fri 18 Nov 2022

Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers don’t do subtlety when it comes to political attacks.

Over the last week, readers of his US titles have been informed that Donald Trump is “Trumpty Dumpty”, the “biggest loser” in Republican politics, and the man who meant the “red wave” never crested in the US midterm elections.

The New York Post marked Trump’s latest bid for election with something more damning: outright mockery.

Under the headline: “Florida Man makes announcement,” the formerly pro-Trump newspaper directed readers to a story deep inside the newspaper on page 28.

“With just 720 days to go before the next election, a Florida retiree made the surprise announcement Tuesday night that he was running for president,” said the deadpan news report.

The tabloid’s print edition has a dwindling readership but the former US president is still said to be a regular reader – which means it probably hurt when they mocked his Mar-a-Lago home – raided by the FBI in August – as a “classified documents library”.

Yet while the newspaper editorials have led to suggestions that Murdoch has completed a clean break with the former US president, this misses the more positive reaction on Murdoch’s Fox News television channel.

“Murdoch has very little control over his most important outlet, which is Fox,” said Michael Wolff, the media commentator who has written three books on Trump.

“Let’s assume Murdoch was giving a message to the Post … he can’t do that at Fox. And Fox is the all-important thing.”

Although there has been criticism of Trump on Fox News in recent weeks, several presenters such as Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson have their own loyal audiences who have been fed pro-Trump material for years. A rapid U-turn may be too much for them to take, especially if the network is accused of betrayal.

As Wolff puts it: “Each of the voices at Fox is going to be motivated by their own ratings – and if their own ratings are dependent on Trump then they’re not going to deviate. Hannity does not seem to have deviated one increment off his absolute fealty to Trump. Tucker likewise.”

In the background is Murdoch’s attempt to reunite two parts of his business empire and ultimately hand over control to his 51-year-old son, Lachlan. The family’s main media interests are separated into two businesses as a result of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, which saw the legally troubled outlets separated.

The core business is the US-focused television business Fox, while the newspaper assets – including its UK titles – are controlled by News Corp.

Combining the two makes little business sense but would tidy up family succession planning, according to the media analyst Alice Enders: “It’s not about Rupert being back in charge, it’s about Lachlan taking over and pursuing the same traditional classic conservative agenda.”

She said that it would be hard for Fox News to find a way to let go of Trump without risking some of the hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising that flows to the network.

“Fox is the jewel in the crown. The influence that the Murdochs want to exercise is through Fox News. What’s super interesting is they want to maintain their currency as the go-to news channel for conservative voters – and they have to do that in a way that balances the Trumpistas against everyone.”

The focus on US politics also reflects a physical change in Rupert Murdoch’s location.

He has spent a substantial time in the UK in recent years alongside his now ex-wife Jerry Hall and his daughter Elisabeth.

During the Covid pandemic they were based at an Oxfordshire mansion, where he took the decision to sign up Piers Morgan for the launch of TalkTV and went to get his Covid vaccine – at the same time that his US media outlets were casting doubts on its effectiveness.

Now the recently divorced nonagenarian is increasingly based at a newly acquired ranch in rural Montana, a remote state favoured by billionaires. Official documents show that last month he paid £13,000 to fly the former prime minister Boris Johnson there for a meeting, while corporate filings suggest he is running his business empire from the ranch and has permission to hold board meetings there.

This raises the question of which Murdoch is now calling the shots: 91-year-old Rupert or Lachlan, who is managing part of the business from his family home in Australia – working late into the night on video calls due to the time difference.


Could Trump’s 2024 campaign keep his legal troubles at bay?

The Trump years weighed heavily on Murdoch, with Fox News facing a $1.6bn lawsuit over claims it amplified Trump’s false allegations about fraud at a voting machine company after his election defeat. Murdoch’s son James has left the family business and had made barely coded criticisms of Fox News, which hit hard according to Wolff.

“In terms of Rupert himself, he has always detested Trump. Trump has been the cross to bear in his life, and the Trump effect at Fox has essentially broken up his family.”

Trump, banned from Twitter and struggling to get airtime, has not taken his ostracism lightly, whining that they were favouring Florida governor Ron DeSantis.

“NewsCorp – which is Fox, the Wall Street Journal and the no longer great New York Post – is all in for Governor Ron DeSanctimonious,” Trump said.

But as Enders puts it: “Murdoch doesn’t back losers. Trump is a loser.”

Dark Matter as an Intergalactic Heat Source

November 18, 2022• Physics 15, 180

Spectra from quasars suggest that intergalactic gas may have been heated by a form of dark matter called dark photons.

K. G. Lee/Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and C. Stark/UC Berkeley

Cloudy forecast. Light from distant quasars travels through the Universe toward Earth and is imprinted with the absorption signatures from hydrogen gas it encounters along the way. These absorption lines suggest anomalous heating that could be explai... Show more

Dense gas clouds across the Universe absorb light from distant quasars, producing absorption lines in the quasar spectra. A new study shows that the larger-than-predicted widths of these lines from nearby gas clouds could result from a form of dark matter called dark photons [1]. These particles could heat the clouds, leading to a widening of the absorption lines. Other explanations of the broadening—based on more conventional heating sources—have been proposed, but if the dark-photon mechanism is at work, it might also cause heating in low-density clouds from earlier epochs of the Universe. Researchers are already planning to test this prediction.

When viewing the spectrum of a distant quasar, astronomers often observe absorption lines coming from the intervening clouds of gas. The most prominent absorption line is the Lyman-alpha line of hydrogen. Indeed, some quasar spectra have a “forest” of Lyman-alpha lines, with each coming from a cloud at a different distance from our Galaxy (or different epochs). By examining the widths, depths, and other details of the line shapes, researchers can extract information about the density, the temperature, and other features of the clouds. This information can be compared with the results of cosmological simulations that try to reproduce the clumping of matter into galaxies and other large-scale structures.

Comparisons between forest data and simulations have generally shown good agreement, but a discrepancy appears for relatively nearby gas clouds. Observations show that these so-called low redshift clouds produce broader absorption lines than predicted in simulations. “This may be an indication of a particular candidate of dark matter, which is called a dark photon,” says Andrea Caputo from CERN in Switzerland. “This dark photon can inject some energy and heat up the gas, [which makes] the lines a bit broader, in better agreement with the data.”

P. Gaikwad/Kavli Institute for Cosmology, Cambridge

Seeing the trees. The light from a distant quasar passes through regions of dense gas (purple) in the intergalactic medium. The gas absorbs light at specific frequencies, leading to a “forest” of absorption lines in the quasar spectra (green).

To explore how this energy injection might work, Caputo and his colleagues ran cosmic simulations with dark photons. The theory of dark photons assumes that the particles can spontaneously turn into normal photons with some small probability, but this conversion can be enhanced when dark photons enter an ionized gas satisfying a resonance condition. The condition amounts to the gas having a certain density, which is determined by the dark photon’s mass. If an intergalactic cloud has this density, then the ordinary photons generated by the resonance conversion will heat the gas.

Caputo stresses that a cloud’s density changes over time, so the resonance condition will be met for only a certain period of time. This time-dependent heating is unique to dark photons, as other proposed types of heat-producing dark matter, such as those that decay or annihilate, are expected to be “switched on” all the time. However, models of continuous heating are constrained by other cosmological observations, such as the cosmic microwave background, which don’t show signs of unexplained heating.

The simulations of Caputo and colleagues suggest that dark photons with an extremely small mass of around 10⁻¹⁴ eV/c² (roughly 10¹⁹ times smaller than the electron mass) would resonantly convert to photons in low-redshift Lyman-alpha clouds. This conversion would inject between 5 and 7 eV of energy per hydrogen atom into the gas, enough to account for the observations.

In addition, the team predicts that dark-photon heating might have occurred at higher redshift, but only in so-called under-dense clouds, which in the past had higher densities—potentially high enough to meet the resonance condition. The team is currently running simulations to see if this predicted heating would agree with observations of high-redshift clouds.

However, exotic dark matter physics models may not be required to explain the Lyman-alpha data, says astrophysicist Blakesley Burkhart from Rutgers University in New Jersey. She says dark photons are an exciting possibility, but researchers have not yet ruled out more conventional heating sources, such as supermassive black hole jets at the centers of galaxies, known as active galactic nuclei.

Sam Witte—a cosmologist from the University of Amsterdam—agrees that the dark photon explanation is more speculative than other scenarios, but he thinks the researchers have made a convincing case with testable predictions. “Should future studies exclude conventional astrophysical explanations, it is compelling to consider the possibility that we might be observing the first nongravitational imprint of dark matter,” he says.

–Michael Schirber

Michael Schirber is a Corresponding Editor for Physics Magazine based in Lyon, France.

References

1. J. S. Bolton et al., “Comparison of low-redshift Lyman-α$𝛼$ forest observations to hydrodynamical simulations with dark photon dark matter,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 211102 (2022).

Scroll through the universe with a new interactive map

by Jill Rosen, Johns Hopkins University

Credit: Visualization by B. MéNard & N. Shtarkman

A new map of the universe displays for the first time the span of the entire known cosmos with pinpoint accuracy and sweeping beauty

Created by Johns Hopkins University astronomers with data mined over two decades by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the map allows the public to experience data previously only accessible to scientists.

The interactive map, which depicts the actual position and real colors of 200,000 galaxies, is available online, where it can also be downloaded for free.

"Growing up I was very inspired by astronomy pictures, stars, nebulae and galaxies, and now it's our time to create a new type of picture to inspire people," says map creator Brice Ménard, a professor at Johns Hopkins.

Credit: Johns Hopkins University

"Astrophysicists around the world have been analyzing this data for years, leading to thousands of scientific papers and discoveries. But nobody took the time to create a map that is beautiful, scientifically accurate, and accessible to people who are not scientists. Our goal here is to show everybody what the universe really looks like."

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is a pioneering effort to capture the night sky through a telescope based in New Mexico. Night after night for years, the telescope aimed at slightly different locations to capture this unusually broad perspective.

The map, which Ménard assembled with the help of former Johns Hopkins computer science student Nikita Shtarkman, visualizes a slice of the universe, or about 200,000 galaxies—each dot on the map is a galaxy and each galaxy contains billions of stars and planets. The Milky Way is simply one of these dots, the one at the very bottom of the map.

The expansion of the universe contributes to make this map even more colorful. The farther an object, the redder it appears. The top of the map reveals the first flash of radiation emitted soon after the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.

"In this map, we are just a speck at the very bottom, just one pixel. And when I say we, I mean our galaxy, the Milky Way which has billions of stars and planets," Ménard says. "We are used to seeing astronomical pictures showing one galaxy here, one galaxy there or perhaps a group of galaxies. But what this map shows is a very, very different scale."

Ménard hopes people will experience both the map's undeniable beauty and its awe-inspiring sweep of scale.

"From this speck at the bottom," he says, "we are able to map out galaxies across the entire universe, and that that says something about the power of science."

More information: Map: mapoftheuniverse.net/

Provided by Johns Hopkins University 

Webb offers never-before-seen details of early universe

Giant cosmic map charts from here to the edge of the observable universe

By Michael Irving
November 17, 2022

Astronomers have created a huge map of the cosmos, where each dot represents an entire galaxy
Visualization by B. Ménard & N. Shtarkman

Astronomers at Johns Hopkins University have created an interactive map of the universe, charting the positions and colors of 200,000 galaxies stretching from here to the very edge of the observable universe.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has been scanning the cosmos almost every night for over 20 years. The telescope images different portions of the sky over time to build up a comprehensive atlas at different scales, including 4 million stars in our own Milky Way, galaxies within our Local Group, and others billions of light-years away.

A new map zooms out to an incredible scale. Two Johns Hopkins astronomers, Brice Ménard and Nikita Shtarkman, assembled SDSS data to create a dense visualization of one wedge of the universe.

If there was a You Are Here marker, it would be down at the pointy end of this cosmic pizza slice. From there, the map radiates outwards into space and time, from the present in our local area right back to 13.7 billion light-years away – i.e., 13.7 billion years ago. And this 10-degree-thick wedge is just one segment of a circle around us, which itself is just a small part of a gigantic sphere that would constitute the observable universe.

The map depicts 200,000 tiny dots that each represent an entire galaxy, containing billions of stars, planets and other objects. The colors of these dots aren’t just for decoration either – they indicate the identity and characteristics of the galaxies, and at this scale there are two clear patterns of blue to red transitions.

The map of the universe, and what objects are represented by each color
Visualization by B. Ménard & N. Shtarkman

Starting from the bottom, the pale blue dots are spiral galaxies located within about 2 billion light-years of Earth. Beyond that the dots start to turn yellow, as elliptical galaxies dominate the map – these are brighter and can be seen from farther away

Between about 4 and 8 billion light-years away, the map turns red. These are still elliptical galaxies, but their lightwaves have been “redshifted,” or stretched towards the red end of the spectrum by the expansion of the universe. After that, the map becomes blue again – these are quasars, galaxies with very active supermassive black holes at their center that give off blue light.

Towards the wider part of the map, the dots turn red again, as redshifted quasars become basically the only thing still visible at this immense distance. And then, after a billion light-years of almost total darkness, we reach the edge of the observable universe. This splotchy pattern is an image of light emitted soon after the Big Bang itself – the Cosmic Microwave Background. While there is technically more universe past this border, we can’t see it because there hasn’t been enough time for the light from that far away to reach us.

With this map, the team set out to create a visualization of the cosmos that can be read, understood and appreciated by people who aren’t scientists.

“Growing up I was very inspired by astronomy pictures, stars, nebulae and galaxies, and now it's our time to create a new type of picture to inspire people,” said Ménard, a professor at Johns Hopkins. “Astrophysicists around the world have been analyzing this data for years, leading to thousands of scientific papers and discoveries. But nobody took the time to create a map that is beautiful, scientifically accurate, and accessible to people who are not scientists. Our goal here is to show everybody what the universe really looks like.”

Japan extends participation in International Space Station to 2030


 ISS is photographed by Expedition 66 crew member from a ÊSoyuz MS-19Ê spacecraft

Thu, November 17, 2022 

TOKYO (Reuters) -Japan will extend its participation in the International Space Station (ISS) programme to 2030, education and science minister Keiko Nagaoka said on Friday, following the footsteps of ally the United States.

The United States pledged in December to keep the ISS operational through to 2030. Among Washington's programme partners, which are Russia, Canada, Japan and the 11-nation European Space Agency, Tokyo is the first to join the United States in extending participation.

The space station, a science laboratory spanning the size of a football field and orbiting about 250 miles (400 km) above Earth, has been continuously occupied for more than two decades under a partnership led by the United States and Russia.

Japan's announcement comes just days after NASA's next-generation moon rocket blasted off from Florida in a crewless voyage inaugurating the U.S. space agency's Artemis exploration programme, in which Japan is also participating.

"ISS is inevitable as a place to verify technologies for the Artemis programme. It is also an important venue for Japan-U.S. cooperation," Nagaoka said at a signing ceremony for a Japan-U.S. agreement on cooperation for a lunar space station called Gateway.

Under the agreement, a Japanese astronaut will go aboard Gateway, which is under development for the Artemis programme, and Japan will supply batteries and other equipment for that space station.

U.S. President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida in May confirmed their intention to include a Japanese astronaut in the programme, including its lunar surface missions.

"We will maintain close cooperation with the United States to realise a Japanese astronaut's landing on the moon in the second half of the 2020s, which would be the first for non-Americans," Kishida said in a message read aloud at the ceremony.

(Reporting by Kiyoshi Takenaka; Editing by Lisa Shumaker and Bradley Perrett)

The Dengue Virus Has Been Found in Arizona

Dengue has been found in native mosquitos and at least one human, suggesting that it could be spreading locally in the state for the first known time.

By Ed Cara
Published Thursday Nov 17,2022


Aedes aegypti mosquitos, the primary vector of dengue, seen at a lab of the Institute of Biomedical Sciences of the Sao Paulo University, on January 8, 2016 in Sao Paulo, Brazil

Photo: Nelson Ameida/AFP (Getty Images)

A dangerous viral disease transmitted by mosquitoes has seemingly landed in Arizona. Earlier this week, health officials reported that a Maricopa County resident recently contracted dengue, while routine surveillance has found traces of the dengue virus in at least one nearby mosquito population. These discoveries suggest that the infection could be spreading locally in the state for the first time, though the investigation is still ongoing.

Maricopa County Department of Public Health (MCDPH) officials announced the human case of dengue on Monday, though no other details about the patient were provided. They also reported that the Maricopa County Environmental Services Department had detected the virus last month in samples taken from a mosquito trap in a neighborhood of the county. Though there have been cases of dengue reported in Arizona before, they’ve been found in people who likely caught it while recently traveling to countries where the disease is endemic. But given the surveillance data, officials say, it’s possible that this is the first locally transmitted case of dengue to be reported in the county and the state as a whole.

“While previous dengue cases in Maricopa County have been related to travel to countries where dengue commonly occurs, it is important to understand if others could have been exposed or if this is an isolated incident,” said Nick Staab, medical epidemiologist, in a statement released by the MCDPH. “This is in addition to our routine investigations of anyone suspected to have dengue or other mosquito-borne diseases.”

Dengue is spread by bites from infected mosquitoes. Most infected people will experience no illness, but about one in every four will develop flu-like symptoms, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About one in every 20 people will develop severe dengue, which can lead to life-threatening complications like internal bleeding and shock. There are four major serotypes of the virus, and surviving infection from one type does not provide immunity to the others. In fact, it actually raises the risk of severe dengue should you ever catch another type of the virus.

Though dengue is most common in the hottest and most humid areas of the world, it’s become remarkably widespread in recent decades, with the virus now believed to be endemic in over 100 countries, according to the World Health Organization. Many experts fear that climate change will allow dengue and similar viruses to become a local problem in previously unaffected parts of the world, like much of Europe and the United States. Notably, two of the best known vectors of dengue, Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquitoes, can now be found throughout much of the Southern and Eastern U.S. during their peak seasons, though it’s still not clear whether these populations could sustain the widespread local transmission of dengue and other viruses yet.

For the time being, Maricopa officials are planning to go door to door in the area, armed with mosquito prevention kits and tests that should be able to detect whether any residents have been infected with dengue in the past several months.

Drugs, Death and Denial on the Job
One in three BC construction workers reported problematic substance use. As deaths rise, a response is taking shape.

Zak Vescera

15 Nov 2022

TheTyee.ca
Zak Vescera is The Tyee’s labour reporter. This reporting beat is made possible by the Local Journalism Initiative.

LONG READ

Trevor Botkin, who stopped using drugs in 2019, says the culture in trades work increases the risks. ‘Look at the rate that men are dying.’ Photo for The Tyee by Lillie Louise Major.

Vince Tournour’s obituary said it best: he loved and he was loved.

Before he broke his back after a hard fall at work, before the pills, before he died alone on a winter night in a motel room in Bracebridge, Ontario, Rob Tournour says his brother was a good man who gave big hugs, had a bigger smile and loved carving, canoeing and carpentry.

But then a cocktail of drugs turned him into a number, one of thousands killed in a toxic drug epidemic claiming Canada’s working men.

“When I think about my brother lying dead in that fucking, shitty little motel, and I’m looking at his picture right now beside my desk, every day I wish he was still here,” Rob Tournour said.

“He tried. But in our system, he was a statistic.”

Vince was one of hundreds of men in the trades who died as a result of a toxic, unpredictable drug supply — a public health crisis that has shaken an industry defined by camaraderie and brotherhood.

Good data is scarce. But available information paints a troubling picture of substance use in the trades. A recent survey of construction workers in B.C. found one in three self-reported problematic substance use.

For many, that substance may be alcohol or cannabis. But many workers are also using stimulants, opioids, benzodiazepines or a combination of them all — a dangerous and increasingly deadly trend. The BC Coroners Service says roughly one in five of the 6,000 British Columbians who died of a toxic drug poisoning from July 2017 to August 2021 worked in the skilled trades and transportation sectors.

Rob Tournour might have been one of them. He started drinking when he was 16 and turned to cocaine shortly after. He quit 12 years ago, after a sleepless night that ended in a bleary-eyed sobriety meeting.

He said his story, and that of his brother, are tragically common accounts in construction and the skilled trades. Unions and workers say tough working conditions, high rates of injury and zero-tolerance policies create ripe conditions for use and abuse. Tradespeople — more than 90 per cent of whom are men — have long avoided talking about it, for fear of judgment or loss of work.

“Everybody is a tough guy. And they’re scared to not be a tough guy. They’re scared to be the one with the problem,” said Trevor Botkin, a carpenter who stopped using drugs in 2019. “Using the drugs is fine. But being addicted, that’s dirty.”

Employers and tradespeople alike have bristled at discussing the topic, worried it paints their profession in a negative light.

Today, that attitude is changing. Businesses and unions have made joint pitches to British Columbia’s NDP government, asking for more money to prevent deaths in the trades. Workers like Botkin and Tournour have personally fought to change the culture at work sites.

But the few specialized resources for construction workers at risk of dying are overwhelmed.

“Nothing is going to happen fast enough. Look at the rate that men are dying,” Botkin said. “I just don’t have that answer.”

Born into the trades

Anthony Monti was born to be a tradesman. At 12, his father was taking him to construction sites. When he was 15, he got his first job in Kelowna. And by 18, he was working in the oilfields near Fort McMurray. He loved the work, the people and the satisfaction of a good concrete finish.

“There’s just something about it,” Monti said. “It’s hard work, as well. But there’s an artistic part of it.”

In eight months of work in Alberta, he could clear six figures.

“I was making a lot of money, so I thought I was doing OK,” Monti said. “That was the main thing. If you’re making money, you’re doing good. But I wasn’t inside. Not mentally.”

Since he was a teenager, Monti had been dealing with a worsening substance use issue.

When Monti arrived in Alberta, he fell deeper into a pattern of use. Shift hours were long and hard. Offsite, workers would use drugs to numb pain from the job or pass the time. In Kelowna, he mostly drank and used cocaine. By the time he left Fort McMurray, he was using heroin.

“In my heart, I didn’t like it. But to survive in that atmosphere, you had to change,” Monti said.

It was an open secret: everyone knew what was happening, Monti said. But any sign that someone was struggling with substance use was met with judgment, Monti says — even if many others were going through the same thing.

“It shows weakness,” he said. “Before I got into recovery, I could have friends die, and my mentality in my head was, ‘He wasn’t doing it right.’”

Monti’s story echoes that of many workers in the trades, who say the culture of the industry and a stigma against substance use kept them from seeking help and plunged them deeper into addiction.

Substance use in the trades is not a new issue. In 1980, construction industry employers and unions joined forces to create the Construction Industry Rehabilitation Plan, a dedicated resource for members who used drugs and wanted to stop. The program is funded jointly by employers and unions, a recognition the issue goes beyond differences at the bargaining table.

What has changed over the years, however, is the toxicity of the illicit drug supply.

‘Before I got into recovery, I could have friends die,’ says Anthony Monti. ‘My mentality in my head was, “He wasn’t doing it right.”’ Photo for The Tyee by Lillie Louise Major.

In 2016, Monti completed a 60-day rehabilitation program, right as fentanyl was coming into B.C.’s illegal drug supply. He remembers losing seven friends in the six months that followed.

“It rattled me,” Monti said. “It could have been me. It would have been me.”

That loss — and risk — is felt deeply in the skilled trades. Last year, the Construction Industry Rehabilitation Plan conducted a survey in partnership with WorkSafeBC. One in three of the 270 workers who responded to the online poll reported having problematic substance use. Half of total respondents said they had a mental health problem and more than 70 per cent screened positive for post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I don’t think we would have the issue we have in construction today if it weren’t for what I call the perfect storm,” said rehabilitation plan executive director Vicky Waldron. “It’s not something anyone has thought out or maliciously created. I think a lot of variables have all collided.”

Waldron says the loss is felt at every level of the industry. But for many years, it was verboten.

“There are still many parts of the industry [that] will tell you there is not an issue going on. ‘There is nothing to see here.’ The truth is, it’s becoming more and more difficult to deny as more and more data comes in.”

‘Suck it Up’

Kale Moth pulled prosperity from the ground. Moth began his career as an oil rigger in Lloydminster, a border town with one foot in Alberta and the other in Saskatchewan. He didn’t have much growing up. His job on the rigs let him afford a truck, a home and more than one decision he would grow to regret.

A short while into his job, Moth tried cocaine for the first time. Within three months, he was selling it. Drugs, he said, were part of a lifestyle. But they were also one of the only ways to numb the pain of “backbreaking” shifts at the rigs that started early in the morning and went well into the night.

Kale Moth says the work was dangerous, demanding, draining and drugs were part of the equation for many workers. Photo for The Tyee by Zak Vescera.

“The work is beyond physically demanding. It’s mentally draining. It’s not easy to push yourself through that without some sort of stimulant,” Moth said.

Moth was far from the only person on the rigs using drugs, he said. But the topic wasn’t discussed. Asking someone for help, Moth said, would be met with more scorn than compassion.

“You’re not getting connection. You’re not getting fulfilled in any way. So you turn to something that makes you feel good for a short amount of time,” Moth said.

Moth said part and parcel of the crisis in the trades is a crisis of masculinity and of societal norms that push men from seeking help.

Across Canada, three out of four people who die from the toxic drug supply are men. In B.C., nine out of ten of the roughly 250,000 workers in the construction industry are male. Tradesmen describe their profession as a tight-knit brotherhood, a career where anyone could earn a good living by working hard. The trades, as careers, are often open to men regardless of the postal code they grew up in, their personal histories or their high school transcripts.

The flipside, according to Botkin, is a culture that celebrates suffering and looks down on vulnerability.

“The culture around job sites is, ‘Work hard and good things will come to you’,” Botkin said. “We celebrate our suffering on job sites. We’re proud of how hard the job is and that not everybody can do it. And with that, we’re very scared to be vulnerable, to be the weak link in the chain.”

Lorna Thomas’s son Alex, a welder, died by a drug-related suicide at the age of 24.

“I say he died by stigma,” Thomas said. “He was not able to speak to people, not able to speak to his boss openly about what was going on.”

Thomas, a filmmaker, documented the troubling toll overdose deaths have taken in the skilled trades in a short film called Building Hope: Substance Use in the Trades, which starred Tournour, Moth and Botkin.

“People are going to do everything they can to avoid being in trouble. And the workplace policies don’t always work in favour of someone who wants to disclose,” Thomas said.

For Moth, the breaking point came when his older cousin died of a fatal overdose in a B.C. rehabilitation centre. He is now sober and living in Saskatoon, where he is training to be a welder. In his spare time, he is an advocate for men’s health — and particularly for workers in the trades using substances.

“It’s so embedded into the trades,” Moth said. “It’s so accepted.”

Breaking backs

BC Building Trades executive director Brynn Bourke says B.C.’s construction industry is inherently precarious, dangerous work.

“The structure of how the industry works is so unforgiving for anyone,” Bourke later said. “If you don’t report to work, you don’t get paid. There are very few industries that operate with such hard guardrails around being sick or being unable to come to work like the construction industry does.”

Less than 15 per cent of B.C. construction workers are in a union. Many don’t have benefits or a formal relationship with an employer. The rate of serious injury is nearly three times higher than the average worker, according to data from WorkSafeBC. The vast majority of employers are small companies employing fewer than 20 people, meaning staffing and deadlines are often tight.

“You’ve got an industry that is very short-staffed, an industry that doesn’t have enough supply for the demand that exists. You have an industry that is predominantly made of small, independent contractors that are competing with very tight margins against each other to deliver on jobs,” Waldron said. “When you couple all of these variables together… you have the perfect storm.”

The BC Building Trades, whose 14 affiliate unions represent about 40,000 tradespeople, has long advocated for a holistic approach to reducing the harms of substance use that includes on-site worker safety, better working conditions and more resources such as the Construction Industry Rehabilitation Plan, which it helps fund. “Every one of my business managers knows someone who has died from poisoned drugs,” Bourke said.

One of the long-standing issues is chronic pain and injury on the job. Doug Parton, the business agent for Ironworkers Local 97, believes prescription of opioids after being hurt on the job is one of the drivers of use.

A 2020 Globe and Mail investigation found doctors used by workers compensation boards, which are designed to protect workers, were sometimes prescribing opioids after an injury, pushing them back to work and then cutting their benefits, pushing them towards the illicit supply.

B.C. Labour Minister Harry Bains said WorkSafeBC, the organization mandated to keep workers safe, had adopted what he called a “harm reduction strategy” around opioid prescriptions for workers focused on preventing chronic opioid use and finding alternative therapies for workers with chronic pain or addiction.

The decision of what to prescribe is up to a doctor, Bains said, but he believes the program is bearing fruit. He said the number of workers considered chronic opioid users without a viable treatment alternative had decreased from about 9,000 in 2017 to just over 6,200 in 2021.

Bourke says non-opiate pain prescriptions are part of the solution. But she and other advocates say broader, institutional change is needed.

In 2020, Fraser Health and the rehabilitation plan released a report around return-to-work procedures for construction workers who use or used drugs. One of the findings was that many employers and unions did not have concrete policies to accommodate those workers or suitable work options if they could not do their prior job. In addition, the report said, many workers preferred after-work treatment options because they feared losing income. It also found that return-to-work processes often hinged on the question of whether a worker was impaired, rather than overall well-being, and that there was generally poor awareness around what treatment programs were available and how to access them.

The Construction Industry Rehabilitation Plan exists specifically to help construction workers access those resources. In 2021, Waldron said they received 6,500 calls — a more than 60 per cent jump from the year prior. When she began work at the program in 2016, she said they treated an average of 60 people a year. Now they consistently see more than 200.

Not all people who use drugs want to enter residential treatment. But for those who do, Waldron said waits are a challenge. “Getting a bed is incredibly difficult, and I know I’ll take some heat for that, but it’s true. There are not enough beds. There are not enough resources. And the wait times can be considerable.”

The Construction Industry Rehabilitation Plan used to run its own residential treatment facility, Waldron said, but it was closed years ago due to issues with the building. She says the organization is now trying to secure government support for a new, dedicated facility with 25 to 40 beds specifically for B.C. construction workers. (Bains said he was aware of the proposal but that no funding commitment had been made.)

Unions and employers say they’re also embracing the B.C. government’s broader focus on harm reduction — ways of making substance use safer rather than insisting on abstinence.

Dave Baspaly, the president of the Council of Construction Associations, said that has included asking government to provide naloxone kits at all construction sites. Such kits can temporarily reverse an opioid overdose if provided quickly.

“You’ve got a patchwork quilt and everybody trying to do right by it, but I think that what ends up happening is that it drives it underground,” Baspaly said.

“This is one of those issues that is felt top to bottom, labour to employer,” Baspaly said. “That, and asbestos.”

But unlike asbestos, Bourke says employers and unions don’t have a clear understanding of how to integrate harm reduction approaches for substance use into the industry.

“We don’t have the blueprint. We have a system that is built on trying to manage use of substances, and it only has blunt instruments for that,” she said.

Tough enough to talk about it

There’s one place where people agree progress is being made: awareness. Waldron said the rehabilitation plan survey of B.C. construction workers found most wouldn’t feel comfortable disclosing a substance use issue to their peers. But paradoxically, it also found the vast majority would support a colleague if they disclosed.

“We have unions and employers that are spending hours of their time just talking about mental health and substance use, talking about using the correct language without stigmatizing, encouraging people to come forward,” Waldron said.

In 2017, the Vancouver Island Construction Association began the Tailgate Toolkit, a guide to how construction workers can access resources to use drugs more safely. The association began giving talks on Vancouver Island, and now offer them across the province, with backing from the B.C. government.

The association’s CEO, Rory Kulmala, says many greeted those talks with skepticism at first. Now people are taking the issue more seriously.


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“I have to say when I started down this road five years ago, I had industry people saying, ‘Don’t say anything, because people will say we have a problem,’” Kulmala said. “Well, the coroners’ report says we have a problem.”

Many of the men interviewed for this story have made personal and professional commitments to helping their peers struggling with substance use.

Rob Tournour, a bricklayer by trade, says his substance use began with alcohol, adding that it was normal for a crew to go out drinking after a hard day of work.

“On the outside, it might look like you’re having a pretty damn good time,” Tournour said. “But for me, as it progressed through my 30s and my early 40s, the more I drank, the more I was thinking of getting ahold of coke, and then it turned into crack as well.”

That ended 12 years ago, when Tournour got home from another late, hard night and decided to go to his first sobriety meeting. He estimated he went to as many as 200 meetings in the 90 days after that.

Moth, who now lives in Saskatoon, has delivered public talks about his time in the trades encouraging other men to come forward.

Botkin, who works full time at a Victoria non-profit, has also shared his story.

Monti resolved years ago, he said, to pay it forward to other workers in the industry going through what he went through.

And Tournour says he is doing it for his brother.

“It’s become a little more OK for men to open up and discuss the traumas they may have faced,” said Tournour. “Our society has groomed us to be strong, to be protectors, to be the providers. And God, in this world now that we’re living in, that’s not such an easy thing to do.”