US nuclear generation down but share remains the same

12 April 2022

Total US nuclear electricity generation declined slightly for the second consecutive year in 2021, although nuclear's share of electricity generation has remained similar to its average share over the previous decade, according to figures from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA).

(Image: EIA)

Output from US nuclear power plants totalled 778 million MWh in 2021, 1.5% less than the previous year. Nuclear's share of US electricity generation across all sectors was 19%.

Since 2017, the EIA has included all US generating plant retirements since 2002 in its Preliminary Monthly Electric Generator Inventory. Six nuclear units with a total capacity of 4736 MWe have retired since the end of 2017, and three more, with a combined capacity of 3009 MWe, are scheduled to retire in the coming years. These are: Palisades, in Michigan, which is scheduled to retire later this year; and Diablo Canyon, in California, where one unit is scheduled to retire 2024 and one in 2025.

Only one of the five 2021 nuclear retirements that EIA expected, of January that year, actually took place. Exelon Generation reversed the decision to retire the Byron and Dresden plants - each home to two units - following the passage by Illinois of energy legislation supporting their continued operation.

The loss of electricity generation from the only retirement of the year - Entergy Corporation's Indian Point unit 3, which closed in April after nearly 60 years of nuclear power generation at the site in New York state - was partially offset by an increase in the generation of the remaining nuclear fleet at a higher capacity factor, EIA said. The US fleet achieved an average nuclear capacity factor 93% in 2021.

The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, enacted in November 2021, includes the allocation of some USD6 billion to prevent the premature retirement of existing nuclear power plants.

Vogtle units 3 and 4 in Georgia remain the only nuclear units currently under construction in the USA. The two AP1000 units - each rated at 1114 MWe - are scheduled to come online by the end of 2023.

UEC launches Wyoming hub-and-spoke project

08 April 2022

US uranium mining company Uranium Energy Corp (UEC) has disclosed mineral resources totalling over 69 million pounds U3O8 (26,541 tU) in the first technical filing for its Wyoming hub-and-spoke uranium in-situ leach project.

UEC's Wyoming hub-and-spoke concept (Image: UEC)

The project is centred on the fully licensed Irigaray Central Processing Plant as the "hub" with seven satellite projects - four of which are fully permitted - forming the "spokes". The satellites include assets purchased by UEC through its acquisition of Uranium One Americas (U1A), completed in December 2021, and the Reno Creek project, which it acquired in 2017.

The project consists of the Irigaray, Christensen Ranch, Moore Ranch, Reno Creek, Ludeman, Allemand-Ross, Barge and the Jab/West Jab project areas. Total measured and indicated resources across all the assets total 61,956,200 pounds U3O8, with total inferred resources of 7,105,700 pounds U3O8.

Texas-based UEC reports its mineral resources in accordance with the US Security and Exchange Commission's S-K 1300 regulation. With the exception of Reno Creek, the Technical Report Summary (TRS) filed by the company is the first time these resources have been reported under the S-K 1300 format.

Irigaray and Christensen Ranch have previously collectively been referred to as the Willow Creek project, with  Irigaray plant as the processing plant for that project. Christensen Ranch is currently under care and maintenance and Irigaray is operating in a toll processing capacity. The Christensen Ranch satellite plant is also fully licensed, and Moore Ranch, Reno Creek and Ludeman are fully permitted.

UEC President and CEO Amir Adnani said the technical data from the conversion of U1A’s historical resources into fully compliant S-K 1300 resources would be employed in implementing the company's uranium extraction plans. The resources outlined in the TRS filing also represent the largest S-K 1300 resource summary completed and filed to date, he added. "These considerable permitted Wyoming resources coupled with our Texas permitted projects, positions UEC to lead the resurgence of US uranium production," he said.

Researched and written by World Nuclear News

Samsung, Seaborg partnership on floating nuclear reactors


The Memorandum of Understanding is to manufacture and sell turnkey power plants combining Samsung Heavy Industry’s ship-building expertise and the Danish company’s Compact Molten Salt Reactor (CMSR). It also covers development of hydrogen production plants and ammonia plants.

How a 200 MWe Power Barge could look (Image: Seaborg)

08 April 2022

Seaborg’s design is for modular CMSR power barges that can produce between 200 MW and 800 MW of electricity, with an operational life of 24 years. Instead of having solid fuel rods that need constant cooling, the CMSR’s fuel is mixed in a liquid salt that acts as a coolant, which means that it will simply shut down and solidify in case of emergency.

Jin-Taek Jeong, president and CEO of Samsung Heavy Industries, said: "CMSR is a carbon-free energy source that can efficiently respond to climate change issues and is a next-generation technology that meets the vision of Samsung Heavy Industries.

"Through this agreement, we plan to pioneer the CMSR-based floating nuclear power plant market as part of strengthening its future new business opportunity."

The partnership agreement was signed at an online event, with Seaborg CEO and co-founder Troels Schönfeldt saying: "We are honoured and proud to have formed this partnership with Samsung Heavy Industries, one of the world’s largest and most experienced shipyards. It is another step forward in our quest to introduce a new generation of nuclear reactors that are clean and safe and can be built using industrial technology with all the benefits of scalability, speed, and lower costs."

The signing of the partnership agreement took place on 7 April (Image: Samsung Heavy Industries)

The timeline for Seaborg, which was founded in 2014, has been for commercial prototypes to be built in 2024 with commercial production of Power Barges beginning from 2026.

Samsung Heavy Industries signed an agreement in June last year with the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute for offshore molten-salt-cooled reactors development and research.

Researched and written by World Nuclear News

The West Is Suffering The Consequences Of Poor Energy Decisions

By Irina Slav - Apr 10, 2022, 

• The EU has doubled down on becoming the world’s first net-zero region.
• The West hasn’t done enough to secure crucial supply chains to provide raw materials for their energy transition plans.
• Import dependency has made Western economies more vulnerable.

There has been an unspoken assumption that the West knows what it’s doing because it has been doing it longer than the East. Almost all developed economies are in Western Europe and North America. Yet recently, the tables have turned in one vital respect: energy policy. During the last few years, the EU has doubled down on its ambition to become the world’s first net-zero region. It has built up massive amounts of renewable energy, has slated huge investments in green hydrogen, and has been adopting policy after policy to discourage the consumption of fossil fuels.

In the U.S., the big push into renewables started two years ago as President Joe Biden took office. The transition from a fossil fuel-based economy to one based on and fueled by renewable energy was a central tenet in his campaign, and he got to work from day one, banning the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada and soon after temporarily banning oil and gas drilling on federal lands.

Meanwhile, far, far, away in the East, OPEC+ was formed to include two of the world’s largest oil producers—Russia and Saudi Arabia—as well as the Central Asian oil producers from the former Soviet Union, including Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. The expanded cartel hasn’t always seen eye to eye, and just before the pandemic really blew up, the Russians and the Saudis engaged in a brief price war. Yet since then, OPEC+ has worked like a well-oiled machine.

The EU, the UK, and the United States have raced to install more wind turbines, more solar panels, and more storage, and carmakers, almost all based in either Europe or the U.S., have equally raced to commit tens of billions of dollars to the electrification of transport. Those races are both based on the Paris Agreement and the goal of reducing the rise in global average temperatures by 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels.

Related: JP Morgan: Commodities Could Surge By Another 40%
While the West has been busy with that, OPEC+, headed by Russia and Saudi Arabia, has been pumping as much oil as it has seen fit at any given moment. In addition to that, Russia has kept its metals and uranium industry going and has continued to forge closer ties with the Far East, with a focus on China. Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has staked a claim in the mining world and has allocated tens of billions on renewable energy and smart tech investment.

What this means, basically, is while the West has enthusiastically focused on the final section of the energy supply chain—the wind turbines, the panels, and the EVs—the East, in the face of Russia and Saudi Arabia, has focused on the start and the middle of the process, on the raw materials without which no energy transition would be possible. While doing that, they have also continued what they have done for decades: supply the world, including transition-happy economies, with fossil fuels.

Right now, the West is discovering how important the raw materials part is for the energy industry as a whole. U.S. shale drillers cannot boost production as fast as the Biden administration would like because it has been plagued by shortages. The EU is struggling under a growing electricity cost burden because renewables have under-delivered while the EU has been trying to reduce its consumption of fossil fuels. Now, this consumption is on the rise, but it’s also a lot more expensive than it was because of the tight supply. Ironically, emissions are also on the rise.Related: Outlook For China Oil Demand Darkens

The Biden administration wants to bring in more Canadian oil into the U.S., but the Keystone XL pipeline that could’ve done that has been killed by that very same administration. The administration also wants more local critical mineral production but appears to not want the mines that would be necessary to do that. What it doesn’t want, apparently, is Russian oil and fuels amid the Ukraine war, but it will only suspend these imports beginning on April 22, so it can stock up before that.

In Europe, politicians have been equally active in punishing Russia for Ukraine with, so far, five rounds of sanctions that many have joked have hurt the EU more than they have hurt Russia. There is some truth in these jokes: EU energy prices have skyrocketed and stayed in the sky, industries are warning they might have to close if the EU sanctions Russian gas or if Russia decides to turn the tap off in retaliation, and people are beginning to protest.

Even so, Brussels officials are talking about oil and gas sanctions, and they just this week voted for a ban on Russian coal imports... to take effect in August. That last part is a sliver of common sense. Russia supplies 45 percent of Europe’s thermal coal, used for electricity and heat generation. The EU is now scrambling to find a replacement, while the world’s biggest coal exporter Indonesia is hiking its prices massively and Australia, another coal giant, is warning it will not have enough for Europe.

The West is beginning its painful awakening to one very simple fact. This fact is that whoever controls the raw materials controls everything. And if those who control the raw materials play their cards right, they are likely to remain in control while the consumers of these raw materials deepen their dependence on these external suppliers.

By Irina Slav for Oilprice.com

Russia is trying to destroy Ukraine’s energy sector

The aim is to make the country uninhabitable

Mattia Nelles

THE SPECTATOR

11 April 2022

We are seven weeks into the war and the level of destruction in Ukraine is mounting. Every single day we learn more about Russia’s scorched earth tactics and about the atrocities its forces have committed in the areas they once occupied.

But with another Russian surge in Ukraine’s east looming, one trend is not sufficiently understood in the West. Over the past weeks, Russian air and missile strikes have deliberately targeted and destroyed key components of Ukraine’s critical civilian infrastructure, especially in the energy sector, in a bid to make the country collapse.

In late March the Pentagon estimated that Russia had fired over 1,200 precision guided missiles into Ukraine. The cost of direct damage to Ukraine’s infrastructure in the month since Russia invaded the country has reached $63 billion, according to the Kyiv School of Economics. Ninety-two factories (including food warehouses), 378 educational institutions, 138 healthcare institutions and 12 airports have been damaged, destroyed or seized.

But it may well be the energy sector where Russian missiles will do the most long-term harm. Modern cities and villages cannot survive without a proper supply of electricity, gas and fuel that is needed not only for households and businesses, but also for water supply, sewage systems and heating. Since 24 February the Russians have damaged and destroyed numerous assets of the Ukrainian energy sector. They are systematically targeting and destroying Ukrainian critical infrastructure in order to make villages, towns, cities and eventually entire regions uninhabitable for Ukrainians, forcing people to leave their homes.
The sad reality is that Ukraine lacks the ability to protect its critical infrastructure against air and missile attacks

Since the beginning of the invasion, seven power plants and parts of the electricity grid have been damaged, and one destroyed. Russia has also targeted gas pipelines. Parts of the Soyuz transmission line carrying westbound gas to Europe were seized in the Kharkiv region by Russian forces in March. Forty-four gas distribution stations are now not operating in Ukraine due to the damage to middle and low-pressure gas pipelines at a regional, city and village level, leaving around 300,000 households across the country without gas.

Key targets have included heat and power plants in the cities of Chernihiv, Sumy and Okhtyrka (in the Sumy region). Russians also targeted and damaged over 50 components of electricity grids in the Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Mykolaiv and Kherson regions and damaged the grids of the Rivne Nuclear Power Plant and the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), Europe’s largest NPP, which provides 25 per cent of Ukraine’s electricity. In a press briefing this month, the CEO of Ukraine’s largest private energy company DTEK Group said that despite his company’s efforts, approximately 1.5 million households remain cut off from electricity.

On 3 April, Russian missiles hit and completely destroyed Ukraine’s largest oil refinery in Kremenchuk, in the Poltava region. On the same day, missiles also destroyed a critical oil processing plant in the harbour of Odesa. With the Ukrainian Black Sea blockaded and critical oil storage and processing infrastructure destroyed, the only way to import oil and fuel into Ukraine is now via train and trucks from the EU.

Russia is well aware of that and experts worry that it will soon target the Ukrainian railway system to disrupt fuel supplies. As of now, fuel is already rationed and as evacuations from the eastern regions are underway, civilians and possibly the army will face fuel shortages in the near future.

Even before the beginning of the renewed Russian aggression, the situation was especially acute in the country’s eastern regions of Kharkiv, Luhansk and Donetsk – especially in the besieged city of Mariupol.

In Luhansk 132,000 users across more than 35 settlements have been cut off from gas. And as of 5 April, almost 96,000 people in 30 settlements across the Luhansk region are without electricity. Last week the governor of Luhansk wrote on Telegram that every hospital in the Luhansk region was either damaged or destroyed.

In April, fighting in the Kharkiv region damaged energy infrastructure, leaving more than 60,000 residents cut off from their water supply and another 40,000 residents without electricity. Around 20,000 people are still trapped and completely cut off from electricity, gas and water in the besieged city of Izium, in the Kharkiv region.

We have to understand that despite Russia trying to militarily capture large parts of Ukraine’s eastern region, it is highly likely to continue striking energy infrastructure across the country. The sad reality is that Ukraine lacks the ability to protect its critical infrastructure against air and missile attacks. Without more advanced medium and long-range anti-air systems, Russian rockets will continue to damage and destroy peaceful cities and infrastructure. Only some of this infrastructure can be quickly restored once the fighting stops.

Whether Ukraine can effectively deploy defence systems like the S-300 from Slovakia, which recently arrived in Ukraine, will decide whether Putin can realise his goal of punishing and destroying large parts of the country. If the Russians continue to disrupt Ukraine’s energy infrastructure unabated, the number of displaced people (which currently stands at over seven million) will quickly grow. People do want to stay in the country but the Russian plan to make large areas of Ukraine unliveable will force them out. The EU believes that up to eight million refugees will seek shelter in the European Union. Given the Russian ability and desire to wreak havoc on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, millions more may be forced to leave very soon as well.

WRITTEN BY

Mattia Nelles
Mattia Nelles is a political analyst usually based in Kyiv.

Putin’s war shows autocracies and fossil fuels go hand in hand. Here’s how to tackle both

‘Autocrats are often directly the result of fossil fuel.

 Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images

Democracies are making more progress than autocracies when it comes to climate action. But divestment campaigns can put pressure on the most recalcitrant of political leaders


Bill McKibben
@billmckibben

Mon 11 Apr 2022

At first glance, last autumn’s Glasgow climate summit looked a lot like its 25 predecessors. It had:

A conference hall the size of an aircraft carrier stuffed with displays from problematic parties (the Saudis, for example, with a giant pavilion saluting their efforts at promoting a “circular carbon economy agenda”).

Squadrons of delegates rushing constantly to mysterious sessions (“Showcasing achievements of TBTTP and Protected Areas Initiative of GoP”) while actual negotiations took place in a few back rooms.

Earnest protesters with excellent signs (“The wrong Amazon is burning”).

But as I wandered the halls and the streets outside, it struck me again and again that a good deal had changed since the last big climate confab in Paris in 2015 – and not just because carbon levels and the temperature had risen ever higher.

The biggest shift was in the political climate. Over those few years the world seemed to have swerved sharply away from democracy and toward autocracy – and in the process dramatically limited our ability to fight the climate crisis. Oligarchs of many kinds had grabbed power and were using it to uphold the status quo; there was a Potemkin quality to the whole gathering, as if everyone was reciting a script that no longer reflected the actual politics of the planet.

Now that we’ve watched Russia launch an oil-fired invasion of Ukraine, it’s a little easier to see this trend in high relief – but Putin is far from the only case. Consider the examples.

Brazil, in 2015 at Paris, had been led by Dilma Rousseff, of the Workers’ party, which had for the most part worked to limit deforestation in the Amazon. In some ways the country could claim to have done more than any other on climate damage, simply by slowing the cutting. But in 2021 Jair Bolsonaro was in charge, at the head of a government that empowered every big-time cattle rancher and mahogany poacher in the country. If people cared about the climate, he said, they could eat less and “poop every other day”. And if they cared about democracy, they could … go to jail. “Only God can take me from the presidency,” he explained ahead of this year’s elections.

A climate activist holds a sign depicting Jair Bolsonaro with the slogan ‘Exterminator of the Future’. 

Photograph: Luis Robayo/AFP/Getty Images

Or India, which may turn out to be the most pivotal nation given the projected increases in its energy use – and which had refused its equivalent of Greta Thunberg even a visa to attend the meeting. (At least Disha Ravi was no longer in jail).

Or Russia (about which more in a minute) or China – a decade ago we could still, albeit with some hazard and some care, hold climate protests and demonstrations in Beijing.

 Don’t try that now.

Or, of course, the US, whose deep democratic deficits have long haunted climate negotiations. The reason we have a system of voluntary pledges, not a binding global agreement, is that the world finally figured out there would never be 66 votes in the US Senate for a real treaty.

Joe Biden had expected to arrive at the talks with the Build Back Better bill in his back pocket, slap it down on the table, and start a bidding war with the Chinese – but the other Joe, Manchin of West Virginia, the biggest single recipient of fossil fuel cash in DC, made sure that didn’t happen. Instead Biden showed up empty-handed and the talks fizzled.

And so we were left contemplating a world whose people badly want action on climate change, but whose systems aren’t delivering it. In 2021 the UN Development Programme conducted a remarkable poll, across the planet – they questioned people through video-game networks to reach humans less likely to answer traditional surveys. Even amid the Covid pandemic, 64% of them described climate change as a “global emergency”, and that by decisive margins they wanted “broad climate policies beyond the current state of play”. As the UNDP director, Achim Steiner, summarized, “the results of the survey clearly illustrate that urgent climate action has broad support amongst people around the globe, across nationalities, age, gender and education level”.

The irony is that some environmentalists have occasionally yearned for less democracy, not more. Surely if we just had strongmen in power everywhere they could just make the hard decisions and put us on the right path – we wouldn’t have to mess with the constant vagaries of elections and lobbying and influence.

But this is wrong for at least one moral reason – strongmen capable of acting instantly on the climate crisis are also capable of acting instantly on any number of other things, as the people of Xinjiang and Tibet would testify were they allowed to talk. It’s also wrong for a number of practical ones.

Those practical problems begin with the fact that autocrats have their own vested interests to please – Modi campaigned for his role atop the world’s largest democracy on the corporate jet of Adani, the largest coal company in the subcontinent. Don’t assume for a minute that there’s not a fossil fuel lobby in China; right now it’s busy telling Xi that economic growth depends on more coal.

And beyond that, autocrats are often directly the result of fossil fuel. The crucial thing about oil and gas is that it is concentrated in a few spots around the world, and hence the people who live on top of or otherwise control those spots end up with huge amounts of unwarranted and unaccountable power.

Boris Johnson was just off in Saudi Arabia trying to round up some hydrocarbons – the day after the king beheaded 81 folks he didn’t like. Would anyone pay the slightest attention to the Saudi royal family if they did not possess oil? No. Nor would the Koch brothers have been able to dominate American politics on the basis of their ideas –when David Koch ran for the White House on the Libertarian ticket in 1980 he got almost no votes. So he and his brother Charles decided to use their winnings as America’s largest oil and gas barons to buy the GOP, and the rest is (dysfunctional) political history.

The most striking example of this phenomenon, it hardly need be said, is Vladimir Putin, a man whose power rests almost entirely on the production of stuff that you can burn. If I wandered through my house, it would be no problem to find electronics from China, textiles from India, all manner of goods from the EU – but there’s nothing anywhere that would say “made in Russia”. Sixty per cent of the export earnings that equipped his army came from oil and gas, and all the political clout that has cowed western Europe for decades came from his fingers on the gas spigot. He and his hideous war are the product of fossil fuel, and his fossil fuel interests have done much to corrupt the rest of the world.

Vladimir Putin and Alexei Miller, CEO of Russian natural gas giant Gazprom, attend a ceremony to mark the launch of the Sakhalin-Khabarovsk-Vladivostok natural gas pipeline in 2011. 

Photograph: Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images

It’s worth remembering that Donald Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, wears the Order of Friendship, personally pinned on his lapel by Putin in thanks for the vast investments Tillerson’s firm (that would be Exxon) had made in the Arctic – a region opened to their exploitation by the fact that it had, um, melted. And these guys stick together: it’s entirely unsurprising that when Coke, Pepsi, Starbucks and Amazon quit Russia last month, Koch Industries announced that it was staying put. The family business began, after all, by building refineries for Stalin.

Another way of saying this is that hydrocarbons by their nature tend towards the support of despotism – they’re highly dense in energy and hence very valuable; geography and geology means they can be controlled with relative ease. There’s one pipeline, one oil terminal.

Whereas sun and wind are, in these terms, much closer to democratic: they’re available everywhere, diffuse instead of concentrated. I can’t have an oilwell in my backyard because, as with almost all backyards, there is no oil there. Even if there was an oilwell, I would have to sell what I pumped to some refiner, and since I’m American, that would likely be a Koch enterprise. But I can (and do) have a solar panel on my roof; my wife and I rule our own tiny oligarchy, insulated from the market forces the Putins and the Kochs can unleash and exploit. The cost of energy delivered by the sun has not risen this year, and it will not rise next year.

Hydrocarbons by their nature tend towards the support of despotism

As a general rule of thumb, those territories with the healthiest, least-captive-to-vested-interest democracies are making the most progress on climate change. Look around the world at Iceland or Costa Rica, around Europe at Finland or Spain, around the US at California or New York. So part of the job for climate campaigners is to work for functioning democratic states, where people’s demands for a working future will be prioritized over vested interest, ideology and personal fiefdoms.

But given the time constraints that physics impose – the need for rapid action everywhere – that can’t be the whole strategy. In fact, activists have arguably been a little too focused on politics as a source of change, and paid not quite enough attention to the other power center in our civilization: money.

If we could somehow persuade or force the world’s financial giants to change, that would yield quick progress as well. Maybe quicker, since speed is more a hallmark of stock exchanges than parliaments.

And here the news is a little better. Take my country as an example. Political power has come to rest in the reddest, most corrupt parts of America. The senators representing a relative handful of people in sparsely populated western states are able to tie up our political life, and those senators are almost all on the payroll of big oil. But money has collected in the blue parts of the country – Biden-voting counties account for 70% of the country’s economy.

That’s one reason some of us have worked so hard on campaigns like fossil fuel divestment – we won big victories with New York’s pension funds and with California’s vast university system, and so were able to put real pressure on big oil. Now we’re doing the same with the huge banks that are the industry’s financial lifeline. We’re well aware that we may never win over Montana or Mississippi, so we better have some solutions that don’t depend on doing so.

The same thing’s true globally. We may not be able to advocate in Beijing or Moscow or, increasingly, in Delhi. So, at least for these purposes, it’s useful that the biggest pots of money remain in Manhattan, in London, in Frankfurt, in Tokyo. These are places we still can make some noise.

And they are places where there’s some real chance of that noise being heard. Governments tend to favor people who’ve already made their fortune, industries that are already ascendant: that’s who comes with blocs of employees who vote, and that’s who can afford the bribes. But investors are all about who’s going to make money next. That’s why Tesla is worth far more than General Motors in the stock market, if not in the halls of Congress.

Moreover, if we can persuade the world of money to act, it’s capable of doing so quickly. Should, say, Chase Bank, currently the biggest lender on earth to fossil fuel, announce this year that it was quickly phasing out that support, the news would ripple out across stock markets in the matter of hours. That’s why some of us have felt it worthwhile to mount increasingly larger campaigns against these financial institutions, and to head off to jail from their lobbies.

The world of money is at least as unbalanced and unfair as the world of political power – but in ways that may make it a little easier for climate advocates to make progress.

Putin’s grotesque war might be where some of these strands come together. It highlights the ways that fossil fuel builds autocracy, and the power that control of scarce supplies gives to autocrats. It’s also shown us the power of financial systems to put pressure on the most recalcitrant political leaders: Russia is being systematically and effectively punished by bankers and corporations, though as my Ukrainian colleague Svitlana Romanko and I pointed out recently, they could be doing far more. The shock of the war may also be strengthening the resolve and unity of the world’s remaining democracies and perhaps – one can hope – diminishing the attraction of would-be despots like Donald Trump.

But we’ve got years, not decades, to get the climate crisis under some kind of control. We won’t get more moments like this. The brave people of Ukraine may be fighting for more than they can know.

This story is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of news outlets strengthening coverage of the climate story

‘Black carbon’ threat to Arctic as sea routes open up with global heating


As climate crisis allows new maritime routes to be used, sooty shipping emissions accelerates ice melt and risk to ecosystems

Shrinking polar ice has allowed shipping traffic in the 

Arctic to rise by 25% between 2013 and 2019 and the

 growth is expected to continue. 

Photograph: Viacheslav Misiurin/Getty/iStockphoto


Seascape: the state of our oceans is supported by


Karen McVeigh
@karenmcveigh1

Sun 10 Apr 2022 15.00 BST

In February last year, a Russian gas tanker, Christophe de Margerie, made history by navigating the icy waters of the northern sea route in mid-winter. The pioneering voyage, from Jiangsu in China to a remote Arctic port in Siberia, was heralded as the start of a new era that could reshape global shipping routes – cutting travel times between Europe and Asia by more than a third.

It has been made possible by the climate crisis. Shrinking polar ice has allowed shipping traffic in the Arctic to rise 25% between 2013 and 2019 and the growth is expected to continue.

But Arctic shipping is not only made possible by the climate crisis, it is adding to it too. More ships mean a rise in exhaust fumes, which is accelerating ice melt in this sensitive region due to a complex phenomenon involving “black carbon”, an air pollutant formed by the incomplete combustion of fossil fuels.

An iceberg off Greenland. Though soot from forest fires and algae are also responsible for darkening ice, shipping emissions are a major cause. 

Photograph: Hannibal Hanschke/Reuters

When black carbon, or soot, lands on snow and ice, it dramatically speeds up melting. Dark snow and ice, by absorbing more energy, melts far faster than heat-reflecting white snow, creating a vicious circle of faster warming.

Environmentalists warn that the Arctic, which is warming four times faster than the global average, has seen an 85% rise in black carbon from ships between 2015 and 2019, mainly because of the increase in oil tankers and bulk carriers.

The particles, which exacerbate respiratory and cardiovascular illness in towns, are short-term but potent climate agents: they represent more than 20% of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions from ships, according to one estimate.
We’re hitting this cascading tipping point for the climate … we need to do something about black carbon urgentlyDr Lucy Gilliam, Seas at Risk

Yet unlike other transport sectors, including road, rail and inland waterways, where air-quality standards curb emissions, no regulations exist for shipping. Last November, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) adopted a resolution on the use of cleaner fuels in the Arctic to reduce black carbon, but left it as a voluntary move.

Last week, the IMO was once again in the spotlight. A coalition of environmental groups warned a meeting of its pollution, prevention and response subcommittee that its resolution did too little to tackle the Arctic’s climate crisis. They submitted a paper calling on governments to agree mandatory regulations to slash shipping’s emissions of black carbon in the region.

“We’re hitting this cascading tipping point for the climate,” said Dr Lucy Gilliam, senior shipping policy officer of Seas at Risk. “With the IPCC report, we are seeing again why we need to do something about black carbon urgently.”

Last Monday, scientists from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned it was “now or never” for action to stave off climate breakdown. They concluded that the international community was underperforming on climate commitments, but singled out the shipping sector and the IMO for particular criticism.

The pollution from global shipping increased by 4.9% in 2021, according to a report by the shipbrokers Simpson Spence Young.

The Russian diesel-electric icebreaker Admiral Makarov in the Arctic. Water vapour condensing around particles from exhaust fumes can cause a thick fog. 

Photograph: Mauritius Images/Alamy

“IMO member states must agree on ambitious and urgent global action to dramatically reduce ship-source black carbon emissions this decade, in order to mitigate the climate crisis in the Arctic,” said Dr Sian Prior, lead adviser to the Clean Arctic Alliance, a coalition of 21 non-profit groups lobbying governments to protect Arctic wildlife and people. She urged states and regions to do their part by acting immediately to cut black carbon from ships.

If all shipping using heavy fuel oil in the Arctic switched to cleaner distillate fuel, it would cut their black carbon emissions by 44%, the Alliance said. Heavy fuel oil or bunker fuel is a viscous, low-grade, cheap oil contaminated with substances including nitrogen and sulphur, which make it more polluting than distillate.

If all ships also installed diesel particulate filters, which reduce emissions by capturing and storing soot, black carbon could be cut by a further 90%.


UN shipping summit criticised for ‘dangerous’ delay on emissions plan

However, others argue that the IMO’s 2021 ban on heavy fuel oils in the Arctic – a move aimed at reducing the risk of spillage and expected to come into effect in 2029 – will see a reduction in black carbon.

“The tide is swimming in the same direction already,” said Paul Blomerus, director of Clear Seas: Centre for Responsible Marine Shipping, an independent research institute in Canada funded by industry and government. “Many Canadian-flagged ships are moving towards distillate fuels, ahead of the IMO ban, which will have the added effect of reducing black carbon emissions.

“You could argue that the IMO only has a certain amount of bandwidth and we should concentrate on decarbonisation and how to get to net zero by 2050.”

He also noted the major role that Russia played in Arctic shipping. “Whether they would abide by the IMO’s regulation is anyone’s guess in the current circumstances,” he said.

New Mexico's water outlook for summer, fall: On the edge


Scott Wyland, The Santa Fe New Mexican
Sun, April 10, 2022, 

Apr. 10—Another year, another growing season that will need summer monsoon rains to avoid water shortages.

After a promising snowy start in late December, the weather became drier as expected under La Niña, with the regional snowpack and precipitation falling to levels below a year ago and the 30-year median, according to a newly released federal report on March conditions.

Lower temperatures this year have been a double-edged sword, causing more powdery snowfall with less water content. But the sometimes-frigid conditions have also kept the snowpack from melting too early — as it has done in recent years — so the runoff flows when New Mexico farmers need it for their spring planting.

Water managers say March offers the first accurate forecast of the upcoming runoff because that's when the biggest snowpack buildup occurs.

This year's snowpack would be sufficient if not for the reservoirs being low, as the state owes Texas a hefty amount of water. There's also this problem, experts say: Climate change raises temperatures and increases evaporation.

The spring runoff should be enough to get irrigators through to July, but after that they'll need robust summer rainstorms to boost water supply for the rest of the growing season, said Jason Casuga, acting CEO and chief engineer for the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District.

"I expect it to be difficult during the hot months," Casuga said. "Without late-season storage, if we don't get rain in the monsoon season, it's going to be very difficult in the back half of the irrigation season."

It's a similar situation to 2021, also beset by a La Niña, a Pacific Ocean weather pattern that pushes precipitation north and causes drier-than-normal conditions in Southwestern states.

Nearly all of New Mexico is immersed in drought conditions ranging from severe to exceptional, with Santa Fe County grappling with extreme drought. Although far better than a year ago, when half the state was mired in exceptional drought, it's a sharp downturn from January's more favorable picture after the heavy snowfall.

Last year, some much-needed summer rainstorms came, replenishing water resources enough for most farmers to irrigate into the fall, in clear contrast to 2020, when almost no rain fell during the summer, resulting in severe water shortages by September.

'Tough situation' Data shows the Upper Rio Grande Basin's snowpack is at 90 percent of the "long-term normal" and down 18 percent from a year ago, said Jaz Ammon, hydrological technician at the U.S. Natural Resource Conservation Service, who helped compile the report. This basin is the closest survey area to Santa Fe, with data collected at weather stations in Taos, at Ski Santa Fe and at other spots in the area, Ammon said.

Precipitation in the basin between October and April was 79 percent of the long-term normal, versus last year when it was 90 percent, Ammon said.

The long-term median, or normal, covers the period from 1991 to the present, he said.

State Engineer Mike Hamman said the agency recently moved the starting time up a decade, cutting out the wetter period in the 1980s, which created a drier scale that has made the drought years appear less arid.

"The bar is lower," Hamman said.

A recent study published in the journal Nature Climate Change says the West is experiencing the driest 22-year period since A.D. 800, putting the region, which includes New Mexico, in a megadrought.

Human-driven climate change is compounding the drought's severity and lengthening its duration, the researchers say, estimating it could drag on to the 30-year mark before it finally passes.

The previous megadroughts predated the industrial revolution, when heat-trapping greenhouse gases began to be spewed en masse into the atmosphere, showing the West can have severe natural droughts independent of climate change, the study's authors stated.

However, the cumulative greenhouse emissions of the past two centuries have clearly worsened the West's current drought, they said.

The changing climate has raised average temperatures roughly 2 degrees since the 1990s and decreased precipitation, leading to what scientists call aridification.

It has intensified evaporation and parched the soil, making it soak up water like a sponge. That in turn has reduced the amount of runoff going into the Rio Grande and flowing downstream to farmers and Elephant Butte Reservoir, the main hub for passing water to Texas to pay the debt and meet obligations in a multistate water-sharing pact.

Meanwhile, back-to-back La Niña patterns are further depleting water sources.

Rolf Schmidt-Petersen, director of the Interstate Stream Commission, said the overall picture the federal report paints is bleak — unless the region gets a healthy monsoon.

"It indicates a tough situation coming our way," Schmidt-Petersen said. "I see as difficult a year coming up to us as last year with less stored water available."

No backup supply

Water storage will be greatly reduced this year because El Vado Dam's renovation will get underway by summer.

The work will take out the main reservoir for keeping the Rio Grande's "native" or natural water, as opposed to Colorado River water that flows through dams and tunnels in the federal San Juan-Chama system into the Rio Grande.

At the moment, losing the reservoir means there's no place to store native water for irrigation, leaving the conservancy district no buffer to supply farmers in the latter part of the season, Casuga said. Having no backup water in a drought season can be problematic, he added.

State officials want to store additional native water in Abiquiú Lake but must overcome some hurdles. The Army Corps of Engineers, which oversees Abiquiú Dam, must sign off on it, and all Rio Grande Compact commissioners must approve.

Texas has opposed New Mexico expanding storage until it pays down its water debt to the Lone Star State of roughly 127,000 acre-feet, or 41 billion gallons. An acre-foot is enough to submerge a football field in a foot of water.

Hamman, the state engineer, said he wrote a letter to the Army Corps of Engineers asking to store 20,000 acre-feet, or 6.5 billion gallons, at Abiquiú to serve the pueblos' water needs. He's confident the corps will agree to it.

In addition, the state wants to store 45,000 acre-feet, or 14.6 billion gallons, at the reservoir to help cover irritation needs.

Hamman believes he can work through the impasse with Texas.

"We'll continue to talk with the state of Texas to see if there are other scenarios that might benefit the entire basin," he said.

Meanwhile, the irrigation district has staggered water deliveries to various areas since March, so growers get their supply early rather than late, as they did last year, Casuga said, adding that timely distribution is important as they face another challenging season.

"We wanted to make sure we were more on top of that and were more efficient than we were last year," Casuga said.

Ammon said the only way to really solve the drought-induced problems is to have two or three above-average wet years in a row.

Robust snowpacks and precipitation would be required in all those years, he said.

"One or the other is not enough to cut it," Ammon said.

Amazon workers made up almost half of all warehouse injuries last year

Mitchell Clark -
The Verge
© Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon workers only make up a third of US warehouse employees, but in 2021, they suffered 49 percent of the injuries for the entire warehouse industry, according to a report by advocacy group Strategic Organizing Center (or SOC). After analyzing data from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the union coalition found that Amazon workers are twice as likely to be seriously injured than people who work in warehouses for other companies.

The report considers “serious injuries” to be ones where workers either have to take time off to recover or have their workloads reduced, following OSHA’s report classification (pdf) of “cases with days away from work” and “cases with job transfer or restriction.” The data shows that, over time, the company has been shifting more toward putting people on light duty, rather than having them take time off. The report authors also note that Amazon workers take longer to recover from injuries than employees at other companies: around 62 days on average, versus 44 across the industry.


© Graph: Strategic Organizing Center

A graph showing Amazon’s injury rates over the past five years.

Amazon employees have said it’s not the work itself that’s particularly dangerous but rather the grueling pace the company’s automated systems demand. Amazon actually had workers go slower in 2020 to help combat COVID-19, which accounts for the notably lower injury rates that year. But, as the report notes, the injuries increased by around 20 percent between 2020 and 2021 as the company resumed its usual pace — though the injury rates for 2021 were still lower than they were in 2019.

It’s also worth noting that even with that slowed pace of work in 2020, Amazon has been criticized for how it treated workers in its response to COVID-19, especially in New York, where organizers were motivated to start working toward unionizing at the company’s warehouses. New York Attorney General Letitia James has also filed a suit against Amazon, alleging it failed to protect workers and retaliated against them (which included firing lead organizer Christian Smalls) after they spoke out.

Unfortunately, this study’s results tell the same story we’ve been hearing for years. Even with its reduced injury rates in 2020, Amazon workers were still hurt twice as often as other warehouse workers, according to SOC. Tuesday’s report also shows that Amazon’s human workers (whom it’s called “industrial athletes”) are more at risk for injuries when working at warehouses that have been automated — a fact Amazon knew years ago, according to internal documents. As CNBC points out, Amazon says it wants to become the safest place to work, but the company may need to overhaul its entire system to meet that goal.

Amazon didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment on the report.

Amazon warehouse workers suffer serious injuries at twice the rate of rivals, study finds

Annie Palmer -

Amazon warehouse workers in the U.S. suffered serious injuries at twice the rate of rival companies in 2021, according to a new study.

There were 6.8 serious injuries for every 100 Amazon warehouse workers, compared with 3.3 serious injuries per 100 workers at all other employers in the warehouse industry, the Strategic Organizing Center wrote in a new report published Tuesday.

Amazon has pledged to become "Earth's Safest Place to Work," with the aim of cutting worker injuries by 50%.


© Provided by CNBC  An Amazon warehouse

Amazon warehouse workers in the U.S. suffered serious injuries at twice the rate of rival companies in 2021, according to a new study.

There were 6.8 serious injuries for every 100 Amazon warehouse workers. That's more than twice the rate of all other employers in the warehouse industry, which had 3.3 serious injuries per 100 workers, the Strategic Organizing Center said in a report released Tuesday.

The SOC, which is a coalition of labor unions including the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Service Employees International Union, analyzed data Amazon submitted to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration about its warehouses in 2021.

Even as Amazon set its sights on improving workplace safety, including a pledge to become "Earth's Safest Place to Work," injuries at its U.S. warehouses increased between 2020 and 2021.

Amazon reported approximately 38,300 total injuries at its U.S. facilities in 2021, up about 20% from 27,100 injuries in 2020. The vast majority of injuries in 2021 were categorized as serious, or injuries "where workers were hurt so badly that they were either unable to perform their regular job functions (light duty) or forced to miss work entirely (lost time)," according to the report.

Amazon was responsible for a "staggering" amount of worker injuries in the U.S., the report found. In 2021, Amazon accounted for almost half of all injuries in the industry, while making up a third of all U.S. warehouse workers.

In a statement, Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel pointed to the company's pandemic-induced hiring spree as one catalyst behind the increase in recordable injuries between 2020 and 2021. Amazon's recordable injury rate last year dropped roughly 13% compared to 2019, Nantel added.

"While we still have more work to do and won't be satisfied until we are excellent when it comes to safety, we continue to make measurable improvements in reducing injuries and keeping employees safe, and appreciate the work from all of our employees and safety teams who are contributing to this effort," Nantel said in a statement.

In January, Amazon disclosed it spent $300 million on worker safety improvements in 2021. It said the rate of employees who missed work due to a workplace injury dropped by 43% in 2020 from the prior year.

Still, Amazon has faced pressure from lawmakers and its own employees to address the breakneck pace of work inside its warehouses. Last fall, California's state Senate passed a landmark bill aimed at curbing Amazon's use of productivity quotas in its facilities.

Warehouse and delivery workers have routinely spoken out against the company, arguing its "customer obsession" and focus on speedy delivery have created an unsafe working environment. They've claimed the pace of work doesn't allow for adequate breaks and bathroom time.

Those concerns have come into greater focus as unionization efforts have ramped up at Amazon warehouses. This month, Amazon workers on New York's Staten Island voted to form the first union at an Amazon warehouse. The union has called for Amazon to put in place "more reasonable" productivity rates in the warehouse, among other demands.

Last year, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos laid out a vision for improving the company's workplace safety, acknowledging it needed "a better vision for our employees' success." Amazon also launched a series of wellness programs, with the aim of cutting recordable incident rates by 50% by 2025.