Belarus begins fuelling its first nuclear power plant

The Russian-built Astravets nuclear plant is expected to start powering Belarus by the end of this year. 

JUST DOWN THE ROAD AND AROUND THE CORNER FROM CHERNOBYL ANOTHER RUSSIAN BUILT NUCLEAR PLANT

Belarus denies that the plant poses a risk and has insisted it meets all safety requirements [Getty Images]

Belarus has begun loading fuel into the first of two reactors at its new Russian-built Astravets nuclear power plant, saying it expects to begin using the plant by the end of this year.

Built by the Russian state nuclear agency Rosatom and financed by Moscow with a $10bn loan, the project is opposed by neighbouring Lithuania, whose capital Vilnius is just 50 km (31 miles) away.

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda on Friday called it a "threat to our state's national security, public health and environment".

Lithuania's Energy Minister Zygimantas Vaiciunas said he had warned the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) over what he called Minsk's haste to launch the project.
Safety fears

Vilnius has banned all electricity imports from the plant, citing concerns about safety and national security, and along with Estonia and Latvia is considering slapping a fee on power imports from Russia, as well.

Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are moving towards a full decoupling from their Soviet-era common power system by 2025.

Belarus denies that the plant poses a risk and has insisted it meets all safety requirements.

Russia's Rosatom says the plant "fully meets post-Fukushima demands", referring to Japan's 2011 nuclear accident, as well as "international norms and IAEA recommendations".

The Belarusian energy ministry said it plans to add the first 1.2 gigawatt VVER 1200 reactor to the country's power system in the fourth quarter of this year.

Construction of the second reactor is scheduled for completion in 2022 and will double the plant's capacity to 2.4 gigawatts.

The ministry said the plant will meet about one-third of Belarus's demand for electricity, replacing 4.5 billion cubic metres of natural gas per year and reducing greenhouse gas emissions by more than seven million tonnes annually.

Belarus has experienced severe radiation in 1986 from neighbouring Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster. Chernobyl's nuclear fallout contaminated about a quarter of Belarus's territory.


SOURCE: NEWS AGENCIES

Prehistoric Graves Reveal The Wealth Gap Existed Even in The Stone Age

CARLY CASSELLA
7 AUGUST 2020

Even in early prehistoric Europe, there was a clear wealth gap between the rich and the poor, and this inequality in life followed people long after their deaths.

New archaeological research in Poland reveals the richest humans from Neolithic times were also the ones buried with the most exotic artefacts.

This might sound obvious, but it was not the connection archaeologists were initially after. The study of these 6,600-year-old grave sites, located in the town of Oslonki, was supposed to reveal what Neolithic farmers used to grow and eat all those years ago.

It just so happened that the richest diets also aligned with the most valuable buried artefacts.

During this time, it appears the artefacts humans were buried with were not simple funerary donations by hopeful family members, but direct translations of material wealth from life into death.

"We have uncovered some of the earliest evidence for a direct link between social status and long-term diet in prehistoric Europe," says archaeologist and anthropologist Chelsea Budd from Umeå University in Sweden.

"We are witnessing the emergence of social and economic inequality in early prehistoric communities – the 'haves' and the 'have nots' - at a time much earlier than we thought."

Examining the bones of 30 people, all buried within the same 200 years, the international team found that skeletons containing more carbon-13 isotopes were often buried with fancier grave goods, made of copper.


These isotopes accumulate in food sources at different rates, and are subsequently incorporated into human tissue, thus giving us a potential glimpse at the person's diet during their life. However, exactly what carbon-13 can tell us about Neolithic food is limited. It could possibly suggest more dairy intake, for instance, but there's little evidence of this in the region.

It could also suggest some people had access to plants and animals that were isotopically different from the rest. And this isotopic balance was also seen in cattle bones found in the area.

This implies that some people and animals had privileged access to large fields and more lush pastures well lit by the sun (which leads to more carbon-13 in the plants), while others didn't.

"Perhaps founding members of the community had privileged access to these fields, and, by extension, to the exchange networks that brought exotic copper ornaments this far north," the authors suggest.

"Although speculative, this is a plausible scenario given the abundant ethnographic evidence for the importance ascribed to the 'first settlers' in a region and/or to a community's founders."


What's more, it could very well be argued that these lands were passed down, exhibiting some of the earliest forms of generational wealth.

No matter the specifics, the findings do suggest there was some sort of dietary difference between those who were buried with copper materials and those who weren't.

The copper artefacts discovered, including 50 strips, 200 beads, five pendants and a diadem, were likely brought in from sources hundreds of kilometres away - another line of evidence that suggests they belonged to the richest.

When Oslonki and other nearby sites were abandoned for an unknown reason sometime around 4,500 BC, copper ornaments in northern Europe stopped showing up for a millennium, suggesting the town was an important part of the trade networks involving these precious goods.

"That the system appears quite short-lived highlights that early attempts at developing hierarchical structures were not always successful in the long term," the authors note.

While there's some evidence for income inequality amongst human society in the later Bronze Age of Europe, this new study suggests the wealth gap - a phenomenon we experience to this day - goes back even further in history.

The study was published in Antiquity.

SEE

Sahlins, Marshall, "The Original Affluent Society" (abridged ...

web.mnstate.edu › robertsb › Sahlin-OriginalAffluentSociety-abridged

Sahlins, Marshall, "The Original Affluent Society" (abridged), ch.5,pp79-98. The Politics of Egalitarianism: Theory and practice, ed. Jacqueline Solway.

The Viral Loads of Asymptomatic Coronavirus Carriers Are Surprisingly High, Study Reveals

SO ARE THE LOADS CARRIED BY CHILDREN

THIS IS THE #TRUMPVIRUS HE IS ASYMPTOMATICAFP
7 AUGUST 2020

People who are infected with the coronavirus carry similar levels of the pathogen in their nose, throat and lungs whether they have symptoms or not, a new study from South Korea showed Thursday.

The paper, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, is an important biological line of evidence in support of the idea that asymptomatic carriers can spread COVID-19.

Until now, experts have relied on inferring asymptomatic spread when people contract the virus without contact with a known carrier.

A team of researchers led by Seungjae Lee at Soonchunhyang University College of Medicine analyzed swabs taken between March 6 and March 26 from 303 people isolated at a center in Cheonan, following an outbreak among a religious group in another city.

The group ranged in age from 22 to 36 and two-thirds were women. Of the total, 193 were symptomatic and 110 were asymptomatic.

Among those who were initially asymptomatic, 89 never developed symptoms at all – about 30 percent of the total.

This finding itself helps gives a sense of what portion of infected people are truly asymptomatic rather than merely "presymptomatic," a subject of confusion.

All were sampled at regular intervals after day eight of isolation, and the samples returned comparable values of the virus' genetic material from the upper and lower airways.

The median time taken for the patients to return negative tests was marginally less for asymptomatic patients compared with symptomatic: 17 and 19.5 days, respectively.

The authors wrote their findings "offer biological plausibility" to reports of asymptomatic transmission.

But they added that their study only looked at the amount of viral genetic material present and did not attempt to follow the subjects to see if that translated to the spread of infectious virus.

© Agence France-Presse

Here's How Exploding Stars Forged The Calcium in Your Teeth And Bones

We really are star-stuff.

(sultancicekgil/Getty Images)
SPACE
DAVID NIELD
7 AUGUST 2020

Up to half the calcium in the Universe – and that includes our bones and teeth – is thought to come from exploding supernova stars, and researchers have now been able to get unprecedented insight at how these ultra-rare, calcium-rich supernovae reach the end of their lives.

The never-before-seen look at how these stellar explosions throw out so much calcium was carried out using deep space X-ray and infrared imaging, and fills in quite a few of the gaps in our scientific knowledge about the process.

Drawing together contributions from 67 authors across 15 countries, the resulting study suggests that the calcium-rich supernovae start off as compact stars that quickly lose mass at the end of their lives, giving off an outer layer of gas that exploding materials then collide with.

(Aaron M. Geller, Northwestern University)

"These events are so few in number that we have never known what produced calcium-rich supernovae," says astrophysicist Wynn Jacobson-Galan, from Northwestern University.

"By observing what this star did in its final month before it reached its critical, tumultuous end, we peered into a place previously unexplored, opening new avenues of study within transient science."

The supernova in question, SN 2019ehk, was first spotted by amateur astronomer Joel Shepherd in the Messier 100 (M100) spiral galaxy about 55 million light-years away from Earth. Very soon after the discovery was made, most of Earth's major telescopes were following it – with transient events like this, speed is crucial.


What astronomers weren't expecting was the luminosity of the X-ray light that SN 2019ehk was giving off. Scientists quickly realised they were looking at a flood of high-energy X-rays flowing from the star and hitting the outer shell of gas, providing key clues to the materials that it was shedding and how much of the material there was.

The readings from the dying star helped scientists to work out what was happening: the reactions between the expelled materials and the outer gas ring were producing intensely hot temperatures and high pressures, leading to a calcium-producing nuclear reaction as the star tries to shed its heat and energy as quickly as possible.

"Most massive stars create small amounts of calcium during their lifetimes, but events like SN 2019ehk appear to be responsible for producing vast quantities of calcium and in the process of exploding disperse it through interstellar space within galaxies," says astronomer Régis Cartier, from the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab) in the US.

"Ultimately this calcium makes its way into forming planetary systems, and into our bodies in the case of our Earth!"

It's because these stars are so important in calcium production that scientists have been so keen to take a look at them – something that has proved difficult (even Hubble missed SN 2019ehk). The explosion at the centre of the new study is responsible for the most calcium ever seen emitted in a singular observed astrophysical event.

Being able to see the inner workings of this type of supernova will open up new areas of research and give us a better idea of how the calcium in our bones and teeth – and everywhere else in the Universe – came to be.

It's also a great example of the international scientific community working together to capture and record something of great importance. Just 10 hours after the initial bright burst was spotted in the sky by Joel Shepherd, some of the best telescopes we have were ready to record what happened next.

"Before this event, we had indirect information about what calcium-rich supernovae might or might not be," says astrophysicist Raffaella Margutti, from Northwestern University. "Now, we can confidently rule out several possibilities."

The research has been published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Prehistoric 'Hell Ant' Stuck in Amber Has Been Mauling Its Prey For 99 Million Years

(Barden et al., Current Biology, 2020) NATURE

CARLY CASSELLA
6 AUGUST 2020

A long-extinct lineage of insect, known fondly as the 'hell ant', has been discovered frozen in 99-million-year-old amber, with its scythe-like jaw still pinning its prey.

According to scientists, this fierce predator is a newly identified species of prehistoric ant, known as Ceratomyrmex ellenbergeri, and it's the first time we've ever seen a hell ant actively feeding. Its meal is an extinct relative of the cockroach.

"Fossilised behaviour is exceedingly rare, predation especially so," says Phillip Barden, who studies social insect evolution at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT).

"As palaeontologists, we speculate about the function of ancient adaptations using available evidence, but to see an extinct predator caught in the act of capturing its prey is invaluable."

Ants are some of the most diverse creatures on planet Earth. To date, scientists have identified over 12,500 different species and they think there are probably another 10,000 or so out there, just waiting to be discovered underfoot.

That's quite the selection. And yet of all the ants marching today, none of them look anything like what scientists have found in amber deposits from Myanmar, Canada and France.

In fact, Barden says the mouthparts of these haidomyrmecine hell ants are unlike that of nearly all insects alive today. This newly-identified hell ant used its lower mandible to move upwards and pin its prey to the horn-like paddle above.

Other hell ants discovered in the past also have this horn, and while scientists thought it might be a sort of clamp, this 99-million-year-old fossil is the first real evidence that can back that up.

Contrary to these ancient bugs, modern ants and almost all other living hexapods have mandibles that only move on a horizontal axis.

"Since the first hell ant was unearthed about a hundred years ago, it's been a mystery as to why these extinct animals are so distinct from the ants we have today," Barden says.

"This fossil reveals the mechanism behind what we might call an 'evolutionary experiment,' and although we see numerous such experiments in the fossil record, we often don't have a clear picture of the evolutionary pathway that led to them."

 

(Barden et al., Current Biology, 2020)

Above: The hell ant Ceratomyrmex ellenbergeri grasping a nymph of Caputoraptor elegans (Alienoptera) preserved in amber dated to roughly 99 million years.

Hell ants actually precede the most common ancestor of all living ants, and even then, they were incredibly diverse.

Other species trapped in amber have been found equipped with spiky mouthparts, most probably used to drink their victims' blood.

Modern ants, on the other hand, look remarkably different. They have mouths facing forward, which keeps their heads relatively parallel to the ground, although they can look up and around.

Hell ants couldn't move their heads nearly as well, and they likely captured prey with their mouths facing downwards.

A simplified reconstruction of the hell ant eating from a lateral view. (Barden et al., Current Biology, 2020)

"Despite staggering anatomical diversity of insects, larval dytiscid beetles and hell ants together appear to represent the only two known instances of mandible-on-head contact used in prey capture, both appearing with vertically articulating mouthparts," the authors write.

Why exactly hell ants died out as a lineage after nearly 20 million years of existence is still unknown, but it might have to do with their specialised predatory behaviour.

Barden says it just goes to show that even the most diverse and ubiquitous species on Earth can go extinct. Even something as familiar as an ant.

The study was published in Current Biology.

Uncircumcised Men Are Responsible for up to 37% of Vaginal Infections

By Mary Moore | Published on August 6, 2020
Reviewed By Gilmore Health | On: August 6, 2020

Table of Contents

According to a US study, between a quarter and a third of vaginal infections are caused directly by men, depending on whether they are circumcised or not.


Vaginosis

All too often the role of men in women’s reproductive health is overlooked. To remedy this, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have shown that men are responsible for between a third and a quarter of vaginal infections. They published their findings in the journal Frontiers of Cellular Microbiology and Infection on August 4.
Circumcision a real influence

The researchers examined 168 heterosexual couples who had regular sex for one year. They investigated the presence of bacterial vaginosis – an imbalance in the vaginal or vulvar flora that causes the growth of harmful bacteria – in the women at the beginning of the study, six months and a year later. They also took samples from men in the urethral duct, glans and urethral meatus to test for the bacteria.

Read Also: A Comprehensive Look at STDs and Their Various Types

The influence of the men on the development of vaginal infections became clear. The results showed “a clear temporal relationship between the microbial composition of the penis and subsequent disease development,” observed Supriya Mehta, the lead author of the study. About one in four women (26.3%) developed an infection during the study when their partner was circumcised. Among those whose partner is not circumcised, this figure rises to more than every third woman (37.3%). According to the researchers, this difference is explained by the lower number of anaerobic bacteria in circumcised penises.
Men must be included

The role of men in the development of female reproductive diseases is obvious: “The correspondence between the penis microbiome and the vaginal microbiome of the sexual partners does not simply reflect the vaginal microbiome, but can contribute to it,” the researchers argue. It has been shown that the observation of penile microbes is a strong predictor of bacterial vaginosis. Bacterial types were predicted in 74.6% of cases.

The authors believe that these results should help to further investigate the influence of men on reproductive diseases developed by women. “A possible treatment should effectively reduce or modify the presence of bacteria in men” and thus reduce bacterial vaginosis. “I want doctors, researchers, and the general public to involve male partners in their efforts to improve women’s reproductive health,” Supriya Mehta told AFP. It’s not about blaming one of them, but about expanding the possibilities and opportunities for improvement.
References

The Microbiome Composition of a Man’s Penis Predicts Incident Bacterial Vaginosis in His Female Sex Partner With High Accuracy

'Weirdest Fossil' Wasn't a Dinosaur After All

George Dvorsky
Yesterday 4:32PM

A beautifully preserved skull in 99-million-year-old Burmese amber.Image: Lida Xing
CT scan of Oculudentavis skull.Image: L. Xing et al., 2020/Nature

The authors of a high-profile study published earlier this year, in which the scientists claimed to have discovered the world’s smallest dinosaur, have now retracted the paper in response to new fossil evidence.

The now-retracted Nature paper, published on March 11, 2020, apparently misidentified a tiny skull found inside a 99-million-year-old chunk of Burmese amber. Dating back to the Late Cretaceous period, the specimen was said to be the smallest dinosaur in the fossil record, in a claim that attracted considerable media and public attention.

With its bulbous eyes, 14-millimeter-long skull, and dozens of sharp teeth, it was “the weirdest fossil I’ve ever been lucky enough to study,” declared Jingmai O’Connor, the lead author of the paper and a researcher from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, China, in a press release issued when the paper was first published. The fossil was identified as a tiny bird, weighing just 2 grams, and given the name Oculudentavis khaungraae.

This interpretation, however, appears to have been flawed. This fossil, designated HPG-15-3, is probably a lizard, and not an avian dinosaur. As Giuliana Viglione reports at Nature News, the paper was retracted owing to the emergence of a similar fossil, which a separate team of scientists have identified as belonging to a lizard.

“We, the authors, are retracting this Article to prevent inaccurate information from remaining in the literature,” wrote the authors in their official retraction statement. “Although the description of Oculudentavis khaungraae remains accurate, a new unpublished specimen casts doubts upon our hypothesis regarding the phylogenetic position [in the evolutionary tree] of HPG-15-3.”

In an email to Gizmodo, O’Connor said that while she agrees that the original assessment of the fossil as an avian dinosaur was incorrect, she doesn’t think a retraction was the best way to handle the problem, as it has created further problems.

“However, we were wrong and Oculudentavis is not a bird but a lizard, which time and new data will demonstrate,” she said. “Nature was not unfair or unkind to us; they made their decision for their own reasons, which were not disclosed to us but of course we must accept—and we do accept,” said O’Connor, adding that her team “worked every step of the way doing whatever Nature asked of us.”

Speaking to Retraction Watch, O’Connor said her team may have been wrong in their identification of the fossil, “but as we have demonstrated in a Matters Arising reply…the specimen cannot be unequivocally identified as either a bird or a squamate [lizard] without more material (which has come to light but is as yet unpublished and effectively does not exist to science yet).”

Nature’s Matters Arising policy allows outside scientists to submit any concerns they might have about a published Nature paper “as necessary to advancing scientific discourse.” These comments “can involve either challenges or clarifications of the published work and may, after peer review, be published online as Matters Arising, usually alongside a Reply from the original Nature authors,” but these comments “should ideally be based on knowledge contemporaneous with the original paper, rather than subsequent scientific developments,” according to Nature.

O’Connor brings up a good point: It seems odd that Nature would retract a paper based on a forthcoming study that has yet to go through peer review, but that appears to be the case.

O’Connor also said it’s not out of the ordinary for paleontologists to misidentify specimens and for new data to correct previous hypotheses, as she told Retraction Watch:

However, Nature chose not to publish our Matters Arising reply and instead retracts our paper—they must have their reasons. It’s unfortunate because this way science can’t simply correct itself (as it is supposed to do) and on top of that, according to the [International Code of Zoological Nomenclature] ICZN the nomenclatural acts are valid whether retracted or not creating a complex grey area. The paper is retracted, yet will continue to be cited. So science will correct itself and cite the paper even though it is retracted making the retraction pointless.

Which speaks to the new problems that O’Connor alluded to in her email to Gizmodo. It’s now an open question as to whether or not scientists will ignore the retraction or the new name, Oculudentavis khaungraae. As the authors pointed out in their retraction statement, they stand by their description of the fossil, even if their interpretation of its place within the evolutionary tree was flawed.

When asked to explain the retraction, a spokesperson from Nature said in an email that the journal is “unable to discuss the confidential process behind retractions as all correspondence with the author prior to publication remains confidential. The research paper was retracted by the authors and the retraction note reflects their rationale for the retraction.”

Addressing the retraction being influenced by the apparent introduction of a new scientific paper after the fact, the spokesperson said, “Nature retracts or agrees to a request for retraction when important contemporary errors or mistakes have been identified or acknowledged that undermine the conclusions of the research. Subsequent scientific developments are not, in and of themselves, a reason for retraction unless they invalidate the methodology used.”

Not very helpful responses. Nature is being tight-lipped about the situation, to the point where we can’t actually be sure why the paper was retracted and if Nature violated its own policies.

It’s important to point out that a preprint in June, written by a different group of scientists, also took exception to the O’Connor paper. In this preprint, which hasn’t gone through peer review, the authors said their own findings “highly contradict” the interpretation that the fossil belonged to a bird and that this “enigmatic animal demonstrates various morphologies” resembling lizards. In a subsequent retort, O’Connor and her colleagues said these authors “failed to provide conclusive evidence for the reidentification” of the fossil as lizard, but O’Connor now seems to have changed her opinion on the matter.

Paleontologist Andrea Cau from Parma, Italy, is also skeptical of the original classification, as Nature News reports:


[B]ecause so many of the specimen’s features are lizard-like — about ten, by his estimate — “the idea that it was instead a lizard could not be excluded”. Cau is not surprised by the retraction, and notes that reclassifications, especially of incomplete fossil specimens from unknown groups, are not uncommon in the field.

These concerns aside, and revisiting O’Connor’s comments to Retraction Watch, this particular retraction isn’t sitting very well with me. Nature seems to be violating its own Matters Arising policy, by considering data that wasn’t available to the researchers at the time of authorship.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that criticism of the original paper is wrong, but this whole thing could’ve been handled considerably better.

George Dvorsky
George is a senior staff reporter at Gizmodo.

AU CONTRAIRE
Nuclear Fusion Will Not Save Us
Yessenia Funes
Wednesday  August 6, 2020

A technician walks past the lower cylinder of the cryostat, which provides the high vacuum, ultra-cool environment for ITER.Photo: Clement Mahoudeau/AFP (Getty Images)

Last week, construction kicked off on the world’s largest experimental nuclear fusion reactor. It marked the start of a new era in the energy sector: The fossil fuel industry has historically dominated this arena, but renewable energy is quickly taking over. Now, nuclear scientists are hoping that the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, the experimental power plant under construction in southern France, can play a role alongside already-established technologies like solar and wind.

All the nuclear power plants that exist today rely on nuclear fission. ITER, however, will rely on nuclear fusion. The two are dramatically different, and scientists have struggled to recreate nuclear fusion—the process that makes stars shine—in a lab setting. ITER is the world’s first true attempt at this on a large scale.

The Promise and Peril of Nuclear Power
Temperatures are rising, the Antarctic is melting, and a million animal and plant species face the…Read more

“The difference between nuclear fission and nuclear fusion is the reason why we’ve developed a nuclear fission reactor in a matter of years, and still after more than six decades, we still don’t have a nuclear fusion reactor,” said Eugenio Schuster, a mechanical engineering and mechanics professor at Lehigh University who is working on ITER.

Around the world, 450 nuclear reactors were operating last year, all using nuclear fission, which involves splitting heavy atoms of elements such as uranium and plutonium. The process produces tons of highly radioactive waste, the ingredients to create nuclear weapons, potential instability that could lead to a destructive nuclear meltdown, and other concerning issues.

This process also requires uranium. In the U.S., the mining of this resource has contaminated the waters of the Navajo Nation and left countless individuals sick. President Donald Trump wants to see more uranium mining, and he doesn’t care where. The Grand Canyon? It can be mined. Bears Ears National Monument? That, too. Nuclear fission has proven destructive to both human health and the environment. There’s a reason many environmental advocates are highly opposed.

“We have a horrible legacy of uranium contamination in our communities,” said Carol Davis, the executive director of Diné C.A.R.E., an environmental organization that supports the Navajo people. “Water was contaminated with uranium, and it’s never been cleaned, and people are using that and drinking that.”

Davis and other advocates worry nuclear power is just another false promise that creates radioactive waste while taking time and money away from developing renewable energy technologies. The United States alone has 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste with nowhere to go. Nuclear fusion doesn’t create the same level of long-lived radioactive waste as the more popular process of nuclear fission, but it isn’t waste-free, either.

The process begins with the breaking down of lighter atoms into a state of matter called plasma. It requires more than 270 million degrees Fahrenheit of heat to get going, though. When you’re comparing it to fission, of course, fusion is better. It can’t cause the nuclear meltdowns that we’ve seen at other sites. It doesn’t need any uranium; all it needs is lithium and water. If greenhouse gas emissions are the concern, fusion doesn’t have any evidence of contributing there. But the process does still produce some waste, and advocates are worried that their communities will be forced to deal with that waste for the greater good.

“This whole notion of endless power with little to no waste, it just sounds too good to be true. We really need to examine what are the true costs and who are the people who will be impacted,” said Leona Morgan, a Diné activist and coordinator of the Nuclear Issues Study Group, a New Mexico-based volunteer organization against nuclear power. “It seems like we should really learn from what we have already experienced with the loss of human rights and loss of water resources from contamination.”

If scientists want communities to fully embrace nuclear energy, they need to figure out what the hell to do with this toxic trash. In the U.S., decision-makers have historically dumped this stuff near tribal or low-income rural communities. History is bound to repeat itself if leaders don’t take proper action to prevent these injustices.

This Town Didn't Want to Be a Radioactive Waste Dump. The Government Is Giving Them No Choice.

PIKETON, OHIO—David and Pam Mills have grown tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and okra on their…Read more

“The reason we’re investing in fusion is because the promise is big,” Schuster said. “We’re going to have the benefits of renewables in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, but at the same time, we’re going to reduce the area we need to produce the same amount of energy while eliminating the risk of nuclear accidents and the generation of long-lived radioactive waste.”


That’s the thing, though. Intense attention on the climate crisis allows other ecological crises to happen alongside it. No one wants to see the world burn from rising temperatures, but disenfranchised communities don’t want to keep being sacrificed for the sake of human progress, either. Lithium extraction primarily happens in Argentina and Chile, where Indigenous advocates worry about the amount of water the mining requires, as well as the potential for contamination of their lands. Water is going to become even more valuable as we see droughts dry out lakes, rivers, and streams. Fusion simply doesn’t come without a cost.“This whole notion of endless power with little to no waste, it just sounds too good to be true.”

Proponents of ITER note that the amount of lithium and water needed is minimal, especially compared to the extractive industries that exist today. The plant is expected to need only 550 pounds of fuel a year, half from the isotopes they need from water and half from the isotopes they need from lithium. Schuster notes that most of the water needed for this process would be returned to its source. That’s because researchers need only a specific molecule from the water. These materials won’t be the main issue with nuclear fusion, said Egemen Kolemen, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University who is also working on the plant.

“The real issue is going to be the nuclear safety issues,” Kolemen said. “Even though it doesn’t have this runaway type of [reaction], there is still going to be some sort of nuclear reactions… that are going to have low levels, but still some, nuclear waste of sorts.”

The construction of ITER certainly does mark a new chapter in the world’s energy sector. It marks a moment of technological breakthrough and scientific accomplishment, but it won’t save us by itself. No new energy source can. At the heart of the climate crisis is human behavior. If we’re to survive it—and, more importantly, solve it—we need to take a long, hard look in the mirror. Reducing emissions will require more than finding the perfect clean energy source; it will need a massive shift in human behavior, lowering our emissions through energy efficiency and less consumption.

Then again, emissions aren’t everything. If we’re lowering our carbon footprint without protecting the health of vulnerable communities, what good is it after all? A nuclear future needs a justice and equity lens if it’s to actually be successful. Otherwise, it’ll be another damaging industry. The world already has enough of those.
Yessenia Funes
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Yessenia Funes is a senior staff writer with Earther. She loves all things environmental justice and dreams of writing children's books.

Fukushima’s Contaminated Wastewater Could Be Too Risky to Dump in the Ocean


Dharna Noor
Yesterday 5:10PM
•
Filed to:FUKUSHIMA

A person walks past storage tanks for contaminated water at the company’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Photo: Tomohiro Ohsumi/AFP (Getty Images)

Almost a decade ago, the Tohoku-oki earthquake and tsunami triggered an explosion at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, causing the most severe nuclear accident since Chernobyl and releasing an unprecedented amount of radioactive contamination in the ocean. In the years since, there’s been a drawn out cleanup process, and water radiation levels around the plant have fallen to safe levels everywhere except for in the areas closest to the now-closed plant. But as a study from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution published in Science on Thursday shows, there’s another growing hazard: contaminated wastewater.





Radioactive cooling water is leaking out of the the melted-down nuclear reactors and mixing with the groundwater there. In order to prevent the groundwater from leaking into the ocean, the water is pumped into more than 1,000 tanks. Using sophisticated cleaning processes, workers have been able to remove some of this contamination and divert groundwater flows, reducing the amount of water that must be collected each day. But those tanks are filling up, and some Japanese officials have suggested that the water should dumped into the ocean to free up space.

The water in the tanks goes through an advanced treatment system to remove many radioactive isotopes. The Japanese utility company TEPCO, which is handling the cleanup processes, claims that these processes remove all radioactive particles from the water except tritium, an isotope of hydrogen which is nearly impossible remove but is considered to be relatively harmless. It decays in about 12 years, which is faster than other isotopes, is not easily absorbed by marine life, and is not as damaging to living tissue as other forms of radiation.

But according to the new study, that’s not the only radioactive contaminant left in the tanks. By examining TEPCO’s own 2018 data, WHOI researcher Ken Buesseler found that other isotopes remain in the treated wastewater, including carbon-14, cobalt-60, and strontium-90. He found these particles all take much longer to decay than tritium, and that fish and marine organisms absorb them comparatively easily.

Nuclear Fusion Will Not Save Us

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“[This] means they could be potentially hazardous to humans and the environment for much longer and in more complex ways than tritium,” the study says.

Though TEPCO’s data shows there is far less of these contaminants in the wastewater tanks than tritium, Buesseler notes that their levels vary widely from tank to tank, and that “more than 70% of the tanks would need secondary treatment to reduce concentrations below that required by law for their release.”

The study says we don’t currently have a good idea of how those more dangerous isotopes would behave in the water. We can’t assume they will behave the same way tritium does in the ocean because they have such different properties. And since there are different levels of each isotope in each different tank, each tank will need its own assessment.

“To assess the consequences of the tank releases, a full accounting after any secondary treatments of what isotopes are left in each tank is needed,” the study said.

Buesseler also calls for an analysis of what other contaminants could be in the tanks, such as plutonium. Even though it wasn’t reported in high amounts in the atmosphere in 2011, recent research shows it may have been dispersed when the explosion occurred. Buesseler fears it may also be present in the cooling waters being used at the plant. That points to the need to take a fuller account of the wastewater tanks before anything is done to dump them in the ocean.

“The first step is to clean up those additional radioactive contaminants that remain in the tanks, and then make plans based on what remains,” he said in a statement. “Any option that involves ocean releases would need independent groups keeping track of all of the potential contaminants in seawater, the seafloor, and marine life.”

Many Japanese municipalities have been pushing the government to reconsider its ocean dumping plans and opt to find a long-term storage solution instead, which makes sense, considering exposure to radioactive isotopes can cause myriad health problems to people. It could also hurt marine life, which could have a devastating impact on fishing economies and on ecosystems.

“The health of the ocean—and the livelihoods of countless people—rely on this being done right,” said Buesseler.
Dharna Noor
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Staff writer, Earther

Shallow Lightning and Mushy Hail: Violent Storms on Jupiter Are Weirder Than We Thought


George Dvorsky

Artistic depiction of electrical storms on Jupiter, using data obtained by NASA’s Juno mission.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt

Lightning and hailstones exist on Jupiter, but they’re of a very different sort than the ones we’re familiar with on Earth, as new research suggests.

Shallow lightning on Jupiter doesn’t originate from watery clouds like on Earth but instead from clouds packed with both water and ammonia, according to new research published this week in Nature.

In a related study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, scientists show how these same thunderstorms are capable of producing unexpected weather in the form of hailstones, or “mushballs,” in the parlance of the researchers. These slushy orbs fall into the bowels of the gas giant, delivering ammonia to its deeper layers.

Planetary scientists have known about lightning bolts on Jupiter for decades, figuring they were caused by similar conditions on Earth, that is, forming from water clouds and at temperatures near the freezing point. For this to work, however, these storms would have to form at altitudes reaching 28 to 40 miles (45 to 65 kilometers) below Jupiter’s cloud tops. Trouble is, observations made by NASA’s Juno spacecraft pointed to the presence of smaller and shallower flashes, which appeared considerably higher in Jupiter’s atmosphere.

In the new Nature study, planetary scientist Heidi Becker from the California Institute of Technology, along with colleagues, present a plausible explanation for this apparent inconsistency: Storms at deeper atmospheric layers toss water-ice crystals up into the higher layers, some 16 miles (25 km) above the gas giant’s water clouds. The ice crystals then come into contact with ammonia at this higher altitude, resulting in an ammonia-water mixture. At this level, temperatures reach -126 degrees Fahrenheit (-88 degrees Celsius), but the ammonia melts the incoming ice.

“At these altitudes, the ammonia acts like an antifreeze, lowering the melting point of water ice and allowing the formation of a cloud with ammonia-water liquid,” explained Becker in a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory press release. “In this new state, falling droplets of ammonia-water liquid can collide with the upgoing water-ice crystals and electrify the clouds. This was a big surprise, as ammonia-water clouds do not exist on Earth.”

Conveniently enough, this explanation appears to have solved another mystery having to do with Jupiter: uneven gaps of missing ammonia. Scientists previously figured that the absent ammonia was caused by rain, in which a wet mixture of ammonia and water precipitated down into the deeper levels. Calculations of this scenario didn’t work, however, as the hypothesized rain wouldn’t be capable of falling deep enough to match observations made by Juno’s Microwave Radiometer, which detected the depleted ammonia.


Graphic depicting the evolutionary process of shallow lightning and mushball hail on Jupiter.Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/CNRS

A new explanation, as described in the new Journal of Geophysical Research study, suggests scientists were on the right track. But rather than invoking rain as the cause, the new paper, also co-authored by Becker, posits a different type of precipitation: hailstones.

Referred to as “mushballs” by the researchers, these hailstones are made from water and ammonia. Similar to the way hailstones form in Earth’s atmosphere, the mushballs start as small seeds that grow in size as they’re kept aloft by violent winds. Eventually, these slushy orbs get too heavy and fall down to the deeper layers below, evaporating in the warmer temperatures.

“As it turned out, the ammonia isn’t actually missing; it is just transported down while in disguise, having cloaked itself by mixing with water,” explained Scott Bolton, a co-author of the study and Juno PI at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, in the JPL press release.

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So, in addition to showing where the missing ammonia had gone, the new theory also explains the uneven distribution of the missing ammonia in the Jovian atmosphere.

It’s so cool when one scientific discovery leads to another, which is what happened here. Some scientific endeavors might seem superfluous or indulgent, but as these two papers show, we don’t always know where they’re going to lead us.

George Dvorsky
George is a senior staff reporter at Gizmodo.