Drones, AI being used in climate change research at new centre on P.E.I.

Wed, August 3, 2022 

UPEI is getting ready to welcome its first group of students at the new Canadian Centre for Climate Change and Adaptation, which is already engaged in studies to combat the consequences of climate change.

Aitazaz Farooque, associate dean of the UPEI School of Climate Change and Adaptation, says the centre based in St. Peters Bay encourages an integrated approach to climate solutions, and houses labs and classrooms designed to foster collaboration.

Farooque says the centre on the shores of St. Peters Bay has been instrumental in setting up experiments all over Prince Edward Island, taking advantage of its coastal location and the many farms that surround it.

P.E.I. is vulnerable to coastal erosion, so the centre — abbreviated as CCCCA — has set up points on the coast to periodically measure how much soil and shore are being lost.

"We have about over 150 points established on the coast across P.E.I.," Farooque told CBC News during a tour of the new facility.

These points are measured manually and are linked with drone mapping information to calculate coastal erosion. Eventually, the centre should be able to come up with proposals for best practices to prevent erosion.

Jane Robertson/CBC

Drones and cover crops

The other type of erosion occurs farther in from the coast, as topsoil is blown or flooded away. Plants grown in such fields won't thrive because they don't get adequate nutrients and water.

Some research being done at the centre uses drones to conduct thermal energy mapping to detect that kind of soil erosion. The research teams might then advise farmers to plant cover crops on those areas and leave them for a few years to allow the organic matter to grow until the soil is once more "strong enough to be profitable," in Farooque's words.

Jane Robertson/CBC

He also said drones are being used in climate modelling to predict and forecast "how the climate is going to behave over the next 20 years."

If sea levels rise on a global basis as the world's scientists have predicted, Farooque said the centre aims to find out "what's going to happen to this island?"

Monitoring emissions across P.E.I.

Farooque said as greenhouse gas emissions increase, temperatures and sea levels also rise. So the centre has installed 100 greenhouse gas chambers across P.E.I. to measure greenhouse emissions in each specific location.

Submitted by Aitazaz Farooque

"We are monitoring those emissions in the morning, then in the afternoon, just to see how they relate with the temperature, and then whether they go high or low as the temperature goes high.

"The idea is to model those emissions on P.E.I., once we have enough data, to see how we are doing with the emissions from the agriculture sector."

Different solutions might be proposed for certain areas of the Island depending on the emissions measured.

For example, one type of carbon sequestration strategy is burning organic waste from agriculture and forestry processes to store carbon in a substance called biochar. Basically, it amounts to a carbon sink on agricultural land.

Artificial intelligence on the field

Other research involves harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) to reduce the environmental footprint of farming and make the use of chemical or biological control measures more efficient.

Jane Robertson/CBC

For example, a smart sprayer prototype uses AI to spray "just on the weeds and just on the disease, not everywhere."

The device has a camera situated about 15 centimetres ahead of the spray nozzle. The camera captures ground images that are analyzed in the control system in real time as the sprayer rolls through the field or orchard.

That lets a grower spray as little as necessary, and minimize wastage.

'We are a multidisciplinary team'

Farooque said there isn't one simple answer when it comes to addressing climate change and preserving the environment — but he said well-informed teamwork involving scientists and students is essential.

Faculty members from various departments and with different backgrounds work together on research projects at the centre to come up with integrated climate solutions.

One thing which we are doing well is collaboration with the industry and growers, where we work with them directly, we listen to them about the issues they are facing. — Aitazaz Farooque

"We have one faculty member on policy, we have one faculty member on modelling," he said as an example, and there are other collaborations within UPEI, with other institutions in Atlantic Canada, and nationally and internationally.

Jane Robertson/CBC

"One thing which we are doing well," said Farooque, "is collaboration with the industry and growers, where we work with them directly, we listen to them about the issues they are facing."

From a farm family

Inspired by his own father's work, Farooque completed a master's and PhD in precision agriculture — using information technology to determine exactly what the soil and crops are doing to help farmers manage their operations in a more eco-friendly and efficient way.

"My father is a farmer and he still farms, and that's where I developed my interest in agriculture," he said.

Jane Robertson/CBC

Farooque's work focuses on developing "climate-smart agricultural practices on Prince Edward Island to reduce greenhouse gas emissions." It also involves studying subsurface water contamination and nutrient run-off in surrounding water bodies.

As well as holding the associate dean's role, he is the director of the Centre for Excellence in Food Security, which is housed in the CCCCA.

Jane Robertson/CBC

He is supervising multiple student projects that use technology to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

"A few of our students are also looking at the impact of climate change on animal and human health, and what is happening with the natural habitat," Farooque said.

Other student projects include studying heat waves and heat stress, and monitoring how much the sea is rising.

Living where they research

"Starting this fall, students will have the opportunity to live in the building while they complete their studies and research," Farooque said.

Jane Robertson/CBC

The top two floors of the 45,000-square-foot, three-storey building in St. Peters Bay are dedicated to student residences, with about 20 apartments able to accommodate about 40 people.

"We have over 30 graduate students — M.Sc.s, PhDs — working on various aspects of climate change."

We want to leave a place for the upcoming generations that they can be proud of. — Aitazaz Farooque

Students from all over the world are pursuing graduate studies at the centre alongside Prince Edward Islanders, including people from China, India, the U.S., the U.K., Pakistan and more.

The work is not all about agriculture, of course.

Farooque said the centre is looking into developing renewables and wind energy options and working with engineers to develop "smart cities and urban planning scenarios so that we are emitting less."

He added: "We want to leave a place for the upcoming generations that they can be proud of."

Freeland Says Canada Has Responsibility to Help Europe on Energy

Brian Platt
Wed, August 3, 2022



(Bloomberg) -- Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said her government has a “political responsibility” to help move Europe off Russian energy dependence.

Freeland, speaking to reporters in Saint John, New Brunswick, said the federal government needs to step up to support its allies in the face of Russia’s aggression in Ukraine.

The comments are the strongest yet from a Canadian official on supporting the construction of new export infrastructure along Canada’s east coast to supply Europe with liquefied natural gas.

“I think it is a political responsibility for us as a country to support our allies with energy security,” Freeland told reporters, adding that Canada is lucky to have abundant energy supplies.

European countries are going through a “tough moment” right now as they transition away from Russian oil and gas, Freeland said, adding she discussed LNG projects directly with her German “counterparts.”

“I think that it’s very important for Canada to step up and to say, we’re going to help you, we’re going to help replace that energy,” Freeland said. “So yes, I think there is a role for the federal government, working with provincial governments, working with the private sector, working with our European allies to make this happen.”

Freeland was asked specifically about a Saint John facility owned by Spanish energy firm Repsol SA, which has said it is studying the possibility of building liquefaction capacity at the site. Freeland said she is “very familiar” with the Repsol project, but also with other proposals to build new LNG terminals and that “this is not the moment to pick specific projects.”

The Repsol project is widely considered the most likely to be operational quickly because it builds onto existing infrastructure.

Freeland told reporters she will be meeting with energy industry leaders on her current trip through Atlantic Canada.

Italy’s Center-Left Join Forces Against Right-Wing Landslide

Alessandra Migliaccio and Alberto Brambilla
Tue, August 2, 2022 



(Bloomberg) -- Italy’s Democratic party and centrists have formed an alliance ahead of general elections next month to try to counter a possible right-wing landslide victory.

The left-wing Democratic Party and centrist parties +Europe and Azione have agreed to combine forces ahead of the vote scheduled for Sept. 25, leaders said during a press conference on Tuesday. Among other things they agreed not to name divisive candidates that could disperse votes favoring the right and to pursue the current government’s reform agenda.

“It’s a matter of dignity. The choice is between a country that stays with Europe or with Orban or Putin,” Carlo Calenda, leader of the centrist coalition said. He was echoed by PD leader Enrico Letta who said it was “unimaginable” to go from the current national unity government led by Premier Mario Draghi to a right-wing coalition led by far-right Brothers of Italy leader Giorgia Meloni.

The move follows polls showing that if the center-left parties don’t unite, then an alliance of Italy’s Brothers of Italy with Matteo Salvini’s League and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia could lead to an almost two-thirds majority in both houses of Parliament. That would be reminiscent of Hungarian leader Viktor Orban who won a large majority in 2010, and awakens fears of attempts to change the constitution.

Early elections were called for next month following Draghi’s resignation caused by the falling apart of his coalition. While he remains as caretaker until a new government takes power, his impending departure has left investors concerned about Italy’s public finances. There is also worry regarding Italy’s ability to meet EU Recovery Fund targets, which call for reforms to unlock about 200 billion euros-worth of grants and loans aimed at permanently boosting the country’s growth.

The centrist parties Azione and +Europe gained most in Italian polling average this week, according to Bloomberg calculation. They gained to garner 5.9% support.

NO BONE KNIFE USED

Did U.S. Chop Up al Qaeda Boss With
Terrifying Top Secret Spinning Blades?


Barbie Latza Nadeau Tue, August 2, 2022

Ausaf Newspaper for Daily Dawn/Handout via Reuters

When Ayman al-Zawahiri, the post-Osama bin Laden leader of al Qaeda, was obliterated on the balcony of a pink house in a posh-for-Kabul district in the Afghan capital, neighbors heard a bang but did not see signs of an explosion.

A neighbor who lives nearby told Reuters that she heard a loud noise on Sunday but curiously did not see the usual chaos most Kabul residents associate with a bomb or missile attack, including smoke and fire. That has led the ballistics chattering class to presume the attack was carried out by the notorious “flying Ginsu”—which is named after the iconic super-sharp Japanese knives that were heavily advertised in the 1980s. It is pretty much exactly as brutal as it sounds, slicing through walls or the roofs of vehicles to destroy its target.

The weapon—officially called an R9X Hellfire missile—seems straight out of a James Bond brainstorming session. The missile does not carry a warhead or explosives, and instead uses kinetic energy and six devastating blades to take out its target, according to a Bellingcat review of the weapon.

The precision capability of the weapon means there is less chance of collateral damage. And in fact, there were no civilians killed in the hit on Zawahiri. The telltale sign of its use is that there is no explosion. In the case of Zawahiri, 71, only the windows of the balcony, where he was standing alone, were shattered.

The U.S. does not lay claim to keeping the Hellfire “flying Ginsu” in its arsenal, but several reports in recent years seem to show indisputable evidence that they were used in precision kills in Syria, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. This is the first suspected use in Afghanistan, according to several news reports.

The Taliban, who might have let their guard down when it came to protecting the al Qaeda chief, condemned the attack. Spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid called it a violation of “international principles”—which may be a little rich for the terror group that has de-fingered, enslaved, and beheaded hundreds of people.

Several sources speaking to the Associated Press and Reuters say the CIA spearheaded the intelligence work that led to the attack. Pakistan’s government tweeted on Tuesday that the U.S. did not use their intelligence or territory, nor did the attack breach Pakistani airspace.

Reuters reports that Zawahiri had been living safely in the mountains until he was moved to Kabul when the Taliban took over in the wake of the swift U.S. withdrawal last year.

Hellfire R9X missile: the drone missile with razor-sharp blades used to kill Ayman al-Zawahiri

Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed in a US strike last weekend, President Joe Biden announced. The US military used its 'secret weapon', the Hellfire R9X missile, to kill him. What is this missile, and when did it enter active service? Where has it been used previously?

Written by Man Aman Singh Chhina ,

 Edited by Explained Desk | Chandigarh |
Updated: August 4, 2022

In this image provided by the US Army, contactors from General Atomics load Hellfire missiles onto an MQ-1C Gray Eagle at Camp Taji, Iraq, on Feb. 27, 2011.

(Jason Sweeney/U.S. Army via AP)

The US military used its ‘secret weapon’ — the Hellfire R9X missile – to kill Al Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri on the balcony of a safehouse in Kabul on July 31.

Al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian surgeon who had a $25 million bounty on his head, had helped coordinate the September 11, 2001, attacks that had killed nearly 3,000 people.

What is the Hellfire R9X missile?

Better known in military circles as the AGM-114 R9X, the Hellfire R9X is a US-origin missile known to cause minimum collateral damage while engaging individual targets.

Also known as the ‘Ninja Missile’, this weapon does not carry a warhead and instead deploys razor-sharp blades at the terminal stage of its attack trajectory. This helps it to break through even thick steel sheets and cut down the target using the kinetic energy of its propulsion without causing any damage to the persons in the general vicinity or to the structure of the building.

The blades pop out of the missile and cut down the intended target without causing the massive damage to the surroundings which would be the case with a missile carrying an explosive warhead

. 

Zawahiri was targeted with two Hellfire missiles

When did the Hellfire missile enter active service?

The Hellfire 9RX missile is known to have been in active service since 2017. However, its existence became public knowledge two years later in 2019.

It is a variant of the original Hellfire missile family which is used in conventional form with warheads and is traditionally used from helicopters, ground-based vehicles, and sometimes small ships and fast moving vessels. For several years now, the Hellfire family of missiles, including the ‘Ninja Missile’, are armed on Combat Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or drones that the US Military uses in offensive military operations around the world.
Also in Explained |Explained: 4 reasons why Ayman al-Zawahiri’s killing is important for India
Where has the Hellfire missile been used on previous occasions?

In 2017, the ‘Ninja Missile’ was reportedly used to kill the then No. 2 leader of Al Qaeda, Abu Khayr Al Masri, in Syria. It was also used against other targets in Syria at around the same time. The damage caused to the vehicles which carried the targets, particularly the shredded roofs of cars, gave the first clues that a normal warhead was not used on the missile and that it had sharp blades. It has also been used against Taliban targets in Afghanistan in 2020 and again in 2022. 

 

Other targets

What is known about the other Hellfire missile variants?

Hellfire is actually an acronym for Heliborne, Laser, Fire and Forget Missile and it was developed in the US initially to target tanks from the Apache AH-64 attack helicopters. Later, the usage of these missiles spread to several other variants of helicopters and also ground and sea-based systems and drones.

Developed by Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, the Hellfire missile has other variants such as ‘Longbow’ and ‘Romeo’ apart from the ‘Ninja’.

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M 

They quit Goldman's star trading team, then the bank raised alarms

TUE, AUG 02, 2022 - 9:08 AM
UPDATED TUE, AUG 02, 2022

Soon after, Goldman fired the pair - Jon "JP" Paul and Sina Lashgari - from jobs on its programme-trading desk, telling regulators they accessed sensitive computer code without authorisation or a valid business purpose.
PHOTO: BLOOMBERG

INSIDE a lucrative and envied Goldman Sachs Group trading squad, a pair of employees racked up praise in their recent reviews. One was dubbed "exceptional" with an "impeccable work ethic", the other as "outperforming" and a "culture carrier".

When the duo accepted new jobs at a hedge fund this year, they said, the bank urged them to reconsider. One recalled that after he refused, his manager's tone shifted to a warning: "I would be concerned about your behaviour in the past" at Goldman.

Soon after, Goldman fired the pair - Jon "JP" Paul and Sina Lashgari - from jobs on its programme-trading desk, telling regulators they accessed sensitive computer code without authorisation or a valid business purpose. Goldman suspected, but couldn't prove, they intended to swipe some of the secret sauce behind several hundred million dollars in revenue, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. A notice it posted in their public employment records is now a red flag to any future employer.

Side by side at their lawyer's office, Paul and Lashgari took the unusual step of opening up about Goldman's allegation and their bitter breakup with one of Wall Street's most elite banks. The way they see it: They did nothing wrong, and the ouster was retaliation, designed to send a message to their former team.

"We didn't take a single line of code," said Paul, a trader on the desk.

"I have worked hard to establish my career and reputation. Goldman will not take that away from me," said Lashgari, who was a coder. "I was shocked by Goldman's reaction to our resignations. I worked with these people for 10-12 hours a day for 6 years, and they know what type of person I am."

The messy exit of 2 employees who pulled in 7-figure paydays from a vaunted Goldman team is a jarring turn in Wall Street's yearlong war for talent. The pressure on investment banks to guard their franchises is particularly acute right now. Trading is pulling a lot of weight in earnings, there are few strategies left that offer an opportunity for outsize hauls, and just about every bank is fighting a tidal current of turnover.

While acrimony and breakups between banks and their talent are inevitable, they tend to stay quiet. This one offers a rare look at a trading desk that generates more revenue per employee than almost any other at Goldman. The unit, with about 20 people, crafts algorithms to help wager Goldman's cash, raking in profits by anticipating and reacting to changes in the world's biggest stock indexes.

It's a business line that has a history of high anxiety over decampments, at a bank that spends deeply to get a technological edge and guards it fiercely.

"Our investigation showed that these employees engaged in serious misconduct," said Andrea Williams, a spokesperson for the bank, who rejected any notion of retaliation. "They were terminated for accessing confidential and proprietary firm information without authorisation and for refusing to cooperate fully with the firm's investigation."

A third-party forensic firm that both sides agreed to hire rooted through their computers and mobile phones. The review didn't find evidence of data transfer or any communication that would suggest intent to steal data, according to an Apr 4 report seen by Bloomberg.

Weeks later, Goldman fired the 2 vice-presidents. It then levied an unusual accusation in a database maintained by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority that they improperly accessed systems and that Lashgari took steps to cover his tracks. Their attorney said those disclosures are unfairly hurting their reputations.

"Goldman's actions were defamatory and unlawful," said the lawyer, Lou Pechman. He said his clients cooperated with the review. "We are keeping open all of our litigation options."

Big opportunity

The rise of passive investing over the past few decades has created a big opportunity for sophisticated trading firms like Goldman. Indexes publicly lay out their methodology for picking which stocks to add or bump out of their rosters, known as index rebalancing. Once they make their decisions, the tweaks trigger a wave of buying and selling by passive funds, which have to rebalance portfolios that collectively command trillions of dollars.

If a bank like Goldman or hedge fund such as Millennium Management can develop systems that predict which stocks are ripe for inclusion, they can position themselves to profit. That's the programme-trading desk's key remit. Other events, like mergers, can also create similar opportunities. In either case, the earlier the firm guesses right, the better chance it has of capitalising. Over the years, Goldman has assigned traders and coders to work together and help develop mathematical models and software tools.

Goldman doesn't break out how much it earns from anticipating changes to indexes, and Paul and Lashgari wouldn't discuss it. But the prowess of its franchise is an open secret on Wall Street. According to conservative estimates from rival traders and industry observers, it pulled in at least US$700 million in each of the past 2 years, trouncing banking peers. Senior traders point out that the strategy has gotten crowded and the opportunity to make easy money from the niche has waned. This year may be lean for many.

Goldman sees the hedge funds in this space as its direct competition. The firm has poured talent and resources into the strategy and made capital available as needed. Notable names have called the desk home over the years. Joe Montesano established himself there before rising to head US equity trading for Goldman. Anne-Victoire Auriault, one of the firm's youngest partners, is part of the current team.

Inside Goldman's equities business, the group is a bastion that still deploys the bank's own money without waiting for clients to submit orders. After the 2008 financial crisis, big banks were broadly banished from wagering their own capital to hunt for profits. But it's still de rigueur in fixed income, where banks match sellers with buyers in less-liquid markets. The rules allow for such risk-taking if there is "reasonably expected near-term demand". Goldman leans on that same logic in the index-rebalancing business, knowing that when indexes change, the demand from passive funds surges.

Despite all the interest attracted by the strategy, it's a corner of Wall Street where relatively few people understand how to succeed, making Goldman particularly protective of its group. Last year, the bank even extended non-compete clauses for the junior members of its team to 6 months on top of a notice period when they want to leave.

Lashgari described himself as his group's most senior coder aside from its leader and said he routinely monitored and tweaked its library.

"I was a designated code reviewer for all of the desk's confidential and proprietary code," Lashgari said. He called Goldman's accusation of improper access baseless. "Had we agreed to reconsider the resignations, none of this would have happened."

For decades, the bankers and traders who found their way into the heart of Wall Street have tended to be one of 2 types. There are those born into pedigrees and connections that make careers in dealmaking seem almost inevitable, and the outsiders who arrive with ambition and smarts. Paul and Lashgari's biographies read like the latter.

Paul said he was born in 1993 an hour outside Haiti's Port-au-Prince and grew up near Philadelphia, where his father drove a cab and his mother worked shifts as a nurse. At Columbia University, he studied computer science and economics and joined the National Society of Black Engineers, where another member told him about Goldman. What hit him was "the energy and vibrancy radiating across the trading floors" and "the sports-team-like atmosphere", he recalled.

Lashgari was born in 1987 in Iran's Kurdistan province near Iraq and moved at age 5 to Tehran, he said. He graduated from one of the country's premier schools for gifted students, studied electrical engineering and then moved to the US for a PhD at Cornell University on the mathematics of satellite communications.

After interning at Goldman, he joined the programme-trading group in 2016, where Paul was already plying his craft.

Biblical betrayal

One reason big banks pay handsomely is that investment firms pay even more. If a bank assembles a successful trading team, it's under pressure to keep the talent from jumping ship and to protect intellectual property. Goldman's protectiveness may be understandable, but sometimes it has also prompted questions over whether it's too aggressive.

Most famously, the bank enlisted US authorities in 2009 when it believed a computer programmer, Sergey Aleynikov, was making off with source code for high-speed trading on his way to another job. That unleashed a decade-long legal saga, and a debate over the fairness of his prosecution. After years of battling federal and state charges, and winning acquittals on most of them, Aleynikov was found guilty on one count of unlawfully using secret scientific material and sentenced to time served.

In the midst of that battle, another Goldman programme trader, Glen Scheinberg, jumped ship to multibillion-dollar hedge fund Millennium along with 3 colleagues, stirring yet more consternation within the bank. That hedge fund group became one of the most successful index-rebalancing teams on Wall Street.

Paul said that the day he submitted his resignation a manager told him Goldman doesn't like it when employees leave in unison, warning, "this was a team move and the firm does not take these things lightly".

Earlier this year, other parts of Goldman turned heads in the industry as the firm denied past compensation awards to key executives who decided to leave. At one point it even looked to confiscate vested stock awards from some defectors, a measure usually reserved for cases of misconduct.

The disclosures in Paul and Lashgari's Finra employment files are rare. A review of Finra's database shows accusations against only about 70 brokers terminated from Goldman in the past decade, according to SLCG Economic Consulting. Among those, only Lashgari and Paul were accused of improperly accessing proprietary information.

"After making hundreds of millions of dollars in profit for Goldman, it would have been nice for Sina and JP to have received a 'thank you' and a goodbye handshake," said Pechman, their lawyer. "Goldman unfairly viewed JP's and Sina's departures as a betrayal of biblical proportions." BLOOMBERG

Experts at odds over nuclear power's role in fighting climate change

Melissa Rossi
·Contributor
Tue, August 2, 2022 at

One key provision in the Senate's draft Inflation Reduction Act — the first-of-its-kind climate bill in the U.S. that aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change — is an improved tax credit for American nuclear power plants and funding for next-generation nuclear fuels.

The role nuclear power can or should play in helping the world reduce these emissions is hotly debated, however. Many climate hawks see nuclear, which generates about 19% of electricity in the U.S., as a necessary bridge to helping the global economy transition to renewable sources of energy. John Kerry, President Biden’s special envoy for climate, has indicated that the construction of new nuclear plants needs to be a global priority.

"Secretary Kerry has repeatedly spoken about the role that existing and new nuclear can play in tackling the climate crisis," a State Department official told Yahoo News. "The United States stands ready to provide support and partnership to those countries around the world that have prioritized nuclear in their clean energy and climate plans to address the global climate crisis and bolster energy security."

Microsoft founder Bill Gates also supports expanding nuclear power.

"It’s hard to imagine a future where we can decarbonize our power grid affordably without using more nuclear power," Gates, who has started a company to build small modular nuclear reactors, told the Nuclear Energy Assembly last summer.

The cooling towers of a nuclear power plant in Winfield, W.Va. (Getty Images)

In much of Europe, however, nuclear power is seen as "an old way of thinking about energy systems," Raphael Hanoteaux, a senior policy adviser at the climate change think tank E3G, told Yahoo News. Embarking on more nuclear plants requires huge startup costs and a conservative time frame of a decade or more between ground breaking and electricity delivery, he added.

"It doesn't make sense to invest in new nuclear power plants," he said. "They cost a lot of money compared to the current price of renewables, energy efficiency investments or batteries."

Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm told Yahoo News at last year’s United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, that the Biden administration was "very bullish" on helping build the next generation of nuclear reactors. The U.S. Department of Energy also recently made $6 billion in funding available to struggling nuclear companies.

While acknowledging that every country must make its own energy decisions, multinational electric utility Iberdrola, the second biggest in Spain, has entirely ditched nuclear and is directing €150 billion ($153 billion) over the next eight years to wind and solar, smart networks, storage solutions and green hydrogen.

"In our view, renewable energy is the main answer to decarbonizing the economy," Xabier Viteri, Iberdrola’s director of renewable energy, told Yahoo News. Strictly speaking, only solar, wind, geothermal and hydropower are considered renewable, as they do not require additional fuel sources to provide energy.

While issues like energy storage and a fine-tuned electrical grid still need to be hammered out, "on paper, technically speaking, it's doable to have electricity generated by a 100% renewable system," Paris-based Phuc-Vinh Nguyen, research fellow at the Jacques Delors Energy Center, told Yahoo News. "But with nuclear, it would be easier."

U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm speaks at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna in 2021. (Leonhard Foeger/Reuters)

An entirely renewable electrical system, he said, would require some sacrifices from consumers, including not charging their electric vehicles at peak times, such as evenings.

In Germany, which had 17 nuclear plants in 2011 when the Fukushima disaster in Japan prompted the government to begin dismantling them, only three nuclear plants remain, generating 11% of the country’s electricity. Those remaining plants, however, are scheduled to be decommissioned in December, a move that has earned Germany criticism, since the country is suffering an energy shortfall thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In apparent retaliation for Europe’s imposition of sanctions on Russia, that country's gas giant Gazprom has cut natural gas flows through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline to 20% of normal capacity, forcing Germany to scramble to make up the shortfall.

Joachim Bühler, managing director of Germany’s safety inspection association TÜV, told the German broadcaster Die Welt this weekend that not only are the three existing plants safe to continue operations, but three plants decommissioned last December are perfectly fine to bring back online. That information "puts more pressure on the government to do so," noted Thorfinn Stainforth, policy analyst at the Institute for European Environmental Policy.

Belgium, where nuclear power provides almost half the country's electricity, also planned to shut down its last seven nuclear reactors by 2025, but given Europe’s natural gas shortages, it decided to extend the lifetime of two of the facilities for another decade.

In the same way that firing up shuttered coal plants has angered environmentalists, the decision to continue relying on nuclear power has rankled some analysts. "We are advocating for a clean energy revolution," Esther Bollendorff, a senior energy analyst at the NGO coalition Climate Action Network Europe, which represents over 1,500 European NGOs, told Yahoo News. "For us, nuclear is not a clean energy. Nuclear is not a cheap energy. It cannot be built up quickly and doesn't respond to the challenge of acting quickly. And it [creates] significant problems with managing waste."

A nuclear power plant in Gundremmingen, Germany, whose last unit was shut down at the end of 2021. (Lukas Barth/Reuters)

Others, however, have applauded the reappraisal of nuclear power.

London-based energy consultancy firm LucidCatalyst in June released a report titled "Beautiful Nuclear," which argued that "no other electricity generation technology can match [nuclear’s] diversity of beneficial impacts." It pointed out that countries such as Sweden and Finland have combined renewables with nuclear to effectively decarbonize.

In the U.K., where nuclear power provides 15% of electricity, an additional eight reactors are planned. In May, prior to his resignation, Prime Minister Boris Johnson promised that his country would "build one [new nuclear plant] every year, powering homes with clean, safe and reliable energy."

No leader, however, has been more supportive of nuclear energy than French President Emmanuel Macron. In February, Macron called for a "rebirth of France’s nuclear industry," announcing plans to build up to 14 new-generation reactors to battle climate change.

But it's precisely the underperformance of France’s power plants this summer that, for some, is the final nail in the nuclear coffin. With France's fleet of 56 reactors, nuclear power normally provides 70% of its electricity. This year, however, as high temperature records were toppled in much of the country, nuclear power has made up only some 30%. Over half of French reactors are down, some for maintenance, others because cooling waters from nearby rivers, such as the Rhône, are too warm this year. Normally a summer electricity exporter, France was forced this summer to purchase it from Germany.

When people question the reliability of wind and solar, Hanoteaux suggests they "look at the French example. Nuclear is not as reliable as people would like to think."

Nevertheless, the Paris-based International Energy Agency in June issued a report that encouraged more investment in nuclear power. "Building sustainable and clean energy systems will be harder, riskier and more expensive without nuclear," an agency press release accompanying the report stated.

French President Emmanuel Macron speaks at the GE Steam Power System main production site for its nuclear turbine systems in Belfort, France. 

(Jean Francois Badias/AFP via Getty Images)

American climatologist Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, doesn’t buy that argument. In his book "The New Climate War," he dismisses the idea of investing in new nuclear power to address climate change as "a fallacy."

"We can decarbonize our economy with existing — and cheaper — renewable energy, such as wind, solar and geothermal," he told Yahoo News, pointing at studies by Mark Z. Jacobson, director of Stanford's Atmosphere/Energy Program, showing that the U.S. doesn't need new nuclear plants as part of the transition. "Investing in nuclear would crowd out investment in cheaper, safer renewable energy. So why would we do it?" Mann also regards the great hope in small modular reactors as misguided, calling them "likely another false promise" and "a costly option that comes with the same risks, including proliferation and an even worse potential waste problem."

But for all the ongoing debate about the role nuclear power should play in order to transition away from fossil fuels, most analysts underscore that almost every country needs to move quickly to build more wind and solar facilities. What's important isn't to what extent nuclear plays a role or doesn't in the energy transition, Elisabeth Cremona, energy and climate data analyst at the think tank Ember, emphasized to Yahoo News. "Accelerating wind and solar deployment remains the central challenge of the next decade," she said.

Georgia nuclear plant gets OK to load fuel at new reactor


JEFF AMY
Wed, August 3, 2022 

ATLANTA (AP) — A nuclear power plant being built in Georgia can begin loading radioactive fuel into one of its two new reactors, federal regulators said Wednesday, a key step toward generating electricity at the first new nuclear reactor built in decades in the United States.

The Southern Nuclear Operating Co. hopes in October to begin loading fuel into its third reactor at Plant Vogtle, near Waynesboro, Tom Fanning, CEO of Southern Nuclear's parent company, Atlanta-based Southern Co, said last week.

Andrea Veil, director of the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation, said inspectors “independently verified that Vogtle Unit 3 has been properly built and will protect public health and safety when it transitions to operation.” She said they will keep “a close eye” on the unit moving forward.

A third and a fourth reactor were approved for construction at Vogtle by the Georgia Public Service Commission in 2012, and the third reactor was supposed to start generating power in 2016. Now, the schedule calls for that to happen by the end of March 2023. The cost of the third and fourth reactors has climbed from an original cost of $14 billion to more than $30 billion.

The operating company will operate the plant on behalf of owners including fellow Southern Co. subsidiary Georgia Power Co., Oglethorpe Power Corp., the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia and the city of Dalton. Oglethorpe and MEAG would sell power to cooperatives and municipal utilities across Georgia, as well in Jacksonville, Florida, and parts of Alabama and the Florida Panhandle.

Approval of the third reactor was hung up in recent months because much of its wiring had to be redone after federal regulators found major flaws in it. Southern Co. also had fallen behind on inspection documents that had to be completed before the NRC could sign off.

Fanning and Southern Chief Financial Officer Daniel Tucker said July 28 that before fuel could be loaded, the company also needed to remove scaffolding, temporary lighting and other construction equipment and get the nuclear containment unit into “pristine condition” before loading fuel.

Georgia Power said Thursday that fuel is already on site. After it's loaded, operators will test to make sure that the reactor can operate at the extreme temperature and pressure needed to split atoms. Once those tests are done, operators will link up the plant to the electrical grid.

Georgia Power customers are already paying part of the financing cost and state regulators have approved a monthly rate increase of $3.78 a month as soon as the third unit begins generating power. But the Georgia Public Service Commission will decide later who pays for the remainder of the costs.

The milestone comes as the other owners of Vogtle seek to shift costs onto Georgia Power. Both Oglethorpe and MEAG sued Georgia Power in June, claiming the company was trying to bilk them out of nearly $700 million by unilaterally changing a contract.

Georgia Power owns 45.7% of the two reactors, compared to Oglethorpe’s 30% and MEAG’s 22.3%. The city of Dalton’s utility owns the remaining 1.6% and hasn’t sued.

Under a 2018 deal, Georgia Power agreed to assume all cost overruns above a certain level. In exchange, the co-owners would sell part of their ownership shares to Georgia Power. Oglethorpe and MEAG say projected overruns have reached that level, but Georgia Power claims the threshold is $1.3 billion higher than the level claimed by the co-owners.

If Georgia Power loses, the shareholders of Southern Co. would most likely have to absorb more losses.

Vogtle is the only nuclear plant under construction in the United States. Its costs and delays could deter other utilities from building such plants, even though they generate electricity without releasing climate-changing carbon emissions.

“These new units remain a strong long-term investment for this state, and, once operating, are expected to provide customers with a reliable and resilient, clean, emission-free source of energy for the next 60 to 80 years," Georgia Power CEO Chris Womack said in a statement. "That’s why we’ve been so committed to getting this project done right — it’s about serving our customers today and for decades to come.”

This Tiny Modular Nuclear Reactor Just Got the Green Light From U.S. Regulators

Caroline Delbert
Wed, August 3, 2022 

Photo credit: Nuscale

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has awarded approval to nuclear leader NuScale for its small, modular reactor design.


These reactors will be built offsite and installed onsite at nontraditionally small nuclear plants.


The energy industry faces huge challenges before it can decarbonize.

In a major step forward for the burgeoning modular nuclear reactor movement, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) approved all but the final formalities on a tiny reactor design put forth by industry leader NuScale. The July 29 announcement comes after six years of steady work toward regulatory approval.

The combination of small and modular is new for nuclear energy. Decades ago, the first nuclear plants were small because that was simply the limit of the emerging technology at the time. Modular design concepts were in the mix back then because, honestly, what wasn’t in the mix? There were even nuclear-powered concepts for family sedans as far back as the 1950s.

NuScale, based in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon, has been working on its small, modular reactor concept for over 15 years. The company began in the early 2000s with funding from the United States Department of Energy that merged the interests of multiple universities and government laboratories—something very common in the energy sector and in scientific fields like physics. Then, in 2007, NuScale went solo and took its show on the road to begin the long slog toward nuclear regulatory approval; the process began formally in 2016 with NuScale’s initial application for its modular reactor design.

“The NuScale team spent over 2 million labor hours to develop the information needed to prepare the design certification application, which included 12,000 pages, 14 topical reports, and had over 2 million pages of supporting information,” Diane Hughes, vice president of marketing and communications for NuScale, tells Popular Mechanics by email. “In turn, the NRC spent over a quarter-million staff hours reviewing the application. That said, the NRC review process took 42 months, which was the fastest design review in the NRC’s history.” Hughes attributes this feat to NuScale’s simple design.

In its announcement, the NRC explains that NuScale’s small, modular reactor is just the seventh reactor design ever to be approved for use in the U.S. It’s also the first design to be modular. To understand what a big deal that is, we have to take a step back and consider how other nuclear power plants have been built.

I grew up in the shadow of the Byron Nuclear Generating Station outside Rockford, Illinois. Construction of the plant took a decade on a site that is about a mile-and-a-half square feet. The plant was planned around the site, not vice versa—where can we put a plant that is far enough outside of town, that has naturally flowing water, with enough room for over 700 employees and all the safety equipment and redundancies we need? What reactor can we build there?

That giant power plant has run for nearly 40 years and has supplied consistent power to about two million homes in northern Illinois. Even so, it’s embroiled in a licensing and renewal controversy, at least partly because the future of nuclear energy, and of energy more broadly, is a big question mark right now. Nuclear energy is considered unfavorable by many people around the world, and not without reason: several high-profile disasters hurt public opinion for decades, and now many of the plants from the “nuclear boom” of the 70s and 80s are aging out of service, becoming albatrosses.

But advocates say that there is simply no other way to replace the bulk of the world’s current fossil-fuel energy. If we’re going to stop burning coal and natural gas at power plants, we need something else, and renewable energy simply can’t account for everything. Renewables aren’t right or accessible for every community that is in need of a decarbonized energy solution. This is the market in which small, modular nuclear reactors have arrived.

Photo credit: NRC.gov/NuScale

“Especially while the global community is suffering from crises like volatile energy prices and climate-driven extreme weather events, the need for carbon-free energy solutions like NuScale’s small modular reactors has never been greater,” Hughes says. “While European gas futures have soared to new records, nuclear fuel prices are and have been much more stable as compared to natural gas prices. Achieving climate goals simply cannot be done without nuclear energy as part of the equation.”

NuScale is certainly not alone in the marketplace of ideas when it comes to small, modular nuclear reactors, but it’s had one special advantage all along: its design is revolutionary in some ways, but still built on the basics of water-cooled, nuclear power generation. Like Byron, a NuScale power plant will be cooled by a pool of fresh water. But that water will circulate and be cooled and reused rather than flushed out in quantity; NuScale says the reactors can still run almost indefinitely without pumps.

With the regulatory approval in hand, NuScale will finally be able to plan its first plants in the United States. These are still subject to location-based approval, especially because nuclear plant regulations are still based on huge sites like Byron. But NuScale’s reactors won’t be made on site. They’ll be made in factories and brought onsite in pieces for final installation and activation.

“Potential customers from numerous countries have expressed interest in our technology, and we currently have 18 signed and active memorandums of understanding with customers in 11 countries interested in, and considering, a deployment of a NuScale power plant,” Hughes says.

Manchin secures top Democrats' commitment for troubled pipeline project - media

Mon, August 1, 2022

WASHINGTON, Aug 1 (Reuters) - Democratic U.S. Senator Joe Manchin has secured a commitment from President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi to allow the Mountain Valley Pipeline to be completed, his office told a CBS affiliate on Monday.

The commitment to the West Virginia senator from Democrats Biden, Schumer and Pelosi will be used to pass legislation for the state's pipeline to be completed and "streamline the permitting process for all energy infrastructure," the news outlet reported, citing Manchin's office.

The legislation will be voted on by the end of the fiscal year, which is Sept. 30, 2022, according to the statement quoted in the news outlet.

Manchin's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday. The senator re-tweeted the report.

The pipeline project has faced legal setbacks and is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.

Last week, Manchin, who has often been a roadblock to Biden's policy goals, reached a deal with Schumer on a bill to increase corporate taxes, reduce the national debt, invest in energy technologies and lower the cost of prescription drugs.

The Washington Post reported on Monday that the deal between Manchin and Schumer would also attempt to remove obstacles to the construction of energy projects across the country. (Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington and Costas Pitas in Los Angeles; Editing by Chris Reese and Bradley Perrett)

Yellen Says Manchin Bill Won’t Raise Taxes for Families Earning Less Than $400,000 a Year

Christopher Condon
Tue, August 2, 2022 



(Bloomberg) -- Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen waded into the congressional debate over proposed economic and climate legislation, saying it won’t raise taxes for families earning less than $400,000 a year.

“The legislation would either reduce or have no effect on the taxes due or paid by any family with income less than $400,000,” Yellen wrote Tuesday in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi obtained by Bloomberg News. “In fact, the clean energy tax credits and the expanded premium tax credit will cut taxes for millions of Americans.”

Yellen wrote to Pelosi after an analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation, an official congressional scorekeeper, found that some middle- and low-income households could pay additional taxes next year under the bill, unveiled last week between West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.

The $400,000 income threshold is crucial for the White House, as President Joe Biden promised during his election campaign not to raise taxes for households below that line. While Democrats have disputed the estimates, Republicans have used the JCT figures to amplify their opposition to the bill.

In her letter, Yellen didn’t respond directly to the JCT’s analysis on the distributional effects of the bill’s tax changes. Instead, she reviewed each of the legislation’s major components and said the tax changes would only affect “large corporations and investment professionals making $400,000 or more per year.”

 QAnon ‘Queen of Canada’ Wants Some American Subjects

Will Sommer

Tue, August 2, 2022 

Patrick Doyle/Reuters

A QAnon leader whose followers believe she’s the “Queen of Canada” has now set her sights on the United States, urging her followers to enforce her dangerous “decrees” in America.

For people outside of the pro-Trump QAnon conspiracy theory, Romana Didulo is just another Canadian citizen. But for her supporters, she’s a monarch ordained by Q and the American military to rule over Canada and, ultimately, the world. After being endorsed by other QAnon promoters, Didulo managed to amass a following, and is currently touring Canada in a fleet of RVs to meet with her supporters.

Now, though, Didulo’s ambitions seem to have grown. In July, she started telling her more than 60,000 followers on the messaging app Telegram about the establishment of the “Kingdom of America,” handing out royal “titles” to Americans who promised to promote her reign there and appointing a new United States “commander-in-chief,” a man named David Carlson.

While Didulo’s ideas are ridiculous, they’ve already had a real-world effect on Canada. When Didulo told her fans that she had abolished Canada’s income tax, some stopped paying taxes to the Canadian government. Because Didulo issued a “decree” announcing that her supporters could now pay their utility bills with “IOUs” backed by her bogus government, her supporters have started losing electricity and water in their homes.

“They’re literally in the dark,” said Christine Sarteschi, a Chatham University associate professor of social work and criminology who has studied Didulo’s group.

The Daily Beast couldn’t reach Didulo or Carlson for comment.

QAnon Fan Is Resurrecting JFK Jr.’s Magazine in Creepy Twist

More seriously, Didulo’s claims that she operates a parallel government to the real Canadian one have put her followers at odds with law enforcement. Last year, she urged her followers to “shoot to kill” COVID-19 vaccine workers. One of Didulo’s followers was arrested after allegedly threatening to shoot up a school where children were receiving vaccines.

Others have followed Didulo’s orders to deliver bogus cease-and-desist notices to Canadian police demanding that they stop enforcing pandemic mandates.

Like the anti-government sovereign citizens movement, which Didulo has borrowed some tactics from, Didulo’s fans seem to think they’re above the law. One follower in Canada tried to avoid being arrested for outstanding warrants by serving a police officer with one of the cease-and-desist notices, only to be immediately arrested. Didulo herself was briefly detained for a mental health evaluation last year.

Even many QAnon observers are puzzled so far about Didulo’s attempts to extend her “kingdom” into the United States. Still, according to Sarteschi, the purported citizens of the “Kingdom of America” and Carlson, a little-known Didulo devotee, both seem to be under her sway.

“They defer to her as the leader and they ask her permission to do anything,” Sarteschi said. “She’ll post about him and talk about him in speeches, but it sounds like he defers to her all the time.”

Didulo’s followers have already started to contact genuine officials in the country, warning them that her reign is about to begin. One of Didulo’s loyal subjects sent a letter to Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody, later posted on Telegram, asking her to bring the state in line with Didulo and Carlson’s new government.

Didulo’s fake “decrees,” which promise to abolish taxes, debts, and mortgages, are key to her popularity with her fans. Some are odd but harmless, including a measure meant to lower speed limits on some streets to improve the popularity of back-alley rollerblading. But others are sinister and potentially violent. Along with her death penalty for vaccine administrators, Didulo has decreed capital punishment for “offenses” such as the distribution of pro-vaccination podcasts. The self-styled queen has also called for a 30-year prison term for reporters who criticize her.

Now Didulo’s American adherents are set on trying to carry out her orders outside of Canada, starting in the United States.

“They want to replicate that movement in the USA, and they want to use her decrees as law,” Sarteschi said.

Read more at The Daily Beast.

Climate change bill would cut U.S. air pollution deaths by up to 3,900 per year, study finds

Ben Adler

·Senior Editor

Tue, August 2, 2022 

The budget reconciliation bill that Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., agreed to with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., could save up to 3,900 lives per year by 2030, thanks to reduced air pollution, according to a new study from the nonpartisan think tank Energy Innovation.

The bill, known as the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), contains $369 billion in spending to address climate change over 10 years, in addition to other provisions, including closing tax loopholes and holding down the rate of increase in the cost of prescription medication.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer at a news conference on Capitol Hill on Thursday. (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Researchers from Energy Innovation, which advocates for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, modeled the effects of the climate provisions, such as loans for the manufacture and purchase of electric vehicles, tax credits to boost solar-panel and wind-turbine manufacturing and subsidies for state and local governments to reduce their emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change. The budget compromise also includes the first-ever fee for oil and gas drilling operations that leak methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

“The IRA provisions could also generate enormous public health and jobs benefits,” the report states. In addition to preventing between 3,700 and 3,900 premature deaths from air pollution in 2030, Energy Innovation found it would lead to a net increase of up to 1.5 million jobs in 2030 and increase the United States' gross domestic product by 0.84% to 0.88% in 2030.

While the emphasis in media coverage of the clean energy programs has been on combating climate change, switching from coal and gas to wind and solar power, and from internal combustion engines to electric cars and trucks, the legislation would also reduce the presence of conventional air pollutants that are produced by burning fossil fuels.

Using open-source software from the Department of Energy, Energy Innovation modeled the effects of the energy policy components of the bill. The estimate of premature deaths prevented is based on the expected reductions in particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds.

A forest killed by carbon dioxide near the dried-out Horseshoe Lake in California on Thursday. (David McNew/Getty Images)

Depending on a variety of factors, including economic growth and how eager consumers are to take advantage of the tax credits, the team played out four different scenarios.

If the bill doesn’t pass, the study projected that U.S. emissions will be 24% below 2005 levels by 2030. Largely thanks to gas, wind and solar energy displacing coal, U.S. emissions have already been reduced to 17% below 2005 levels, and that trend is expected to continue. However, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that emissions must drop much faster to avert catastrophic climate change. President Biden has pledged that the nation will reduce its emissions by 50% from the 2005 baseline by 2030.

If the IRA passes, even with the most pessimistic assumptions about the size of its effect, Energy Innovation projects that emissions will be 37% below levels in 2005 by the end of this decade. Under a moderate scenario, they will drop 39%, and under a high-effectiveness scenario, they will decrease by 41%. That alone is not enough to meet Biden’s target, but climate change experts hope that new federal regulations and state government policies will help at least partially to bridge the gap.

“The scenarios reflect a range of optimism about how effective the policies in the IRA will be and the uptake of different programs. How much will public sector spending leverage private sector spending?” said Robbie Orvis, the report’s lead author, in a press briefing.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., on Capitol Hill on Tuesday. (Sarah Silbiger/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Although some environmental activist organizations, such as Greenpeace, are criticizing the IRA for including new federal offshore oil and gas drilling and other pro-fossil-fuel development measures — which were needed to win Manchin’s support — Energy Innovation finds the bill would be a huge net positive for the climate.

“For every ton of emissions increases generated by IRA oil and gas provisions, at least 24 tons of emissions are avoided by the other provisions,” the report concludes.

Anand Gopal, executive director of strategy and policy at Energy Innovation, predicted that if the IRA passes, it would catalyze emissions reductions from other countries as well, because the Biden administration would be in a more credible position from which to extract new pledges at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference, more commonly referred to as COP27, in Egypt.

“We think this will change U.S. engagement on climate internationally going into COP27, as well as bilateral engagement,” Gopal said. In particular, he said, collaborative efforts with China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, “are more likely to pick up steam.”