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Few issues are as divisive among American environmentalists as nuclear energy. Concerns about nuclear waste storage and safety, particularly in the wake of the 1979 Three Mile Island reactor meltdown in Pennsylvania, helped spur the retirement of nuclear power plants across the country. Nuclear energy’s proponents, however, counter that nuclear power has historically been among the safest forms of power generation, and that the consistent carbon-free energy it generates makes it an essential tool in the fight against global warming.

But this well-worn debate may not actually be the one that determines the future of nuclear energy in the United States. More decisive is the unresolved question of whether the U.S. actually has the practical ability to build new nuclear plants at all.

The answer to this question may hinge on what happens in the wake of a construction project that’s reaching completion near Waynesboro, Georgia, where the second in a pair of new nuclear reactors is scheduled to enter commercial service at some point over the next three months. Each reactor has the capacity to power half a million homes and businesses annually without emitting greenhouse gases. Despite this, they are hardly viewed as an unambiguous success.

The construction of those reactors — Units 3 and 4 of Plant Vogtle, the first U.S. nuclear reactors built from scratch in decades — was a yearslong saga whose delays and budget overruns drove the giant nuclear company Westinghouse into bankruptcy. The reactors, first approved by Georgia regulators in 2009, are reckoned to be the most expensive infrastructure project of any kind in American history, at a total cost of $35 billion. That’s nearly double the original budget of the project, which is set to cross the finish line seven years behind schedule. Much of the cost was ultimately borne by Georgia residents, whose energy bills have ballooned to pay off a portion of the overruns.

“It’s a simple fact that Vogtle had disastrous cost overruns and delays, and you have to stare that fact in the face,” said John Parsons, a researcher at MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research. “It’s also possible that nuclear, if we can do it, is a valuable contribution to the system, but we need to learn how to do it cheaper than we’ve done so far. I would hate to throw away all the gains that we’ve learned from doing it.”

What kind of learning experience Vogtle ends up being may well come down to how it’s interpreted by the state and regional utility officials who approve new sources of power. Many are likely looking at the monumental expense and difficulty of building Vogtle and thinking they’d be foolish to try their hand at new nuclear power. Other energy officials, however, say those delays and overruns are the reason they’d be foolish not to.

The case for building more nuclear plants in the wake of Vogtle rests on a simple argument: Because the new reactors were the first newly built American nuclear plant to come online since 1993 — and the first to begin construction since the 1970s — many of their challenges were either unique to a first-of-a-kind reactor design or a result of the loss of industrial knowledge since the decline of the nuclear industry. Therefore, they might not necessarily recur in a future project, which could take advantage of the finalized reactor design and the know-how that had to be generated from scratch during Vogtle.

The Biden administration, which sees nuclear energy as an important component of its plan to get the U.S. to net-zero emissions by 2050, is betting that Vogtle can pave the way for a rebirth of the nuclear industry.

The generational gap between Vogtle and previous nuclear projects meant that the workforce and supply chain needed to build a nuclear plant had to be rebuilt for the new units. Their construction involved training some 13,000 technicians, according to Julie Kozeracki, a senior advisor at the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, a once-obscure agency that has become one of the federal government’s main conduits for climate investments under the Biden administration.

When Vogtle’s Units 3 and 4 were approved by Georgia regulators in 2009, the reactor model, known as an AP1000, had never before been built. (It was Westinghouse’s flagship model, combining massive generation capacity with new “passive safety” features, which allow reactors to remain cooled and safe without human intervention, external power, or emergency generators in the case of an accident.) It later emerged that the reactor’s developer, Westinghouse, had not even fully completed the design before starting construction, causing a significant share of the project’s costly setbacks. While that was bad news for Georgians, it could mean a smoother path ahead for future reactors.

“In the course of building Vogtle,” Kozeracki told Grist, “we have now addressed three of the biggest challenges: the incomplete design, the immature supply chain, and the untrained workforce.”

These factors helped bring down the cost of Unit 4 by 30 percent compared to Unit 3, Kozeracki said, adding that a hypothetical Unit 5 would be even cheaper. Furthermore, as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act, the climate-focused law that Congress passed in 2022, any new nuclear reactor would receive somewhere between 30 and 50 percent of its costs back in tax credits.

“We should be capitalizing on those hard-won lessons and building 10 or 20 more [AP1000s],” Kozeracki said.

Despite this optimism, however, no U.S. utility is currently building a new nuclear reactor. Part of the reason may be that it’s already too late to capitalize on the advantages of the Vogtle experience. For one thing, the 13,000 workers who assembled Vogtle may not all be available for a new gig.

“The trained workforce is a rapidly depreciating asset for the nuclear industry,” said John Quiggin, an economist at the University of Queensland, in an email. “Once the job is finished, workers move on or retire, subcontractors go out of business, the engineering and design groups are broken up and their tacit knowledge is lost. If a new project is started in, say, five years, it will have to do most of its recruiting from scratch.”

In Quiggin’s view, the opportunity has already passed, as much of the physical construction at Plant Vogtle happened years ago. “You can’t go back and say, ‘Look, we’ve got the team, we know what we did wrong last time, we’re going to do it better this time.’ It’ll be a totally new group of people doing it,” he said in an interview.

“It would have been better to start five years ago,” Kozeracki acknowledged. “But the second best time is right now.”

The federal government has put money on the table, but whether a new nuclear plant will actually get built is ultimately in the hands of a constellation of players including the nuclear industry, utility companies, and utility commissions, who would have to work together and overcome their current stalemate. None of them are clamoring to shoulder the risk of taking the first step.

“Everybody’s hoping that someone else would solve the cost problem,” Parsons said.

Utility commissioners — the state-level officials, often in elected positions, whose approval would be needed to site a future reactor — are wary of being blamed for passing on potential cost overruns to ratepayers.

“It would just be surprising for me if a Public Service Commission signed off on another AP1000 given how badly the last ones went,” said Matt Bowen, a researcher at Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

If more nuclear energy is built soon, it will most likely be in the Southeast, where power companies operate under what’s called a “vertically integrated monopoly” profit model, meaning they do not participate in wholesale energy markets but rather generate energy themselves and then sell it directly to customers.

Under this model, utilities are guaranteed a return on any investment their shareholders make, which is paid for by their customers at rates set by the state-level utility commissions. Many ratepayer advocates accuse these commissions of effectively rubber-stamping utility demands as a result of regulatory capture — at the expense of customers who are unable to choose a different power company. But this same dynamic means that vertically integrated utilities are in the best position to build something as expensive as a nuclear plant.

“Their primary business model is capital expenditure,” explained Tyler Norris, a Duke University doctoral fellow and former special advisor at the Department of Energy. “The way they make money is by investing capital, primarily in generation capacity or transmission upgrades. They have an inherent incentive to spend money; they make more money the more they spend.”

Under the regulatory compact between states and utilities, it is utility commissioners’ job to make sure those expenditures (which ultimately, after all, come from ratepayer money) are “just and reasonable.”

Tim Echols, a member of Georgia’s Public Service Commission, said in an email that he would not approve another nuclear reactor in Georgia in the absence of “some sort of federal financial backstop” to protect against the risk of a repeat of the Vogtle experience.

“I haven’t seen any other [utility commission] raise their hand to build a nuclear reactor,” added Echols, who is also the chair of a committee on nuclear issues at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.

Kozeracki, of the Department of Energy, said that private-sector nuclear industry players have also asked for such a backstop in the form of a federal cost overrun insurance program, which would require Congressional legislation. However, she added that it might be incumbent upon industry figures to explain just how much more capacity to build such a backstop would give them.

“The real piece that’s missing there is a compelling plan from the nuclear industry for what they would deliver with something like a cost overrun insurance program,” Kozeracki said.

There is an ongoing debate among nuclear advocates about whether a different type of reactor, such as the so-called small modular reactors currently in development, is a more viable solution than the AP1000. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued a permit for the Tennessee Valley Authority to build one such reactor. But the excitement around SMRs has somewhat waned since the cancellation of a much-anticipated project in November. Experts told Grist that some, but not all, of the knowledge and lessons gained through the Vogtle experience would carry over to a new project that was not an AP1000.

The search for new nuclear solutions is coinciding with what could be a dramatic juncture in the history of American energy planning. In recent months, utilities across the country have reported anticipating massive increases in demand for electricity, which had remained relatively flat for two decades. A December report from the consulting firm Grid Strategies found that grid planners’ five-year forecasts for the growth of their power loads had nearly doubled over the last year.

The growth in demand is largely attributed to a mix of new data centers, many of which will power artificial intelligence, as well as new industrial sites.

For James Krellenstein, co-founder of the nuclear energy consultancy Alva Energy, this new load growth “dramatically changes the calculus in favor of nuclear.” 

“Facing both the need to decrease carbon emissions while having to increase the amount of power that we need, nuclear is a natural technology for that challenge,” Krellenstein added.

So far, however, utilities have responded instead by seeking to rapidly expand fossil fuel generation — in particular, by building new natural gas plants.

“We’re seeing utilities put forward very large gas expansion plans, and this is eating nuclear’s lunch,” said Duke University’s Norris.

Kozeracki characterized the utilities’ plans as shortsighted. “I recognize that natural gas may feel like the easy button, but I should hope that folks are able to account for the cost and benefits of decarbonizing resiliently and make choices their children will be proud of, which I think would be starting new nuclear units now,” she said.

Norris urged caution in accepting the largest estimates of forecasted electricity demand. “Utilities have every incentive to characterize a worst case scenario here for extreme load growth, and not seriously consider demand response solutions, so that they can justify very large capital expenditures for capacity,” Norris said. “That’s why it’s so important that the clean energy and climate community be very engaged in these state level resource planning processes.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Georgia’s Vogtle plant could herald the beginning — or end — of a new nuclear era on Apr 8, 2024.

This story is excerpted from THE WEIGHT OF NATURE: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains, available April 9, 2024, from Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group.

Imagine you are a clown fish. A juvenile clown fish, specifically, in the year 2100. You live near a coral reef. You are orange and white, which doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you have these little ear stones called otoliths in your inner ear, and when sound waves pass through the water and then through your body, these otoliths move and displace tiny hair cells, which trigger electrochemical signals in your auditory nerve. Nemo, you are hearing.

But you are not hearing well. In this version of century’s end, humankind has managed to pump the climate brakes a smidge, but it has not reversed the trends that were apparent a hundred years earlier. In this 2100, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen from 400 parts per million at the turn of the millennium to 600 parts per million — a middle‑of‑the-road forecast. For you and your otoliths, this increase in carbon dioxide is significant, because your ear stones are made of calcium carbonate, a carbon-based salt, and ocean acidification makes them grow larger. Your ear stones are big and clunky, and the clicks and chirps of resident crustaceans and all the larger reef fish have gone all screwy. Normally, you would avoid these noises, because they suggest predatory danger. Instead, you swim toward them, as a person wearing headphones might walk into an intersection, oblivious to the honking truck with the faulty brakes. Nobody will make a movie about your life, Nemo, because nobody will find you.

It’s not a toy example. In 2011, an international team of researchers led by Hong Young Yan at the Academia Sinica, in Taiwan, simulated these kinds of future acidic conditions in seawater tanks. A previous study had found that ocean acidification could compromise young fishes’ abilities to distinguish between odors of friends and foes, leaving them attracted to smells they’d usually avoid. At the highest levels of acidification, the fish failed to respond to olfactory signals at all. Hong and his colleagues suspected the same phenomenon might apply to fish ears. Rearing dozens of clown fish in tanks of varying carbon dioxide concentrations, the researchers tested their hypothesis by placing waterproof speakers in the water, playing recordings from predator-rich reefs, and assessing whether the fish avoided the source of the sounds. In all but the present-day control conditions, the fish failed to swim away. It was like they couldn’t hear the danger.

In Hong’s study, though, it’s not exactly clear if the whole story is a story of otolith inflation. Other experiments had indeed found that high ocean acidity could spur growth in fish ear stones, but Hong and his colleagues hadn’t actually noticed any in theirs. Besides, marine biologists who later mathematically modeled the effects of oversize otoliths concluded that bigger stones would likely increase the sensitivity of fish ears — which, who knows, “could prove to be beneficial or detrimental, depending on how a fish perceives this increased sensitivity.” The ability to attune to distant sounds could be useful for navigation. On the other hand, maybe ear stones would just pick up more background noise from the sea, and the din of this marine cocktail party would drown out useful vibrations. The researchers didn’t know.

The uncertainty with the otoliths led Hong and his colleagues to conclude that perhaps the carbon dioxide was doing something else — something more sinister in its subtlety. Perhaps, instead, the gas was directly interfering with the fishes’ nervous systems: Perhaps the trouble with their hearing wasn’t exclusively a problem of sensory organs, but rather a manifestation of something more fundamental. Perhaps the fish brains couldn’t process the auditory signals they were receiving from their inner ears.

The following year, a colleague of Hong’s, one Philip Munday at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, appeared to confirm this suspicion. His theory had the look of a hijacking.

A neuron is like a house: insulated, occasionally permeable, maybe a little leaky. Just as one might open a window during a stuffy party to let in a bit of cool air, brain cells take advantage of physical differences across their walls in order to keep the neural conversation flowing. In the case of nervous systems, the differentials don’t come with respect to temperature, though; they’re electrical. Within living bodies float various ions — potassium, sodium, chloride, and the like — and because they’ve gained or lost an electron here or there, they’re all electrically charged. The relative balance of these atoms inside and outside a given neuron induces a voltage difference across the cell’s membrane: Compared to the outside, the inside of most neurons is more negatively charged. But a brain cell’s walls have windows too, and when you open them, ions can flow through, spurring electrical changes.

In practice, a neuron’s windows are proteins spanning their membranes. Like a house’s, they come in a cornucopia of shapes and sizes, and while you can’t fit a couch through a porthole, a window is still a window when it comes to those physical differentials. If it’s hot inside and cold outside, opening one will always cool you down.

Until it doesn’t.

Here is the clown fish neural hijacking proposed by Philip Munday. What he and his colleagues hypothesized was that excess carbon dioxide in seawater leads to an irregular accumulation of bicarbonate molecules inside fish neurons. The problem for neuronal signaling is that this bicarbonate also carries an electrical charge, and too much of it inside the cells ultimately causes a reversal of the normal electrical conditions. At the neural house party, now it’s colder inside than out. When you open the windows — the ion channels — atoms flow in the opposite direction.

Munday’s theory applied to a particular type of ion channel: one responsible for inhibiting neural activity. One of the things all nervous systems do is balance excitation and inhibition. Too much of the former and you get something like a seizure; too much of the latter and you get something like a coma — it’s in the balance we find the richness of experience. But with a reversal of electrical conditions, Munday’s inhibitory channels become excitatory. And then? All bets are off. For a brain, it would be like pressing a bunch of random buttons in a cockpit and hoping the plane stays in the air. In clown fish, if Munday is right, the acidic seawater appears to short-circuit the fishes’ sense of smell and hearing, and they swim toward peril. It is difficult to ignore the question of what the rest of us might be swimming toward.

From THE WEIGHT OF NATURE: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains by Clayton Page Aldern, to be published on April 9, 2024, by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Clayton Page Aldern.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Climate change is rewiring fish brains — and probably ours, too on Apr 8, 2024.

I scream, you scream, we all scream when it comes to recycling ice cream cartons….

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This week’s quote is from American novelist and playwright, Cormac McCarthy. In his novel, The…

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This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A limitless supply of heat exists beneath our feet within the Earth’s crust, but harnessing it at scale has proved challenging. Now, a combination of new techniques, government support, and the pressing need to secure continuous clean power in an era of climate crisis means that geothermal energy is finally having its moment in the U.S.

Until recently, geothermal has only been viable where the Earth’s inner heat simmers near the surface, such as at hot springs or geysers where hot water or steam can be easily drawn to drive turbines and generate electricity.

While this has allowed a limited number of places, like Iceland, to use geothermal as a main source of heating and electricity, it has only been a niche presence in the U.S, providing less than 1 percent of its electricity. But this could change dramatically, offering the promise of endless, 24/7 clean energy that can fill in the gaps of intermittent solar and wind generation in the electricity grid.

“Geothermal has been used for over 100 years, limited to certain geographic locations — but that is now changing,” said Amanda Kolker, the geothermal laboratory program manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, or NREL.

“As we penetrate the grid with renewables that are not available all the time, we need to find a base load, which is currently taken up by gas. There aren’t really many options for zero-emissions base load power, which is why geothermal is entering the picture.”

Geothermal capacity could increase twentyfold by 2050, generating 10 percent of the country’s electricity, according to a recent road map released by the U.S. Department of Energy. President Joe Biden’s administration has also funded new projects aimed at pushing forward the next generation of geothermal that aim to make the energy source available anywhere on America’s landmass, not just easy-to-reach hot springs.

“The U.S. can lead the clean energy future with continued innovation on next-generation technologies, from harnessing the power of the sun to the heat beneath our feet, and cracking the code to deploy them at scale,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, who added that she saw “enormous potential” in geothermal.

Expanding the geothermal footprint to the entire U.S. will take time, as well as plenty of money — the Department of Energy estimates as much as $250 billion will be needed for projects to become widespread across the country, providing a major source of clean power.

But advocates of geothermal say that such growth is within reach, because of a wave of geothermal technologies as well as government support. In February, the Biden administration announced $74 million for up to seven pilot projects to develop enhanced geothermal systems that, the government said, hold the potential for powering 65 million American homes.

Ironically, enhanced geothermal uses similar fracking techniques currently used to extract oil and gas, which must be phased out if the world is to avoid climate disaster. In the geothermal version of fracking, fluid is injected deep underground, causing fractures to open up, with the liquid becoming hot as it circulates. The hot water is then pumped to the surface, where it can generate electricity for the grid.

This, and other new techniques that involve deeper and horizontal drilling, in some cases 8 miles deep, allows geothermal energy to be drawn from hot rocks found anywhere underground, rather than select spots that have hot water near the surface. This vastly expands the potential of the technology.

“Anywhere in the country, if you drill, it gets hotter and hotter with each mile you go deeper,” said Koenraad Beckers, an NREL thermal sciences researcher.

“In the western United States, that temperature increases fast. If you drill just 1 to 2 miles deep, you have temperatures hot enough for electricity. To get those temperatures in eastern states, you might need to drill miles and miles down, but you can use lower temperatures to directly heat or cool campuses, neighborhoods, and even towns.”

Dozens of new companies are looking to push ahead with geothermal plans, buoyed by incentives offered by recent legislation, although only a few have so far managed to complete full projects in the country, such as Eavor, a Canadian firm that successfully drilled a 3-mile hole in New Mexico to prove it could access heat deep in granite rock.

At play for these companies is an inexhaustible energy supply. Just one type of next generation geothermal — called superhot rock energy, where deep drilling reaches temperatures 400 degrees Celsius (752 degrees Fahrenheit) or hotter — is abundant enough to theoretically fulfill the world’s power requirements. In fact, just 1 percent of the world’s superhot rock potential could provide 63 terawatts of clean firm power, which would meet global electricity demand nearly eight times over.

“While this modeling is preliminary, our findings suggest an enormous opportunity to unlock vast amounts of clean energy beneath our feet,” said Terra Rogers, the director for superhot rock energy at Clean Air Task Force, which produced the modellng tool to measure the potential of this approach.

“Energy security backed by always available zero-carbon energy isn’t a far-off dream.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The US aims to ‘crack the code’ on scaling up geothermal energy production on Apr 7, 2024.

This story was originally published by Mother Jones and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Rolling up to a Tesla charging port, Illinois Republican state Senator Dan McConchie grimaced that wheelchair users like him couldn’t use it — or any of the others at the gas station where he filmed his Instagram reel. They’d all been placed on a raised surface that he couldn’t readily reach. McConchie introduced a state bill to improve relevant accessibility standards, including electric car chargers. But it’s a national problem: Electric vehicle charging stations are often inaccessible, despite being designed and built decades after the Americans With Disabilities Act, or ADA, became law. 

By April 2023, the Department of Energy reported, there were more than 140,000 public EV charging ports in the U.S., up from around 80,000 just three years earlier. The number of charging ports accessible to disabled drivers isn’t easy to pin down, an issue in itself; Department of Transportation data estimates that half of disabled adults under 65, some 10 million people, drive themselves around. By 2030, there will be more than 25 million electric vehicles on U.S. roads, according to industry group Edison Electric Insitute. That includes a growing share of more affordable plug-in hybrids, driving even more demand for charging infrastructure. But for drivers with disabilities, inaccessible chargers make it a lot less appealing to switch: In a 2022 U.K. survey, though two-thirds of disabled drivers planned to go electric, most — more than 70 percent — said concerns about inaccessible infrastructure factored in. And in a society that considers EVs key to a more sustainable future, the spread of inaccessible chargers signals that disabled people have been left behind. 

Adam Lubinsky, of New York–based architecture and design firm WXY Studio, has worked with New York state to find ways to make future EV charging locations more accessible. “If we really want to move the needle and get to a place where we’re really driving electric vehicles, we have to put them in the public realm,” Lubinsky said. In a city like New York, that means placing them on sidewalks, so residents of different neighborhoods have reliable access. “Once they’re in the public realm, we need to make sure they’re as universally accessibly designed as possible.”

Public charging stations provided by private entities, like the more than 2,000 operated by Tesla, are supposed to be accessible, according to the U.S. Access Board, an independent federal agency focused on making infrastructure and services more accessible for disabled people. The agency is developing enforceable accessibility rules for charging stations, but there’s no estimate for when those standards will come into force, says Juliet Shoultz, an Access Board transit engineer and accessibility specialist who helped develop its accessible design recommendations for EV charging stations. Meanwhile, nothing stops firms like Tesla, real estate developers, or local governments from reaching out to the board for technical assistance.  

The devices themselves, not just their locations, can be made more accessible, says Dak Kopec, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas architecture professor who focuses in part on how different health conditions shape our ability to use the built environment. Kopec has concerns about how aging people, or those with disabilities that cause muscle weakness, such as multiple sclerosis, would be able to operate the charging cord — especially while balancing something like a walker.

“These are all things that need to be considered as we start looking at the design of these stations,” Kopec said.

Shoultz also looked to existing, enforceable requirements — not specific to EV chargers — under the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Rehabilitation Act, and the 1968 Architectural Barriers Act. Under those rules, chargers have to be at a height that allows people using mobility devices to reach the power cable; they also need a clear and wide path that lets people with walkers, for instance, get to them. Chargers that rely on displays need speech output for people with low vision, and other communication features for people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Under the ADA, for example, the highest operable part of a charging station shouldn’t be more than 4 feet off the ground. As with many inaccessibility issues, Shoultz says that enforcement “would probably be by somebody filing some sort of complaint.” 

Coming up with more effective ways for disabled people to access EV chargers isn’t always straightforward. Many are on raised platforms in parking lots. Car-to-car differences mean accessible parking spots can’t necessarily become EV stations. Building more municipal chargers on sidewalks near pedestrian ramps could let wheelchair users plug in more easily. These chargers would also help clear sidewalks blocked by the long, hefty cords of household chargers used by some drivers without garages.

Charging stations aren’t the only accessibility issue for electric vehicles: As Business Insider reported last year, there isn’t a fully wheelchair-accessible EV, with a large door opening and entry-exit ramp, on the American market. (The more accessible Volkswagen ID Buzz won’t launch in the U.S. until almost 2025.)

That’s no reason to delay the push for accessible EV charging, Kopec says: “Retrofitting costs more than simply doing it the right way to begin with.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Disabled drivers can’t use many electric car chargers. It doesn’t have to be this way. on Apr 6, 2024.