Arctic Sea Ice Resumes Its Slide

After a brief rebound in 2020, the oldest ice floating in the Arctic Sea appears to have resumed its melt toward oblivion, according to data released this week by the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Scientists monitor the oldest ice because it tends to be more resilient, NSIDC says, better at reflecting sunlight, better at resisting melt.

“Very little of the oldest (4+ years old) ice remains in the Arctic, with small patches north of Greenland and an area north of the Beaufort Sea,” the NSIDC reported after recording the year’s annual low for Arctic ice on Sept. 19.

The oldest sea ice (in red on the maps above) covers 36,000 square miles, the second lowest extent in the satellite record, which has been maintained since 1985. The lowest was 21,000 square miles in 2019.

In the 1980s old ice covered more than 965,000 square miles of the Arctic Ocean.

In January of 2018, the Harvard University scientist James Anderson urged the world to mount a World-War II-style mobilization to combat climate change before all of the permanent floating ice disappears from the Arctic Sea.

If we didn’t, he said, the loss of that ice could trigger irreversible climate feedbacks, such as the release of methane trapped in permafrost and trapped under the sea, and such as the accelerated collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, with a consequent rise in global sea levels.

It would be a loss, he said, from which we will be unable to recover.

In 2018, Anderson estimated that at the rate permanent floating ice had been melting, it would be gone from the Arctic after 2022. The ice continued to decline in 2019 but rebounded briefly in 2020.

Anderson’s message in 2018 was subverted as his comments were exploited first by climate activists and then by climate-change doubters.

I attended Anderson’s lecture at the University of Chicago in 2018 and wrote an article conveying his warning. The article has bounced between climate partisans for more than five years.

The climate activists struck first, when a now-defunct site called GritPostexaggerated Anderson’s remarks to say that “climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.” Anderson never mentioned the extinction of humanity. Gritpost added that detail. He said that if all the floating ice disappeared from the Arctic—which at the time he predicted could happen in five years—we would be unable to recover from climate change.

Anderson has since elaborated that those with sufficient resources will probably always be able to stave off extinction.

In 2019, Greta Thunberg featured GritPost’s misleading version in a tweet, so the faux prediction of extinction spread fast and wide among climate activists.

When Thunberg later deleted the tweet, the climate doubters pounced, including several prominent bloviators, some of whom misled their audiences about the nature of Anderson’s message. Most attacked Thunberg. Some attacked Anderson for having predicted that humanity would be wiped out by 2023, which of course he never predicted.

This year, Anderson expressed concern that his quote from 2018 doesn’t differentiate between permanent floating ice and land-based ice. “The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero,” Anderson had said in 2018. “Can we lose 75-80 percent of permanent ice and recover? The answer is no.”

Most readers seem to have understood that he was talking about permanent floating sea ice. For the first five years the story was in print, I didn’t encounter anyone who failed to understand that reference. The story itself makes a distinction between the floating ice in that quote and the land-based Greenland ice sheet. But in Anderson’s shorthand description of “permanent sea ice” as just “permanent ice,” those who do not accept mainstream climate science saw an opportunity to discredit both the science and climate activists, because land-based ice is further from disappearing.

In any event, the extent of permanent Arctic sea ice is not zero in 2023, but it’s heading toward zero again.

There have been some excellent fact checkers adjudicating the controversy over Anderson’s remarks, including Newsweek and Tjekdet. I don’t want to repeat their work. I just want to emphasize that five years ago, an eminent scientist—the one largely credited with determining the cause of the hole in the ozone layer—urged us to mobilize to combat climate change, and we still haven’t.

This despite a summer in which both Canada and Hawaii endured unprecedented fires, with almost 100 Hawaiians killed and much of North America inhaling Canadian smoke. Another 110 million North Americans, from California to Florida, simmered under heat waves, while “1,000-year” floods inundated Vermont, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, New York, Florida. Maybe the permanent floating ice isn’t yet vanished from the Arctic Sea, but there’s no shortage of disasters that ought to prompt mobilization, disasters of a scale we didn’t see even five years ago. Take, for a poignant example, a flood that drowned thousands in Libya along a river that normally, in the summer, runs dry.

It’s Dawning On Humans That Human Health Connects To Everything

Humans tend to view their health-care system in isolation, which can make it harder to optimize human health as the climate changes, according to a panel of “One Health” experts convened by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

As the Centers for Disease Control puts it, “One Health is a collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary approach—working at the local, regional, national, and global levels—with the goal of achieving optimal health outcomes recognizing the interconnection between people, animals, plants, and their shared environment.”

Even within this movement, people tend to focus on people.

Dr. Meghana Gadgil is concerned about both the impact of the health system on the climate—because, she said, the U.S. health system produces enough pollution to cause 400,000 deaths, “similar to the burden from preventable medical errors”—and she’s concerned about the impact of climate change on human health.

“Climate-sensitive diseases are some of the best illustrations of the intertwined relationships between environment, human health and health systems that we see,” she said in a June 13 webinar hosted by the National Academies’ New Voices program.

“For now, for instance, there’s a sharp rise in malaria, dengue, and many food-borne and water-borne diseases due to the expanding geographic range of both pathogens and vectors. We have changes in seasonality, rising temperature and precipitation, deforestation and air pollution, all of which contribute to endemic infectious diseases. And novel disease outbreaks will likely worsen as well.”

For patients to get treatment for these disorders, they and their caregivers need a functioning transportation system, a system also vulnerable to climate impacts. For hospitals to provide care, they need power, another system vulnerable to climate impacts. During one outbreak of California wildfires, Gadgil said, 250 hospitals suffered power outages. Many other sectors that integrate with health care are climate vulnerable.

“So I want to invite everyone here to think differently about what constitutes a health system,” said Gadgil, who serves as an Assistant Professor at the University of California San Francisco in the Division of Hospital Medicine at San Francisco General Hospital and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Public Health in the Division of Health Policy and Management.

“So when we think about climate vulnerability, we should also be thinking about health systems as food systems, housing, transportation, building codes, access to utilities, indoor air-quality standards, internet and phone access.”

Some health organizations are already thinking this way, she added. For example, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid have an “Accountable Health Communities Model,” which views health in relation to social needs like housing, food insecurity and access to utilities.

Professor Hassam Mahmoud of Colorado State University studies the resilience of communities as systems of systems. His team models the impacts of events on multiple systems at once: health care, education, transportation, power, etc.

“So these models, in my personal opinion, are key to understanding how the entire system behaves, and how you can actually recover from extreme events and provide the best service to the public.”

But it was Dr. Kinari Webb, founder of the non-profit organization Health in Harmony, who took the conversation beyond the human realm. About 30 years ago, Webb had traveled to Borneo to study orangutans in the rainforest.

“In that time it was like basically a one-year silent retreat, and in that time of getting to know the oneness of all, it was very often interrupted by this terrible sound of chainsaws cutting down 22-story-tall trees,” she said.

“I was horrified, but I got slowly to know many of these loggers. And I was even more horrified, because what I discovered was that they loved the forest, and they wanted the forest to be there for their future, and they understood how important it was. But they were often logging to pay for health care.”

Many of the communities lacked local access to health care. People needed money to travel for essential services. For example, some women were desperate to get birth control, Webb said, because of high maternal mortality rates.

Facing such outcomes, they chose logging, even though they knew, she said, that deforestation could increase disease, reduce access to forest medicines and reduce the water supply for them and their fields.

“In one region where we work, 90% of households admitted logging to pay for health care, even when they didn’t want to,” Webb said. So listening to what the people need can help to save the forest.

“The most efficient, the most effective and the fastest way to combat climate change is to address forest loss, and the experts in how to do that are the rainforest communities.”

These Five Countries Are Laundering Russian Oil And Selling It To The West

Five countries have expanded imports of Russian oil in the wake of the Ukraine invasion and refined it into products they are selling to countries that have sanctioned Russian oil, according to a report released today by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).

Their “laundering” operation is undermining the price cap on Russian oil and fueling the invasion, the analysts say.

“This is currently a legal way of exporting oil products to countries that are imposing sanctions on Russia as the product origin has been changed,” according to the report. “This process provides funds to Putinʼs war chest.”

CREA identifies China, India, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Singapore as “laundromat countries” that increased imports of Russian oil after the Ukraine invasion. They also increased exports of refined products to the “price-cap countries” that sanctioned Russian oil, including the European Union, Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States.

“The EU, G7 and Australia … continue to import Russian fossil fuels as refined oil products from third countries and allow transportation on their vessels and insurance,” said Isaac Levi, Energy Analyst and co-author of the report.

The EU has been the largest importer of these refined products, according to CREA, followed by Australia. And most of the laundered products are traveling on European ships.

In the year following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the five laundering countries increased seaborne imports of Russian crude oil by 140% over the previous year, according to CREA. They are absorbing 70% of Russiaʼs crude oil exports.

Meanwhile, they increased exports of oil products by 26% to price cap-coalition countries. Their exports to non price-cap countries rose only 2%, showing that the price cap-coalition countries drove the increase in oil-product exports from countries importing Russian crude.

“Increasing the imports of oil products from the main importers of Russian crude oil undermines the oil sanctions against Russia,” said Lauri Myllyvirta, lead analyst and co-author of the report. “On the other hand, clamping down on this trade is an opportunity to exert badly needed additional leverage and cut off financing for Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.”

The Russian oil finds its way into the price-cap countries as diesel, jet fuel and gasoil.

The EU spent $19.3 billion on products from the countries sourcing the most Russian crude oil in the 12 months after the invasion of Ukraine, according to CREA, followed by:

  • Australia, $8.74 billion
  • The United States, $7.21 billion
  • The United Kingdom, $5.46 billion
  • Japan, $5.24 billion

CREA is an independent research institute registered in Finland, with staff across Europe and Asia. They have published past insights on Germany’s dependence on Russian gas and Europe’s surprising drop in carbon emissions as it learned to live with reduced Russian supply.

Five Delusions That Are Dooming Homo Sapiens

COPENHAGEN, Dec. 12, 2009—Protestors at COP15 make a bonfire of their protest signs. Photo by Jeff McMahon

COPENHAGEN, Dec. 12, 2009—Protestors at COP15 make a bonfire of their protest signs. Photo by Jeff McMahon

1. The Sky Is Vast

The dumbest moment at the Copenhagen Climate Conference came late on the night of Dec. 12, 2009, after 100,000 protestors had marched three miles from downtown Copenhagen to the Bella Center, site of COP 15, to demand climate action from 192 world leaders gathered there. That wasn’t the dumb part. The dumb part came next. Having demanded an end to greenhouse gas emissions, many of the remaining protestors stacked their signs in a pile and lit them on fire, filling the sky with smoke.

The volume of smoke from that thoughtless bonfire may have been comparatively small, but the assumption behind it is the same assumption made by the worst polluters those protestors had spent the day castigating. They assume the sky can take it.

A few decades ago, when rivers were catching fire and people started getting cancer in their own backyards, we caught on to the idiocy of dumping pollution into water and onto land. Smog gave us a hint the air was no exception, but we’re still dumping carbon pollution full tilt into the atmosphere.

I believe it was Elisabeth Moyer, a geoscientist from the University of Chicago, who impressed upon me how delicate is our atmosphere. Thanks to its diffusion of sunlight, the sky looks vast to us from our humble perspective on the surface of the earth, but relative to the diameter of our planet, it’s razor thin, like the skin on a grape—if the skin on a grape were only made of gas. Life depends on the stability of that wisp of vapor clinging to our hurtling planet.

Among the vital services the atmosphere offers us, it moderates temperature. The moon circles about the same distance from the sun but wears a thinner atmosphere, and daytime temperatures can reach 250º F on the moon while nighttime temperatures can drop to -208º. We are spared those extremes because of the chemistry of our atmosphere. Do we want to dump trash into that veil of shared breath?

2. Nature Is Other

The way we’re headed, the caption beside our diorama in some imagined interstellar archeology museum might say, “Humans knew enough to save themselves but meticulously documented their demise instead.”

And it will say, “They thought they were separate from nature.”

There has been a grave misinterpretation of a line in a book that has had an outsize influence on industrialized Western culture:

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

The results of that dominion? Extinction has reached unprecedented rates for this epoch, with a million species threatened. Roughly 40 percent of creeping things are in decline. Humans have eliminated 83 percent of wild mammals on earth and half of plants. Only 4 percent of the world’s mammals are wild. The remaining 96 percent are headed for slaughter or euthanasia.

Much of this horror derives from our use of animals as food, a practice that consumes 80 percent of agricultural land and denudes forests in its hunger for more. It subjects beings with emotional capacities not much different from our own to abject confinement, sexual assault, forced pregnancy, separation from loved ones, and terrifying, untimely death.

“We must forcefully reject the notion that our being created in God’s image and given dominion over the earth justifies absolute domination over other creatures,” writes Pope Francis in his green encylical, Laudato Si’. He reminds us that man was also directed to “keep” the garden, which “means caring, protecting, overseeing and preserving. This implies a relationship of mutual responsibility between human beings and nature.”

Some think responsibility too weak a word. Some go several pages further in the dictionary, to reverence: animal activists, vegan activists, spiritual leaders, ethical philosophers, movements of experts. The One Health movement, for example, is made up of doctors, veterinarians, scientists who see human health, animal health, plant health, and planetary health as, you guessed it, One Health, inextricably interdependent. But those with reverence are too few.

3. Everything Will Be Fine

Once when a new baby was announced into a group email chain among my friends, I replied-all with a message to the new earthling that said, “Welcome to earth. Sorry it’s a bit of a mess.” The friend who watches Fox News replied by saying, essentially, that everything will be just fine.

Scientists have a name for that common response—the idea that everything will be largely as it has been in the past: normalcy bias. A behavioral scientist named Jason Hreha describes it well:

Normalcy bias is a psychological phenomenon in which people have a tendency to underestimate the likelihood or impact of a disaster or other crisis. This bias can lead people to make inadequate or inappropriate preparations for a crisis, or to underestimate the severity of the situation. For example, if a hurricane is approaching, people with a normalcy bias may assume that the storm will not be as bad as predicted and may not take appropriate action to evacuate or protect their property. Normalcy bias can be dangerous, as it can cause people to underestimate the risks of a situation and to be unprepared for the consequences.”

But it’s not just my Fox News-fed friend who suffers from normalcy bias. In a way, just about all of us are relying on the assumption that everything will be fine when we continue to drive cars, eat meat, fly in airplanes, run air conditioners, and/or make more new humans—the very actions that ensure that everything is not going to be fine.

4. Stuff Can Fill The Void

You may have seen the famous animation “The Story of Stuff” that illustrates the problem with consumption. A deeper insight comes from a 20th Century Indian swami named Chidananda Saraswati. I can only offer a nibble here of his luminous essay “Your True Purpose in Life.” Chidananda writes:

The individual exercises his faculties in order to obtain things which are calculated to promote the experience of happiness. Unfortunately he does not get happiness. Why? For a very simple reason. He is searching for something where it is not. He is looking for happiness amidst objects of this universe which are imperfect, changeful and impermanent. Since imperfection and changeability are the very nature of external objects, they cause in the mind mixed experiences to ensue from their contact. This is the reason why man’s efforts invariably end in disillusionment, disappointment and total dissatisfaction. Whenever one object fails to satisfy, man will try another and then another and yet another.”

This addiction, this cycle of consumption, this hunger for stuff to fill the void drives an economy that plunders nature for resources and pours the resulting waste into the fragile sky. What’s a surer path to happiness? Read the Chidananda, or read on….

5. More Better Stuff Will Fix Everything

The easiest path for world leaders—some economists might say the only path—is to nudge the cycle of consumption in a cleaner direction. So the solution to the climate crisis is often portrayed as more better stuff: solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles, heat pumps, fusion reactors and plant-based burgers. We need all of those things, of course. But we also know, if we’re honest, that the most those things can accomplish is to buy us time.

Even if more better stuff succeeds in mitigating the climate crisis, the many converging environmental crises—toxicity, deforestation, biodiversity collapse, micro-plastic pollution—demand that we evolve beyond extraction-consumption-pollution. They demand that we puncture our delusional separation from nature.

So far, political leaders haven’t been willing or able to approach the deeper, darker specter of life on earth: an economic system that depends on relentless human population growth, which feeds ravenously on virgin resource exploitation and industrialized animal agriculture, which themselves feed on the obliteration of wild nature.

Some people and organizations are willing to approach that specter. I’m going to highlight just one. In 39 years of environmental reporting, I’ve been most impressed by the insight and commitment of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village tradition of Engaged Buddhism. Pope Francis published his commendable green encyclical in 2015, but he didn’t take his church vegan, as Thich Nhat Hanh did in 2007 upon learning of dairy’s culpability in climate change. The Plum Village monastics know what drives the environmental crises, they know how to fix them, they know the inadequacy of the establishment approach, and they speak out.

“Why is it so hard to change the direction of our civilization?” asks Sister True Dedication, a former BBC journalist turned Buddhist nun and a leader of Plum Village’s youth and environmental initiatives. “I’d like to suggest that what’s missing at this point is not more facts and information or even technology. We have more than enough. What’s missing is insight.”

Insight, importantly, into ourselves. Insight not just into the peddlers of stuff but into the consumers of stuff. Insight not just into the Fox News-fed denialists but into the daily denialism of continued participation in the status quo. Insight not just into big polluters, but into those of us huddled around the protest bonfire.

“It is our way of being that has got us into our current crises,” Sister True D says, “and it is our way of being that can get us out.”

Plum Village sent monks to Glasgow in 2021 for COP 26, both to care for the individuals working at that conference and to offer them insight. In a side event at the COP, one of those monks, Brother Phap Linh, told the assembled parties where our efforts need to go:

“What I think we’re seeing here is that it’s natural to approach the problem as a problem of measurement, information, and solutions, and sometimes techno-solutionism. Of course. We need all of those things. It’s not to dismiss any of that. We really know that we have to rely on the science. That’s the base. But for us it’s important to combine all of that information, that sort of ‘head’ world, with heart, with love. And with a different relationship to who we are, who we believe we are, what we think our life is, and what this world is. Is it mere stuff? Is it matter just to be extracted and used, you know?

“For us, it’s kind of like even if we’ve solved—so-called ‘solved’—the climate crisis, even if we keep heating to 1.5 degrees, even if we stop emitting greenhouse gases, for us that’s not enough, actually. I don’t want to add another problem to everybody’s plate, but actually I think this is part of the solution, which is looking at our relationship with Mother Earth, our relationship to ourselves, and bringing in a spiritual dimension, a dimension of reverence, of love, of looking at how we look at each other.

“So not just to use our heads, but to allow ourselves to be motivated, guided, fueled, by love. Because if we’re only fueled by the profit motive—

“You know, we say, ‘Trust the market! We’ll be able to flip this around with the race to zero. We’ll make the companies compete against each other to get to carbon zero. We’ll use competition to get to where we need to go.’ And that’s fine as far as it goes. But even if we achieve success, it’s a kind of success that may be toxic—actually toxic to us as human beings—if we’re always competing and struggling. So what we want to say is there are other energies that can drive us: compassion, love, generosity, inclusiveness, spirit. And those things will never be toxic. They can grow infinitely. Love can always grow.”

If this sounds idealistic, consider that they also have a method. And it only takes meeting one of them to know that it works.

Some Climate Initiatives May Harm Biodiversity, Climate Czar Says

Solutions to the world’s converging environmental crises may not always align, the Biden Administration’s climate czar said last week.

“There are a lot of hard conversations around the clean energy transition that we haven’t figured out yet, that there’s certainly not a global consensus on, let alone an American consensus on,” White House National Climate Advisor Ali Zaidi said in a fireside chat March 13 at Stanford University.

“The one example of that is conflicts with species, not with humans but with biodiversity. If anything the biodiversity crisis is blinking brighter, faster than aspects of the climate crisis. I don’t want to pit one crisis against the other, but we are seeing precipitous decline of species diversity, and when we have conversations about things like transmission—and we have live projects now that are facing this issue—it’s a real big challenge.”

Studies have found that transmission projects can adversely impact wildlife, both during the construction and the operation phases, through habitat loss or fragmentation, electrocution, fire risk and disruption of animal behavior. The government may support projects that harm biodiversity now, Zaidi said, to reduce harm in the future.

“We value biodiversity, but at the same time if we blow through 1.5º, or 2º, 2.5º, 3º then we have fundamentally undermined in an irreversible manner biodiversity at a scale that we couldn’t probably have even imagined a few decades ago.”

About 1,800 gigawatts of power were waiting at the end of 2022 to connect to the grid, according to UtilityDive, which reported this week that the Federal Electricity Regulatory Commission is working feverishly to reform transmission and interconnection bottlenecks.

Zaidi’s comments followed a recollection by former Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Zaidi’s interlocutor at the Stanford event. Chu recounted that his efforts to speed up approvals for transmission lines, seen as critical for connecting and delivering clean energy across the U.S., were stymied by opposition within the administration.

“When I was secretary it was 11 years between the siting of a transmission line and (construction). I said can we get this from 11 years to 3 or 4 years?”

“The answer is sadly still no,” Zaidi interrupted. “We’re working on it.”

Chu continued, recounting a meeting with former Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, who now serves as the U.S. ambassador to Mexico:

“Ken Salazar says if we’re going to do this, somebody’s got to be in charge. And so I say, Okay, I’ll do it, I’ll be in charge. So he says great, and he calls me up half an hour after the meeting, and he says ‘I can’t support this.’ Why not? ‘Because people in my department don’t want it to happen.’ Who’s against it? ‘Fish & Wildlife, Game, they don’t want transmission lines where they hunt and fish.’

“And it was dead.”

Salazar has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Chu, who led DOE from 2009-13, appeared less concerned about the conflict between environmental solutions than the need to overcome obstructions from entrenched interests.

“The groundswell of actually transforming America, getting jobs, bringing prosperity, very very important to help overcome the incumbents,” he said. “It’s much easier to stop things than to start things.”

The two Stanford professors—Chu teaches physics and molecular physiology, Zaidi is a Precourt energy scholar and adjunct—agreed about the groundswell.

“If you do not have the unwavering prioritization of workers and communities, making sure all Americans in every zip code get lifted up in this transition, that will be the source of drag,” Zaidi said, adding he was attracted to his role in the administration by Biden’s optimism.

“This is an opportunity not just to put solar panels out, to make steel in America, perhaps even more importantly, to put steel in the spine of the American middle class, which has been systematically disinvested over the last couple decades.”

Five Enabling Technologies A Fusion Industry Will Need

Fusion energy needs more than a sustained fusion reaction before it can help the world produce sufficient carbon-neutral energy. The U.S. Department of Energy has identified a research and development agenda for a suite of technologies and processes to enable fusion.

Two DOE officials named five of those pressing technologies in a webinar Thursday hosted by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM). More are covered in a 2021 NASEM report that urges rapid development of fusion-enabling tech:

“Although this is often put off for the future, the goal of economical fusion energy within the next several decades as a U.S. strategic interest drives the need to rapidly increase the research and development of enabling materials, components, and fusion nuclear technologies.”

The five highlighted Thursday include:

1 Fusion-Proof Materials

The plasma in which the fusion reaction occurs can be hotter than the sun. A powerful magnetic field or inertia can confine the plasma, buffering it from reactor walls and components, but fusion reactors nonetheless will require materials that can handle extreme heat and bombardment by neutrons set loose when hydrogen isotopes transform into helium.

To test potential materials, scientists need to produce conditions similar to a fusion reaction.

“There is a very dire need for a fusion-prototypic neutron source to be able to gather the materials data, which can take many years of exposure,” said Scott Hsu, DOE’s lead fusion coordinator. While that neutron source is in development, he added, machine learning and materials testing can help narrow the number of candidate materials.

There is also the potential to avoid materials entirely by using “truly transformative first wall and blanket designs, where you may not even have any solid material facing the plasma, and that almost sidesteps the issue of materials,” Hsu said. “And we do need to keep those ideas on the table.”

2 A Tritium Breeder

The most common fusion-reactor designs use two isotopes of hydrogen—deuterium (2H) and Tritium (3H)—as fuel.

“If we’re going to use a deuterium-tritium fuel cycle, we’re going to have to extract the heat and breed tritium,” said Richard Hawryluk, senior technical advisor at the DOE Office of Science and chair of the 2021 NASEM report.

“A particular challenge is the need to safely and efficiently close the fuel cycle,” that report states, “which for deuterium-tritium fusion designs involves the development of blankets to breed and extract tritium, as well as the fueling, exhausting, confining, extracting, and separating tritium in significant quantities.”

3 An Exhaust System

Some of the unfathomable heat produced in a fusion reaction will be used to produce power, but first it has to be managed. The reactor also has to capture exhaust, including the helium, from the plasma.

“A full research program will require test facilities producing environments increasingly similar to a fusion power plant to assess reactor-relevant power exhaust handling in the fusion neutron environment,” the NASEM report states.

4 More Efficient Lasers

DOE’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) celebrated a long-sought accomplishment in December when it sparked a fusion reaction that released more energy (3.15 megajoules) than the beams from the laser that ignited it (2.05 megajoules). But it took 300 megajoules to power the laser.

Eventually, such lasers will be powered, after their startup, by electricity from the fusion reactor. But more efficient lasers mean more efficient reactors, leaving more power for the user or the grid.

5 Repetition

It’s not enough for the laser to be efficient. It also has to operate less like a musket and more like a machine gun.

“The wonderful result at NIF,” Hawryluk said, “we got to that point by doing a few shots per year. You have to be able to get to the point where you’re doing a few shots per second, or a shot per second, so it’s the repetition rate, as well, that we have to master.”

That increases the repetition rate for every step in the process, starting with the fuel capsule. According to the journal Science, “One million capsules a day would need to be made, filled, positioned, blasted, and cleared away—a huge engineering challenge.”

Fusion Is About To Become A Must-Have Investment, DOE Official Says

Investment in fusion energy is about to go mainstream, according to the lead fusion coordinator for the U.S. Department of Energy.

“As the technology continues to mature, there will be a point where private investors feel that they must be invested in fusion, and I feel like we’re starting to reach that inflection point,” Scott Hsu said Thursday in a webinar hosted by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.

Hsu advises DOE leadership on fusion-energy issues, and he coordinates the efforts of all Energy Department offices to promote fusion-energy research, development, and demonstration in partnership with the private sector.

“Whereas earlier on it was regarded as a very high risk kind of activity, at some point later on it will be that everyone’s invested in it. And so, the question is where are we right now, and I do think we’re on an overall growth trend given the macro picture.”

Governments have supported research into fusion for decades, but in 2021 private investment surged past public funding. That year, private investors poured $4.44 billion into a pursuit that had only attracted $1.5. billion over the previous five years, according to a recent assessment by McKinsey & Co.

The more significant development that year, Hsu said, is that both the 3-year and 5-year moving averages for private investment passed the level of public investment.

“Now some of that I think is due to just very specific milestones being reached by certain companies, but I would say there’s a macro trend as well going on.”

That 2021 surge may be a precursor for investments to come if mainstream investors decide to jump into fusion. They are likely to be encouraged by the December breakthrough at DOE’s National Ignition Facility, where for the first time a fusion reaction released more energy (3.15 megajoules) than the laser that ignited it (2.05 megajoules).

All this private investment doesn’t mean, Hsu said, that public investment is no longer needed.

“I want to be clear. There are significant scientific and technical challenges still remaining,” he said. “Robust publicly-funded programs are still very much needed.”

Governments still have to support research into improved power sources for fusion reactors, he said, for materials or processes that can withstand the extreme conditions of fusion plasma, and for a self-sufficient fuel cycle to produce tritium for the reactors.

The most studied fusion reaction merges two isotopes of hydrogen—deuterium and tritium—in a hot plasma where they transform into helium, releasing an extra neutron and a blast of energy.

“In a nuclear fusion reactor, the hot, charged gas known as plasma reaches out-of-this-world temperatures at 150 million degrees Celsius, or 10 times hotter than the center of the sun,” according to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Fusion promises to produce vast amounts of energy from the most abundant element in the universe, with no carbon emissions from the fusion reaction itself.

The recent surge in investment came from investors around the globe, but according to Hsu, about 80 percent of it went to U.S. companies.

Most of those companies are in venture capital stages of development, so main-street investors may have to wait for a crack at them unless they’re willing to settle for investments in the larger companies that have already staked a claim, including such usual suspects as Chevron, Amazon and Alphabet. In a contribution to Forbes, Q.Ai recommends several companies that hold a piece of fusion’s prospects. Josh Enomoto offers a similar take via Yahoo.

In its report, McKinsey notes that 25 companies are pursuing fusion energy, compared to only one at the beginning of this century. It analyzes investments into the following leading companies: TAE Technologies, General Fusion, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, Helion Energy, Zap Energy, Tokamak Energy and First Light Fusion.

Thanks To Climate Change, February Is Now The Cruelest Month

Those unusual frozen Februaries in Texas may not be so unusual anymore.

Early winter has been warming across North America, but late winter is another story. Scientists have documented a cooling trend over more than 40 Februaries, marked by dangerous and increasingly common intrusions of Arctic air deep into the United States.

“December has certainly been warming if you look at the U.S.,” Judah Cohen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says in a recent video. But “February, going back to 1979—so quite a few years now—we’re actually seeing in the center of the U.S. a very distinctive cooling trend.”

Cohen published a paper in the wake of the 2021 Texas Freeze—an event that also froze everything north of Texas—in which he links changes in Arctic snow cover and sea ice to these February intrusions of cold air.

“We tend to get more severe winter weather when the polar vortex is weak and more milder rainy weather when the polar vortex is strong, and we’ve seen a decrease in the strong state of the polar vortex and an increase and the weak state of the polar vortex,” Cohen said in an interview with Peter Sinclair, a videographer for Yale Climate Connections who posts pithy snippets of interviews on his excellent Youtube channel, greenmanbucket.

Sinclair said he first learned of the February trend from Martha Shulski, the state climatologist for Nebraska.

“One thing that we have seen is that we’re warming during the early winter and then really cooling down in the last 30 years during February,” Shulski tells him. “We have a tendency to be getting more Arctic air, more polar air outbreaks for this part of the country during February, during late winter.

“There’s a lot of research going on in this area, but what it seems to be linked to is those strong changes that we’re seeing in the Arctic—loss of sea ice for certain regions of the Arctic—that’s resulting in the wavy jet stream pattern and more of these polar air outbreaks.”

The National Weather Service’s outlook for February does not forecast an icy intrusion this February, but that’s not unusual.

Released Jan. 19, the outlook forecasts above-normal temperatures for the Southeastern United States and below-normal temperatures from the Pacific Northwest to the Northern Plains. But “Equal chances of above, near, and below normal temperatures are indicated across the southwestern CONUS (Continental United States), Central Plains, much of the Great Lakes, parts of the Northeast, and much of Mainland Alaska due to weak or conflicting dynamical and statistical guidance.”

Cohen and his had team set out to investigate why climate models did not anticipate the observed episodes of Arctic air intruding on central North America.

Some scientists have pushed back on Cohen’s paper, saying the February pattern could be random, but Cohen said he doubts that a 43-year trend is random. Other scientists disagree that there’s a trend.

“Observations and models strongly suggest that Arctic change is reducing, not increasing, the risk of winter cold extremes over the United States,” two Canadian and one UK scientist wrote in a letter to Science. “The mechanism proposed by Cohen et al. may be relevant for year-to-year variability, but the evidence does not support a long-term increase in severe winter weather.”

Cohen agrees that climate change is indeed reducing cold extremes overall, but notes that the central U.S. is experiencing an increase in “stretched polar vortices” like the 2021 event that froze Texas.

“If the number of stretched polar vortex days is increasing, it follows that the overall warming trend in the colder months across the United States will be dampened.”

Why Water-Cooled SMRs Will Win The New Nuclear Race

If nuclear power has a future, it will likely be small, modular and water cooled, according to an expert with global credentials in nuclear research.

“There are plenty of technologies now—50 different models around the world. Once one of them gets into a financially viable equation, that will capture the entire market,” said Alfredo Caro, a research professor at The George Washington University, “and I think that this will happen with water-cooled small reactors.”

The first small modular reactor design certified by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a design by NuScale certified this month, is water-cooled.

The economic advantages of small modular reactors (SMRs) are often cited: factory produced and shipped to installation sites, they may avoid the regulatory labyrinths, cost overruns and construction delays that plague traditional reactor projects.

The 50 designs and concepts under development include models cooled by sodium, lead, gas or molten salt, but Caro believes water-cooled SMRs will have an additional advantage: the lessons of history.

“Why? Because there are something like 20,000 reactor years of operational experience with water-cooled reactors and the fuel for those reactors,” he said Wednesday in a lecture hosted by the Security and Sustainability Forum.

“It would be very difficult to come out with something sodium-cooled, lead-cooled, fuel like a spherical, economically competitive against the traditional technology, so I think eventually we will see all the designs that are available that are water cooled, they have a niche,” he said.

“I believe personally that that will happen. There will be plenty of small reactors, water cooled. So the same technology that dominates so well today, with only three accidents in the entire 60 years of history.”

The three accidents Caro refers to are the three major accidents that have crippled the growth of the nuclear industry: Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986, and Fukushima in 2011.

The Union of Concerned Scientists counts seven “serious” accidents, adding to those above: a partial meltdown in Michigan in 1966, an explosion in Idaho in 1961, a partial meltdown in Los Angeles in 1959, and a fire in Cumbria, United Kingdom in 1957.

Even so, nuclear ranks close to the mortality rate for solar and wind energy, far below coal oil and gas, in deaths per terawatt hour of electricity produced.

“Nuclear by far is the safest way to produce electricity,” Caro said, though his assessment did not include solar and wind. “However, the perception of risk is subjective.”

A greater obstacle is cost, he said: “On average it is more expensive than any other source.”

Rate payers in the UK will pay three times the average rate of electricity for 35 years to pay off the construction cost for Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, which is an estimated 11 years behind schedule.

“Clearly it is very difficult to justify the investment,” Caro said.

The most recent reactor to go online, Olkiluoto 3 in Finland, took 17 years to construct. “There is no way you can have an economic equation that closes favorably for the investor if the construction time is 17 years.”

These are the challenges SMRs are designed to address.

“History tells us that in the 60s and 70s when the current nuclear technology was developed, all the options from Generation IV were all tested, and the water-cooled reactor came as the winner because it was the cheapest. Once you have one technology that wins the economic competition, nothing can stop it. Today I think all commercial reactors are water cooled. The same I think will happen with the small modular reactor.”

Caro has directed the Atomic Center and Balseiro Institute in Argentina, and he worked for many other programs including the European Fusion Program at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, the Fusion Program at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Science of Nuclear Materials and Fuels team at Los Alamos National Laboratory. He also served as a program director for the National Science Foundation.

Guess Who’s Loving Climate Change: Mosquitos And The Pathogens They Carry

The number and range of mosquitoes has boomed across North America in recent years, and with it, the number and range of mosquito-borne diseases. Ticks and fleas are following their lead.

“Between the period of 2004 to 2016, the number of diseases caused by these insects— mosquitoes, ticks and fleas—has nearly tripled during this time period, and it is continuing to grow since then,” said Karen Holcomb, a biologist at the Center for Disease Control’s Division of Vector-Borne Diseases.

Those diseases include:

• flu-borne typhus for fleas;

• West Nile virus, dengue, malaria and chikungunya for mosquitos;

• lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, babesiosi, anaplasmosis, erlichiosis for ticks.

“There’s a large number of diseases that these insects can transmit to humans, and climate has a big impact on vector-borne diseases, because it largely impacts where these vectors can live and how fast they can replicate.”

Scientists use the word “vector” for organisms that transmit diseases or parasites from one animal or plant to another. Climate change supports vectors in several ways, Holcomb said:

• As temperatures rise, mosquitos, ticks and fleas can develop faster, producing larger populations.

• At higher temperatures, viruses also spread faster, increasing the risk of infection for humans who get bit by an infected insect or animal.

• As temperatures rise, the habitat for these species expands.

“So for example, for mosquitoes as it rains more we get more water standing around that the mosquitoes can lay their eggs in,” she said in a recent seminar hosted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “and therefore we get larger populations of mosquitoes in different locations, and with the potential to transmit their diseases to humans overall.”

Holcomb worked with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research librarian Trevor Riley to determine whether NOAA’s climate data could be better utilized by the CDC and others to predict and prevent vector-borne diseases. (Lots of detail on their research methods here).

In 2021 the Arizona Department of Public Health documented a record outbreak of West Nile Virus in Maricopa County, Arizona—desert home of the metropolis of Phoenix. More than 1,400 cases were reported, representing Arizona’s largest outbreak ever.

Holcomb studied the event and found that temperatures were normal during the outbreak, but that rainfall had dramatically increased from a prior dry year. Three times as much rain as normal fell in Arizona during the outbreak, and it fell over a greater number of days.

“The continual presence and increased amount of moisture maintained mosquito breeding sites and potentially facilitated a boom in the mosquito population when the virus was circulating in the local bird populations,” Holcomb said in a report published on climate.gov.

Birds serve as an intermediate host for West Nile, a pool from which the virus spreads among mosquitos who feed on the birds.

But weather variability, driven in part by climate change, adds complexity to the picture. Because 2020 had been dry, with fewer mosquitos, fewer birds had contracted West Nile in 2020. That means fewer birds had antibodies to West Nile in 2021. So when the rains came in 2021, the birds had less resistance to the virus.

“Therefore, in 2021, a large proportion of the bird population likely did not have antibodies to the virus,” Holcomb said, “thus allowing rapid amplification and spread of the virus among birds and mosquitoes, eventually spilling over to humans.”