Lifeboat Foundation

The canisters can’t stay on the 11-acre storage site on Bailey Peninsula in Wiscasset forever. And the specter of climate change and ocean level rise adds urgency to the hunt for a solution.

That’s a problem because the waste — 1400 spent nuclear fuel rods housed in 60 cement and steel canisters, plus four canisters of irradiated steel removed from the nuclear reactor when it was taken down — is safe for now, but can’t stay in Wiscasset forever.

The situation in Wiscasset underscores a thorny issue facing more than 100 communities across the U.S.: close to a hundred thousand tons of nuclear waste that has no place to go.

Continue reading “Armed guards protect tons of nuclear waste that Maine can’t get rid of” »

“Gorgon’s failure poses a major problem for any oil and gas company betting on CCS to meet net zero,” said Ian Porter, the chairperson of Sustainable Energy Now, WA. “CCS simply does not work at the scale and at the price needed.”

(Bloomberg) — The world’s biggest project to capture and store carbon dioxide isn’t working like it should, highlighting the challenges oil companies face in tackling their greenhouse gas emissions. Chevron Corp.’s system at the $54 billion Gorgon liquefied natural gas export plant in Australi…

Jacopo Buongiorno and others say factory-built microreactors trucked to usage sites could be a safe, efficient option for decarbonizing electricity systems.

We may be on the brink of a new paradigm for nuclear power, a group of nuclear specialists suggested recently in The Bridge, the journal of the National Academy of Engineering. Much as large, expensive, and centralized computers gave way to the widely distributed PCs of today, a new generation of relatively tiny and inexpensive factory-built reactors, designed for autonomous plug-and-play operation similar to plugging in an oversized battery, is on the horizon, they say.

These proposed systems could provide heat for industrial processes or electricity for a military base or a neighborhood, run unattended for five to 10 years, and then be trucked back to the factory for refurbishment. The authors — Jacopo Buongiorno, MIT’s TEPCO Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering; Robert Frida, a founder of GenH; Steven Aumeier of the Idaho National Laboratory; and Kevin Chilton, retired commander of the U.S. Strategic Command — have dubbed these small power plants “nuclear batteries.” Because of their simplicity of operation, they could play a significant role in decarbonizing the world’s electricity systems to avert catastrophic climate change, the researchers say. MIT News asked Buongiorno to describe his group’s proposal.

A serving of mushrooms is just 0.08 kg of CO₂ emissions—only lentils have a lower per serving CO₂ emission level.

One common question J.P. and I get over and over again is about the problem of overpopulation—if human life extension is a humanitarian goal worth pursuing, won’t there be an inevitable environmental crisis? One worse than what we’re already facing?

When we covered the ethics of life extension we partially answered this question based on what we know about population and consumption trends now (tl;dr: we’re more likely to face a crisis of under population than overpopulation). That said, it’s practically impossible to be able to fully forecast environmental trends 50200, and further years into the future. We noted, “Spanners actually need to address it because we will have to continue living through the consequences of climate change if we don’t.”

Continue reading “5 Sustainable Eating Tips for People Serious About Life Extension” »

The entire US coastline is in for a one-two punch from the lunar cycle and climate change.

Researchers from Skoltech and their colleagues from the UK have managed to create a stable giant vortex in interacting polariton condensates, addressing a known challenge in quantized fluid dynamics. The findings open possibilities in creating uniquely structured coherent light sources and exploring many-body physics under unique extreme conditions. The paper was published in the journal Nature Communications.

In fluid dynamics, a vortex is a region where a fluid revolves around a point (2D) or a line (3D); you’ve clearly seen one in your sink or may have felt one in the form of turbulence while flying. The quantum world also has vortices: the flow of a quantum fluid can create a zone where the particles revolve persistently around some point. The prototypical signature of such quantum vortices is their singular phase at the core of the vortex.

Skoltech Professors Natalia Berloff and Pavlos Lagoudakis and colleagues studied vortices created by polaritons – odd hybrid quantum particles that are half-light (photon) and half-matter (electrons) – forming a quantum fluid under the right conditions. They were looking for a way to create vortices in these polariton fluids with high values of angular momentum (i.e., getting them to rotate fast). These vortices, also known as giant vortices, are generally very hard to obtain as they tend to break apart into many smaller vortices with low angular momentum in other systems.

Continue reading “Giant Quantum Tornados in Hybrid Light-Matter System Reveal Complex Physical Phenomena” »

An elegant new algorithm developed by Danish researchers can significantly reduce the resource consumption of the world’s computer servers. Computer servers are as taxing on the climate as global air traffic combined, thereby making the green transition in IT an urgent matter. The researchers, from the University of Copenhagen, expect major IT companies to deploy the algorithm immediately.

One of the flipsides of our runaway internet usage is its impact on climate due to the massive amount of electricity consumed by computer servers. Current CO₂ emissions from data centers are as high as from global air traffic combined—with emissions expected to double within just a few years.

Only a handful of years have passed since Professor Mikkel Thorup was among a group of researchers behind an algorithm that addressed part of this problem by producing a groundbreaking recipe to streamline computer server workflows. Their work saved energy and resources. Tech giants including Vimeo and Google enthusiastically implemented the algorithm in their systems, with online video platform Vimeo reporting that the algorithm had reduced their bandwidth usage by a factor of eight.

Physics World

A device that can generate electricity while desalinating seawater has been developed by researchers in Saudi Arabia and China, who claim that their new system is highly efficient at performing both tasks. The device uses waste heat from the solar cell for desalination, thereby cooling the solar cell. It also produces no concentrated brine as waste, cutting its potential environmental impact.

In many parts of the world, climate change and population growth are putting huge demands on freshwater supplies. In some coastal regions, desalination – removing the salt from brackish water or seawater to turn it into fresh water – is increasingly being used to meet demand. Indeed, there are now around 16000 desalination plants around the world producing about 95 million cubic metres of freshwater every day.

Continue reading “Solar device generates electricity and desalinates water with no waste brine” »

Mesobot can track squid, jellyfish, and other deep-sea creatures for up to a day at a time.