Month: August 2019

On first read, I was triggered by memories of the ill fated Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor (LMFBR) program, that lasted from the 1970s to the 1990s – a proposed “new generation” of reactors that would “breed” plutonium fuel for other reactors.
The prospect of basing the global economy on constant production and transport of ton quantities of bomb-grade nuclear fuel was crazy on it’s face 40 years ago, and certainly not less so now.
On second read, this proposal seems to be for a testing facility to accelerate evaluation of advanced reactor technology, which is not a fundamentally insane idea.

Google not much help here.
Experts – weigh in.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

BOISE, Idaho — A new nuclear test reactor is needed as part of an effort to revamp the nation’s fading nuclear power industry by developing safer fuel and power plants, the U.S. Department of Energy said Monday.
The federal agency said it will prepare an environmental impact statement as part of the process to build the test reactor in Idaho or Tennessee by the end of 2025. Public comments on the environmental review are being taken through Sept. 4.
The Versatile Test Reactor would be the first new test reactor built in the U.S. in decades and give the nation a dedicated “fast-neutron-spectrum” testing capability. Such reactors are called fast reactors.
“This testing capability is essential for the United States to modernize its nuclear energy infrastructure and for developing transformational nuclear energy technologies that reduce waste generation and enhance nuclear security,” said U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry in a statement.
U.S. residents have been wary of nuclear power since the core from Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island underwent a partial meltdown in 1979 in one of the nation’s worst nuclear mishaps. That was followed by a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine exploding and burning in 1986. In 2011, an earthquake and tsunami led to the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan where the cores of three reactors suffered meltdowns after cooling systems failed.
Federal officials say the proposed test reactor would help create new and safer fuels, materials and reactors being developed by civilian companies in the U.S.
“If this capability is not available to U.S. innovators as soon as possible, the ongoing shift of nuclear technology dominance to other international states such as China and the Russian Federation will accelerate, to the detriment of the U.S. nuclear industrial sector,” said Rita Baranwal, the Energy Department’s assistant secretary for Nuclear Energy.
The Energy Department had a fast reactor, the Experimental Breeder Reactor II, operating in eastern Idaho until it was shut down in 1994 as the nation turned away from nuclear power.

Continue reading “DOE Asking for New Nuclear Test Facility”

Geoengineering still not ready for prime time.

NBC:

Now, designers in Indonesia have offered up what may be the most audacious plan yet: they propose building ice-making submarines that would ply polar waters and pop out icebergs to replace melting floes.
“Sea level rise due to melting ice should not only be responded [to] with defensive solutions,” the designers of the submersible iceberg factory said in an animated video describing the vessel, which took second place in a recent design competition held by the Association of Siamese Architects.
The video shows the proposed submarine dipping slowly beneath the ocean surface to allow seawater to fill its large hexagonal well. When the vessel surfaces, an onboard desalination system removes the salt from the water and a “giant freezing machine” and chilly ambient temperatures freeze the fresh water to create the six-sided bergs. These float away when the vessel resubmerges and starts the process all over again.
A fleet of the ice-making subs, operating continuously, could create enough of the 25-meter-wide “ice babies” to make a larger ice sheet, according to the designers. Faris Rajak Kotahatuhaha, an architect in Jakarta and the leader of the project, said he sees the design as a complement to ongoing efforts to curb emissions.
“To stop global warming, of course we still have to reduce carbon emissions throughout the world,” he said in a message, adding that he advocated a two-pronged approach to curbing climate change: reduce carbon emissions on one hand and rebuild lost ice on the other.
Experts praised the designers’ vision but cast doubt on the project’s feasibility.
“It’s like trying to save the sand castle you built at the beach using a dixie cup as the tide comes in,” Michael Mann, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Penn State, said of the iceberg-making proposal.

Continue reading “Ice, Ice Babies: Polar Ice Machine Leaves Experts Shaken, not Stirred”

15 Years ago, Naomi Oreskes was inspired to shed new light on the “debate” over climate change by going to the researchers themselves, the foot soldiers of global science, to find out what their bottom line take was. She found unanimity.

I interviewed Dr. Oreskes, as well as several researchers who have replicated the finding of overwhelming consensus on the science of climate change. Additional clips from the 2014 interview are below.

Mashable:

Around 15 years ago, Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science, observed that many reporters repeatedly covered climate change in a puzzling way.
The popular media wrote about the topic as if there was still “a great debate” about whether human-caused climate change was occurring, said Oreskes, now a professor of the history of science at Harvard University. But among the atmospheric scientists, geologists, and oceanographers actively researching and publishing peer-reviewed research on the topic, there was no debate. 

“None of the scientists I knew, working in the area, thought there was any doubt that man-made climate change was underway,” Oreskes recalled.
To test her hypothesis — that no such academic debate existed — Oreskes analyzed 928 relevant abstracts published in scientific journalists between 1993 and 2003, all containing the keywords “climate change.” The results were stark: None — zero — of the studies disagreed with the climate consensus among climate researchers: that climate change was happening, and humans were the cause. 
On Monday, Oreskes’ decade and a half old study “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change” surpassed 1 million downloads. Over time, interest in downloading the paper has not waned, as is the fate of many academic studies. Instead, the study has steadily accrued readers, noted John Cook, a research assistant professor at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University.
“It was the first scientific attempt to quantify the [climate] consensus,” said Cook. “It was the first study to do that and help raise the public’s awareness.” 
The conclusions are ever salient. 
“I think it’s pretty clear that scientists were not, and are not wrong,” said Oreskes. “Nearly all the predictions scientists made in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s have come true. If there is any discrepancy, it is that many of the outcomes we are now observing are worse than predicted.”

Continue reading “The First “Climate Consensus” Study Turns 15″

One thread that lit up Twitter following the shootings of the past weekend was from a Republican Nebraska State Senator, John McCollister, who expressed shock and dismay at the increasingly dysfunctional state his party, and the inability of his peers to deal with clear White Supremacist messaging by the Commander in Chief.

John McCollister on Twitter:

The Republican Party is enabling white supremacy in our country.  As a lifelong Republican, it pains me to say this, but it’s the truth.

I of course am not suggesting that all Republicans are white supremacists nor am I saying that the average Republican is even racist.
What I am saying though is that the Republican Party is COMPLICIT to obvious racist and immoral activity inside our party.
We have a Republican president who continually stokes racist fears in his base.  He calls certain countries “sh*tholes,” tells women of color to “go back” to where they came from and lies more than he tells the truth.

We have Republican senators and representatives who look the other way and say nothing for fear that it will negatively affect their elections. 

No more. 

When the history books are written, I refuse to be someone who said nothing.
The time is now for us Republicans to be honest with what is happening inside our party. We are better than this and I implore my Republican colleagues to stand up and do the right thing.
We all like to cite Abraham Lincoln’s Republican lineage when it is politically expedient but NOW is the time to ACT like Lincoln and take a stand.

The Senator followed up a few hours later –

Continue reading “Woke Republican: Racism bad, Wind Power Good”

New York Times:

When election time comes next year, Will Galloway, a student and Republican youth leader at Clemson University, will look for candidates who are strong on the mainstream conservative causes he cares about most, including gun rights and opposing abortion.

But there is another issue high on his list of urgent concerns that is not on his party’s agenda: climate change.

“Climate change isn’t going to discriminate between red states and blue states, so red-state actors have to start engaging on these issues,” said Mr. Galloway, 19, who is heading into his sophomore year and is chairman of the South Carolina Federation of College Republicans. “But we haven’t been. We’ve completely ceded them to the left.”

While Donald Trump has led the Republican Party far down the road of denying the scientific consensus of human-caused climate change, Mr. Galloway represents a concern among younger Republicans that has caught the attention of Republican strategists.

In conversations with 10 G.O.P. analysts, consultants and activists, all said they were acutely aware of the rising influence of young voters like Mr. Galloway, who in their lifetimes haven’t seen a single month of colder-than-average temperatures globally, and who call climate change a top priority. Those strategists said lawmakers were aware, too, but few were taking action.

“We’re definitely sending a message to younger voters that we don’t care about things that are very important to them,” said Douglas Heye, a former communications director at the Republican National Committee. “This spells certain doom in the long term if there isn’t a plan to admit reality and have legislative prescriptions for it.”

President Trump has set the tone for Republicans by deriding climate change, using White House resources to undermine science and avoiding even uttering the phrase. Outside of a handful of states such as Florida, where addressing climate change has become more bipartisan, analysts said Republican politicians were unlikely to buck Mr. Trump or even to talk about climate change on the campaign trail at all, except perhaps to criticize Democrats for supporting the Green New Deal.

Continue reading “Is Climate an “Electoral Time Bomb”?”

I know I don’t have to say this for regulars, but if anyone is here by mistake – chemtrails are, to put it mildly, *not* a thing.

I’m going to have to read “The Demon Haunted World”.

Right Wing Watch:

Mark Taylor, the radical right-wing conspiracy theorist and so-called “firefighter prophet” about whom Liberty University made a movie last year, appeared on the “Blessed to Teach” program over the weekend, where he warned that Satan is using chemtrails to prevent humanity from being able to hear nature as it engages in the worship of God.

Taylor claimed that “everything in life gives off a frequency” and that “all of creation cries out to God in the frequency, they’re actually worshiping God,” and so Satan is using chemtrails to turn human beings into “giant antennas” through to which he can beam a competing frequency that will “block” humanity from being able to hear God’s frequency.

“The chemtrails, all the spraying is to detract us from hearing God’s frequency,” he said. “They are spraying aluminum and barium in the chemtrails and if you look on the periodic table—barium is BA, aluminum is AL; it spells BAAL.”

“That’s deep,” Taylor said. “That’s no coincidence.”

“This is terrifying.. but it’s important that we talk about it..”
If only other major media were taking this approach.

A federal judge in Rhode Island just wrote a really interesting decision about climate change.

Pretty strong stuff from a Republican-appointed, fact-based federal judge. pic.twitter.com/wLLUU7NFRS

— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) August 2, 2019

Houston Chronicle:

 The heat wave that smashed high temperature records in five European countries a week ago is now over Greenland, accelerating the melting of the island’s ice sheet and causing massive ice loss in the Arctic.

Greenland, the world’s largest island, is a semi-autonomous Danish territory between the Atlantic and Arctic oceans that has 82% of its surface covered in ice.

The area of the Greenland ice sheet that is showing indications of melt has been growing daily, and hit a record 56.5% for this year on Wednesday, said Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist with the Danish Meteorological Institute. She says that’s expected to expand and peak on Thursday before cooler temperatures slow the pace of the melt.

More than 10 billion tons (11 billion U.S. tons) of ice was lost to the oceans by surface melt on Wednesday alone, creating a net mass ice loss of some 197 billion tons (217 billion U.S. tons) from Greenland in July, she said.

“It looks like the peak will be today. But the long-term forecast is for continuing warm and sunny weather in Greenland, so that means the amount of the ice loss will continue,” she said Thursday in a telephone interview from Copenhagen.

The scope of Wednesday’s ice melt is a number difficult to grasp. To understand just how much ice is being lost, a mere 1 billion tons — or 1 gigaton — of ice loss is equivalent to about 400,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, the Danish Meteorological Institute said . And 100 billion tons (110 billion U.S. tons) corresponds to a 0.28 mm (0.01 inch) rise in global sea levels.

Mottram said since June 1 — roughly the start of the ice-loss season — the Greenland ice sheet has lost 240 gigatons (240 billion metric tons) this year. That compares with 290 gigatons lost overall in the 2012 melt season, which usually goes through the end of August.

A June 2019 study by scientists in the U.S. and Denmark said melting ice in Greenland alone will add between 5 and 33 centimeters (2 to 13 inches) to rising global sea levels by the year 2100. If all the ice in Greenland melted — which would take centuries — the world’s oceans would rise by 7.2 meters (23 feet, 7 inches), the study found.

The current melting has been brought on by the arrival of the same warm air from North Africa and Spain that melted European cities and towns last week, setting national temperature records in Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Britain.

Continue reading “Heat Wave Wallops Greenland”