This cynical but humorous sign is compliments of my writer and nuclear concerned Wisconsin friend, Michelle UluOla. I will have something more to say about what it represents in tomorrow’s post.
I apologize for being so late with this “All Things Nuclear” Post tonight, but I had three long medical appointments that ran overtime, taking up much of my day. The delay was worth the trouble, though, since I came away with a clean bill of health, which is always good to know; especially at my age.
Because this is so late and there are mostly typical nuclear news tonight, I will leave interested readers to their own devices and scan the nuclear news (plus one Yellowstone story) to suit your fancy. ~llaw
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A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
And so she was fascinated in all things … You have this organization that is very historically nuclear … And you’re not afraid to jump into that room …
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While construction has begun at the site of TerraPower’s Natrium nuclear facility near Kemmerer, Wyoming, testing of the technology that will be used in the reactor continues at the company’s testing facility in Everett, Washington. (TerraPower)
Being that Wyoming is the state I was born and raised, played, and worked in the intrepid (then) nuclear fuel and uranium mining business for several years, and that I am now as anti-nuclear as anyone on planet Earth can be,
I am sad to see this irresponsible act by the Wyoming legislature to throw open the beautiful land of the Wyoming country to uranium and rare earths mining, milling, and the construction of safety-questionable small nuclear reactor power plants (SMRs) to what should have remained a deplorable and dead issue, not only in Wyoming, but globally. But here we are, jumping right back into the middle of pioneering yet another trail along the road to the highway of self-extinction. ~llaw
Wyoming To Expand Critical Minerals Permitting To Include Uranium, Rare Earths
With Wyoming positioning to become ground zero for a new U.S. nuclear power revolution, the state is finalizing rules to expand its energy regulatory authority to include uranium and rare earths mining, aka “nuclear source material.”
With Wyoming positioning to become ground zero for a new U.S. nuclear power revolution, the Cowboy State is finalizing rules to expand its energy regulatory authority to include uranium and rare earths mining, aka “nuclear source material.”
While the permitting process for nuclear plants and oversight of the fuel cycle rests with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Wyoming’s potential new rules are important because there’s a nuclear reactor coming to southwestern Wyoming in the next few years — the first in a long time.
Future Wyoming power plants may not necessarily find permitting easier, but subtle changes are coming at the state level that could deliver a competitive edge for radioactive minerals found in the Cowboy State. These so-called nuclear source materials will effectively streamline the nuclear fuel cycle by helping out with a domestic supply of the ingredients needed to make the fuel — which will continue to be regulated by the NRC.
TerraPower LLC’s nuclear fuel cycle for the reactor it’s building in Kemmerer, Wyoming, will remain under the responsibility of the NRC, which regulates all things nuclear, as will other power plants on the drawing board.
The subtle changes coming at the state level will touch on some of the critical minerals that may go into the fuel cycle or have a radioactive edge for other things being built in the military world or elsewhere.
The state’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) is planning a final presentation on new draft rules that expand a self-regulating program on “nuclear source material” with the NRC — nothing to do with nuclear fuel that’ll get processed for TerraPower’s Natrium reactor.
A groundbreaking ceremony for that project is scheduled for June 10.
Change Began In 2023
There are 39 “agreement states” with programs that meet the NRC’s requirements for regulating nuclear material uses other than nuclear power. This can include the recovery of uranium and thorium, according to NRC spokesman Scott Burnell.
“Wyoming has been an agreement state since 2018 with regards to uranium recovery,” Burnell told Cowboy State Daily in an email seeking answers to questions about proposed changes in Wyoming’s agreement state status.
“Wyoming is seeking to amend its agreement to cover the incidental recovery of uranium and thorium during rare earth mining,” Burnell said.
The changes in Wyoming’s nuclear source material program are the result of a 2023 state law signed by Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon that lay out the Cowboy State’s guidelines for permitting and regulating parts of the rare earth and critical minerals industries.
There are several rare earth minerals companies operating in Wyoming, and which are in various stages of launching major mining operations for critical elements and magnets in coming years.
The rare earth minerals bonanza is the result of consumers starved for magnet metals integral to the green transition to electric vehicles, wind turbines, consumer goods, robots and military drones, missiles and chips needed for sophisticated computing power.
The state’s growing uranium industry is seeing a surge in demand and has lined up in the state’s Red Desert and northeastern Wyoming to mine the strategic radioactive element from underground.
Spot prices on the commodity exchange for trading uranium have soared following intense demand for a domestic, homegrown supply of the mineral following efforts to cut off the gravy train for Russia, once America’s major supplier of enriched uranium.
Thorium, which is used to make ceramics, welding rods, heat resistant paint and metals used in the aerospace industry, as well as in nuclear reactions, is a naturally occurring radioactive metal found at trace levels in soil, rocks, water, plants and animals.
Radioactive Changes
In Wyoming last year, state lawmakers gave authority to the DEQ to promulgate regulations to become an agreement state with the NRC for the regulation of “source material.”
In a February 2023 letter sent by Gordon to NRC Chairman Christopher Hanson, the Republican governor wrote that Wyoming planned to expand its agreement with the NRC for licensing uranium mining and milling and the associated by-product material.
Comments on the DEQ’s finalized draft rules must be received by the state agency’s Land Quality Division by June 19, with an advisory board meeting taking up the topic on June 20. That’s when the advisory board will review a draft of all nine chapters of the proposed rules on the new source material program.
Some of the chapter topics will cover radiation protection standards, inspections, enforcement and penalties, licensing requirements for source material, and transportation of radioactive material.
“The public notice was for the rules for the new source material program, which will be an amendment to the existing agreement state program to include licensing of incidental recovery of source material from mining or milling operations,” said Brandi O’Brien, the DEQ’s uranium recovery program manager, in a statement to Cowboy State Daily.
“The NRC does not rescind authority to regulate nuclear power plants, so Wyoming cannot be granted regulatory authority over licensing for TerraPower,” she emphasized.
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You might have said all those things about the great armies of Europe in 1914. Indeed, people did say them. Reasons for not using nuclear weapons are …
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Yellowstone Caldera, Wyoming … Rather than being a towering mountain which can be seen for miles, Yellowstone Caldera is a 30-by-45-mile supervolcano …
There were quite a few other articles of value in today’s TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS (listed below), but when I saw this one, I couldn’t resist. “So”, I thought to myself, “this is how the powerful, rich, and famous expect to escape nuclear doomsday on planet Earth.”
I had often wondered if the ‘elite’ of us might have a way to ‘take it with ‘em’ after their tour of greed on Earth, other than common death, and perhaps Mars is where they plan to go. But according to Musk, the exodus may not be ready for another 20 years, so the question is, will the “starships” be feasible in time to save even the elite? Certainly, given the problems with ‘all things nuclear’ and global warming that we have today, it is a huge gamble and there is no guarantee. ~llaw
The article is incredibly interesting, and very much worth reading whether or not you have a dim view of Elon Musk . . .
Writing at the intersection of space and defense, focus on SpaceX, Mars’ 1st cosmopolis.
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May 28, 2024,06:26am EDT
An early prototype of SpaceX’s Starship, the space ark designed to shuttle settlers to a terraformed … [+]GETTY IMAGES
SpaceX is racing to conduct the next test flight of its incredibly advanced Starship – the Titan-size “space ark” designed to shuttle humans to a terraformed Mars – even as the specter of nuclear war spreads its shadows across the Earth.
After Moscow’s ambassador to Washington personally warned him that use of the SpaceX satellite system by Ukraine’s resistance could spark Russia to respond with tactical nuclear weapons, Elon Musk has been stepping up tests of the Starship spacecraft, as if he is trying to outpace an atomic time bomb.
Musk told his hand-picked biographer, Walter Isaacson, that Ambassador Anatoly Antonov had directly threatened him that Moscow would repel any Ukrainian assault on occupied Crimea, where the Kremlin’s Black Sea fleet is headquartered, with nuclear arms.
Even as Musk engaged in shuttle diplomacy with Antonov, and with Ukraine’s leadership, to avert any nuclear battlefront, the commander of the SpaceX Starship project has doubled down on the super-capsule’s development.
While his Plan A is to foster the peaceful sphere of space flight to the International Space Station, carrying NASA, allied and Roscosmos astronauts to the outpost aboard his Dragon spacecraft, Musk also has an interplanetary Plan B: creating a second foundation for human civilization on weapons-free Mars, far from the atomic missile silos positioned across the northern hemisphere of the Earth.
The creator of SpaceX – the globe’s first independent space superpower – sketched out his vision of Mars as an off-world sanctuary during a fantastical overview he presented recently at his Starbase launch center, the massive rocket skunkworks he’s expanding, at bullet-speed, right off the turquoise seas of the Gulf of Mexico.
Musk said that as the penumbra of war darkens the fate of the Earth, “There’s a high urgency to making life multi-planetary.”
“The overarching goal of the company is to extend life sustainably to another planet – Mars is the only option really – and to do that ideally before World War III.”
“Obviously I’m not talking about abandoning Earth or anything like that and we want Earth to be as good as possible for as long as possible,” he added, “but there are certain things that may be outside of our control.”
“So we want to just get Mars to be a self-sustaining civilization as quickly as possible.”
Rapidly building a haven for humans on Mars is imperative, SpaceX’s chief rocket designer said, “if there’s something that takes out Earth – like let’s say there’s a World War III global thermonuclear warfare.”
Even an advanced lunar colony wouldn’t survive as a refuge for humanity, Musk said, because nuclear warriors would “probably throw a few nukes at the Moon.”
“It’s way harder to shoot Mars with nuclear,” Musk said, as if narrating a film that he has replayed countless times in his head. “Mars would see it coming and probably have some time to stop the inbound missiles.”
Around the same time that Vladimir Putin’s emissary to Washington issued the ultimatum to Musk on the use of atomic arms in Ukraine, another Kremlin lieutenant began threatening at UN gatherings to shoot down SpaceX Starlink satellites that are beaming broadband internet coverage into the occupied nation.
At the same time, Russia’s state-run TASS news agency has reported the deployment of advanced fighter-bombers and missile systems to destroy Starlink transceivers used along the front lines of the conflict.
The Kremlin is apparently preparing to extend its brinkmanship in the heavens by stationing a nuclear-armed spacecraft in orbit, designed to perpetually circle the Earth and challenge the satellites of NATO nations aiding Ukraine. That might be setting the stage for a showdown between Russian and allied ASATs, which in turn could spark a wider conflict, say defense experts across American universities and think tanks.
While some critics have derided Elon Musk’s visionary blueprints to transform Mars into a second-world sanctum for Homo sapiens, SpaceX’s designer-inventor is not alone in proposing that celestial settlements could guarantee humanity’s future even if the home planet is destroyed via nuclear warfare.
In one of his final interviews with the BBC, the world-shaking astrophysicist Stephen Hawking warned: “We face a number of threats to our survival from nuclear war, catastrophic global warming, and genetically engineered viruses.”
“Although the chance of a disaster to planet Earth in a given year may be quite low, it adds up over time, and becomes a near certainty in the next thousand or ten thousand years.”
Yet Professor Hawking, author of the global blockbuster book “A Brief History of Time,” tempered his doomsday oracle by stating: “By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the human race.”
While outlining his prophecy, Hawking forecast it could take up to a century to begin founding independent colonies in space.
But Musk has proposed creating a self-sustaining civilization on Mars within just 20 years, via flotillas of Starship arks that depart Earth every two years, when the planets are optimally aligned. Each Starship will accommodate 100 settlers, and 10,000 flights will foster a flourishing SpaceX cosmopolis of one million first-generation Martians.
“You know the giant Starship Factory that we’re building is obviously key to that,” Musk said during the Starbase talk. “And the launch sites that we’re building here and at the Cape [Cape Canaveral Space Force Station] and elsewhere in the future will be key to that.”
The next-generation technology, colossal size, high-speed evolution and full reusability of the Starship all represent a planet-changing revolution in space flight – one that will be chronicled in history books for centuries into the future, says Professor Kip Hodges, the founding director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, one of the leading American space studies centers.
In terms of rocketing robots and humans, satellites, servers and other building blocks of a hyper-tech society to Mars, SpaceX’s Starship is absolutely without rival, he told me in an interview.
The first wave of astronauts will live inside and conduct research from Starship outposts that begin to crisscross the orange-red dunes of Mars, Professor Hodges says, as clusters of arks form citadels and then cities beneath robotically assembled geodesic domes.
Although Elon Musk hasn’t yet outlined any scheme to safeguard birds and giraffes, dolphins and Dalmatians by transporting genetic samplings of every species known to Earth aboard his arks, he has set out a masterplan to transfigure the now-frozen Red Planet into a vibrant new proto-Eden.
“We can warm up Mars and we can densify the atmosphere,” he predicted during the spellbinding Starbase talk. “There would be a liquid ocean on about 40 percent of the surface so we could make it an Earth-like planet long-term.”
A Russian intercontinental ballistic missile is cheered by crowds filling Moscow’s Red Square. The … [+]AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
“Elon Musk has rightly identified nuclear weapons as a continuing threat to humanity,” says Tim Wright, Treaty Coordinator at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the group that won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its central role in promulgating the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Thousands of warheads “are still in missile silos and on submarines, ready to be launched at any moment,” Wright told me in an interview. “A thermonuclear war could render much of Earth permanently uninhabitable.”
“It’s important to focus on eliminating the weapons,” Wright says.
With his tremendous wealth and influence – the SpaceX founder now has 184.9 million followers on X/Twitter – Elon Musk could do more to aid the global movement to completely abolish nuclear weaponry from the face of the Earth, he adds.
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A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
… emergency would end as planned in the French … Lifting the state of emergency … 4. Russia not currently planning to restart Zaporizhzhia nuclear power …
As per international best practices in the field of nuclear power, Emergency Preparedness Measures are well in place for timely intervention at these …
… nuclear weapons after what Moscow said were threats from the West. … war between Moscow … Israel at War Vladimir Putin Russia-Ukraine War Donald Trump.
The following article is about pure alchemy (turning metal into gold) and is probably about as likely to solve the rapidly increasing nuclear threat of nuclear war, nuclear meltdowns, and nuclear fuel waste. Also 500 years to reduce lethal radioactivity is a long, long, time in mankind’s world(s).
How is it that we cannot seem to understand that the only way to solve our already seriously life-threatening nuclear world is to permanently get rid of it and never use any of it for any reason again. Doing so would take a long time as well, but the years would be finite (perhaps no more than the time to build 25 years worth of new nuclear power plants), but if this broken world of humanity banded together and concentrated on accomplishing just this one mandatory job, it could be done. (Which is possible. . .)
Of course I have my doubts that humanity could ever unite in an internationally cooperative way to ever make a workable engineering blueprint (which is possible); a workable timeline and occupational accomplishment schedule for a permanently designed long term destruction schedule that would require an unbridled world-wide co-op effort (which is possible); and accumulate the required financial capital to make it happen (which is also possible). But we won’t do the possible. The doomsday darkness of nuclear world war or a sky of world-wide nuclear radiation poisoning, or both, will come. Then is the time when hindsight will tell us that we will wish we had, but it will be too late if it is not already so. ~llaw
Breakthrough Swiss tech cuts 80% of radioactive waste in nuclear plants
Radioactivity of nuclear waste could be reduced from thousands of years to less than 500 years.
Aformer CERN scientist working at the private nuclear fission company Transmutex has developed a new approach that could radically cut down the radioactivity of nuclear waste by as much as 80 percent.
Based in Switzerland, Transmutex’s technology was reviewed over several months by Nagra, the Swiss national body that manages nuclear waste, which also arrived at this estimate.
While the operational safety of nuclear fission reactors has often been the focus of attention, the safety of the spent fuel requires more attention. Nuclear fission fuel remains radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, long after the energy extracted from it is used up.
As countries look for ways to move away from fossil fuels, nuclear fission technology is poised for a comeback. At COP28 last year, 20 nations decided to triple their nuclear energy capacity in the next 25 years but plans for long-term storage of spent fuel have yet to be drawn up.
Interesting Engineering has previously reported Finland’s plans to store nuclear fuel one thousand feet below sea level for over 100,000 years.
However, with countries ramping up nuclear energy production, more such facilities are required unless technological breakthroughs such as Transmutex’s are adopted.
What is Transmutex’s technology?
As its name suggests, Transmutex relies on the transmutation of elements—the conversion of an element into its isotope or another element altogether. Technically speaking, this is the same principle that alchemists attempted to apply in the past to turn metals into gold.
Where the alchemists failed, former scientists from CERN have been able to succeed. Using a particle accelerator, the researchers propose using a slightly radioactive element such as thorium and transmuting it into an isotope of uranium.
The accelerator is connected to a nuclear fission plant, where the newly generated uranium can be processed immediately. However, unlike its uranium counterpart, which is used in nuclear power plants today, this uranium does not produce plutonium or other highly radioactive waste.
The technology is the brainchild of Carlo Rubbia, the former director-general of the physics laboratory at CERN.
Hurdles in the path
While Rubbia might have had access to a particle accelerator at his old workplace, nuclear energy plants do not have the same luxuries. Building a particle accelerator near each plant can be quite expensive, considering that CERN spent nearly US$5 billion to deliver the Large Hadron Collider.
The other challenge is the opposition to nuclear technology itself. Interesting Engineering has previously reported how Germany phased off its nuclear power plants. Switzerland, too, has similar plans for its four existing nuclear power production facilities.
If the government is convinced, Transmutex’s technology could be a lifesaver for these plants. Transmutex has raised private funding for its technology, but Nagra’s assessment is also a major boost.
According to the Swiss national body, Transmutex’s technology could help reduce the volume of nuclear waste generated by 80 percent and reduce the time it remains radioactive to less than 500 years. More importantly, the technology could also be applied to 99 percent of existing nuclear waste.
With regard to operational safety, a Transmutex-powered nuclear facility could also be shut down in two milliseconds, an unprecedented measure in fission tech, a company statement added.
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There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
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A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
Every form of energy, including nuclear power, creates its own adverse consequences. … things through and I understand what humanity is all about and …
Nuclear fission fuel remains radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, long after the energy extracted from it is used up. As countries look for …
… Emergencies Ministry. The humanitarian cargo … Emergencies Minister Aleksandr Khudoleyev informed. … Rosatom ready to build second nuclear power plant …
Partly due to my eye-awakening blog posts from yesterday and an older one from Post #442 on November 6th of last year concerning the misadventures of Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) that have prompted me to delay the scheduled Post of my in-progress Chapter 5 of the novel I am writing, which is being draft-serialized and extensively detail-edited for quicker reading on every other Sunday on this daily Post. I hope to have Chapter 5 ready for posting next Sunday, June 2nd or, at the latest June 9th.
This Post tonight as an explanation for the one-or-two week delay and why I have titled the fictional story “El Nuclear Diablo” together with the fact that PG&E has requested that the government allow them to continue to operate this dangerous, originally federally required for decommission and closing in 2025. The company has asked for another 20 years of operation, which is unheard of as nuclear plant life goes. This extension is without doubt the most ridiculous and underserved petition the U.S. government has ever received in its history.
The plant itself is named the Diablo Canyon Power Plant, which is from where I took the name “Diablo”, the Spanish word for ‘Devil”, and Nuclear is Nuclear in both English and Spanish. But either way “Diablo” is the most fitting name this nuclear power plant could possibly have because it is owned by PG&E, which is no doubt the most dangerous power utility on the planet, or at least in the United States. Even Annie Jacobsen in her new book “Nuclear War: A Scenario” singled out PG&E’s Diablo Canyon nuclear plant for a nuclear bomb attack from North Korea.
All of these recent developments have given me pause, including the fact that our federal and California governments have already extended the plant’s life for an additional five years and provided PG&E with nearly $10 billion to subsidize Diablo Canyon’s extended life, which is more than bad enough on its own.
All of this has caused me to somewhat revise my views and the ultimate plot of my in-progress novel. When I began to write the outline for the story none of this was a factor. However PG&E’s incredibly irresponsible history along with reckless and illegal activities over the years provided me with some my ideas for modifying into a disastrous fiction. So it is that I am in the process of adjusting the plot for the novel in a different way, which will cause some time delays and a bit of change of direction.
So, in recognition of all of this commotion and uncertainty, I have reposted the slovenly and dangerous (and deadly) history of PG&E’s operations from their entire devious history just below from my blog post #442 on November 6, 2023. It is not a pretty report, for sure, but everyone should know and understand that continuing to allow PG&E to operate the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant is like playing Deadman’s poker with the Devil himself . . . ~llaw
LAW’s ‘All Things Nuclear’ #442 (11/06/2023)
“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity”
The above image of the Diablo Canyon Power Plant may remain as my on and off masthead for quite sometime because it is very much like the proverbial “Canary in the Coal Mine”. I have been following PG&E’s merciless “accidental” terrorism on California’s human population throughout the State (living next door in Nevada) for several years, and this aging nuclear power plant may very well be PG&E’s last and most devastating accident of all. A nuclear accident at that! With PG&E running the ‘show’, what could possibly go wrong?
The Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant is old, dating back to the ‘1970s, and has leaked radiation recently because of cracked containment walls. The plant is scheduled for decommissioning, shutdown, and to be mothballed in 2025, but the State of California and the Federal Government has decided to extend the old plant’s life by providing several billion dollars to ‘ensure’ it’s safety and continued operation. To me, knowing the ownership’s history, this is obviously a huge mistake on the part of both the state and the federal government.
In later Posts I will have more to say about this particular power plant and selected others around the planet. They all need to be shut down, destroyed, and part by part and piece by piece put back in the same ground where their nuclear fuel (uranium) came from.
Considering their history of ‘accidents’, neglect, and incompetence, the future possibilities could be disastrous beyond belief. What has PG&E done wrong in the past to make such a prediction? Let me count just a few of the ways of many disasters caused by PG&E.
(Summarized, edited, and abbreviated from cited reports,)
PG&E Disasters:
1. Groundwater contamination in Hinkley, California
From 1952 to 1966, PG&E dumped “roughly 370 million gallons” of chromium 6-tainted wastewater into unlined wastewater spreading ponds around the town of Hinkley, California. PG&E used chromium “one of the cheapest and most efficient commercially available corrosion inhibitors” at their compressor station plants in their cooling towers along the natural gas transmission pipelines.
PG&E did not inform the local water board of the contamination until December 7, 1987, stalling action on a response to the contamination.The residents of Hinkley filed a successful lawsuit against PG&E in which the company paid $333 million— the largest settlement ever paid in a direct-action lawsuit in U.S. history. The legal case, dramatized in the 2000 film Erin Brockovich, became an international cause célèbre. By 2013, PG&E had cleaned up 54 acres, but it is estimated the remediation process will take another 40 years.
2. Metcalf sniper attack
(Included here for evidence of PG&E’s extended reputation of illegalites)
On April 16, 2013, a team of gunmen opened fire on the Metcalf transmission substation in Coyote, California. The attack damaged 17 high-voltage transformers, causing more than $15 million in damage. The team also cut a fiber-optic telecommunications cable owned by AT&T. PG&E and AT&T offered a $250,000 reward for anyone who had information leading to the arrest of the culprits, however, they were never found. The Federal Bureau of Investigation found that it was not domestic terrorismand The Department of Homeland Security claimed they had evidence that it may have been an ‘inside job’.
3. Wildfires
PG&E equipment has often been the cause of wildfires in California. PG&E has been found guilty of criminal negligence in many cases involving fires. These include the 1994 Trauner Fire a substation fire in San Francisco in 1996, the 1999 Pendola Fire, a San Francisco substation fire in 2003, the Sims Fire and Fred’s Fire in 2004 an explosion and electrical fire in San Francisco in 2005, the 2008 Rancho Cordova Gas Explosion,[ the 2010 San Bruno pipeline explosion, 2014 Carmel Gas Explosion,[ 2015 Butte Fire, 2018 Camp Fire, among others.[
Approximately 40 of the 315 wildfires in PG&E’s service area in 2017 and 2018 were allegedly caused by PG&E equipment.
PG&E was on probation after being found criminally liable in the 2010 San Bruno fire.Following that fire, a federally appointed monitor initially focused on gas operations, but his scope expanded to include electricity distribution equipment following the fires in October 2017. A separate case involved allegations the utility falsified gas pipeline records between 2012 and 2017, and as of January 2019 was still being considered.
4. Wildfire Liability
State law follows a principle of “inverse condemnation” for wildfire liability, which means that utilities are held responsible for damages resulting from any fire caused by their equipment, even if their maintenance on equipment and surrounding vegetation was done to standards. This policy resulted in $30B of liability for PG&E from the 2017 & 2018 fires and drove it to bankruptcy proceedings. In July 2019, a new $21 billion wildfire trust fund was created to pay for damages from future wildfires, started with a 50-50 balance of utility and customer monies and also reduced the liability threshold for utilities to where customers must prove negligence before companies are held liable.
5. Sierra blaze
On June 19, 1997, a Nevada County jury in Nevada City found PG&E guilty of “a pattern of tree-trimming violations that sparked a devastating 1994 wildfire in the Sierra”. “PG&E was convicted of 739 counts of criminal negligence for failing to trim trees near its power lines—the biggest criminal conviction ever against the state’s largest utility.
6. San Bruno, California explosion
View of the San Bruno fire on September 9, 2010 at 11:31 pm PDT
On the evening of September 9, 2010, a suburb of San Francisco, San Bruno, California, was damaged when one of PG&E’s natural-gas pipelines that was “at least 54 years old, 30 inches (76.2 centimeters) in diameter and located under a street intersection in a residential area “…exploded sending a “28-foot section of pipe weighing 3,000 pounds flying through the air, fueled by blowing natural gas”.[235] The blast created a crater at the epicenter and “killed eight people and injured nearly five dozen more while destroying about 100 homes” The USGS reported that the shock wave was similar to a 1.1 magnitude earthquake. Following the event, the company was heavily criticized for ignoring the warnings of a state inspector in 2009 and for failing to provide adequate safety procedures. The incident then came under investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). On August 30, 2011, the NTSB released its findings, which placed fault for the blast on PG&E. The report stated that the pipeline that exploded, installed in 1956, did not even meet standards of that time. Even in the years following the disaster, PG&E failed to implement legally mandated safety procedures aimed at preventing similar disasters.
7. Butte Fire
In September 2015, the deadly and destructive Butte Fire ignited in Amador and Calaveras counties. It killed two people and destroyed hundreds of structures. An investigation found PG&E responsible for the fire after a gray pine tree came in contact with one of their powerlines.
8. October 2017 Northern California wildfires
In October 2017, PG&E was responsible for their own lines and poles starting 13 separate fires of the 250 that devastated Northern California. These fires were caused by “electric power and distribution lines, conductors and the failure of power poles”. Pending further investigation, the following fires have been confirmed by CAL FIRE investigators to have been started by PG&E equipment:
On December 2, 2016, in Fruitvale, Oakland, California a fire broke out in a former warehouse that had been illegally converted into an artist collective with living spaces known as Ghost Ship. 80-100 people were at an event in the space and 36 were killed. The plaintiffs claim that the fire was caused by an electrical malfunction. A civil case was put forward against PG&E, alleging blame.
In August 2020, PG&E settled a civil lawsuit for 32 of the victims, out of the 36 who perished in the fire.] The amount of the settlement was undisclosed, but it was limited to the amount available under PG&E’s insurance coverage for the year 2016.
9. Tubbs Fire
The Tubbs Fire was a wildfire in Northern California during October 2017. At the time, the Tubbs Fire was the most destructive wildfire in California history, burning parts of Napa, Sonoma, and Lake counties, inflicting its greatest losses in the city of Santa Rosa. Suspicion for the cause of the fire fell on PG&E, but the company seemed to be cleared of responsibility in this incident after Cal Fire released the results of its investigation on January 24, 2019, upon which news the company’s stock price jumped dramatically. On August 16, 2019, the judge ruled that the trial can proceed “on a parallel track” because “it advances the goals of this bankruptcy.” After the judge’s ruling, the company’s stock price sank by 25%.
10. Camp Fire (The worst of them all)
In November 2018, PG&E and its parent company were sued in the San Francisco County Superior Court by multiple victims of the Camp Fire – the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history. The Camp Fire destroyed more than 18,000 buildings, including 14,000 homes, being particularly devastating to poorer residents. Approximately 90% of the population of the town of Paradise, California as of June 2020 remains dispersed in other parts of the state and the country. The lawsuit accused PG&E of failure to properly maintain its infrastructure and equipment.
The cause of the fire, as indicated by PG&E’s “electric incident report” submitted to the California Public Utilities Commission, was a power failure on a transmission line on November 8, just 15 minutes before the fire was first reported near the same location. Later investigation revealed that a “broken hook may have allowed a piece of electrically charged equipment to swing free and come close enough to the tower to arc, providing the spark that ignited the blaze.
. . . and the heat goes on . . .
11. Dixie Fire
On January 4, 2022, CalFire determined that “the Dixie Fire was caused by a tree contacting electrical distribution lines owned and operated by Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) located west of Cresta Dam.” CalFire forwarded the investigative report to the Butte County District Attorney’s office, the same federal office that prosecuted PG&E in 2018 following the Camp Fire.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
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A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
Under pressure from all sides, Brown backtracks, says Yucca ‘should not be revived’ … nuclear waste project should not be considered. … things I’m …Data centers’ nuclear option – Morning Brew
Morning Brew
As AI turns data centers into gigawatt gluttons, split atoms might soon be a staple of their energy diet. Data center operators and their customers …
Representatives of Western countries have criticized Moscow’s leadership because of atomic threats. Although President Putin has not openly threatened …
The nuclear news is full of substantive, interesting, and useful articles tonight — a rarity! But in deciding which headline was the most significant to me, I chose this one, which is actually three short articles in one about one of my favorite subjects: The future of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant is under review. This week, officials met to discuss options for the site after its decommissioning … from KCBX. As you cannot help but note as you read on, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) is not at all respected by the public, which is no secret from anyone who knows the company’s history. ~llaw
The future of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant is under review. This week, officials met to discuss options for the site after its decommissioning.
The Diablo Canyon Decommissioning Engagement Panel and the plant’s operator, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), went over an environmental impact report that listed several repurposing options for the nearly 800-acre site.
Susan Strachan with the San Luis Obispo County planning department helped draft the report.
“We took information from the strategic plan, different sources and collectively came up with these concepts, but it did also include information provided by PG&E,” Strachan said.
Possible repurposing ideas include turning the site into an energy research lab for Cal Poly, a desalination plant, or an offshore wind area for the Central Coast.
Mona Tucker, tribal chairwoman for Yaktitutitu Yak Tilhini, said the land should be preserved.
“Everything that happens at Diablo lands is of special interest to our tribe, as this is land that was stolen from us,” Tucker said. “We were removed violently from there.”
Another proposed concept is turning the land into a local indigenous historic preservation site.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is reviewing PG&E’s application to renew the plant’s license for another 20 years.
KCBX Reporter Amanda Wernik graduated from Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo with a BS in Journalism. Amanda is currently a fellow with the USC Center for Health Journalism, completing a data fellowship that will result in a news feature series to air on KCBX in the winter of 2024.
Environment and EnergyNuclear Regulatory Commission hosts Oral Argument on Diablo Canyon License RenewalAmanda Wernik, May 22, 2024Mothers for Peace, Friends of the Earth, and the Environmental Working Group are asking for a formal hearing to challenge Pacific, Gas and Electric’s application to extend Diablo Canyon’s operations for another 20 years. Board members with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will consider these arguments in deciding whether to approve the requested hearing.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
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Nuclear Power
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Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There is one Yellowstone Caldera bonus story available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
If Putin believes that NATO is reluctant to risk a war with Russia, he may take the opportunity to exploit the deterrence vacuum by launching a single …
The apparent and extremely dangerous ongoing sabotage of the subject nuclear power plant (Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine) in the article below has been going on for more than a year, and lately the incoming power lines that provide indispensable electricity to operate the plant and its nuclear reactors, forcing the huge nuclear plant (the largest in Europe with six reactors), to rely on inadequate power generation from diesel generators providing far less than full power from the incoming grid. It has become a war weapon unto itself waiting to win the war for Russia.
Several meltdowns have reportedly somehow been avoided by patching up the power lines just in the nick of time according to the news we get from many international news and watchdog agencies sources. Should this plant fail and suffer a meltdown, not only would Ukraine be dangerously affected by radiation from the failing reactors, but much of Europe would be threatened as well.
If we consider the tense world situation today, this kind of problem could, created not only by intensified war, but also by sabotage and cyber attacks from conventional warfare, but also from international terrorism, endangering human and other life wherever nuclear power plants are situated around the globe. The threat of nuclear war is bad enough, but terrorism could also easily contaminate much of planet Earth with lethal radiation.
And yet we are being encouraged by world governments and the aggressive nuclear industry to build more of them in order to defeat global warming and climate change from current use of fossil fuels contaminating the planet with CO2 and other greenhouse gasses. We should be concentrating on renewable resources like wind, solar, hydro, and geothermal energy around the world to achieve a safer, faster and far more economic solution. And an attempt at conservation might help as well. ~llaw
IAEA’s Grossi highlights continued Zaporizhzhia power supply concerns
24 May 2024
International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi has said concerns continue over the impact potential disruption to off-site power could have at Ukraine’s nuclear power plants.
He was speaking after Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (ZNPP), which has been under the control of the Russian military since early March 2022, had to rely on its last remaining 330 kV back-up external power line for more than three hours on Thursday.
According to the IAEA the disconnection of the 750kV Dniprovska line happened at 13:31 local time, about six kilometres from plant’s switchyard, in Russian-controlled territory. The plant told the IAEA that it was caused by a short-circuit and that it was reconnected at 16:49.
Before the conflict the plant had four 750 kV and six 330 kV lines, compared with one of each at the moment. It also has an expanded fleet of emergency diesel generators to provide power for essential safety functions in case all external power is lost.
Grossi said: “For Europe’s largest nuclear power plant to depend on one or two power lines is a deep source of concern and clearly not sustainable. Our concerns also extend to the operating nuclear power plants across Ukraine, where a disruption to off-site power supplies could have very serious implications for nuclear safety.”
He reported that the IAEA team stationed at Zaporizhzhia continued to hear explosions at various distances from the plant: “For the outside world, the situation … may have appeared relatively calm in recent weeks, since the drone attacks on the site confirmed by our experts in mid-April. But this is not the way we see the situation on the ground. The stark reality is one of constant danger. The nuclear safety and security situation at the site remains extremely vulnerable.”
The IAEA team has continued to carry out observations at the plant, and this week visited the main warehouse facility, outside the plant perimeter, where they saw spare parts and “the team noted that much of the electrical equipment originated from western suppliers and was delivered prior to the start of the armed conflict”. The IAEA said it was told by the ZNPP that the transition to a new procurement system was almost complete for procurement from potential suppliers in the Russian Federation.
The IAEA has had staff stationed at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant since September 2022 as part of efforts to reduce the safety risks to a facility which is on the frontline of Russian and Ukrainian forces. It also has experts present at the Khmelnitsky, Rivne and South Ukraine nuclear power plants and the Chernobyl site – they all report that “nuclear safety and security is being maintained despite the effects of the ongoing conflict, including air raid alarms on several days over the past week”.
Researched and written by World Nuclear News
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
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Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
The ability to induce the Leidenfrost effect at lower temperatures could lead to the development of more efficient cooling systems for everything from …
It’s got a touch of the negative gearings about it. Compounding all that, Dutton and Littleproud did not prepare the ground, either in the joint party …
The International Atomic Energy (IAEA) said that the power outage “underlines extremely precarious nuclear safety and security” at the plant. Yet the …
… power could have at Ukraine’s nuclear power plants … power for essential safety functions in case all external power … IAEA staff observe emergency …
With Russia starting nuclear exercises near Ukraine and disarmament negotiations in Geneva at a standstill, the question arises: can diplomacy address …
The following, carefully crafted for appearances, is one of most incomprehensible and irresponsible articles concerning the ‘war’ between renewable energy production and the slowly dying fossil fuel industry taking humanity and other life with it. There are so many hidden inaccurate comparisons in this story that one is tempted to believe that uranium mining is small, cheap, clean, and neat — and that its impact on the environment is minimal. Nothing could be more wrong. Uranium mining is an extremely costly business that includes toxic waste from required refining of milling to produce the basic radioactive product called yellowcake (U308), which also requires further refinement to create the actual fuel (U235) that is eventually used in nuclear reactors.
Uranium mining requires far more earth-moving equipment of specialized kinds for earth stripping of overburden and other waste, analytical engineering, drilling exploration for locating and recovering of ore grades of sufficient grade and quality to mine and mill economically. Mine waste stripping by huge mining equipment may have a stripping ratio to millable ore of 30+ to 1, or more, cubic yard of overburden waste to economic ore that can profitably produce U308 creating man-made hills surrounding multiple pits of uranium mining operations that must be reclaimed along with mill tailings ponds that environmentally takes an ominous toll on wildlife while milling activity goes on, so the huge ratio of waste to a millable uranium product for for further refinement is essentially doubled simply by the eventual reclamation costs.
And, then too, as a non-renewable product, uranium is limited in quantity — far moreso than coal, oil, and natural gas. So the kilowatt hour cost of producing electricity, like all fossil fuels, will continue to increase until there is no more. The costs are already beyond any reasonable economic value, and, as in all commercial products, the working classes ultimately foot the bills, almost always without having a clue what they are paying for.
I could go on and on about the ultimate cost and accompanying waste (which extends all the way through the nuclear process to the spent fuel that created the necessary nuclear reaction, which is a whole ‘nother nuclear issue. But that would be little more than a waste of breath.
The nuclear industry propaganda goes on — and on — and on — evidently until Doomsday . . . ~llaw
It’s Settled, More Nuclear Energy Means Less Mining
Clean Energy Minerals Are Challenging Traditional Environmental Dogmas
MAY 23, 2024
For decades, the environmental movement has lumped nuclear energy with fossil fuels as a mining-intensive, environmentally destructive technologies while extolling solar and wind as pillars of a more sustainable future.
“Nuclear energy is a carbon hog. Plant construction cement, steel, and complex electronics is carbon intensive” opines Greenpeace co-founder Rex Wyler in one rambling essay. Another report by Friends of the Earth condemns mining for nuclear fuel as unacceptable, while exonerating mining for solar and wind as worrying but manageable in the next breath. A graphic produced by the Japanese environmental think tank Climate Integrate groups nuclear power and mining under an unequal fossil-fuel system while enshrining wind and solar within an “equal” and “nature positive” future society, somehow blissfully separated from mineral production.
Claiming that nuclear power is more mining-intensive than renewables never made much sense to begin with, but such assertions have stubbornly persisted in environmental forums, simply because nobody had invested the effort into challenging them with modern data.
That debate is now settled. When considering how to best manage the mining footprint of a global shift to low-carbon energy, the math clearly shows that clean energy systems using relatively more nuclear energy will impose fewer mining impacts than systems using only solar, wind, and storage. A major research report from my team, building on recent U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, MIT, and United States Geological Survey analyses, finds that every unit of clean electricity from a nuclear power plant requires excavating just 30% or 23% the mass of rock and metal, compared to an equal unit of solar or onshore wind electricity.
But many traditional environmentalists and nuclear technology opponents remain determined to exclude clean nuclear power from consideration as a clean energy source by any means necessary. However, using mining as an angle of attack to label nuclear energy as “not sustainable” relative to solar and wind is to make arguments utterly unmoored from real-world data. Rather, insisting on a renewables-only nuclear-free energy system means accepting higher mining-related environmental tradeoffs. Anti-nuclear environmental thinkers must either grapple with that tension or embrace it, but they cannot deny it.
After the clean tech mining arguments
I do have some good news—both for wind and solar advocates and for all pragmatic environmentalists. First, blanket demonization of mining as a concept is misguided to begin with, given mining’s necessity to modern society and for global human development. Second, the extractive intensity of any clean energy system will likely prove considerably better than our existing fossil-based energy system, given the gargantuan scale of coal mining globally. Third, the mining impacts of solar, wind, or nuclear energy are flexible, not fixed, and can improve significantly as technology and practices advance.
To the pragmatic technological optimist, the moderately higher mining footprint of solar and wind energy is just one of many variables in the calculus and politics of achieving a better future, one in which society will probably employ both renewable and nuclear technologies together.
Figure 1: Material and rock moved per GWh of electricity from low-carbon electricity generation technologies, color-coded by raw material. Black dotted lines show total nuclear material requirements per GWh if assuming a higher 92% capacity factor and an 80-year lifetime. This assumes hardrock mining is 34.8% and 60% of global uranium and lithium production. Dashed lines indicate total height of bars if 100% hardrock mining were assumed for uranium and lithium. LFP battery storage considers battery cell mineral inputs only, and assumes 1 GWh of output from a 2 GWh, 500 MW battery system cycling once daily over a 25-year life.
Rather, the harshest rebuke from this data-driven discussion of clean energy mineral needs falls upon entrenched, incoherent environmental dogmas. International green groups and decorated sustainability scholars cannot claim to worship at the altar of empirical science while invoking the material footprint of nuclear energy to classify it “unsustainable”. Nor are calls from degrowth, ecosocialist, or traditional environmentalists to limit extraction through unrealistic and convoluted social measures logically reconcilable with their continued rejection of nuclear power’s potential to alleviate the mining impacts of the clean energy transition.
In one prominent example, the treatise A Planet to Win devotes thirty-odd pages to the importance of reducing energy demand, slashing car dependence, recycling more, restricting the global mining industry, and even supporting resistance at “mines linked to renewable energy” to “buy time” for better mining and recycling technologies (essentially blockading clean energy mineral production) as part of the authors’ vision for a Global Green New Deal. Yet the book’s only mention of nuclear power is a gesture of lukewarm support for running existing nuclear plants a little longer… until society can replace them with solar and wind.
It is time for climate commentators to acknowledge that nuclear technology could in fact aid the advancement of many of their fundamental aims—and in doing so begin the necessary work of rethinking their environmental worldviews in more ecomodernist terms.
At the very least, environmentalists must acknowledge the inherent tradeoffs of insisting on 100% renewable energy systems. The last 10% of an ultimately subjective 100% renewable grid aspiration not only comes withhigh and nonlinearcost increases from the additional solar, wind, and storage resources to cover all needs at all times and in all weather, but also necessitates greater land and mining footprints. Energy systems with high shares of wind and solar also require more geographically distributed infrastructure like transmission, substations, synchronous condensers, distribution upgrades, and more—important additional mineral demand drivers that our recent study does not capture. Producing low-carbon fuels like hydrogen, methanol, or renewable synthetic methane for use in power plants, vehicles, or industry would require yet even more expansive deployment of renewables and storage to power the requisite electrolyzers and carbon capture facilities.
The match between nuclear and better mining is strong
Some environmental commentators would counter that society will ultimately supply new solar, wind, and battery equipment through recycling rather than new mining. While this is possible in the long-term, the limited availability of many recycled materials like silver, rare earth elements, lithium, or graphite makes this infeasible in the near-term. Moreover, improved recycling would benefit nuclear technology equally if not more, enabling reactors not only built with repurposed steel and concrete aggregate but also powered with recycled spent fuel.
Others might emphasize that the avoided coal mining from a clean energy transition is so substantial that the relative differences in the mining footprint of nuclear, wind, or solar are minor and negligible by comparison. This argument has some merit, but falters somewhat upon considering important nuances.
First, coal-fired electricity is already diminishing, extinct, or was nonexistent to begin with in many regions like Western Europe, California, the Middle East, or much of South America. Coal mining impacts are entirely irrelevant to the mining-related implications of the energy transition in these regions, which are effectively choosing between renewables, gas, and nuclear (and oil in the case of the Middle East). Coal of course remains a factor in other regions like Eastern Europe, East Asia, India, Australia, or Southeast Asia.
Second, mining for clean energy minerals is often more additional to coal mining than it is substitutional. Coal is a consumable fuel, not a metal, so society has already incurred all of the coal mining impacts for the coal energy historically produced to date. Much—though certainly far from all—of current and future coal demand will also be supplied from existing mines and regions. Those mines would correspondingly expand even as the required rate of global supply shrinks, consuming more land in the process, but the global geography of coal mining will not likely shift as dramatically as that of the critical minerals sector in the decades to come. The energy transition, in contrast, will bring new mines to mostly new places, impacting new ecosystems and creating new sociopolitical tensions. Such regional dynamics can get overlooked when considering changes in global average mining activity only.
Figure 2: Material and rock moved per GWh of electricity from different technologies. Coal value considers only coal mining, without including power plant infrastructure. Gas value considers only natural gas as fuel, without including drilling impacts, processing, pipelines, or power plant infrastructure. We assume hardrock mining is 34.8% and 60% of global uranium and lithium production. LFP battery storage considers battery cell materials only, for 1 GWh of output by a 2 GWh, 500 MW system cycling once daily over a 25-year life.
Lastly, environmentalists and progressives would themselves challenge society not to contentedly accept a future that only offered moderate improvements from the present day when even greater gains are reasonably possible. All else equal, future energy systems that incorporate more nuclear power alongside renewables will consume less land directly, and less land through mining.
At the same time avid pro-nuclear supporters should not leap too quickly to condemn renewable energy as a mining nightmare. Too often, debate over nuclear and renewables originates out of technological pessimism over allegedly inherent, insurmountable problems that society and technology can actually overcome in practice. Nuclear proponents dismiss wind and solar as sprawling, short-lived infrastructure while nuclear opponents bemoan nuclear energy costs and safety risks. But none of these characteristics are ironclad axioms.
One can imagine thinner, more efficient futuristic solar panels that last for half a century, just as one can imagine affordable factory-produced nuclear reactors with inventive, foolproof safety features. A rigorous ecomodernist and technological optimist imagines both sets of technologies at their best, distinguishes between solvable problems and truly inherent characteristics, and works determinedly to crack the former.
The long lever of innovation
But even if traditional and radical environmentalists remain hesitant to contemplate ecomodernism, it may be time for them to reconsider their stubborn opposition to nuclear energy. Indeed, the challenging nexus of clean energy minerals and the energy transition arguably reveals underlying fissures and incoherencies within both traditional environmentalism and its modern offshoots like ecosocialism and degrowth communism. The key driver for maximizing human well-being and minimizing the impacts of mining upon nature is clearly technological innovation and decoupling, not societal behavior change.
With current technology, nuclear energy would do more to reduce energy transition mining than degrowth ideas like rationing ever could. Looking forward into the future, it is far easier to cut the amount of aluminum in solar farms by half than it would be to cut the amount of solar panels needed globally by half. Innovative approaches for isolating magnesium from seawater could replace aluminum solar module frames with virtually no future mining whatsoever. And even degrowth and circular economy proponents cannot avoid invoking significant future advances in recycling technology that will require some time yet to materialize. While degrowth writers might rush to cite material efficiency gains and recycling improvements as evidence that they also do support technological solutions, this ultimately amounts to drawing the same tired, arbitrary boundaries around “good” and “bad” technologies.
Indeed, the act of mining new metals itself has produced immeasurable good throughout ancient and modern human history and is hardly inherently sinful. The key metric for society to manage is not the quantity of metals pulled out of the ground, but rather the tonnage of moved earth, the change in water quality, the amount of airborne dust and carbon, and the fair sharing of the profound benefits to civilization that those metals produce. Good governance and technological advances can improve all of these metrics.
The point of highlighting differences in mining footprints between energy sources is not that we should build only nuclear energy, that we should limit the amount of energy we consume, or that we should restrict the quantity of renewables we build. Instead, we should continue to use all the tools at our disposal to meet future energy needs with fewer and fewer minerals and environmental impacts. The foundation for this approach is the ability to imagine how technologies can continue to advance individually and in concert. Mounting support for nuclear power in many parts of the world is one of many promising signs that such thinking is already gaining momentum.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There is one Yellowstone Caldera bonus story available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
… dangers to nuclear safety and security” from the Russia-Ukraine war. … nuclear safety and security risks confronting the site. Coming soon: Get the …
Superintendent of Valles Caldera … The Valles Caldera National Preserve: New Mexico’s Crown Jewel … Yellowstone National Park is CLOSED, Plastic Sales …
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This article, posted below, may be the most ridiculous article and governmental advice about how to survive a “nuclear strike” that I have ever seen anywhere, ever. Perhaps it is a satirical cynical joke?
If not, I guess the British government has no idea what a nuclear ‘strike’ would do to you and your home or your surroundings. And stocking up for three days? How absurd! And a cell phone charger? Flooding roads? Why would you even need a cell phone at all? Wind-up radio? It goes on as though a nuclear ‘strike’ would be no more serious than, say, a Covid-like pandemic or a cyber-attack. Perhaps required reading for the British government should be Annie Jacobsen’s new book, “Nuclear War: A Scenario”. (I didn’t bother to click on the Brit Government’s new website, prepare.campaign.gov.uk,) ~llaw
Brits given chilling government warning on exact items they need at home to survive nuclear strike
A new website has been launched by the Government setting out guidance for the public to prepare for emergencies like another pandemic, a mass cyberattack or nuclear war.
Households have been told what they need to stock up on to survive a nuclear attack
Households should stock up on tinned food, bottled water and a battery-powered or wind radio to prepare for a national emergency.
The Government on Wednesday launched a new website, prepare.campaign.gov.uk, which sets out guidance for the public to prepare for crises. Flooding is warned to be the most common risk for the public, with other emergencies to prepare for including anything from another pandemic to a mass cyberattack that cuts off the internet. Extreme cases could include a nuclear attack in Europe or a volcanic eruption in another country sweeping clouds of highly toxic sulphur dioxide to the UK.
The website provides a document that members of the public can download and fill out to help them prepare a plan for situations where they have no electricity, phone, or internet connection. It recommends having three days worth of supplies. Among items the website says people should stock up on, it lists spare batteries for torches and radios, or a portable power bank for charging your mobile phone. It also suggests keeping a first aid kit, wet wipes, hand sanitiser and baby supplies like nappies and formula in the cupboard.
The list also includes non-perishable food that does not need cooking, such as tinned meat, fruit or vegetables, as well as a tin opener. It adds: “Don’t forget food for pets.” The advise says a minimum of 2.5-3 litres of drinking water per person per day is recommended by the World Health Organisation for survival, adding that 10 litres per person per day will make you “more comfortable” by also providing for basic cooking and hygiene needs.
Ministers want people to prepare for emergencies like flooding.
If an emergency is outside the home, the guidance recommends you stay in, close all windows and doors if necessary, and tune into any national and local news and other trusted sources, such as your local emergency services social media accounts. If the emergency is inside the home then the advice is: Get out, stay out and ring 999.
Among other recommendations to prepare for emergencies, the Government urges people to set a reminder in your phone or make a note on your calendar to check your smoke alarms at least once a month. The guidance also suggests writing down important phone numbers on paper such as the number to report a power cut (105) and the numbers of anyone you might want to contact in an emergency.
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A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
An example would be that an agent can read all of chemistry, learn something about it, have a bunch of hypotheses about the chemistry, run some tests …
… emergencies like another pandemic, a mass cyberattack or nuclear war. … powered or wind radio to prepare for a national emergency. … power bank for …
Russia begins exercises for battlefield nuclear weapons, pointing to Western ‘threats … Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly threatened the …
This article insinuates that the threat of actual nuclear war is more clear than ever, considering that the idea of ‘deterrence’ is a shallow or even hollow threat. It is likely that at this point no nuclear armed country, especially North Korea, would honor the specific deterrent of the ‘non-first-use’ policy, which North Korea abandoned in 2022. And actual ‘first use’ would no doubt be the beginning of the end.
Words, promises, and agreements or doctrines mean nothing to all nuclear armed governments, yet ‘deterrence’ (the idea of fear of each other) is the only flimsy hope we have that a nuclear bomb or two will not be directed at one of the other nuclear armed countries, instantly beginning the holocaust of World War III, from which there will be no victor. WWIII would be the beginning of the 6th Extinction . . . ~llaw
North Korea Reacts to ‘Nuclear Threat’ From US
Published May 20, 2024 at 2:27 PM EDTUpdated May 21, 2024 at 4:14 AM EDT
01:10
China Harbors Russian North Korea Arms Ship, Images Show
North Korea has accused the United States of a “dangerous act” and of hypocrisy following a recent subcritical nuclear test.
“The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea will not allow a strategic imbalance and security vacuum to be created on the Korean peninsula,” North Korea’s foreign ministry said in a statement on Monday, using the country’s official name.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced last week it had successfully carried out the subcritical experiment, which did not trigger a fissile chain reaction, at the Nevada National Security Site.
The agency said it plans to increase the frequency of these tests to gather more data on nuclear weapons materials, without needing to return to explosive testing. The U.S.’s last known nuclear explosion test was in 1992, and the country has since adhered to a moratorium.
The U.S., as the country that has carried out the most nuclear tests, “has no right to comment on anyone’s threat of nuclear war,” the North Korean statement said.
The ministry also pointed out the U.S. had deployed nuclear-capable submarines to South Korea last year, for the first time in decades, and is planning “an actual nuclear operation exercise” with Seoul in August.
North Korea previously warned of a “catastrophic aftermath” if the planned joint military exercises, designed to simulate a response to Pyongyang’s potential use of a nuclear weapon, proceed.
Newsweek reached out to the North Korean embassy in Beijing, China, outside of office hours with a written request for comment.
A U.S. Navy Ohio-class submarine approaches the Mubarak Peace Bridge while transiting the Suez Canal on November 5, 2023. Ballistic missile submarines are part of the U.S.’s “nuclear triad” along with strategic bombers and intercontinental… More MASS COMMUNICATION SPECIALIST 1ST CLASS JONATHAN WORD/U.S. NAVY
North Korea, which has conducted six nuclear tests between 2006 and 2017, has threatened a seventh and in 2022 updated its nuclear doctrine to abandon its non-first-use policy.
The country has also upped the frequency of its ballistic missile tests in recent months, including those it says can be equipped with nuclear warheads.
The international community remains concerned about North Korea’s nuclear ambitions. South Korea, Japan, and the U.S. have repeatedly called for stronger international measures and enforcement of United Nations Security Council sanctions meant to curb Pyongyang’s missile and nuclear programs.
Analysts have suggested North Korean leader Kim Jong Un views his nuclear arsenal as essential to deterring foreign intervention and strengthening his bargaining power.
Tokyo, Seoul, and Washington have agreed to enhance their trilateral cooperation to counter North Korea’s threats.
In his memoir, released Saturday, former South Korean President Moon Jae-in recounted how Kim had “sincerely explained his commitment to denuclearization” during their first summit in 2018.
Hong Min, a senior research fellow at the Korea Institute of National Unification, told NK News that Kim’s statements were likely aimed at manipulation while continuing to advance his nuclear capabilities
Update 5/21/24, 4:00 a.m. ET: This article has been updated with additional context.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
… things at the atomic level. … “Today, many people that are fearful about climate change look at nuclear … All rights reserved (About Us). The material …
The recommended evacuation zone for the Cook power plant in the event of nuclear emergency. (Cook power plant). A nuclear emergency has never occurred …
Six municipalities in Massachusetts would be affected if there were to be an emergency situation at the nuclear power plant in Seabrook, NH. The plant …
… Emergencies Ministry (Gosatomnadzor) led by its head Olga Lugovskaya is taking part in the international conference on nuclear … nuclear power plant.
… nuclear weapons” in the Southern Military … Israel and Hamas at War · Japan · Middle East … nuclear weapons” in the Southern Military District, the …
