Nuclear Renaissance is a Myth

The so-called "nuclear power renaissance" is turning out to be non-existent.  The only approved small-scale, modular, nuclear reactor was cancelled Wednesday by its owner.  Research and development of smaller nuclear plants is funded by the national government. Both the Idaho National Environment and Engineering Laboratory and Oregon State University participated in development. Advocates argue that plants (SMRs) in the 50 to 100MW range that can be built on a modular basis are cheaper, safer and more efficient that the megaliths of 1000MW or more of the past.  These have proven extremely expensive and complicated to operate, as well as being vulnerable to natural disasters and terrorist attack.  The Biden Administration has made clear its commitment to a new generation of nuclear power.  His administration has provided $6 billion to keep America's aging reactors operating and added $100 million to the $600 million already spent on SMRs. [photro courtesy NuScale]

NuScale Power was founded on the technical research a quarter-century ago.  Its first SMR design was approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Agency in February. The company planned to build six 77MW modules by 2030, a delay of 2025 start date, as it ran into technical difficulties and the usual cost overruns that ballooned the cost estimate from $3 billion to $6.1 billion. Its first small reactor project was scuttled after NuScale's utility partner backed out when cost estimates escalated further to $9.3 billion.  Utilities that might have signed up to buy power also got cold feet, causing NuScale to admit,"it appears unlikely that the project will have enough subscription to continue toward deployment."

NuScale has turned its attention to SMRs in Eastern Europe. But the example of the massive Zaporizhzhia nuclear station in Ukraine has brought home to utilities and governments the dangers of a nuclear plant in a war zone.  That six reactor unit, the largest in Europe, has been shut down since shelling took place near it.  The potential for a toxic release of radiation due to battle damage is just too great to continue operation.  The same concerns occur in earthquake-prone regions--witness the Fukushima  station destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011.

The only new US reactors built recently, in Georgia, are seven years over schedule and cost $34 billion.  The original cost estimate was $14 billion. The cost overruns and delays led to the bankruptcy of Westinghouse Inc. a company founded in 1886.  Nevertheless, an SMR is planned for Ontario, Canada.  It is scheduled to begin operation in 2028--clearly and overly optimistic forecast.  SMRs, like their larger forerunners, are simply not economical without government subsidies compared to solar and wind installations that are much simpler in design and can be erected relatively quickly.  GE-Hitachi building the Ontario project says it can produce electricity at $60MW/hr.  Solar installation with storage capacity figures at $45MW/hr and wind at $30MW/hr. Nuclear has provided about 20% of the nation's energy production since the 1990s, but going forward it will be difficult to get investors and governments interested in new nuclear projects. US Person has no chip on his shoulder; nuclear power is still NOT too cheap to meter. 

Attenborough's Chimera

Readers of PNG know that US Person is a fan of Sir David Attenborough, the well-know naturalist and narrator of BBC's excellent nature programs. But he did not know that Attenborough also has the honor of an animal namesake. The long-beaked echinda of New Guinea (Zaglossus attenborougi) is named after him. But the species had not been seen in sixty years in its home of the Cyclops Mountains, that is until a trail camera captured video of one om the last day of a four week expedition led by an Oxford University scientist. James Kempton retrieve the image from the last memory card of eighty cameras scattered about the forest. He was elated at the discovery, since the shy, burrowing creature is notoriously difficult to find in the wild. His team survived an earthquake, malaria and even a leech attached to an eyeball! 

The echidna is truly a strange creature, a chimera of made up incongruous body parts: spines of hedgehog, snout of  anteater, and feet of mole. It is ancient, perhaps 220 million years old, a member of the Monotream order that includes another egg- laying strange-o, duckbill platypus. This echidna species has been recorded only once before in 1961 by a Dutch scientist. It is deeply embedded in native folklore. In one tradition a dispute could be settled by sending one party to the conflict into the forest to find an echidna and the other to the ocean to locate a marlin, which could take years, by which time the dispute would be forgotten.  A different Echidna species also occurs in Australia.  [photo credit: UK Guardian]

TWIT: "That's a Problem"

Photogenic Ivanka Trump smiled her way through testifying in the NY civil fraud case. While smiling, she took a predictable path between further incriminating her old man and lying under oath by answering, "I don't recall" numerous times. Her selective memory did not improve after the prosecutor showed her several documents and emails indicating her involvment in deals--Doral Golf Club and the Old Post Office--that significantly over-stated her father's net worth. In one email she wrote to a Trump lawyer that a minimum net worth required by Deutsche Bank--$4.0 billion--to grant a favorable loan would be a "problem" for Trump. Her admission exposes the motive for inflating the numbers--receiving favorable treatment from counterparts--and establishes the materiality of Trump's persistent fraud.  As Letitia James put it to press after the days proceedings, "numbers don't lie."

Don Legit will get another bit at the apple as he will be called by his defense team as one of 127 potential witnesses.

credit: N. Anderson

COTW: The World in 2100

A lot of the Earth's problems in terms of pollution and destruction of natural habitat is driven by human population growth.  So you may ask when it [growth] end?  The chart this week shows the major population models with the UN's projection being the most widely referenced:

UN predicts that in 2100 the world's population will be around 10.5 billion people, with the peak arriving around 2086. Fortunately,US Person will not be around for that occurrence. Unless we solve the climate crisis, Earth will be a hellish place to live, and the starships full. The differences in the projections are due to projected fertility rates.  Both Asia and Africa are predicted to experience sharp declines in birth rates as countries there experience further economic development.  Sub-Saharan Africa, which has open of the highest fertility rates in the world, is not expected to reach replacement rate of 2 births per woman until 2070.  Birth rate changes in high fertility areas have a significant impact on when peak population will occurr.

Texaco's Toxic Legacy in Ecuador

Some of the sludge pools hidden in the jungle are over 6 meters deep, the legacy of decades of oil production and exploration by Texaco, now Chevron. Chevron faced a land mark and higly controversial lawsuit in which it was assessed $9.5 billion in damages and costs. A decade later the clean up has yet to materialize in the Sacha field, Orellana Province. Fruit trees will not in the contaminated soil covering the pools, or if they do struggle to survive they do not produce fruit. People living nearby are forced to use polluted water wells until they finally leave the area. There are an estimated 3,568 sites in Ecuador's Amazon that the government lists as sources of contanmination. Satelite imagery produced for litigation showed 990 waste pits scattered about the forest floor. Texaco was deemed responsible for 1,107. Rather than remediate the waste sites, the company covered them up, despite the fact that it signed a remediation plan. 

The Sacha field is now owned by Petroecuador, the state oil company. The country has been extracting oil from the rainforest since the 1960s, but there is little research and data on the health effects on local populations directly affected by extraction. So far Petroecuador has done very litle to clean-up the mess, recognized as one of the largest ecological disasters in the world. Over the years the waste oil buried by Texaco has seeped up to the surface in Orellana and neighboring Sucumbios province. [photo credits:A. Lara]

Despite international litigation and arbitration against Chevon, which acquired Texaco in 2001,  Ecuador has come out a looser probably due to incompetence-or perhaps coruption--of its former Attorney General, Ignio Salvador. Successive governments have become accustom to ignoring the disasterous pollution caused the dumping of 650,000 barrels of oil and billions of gallons of contaminated water. Petroecuador repeatedly claims that it has remediated 51 million cubic feet of soil and eliminated 1,127 sources of contamination. but the state company does not provide data to corroborate up its public claims, and people continue to die of cancer from toxic exposure. In a famous study of oil exploitation affects on rural health by physician Miguel San Sebastian, people living in San Carlos, Orellana face a cancer risk 2.3 times higher than residents of the capital, Quito. Undiagnosed diseases abound in the region. One resident told interviers, "This is not a spill. This was dumped here forty years ago, and they knew what they were doing."  

TWIT: "I pour concrete"

credit: M. Wuerker

Latest:  Judge Chutkin has set jury selection in the January 6th federal criminal case to begin February 9th. She reinstated her gag order against Don 'Legit' on Sunday after pausing it for briefing. Team Trump continues to find ways to delay all proceedings by filing motions unlikely to succeed.  

California lawyer John Eastman has been found culpable in a disciplinary trial lasting 32 days.  The proceedings now move to the punishment phase.  Possible penalties include disbarment. 

And Eric lies as well.  That was the top line from Eric Trump's testimony in the NewYork civil fraud case against him, his older brother and daddy.  Eric opened his testimony by disavowing any knowledge or involvement in his father's fraudulent statements of financial condition used by the Trump Org to obtain favorable loans, insurance and avoid taxes.   The prosecuting attorney promptly confronted him with emails and documents that showed him participating in preparation of the statements and signing off on documents as the trustee for his father's revocable trust established during his term in public office.  Eric was eventually forced to admit that it "appeared" he did have knowledge and participation in the persistent fraud for which he is being tried.  

Don 'Legit" is scheduled to testify beginning Monday and his daughter goes last on Wednesday. He already know that Trumpilini will dissemble in a maze of word salad. However, the order of the family witnesses is significant because it places Ivanka in a perjury vice. Ivanka was the principal point of contact with Deutsche Bank, that several large loans to the Trump Org. She has been cleared of wrongdoing by virtue of a statute of limitations, but she could still face legal jeopardy if she lies on the witness stand about the fraud already found to have taken place by Judge Engoron. Her last ditch effort to delay her appearance on grounds of school days for her children was rejected by the appellate court. Spin may work in the business and political worlds, but not on the witness stand under oath and cross examination. The family that crimes together, lies together.

Keeping you up to speed, the campaign to bar Trump from election ballots under the 14th Amendment is picking up steam in several states.  A trial in Denver, CO started Monday on the issue of whether Section 3 of the amendment applies to what Trump did or did not do on January 6th when his mob attacked the Capitol.  The section drafted to keep former Confederates from holding public office, prohibits anyone who takes an oath of office and participates in, or gives aid and comfort to an insurrection, from holding public office.  Two prominent conservative legal scholars have publicly supported the idea that its disqualification should be applied to Trumpilini. The issue is not clear cut since there is understandably very little legal precedent. Whatever a lower court decides will be appealed all the way to the Supreme Court by Trump's legal minions.

The case was brought by several registered Republican and a couple of unaffiliated voters.  People have written to their Secretaries of State demanding that Don 'Legit' be barred from appearing on state ballots in New Mexico, Florida, New Hampshire, Ohio and Wisconsin.  US Person has also made a similar request to the Oregon Secretary of State. Write your Secretary of State today!  Many legal challenges lay ahead for the efforts.  A court could decide that private citizens do not have standing to bring a lawsuit challenging the qualifications of candidate, or that the suit is not ripe for adjudication, since candidates have not yet formally filed for ballot access.

credit: R. Molina

 

Recovering the American Chestnut Tree

Once it was the dominant over story tree of the eastern American forest.  The species is fast growing and large, reaching heights of 80ft and three to four feet in diameter. [photo]  Its tree is prized for it wood that has straight grain and hardness.  Chestnuts were roasted over an open fire (at least according to Nat King Cole) and fed the hogs, which were released into the forest to feast on the burrs.  Wildlife likes chestnuts too.  The species was all but eliminated by a blight introduced through Japanese specimens beginning in New York in 1904, considered one of the largest ecological disasters in modern times.  A staggering four billion trees were killed in just forty years. A few wild chestnut trees have managed to survive, and stumps continue to produce shoots that succumb within a few years. So the pure genetic code is still available to us.

Efforts are underway to restore the chestnut tree to its place in American deciduous forests.  The American Chestnut Foundation is conducting research to develop blight resistant strains.  Asian chestnut trees are resistant to blight, so a back-cross breeding program is underway to find a suitable variety to reintroduce.  Breeders want to retain as much American genome as possible while obtaining blight resistance from Asian genes.  Asian trees look different and grow differently in the forest.

The blight fungus lives in the tree's cambium where it spreads and girds the tree killing it.  A resistant tree forms a canker which stops the fungus from spreading.  The University of Virginia has been conducting breeding research for fifty years and is working with the Foundation to establish a breeding colony from which seedlings can be planted in Virginia's forests.  This type of breeding program is important for other species such as ash and white pine, both of which are suffering from disease.