According to NBC, Cyprus is reducing water allocations to farmers in favor of public water supply, partly to protect the tourism industry. Cyprus has desalination, and some farmers have wells, but these have begun to experience saltwater intrusion.
Category Archives: Web Article Review
NYC banning styrofoam
NYC is banning styrofoam as of January 1, 2019.
The ban now means that food service establishments, stores, and manufacturers may not possess, sell, or offer for use single service Expanded Polystyrene (EPS) foam food service articles or loose fill packaging, such as “packing peanuts” in New York City beginning in 2019…
Manufacturers and stores will not be able to sell or offer single-use foam items such as cups, plates, trays, or clamshell containers in the city.
space catapults
A space catapult is a theoretical alternative to rockets, and apparently Airbus and Google are interested.
Rather than using propellants like kerosene and liquid oxygen to ignite a fire under a rocket, SpinLaunch plans to get a rocket spinning in a circle at up to 5,000 miles per hour and then let it go—more or less throwing the rocket to the edge of space, at which point it can light up and deliver objects like satellites into orbit.
Chicago Hyperloop
The Chicago Tribune has a video of how the Hyperloop will supposedly get people from the (Chicago) Loop to O’hare airport in 12 minutes. The City’s press release says the project will be funded entirely by private investors. The construction timeline? It will be “finalized during the process”. I’m a little skeptical, but winning a competitive bid process for a major city does suggest the Hyperloop is more than a pipedream. It almost makes me want to move to a U.S. city that is willing to plan for the future, which in this case means catching up to modern world class cities that have efficient rail links from their downtowns to their airports.
more on the downward spiral of nuclear power economics
This one is from Five Thirty Eight:
The age of the nuclear fleet is partly to blame. That’s not because America’s nuclear reactors are falling apart — they’re regularly inspected, and almost all of them have now gone through the process of renewing their original 40-year operating licenses for 20 more years…
Instead, it’s the cost of upkeep that’s prohibitive. Things do fall apart — especially things exposed to radiation on a daily basis. Maintenance and repair, upgrades and rejuvenation all take a lot of capital investment. And right now, that means spending lots of money on power plants that aren’t especially profitable. Historically, nuclear power plants were expensive to build but could produce electricity more cheaply than fossil fuels, making them a favored source of low-cost electricity. That changed with the fracking boom, Morgan told me. “Natural gas from fracking has gotten so cheap, [nuclear plants] aren’t as high up in the dispatch stack,” he said, referring to the order of resources utilities choose to buy electricity from. “So many of them are now not very attractive economically…”
Morgan and other researchers are studying the economic feasibility of investment in newer kinds of nuclear power plants — including different ways of designing the mechanical systems of a reactor and building reactors that are smaller and could be put together on an assembly line. Currently, reactors must be custom-built to each site. Their research showed that new designs are unlikely to be commercially viable in time to seriously address climate change. And in a new study that has not yet been published, they found that the domestic U.S. market for nuclear power isn’t robust enough to justify the investments necessary to build a modular reactor industry.
Three Mile Island
A lot of people probably don’t realize that 2 of the 4 reactors at Three Mile Island have been operational without issues since the 1970s. They are projected to be shut down next year.
Across the U.S., more communities are grappling with such questions, as the owners of nuclear plants dating back to the 1960s and ’70s begin to put their facilities into premature retirement. That’s because the plants are having trouble staying competitive in an era of cheap natural gas, a product of the shale boom. Also, nuclear power’s attraction as a clean energy source has been eclipsed by no-emissions alternatives such as wind and solar power.
One enemy of the nuclear industry in Pennsylvania is natural gas lobbyists.
Even so, nuclear advocates have thus far had better success mobilizing resources at the state level. In Illinois, the state that leads the U.S. in nuclear power generation, lawmakers passed controversial legislation in 2016 to subsidize nuclear plants with so-called zero-emission credits. Exelon, which operates the largest nuclear fleet in the nation, owns the state’s six operational sites.
States including New York and New Jersey have enacted similar policies. Pennsylvania has been a tougher sell. A nuclear energy caucus in the state legislature has failed to pass anything helpful yet. Its efforts have been stymied, in part, by forces supporting the state’s booming natural gas industry.
stranded fossil fuel assets
An article from Cambridge (University, not Analytica) in Nature Climate Change estimates potential losses if renewables were to lead to a sudden drop in demand for fossil fuels.
Our analysis suggests that part of the SFFA would occur as a result of an already ongoing technological trajectory, irrespective of whether or not new climate policies are adopted; the loss would be amplified if new climate policies to reach the 2 °C target of the Paris Agreement are adopted and/or if low-cost producers (some OPEC countries) maintain their level of production (‘sell out’) despite declining demand; the magnitude of the loss from SFFA may amount to a discounted global wealth loss of US$1–4 trillion; and there are clear distributional impacts, with winners (for example, net importers such as China or the EU) and losers (for example, Russia, the United States or Canada, which could see their fossil fuel industries nearly shut down), although the two effects would largely offset each other at the level of aggregate global GDP.
So coal subsidies might be “making America Great Again”, but not for long. And they might not even have the desired effect according to this article, which argues they would primarily benefit nuclear. And solar energy, it turns out, is a growth industry creating jobs in many Republican districts.
offshore wind competitive with natural gas
Huge, new offshore wind turbines can be competitive with natural gas, according to Bloomberg. Skeptics in the article bring up the intermittent nature of wind, but don’t address whether battery storage could be a cost-effective solution at this point.
top 20 metros for venture capital
This post has an interesting list of the top 20 metro areas in the world for venture capital investment. San Francisco and San Jose together vacuum up about 25%. Add LA and San Diego, and California gets over 30%. Boston and New York add up to a respectable 12%. After that it drops off quickly, with the major global cities tending to grab 1-2% or so. Austin does a great job marketing itself, but only adds up to 1.5%. Big cities in China and India are only grabbing in the 1% range, but presumably the money may go farther there. My home city of Philadelphia grabs around 1% which seems underwhelming, but at least we crack the list when there are a plenty of major cities (Miami, Atalnta, Houston, Rome, anywhere in Europe outside London and Paris, the entire continents of South America and Africa?) that do not.
the numbers on Syria
Syria might not be grabbing the U.S. headlines right now, but the conflict is grinding on. The Week has some staggering numbers. Out of a population of about 20 million, 5.6 million are refugees inside the country and 6.2 million have left the country as refugees. That’s 60% of the population. Estimates of the death toll vary but the most widely accepted is around half a million. That’s 2-3% of the population.