86955139
submission
mdsolar writes:
A surprisingly large number of critical infrastructure participants—including chemical manufacturers, nuclear and electric plants, defense contractors, building operators and chip makers—rely on unsecured wireless pagers to automate their industrial control systems. According to a new report, this practice opens them to malicious hacks and espionage.
Earlier this year, researchers from security firm Trend Micro collected more than 54 million pages over a four-month span using low-cost hardware. In some cases, the messages alerted recipients to unsafe conditions affecting mission-critical infrastructure as they were detected. A heating, venting, and air-conditioning system, for instance, used an e-mail-to-pager gateway to alert a hospital to a potentially dangerous level of sewage water. Meanwhile, a supervisory and control data acquisition system belonging to one of the world's biggest chemical companies sent a page containing a complete "stack dump" of one of its devices.
Other unencrypted alerts sent by or to "several nuclear plants scattered among different states" included:
Reduced pumping flow rate
Water leak, steam leak, radiant coolant service leak, electrohydraulic control oil leak
Fire accidents in an unrestricted area and in an administration building
Loss of redundancy
People requiring off-site medical attention
A control rod losing its position indication due to a data fault
Nuclear contamination without personal damage
86654899
submission
mdsolar writes:
If the Hinkley plan seems outrageous, that’s because it only makes sense if one considers its connection to Britain’s military projects — especially Trident, a roving fleet of armed nuclear submarines, which is outdated and needs upgrading. Hawks and conservatives, in particular, see the Trident program as vital to preserving Britain’s international clout.
A painstaking study of obscure British military policy documents, released last month by the Science Policy Research Unit at the University of Sussex, demonstrates that the government and some of its partners in the defense industry, like Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems, think a robust civilian nuclear industry is essential to revamping Britain’s nuclear submarine program.
For proponents of Trident, civilian nuclear projects are a way of “masking” the high costs of developing a new fleet of nuclear submarines, according to the report. Merging programs like research and development or skills training across civilian and military sectors helps cut back on military spending. It also helps maintain the talent pool for nuclear specialists. And given the long lead times and life spans of most nuclear projects, connections between civilian and military programs give companies more incentives to make the major investments required.
One might say that with the Hinkley Point project, the British government is using billions of Chinese money to build stealth submarines designed to deter China.
86268525
submission
mdsolar writes:
The House Ways and Means Committee voted Wednesday to remove a key deadline for a nuclear power plant tax credit.
The legislation from Reps. Tom Rice (R-S.C.) and Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) would remove the requirement that newly-built nuclear power plants be in service by 2020 in order to receive a tax credit for producing power.
The credit was first enacted in 2005 to spur construction of new nuclear plants, but it has gone completely unused because no new plants have come online since then.
The bill passed 23-9, with only Democrats opposed.
It would likely benefit two reactors under construction at Southern Co.’s Vogtle Electric Generating Plant in Georgia and another two at Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Generating Station in South Carolina. Both projects are at risk of missing the 2020 deadline.
Rice emphasized that it is not an expansion of the tax credit, because it can still be applied only to a total of 6,000 megawatts of generating capacity, as it was written in 2005.
“This bill ensures that the 6,000-megawatt capacity authorized by Congress in 2005 is fulfilled as intended, and stops there. This is not an expansion of the program,” Rice said at the committee meeting.
“When Congress passed the 2005 act, it could not have contemplated the effort it would take to get a nuclear plant designed and licensed.”
Blumenauer said he supports the legislation because he believes it could make small modular nuclear reactors a reality.
“It’s part of our future to see if we can make nuclear energy work in a way that’s safe and effective and manageable. Making this production credit work with this technology is an important step in that direction,” he said.
But some Democrats and environmentalists opposed the bill due to their overall objections to nuclear power. They pushed the Ways and Means Committee to instead act on renewable power tax incentives, such as credits for geothermal and similar technologies that were left out of a wide-ranging tax bill last year.
“I think the real problem with nuclear power is that it does better in a socialist economy than in a capitalist one, because nuclear energy prefers to have the public do the cleanup, do the insurance, cover all of the losses and it only wants the profits,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas).
85625105
submission
mdsolar writes:
When a drum containing radioactive waste blew up in an underground nuclear dump in New Mexico two years ago, the Energy Department rushed to quell concerns in the Carlsbad desert community and quickly reported progress on resuming operations.
The early federal statements gave no hint that the blast had caused massive long-term damage to the dump, a facility crucial to the nuclear weapons cleanup program that spans the nation, or that it would jeopardize the Energy Department’s credibility in dealing with the tricky problem of radioactive waste.
But the explosion ranks among the costliest nuclear accidents in U.S. history, according to a Times analysis. The long-term cost of the mishap could top $2 billion, an amount roughly in the range of the cleanup after the 1979 partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.
The Feb. 14, 2014, accident is also complicating cleanup programs at about a dozen current and former nuclear weapons sites across the U.S. Thousands of tons of radioactive waste that were headed for the dump are backed up in Idaho, Washington, New Mexico and elsewhere, state officials said in interviews.Link to Original Source
85468615
submission
mdsolar writes:
Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), operated by the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the global average July temperature was nearly one-fifth of a degree Celsius higher than previous July temperature records set in 2015 and in 2009. July was also 0.55 degrees Celsius higher than the July average for 1981-2010.
Compared to the July average, the south-central part of the United States including Texas and into northern Mexico were the most anomalously warm for North America.
Globally, portions of western Russia and the Southern Ocean were warmest compared to average.
In Russia, fires and an anthrax outbreak have been blamed on warmer than average temperatures.
Each of the last 12 months has been the warmest on record for their respective months. This is due to a combination of global climate variability and human activity according to C3S.
July is typically the warmest month of the year globally because the Northern Hemisphere has more land masses than the Southern Hemisphere.
(NASA GISTEMP confirms today)Link to Original Source
85393079
submission
mdsolar writes:
The world's next energy revolution is probably no more than five or ten years away. Cutting-edge research into cheap and clean forms of electricity storage is moving so fast that we may never again need to build 20th Century power plants in this country, let alone a nuclear white elephant such as Hinkley Point.
The US Energy Department is funding 75 projects developing electricity storage, mobilizing teams of scientists at Harvard, MIT, Stanford, and the elite Lawrence Livermore and Oak Ridge labs in a bid for what it calls the 'Holy Grail' of energy policy.
You can track what they are doing at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). There are plans for hydrogen bromide, or zinc-air batteries, or storage in molten glass, or next-generation flywheels, many claiming "drastic improvements" that can slash storage costs by 80pc to 90pc and reach the magical figure of $100 per kilowatt hour in relatively short order.
“Storage is a huge deal,” says Ernest Moniz, the US Energy Secretary and himself a nuclear physicist. He is now confident that the US grid and power system will be completely "decarbonised" by the middle of the century.Link to Original Source
85352189
submission
mdsolar writes:
China has cautioned Britain against closing the door to Chinese money and said relations were at a crucial juncture after Prime Minister Theresa May delayed signing off on a $24 billion nuclear power project.
In China's sternest warning to date over May's surprise decision to review the building of Britain's first nuclear plant in decades, Beijing's ambassador to London said that Britain could face power shortages unless May approved the Franco-Chinese deal.
"The China-UK relationship is at a crucial historical juncture. Mutual trust should be treasured even more," Liu Xiaoming wrote in the Financial Times.
"I hope the UK will keep its door open to China and that the British government will continue to support Hinkley Point — and come to a decision as soon as possible so that the project can proceed smoothly."
The comments signal deep frustration in Beijing at May's move to delay, her most striking corporate intervention since winning power in the political turmoil which followed Britain's June 23 referendum to leave the European Union.Link to Original Source
83576199
submission
mdsolar writes:
peaking to the Westfälischer Anzeiger, 83-year-old retired engineer Hermann Schollmeyer apparently decided it was time to come clean, three decades after the incident he describes.
The official story had always been that radioactive waste was unintentionally leaked into the air at the THTR reactor in Hamm in May 1986, the western German newspaper reports.
But Schollmeyer now claims that the plant used the cover of the Chernobyl — which had released a cloud of radioactive waste over western Europe — to pump their own waste into the atmosphere, believing no one would notice.
“It was done intentionally,” Schollmeyer said. “We had problems at the plant and I was present at a few of the meetings.”
83575933
submission
mdsolar writes:
Ninety-six aboveground, aquamarine pools around the country that hold the nuclear industry's spent reactor fuel may not be as safe as U.S. regulators and the nuclear industry have publicly asserted, a study released May 20 by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine warned.
Citing a little-noticed study by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the academies said that if an accident or an act of terrorism at a densely-filled pool caused a leak that drains the water away from the rods, a cataclysmic release of long-lasting radiation could force the extended evacuation of nearly 3.5 million people from territory larger than the state of New Jersey. It could also cause thousands of cancer deaths from excess radiation exposure, and as much as $700 billion dollars in costs to the national economy.
83243877
submission
mdsolar writes:
Federal safety regulators used the wrong data to analyze the potential economic impacts of a severe accident at the Indian Point nuclear power plant, a panel of commissioners for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ruled Wednesday.
The ruling, which reversed an earlier finding, will force the NRC to conduct a fresh analysis of the costs of a devastating accident and cleanup at the nuclear power plant in Buchanan, 24 miles north of New York City.
The decision was hailed by New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman, whose office is spearheading the state’s challenge to Indian Point’s efforts to renew federal licenses for its two reactors. Schneiderman estimates that some 1.5 million workers would be needed in to take part in decontamination efforts in the event of a nuclear mishap, with cleanup costs surging as high as $1 trillion.
83167373
submission
mdsolar writes:
For nearly 80 years, nuclear fission has awaited a description within a microscopic framework. In the first study of its kind, scientists collaborating from the University of Washington, Warsaw University of Technology (Poland), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory, developed a novel model to take a more intricate look at what happens during the last stages of the fission process. Using the model, they determined that fission fragments remain connected far longer than expected before the daughter nuclei split apart. Moreover, they noted the predicted kinetic energy agreed with results from experimental observations. This discovery indicates that complex calculations of real-time fission dynamics without physical restrictions are feasible and opens a pathway to a theoretical microscopic framework with abundant predictive power.
In addition to its publication, "Induced Fission of 240Pu Within a Real-time Microscopic Framework" was highlighted as an Editors' Suggestion by Physical Review Letters—ranked first among physics and mathematics journals by the Google Scholar five-year h-index. Only about one letter in six is highlighted based on its particular importance, innovation, and broad appeal.
Apart from its fundamental significance in theoretical physics, providing a usable capability that can accurately model fission dynamics will impact research areas such as future reactor fuel compositions, nuclear forensics, and studies of nuclear reactions. Excitation energies of fission fragments are not directly accessible by experiments but are crucial inputs to key activities at National Nuclear Security Administration laboratories. The capability developed by this research stands to improve activities that depend upon empirical data and evaluation models by aligning these with predictive theory.
The researchers extended the density functional theory (DFT) modeling method designed for electronic structure systems to strongly interacting many-fermion systems and real-time dynamics, creating a time-dependent superfluid local density approximation (TDSLDA). For the study reported, evaluating the theory amounted to solving 56,000 complex coupled nonlinear, time-dependent, three-dimensional partial differential equations for a 240Pu nucleus using a highly efficient parallelized graphic processing unit (GPU) code. The calculations required 1760 GPUs and 550 minutes total wall time on Titan, a Cray XK7 supercomputer located at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF).
83127477
submission
mdsolar writes:
Offshore wind farms are growing in popularity as energy providers look for different ways of harvesting power from the sun without using valuable land resources. One unique idea being developed by engineers at Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) is a floating platform called a Heliofloat that would function as a sea-based solar power station.
As detailed by the Vienna engineers, the Heliofloat is an open-bottom, flexible float as large as a football field and covered from edge to edge with solar panels. Heliofloats can operate as standalone platforms for smaller operations with moderate energy requirements. Multiple heliofloats also can be connected together, forming a floating solar-harvesting power grid.
Each 100-meter heliofloat is designed to stay upright even in the worst weather. Like most platforms, the Heliofloat is constructed using barrels to provide flotation, but it differs in one major way — each Heliofloat barrel is made from a soft flexible material that is open to the sea. This open-bottom, flexible material traps air at the top of each barrel, operating much like a ballast tank at the bottom of a sub. This system creates an air pocket that acts like a shock absorber in rough weather. The soft sides of the barrel also flex when hit by waves, allowing the system to remain stable in high seas.
83115613
submission
mdsolar writes:
North America used to be teeming with bison. But in one century, their numbers plummeted from tens of millions to just a few dozen in the wild after hunters nearly wiped out the continent’s largest mammals.
Now, the bison is about to become the first national mammal of the United States. The National Bison Legacy Act, which designates the bison as the official mammal of the United States, passed the House on Tuesday and the Senate on Thursday.
The legislation now heads to President Obama’s desk to be signed into law.
At a time of political gridlock and partisan bickering, lawmakers agree on an official national mammal.
The bison, which will join the bald eagle as a national symbol, represents the country’s first successful foray into wildlife conservation. Lobbying for the official mammal designation was a coalition of conservationists; ranchers, for whom bison are business; and tribal groups, such as the InterTribal Buffalo Council, which wants to “restore bison to Indian nations in a manner that is compatible with their spiritual and cultural beliefs and practices.”
83043513
submission
mdsolar writes:
Belgium is to provide iodine pills to its entire population of around 11 million people to protect against radioactivity in case of a nuclear accident, the health minister was quoted as saying Thursday.
The move comes as Belgium faces growing pressure from neighbouring Germany to shutter two ageing nuclear power plants near their border due to concerns over their safety.
Iodine pills, which help reduce radiation build-up in the human thyroid gland, had previously only been given to people living within 20 kilometres (14 miles) of the Tihange and Doel nuclear plants.
Health Minister Maggie De Block was quoted by La Libre Belgique newspaper as telling parliament that the range had now been expanded to 100 kilometres, effectively covering the whole country.
The health ministry did not immediately respond to AFP when asked to comment.
The head of Belgium's French-speaking Green party, Jean-Marc Nollet, backed the measures but added that "just because everyone will get these pills doesn't mean there is no longer any nuclear risk," La Libre reported.
Belgium's creaking nuclear plants have been causing safety concerns for some time after a series of problems ranging from leaks to cracks and an unsolved sabotage incident.
82890207
submission
mdsolar writes:
In areas of Russia and Japan that have been decontaminated by the government, allowing for people to move back, life has tried to continue but evidence of radiation remains.
Greg McNevin, a photographer working with the environmental group Greenpeace, set out to visualize the radiation that persists in many of these areas. The resulting project juxtaposes radiation data onto long exposure photographs from the affected regions.
Using a programmable LED rod that when connected to a Geiger counter (a device that measures ambient radiation) translates the analog signal into a light display, McNevin walked through long exposure photographs he was taking of affected areas, showcasing the live radiation data his counter was reading.
