Monthly Archives: August 2022

While birth and death remain at opposite ends of the spectrum of mortality, theyre united in a bizarre commonality. After all, no one asks for either and, crucially, neither can be reported on from a first-hand point of view. And yet what of re-birth? Or at least that from the perspective of musical shift?

Singularity Zone Vol.1 is the next step of a journey that has seen The Oscillation mutate and grow over their last few albums as they or, at least, sole constant member Demian Castellanos explore the many sonic possibilities that psychedelia can offer. While 2018s UEF found Castellanos experimenting with sequencers and analogue equipment, its follow-up, Wasted Space was a consolidation of that approach with the addition a post-punk sensibility that ramped up the groove. Meanwhile, the righteous howl of rage that ripped from the centre of 2021s Untold Futures was wrapped in dense layers of guitars, squalls, squelches and relentless low-end throb wherein Castellanos appeared to disappear into the musics intensity. His voice became less a vehicle for singing as part of the instrumentation. This, then, was a reflection as much of where he was at as of the ramifications of what wed all experienced over the previous eighteen months.

With Castellanos now relocated from London to the Czech countryside, his new environment has clearly had a positive effect on him and his music. Replacing the aggression and frustration of his most recent releases with a warm and fragrant beauty, Singularity Zone Vol.1 , The Oscillations eighth full length album, explores the possibility of sound collages, drones, expansive washes of sound, and a shared aesthetic with Autotelia, the project hed partnered on with the late Tom Relleen. It is both a re-birth and the next logical step for him to take.

As evidenced by the gorgeously alluring synth sweeps, breaths and bass pulses of opener I Am, Castellanos is not only a student and graduate of the celebrated Berlin School, hes also a standard bearer. This is music that soothes like a balm as it envelopes the senses to signal the first step of an incredible voyage. Indeed, with each step, Castellanos slowly yet methodically increases the intensity with a sensitivity that simultaneously teases and seduces. Witness Mind Unveiled where the guitars turn up the heat yet blend seamlessly with the soundscapes that burn at the tracks core. Jem Doultons subtle yet insistent work on the toms and cymbals never threatens to overwhelm; instead they compliment the sounds that surround them.

The six pieces of music that make up Singularity Zone Vol.1 are best experienced in a single sitting. An expedition into inner and outer space, this is a breathtaking experience that displays another facet of this restless and creative psychedelic explorer.

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In the city of Woburn, Massachusetts, a suburb just north of Boston, a cadre of engineers and scientists in white coats inspected an orderly stack of brick-sized, gunmetal-gray steel ingots on a desk inside a neon-illuminated lab space.

What they were looking at was a batch of steel created using an innovative manufacturing method, one that Boston Metal, a company that spun out a decade ago from MIT, hopes will dramatically reshape the way the alloy has been made for centuries. By using electricity to separate iron from its ore, the firm claims it can make steel without releasing carbon dioxide, offering a path to cleaning up one of the worlds worst industries for greenhouse gas emissions.

An essential input for engineering and construction, steel is one of the most popular industrial materials in the world, with more than 2 billion tons produced annually. This abundance, however, comes at a steep price for the environment. Steelmaking accounts for 7 to 11 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions, making it one of the largest industrial sources of atmospheric pollution. And because production could rise by a third by 2050, this environmental burden could grow.

That poses a significant challenge for tackling the climate crisis. The United Nations says significantly cutting industrial carbon emissions is essential to keeping global warming under the 1.5 degrees Celsius mark set under the 2015 Paris climate agreement. To do so, emissions from steel and other heavy industries will have to fall by 93 percent by 2050, according to estimates by the International Energy Agency.

Facing escalating pressure from governments and investors to reduce emissions, a number of steelmakersincluding both major producers and startupsare experimenting with low-carbon technologies that use hydrogen or electricity instead of traditional carbon-intensive manufacturing. Some of these efforts are nearing commercial reality.

What we are talking about is a capital-intensive, risk-averse industry where disruption is extremely rare, said Chris Bataille, an energy economist at IDDRI, a Paris-based research think tank. Therefore, he added, its exciting that theres so much going on all at once.

Still, experts agree that transforming a global industry that turned over $2.5 trillion in 2017 and employs more than 6 million people will take enormous effort. Beyond the practical obstacles to scaling up novel processes in time to reach global climate goals, there are concerns about China, where over half the worlds steel is made and whose plans to decarbonize the steel sector remain vague.

Its certainly not an easy fix to decarbonize an industry like this, said Bataille. But theres no choice. The future of the sectorand that of our climatedepends on just that.

Modern steelmaking involves several production stages. Most commonly, iron ore is crushed and turned into sinter (a rough solid) or pellets. Separately, coal is baked and converted into coke. The ore and coke are then mixed with limestone and fed into a large blast furnace where a flow of extremely hot air is introduced from the bottom. Under high temperatures, the coke burns and the mixture produces liquid iron, known as pig iron or blast-furnace iron. The molten material then goes into an oxygen furnace, where its blasted with pure oxygen through a water-cooled lance, which forces off carbon to leave crude steel as a final product.

This method, first patented by English engineer Henry Bessemer in the 1850s, produces carbon-dioxide emissions in different ways. First, the chemical reactions in the blast furnace result in emissions, as carbon trapped in coke and limestone binds with oxygen in the air to create carbon dioxide as a byproduct. In addition, fossil fuels are typically burned to heat the blast furnace and to power sintering and pelletizing plants, as well as coke ovens, emitting carbon dioxide in the process.

As much as 70 percent of the worlds steel is produced this way, generating nearly two tons of carbon dioxide for each ton of steel produced. The remaining 30 percent is almost all made through electric arc furnaces, which use an electrical current to melt steellargely recycled scrapand have far lower CO2 emissions than blast furnaces.

But because of the limited scrap supply, not all future demand can be met this way, said Jeffrey Rissman, an industry program director and head of modeling at the San Francisco-based energy and climate policy firm Energy Innovation. With the right policies in place, recycling could supply up to 45 percent of global demand in 2050, he said. The rest will be satisfied by forging primary ore-based steel, which is where most emissions come from.

So if the steel industry is serious about its climate commitments, he added, it will have to fundamentally reshape the way the material is madeand do so fairly quickly.

One alternative technology being tested replaces coke with hydrogen. In Sweden, Hybrita joint venture between the steelmaker SSAB, the energy supplier Vattenfall, and LKAB, an iron ore produceris piloting a process that aims to repurpose an existing system called direct reduced iron. The process uses coke from fossil fuels to extract oxygen from iron ore pellets, leaving a porous iron pellet called sponge iron.

The Hybrit method instead extracts the oxygen using fossil-free hydrogen gas. The gas is created through electrolysis, a technique that uses an electric currentin this case, from a fossil-free energy sourceto separate water into hydrogen and oxygen. (Most pure hydrogen today is made with methane, which produces CO2 when burned.) The resulting sponge iron then goes into an electric arc furnace, where its eventually refined into steel. The process releases only water vapor as a byproduct.

This technology has been known for a while, but its only been done in the lab so far, said Mikael Nordlander, head of industry decarbonization at Vattenfall. What we are doing here is to see if it can work at [the] industrial level.

Last August, Hybrit reached its first milepost: SSAB, which produces and sells the end product, delivered its first batch of fossil-free steel to the automaker Volvo, which used it in vehicle prototypes. It is also planning a plant for commercial-scale production, which it aims to complete by 2026.

Another Swedish venture, H2 Green Steel, is developing a similar commercial-scale hydrogen steel plant with the help of $105 million raised from private investors and companies including Mercedes-Benz, Scania, and IMAS Foundation, an organization linked to Ikea. The company plans to begin production by 2024 and produce 5 million tons of zero-emissions steel annually by the end of the decade. Other companies testing hydrogen-powered steelmaking include ArcelorMittal, Thyssenkrupp, and Salzgitter AG in Germany; Posco in South Korea; and Voestalpine in Austria.

Electricity can also be used to reduce iron ore. Boston Metal, for example, has developed a process called molten oxide electrolysis, in which a current moves through a cell containing iron ore. As electricity travels between both ends of the cell and heats up the ore, oxygen bubbles up (and can be collected), while iron ore is reduced into liquid iron that pools at the bottom of the cell and is periodically tapped. The purified iron is then mixed with carbon and other ingredients.

What we do is basically swapping carbon for electricity as a reducing agent, explained Adam Rauwerdink, the companys senior vice president of business development. This allows us to make very high-quality steel using way less energy and in fewer steps than conventional steelmaking. As long as power comes from fossil-free sources, he added, the process generates no carbon emissions.

He said the company, which currently runs three pilot lines at its Woburn facility, is working to bring its laboratory concept to the market, using $50 million raised last year from an investor group including Breakthrough Energy Ventures, backed by Bill Gates, and the German carmaker BMW. A commercial-scale demonstration plant is expected to be up and running by 2025.

I feel all these solutions have their place, depending on location, resource availability, and targeted product, said Sridhar Seetharaman, a professor of materials science and engineering at Arizona State University. However I do not think for now any one alone will give you a silver bullet to meet the demand.

Hydrogen has a bit of a head start being based on an established system and its also ahead in commercialization, said Bataille, the IDDRI energy economist. But achieving a net-zero steel industry will take more carbon-free pathways, so I think there will be enough room in the market for all of them in the end.

Although greener steelmaking processes appear to be gaining momentum, there remain a number of serious challenges to confront. Chief among them is the massive expansion in renewable energy infrastructure that an industry-wide shift to these new methods would entail, said Thomas Koch Blank, senior principal at the Colorado-based nonprofit Rocky Mountain Institute. He estimates that the world would need up to three times the currently installed solar and wind energy sources to electrify the existing primary steel production.

Another barrier is cost. Switching to electricity or hydrogen would require vast amounts of capital spending to erect new plants and retrofit old ones. In the case of the clean hydrogen method, the price tag for steel will increase largely because steel producers are located close to low-cost coking coal rather than low-cost hydrogen, pointed out Koch Blank. These upfront costs will likely drive up the price of both steel and the end products, at least in the beginning.

According to Rissman, the analyst in San Francisco, legislation on both the supply and the demand side could help offset those higher costs and encourage more investment in greener technologies. Governments, he said, could incentivize the use of low-carbon steel for building and infrastructure by requiring state-funded projects to use low-carbon versions of designated construction materials. They could also enforce policies that make it more expensive to buy from countries where rules on emissions are less stringent. That will help domestic producers stay competitive as the market for clean steel grows and new production processes achieve economies of scale, said Rissman.

Perhaps the biggest roadblock is China, where about 90 percent of steel production is achieved using blast furnaces. In September 2020, President Xi Jinping announced that the country aims to become carbon neutral by 2060. In a bid to reduce pollution from domestic steel mills, which account for roughly 15 percent of the nations overall carbon emissions, Beijing has also pledged to achieve peak steel emissions by 2030. Even so, 18 new blast-furnace projects were announced in China just in the first six months of 2021, according to the Helsinki-based research group Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

Steel is one of the most important and challenging industries to decarbonize, said Rissman, so global coordination on it would help greatly.

Back in Boston, Rauwerdink, surveying Boston Metals factory lines, agreed. Its a fantastic challenge that were up against, he said. But, he added, We are showing that solutions existand work.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

Image Credit: Tineck elezrny / Wikimedia Commons

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The Race to Remake the $2.5 Trillion Steel Industry With Green Steel - Singularity Hub

Atomic clocks, combined with precise astronomical measurements, have revealed that the length of a day is suddenly getting longer, and scientists dont know why.

This has critical impacts not just on our timekeeping, but also things like GPS and other technologies that govern our modern life.

Over the past few decades, Earths rotation around its axiswhich determines how long a day ishas been speeding up. This trend has been making our days shorter; in fact, in June 2022 we set a record for the shortest day over the past half a century or so.

But despite this record, since 2020 that steady speedup has curiously switched to a slowdowndays are getting longer again, and the reason is so far a mystery.

While the clocks in our phones indicate there are exactly 24 hours in a day, the actual time it takes for Earth to complete a single rotation varies ever so slightly. These changes occur over periods of millions of years to almost instantlyeven earthquakes and storm events can play a role.

It turns out a day is very rarely exactly the magic number of 86,400 seconds.

Over millions of years, Earths rotation has been slowing down due to friction effects associated with the tides driven by the moon. That process adds about 2.3 milliseconds to the length of each day every century. A few billion years ago an Earth day was only about 19 hours.

For the past 20,000 years, another process has been working in the opposite direction, speeding up Earths rotation. When the last ice age ended, melting polar ice sheets reduced surface pressure, and Earths mantle started steadily moving toward the poles.

Just as a ballet dancer spins faster as they bring their arms toward their bodythe axis around which they spinso our planets spin rate increases when this mass of mantle moves closer to Earths axis. And this process shortens each day by about 0.6 milliseconds each century.

Over decades and longer, the connection between Earths interior and surface comes into play too. Major earthquakes can change the length of a day, although normally by small amounts. For example, the Great Thoku Earthquake of 2011 in Japan, with a magnitude of 8.9, is believed to have sped up Earths rotation by a relatively tiny 1.8 microseconds.

Apart from these large-scale changes, over shorter periods weather and climate also have important impacts on Earths rotation, causing variations in both directions.

The fortnightly and monthly tidal cycles move mass around the planet, causing changes in the length of day by up to a millisecond in either direction. We can see tidal variations in length-of-day records over periods as long as 18.6 years. The movement of our atmosphere has a particularly strong effect, and ocean currents also play a role. Seasonal snow cover and rainfall, or groundwater extraction, alter things further.

Since the 1960s, when operators of radio telescopes around the planet started to devise techniques to simultaneously observe cosmic objects like quasars, we have had very precise estimates of Earths rate of rotation.

A comparison between these estimates and an atomic clock has revealed a seemingly ever-shortening length of day over the past few years.

But theres a surprising reveal once we take away the rotation speed fluctuations we know happen due to the tides and seasonal effects. Despite Earth reaching its shortest day on June 29 2022, the long-term trajectory seems to have shifted from shortening to lengthening since 2020. This change is unprecedented over the past 50 years.

The reason for this change is not clear. It could be due to changes in weather systems, with back-to-back La Nia events, although these have occurred before. It could be increased melting of the ice sheets, although those have not deviated hugely from their steady rate of melt in recent years. Could it be related to the volcanic explosion in Tonga injecting huge amounts of water into the atmosphere? Probably not, given that occurred in January 2022.

Scientists have speculated that this recent, mysterious change in the planets rotational speed is related to a phenomenon called the Chandler wobblea small deviation in Earths rotation axis with a period of about 430 days. Observations from radio telescopes also show that the wobble has diminished in recent years; the two may be linked.

One final possibility, which we think is plausible, is that nothing specific has changed inside or around Earth. It could just be long-term tidal effects working in parallel with other periodic processes to produce a temporary change in Earths rotation rate.

Precisely understanding Earths rotation rate is crucial for a host of applications navigation systems such as GPS wouldnt work without it. Also, every few years timekeepers insert leap seconds into our official timescales to make sure they dont drift out of sync with our planet.

If Earth were to shift to even longer days, we may need to incorporate a negative leap secondthis would be unprecedented, and may break the internet.

The need for negative leap seconds is regarded as unlikely right now. For now, we can welcome the news thatat least for a whilewe all have a few extra milliseconds each day.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The Length of Earth's Days Has Been Mysteriously Increasing, and Scientists Don't Know Why - Singularity Hub

Oxygen is the elixir of life. Stop its flowduring a stroke, heart attack, or deathand the bodys tissues respond in a biological storm that eventually leads to their death.

Its not great for organ transplants. Most donated organs struggle to survive beyond death. Deprived of oxygen, they rapidly lose their function. Cells turn into acidic, bloated blobs that leak, injuring their neighbors. The immune system ramps up, pumping out a deadly concoction of hormones and immune chemicals that send the brain and immune system into hyperdrive, damaging most organs in the process. In other words, once death sets in, theres no turning back.

Or is there?

A new study in Nature suggests there might be. Using an external circulation system, a team of scientists partially revived organs in pigs hours after their deaths. The system, dubbed OrganEx, works like an alternative circulatory system. Instead of blood, it pumps a synthetic substitute to trick the body into thinking its still somewhat alive.

To be clear, the scientists didnt make porcine zombies. Although the blood replacement recipe helped to preserve some brain tissue, it didnt reactivate any coordinated electrical activity in neurons. In other words, its extremely unlikely that the pigs regained any consciousness during the procedure. But other bodily organs did get a potential boost for a second life. Cells in the heart, liver, and kidneys repaired themselves based on multiple molecular analyses.

The goal isnt to build a new-age Frankenstein. Rather, its to help with the current organ transplant shortage and health emergencies caused by constricted blood flow. The achievement points to ways to improve transplants and the treatment of strokes and heart attacks, wrote Dr. Robert Porte at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, who was not involved in the study.

Its not the teams first foray into reviving dead organs. Back in 2019, they triggered brain activity in pigs four hours after their passing, sparking a firestorm on how to define death. For most of human history, death was very simplenow, we have to question what is irreversible, said Dr. Christof Koch, president and chief scientist at the Allen Institute of Brain Science at the time.

This is a truly remarkable and incredibly significant study. It demonstrates that after death, cells in mammalian organs (including humans) such as the brain do not die for many hours, said Dr. Sam Parnia at New York University, who was not involved in the study.

The first bits of death arent pretty. When cells are deprived of oxygen, their inner molecular processes go topsy-turvy. The process is dubbed ischemia, which means a lack of blood that normally carries oxygen. Like a valley of crops without water, its a bad sign: ischemia to the heart can trigger a heart attack; to the brain, a stroke.

The solution should be easy. Add more oxygen to the cells, like water to crops, and they should perk right up.

Not quite. With trial and error, scientists realized that pumping oxygen-deprived tissuesay, a brain or heartwith oxygen-rich blood causes more injury. Its like suddenly overwatering a dried-out cactus and rotting its roots.

Were still not quite sure why this happens, but scientists have been cooking up ideas. A first breakthrough from the same team came in 2019, when they developed a technique called BrainEx to help restore some neural function in 32 pig heads after 6 hours of depleted oxygen. Pumping a warmed-up preservative liquid into the brains arteries, the brain cells showed normal metabolic activities and kept their structurewhich would normally collapse in death. Individual neurons also sparked with electrical bursts, but the brains didnt show any signs of sophisticated neural activity or awareness.

Yet the results sparked an idea for study author Dr. Nenad Sestan at Yale University. The brain is an exceptionally delicate organ susceptible to lack of oxygen. If we can somewhat reboot it, why not do the same for organs throughout the body?

If you can regain some function in a dead pig brain, you can do it in other organs, too, he said.

Lets backtrack.

Upon death, the heart stops pumping. This means that all tissues are starved of oxygen and nutrients, and even after reperfusion with blood, they wither away. Their protective membranes break down. Organs lose their structural integrity.

The trick to keeping tissue healthy is a special fluid called cryoprotective perfusate. Think of it as an incredibly nutritious smoothie that goes straight into your blood circulation. Or biological liquid gold. The authors have a recipe: Hemopure, a chemical that mimics proteins in red blood cells to help carry oxygen; chemicals to protect against blood clots; and a wealth of nutrients to protect cells against damage.

But protecting the entire body is a much larger job than just preserving some neural function. In the new study, the authors made a few tweaks to their recipe. A main one was adding components that help keep the immune system in check. Another was a sprinkling of electrolytes to help dying tissues, and changing the type of antibiotics. They dubbed their new technology OrganEx.

To transfuse the artificial blood, the team rigged up an automated system that pumps the perfusate into the pigs bloodstream. They had all died from cardiac arrest an hour earlier and did not have a pulse. The team pitted their OrganEx system against the gold standard of careECMO, or an extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machinethat hospitals use as a hail-Mary attempt for people struggling with oxygen, for example, Covid-19.

Six hours later, they checked the results. ECMO wasnt able to properly provide oxygen to all organs. Some of the smaller blood vessels had collapsed. In contrast, animals treated with the OrganEx system had few problems with electrolytes or acidity, which are common issues with decaying cells. Digging deeper, three types of brain cells seemed to preserve better in the prefrontal cortex (a brain region at the front of your head important for reasoning and other executive functions).

Going beyond the brain, the team next tested OrganEx on a whole slew of bodily organs, such as the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, and pancreas. The system seemed to kick circulation back into gear, with oxygen flowing to tissues in the body. Some parts of the organs took up glucose, a type of sugar cell often used for metabolism. The livers of OrganEx-treated pigs also pumped out a normal protein, unlike those under ECMO. The cells genetic programming also came back to life, ramping up genes involved in cellular repair and restoration.

Under the microscope, it was difficult to tell the difference between a healthy organ and one which had been treated with OrganEx technology after death, said study author Dr. Zvonimir Vrselja.

Yes, it does. Although OrganEx helps revitalize pigs organs, its far from a deceased animal being brought back to life. Rather, their organs were better protected from low oxygen levels, which occur during heart attacks or strokes.

One could imagine that the OrganEx system (or components thereof) might be used to treat such people in an emergency, said Porte.

The technology could also help preserve donor organs, but theres a long way to go. To Dr. Brendan Parent, director of transplant ethics and policy research at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, OrganEx may force a rethink for the field. For example, is it possible that someone could have working peripheral organs but never regain consciousness? As medical technology develops, death becomes a process, not a moment.

This situation is known in medical communities as the bridge to nowhere, and has already become more common with increased use of ECMO in ECPR [extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation], wrote Parent.

For now, the study suggests that tissues and organs have a surprising ability to regenerate after being deprived of blood. Overall, further optimization and expansion of our technology will be needed to fully understand its broader effects on ischemic tissues and recovery, the authors said.

Image Credit: David Andrijevic, Zvonimir Vrselja, Taras Lysyy, Shupei Zhang; Sestan Laboratory; Yale School of Medicine. OrganEx restores tissue functions one hour after death; the kidneys regain their structure.

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How Scientists Revived Organs in Pigs an Hour After They Died - Singularity Hub

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One day, perhaps we will finally reach the inevitable entertainment singularity, where everything that could have possibly been done and redone, has been done, ending with a multiversal war between the likes of Paramount, Netflix, and Disney, the entire spectacle captured in a medium that hasnt been invented just yet.

The next stepping stone in Hollywoods ultimate destiny is the recently announced Pac-Man movie, a live-action feature based on the emblematic video game and character of the same name. Spearheaded by the mind of Chuck Williams, who was responsible for 2020s Sonic the Hedgehog (a film that could very well ramp up into a cinematic universe if its sequels stay steady), the Pac-Man prospect is one that should be exercised with equal parts fascination and caution; how could it possibly work, and will we get a Galaga mid-credits scene?

But the world of entertainment wouldnt have a fraction of its traction without the internets incessant reflex to make everything into a meme, and it seems everyone had the same idea when they caught wind of such a project.

With Hollywoods most controversial Chris making some unsavory rounds on Twitter again, it seemed the perfect time to plunge the actor into a ridiculous hypothetical that, if we cast our minds back to the events of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, may not be that ridiculous after all.

The good people of Twitter, of course, are referring to the scene in James Gunns sophomore MCU project where Star-Lord, played by Chris Pratt faces off against his father, Ego. During the fight, Star-Lord dons a husk of various debris made to resemble Pac-Man before crashing into his father.

At this rate, anything could happen. We already know Pratt is set to voice a certain world-famous plumber in the upcoming Super Mario Bros. film project, so why not expand his library of films adapted from video games with Namcos number-one dot muncher?

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Everyone's Making the Exact Same Joke About the 'Pac-Man' Movie - We Got This Covered

Nuclear power could play an important role in decarbonizing the energy sector, but reactors are simply too expensive and complicated to roll out quickly. A new, smaller reactor could soon change that after receiving certification from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last week.

As countries around the world race to replace fossil fuel power plants, the debate around whether nuclear power should play a role has been heated. While the technology can provide large and reliable amounts of carbon-free electricity, cost and safety concerns have held back its deployment as a solution to the climate crisis.

In recent years though, a crop of new companies have emerged promising to sidestep many of these concerns by shrinking reactors down. So-called small modular reactors (SMRs) are designed to be small enough to build in a factory before being shipped to wherever theyre needed, which should significantly reduce costs. They are also designed to be much safer than existing reactors.

A reactor designed by Oregon-based energy company NuScale Power has become the first small modular reactor design approved for use in the US by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), paving the way for new plants that utilize the reactor. The move wasnt exactly a surprise, because the design passed its final safety evaluation back in 2020, but it is a crucial step towards actually deploying the technology in the field.

While some SMRs under development rely on exotic new designs that use molten uranium or thorium salts as a fuel, the NuScale reactor, which has been named VOYGR, is not dramatically different from traditional full-scale ones. It is based on a design developed at Oregon State University in the early 2000s called the Multi-Application Small Light Water Reactor.

The design consists of a 76-foot-tall, 15-foot-wide cylindrical containment vessel that houses the reactor. Water is passed over a series of uranium fuel rods that generate heat through fission reactions. The heated water then rises up towards steam generators, which use the heat from the water to produce superheated steam. This is then used to drive a turbine that generates electricity.

Each module is designed to generate 50 megawatts of energy, but the company plans to combine up to 12 SMRs to achieve similar outputs to conventional nuclear plants. The SMRs come with novel safety features designed to prevent the kind of disasters that have hardened public opinion against nuclear power.

For a start, control rods used to stop the fission reaction by encasing the fuel rods are held above the reactors core by an electric motor. This means that in the case of a power outage they will automatically drop into position under the force of gravity. The entire reactor is also bathed in a water pool, which can draw away excess heat in case of emergency. Also, by using smaller amounts of fuel, the total amount of heat produced is greatly reduced.

The hope is that these extra safety featurescombined with reduced costs due to the ability to mass-manufacture these reactors in a factory rather than on-sitecould lead to a renaissance in nuclear power. NuScale is working on a number of projects in the US, including one in Idaho that is scheduled to be completed by 2029.

But questions have been raised about whether SMRs will really live up to their billing as a cheaper, safer alternative to traditional nuclear power plants. A study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in May found that contrary to the claims of SMR makers, these smaller reactors are actually likely to produce more radioactive waste than conventional plants.

In an article in Counterpunch, nuclear power expert M.V. Ramana also points out that the cost of renewable energy like wind and solar is already lower than that of nuclear, and continuing to fall rapidly. In contrast, nuclear power has actually become more expensive over the years.

SMRs could cost more than bigger nuclear plants, he adds, because they dont have the same economy of scale. In theory this could be offset through mass manufacture, but only if companies receive orders in the hundreds. Tellingly, some utilities have already backed out of NuScales first project over cost concerns.

Perhaps even more importantly, notes Ramana, SMRs are unlikely to be ready in time to contribute to the climate fight. Projects arent expected to come online until the end of the decade, by which time the IPCC says we already need to have made drastic emissions reductions.

The technology has some powerful boosters though, not least President Joe Biden, who recently touted NuScales groundbreaking American technology while announcing a grant for an SMR plant the company will build in Romania. Engineering giant Rolls-Royce also recently announced a shortlist for the location of its future SMR factory, which will be used to build 16 SMRs for the UK government by 2050.

Whether SMRs can deliver on their promise remains to be seen, but given the scope of the climate challenge facing us, exploring all available options seems wise.

Image Credit: NuScale

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The First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Was Just Approved by US Regulators - Singularity Hub

Thursday September 15, 2022 05:00 PM EDT09/15/2022 5:00 PM

Cost: $16 ,

From the venue:The third full-length from Tall Heights, Juniors emerged from a period of profound turmoil and revelation for the Massachusetts duo. In the span of five months, Paul Wright and Tim Harrington experienced a convergence of events that included major health and substance-abuse crises among their closest loved ones, saying goodbye to Harringtons grandfather and to a beloved grandfather figure for Wright, andin far happier, yet still intense newsthe announcement that each of their wives was expecting. Compounded by a series of shake-ups in their professional life, that upheaval coincided with the start of the pandemic. Rather than succumbing to the tremendous pressure of that point in time, Tall Heights chose to confront the chaos by creating within it. The result: an album that precisely channels the pain, uncertainty, and unbridled joy of its inception.As they set to work on Juniors, Harrington and Wright discovered an unexpected outcome of the loss that theyd endured: a shift in mindset that enabled them to embrace a boundless curiosity and exploratory spirit even more powerful than when they first formed Tall Heights (an endeavor that began when Harrington, on guitar, and Wright, on cello, used to busk on the streets of Boston back in the late 2000s). In a nod to the wide-eyed perspective that arose from the albums creation, the duo chose a title evocative of youthful wonder. After everything we went through, we came to a place of understanding that we have no control, that each new day is an adventure we need to approach with beginners eyes, says Harrington. Wright adds: Through all the discomfort, we took it as our mission to stay humble and hungry, to know that everything will change and to be prepared to find something of real value in thatand to find ourselves in it, too.The follow-up to 2018s Pretty Colors For Your Actions, Juniors came to life at The Tall Housethe Northeastern Massachusetts home where Wright and Harrington lived together for six years with their wives, pets, and Harringtons firstborn son, eventually moving out in August 2020. In a departure from the elaborate production process that yielded its predecessor, the two musicians wrote and recorded most of Juniors in isolation, holing up on the third floor of the household they liken to a joyfully anarchic artist commune. It all happened in this tiny, hectic, beautiful space where our wives were also working from home, both pregnant, and theres a dog and a cat that hated each other, and then Tims toddler whod just started walking would come barging in and start dancing mid-take, joining in a song with us, Wright recalls. Despite the nonstop disruption, Tall Heights soon found their way to a shapeshifting sound that illuminates their singularity like never before. Because we were cut loose and isolated within this space and time, we ended up capturing something incredibly and uniquely us in the new sound we created, Harrington points out.In putting the finishing touches on Juniors, Tall Heights headed to Omaha and worked with producers Mike Mogis (Paul McCartney, Phoebe Bridgers, Bright Eyes) and Oliver Hill, who helped refine and enrich the backdrop of their emotionally raw songwriting. On the opening track Keeps Me Light, the band muses on the ineffable comfort and safety of true connection, intensifying the tracks radiant mood with the luminous vocals of a Berklee College of Music a cappella group called Upper Structure. Revealing the complexity of Juniors, Tall Heights then drift into the wistful reverie of Locked Out, a song inspired by Wrights struggle to help his wife through a severe bout of anxiety. Paul and I each wrote the lyrics to Locked Out, which I think points back to how intertwined our lives have become, says Harrington. Its so unlikely that I could have felt his pain as hard as I didbut because I was living it too in that house, whats fiercely personal to Paul became fiercely personal to me.The most commanding track on Juniors, Hear It Again took shape as Tall Heights messed around with an assortment of synthesizers theyd borrowed from their friend and tourmate Ben Folds, arriving at a tender rumination on home and belonging. Weve spent so much of our time living on the road, and that song is our way of asking, What if thats the place where we feel the most safety and consistency and stability? says Harrington. In a particularly poignant turn, The Mountain reflects on the losses that Harrington and Wright recently suffered, transforming that heartache into a moment of healing. A friend had texted us a photo of his grandfather on the day before he died: he was sitting in a hospital bed looking out the window at the mountains, and the sun was shining on his face, says Wright. That song came from thinking about our friends grandmother saying goodbye to his grandfather and sending him off on his journey, but in a way it also speaks to how theres been so much collective loss over the past year. Meanwhile, on Raindrop, Tall Heights offer up a meditation on emotional responsibility. Sometimes a relationship can get intense in the wrong place and time, says Harrington. So, in the end, its a song about choosing which relationships deserve your all, and when to let things go and move on with your life.Looking back on the tumultuous year that gave rise to their latest album, Harrington and Wright note that theyve adopted the Juniors outlook as something of a spiritual ethos: a realization that every new endeavorno matter how familiarwill undoubtedly present new challenges and extraordinary surprise, ultimately reminding them that they are still but juniors. I feel ready to view each next chapter of Tall Heights as another round of Juniors, says Harrington. This experience has emboldened us to create in any situationbecause when life got very intense, we doubled-down on what we care about the most: creating songs together. And it felt fresh and new in that context. And although leaving the Tall House proved nothing short of heartbreaking, the duo have found their devoted bond to be stronger than ever. This record gave us the chance to really understand what we have in each other as weird partners on the great journey of self-exploration, says Wright. We know now that the Tall House can be a state of mind, not just a place of refuge. So while chaos continues, were able to fully see the beauty that can come from it.

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