American nuclear is in 25-year-old Isaiah Taylor’s blood: his great-grandfather worked on the Manhattan Project. In 2023, Taylor, who dropped out of high school to work in tech, started his own nuclear company, Valar Atomics. It’s currently developing a small test reactor, named after Taylor’s great-grandfather. But the company says …
Read More »Grid-Scale Battery Storage Is Quietly Revolutionizing the Energy System
Grid batteries have a halo effect for other power generators too. Most thermal power plants—coal, gas, nuclear—prefer to run at a steady pace. Ramping up and down to match demand takes time and costs money, but with batteries soaking up some of the variability, thermal power plants can stay closer …
Read More »Finland Could Be the First Country in the World to Bury Nuclear Waste Permanently
Together with his colleagues, Jinshan Pan, a professor of corrosion science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, published a study in January 2023 devoted to the risk of sulfides in groundwater corroding the copper used for spent nuclear fuel containers. “More work is needed to define […] the …
Read More »This Artificial Wetland Is Reusing Wastewater to Revive a Lost Ecosystem
In the arid region south of Mexicali, where the pale desert dominates the landscape, the Las Arenitas wetland feels like a mirage. But it is real, and is an oasis for endemic and migratory birds that cross the Colorado River delta. Here, just south of the US-Mexico border, used water …
Read More »As Summer Approaches, Federal Cuts Threaten Program to Keep Vulnerable People Cool
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The summer of 2021 was brutal for residents of the Pacific Northwest. Cities across the region from Portland, Oregon, to Quillayute, Washington, broke temperature records by several degrees. In Washington, as the searing heat wave settled …
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