Category Archives: Uncategorized

Will the 4 Waves of Sanctions Stop Russia?

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Supercooled gas has quickly become one of the world’s most important energy sources—and a flashpoint between Russia and the U.S. Nowhere is that contest more apparent than in Russia’s Arctic north. An enormous new coastal facility is being built there to produce liquefied natural gas, a key project for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The U.S. is using a barrage of sanctions to cripple the initiative, known as Arctic LNG 2. These have stopped Russia from taking delivery of specialized, colossal tankers that it needs to transport the gas, and made it hard to build alternative vessels domestically. “Our role is to ensure Arctic LNG 2 is dead in the water,” Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for energy resources, told a conference in Switzerland in April 2024.

Globally, LNG is ascendant. Demand is buoyant as governments ditch dirtier coal and the uptake of power-hungry artificial intelligence accelerates. Supply is surging too, and players such as industry heavyweight Qatar have major expansion plans. For Russia’s part, Putin aims to more than triple LNG exports in the coming years. His goal: Bring in more money to fund the war in Ukraine and offset a decline in Russia’s traditional business of exporting gas via pipelines. ..

About 32 million metric tons a year of capacity are under construction, according to Rystad Energy, a consulting firm, on top of an existing 29 million tons. In December 2023, the first of three liquefaction plants, known in the industry as trains, was completed at Arctic LNG 2, and the facility began producing LNG. The milestone, despite U.S. sanctions, was lauded as a win for Moscow by analysts and Russian officials. A few months later, however, victory looks less certain.

Exports were supposed to begin in the first quarter of 2024, according to Russia’s energy minister. But the custom-built ships that Novatek, the Russian energy giant behind the project, needs to break through frozen parts of the Arctic Ocean haven’t been delivered.

Hanwha Ocean, a South Korean shipbuilder, said it has canceled plans to build three vessels for Arctic LNG 2 for sanctions-related reasons. Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, a Japanese shipping company, has said it also won’t provide vessels to Arctic LNG 2 despite having planned to charter three carriers. Without ships, Novatek can’t export any gas. As a result, LNG output has ground to a halt, and the facility is mostly recirculating already-produced gas, according to people familiar with the plant. Novatek didn’t respond to a request for comment.

France’s TotalEnergies, which holds 10% of Arctic LNG 2, declared a force majeure earlier this year, indicating it can’t supply customers due to circumstances beyond its control. Total said it was complying with sanctions and doesn’t plan to deliver gas from the project this year.

In total, the U.S. has hit Russia’s fledgling LNG industry with four waves of sanctions since September. It has targeted operating companies for the Arctic LNG 2 project, storage vessels, shipping companies it suspected were seeking to buy specialized carriers for the project, and companies working on a second facility near the Baltic Sea.

Excerpts from Anna Hirtenstein, The U.S. Is Trying to Cripple Russia’s Vast Arctic LNG Project, WSJ, Apr. 14, 2024

13 Most Radioactive Places in the World

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  1. Fukushima, Japan 2. Chernobyl, Pripyat, Ukraine 3. The Polygon, Semiplataninsk, Kazakhstan 4. The Hanford Site, Washington, USA 5. The Siberian Chemical Combine, Seversk, Russia 6. Zapadnyi Mining and Chemical Combine, Mailuu-Suu, Kyrgyzstan 7.The Somalian Coast, Somalia (illegal dumping) 8.Instituto Goiano de Radioterapia, Goias, Brazil (robbery at abandoned hospital) 9.Sellafield, United Kingdom 10. Mayak, Russia 11. BOMARC Site RW-01, The McGuire Air Force Base, Burlington County, New Jersey ,USA 12. Church Rock Uranium Mill, Church Rock, New Mexico, USA 13. Fort d’Aubervilliers, Paris, France

As reported by Engineering News

Floating Nuclear Plants: Akademik Lomonosov

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The physical launch of the reactor unit on the starboard side of the floating power plant Akademik Lomonosov happened on Friday. The reactor reached the minimum controlled power level at 17.58 Moscow time,” a spokesperson for Rosatom told Ria Novosti.

Comprehensive tests of the reactor will start within a few days, RBCreports. Testing will continue until first half of 2019, when the floating nuclear power plant will be towed from its current location at the Atomflot-base north of Murmansk where the plant is moored next to Russia’s fleet of nuclear powered icebreakers and service vessels.

“Akademik Lomonosov” has two reactors and also the other will be test-started in the nearest future….After reactor testing, the plan is to tow the plant across the Barents Sea and further east along the Northern Sea Route to the port of Pevek on the Chukotka Peninsula in the east Arctic next spring.  The two KLT-40S reactor units can generate up to 70 MW of electric energy additional to providing thermal heating to the town of Pevek.

Excerpts, Thomas Nilsen, First reactor started at floating nuclear plant, The Barents Observer, Nov. 2,  2018

Revival of Nuclear Industry – Japan

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Japan prepares to  reopen Shikoku Electric Power’s Ikata nuclear plant, nestled next to Japan’s inland sea at the base of the verdant Sadamisaki peninsula. Nearly eight years after an earthquake and tsunami triggered nuclear meltdowns at Tokyo Electric Power’s Fukushima Daiichi plant, the battered industry is making a quiet and somewhat unexpected return in Japan.

Ikata is a poster child for that recovery. In September 2018, a court reversed a decision that had idled Shikoku Electric’s sole nuclear reactor for about a year, paving the way for the operator to re-open the facility last week.  Regional utilities like Shikoku Electric have aggressively fought a string of lawsuits since 2011, hiring veteran lawyers to beef up their legal teams. At the same time, they wooed towns where nuclear plants are based, visiting with residents door to door while the government kept up a stream of generous subsidies for local projects.

Thanks in large part to this strategy, Japan is on track to have nine reactors running in the near future…That is a far cry from the 54 running before 2011 – all of which were idled after the Fukushima disaster – but more than analysts and experts expected, considering it seemed at the time like the end of the road for the country’s nuclear industry…

The quiet revival of Japan’s nuclear industry is most tangible in rural areas like Ikata, which are home to the bulk of the country’s nuclear plants…The town, with 9,500 residents, relies on nuclear power for a third of its annual revenue. Since 1974, Ikata has received more than 101.7 billion yen ($908.4 million) in such payments.  These funds literally built the town; Ikata’s roads, schools, hospitals, fire stations and even five traditional “taiko” drums for festivals were all paid for with subsidies.  The town and utility’s mutual dependence stretch back decades.

Excerpts from  Mari Saito, Treading carefully, Japan’s nuclear industry makes a comeback, Reuters, Nov. 1, 2018

 

 

 

Nuclear Waste Above Sea Level: Pilgrim

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Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station (PNPS) is the only nuclear power plant operating in Massachusetts. …On October 13, 2015, plant owners announced that it would close by June 1, 2019, citing “market conditions and increased costs,” which would have included tens of millions of dollars of necessary safety upgrades.

Up to 2015,all of the nuclear reactor fuel rods from the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station were submerged in a deep pool of water, which was running out of space.  In 2015, the company started to use casks to store the waste. Cask storage is used at many nuclear plants in the United States to deal with excess nuclear reactor waste. The casks, 18 feet tall and 11 feet wide, are designed to withstand a truck bomb or a tornado-borne projectile moving at 360 miles per hour.

The plant in 2018 had 17 steel-reinforced concrete cylinders filled with the radioactive waste on a concrete pad about 25 feet above sea level and about 200 feet from shore.  It announced it was planning to move these 360,000-pound casks to a new pad on an existing parking lot that’s about 75 feet above mean sea level and 700 feet from shore to avoid risks associated with sea-level rise due to climate change.

Flowering the Sahara

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The installation of large-scale wind and solar power generation facilities in the Sahara could cause more local rainfall, particularly in the neighboring Sahel region. This effect,  could increase coverage by vegetation, creating a positive feedback that would further increase rainfall.

Wind and solar farms offer a major pathway to clean, renewable energies. However, these farms would significantly change land surface properties, and, if sufficiently large, the farms may lead to unintended climate consequences. In this study, we used a climate model with dynamic vegetation to show that large-scale installations of wind and solar farms covering the Sahara lead to a local temperature increase and more than a twofold precipitation increase, especially in the Sahel, through increased surface friction and reduced albedo. The resulting increase in vegetation further enhances precipitation, creating a positive albedo–precipitation–vegetation feedback that contributes ~80% of the precipitation increase for wind farms…

This highlights that, in addition to avoiding anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and the resulting warming, wind and solar energy could have other unexpected beneficial climate impacts when deployed at a large scale in the Sahara, where conditions are especially favorable for these impacts. Efforts to build such large-scale wind and solar farms for electricity generation may still face many technological (e.g., transmission, efficiency), socioeconomic (e.g., cost, politics), and environmental challenges, but this goal has become increasingly achievable and cost-effective

Exceprts from Yan Li, Climate model shows large-scale wind and solar farms in the Sahara increase rain and vegetation, Science, Sept. 7, 2018

Who Owns the Genes in the Seas?

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It’s an eye-catching statistic: A single company, the multinational chemical giant BASF, owns nearly half of the patents issued on 13,000 DNA sequences from marine organisms. That number is now helping fuel high-stakes global negotiations on a contentious question: how to fairly regulate the growing exploitation of genes collected in the open ocean, beyond any nation’s jurisdiction.

The negotiations that took place at the UN in September 2018 aim, inter alia, to replace today’s free-for-all scramble for marine genetic resources with a more orderly and perhaps more just regime.  Many developed nations and industry groups are adamant that any new rules should not complicate efforts to discover and patent marine genes that may help create better chemicals, cosmetics, and crops. But many developing nations want rules that will ensure they, too, share in any benefits. Scientists are also watching. A regulatory regime that is too burdensome could have “a negative impact” on scientists engaged in “noncommercial ocean research,” warns Robert Blasiak, a marine policy specialist at the Stockholm Resilience Centre.  It is not the first time nations have wrangled over how to share genetic resources. Under another U.N. pact, the 2010 Nagoya Protocol, 105 countries have agreed to rules to prevent so-called biopiracy: the removal of biological resources—such as plant or animal DNA—from a nation’s habitats without proper permission or compensation.

Those rules don’t apply in international waters, which begin 200 nautical miles from shore and are attracting growing interest from researchers and companies searching for valuable genes. The first patent on DNA from a marine organism was granted in 1988 for a sequence from the European eel, which spends part of its life in freshwater. Since then, more than 300 companies, universities, and others have laid claim to sequences from 862 marine species, a team led by Blasiak reported in June in Science Advances. Extremophiles have been especially prized. Genes from worms found in deep-sea hydrothermal vents, for example, encode polymers used in cosmetics. And BASF has patented other worm DNA that the company believes could help improve crop yields. The conglomerate, based in Ludwigshafen, Germany, says it found most of its 5700 sequences in public databases…

It may take years for nations to agree on a marine biodiversity treaty; [A]n “ideological divide” between developing and developed countries has, so far, “led to stalemate” on how to handle marine genetic resources, says Harriet Harden-Davies, a policy expert at the University of Wollongong in Australia.

Most developing nations want to expand the “common heritage” philosophy embedded in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which declares that resources found on or under the seabed, such as minerals, are the “common heritage of mankind.” Applying that principle to genetic resources would promote “solidarity in the preservation and conservation of a good we all share,” South Africa’s negotiating team said in a recent statement. Under such an approach, those who profit from marine genes could, for example, pay into a global fund that would be used to compensate other nations for the use of shared resources, possibly supporting scientific training or conservation.

But developed nations including the United States, Russia, and Japan oppose extending the “common heritage” language, fearing burdensome and unworkable regulations. They argue access to high seas genes should be guaranteed to all nations under the principle of the “freedom of the high seas,” also enshrined in the Law of the Sea. That approach essentially amounts to finders keepers, although countries traditionally have balanced unfettered access with other principles, such as the value of conservation, in developing rules for shipping, fishing, and research in international waters.

The European Union and other parties want to sidestep the debate and seek a middle ground. One influential proposal would allow nations to prospect for high seas genes, but require that they publish the sequences they uncover. Companies could also choose to keep sequences private temporarily, in order to be able to patent them, if they contribute to an international fund that would support marine research by poorer nations. “Researchers all around the world should be put all on a level playing field,” says Arianna Broggiato, a Brussels-based legal adviser for the consultancy eCoast, who co-authored a paper on the concept this year in The International Journal of Marine and Coastal Law.

Exceprts from Eli Kintisch U.N. tackles gene prospecting on the high seas, Science, Sept. 7, 2018