April 2010 Archives

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar today approved the Cape Wind renewable energy project on a 25-mile section of federal submerged lands in Nantucket Sound, but will require the developer of the $1 billion wind farm to agree to additional binding measures to minimize the potential adverse impacts of construction and operation of the facility. 

"With this decision we are beginning a new direction in our Nation's energy future, ushering in America's first offshore wind energy facility and opening a new chapter in the history of this region," Salazar said in an announcement at the State House in Boston.

The Cape Wind project would be the first offshore wind farm for the US, generating enough power to meet 75% of the electricity demand for Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket Island, combined with an average anticipated output of 182 megawatts, and a maximum of 468 megawatts.

The project will also cut carbon dioxide emissions from conventional power plants by 700 000 tons annually.

First of many?

Although a number of offshore wind farms are being constructed in Europe and some proposed in Canada, according to the New York Times, developers are waiting for the approval of the first US offshore wind farm before formally submitting more applications in the US.

Offshore wind farms are about twice as expensive as land-based wind farms, although they usually have access to more frequent and stronger winds, which can make them cost competitive if a carbon tax is introduced. Roughly 1 million megawatts of potential Atlantic wind energy exists along the US east coast.

The project didn't emerge completely unscathed after the Department of the Interior review: Changes to the design were proposed to diminish the visual effects of the project from the shore; the turbines are to be painted off-white to contrast with the sea and sky yet remain visible to birds; nighttime lighting for air and sea traffic will be reduced; and the number of turbines has been reduced from 170 to 130.

"After almost a decade of exhaustive study and analyses, I believe that this undertaking can be developed responsibly and with consideration to the historic and cultural resources in the project area," Salazar said.

Paul Guinnessy

Following President Obama’s address at the Kennedy Space Center regarding the administration’s new space exploration policy, NASA administrator Charles Bolden, Office of Science and Technology Policy director John Holdren, and retired Lockheed Martin chairman and CEO Norman Augustine spoke to a gathering of government, private, and academic leaders.

Holdren said that the administration's new strategy offered a number of important advantages, such as faster access to space, less cost to the taxpayer, and a wider range of space destinations. He predicted the policy will gain support as more people come to fully understand it.

Augustine briefly described how the 10-member commission that he chaired examined NASA’s current space exploration programs, budgets, and objectives. Having 90 days in which to write a report, the committee was tasked with offering options but not specific recommendations.

Explaining that a nation’s space policy depends heavily on how much it can afford, Augustine reviewed some of the factors considered by the committee. Among them was the years-ago decision made by the Bush administration to retire the space shuttle. The committee concluded that keeping the shuttle in active service would consume funding that is needed for the exploration program and increase the time that American astronauts would be confined to a low Earth orbit.

The administration’s new policy recommends the International Space Station be kept in service for an additional five years beyond its original retirement date of 2010. Augustine said this would be “a very good investment” that would avoid damaging US relationships with the station’s international partners.

Regarding the Constellation medium- and heavy-lift launch vehicle program, Augustine described how appropriations for the program had been about one-third less than what was originally planned, which has resulted in a significant disparity between the program’s objectives and its funding. The original program is, he said, “not executable.” The Constellation’s Ares I has had a schedule slippage of between three and five years, which will result in the rocket being put in service too late to ferry crews to the shuttle, and too early for use in exploration. It is important for the US to develop a heavy-lift launch vehicle such as the Ares V for deep space exploration. Work on this rocket has barely started because funding has been shifted away from it to other programs. Augustine concurred with the president’s decision to develop the Orion space capsule as a space station rescue vehicle.

One of the most controversial aspects of the administration’s new space policy involves the eventual use of commercial contractors for the transportation of astronauts to the space station following the shuttle’s retirement. Augustine contends commercial interests would be able to provide this service at less expense than the shuttle would. In addition, federal contracting for this service would encourage the development of commercial space providers in much the same way that the government’s use of commercial airlines did for the delivery of air mail. “I believe our industry is up to the job,” Augustine said, asking if critics have more faith in Russia’s Soyuz to transport American astronauts to the space station than US companies.

Augustine predicted that after spending tens of billions of dollars the US would land humans on the Moon in 2020, which, he said, many would see as their “grandfather’s” space program. Augustine said it would take decades for America to land humans on Mars. In the intervening years, much could be learned from sending Americans to other destinations such as asteroids, Lagrange points, and an orbital mission to Mars.

In concluding his remarks, Augustine explained that the administration’s new space policy is “very close” to Variant 5B in the Augustine Commission’s report, and would be “worthy of our nation.” It would, Augustine said, transform our space program from one of transportation to exploration.

Written by Richard M. Jones; edited by Paul Guinnessy. Originally published at the American Institute of Physics FYI.

If you looked merely at the realm of politics, says Slate's Clive Thompson, it would be easy to believe that the question "Is climate change really happening?" is still unresolved. In recent months, skeptics have attacked climate science with renewed vigor, through faking scandals or denouncing global warming as a hoax.

The results of these attacks have been seen in opinion polls: A Gallup study found that Americans' concern over global warming peaked two years ago, and has steadily declined since.

But there's one area where doubt hasn't grown—says Thompson—and where, indeed, people are more and more certain that climate change is not only real, but imminent: the world of industry and commerce.

Scientist Steve Easterbrook of Toronto University has been following the case of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit's email server that were hacked into and made public with great interest.

In particular, Easterbrook has posted a number of comments at RealClimate.org about the Guardian’s investigation of the CRU emails fiasco.

The Guardian has, until recently, had an outstandingly good record on it’s climate change reporting says Easterbrook. It commissioned Fred Pearce to do a detailed investigation into the emails. While some parts of his final report are excellent, other parts demonstrate a complete misunderstanding of how science works says Easterbrook, especially the sections dealing with the peer-review process.

These were just hopelessly wrong, he says, and led to a number of rebuttals of the specific allegations.

Guardian opinion columnist George Monbiot, who frequently writes about climate science, has been arguing for Phil Jones to resign as head of the CRU at East Anglia, on the basis that his handling of the freedom of information (FOI) requests was unprofessional.

The problem with both Pearce’s investigation, and Monbiot’s criticisms of Jones is that neither has any idea of what academic research looks like from the inside, nor how scientists normally talk to one another argues Easterbrook.

The following essay below is Easterbrook's attempt to explain this context, and in particular why scientists talking freely among themselves might seem to rude or worse.

I should add one disclaimer says Easterbrook: "I don’t mean to suggest here that scientists are not nice people – the climate scientists I’ve gotten to know over the past few years are some of the nicest people you could ever ask to meet. It’s just that scientists are extremely passionate about the integrity of their work, and don’t take kindly to people wasting their time."

Paul Guinnessy

Weak management of the National Ignition Facility is being blamed for more cost overruns and delays to experiments at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory project, according to a recently released report by congressional auditors. The cost of NIF's experimental program has already grown by 25%, or $400 million, to an estimated $2 billion through fiscal year 2012, and the scheduled completion of ignition experiments has been pushed back by a year, to September 2012, says the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

US President Obama announced in Florida yesterday at the Kennedy Space Center, that the US will not be sending humans back to the Moon, but will instead send them to near-Earth astroids by 2025 and onto Mars by 2035 "and bring them back safely." Obama also committed more forcefully his administration to pushing NASA to do more research in Earth sciences, space science and in technology innovation, and to keep the international space station going to beyond 2020.

The second of three committees looking into the so-called climategate emails, has issued its report.

This committee, led by Royal Society fellow Ron Oxburgh, was asked by the University of East Angelia to look into the science done at the university's Climate Research Unit (CRU). The committee said in its report that they could find no evidence of malpractice or sloppiness among the data techniques used by the center.

For example, regarding the analysis of tree ring data the committee said.

Although inappropriate statistical tools with the potential for producing misleading results have been used by some other groups, presumably by accident rather than design, in the CRU papers that we examined we did not come across any inappropriate usage although the methods they used may not have been the best for the purpose. It is not clear, however, that better methods would have produced significantly different results. The published work also contains many cautions about the limitations of the data and their interpretation.

The committee did recommend that professional statisticians should be used as collaborators in climate research, as a lot of the data analysis is "fundamentally statistical." They also recommended that researchers document the judgmental decisions they make over which data sets to include or exclude, in order "so that the work can in principle be replicated by others."

After reading publications and interviewing the senior staff of CRU in depth, we are satisfied that the CRU tree-ring work has been carried out with integrity, and that allegations of deliberate misrepresentation and unjustified selection of data are not valid. In the event CRU scientists were able to give convincing answers to our detailed questions about data choice, data handling and statistical methodology. The Unit freely admits that many data analyses they made in the past are superseded and they would not do things that way today.

One area that the committee did criticize, is how outside groups had reported CRU research, particularly the "over- simplifications that omit serious discussion of uncertainties emphasized by the original authors."

For example, CRU publications repeatedly emphasize the discrepancy between instrumental and tree-based proxy reconstructions of temperature during the late 20th century, but presentations of this work by the IPCC and others have sometimes neglected to highlight this issue. While we find this regrettable, we could find no such fault with the peer-reviewed papers we examined.

The committee also criticized the UK government for requiring payment for freedom of information requests, stating that it went against the current government's policy on openness, and agreed that the owners of raw data should be ones to decide when to release such datasets to the public, not groups such as CRU who use them.

Paul Guinnessy

Related link
UEA climate science panel announced

Representatives from more than 40 countries have gathered in Washington, DC, to discuss nonproliferation and securing nuclear material.

In surveys of scientific literacy, Americans are less likely than people
in the rest of the world to believe that humans evolved from earlier species and that the universe began with a big bang.

But the 2010 edition of Science and Engineering Indicators, the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) biennial compilation of the state of global science, omits any mention of those two hot-button issues in its chapter on public attitudes toward science and technology reports Science.

A section describing the survey results and related issues was edited out by the National Science Board, NSF's oversight body and the official publisher of
Indicators.

Earlier this week the Obama administration released the new version of the nuclear posture review (NPR), just days before US president Obama is to fly to Europe to sign the new START treaty with Russia.

As frequently stated in Washington, money talks, and it is now money that is at the heart of the problem surrounding the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository facility. After decades of planning, and more than $10 billion spent, the Obama administration recently announced that Yucca Mountain would no longer be a candidate for storing US nuclear waste (see also Overhauling US Nuclear Waste Policy).

NASA officials laid out plans last Wednesday to boost spending on climate research substantially over the next five years, to make up for cutbacks during the Bush administration.

The news was widely covered in the media, including the Washington Post.

Edward Weiler, the agency's associate administrator for science, said that NASA's Earth science budget will get a $2.4 billion, or 62%, increase through 2015. By that point, the program will have launched as many as 10 new missions, collecting information about ocean temperatures, ice coverage, ozone depletion, and the central question of how much carbon dioxide is being released through human activities.

NPR also covered the budget request, while in a related piece on the BBC website on the new US exploration strategy, NASA administrator Charlie Bolden gives an interview in which he reflects on the end of the space shuttle program and the battle to win over critics of the new strategy.

At the end of March, 200 scientists gathered at the Asilomar resort in California to try to determine how research into the possibilities of geoengineering the planet to combat climate change should proceed.

The scientists say it’s necessary because of the riskiness and scale of the experiments that could be undertaken—and the moral implications of their work to intentionally alter Earth’s climate.

The conference organizers declared that geoengineering research is "indispensable" but said that it should be done with "humility," reports Science's Eli Kintisch. Governments and the public should work together to decide what schemes are "viable, appropriate, and ethical," the statement added. Cuts in greenhouse emissions should be a priority, it said, mirroring statements by the American Geophysical Union and the UK Royal Society.

Wired's Alexis Madrigal points out that this meeting harkens back to the February 1975 Asilomar meeting of molecular biologists hashing out rules to govern what was then the hot-button scientific issue of the day: recombinant DNA and the possibility of biohazards. The discussion and the eventual rules that came out of it, were messier than most would probably like to recall, adds Madrigal.

Yale University's Eniviroment 360 reporter Jeff Goodell also looked at a comparison between the two meetings, stating that Asilomar 2.0 seemed to pale in comparison. For one thing, geoengineering may be a scary idea, but the dangers were nowhere near as immediate as the unintentional release of genetically modified organisms, he says.

But should this group determine whether geoengineering should go ahead? Mother Jones's Jim Rendon talks to some groups who are worried about the potential risks involved.

Related Physics Today content
Geoengineering: What, how, and for whom? February 2009
Will desperate climates call for desperate geoengineering measures? August 2008
Geoscience research for our energy future August 2008

If there is nothing else that the disparate membership of the committee that was formed to advise the US on what to do with its highly radioactive waste can agree upon, it was in accord that no imminent crisis looms because of President Obama’s decision to terminate the more than two-decade-long plan to bury the waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

“There is no crisis, but there is an urgency to allay the world’s concerns,” said Mark Ayers, president of the building and construction trades department of the AFL-CIO, and one of 15 members of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future. “We don’t have to do anything quickly to keep the public safe,” agreed John Rowe, CEO of Exelon Corp, which co-owns and operates 17 nuclear generating plants. “But we do have to do something decisively to gain credibility with the public.” Speaking at the commission’s inaugural public meeting on 25 March, Rowe added that the lack of a permanent solution for spent fuel is one of several reasons that Exelon has not been in the vanguard of companies that are eager to build more reactors.

Co-chaired by former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-IN) and former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, the commission was announced on 1 February by Secretary of Energy Steven Chu. The advisory panel has been given a full two years to provide its recommendations to Chu, although an interim report is expected in the fall of 2011.

The commissioners were briefed by federal officials about the enormity of the waste problem and the nation’s inability to deal with it. The current inventory of commercial spent fuel is now nearing 63 000 tons—approaching the 70 000 ton capacity for a repository that was imposed by statute. The Department of Energy, which had contracted to accept commercial waste in 1998, is now paying utilities about $500 million annually for the marginal costs the companies incur from keeping the material onsite. Matthew Crozat, a senior policy analyst in DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, told the commission that the waste will grow to 100 000 metric tons by 2050, even if all US operating reactors were to be shut down when their current licenses expire, and no new reactors were to be built. Alternatively, he said, spent fuel inventories would balloon to more than 200 000 tons if the nuclear industry were to grow at a rapid pace, which he defined as nine new reactors coming on line in each year after 2020.

In addition, Yucca Mountain was meant to serve as the destination for high-level liquid nuclear waste generated during cold war weapons production and currently held in underground tanks at several DOE sites. More than 20 000 canisters of that material were to be shipped to the Nevada repository after solidification into a glass-like material, said Frank Marcinowski, of DOE’s Environmental Management division.

Former Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman Richard Meserve noted that the on-site storage of spent fuels in so-called dry casks has taken much of the heat off of finding a long-term solution. But he warned that the spent fuel storage problem will become more acute as some older reactors are retired and decommissioned in the years ahead. Former senator and commissioner Pete Domenici (R-NM) touted the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in his state as an example for a geological storage facility, although WIPP was designed exclusively as a repository for slightly radioactive transuranic wastes generated during nuclear weapons production. Per Peterson, a nuclear engineering professor at UC Berkeley, said that a new waste policy must be more flexible than the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which offered no alternatives to Yucca Mountain and is unable to accommodate either the changes in technology or in the geopolitical landscape that have occurred over the past 25 years.

Chu has instructed the commission to consider the possibility of reprocessing commercial spent fuel, an option that has been prohibited in the US since the late 1970s due to fears that it could risk nuclear proliferation. Chu has also made clear that revival of the Yucca Mountain project, which has consumed more than $10 billion, is not among the options. That message was confirmed when DOE in March formally withdrew the Bush administration’s 2008 application from the NRC for a license to operate the proposed repository.

David Kramer