In March 2017, at a small summit in Washington, DC, two Harvard professors, David Keith and Frank Keutsch, laid out plans to conduct what would have been the primary photo voltaic geoengineering experiment within the stratosphere.
The fundamental idea behind photo voltaic geoengineering is that by spraying sure particles excessive above the planet, people might mirror some quantity of daylight again into area as a method of counteracting local weather change. However critics have argued that an intervention that might tweak your complete planet’s local weather system is simply too harmful to review in the actual world.
The only, small balloon experiment got here to characterize all of those fears—and, ultimately, it was greater than the researchers had been ready to tackle. Final month, a decade after the undertaking was first proposed, Harvard formally introduced the undertaking’s termination. So what went incorrect? And what does that failure say in regards to the latitude that researchers should discover such a controversial topic? Learn the complete story.
—James Temple
Why the lifetime of nuclear crops is getting longer
The common age of reactors in nuclear energy crops all over the world is creeping up. Within the US, which has extra working reactors than every other nation, the typical reactor is 42 years previous. Almost 90% of reactors in Europe have been round for 30 years or extra.
Older reactors, particularly smaller ones, have been shut down in droves because of financial pressures, notably in areas with different cheap sources of electrical energy, like low-cost pure gasoline. However there might nonetheless be lots of life left in older nuclear reactors.
