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 primary idea behind photo voltaic geoengineering is that by spraying sure particles excessive above the planet, people may replicate some quantity of daylight again into area as a method of counteracting local weather change. But critics have argued that an intervention that would tweak the complete planet’s local weather system is just too harmful to check in the true world.
The single, small balloon experiment got here to symbolize all of those fears—and, ultimately, it was greater than the researchers had been ready to tackle. Last month, a decade after the undertaking was first proposed, Harvard formally introduced the undertaking’s termination. So what went unsuitable? And what does that failure say concerning the latitude that researchers need to discover such a controversial topic? Read the total story.
—James Temple
Why the lifetime of nuclear vegetation is getting longer
The common age of reactors in nuclear energy vegetation all over the world is creeping up. In the US, which has extra working reactors than another nation, the typical reactor is 42 years outdated. Nearly 90% of reactors in Europe have been round for 30 years or extra.
Older reactors, particularly smaller ones, have been shut down in droves attributable to financial pressures, significantly in areas with different cheap sources of electrical energy, like low-cost pure fuel. But there may nonetheless be a variety of life left in older nuclear reactors.