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Tel Aviv Comes Under Fire As Hamas Rockets Pierce Israel's 'Iron Dome'The Israeli military said eight projectiles crossed into its territory after being launched from the southern Gaza city of Rafah.
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Elon Musk expects AI will replace all human jobs, lead to ‘universal high income’"The question will really be one of meaning, of how — if a computer can do, and the robots can do everything better than you … does your life have meaning?" Musk said.
Woman Wonders Why Cat Didn't Eat Breakfast, Then Reason Becomes Clear"She's just trying to clean up the mess. Such a good helper," wrote one TikTok user.
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Texas BBQ, with a foreign flavorThe Lone Star State's distinctive barbecue is getting some impressive variations, with the help of pitmasters with roots in such places as Egypt, Vietnam and Japan. Correspondent Lee Cowan talks with some of the new bright lights of Texas BBQ, and with Daniel Vaughn, barbecue editor of Texas Monthly. (This story was originally broadcast November 19, 2023.)
Indigenous artist Jeffrey Gibson, on view at the Venice BiennaleJeffrey Gibson, a member of the Mississippi band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, is the first Indigenous artist to be chosen to represent the United States with a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale, which is considered the Olympics of the art world. Correspondent Seth Doane visits the site of the Biennale, and meets with Gibson at his studio in Upstate New York, where he created his exhibition titled "the space in which to place me."
Indigenous artist Jeffrey Gibson, on view at the Venice BiennaleJeffrey Gibson, a member of the Mississippi band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, is the first Indigenous artist to be chosen to represent the United States with a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale, which is considered the Olympics of the art world. Correspondent Seth Doane visits the site of the Biennale, and meets with Gibson at his studio in Upstate New York, where he created his exhibition titled "the space in which to place me."
North Korea Accuses US of Spying at BorderThe United States is accused of conducting regular reconnaissance missions along the central Korean border this month.
Almanac: May 26"Sunday Morning" looks back at historical events on this date.
Almanac: May 26"Sunday Morning" looks back at historical events on this date.
World War II veterans speak to the agesThe National WWII Museum in New Orleans is in a race against time to preserve the stories of the men and women who fought in the war effort. Thanks to voice recognition software and AI, veterans will be able to "converse" with future generations.
World War II veterans speak to the agesThe National WWII Museum in New Orleans is in a race against time to preserve the stories of the men and women who fought in the war effort. Thanks to voice recognition software and AI, veterans will be able to "converse" with future generations.
Recording World War II veterans for posterityVincent Speranza, who served as a paratrooper during the Battle of the Bulge, died last year at age 98. But visitors to the National WWII Museum in New Orleans can still talk to him, and – thanks to voice recognition software and artificial intelligence – hear answers to their questions about Speranza's experiences during and after the war. CBS News national security correspondent David Martin talks with the museum's vice president Peter Crean about the race against time to preserve the stories of the men and women who fought in the war, and with some of the veterans who will be able to "speak" to future generations.
Recording World War II veterans for posterityVincent Speranza, who served as a paratrooper during the Battle of the Bulge, died last year at age 98. But visitors to the National WWII Museum in New Orleans can still talk to him, and – thanks to voice recognition software and artificial intelligence – hear answers to their questions about Speranza's experiences during and after the war. CBS News national security correspondent David Martin talks with the museum's vice president Peter Crean about the race against time to preserve the stories of the men and women who fought in the war, and with some of the veterans who will be able to "speak" to future generations.
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The Trump hush-money trial’s greatest missesA look at some of the questionable actions by Donald Trump, his lawyers, prosecutors and Justice Juan Merchan that could impact Trump’s criminal trial.
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Study a new language ahead of summer travels with Memorial Day savings on Babbel, now $140Learn a new language for less!
Suspended as Biden Special Envoy, now teaching at the IviesImagine this headline: Alec Baldwin, on trial for involuntary manslaughter during film shoot, teaching seminar on Hollywood gun safety. Ludicrous, right? Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani (R) meets with former U.S. Special Envoy to Iran Robert Malley (L) in Doha, Qatar on October 19, 2021 — before the latter had his security...
Suspended as Biden Special Envoy, now teaching at the IviesImagine this headline: Alec Baldwin, on trial for involuntary manslaughter during film shoot, teaching seminar on Hollywood gun safety. Ludicrous, right? Qatari Foreign Minister Sheikh Mohammed Bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani (R) meets with former U.S. Special Envoy to Iran Robert Malley (L) in Doha, Qatar on October 19, 2021 — before the latter had his security...
Troubled Southwest Virginia draws promise of help from Youngkin, lawmakersVirginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) rolled out a “holistic” plan to aid a distressed region of the state. General Assembly members have also promised help.
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Is Prince William Planning to Put Younger Royals Center Stage?Henry Nicholls/Pool via ReutersWilliam’s cousins are there for himPeter Phillips, Zara and Mike Tindall, Princess Beatrice, and Princess Eugenie all turned out to support Prince William at this week’s rain-spattered Buckingham Palace garden party, which William was hosting on behalf of King Charles and without wife Kate Middleton.The Telegraph reported that this was not the vision of the “slimmed-d0wn monarchy” oft-imputed to Charles, but rather William echoing what grandmother Queen Elizabeth had occasionally done, using cousins of her own generation as support at such occasions. Read more at The Daily Beast.
Is Prince William Planning to Put Younger Royals Center Stage?Henry Nicholls/Pool via ReutersWilliam’s cousins are there for himPeter Phillips, Zara and Mike Tindall, Princess Beatrice, and Princess Eugenie all turned out to support Prince William at this week’s rain-spattered Buckingham Palace garden party, which William was hosting on behalf of King Charles and without wife Kate Middleton.The Telegraph reported that this was not the vision of the “slimmed-d0wn monarchy” oft-imputed to Charles, but rather William echoing what grandmother Queen Elizabeth had occasionally done, using cousins of her own generation as support at such occasions. Read more at The Daily Beast.
Bridesmaid Backed for Secretly Walking out of Bride's Dress AppointmentTrying on wedding dresses should be a happy occasion, but one bridesmaid said she walked out after a hurtful betrayal.
Red Lobster’s mistakes go beyond endless shrimp A Red Lobster restaurant in Lakewood, California, US, on Wednesday, May 15, 2024. Red Lobster is closing at more than 50 of its restaurants across the country, according to a company that helps businesses liquidate restaurant equipment, reports CBS. Photographer: Eric Thayer/Bloomberg via Getty Images It wasn’t just the free shrimp that tanked Red Lobster. The Orlando-based seafood chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week citing $1 billion in debt, according to court filings. The company announced the closure of dozens of stores nationally, with plans to sell company assets — including auctioning interior furniture and kitchenware. The announcement comes after a disastrous 2023 endless shrimp promotion in which, for around $20, patrons could order as much shrimp as they wanted, prompting eating challenges by users of TikTok. But while it brought customers to stores, it also put the chain $11 million in the red. Heather Haddon covers the restaurant industry for the Wall Street Journal and broke the news about Red Lobster’s pending bankruptcy. She explains that other casual restaurants like Olive Garden — chain-mates of Red Lobster and owned by Darden Restaurants — and Applebees are experiencing the same headwinds: customers looking for cheaper eats, plus rising labor and real estate costs. Haddon says the saga of endless shrimp was just one in a long series of missteps going back a decade. In the early 2010s, the company was sold to private equity firm Golden Gate Capital which sold Red Lobster-owned real estate, making them beholden to landlords and leases. In 2016, Thai Union Group, one of the world’s biggest producers of canned tuna, took a minority stake in Red Lobster. This year, they decided to cut bait as the company continued to lose money, citing the pandemic and rising debts. Haddon spoke with Today, Explained guest host David Pierce about how Red Lobster became a restaurant icon and what contributed to its decline. Listen to the full conversation and follow Today, Explained on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Pandora or wherever you find podcasts. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. David Pierce What happened to Red Lobster this week? Heather Haddon Red Lobster declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy and they are planning to restructure as a company. Red Lobster is not closing all of its restaurants but they have closed several dozen, and they have about 600 total. They are seeking bankruptcy protection basically to deal with nearly $300 billion in debt to their creditors. By late last year, they only had $30 million left in cash, which is just not enough money to run a big, complicated business like this. And they were unable to pay a lot of their suppliers. Clearly, this is a situation that has been piling up for some time, but this is where it’s ended up. David Pierce I am confident that there is more going on here than the unlimited shrimp. And I want to get to all of it, but I have seen some people connect the dots, more or less saying unlimited shrimp cost this company so much money that it went into bankruptcy. What happened there? Heather Haddon So Red Lobster certainly has run these kinds of bottomless promotions in the past where you could get all the shrimp that you want from a certain part of the menu. But they tended to run it as a limited-time offer, you know, one day a week for a limited time or just for a certain period. The company last June said, “Hey, we’re going to run this all the time so you can come in and pay $20 and you can get as much shrimp as you want.” So it drove a lot of traffic, but the profits did not go along with those sales. David Pierce That’s the sort of thing that makes sense to me when it’s unlimited breadsticks. Unlimited shrimp — I can imagine how that would become a bad financial deal pretty fast. Heather Haddon I’ve actually talked to some restaurant executives since about that. Shrimp prices fluctuate quite a bit. And when they go up, particularly, that’s just going to cost you a lot of money. David Pierce You mentioned not all the stores are going to close. What happens at this moment for a company like Red Lobster? Heather Haddon They’re in the bankruptcy protection process. They have a CEO who is a restructuring specialist who was brought on to prepare for this bankruptcy process, when the company was already on very shaky ground. The goal was to get some new terms with their landlords and try to restructure into a new company and go forward. David Pierce Okay, so Red Lobster will continue to be open, at least for some people. Do you think the experience of going to Red Lobster is going to be really different after this bankruptcy proceeding? Heather Haddon At some point, they’ll probably try to get it in a place where it could sell. But if you look at the filing, it talks about the history of Red Lobster and its legacy. So I wouldn’t expect a lot of immediate changes, but maybe moving away from some of those limited-time offers. David Pierce Where did Red Lobster come from in the first place? This company has been around a pretty long time and is an American food institution. Heather Haddon They were founded in the late ’60s by Bill Darden, who is known as the father of casual dining. It was one of the first casual dining chains around, a place you could bring your family or a date and have a nice meal out and not break the bank. David Pierce And there wasn’t a ton of that at the time, right? Heather Haddon No, this was new. In the ’70s, General Mills invested in the company and that really helped it expand its reach in the US. From there they developed all these kind of fun, kitschy things like Lobster Fest and popcorn shrimp and coconut shrimp — things they really became known for. By the 1980s and ’90s, they’re the biggest seafood restaurant chain in the US. They really hit on something that consumers liked. David Pierce Looking back, when was peak Red Lobster? Heather Haddon I’d probably say the ’90s were a heyday for them. David Pierce And when do things start to — I’m very sorry — flounder. Heather Haddon Darden Restaurants had an activist investor, Starboard, who was basically agitating for change and they wanted the company to be more profitable. Bill Darden, who I believe was still heading the company, was like, “All right, I’m going to deal with you by spinning off Red Lobster.” They sold Red Lobster in 2014 to the private equity firm Golden Gate Capital to deal with this activist. Golden Gate Capital very quickly had the company sell off all its real estate, which gave them an infusion of cash. But it meant that Red Lobster was going to be forever leasing back their real estate. In 2016, Thai Union Group comes along, one of the world’s biggest producers of canned tuna, and takes a minority stake in Red Lobster. Then in 2020, after the pandemic hit, they bought it out wholesale. David Pierce How common a story is that in the restaurant world? These private equity firms have a reputation for taking over companies and stripping them for parts. Is that something that happens a lot in the restaurant world? Heather Haddon Golden Gate has owned quite a number of restaurants. Private equity owning restaurants is pretty common, in part because they generate a lot of cash. David Pierce Were there any other sort of contributing factors to this? I know one of the things that showed up in Red Lobster’s bankruptcy filing was that it just has an unbelievable amount of debt compared to the amount of money that it has coming in. Where did all of that come from? Heather Haddon In 2021, labor costs just shot through the roof because restaurants didn’t have enough labor. They were really fighting to get workers and as a result had to really increase how much they were paying them. Then you have inflation in 2022 sending menu prices up and people starting to get unhappy about paying those prices. By June 2023, things are starting to look a little better but consumers at this point are just not going out to restaurants as much. Consumers are just tightening their belts and then comes Red Lobster offering this shrimp deal in June 2023. David Pierce Some of that sounds like things that hit every restaurant, and to some extent every industry, during the pandemic. But it also seems like maybe sort of a perfect storm for Red Lobster in particular. Heather Haddon That’s absolutely right. A lot of sit-down chains and independent sit-down restaurants have been struggling. They’re more labor intensive than fast food and when that labor gets more expensive, that’s really tough. Commodity costs have gone up for these restaurants, and the consumer is just not loving it lately. What’s specific to Red Lobster is the all-you-can-eat promotion. And being run and owned by their supplier was very unusual: The restructuring CEO has actually raised questions about whether Thai Union structured a deal that benefited them more than Red Lobster. According to this filing, they cut out some of the other shrimp suppliers, giving them a preferred status. David Pierce So does it feel like we’re at the end of an era right now? We had decades of there being Red Lobsters and things like it in every strip mall everywhere. You practically couldn’t turn around without finding one of these fast casual restaurants. Are we at the end of that part of our lives in history now? Heather Haddon I don’t think we’re at the end of the era, but it is definitely changing. You see chains like Applebee’s, even Chili’s closing locations. I do think we are seeing a little bit of shaking out in casual dining where units are closing and, talking to the restaurant analysts, they think it could actually rightsize the business a bit better, that we just have too many of these restaurants and we need fewer of them to serve the amount of consumers there are for their food. David Pierce Red Lobster in particular, I feel like was very clever about being slightly elevated in what it was for a really long time — it didn’t feel quite as casual as some of the other casual restaurants — and I wonder if that’s what Red Lobster lost over the years was it felt fancy? Heather Haddon Absolutely. And some of that is a cultural shift. You know, when this chain started, a lot of people didn’t have a seafood restaurant, especially if you’re in the middle of the country. I’m from New Jersey where you go to the Jersey Shore and have seafood; a lot of people didn’t have that. A lot of the consumers I talked to had vivid memories of going out and having their birthday parties when there were 10 at Red Lobster. It was seen as a treat, an occasion, and something to celebrate. David Pierce So if these restaurants aren’t doing well, have we seen anyone that has been on a huge upswing as a result of some of the changes you’re talking about? Heather Haddon Some of these fast casual chains are doing pretty good. But I would say in general, this is not a great time for restaurants — even Starbucks and McDonald’s aren’t doing good. I think we’re going to have to see what happens later this year, if consumers start to feel a little looser with their money. I think that there are going to be price promotions and value wars coming this summer. David Pierce So for Red Lobster, is there any hope for this storied brand at this point, or are we in kind of a slow, inexorable decline? Heather Haddon The current CEO certainly believes there’s hope that this restructuring process will work. And the firm he works for, they’ve done this before. So I wouldn’t lose all hope for Red Lobster.
Red Lobster’s mistakes go beyond endless shrimp A Red Lobster restaurant in Lakewood, California, US, on Wednesday, May 15, 2024. Red Lobster is closing at more than 50 of its restaurants across the country, according to a company that helps businesses liquidate restaurant equipment, reports CBS. Photographer: Eric Thayer/Bloomberg via Getty Images It wasn’t just the free shrimp that tanked Red Lobster. The Orlando-based seafood chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week citing $1 billion in debt, according to court filings. The company announced the closure of dozens of stores nationally, with plans to sell company assets — including auctioning interior furniture and kitchenware. The announcement comes after a disastrous 2023 endless shrimp promotion in which, for around $20, patrons could order as much shrimp as they wanted, prompting eating challenges by users of TikTok. But while it brought customers to stores, it also put the chain $11 million in the red. Heather Haddon covers the restaurant industry for the Wall Street Journal and broke the news about Red Lobster’s pending bankruptcy. She explains that other casual restaurants like Olive Garden — chain-mates of Red Lobster and owned by Darden Restaurants — and Applebees are experiencing the same headwinds: customers looking for cheaper eats, plus rising labor and real estate costs. Haddon says the saga of endless shrimp was just one in a long series of missteps going back a decade. In the early 2010s, the company was sold to private equity firm Golden Gate Capital which sold Red Lobster-owned real estate, making them beholden to landlords and leases. In 2016, Thai Union Group, one of the world’s biggest producers of canned tuna, took a minority stake in Red Lobster. This year, they decided to cut bait as the company continued to lose money, citing the pandemic and rising debts. Haddon spoke with Today, Explained guest host David Pierce about how Red Lobster became a restaurant icon and what contributed to its decline. Listen to the full conversation and follow Today, Explained on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Pandora or wherever you find podcasts. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. David Pierce What happened to Red Lobster this week? Heather Haddon Red Lobster declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy and they are planning to restructure as a company. Red Lobster is not closing all of its restaurants but they have closed several dozen, and they have about 600 total. They are seeking bankruptcy protection basically to deal with nearly $300 billion in debt to their creditors. By late last year, they only had $30 million left in cash, which is just not enough money to run a big, complicated business like this. And they were unable to pay a lot of their suppliers. Clearly, this is a situation that has been piling up for some time, but this is where it’s ended up. David Pierce I am confident that there is more going on here than the unlimited shrimp. And I want to get to all of it, but I have seen some people connect the dots, more or less saying unlimited shrimp cost this company so much money that it went into bankruptcy. What happened there? Heather Haddon So Red Lobster certainly has run these kinds of bottomless promotions in the past where you could get all the shrimp that you want from a certain part of the menu. But they tended to run it as a limited-time offer, you know, one day a week for a limited time or just for a certain period. The company last June said, “Hey, we’re going to run this all the time so you can come in and pay $20 and you can get as much shrimp as you want.” So it drove a lot of traffic, but the profits did not go along with those sales. David Pierce That’s the sort of thing that makes sense to me when it’s unlimited breadsticks. Unlimited shrimp — I can imagine how that would become a bad financial deal pretty fast. Heather Haddon I’ve actually talked to some restaurant executives since about that. Shrimp prices fluctuate quite a bit. And when they go up, particularly, that’s just going to cost you a lot of money. David Pierce You mentioned not all the stores are going to close. What happens at this moment for a company like Red Lobster? Heather Haddon They’re in the bankruptcy protection process. They have a CEO who is a restructuring specialist who was brought on to prepare for this bankruptcy process, when the company was already on very shaky ground. The goal was to get some new terms with their landlords and try to restructure into a new company and go forward. David Pierce Okay, so Red Lobster will continue to be open, at least for some people. Do you think the experience of going to Red Lobster is going to be really different after this bankruptcy proceeding? Heather Haddon At some point, they’ll probably try to get it in a place where it could sell. But if you look at the filing, it talks about the history of Red Lobster and its legacy. So I wouldn’t expect a lot of immediate changes, but maybe moving away from some of those limited-time offers. David Pierce Where did Red Lobster come from in the first place? This company has been around a pretty long time and is an American food institution. Heather Haddon They were founded in the late ’60s by Bill Darden, who is known as the father of casual dining. It was one of the first casual dining chains around, a place you could bring your family or a date and have a nice meal out and not break the bank. David Pierce And there wasn’t a ton of that at the time, right? Heather Haddon No, this was new. In the ’70s, General Mills invested in the company and that really helped it expand its reach in the US. From there they developed all these kind of fun, kitschy things like Lobster Fest and popcorn shrimp and coconut shrimp — things they really became known for. By the 1980s and ’90s, they’re the biggest seafood restaurant chain in the US. They really hit on something that consumers liked. David Pierce Looking back, when was peak Red Lobster? Heather Haddon I’d probably say the ’90s were a heyday for them. David Pierce And when do things start to — I’m very sorry — flounder. Heather Haddon Darden Restaurants had an activist investor, Starboard, who was basically agitating for change and they wanted the company to be more profitable. Bill Darden, who I believe was still heading the company, was like, “All right, I’m going to deal with you by spinning off Red Lobster.” They sold Red Lobster in 2014 to the private equity firm Golden Gate Capital to deal with this activist. Golden Gate Capital very quickly had the company sell off all its real estate, which gave them an infusion of cash. But it meant that Red Lobster was going to be forever leasing back their real estate. In 2016, Thai Union Group comes along, one of the world’s biggest producers of canned tuna, and takes a minority stake in Red Lobster. Then in 2020, after the pandemic hit, they bought it out wholesale. David Pierce How common a story is that in the restaurant world? These private equity firms have a reputation for taking over companies and stripping them for parts. Is that something that happens a lot in the restaurant world? Heather Haddon Golden Gate has owned quite a number of restaurants. Private equity owning restaurants is pretty common, in part because they generate a lot of cash. David Pierce Were there any other sort of contributing factors to this? I know one of the things that showed up in Red Lobster’s bankruptcy filing was that it just has an unbelievable amount of debt compared to the amount of money that it has coming in. Where did all of that come from? Heather Haddon In 2021, labor costs just shot through the roof because restaurants didn’t have enough labor. They were really fighting to get workers and as a result had to really increase how much they were paying them. Then you have inflation in 2022 sending menu prices up and people starting to get unhappy about paying those prices. By June 2023, things are starting to look a little better but consumers at this point are just not going out to restaurants as much. Consumers are just tightening their belts and then comes Red Lobster offering this shrimp deal in June 2023. David Pierce Some of that sounds like things that hit every restaurant, and to some extent every industry, during the pandemic. But it also seems like maybe sort of a perfect storm for Red Lobster in particular. Heather Haddon That’s absolutely right. A lot of sit-down chains and independent sit-down restaurants have been struggling. They’re more labor intensive than fast food and when that labor gets more expensive, that’s really tough. Commodity costs have gone up for these restaurants, and the consumer is just not loving it lately. What’s specific to Red Lobster is the all-you-can-eat promotion. And being run and owned by their supplier was very unusual: The restructuring CEO has actually raised questions about whether Thai Union structured a deal that benefited them more than Red Lobster. According to this filing, they cut out some of the other shrimp suppliers, giving them a preferred status. David Pierce So does it feel like we’re at the end of an era right now? We had decades of there being Red Lobsters and things like it in every strip mall everywhere. You practically couldn’t turn around without finding one of these fast casual restaurants. Are we at the end of that part of our lives in history now? Heather Haddon I don’t think we’re at the end of the era, but it is definitely changing. You see chains like Applebee’s, even Chili’s closing locations. I do think we are seeing a little bit of shaking out in casual dining where units are closing and, talking to the restaurant analysts, they think it could actually rightsize the business a bit better, that we just have too many of these restaurants and we need fewer of them to serve the amount of consumers there are for their food. David Pierce Red Lobster in particular, I feel like was very clever about being slightly elevated in what it was for a really long time — it didn’t feel quite as casual as some of the other casual restaurants — and I wonder if that’s what Red Lobster lost over the years was it felt fancy? Heather Haddon Absolutely. And some of that is a cultural shift. You know, when this chain started, a lot of people didn’t have a seafood restaurant, especially if you’re in the middle of the country. I’m from New Jersey where you go to the Jersey Shore and have seafood; a lot of people didn’t have that. A lot of the consumers I talked to had vivid memories of going out and having their birthday parties when there were 10 at Red Lobster. It was seen as a treat, an occasion, and something to celebrate. David Pierce So if these restaurants aren’t doing well, have we seen anyone that has been on a huge upswing as a result of some of the changes you’re talking about? Heather Haddon Some of these fast casual chains are doing pretty good. But I would say in general, this is not a great time for restaurants — even Starbucks and McDonald’s aren’t doing good. I think we’re going to have to see what happens later this year, if consumers start to feel a little looser with their money. I think that there are going to be price promotions and value wars coming this summer. David Pierce So for Red Lobster, is there any hope for this storied brand at this point, or are we in kind of a slow, inexorable decline? Heather Haddon The current CEO certainly believes there’s hope that this restructuring process will work. And the firm he works for, they’ve done this before. So I wouldn’t lose all hope for Red Lobster.
Food truck nonprofit helps veterans get their culinary chopsFoley said the program is self-paced and “completely hands-on. If you have the drive, if you have the ability and you care about it, we’re going to get you to where you need to go.”
Food truck nonprofit helps veterans get their culinary chopsFoley said the program is self-paced and “completely hands-on. If you have the drive, if you have the ability and you care about it, we’re going to get you to where you need to go.”
Witnessing the spectacle of synchronous fireflies is ‘like magic’For a few weeks in late spring, thousands of fireflies emerge at the Congaree National Park in South Carolina to blink in synchrony. Scientists are trying to learn their secrets and to protect them.
Witnessing the spectacle of synchronous fireflies is ‘like magic’For a few weeks in late spring, thousands of fireflies emerge at the Congaree National Park in South Carolina to blink in synchrony. Scientists are trying to learn their secrets and to protect them.
Angels get a reminder about the perils of relying too much on core prospectsCleveland Guardians assistant pitching coach Joe Torres was once part of an Angels core of top prospects, but he was never able to play in Anaheim.
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Scientists Are Rushing to Find America’s Secret WetlandsThis article was originally published by High Country News.On a warm day in August, Anthony Stewart hiked through a forest on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, making his way through a tangle of ferns and grasses. Wispy, lichen-coated branches hung overhead, providing shade as he set down his backpack and shovel, and he and his team prepared to dig.This was one of Stewart’s favorite study sites, he says. It’s relatively dry on the surface, but just underneath it, a layer of reddish soil, full of organic matter, gives way to gray-blue, claylike soil. These layers, formed over time as water flooded the area, are signs of a wetland. But like many forested wetlands in the Pacific Northwest, this area doesn’t appear on any state maps.In a study published in Nature Communications this past January, Stewart, a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, and his team reported the surprising abundance of unmapped, carbon-rich wetlands in the Pacific Northwest’s forests. The scientists studied the Hoh River watershed, which snakes westward across the Olympic Peninsula, documenting potential wetlands that, because of the thick forest canopy, were invisible to satellite imaging. Including them in estimates of the watershed’s carbon-storage capacity increased them by fivefold.Conserving forested wetlands not only protects valuable habitat; it could help stabilize the climate. But first, the wetlands must be put on the map—and that is no easy task.Wetland ecosystems are stunningly effective at soaking up carbon from the atmosphere. Despite covering only less than 10 percent of the world’s land surface, they contain roughly 20 to 30 percent of the carbon stored in the soil. And because the plant matter in the waterlogged soil decays slowly, their carbon tends to stay put.[Read: Nowhere is ready for this heat]Wetlands provide other benefits too: Some 40 percent of all animal and plant species rely on wetlands. The gnarled roots of wetland trees and plants purify water, and the wetland soils absorb it, providing flood protection to nearby areas.Since the 1920s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has surveyed the types and quality of soil throughout the nation. But until recently, these soil maps focused primarily on agricultural land, leaving out most forests and thus huge gaps in knowledge about the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. On top of that, “wetlands were not at all a focus in forested landscapes,” says David D’Amore, a soil scientist with the USDA Forest Service and a co-author of the study.To identify these hidden forested wetlands and estimate their carbon content, the researchers used the Wetland Intrinsic Potential (WIP) tool, a wetland-mapping tool that uses LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, an aerial remote-sensing technique that can resolve details underneath the tree canopy. The researchers then randomly selected 36 sampling sites across the entire Hoh River watershed, many of which were far from any sort of trail. Armed with shovels, hoses, and pumps, the researchers drove along bumpy backcountry roads and bushwhacked their way through thick woods. Once they arrived at their sampling locations, they used shovels to dig three-foot-deep holes in the ground. “It’s really intensive to get a carbon measurement,” Stewart says. “It’s not an easy path.”The team scooped the soil into gallon-size plastic bags and carried it back to the University of Washington. In the laboratory, Stewart ground the samples to a fine powder and heated them to 1,000 degrees Celsius (about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit). At that temperature, the carbon-containing substances in the soil were completely decomposed and transformed into carbon dioxide, allowing the scientists to measure its carbon content. Finally, the researchers combined the soil-carbon data with remote-sensing topography information to create a model of the amount of soil carbon that is stored across the watershed. “We just rediscovered these really carbon-rich forested wetland areas that weren’t being mapped by the currently available land data sets,” Stewart says.In the 2016 National Wetland Condition Assessment, a federal survey of the nation’s wetlands, Amanda Nahlik, an ecologist and biogeochemist in the Office of Research and Development at the Environmental Protection Agency, concluded that wetlands in the West held about 6 percent of the total carbon stored by wetlands in the Lower 48. “We recognized we were probably underestimating the amount of carbon stored in the West,” she says. Stewart’s study confirmed this hunch. “There is this landscape that’s uncharacterized that we need to start to target,” Stewart says.In general, wetlands aren’t faring well. Half of the wetlands in the Lower 48 have disappeared since the 1780s, and, over the past decade, the rate of wetland loss has doubled, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service’s most recent National Wetlands Inventory. Roughly half of the wetlands in the Mountain West are in poor condition. Though there are thought to be fewer wetlands in the arid West than on the East Coast, “that does not mean that those wetlands are less important,” says Megan Lang, the inventory’s chief scientist. “In fact, it might mean that those wetlands are more important, because there are fewer of them.”[Read: The oceans we knew are already gone]The two main drivers of wetland loss in the West, Lang says, are drought and cattle grazing. Climate change, which is expected to increase aridity in the West, could dry up huge portions of the region’s remaining wetlands by 2050. And when wetlands are destroyed, their carbon is often released into the atmosphere, further worsening global warming.Last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency changed the federal definition of a wetland under the Clean Water Act, disqualifying thousands of miles of ephemeral streams and millions of acres of wetlands—including those along the Hoh River—from protection under that law. Some federal and state initiatives are attempting to compensate: Late last month, President Joe Biden announced a goal to protect 8 million acres of wetlands over the next six years. And earlier this month, Colorado became the first state to pass legislation protecting the wetlands excluded by last year’s Supreme Court decision.Lang emphasizes that it’s crucial to map, measure, and conserve the wetlands we still have: “If we’re going to maintain resilience to climate change, if we are going to have clean water for the future, if we’re going to keep feeding our families, if we are going to be safe from flooding, we are going to need to do better in terms of wetland conservation.”
Scientists Are Rushing to Find America’s Secret WetlandsThis article was originally published by High Country News.On a warm day in August, Anthony Stewart hiked through a forest on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, making his way through a tangle of ferns and grasses. Wispy, lichen-coated branches hung overhead, providing shade as he set down his backpack and shovel, and he and his team prepared to dig.This was one of Stewart’s favorite study sites, he says. It’s relatively dry on the surface, but just underneath it, a layer of reddish soil, full of organic matter, gives way to gray-blue, claylike soil. These layers, formed over time as water flooded the area, are signs of a wetland. But like many forested wetlands in the Pacific Northwest, this area doesn’t appear on any state maps.In a study published in Nature Communications this past January, Stewart, a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington’s School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, and his team reported the surprising abundance of unmapped, carbon-rich wetlands in the Pacific Northwest’s forests. The scientists studied the Hoh River watershed, which snakes westward across the Olympic Peninsula, documenting potential wetlands that, because of the thick forest canopy, were invisible to satellite imaging. Including them in estimates of the watershed’s carbon-storage capacity increased them by fivefold.Conserving forested wetlands not only protects valuable habitat; it could help stabilize the climate. But first, the wetlands must be put on the map—and that is no easy task.Wetland ecosystems are stunningly effective at soaking up carbon from the atmosphere. Despite covering only less than 10 percent of the world’s land surface, they contain roughly 20 to 30 percent of the carbon stored in the soil. And because the plant matter in the waterlogged soil decays slowly, their carbon tends to stay put.[Read: Nowhere is ready for this heat]Wetlands provide other benefits too: Some 40 percent of all animal and plant species rely on wetlands. The gnarled roots of wetland trees and plants purify water, and the wetland soils absorb it, providing flood protection to nearby areas.Since the 1920s, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has surveyed the types and quality of soil throughout the nation. But until recently, these soil maps focused primarily on agricultural land, leaving out most forests and thus huge gaps in knowledge about the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. On top of that, “wetlands were not at all a focus in forested landscapes,” says David D’Amore, a soil scientist with the USDA Forest Service and a co-author of the study.To identify these hidden forested wetlands and estimate their carbon content, the researchers used the Wetland Intrinsic Potential (WIP) tool, a wetland-mapping tool that uses LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, an aerial remote-sensing technique that can resolve details underneath the tree canopy. The researchers then randomly selected 36 sampling sites across the entire Hoh River watershed, many of which were far from any sort of trail. Armed with shovels, hoses, and pumps, the researchers drove along bumpy backcountry roads and bushwhacked their way through thick woods. Once they arrived at their sampling locations, they used shovels to dig three-foot-deep holes in the ground. “It’s really intensive to get a carbon measurement,” Stewart says. “It’s not an easy path.”The team scooped the soil into gallon-size plastic bags and carried it back to the University of Washington. In the laboratory, Stewart ground the samples to a fine powder and heated them to 1,000 degrees Celsius (about 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit). At that temperature, the carbon-containing substances in the soil were completely decomposed and transformed into carbon dioxide, allowing the scientists to measure its carbon content. Finally, the researchers combined the soil-carbon data with remote-sensing topography information to create a model of the amount of soil carbon that is stored across the watershed. “We just rediscovered these really carbon-rich forested wetland areas that weren’t being mapped by the currently available land data sets,” Stewart says.In the 2016 National Wetland Condition Assessment, a federal survey of the nation’s wetlands, Amanda Nahlik, an ecologist and biogeochemist in the Office of Research and Development at the Environmental Protection Agency, concluded that wetlands in the West held about 6 percent of the total carbon stored by wetlands in the Lower 48. “We recognized we were probably underestimating the amount of carbon stored in the West,” she says. Stewart’s study confirmed this hunch. “There is this landscape that’s uncharacterized that we need to start to target,” Stewart says.In general, wetlands aren’t faring well. Half of the wetlands in the Lower 48 have disappeared since the 1780s, and, over the past decade, the rate of wetland loss has doubled, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service’s most recent National Wetlands Inventory. Roughly half of the wetlands in the Mountain West are in poor condition. Though there are thought to be fewer wetlands in the arid West than on the East Coast, “that does not mean that those wetlands are less important,” says Megan Lang, the inventory’s chief scientist. “In fact, it might mean that those wetlands are more important, because there are fewer of them.”[Read: The oceans we knew are already gone]The two main drivers of wetland loss in the West, Lang says, are drought and cattle grazing. Climate change, which is expected to increase aridity in the West, could dry up huge portions of the region’s remaining wetlands by 2050. And when wetlands are destroyed, their carbon is often released into the atmosphere, further worsening global warming.Last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency changed the federal definition of a wetland under the Clean Water Act, disqualifying thousands of miles of ephemeral streams and millions of acres of wetlands—including those along the Hoh River—from protection under that law. Some federal and state initiatives are attempting to compensate: Late last month, President Joe Biden announced a goal to protect 8 million acres of wetlands over the next six years. And earlier this month, Colorado became the first state to pass legislation protecting the wetlands excluded by last year’s Supreme Court decision.Lang emphasizes that it’s crucial to map, measure, and conserve the wetlands we still have: “If we’re going to maintain resilience to climate change, if we are going to have clean water for the future, if we’re going to keep feeding our families, if we are going to be safe from flooding, we are going to need to do better in terms of wetland conservation.”
Nuclear Power Has to WorkNuclear energy occupies a strange place in the American psyche—representing at once a dream of endless emissions-free power and a nightmare of catastrophic meltdowns and radioactive waste. The more prosaic downside is that new plants are extremely expensive: America’s most recent attempt to build a nuclear facility, in Georgia, was supposed to be completed in four years for $14 billion. Instead it took more than 10 years and had a final price tag of $35 billion—about 10 times the cost of a natural-gas plant with the same energy output.But the United States might not have the luxury of treating nuclear energy as a lost cause: The Department of Energy estimates that the country must triple its nuclear-power output by 2050 to be on track for its climate targets. For all the recent progress in wind and solar energy, renewables on their own almost certainly won’t be enough. Arguably, then, we have no choice but to figure out how to build nuclear plants affordably again.Half a century ago, nuclear energy seemed destined to become the power source of the future. The first commercial-reactor designs were approved in the 1950s, and by the late ’60s, America was pumping them out at a fraction of what they cost today. In 1970, the Atomic Energy Commission predicted that more than 1,000 reactors would be operating in the United States by the year 2000.In the popular history of atomic energy in America, the turning point was the infamous meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant in 1979. In the aftermath of the accident, environmentalists pressured regulators to impose additional safety requirements on new and existing plants. Nuclear-energy advocates argue that these regulations were mostly unnecessary. All they did, in this telling, was make plants so expensive and slow to build that utility companies turned back to coal and gas. Activists and regulators had overreacted and killed America’s best shot at carbon-free energy.This story contains some kernels of truth. The safety risk of nuclear energy is often wildly overblown. No one died at Three Mile Island, and later studies found that it didn’t have any adverse health effects on the local community. Even including the deadly meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear power has most likely caused only a few hundred deaths, putting its safety record on par with wind turbines and solar panels, which occasionally catch fire or cause workers to fall. (The immediate areas around the sites of the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters have, however, been rendered uninhabitable for decades because of the potential dangers of radiation.) Nuclear waste can be harmful if mishandled, but isn’t difficult to store safely. Air pollution from fossil fuels, meanwhile, is estimated to kill anywhere from 5 million to 9 million people every year.[Read: Nuclear is hot, for the moment]The claim that excessive regulation single-handedly ruined the American nuclear industry, however, doesn’t hold up. The cost of building new nuclear plants was already rising before Three Mile Island. Several nuclear-energy experts told me that a major driver of those cost increases was actually a lack of industry standards. According to Jessica Lovering, the executive director of Good Energy Collective and a co-author of a widely cited study on the cost of nuclear energy, throughout the ’60s and ’70s, utilities kept trying to build bigger, more ambitious reactors for every new project instead of just sticking with a single model. (Lovering used to be the head of nuclear policy at the Breakthrough Institute—a think tank that tends to warn against excessive regulation.) “It’s like if Boeing went through all the trouble to build one 737, then immediately threw out the design and started again from scratch,” she told me. “That’s a recipe for high costs.” The 94 nuclear reactors operating in the United States today are based on more than 50 different designs. In countries such as France and South Korea, by contrast, public utilities coalesced around a handful of reactor types and subsequently saw costs remain steady or fall.Lovering also noted that the overregulation story leaves out a crucial fact: Because of a slowing economy, electricity demand flatlined in the early 1980s, causing American utilities to stop building basically every electricity-generating resource, not just nuclear plants. By the time the U.S. finally did try to build them again, in 2013, the American nuclear industry had all but withered away. “In the 1970s, we had a whole ecosystem of unionized workers and contractors and developers and utilities who knew how to build this stuff,” Josh Freed, who leads the climate and energy program at Third Way, a center-left think tank, told me. “But when we stopped building, that ecosystem died off.” This became obvious during the disastrous Vogtle project, in Georgia—the one that ended up costing $35 billion. Expensive changes had to be made to the reactor design midway through construction. Parts arrived late. Workers made all kinds of rookie mistakes. In one case, an incorrect rebar installation triggered a seven-and-a-half-month regulatory delay. Experts estimate that by the time it was finished, the project was four to six times more expensive per unit of energy produced than plants built in the early ’70s.Given the impracticality of nuclear energy, some environmentalists argue that we should focus on wind and solar. These technologies can’t power the entire grid today, because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. With enough advances in battery-storage technology, however, they could in theory provide 24/7 power at a far lower price than building nuclear plants. “The nuclear industry has been promising cheap, clean energy for decades at this point,” David Schlissel, a director at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told me. “Why waste our money on false hopes when we could be putting it towards technologies that have a real chance of working?”He may be right about the technology. But just because it might one day be technically feasible to power the entire grid with renewables doesn’t mean it will ever be politically feasible. That’s because wind and solar require land—a lot of land. According to Princeton University’s “Net-Zero America” study, reaching net-zero emissions with renewables alone would involve placing solar panels on land equivalent to the area of Virginia and setting up wind farms spanning an area equivalent to Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma combined. The more land you need, the more you run into the meat grinder of American NIMBYism. Efforts to build renewables are already getting bogged down by local opposition, costly lawsuits, and permitting delays. These challenges will only intensify as the easiest sites come off the board.Transmission lines, which are needed to transport renewable energy from where it’s generated to where it’s used, may present an even bigger challenge. Some lines have taken nearly two decades just to receive their full suite of approvals. “There’s a chance we will suddenly get our act together and overcome the many, many constraints to deploying renewables,” Jesse Jenkins, who leads the Princeton Zero-Carbon Energy Systems Research and Optimization Lab, told me. “But I’m certainly not willing to bet the fate of the planet on that happening.”The case for nuclear, then, is less about technological possibilities than it is about political realities. Nuclear can generate the same amount of power while using 1/30th as much land as solar and about 1/200th as much as wind. Reactors can be built anywhere, not just in areas with lots of natural wind and sunshine, eliminating the need for huge transmission lines and making it easier to select sites without as much local opposition. And nuclear plants happen to generate the greatest number of high-paying jobs of any energy source, by far. (On average, they employ six times as many workers as an equivalent wind or solar project does and pay those workers 50 percent more.) That helps explain why four different towns in Wyoming recently fought over the right to host a nuclear project. Nuclear power is also the only energy source with overwhelming bipartisan support in Washington, which makes Congress more likely to address future bottlenecks and hurdles as they arise.[Brian Deese: The next front in the war against climate change]As for how to make the economics work, there are two schools of thought. One holds that if America forgot how to build nuclear because we stopped doing it, we just need to start back up. Pick a design, build lots of plants, and we’ll eventually get better. Other countries have done this with great success; South Korea, for instance, slashed the cost of constructing nuclear plants in half from 1971 to 2008. Here, the Vogtle project carries a silver lining: The second of the plant’s two reactors was about 30 percent cheaper to build than the first, because workers and project managers learned from their mistakes the first time around. “I consider Vogtle a success,” Mike Goff, acting assistant secretary for the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, told me. “We learned all kinds of hard lessons. Now we just need to apply them to future projects.”The second school of thought is that we’ve been building nuclear reactors the wrong way all along. This camp points out that over the past half century, basically every kind of major infrastructure project—highways, skyscrapers, subways—has gotten more expensive, whereas manufactured goods—TVs, solar panels, electric-vehicle batteries—have gotten cheaper. Lowering costs turns out to be much easier when a product is mass-produced on an assembly line than when it has to be built from scratch in the real world every single time. That’s why dozens of companies are now racing to build nuclear reactors that are, in a phrase I heard from multiple sources, “more like airplanes and less like airports.” Some are simply smaller versions of the reactors the U.S. used to build; others involve brand-new designs that are less likely to melt down and therefore don’t require nearly as much big, expensive equipment to operate safely. What unites them is a belief that the secret to making nuclear cheap is making it smaller, less complicated, and easier to mass-produce.Both paths remain unproven—so the Biden administration is placing bets on each of them. The president’s signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, included generous tax credits that could reduce the cost of a nuclear project by 30 to 50 percent, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law included $2.5 billion to fund the construction of two new reactors using original designs. The Department of Energy, meanwhile, is exploring different options for permanent nuclear-waste storage, investing in building a domestic supply chain for uranium, and helping companies navigate the process of getting reactor designs approved.There’s no guarantee that the U.S. will ever relearn the art of building nuclear energy efficiently. Betting on the future of atomic power requires a leap of faith. But America may have to take that leap, because the alternative is so much worse. “We just have to be successful,” Mike Goff told me. “Failure is not an option.”
Nuclear Power Has to WorkNuclear energy occupies a strange place in the American psyche—representing at once a dream of endless emissions-free power and a nightmare of catastrophic meltdowns and radioactive waste. The more prosaic downside is that new plants are extremely expensive: America’s most recent attempt to build a nuclear facility, in Georgia, was supposed to be completed in four years for $14 billion. Instead it took more than 10 years and had a final price tag of $35 billion—about 10 times the cost of a natural-gas plant with the same energy output.But the United States might not have the luxury of treating nuclear energy as a lost cause: The Department of Energy estimates that the country must triple its nuclear-power output by 2050 to be on track for its climate targets. For all the recent progress in wind and solar energy, renewables on their own almost certainly won’t be enough. Arguably, then, we have no choice but to figure out how to build nuclear plants affordably again.Half a century ago, nuclear energy seemed destined to become the power source of the future. The first commercial-reactor designs were approved in the 1950s, and by the late ’60s, America was pumping them out at a fraction of what they cost today. In 1970, the Atomic Energy Commission predicted that more than 1,000 reactors would be operating in the United States by the year 2000.In the popular history of atomic energy in America, the turning point was the infamous meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant in 1979. In the aftermath of the accident, environmentalists pressured regulators to impose additional safety requirements on new and existing plants. Nuclear-energy advocates argue that these regulations were mostly unnecessary. All they did, in this telling, was make plants so expensive and slow to build that utility companies turned back to coal and gas. Activists and regulators had overreacted and killed America’s best shot at carbon-free energy.This story contains some kernels of truth. The safety risk of nuclear energy is often wildly overblown. No one died at Three Mile Island, and later studies found that it didn’t have any adverse health effects on the local community. Even including the deadly meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear power has most likely caused only a few hundred deaths, putting its safety record on par with wind turbines and solar panels, which occasionally catch fire or cause workers to fall. (The immediate areas around the sites of the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters have, however, been rendered uninhabitable for decades because of the potential dangers of radiation.) Nuclear waste can be harmful if mishandled, but isn’t difficult to store safely. Air pollution from fossil fuels, meanwhile, is estimated to kill anywhere from 5 million to 9 million people every year.[Read: Nuclear is hot, for the moment]The claim that excessive regulation single-handedly ruined the American nuclear industry, however, doesn’t hold up. The cost of building new nuclear plants was already rising before Three Mile Island. Several nuclear-energy experts told me that a major driver of those cost increases was actually a lack of industry standards. According to Jessica Lovering, the executive director of Good Energy Collective and a co-author of a widely cited study on the cost of nuclear energy, throughout the ’60s and ’70s, utilities kept trying to build bigger, more ambitious reactors for every new project instead of just sticking with a single model. (Lovering used to be the head of nuclear policy at the Breakthrough Institute—a think tank that tends to warn against excessive regulation.) “It’s like if Boeing went through all the trouble to build one 737, then immediately threw out the design and started again from scratch,” she told me. “That’s a recipe for high costs.” The 94 nuclear reactors operating in the United States today are based on more than 50 different designs. In countries such as France and South Korea, by contrast, public utilities coalesced around a handful of reactor types and subsequently saw costs remain steady or fall.Lovering also noted that the overregulation story leaves out a crucial fact: Because of a slowing economy, electricity demand flatlined in the early 1980s, causing American utilities to stop building basically every electricity-generating resource, not just nuclear plants. By the time the U.S. finally did try to build them again, in 2013, the American nuclear industry had all but withered away. “In the 1970s, we had a whole ecosystem of unionized workers and contractors and developers and utilities who knew how to build this stuff,” Josh Freed, who leads the climate and energy program at Third Way, a center-left think tank, told me. “But when we stopped building, that ecosystem died off.” This became obvious during the disastrous Vogtle project, in Georgia—the one that ended up costing $35 billion. Expensive changes had to be made to the reactor design midway through construction. Parts arrived late. Workers made all kinds of rookie mistakes. In one case, an incorrect rebar installation triggered a seven-and-a-half-month regulatory delay. Experts estimate that by the time it was finished, the project was four to six times more expensive per unit of energy produced than plants built in the early ’70s.Given the impracticality of nuclear energy, some environmentalists argue that we should focus on wind and solar. These technologies can’t power the entire grid today, because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. With enough advances in battery-storage technology, however, they could in theory provide 24/7 power at a far lower price than building nuclear plants. “The nuclear industry has been promising cheap, clean energy for decades at this point,” David Schlissel, a director at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told me. “Why waste our money on false hopes when we could be putting it towards technologies that have a real chance of working?”He may be right about the technology. But just because it might one day be technically feasible to power the entire grid with renewables doesn’t mean it will ever be politically feasible. That’s because wind and solar require land—a lot of land. According to Princeton University’s “Net-Zero America” study, reaching net-zero emissions with renewables alone would involve placing solar panels on land equivalent to the area of Virginia and setting up wind farms spanning an area equivalent to Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma combined. The more land you need, the more you run into the meat grinder of American NIMBYism. Efforts to build renewables are already getting bogged down by local opposition, costly lawsuits, and permitting delays. These challenges will only intensify as the easiest sites come off the board.Transmission lines, which are needed to transport renewable energy from where it’s generated to where it’s used, may present an even bigger challenge. Some lines have taken nearly two decades just to receive their full suite of approvals. “There’s a chance we will suddenly get our act together and overcome the many, many constraints to deploying renewables,” Jesse Jenkins, who leads the Princeton Zero-Carbon Energy Systems Research and Optimization Lab, told me. “But I’m certainly not willing to bet the fate of the planet on that happening.”The case for nuclear, then, is less about technological possibilities than it is about political realities. Nuclear can generate the same amount of power while using 1/30th as much land as solar and about 1/200th as much as wind. Reactors can be built anywhere, not just in areas with lots of natural wind and sunshine, eliminating the need for huge transmission lines and making it easier to select sites without as much local opposition. And nuclear plants happen to generate the greatest number of high-paying jobs of any energy source, by far. (On average, they employ six times as many workers as an equivalent wind or solar project does and pay those workers 50 percent more.) That helps explain why four different towns in Wyoming recently fought over the right to host a nuclear project. Nuclear power is also the only energy source with overwhelming bipartisan support in Washington, which makes Congress more likely to address future bottlenecks and hurdles as they arise.[Brian Deese: The next front in the war against climate change]As for how to make the economics work, there are two schools of thought. One holds that if America forgot how to build nuclear because we stopped doing it, we just need to start back up. Pick a design, build lots of plants, and we’ll eventually get better. Other countries have done this with great success; South Korea, for instance, slashed the cost of constructing nuclear plants in half from 1971 to 2008. Here, the Vogtle project carries a silver lining: The second of the plant’s two reactors was about 30 percent cheaper to build than the first, because workers and project managers learned from their mistakes the first time around. “I consider Vogtle a success,” Mike Goff, acting assistant secretary for the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, told me. “We learned all kinds of hard lessons. Now we just need to apply them to future projects.”The second school of thought is that we’ve been building nuclear reactors the wrong way all along. This camp points out that over the past half century, basically every kind of major infrastructure project—highways, skyscrapers, subways—has gotten more expensive, whereas manufactured goods—TVs, solar panels, electric-vehicle batteries—have gotten cheaper. Lowering costs turns out to be much easier when a product is mass-produced on an assembly line than when it has to be built from scratch in the real world every single time. That’s why dozens of companies are now racing to build nuclear reactors that are, in a phrase I heard from multiple sources, “more like airplanes and less like airports.” Some are simply smaller versions of the reactors the U.S. used to build; others involve brand-new designs that are less likely to melt down and therefore don’t require nearly as much big, expensive equipment to operate safely. What unites them is a belief that the secret to making nuclear cheap is making it smaller, less complicated, and easier to mass-produce.Both paths remain unproven—so the Biden administration is placing bets on each of them. The president’s signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, included generous tax credits that could reduce the cost of a nuclear project by 30 to 50 percent, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law included $2.5 billion to fund the construction of two new reactors using original designs. The Department of Energy, meanwhile, is exploring different options for permanent nuclear-waste storage, investing in building a domestic supply chain for uranium, and helping companies navigate the process of getting reactor designs approved.There’s no guarantee that the U.S. will ever relearn the art of building nuclear energy efficiently. Betting on the future of atomic power requires a leap of faith. But America may have to take that leap, because the alternative is so much worse. “We just have to be successful,” Mike Goff told me. “Failure is not an option.”
Disney Legend Richard M. Sherman, of Mary Poppins and It’s a Small World Fame, Dies at 95NEW YORK — Richard M. Sherman, one half of the prolific, award-winning pair of brothers who helped form millions of childhoods by penning the instantly memorable songs for “Mary Poppins,” “The Jungle Book” and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” — as well as the most-played tune on Earth, “It’s a Small World (After All)” — has…
Disney Legend Richard M. Sherman, of Mary Poppins and It’s a Small World Fame, Dies at 95NEW YORK — Richard M. Sherman, one half of the prolific, award-winning pair of brothers who helped form millions of childhoods by penning the instantly memorable songs for “Mary Poppins,” “The Jungle Book” and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” — as well as the most-played tune on Earth, “It’s a Small World (After All)” — has…
