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Forget Three Mile Island. Imagine, instead, a mini nuclear generator that operates like a battery. Plug it in and it runs for eight years until its fuel is spent
By Anya Litvak, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Westinghouse Electric Co. is scouting the former J&L Steel campus in Aliquippa;, Pa. as a potential home for a large manufacturing plant for its eVinci microreactors.
The Cranberry-based nuclear technology firm is in the process of licensing the eVinci design, which departs from current nuclear power plants in several key ways. It’s much smaller — Westinghouse advertises truck delivery — doesn’t require water or outside power, and comes pre-fueled to generate about five megawatts of power for eight years.
The company is aiming to have the first one up and running by the end of the decade, Leah Crider, Westinghouse’s vice president of commercial operations for eVinci, said at a recent datacenter and energy summit hosted by the Pittsburgh Technology Council.
“The good news about this is that we’re looking to do what Henry Ford did for automobiles with microreactors,” she said. “So, entirely built in a factory, delivered to the sites where they’re needed.
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PENNSYLVANIA — Pennsylvania is seeking to reverse the recent federal funding cuts and pauses by the Trump administration, calling the program which would place severe pressure on already-strained food banks “unlawful.”
Gov. Josh Shapiro’s administration already filed an appeal Thursday to reverse the cuts and ensure the USDA maintains its contracts with the state.
“Crops are not planted overnight, and neither are food bank budgets,” Pennsylvania Secretary of Agriculture Russell Redding said in a statement “Supplier and buyer contracts are sealed months in advance. Whether you’re a farm or a food bank, you plan your operations based on what you have to spend.”
Pennsylvania’s $13 million contract for the LFPA program is completely eliminated under the new cuts.
“Losing operating dollars means losing crops and losing customers,” Redding added. “Cancelled federal funding hurts Pennsylvania farmers, along with food bank customers — hungry families, children, military veterans, and seniors.”
State leadership said Pennsylvania is hit harder by these cuts than many other states because agriculture is its top industry, and because the Keystone State one of the few states in the nation that relies exclusively upon the LFPA program to support in-state farmers. They say the program ensures federal grants stay within Pennsylvania.
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Donald Trump’s administration has offered fossil fuel companies an extraordinary opportunity to evade air pollution rules by simply emailing the US president to ask him to exempt them.
Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has set up a new email address where what it calls the “regulated community” can request a presidential exemption from their requirements under the Clean Air Act, which is used to regulate dangerous toxins emitted from polluting sources.
Operators of power plants that burn coal or oil, linked to tens of thousands of deaths each year in the US via the mercury, arsenic and other carcinogens emitted through their air pollution, have until Monday to ask Trump to allow them to bypass clean air laws.
“The president will make a decision on the merits” of each request, which can be for up to two years and be renewed, according to the EPA website. Helpfully, the EPA’s site provides a template for these requests, including pointers as to how to successfully ask for an exemption.
Trump pledged as a presidential candidate to repeal environmental laws if he got $1bn in campaign donations from oil and gas companies. While he didn’t reach that figure, Trump did receive tens of millions of dollars from the industry and has said that the US needs to “drill, baby, drill” through unfettered fossil fuel expansion, rejecting the scientific consensus that burning coal, oil and gas is causing a worsening climate crisis.
As president, Trump has set about dismantling pollution rules. Dozens of rollbacks by the EPA have targeted regulations that were intended to save nearly 200,000 lives in the US by 2050, as well as prevent millions of asthma attacks, heart and respiratory problems and other public health harms.
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As a follower of the carnivore diet, holistic skincare specialist Danny Neifert largely avoids grains and veggies and subsists almost entirely on meat, which she says makes her feel sated and healthy.
To round out her meals, though, she supplements with dairy — or, more specifically, with unpasteurized milk, cheese and ice cream that she’s carefully sourced from an Amish farm more than 1,500 miles away. A styrofoam box loaded with these raw milk products arrives on her Colorado doorstep most months, each package costing her more than $100 in shipping fees. More:
It’s worth the price, she says.
Like many customers of Pennsylvania farmer Amos Miller, she believes his dairy is so wholesome that it’s a kind of medicine, bearing little resemblance to the nutrient-poor, lifeless foods that dominate American grocery stores.
And it’s delicious, she says. She talks about the “notes” she tastes in Miller’s raw milk, as if describing a fine wine.
Like many customers of Pennsylvania farmer Amos Miller, she believes his dairy is so wholesome that it’s a kind of medicine, bearing little resemblance to the nutrient-poor, lifeless foods that dominate American grocery stores.
And it’s delicious, she says. She talks about the “notes” she tastes in Miller’s raw milk, as if describing a fine wine.
“You just feel like there’s this symphony going on,” said Neifert, who said she learned of the Amish farm through her acupuncturist.
Last year, she was worried she’d lose access to these products after state regulators descended on Miller’s farm in Bird-and-Hand. Though the Amish man sells unpasteurized dairy — or dairy that hasn’t been heated to kill off dangerous bacteria — he’s refused to get a Pennsylvania raw milk permit and has clashed with federal and state food safety officials repeatedly over the years.
Authorities lost patience after tracing two cases of E. coli back to Miller’s operation. Early last year, they descended on his farm, then asked a judge to stop him from illegally selling food through a buyers club that distributes products to thousands of people across the nation.
The move provoked outrage from Miller’s devoted customers, including Neifert, who views the farmer’s lifestyle as an art form passed down across generations and says, “there has to be a way that that can exist in America.”
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Insurers are betting on a suite of new AI-driven techniques to better predict surging losses from climate-driven weather catastrophes ranging from unprecedented wildfires to hurricanes and floods.
Less than three months into the year, natural disasters are already causing major economic disruption around the world, including recent fires across Los Angeles, an economy-denting cyclone in Australia, floods in Jakarta and a giant storm that left dozens dead in the US. According to a recent report by broker Gallagher Re, annual insured catastrophe losses of $150 billion have become “the new normal.”
While traditional models apply complex physics and elaborate computer simulations to estimate the probability of future losses, the results often can fall short. Flood models designed to measure the same risk have yielded conflicting outcomes. Wildfire models can struggle to accommodate the dizzying number of variables in play—everything from the role of human intervention to the possible flight path of a wind-borne ember.
Some investors in catastrophe bonds expressly shun securities exposed to such perils because they don’t trust the modeling. Every model “is an imperfect representation of a very complex phenomena,” said Firas Saleh, director of product management at Moody’s Corp.
That’s where artificial intelligence comes in. Its proponents contend it can provide a more accurate estimate of property-level risk for weather calamities.
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