The SUV-sized pallet of old batteries is the most massive object the station has ever jettisoned.

The International Space Station got a little lighter last week.

The orbiting lab discarded a 2.9-ton (2.6 metric tons) pallet of used batteries on Thursday morning (March 11) — the most massive object it has ever jettisoned, NASA spokesperson Leah Cheshier told Gizmodo.

The space junk is expected to fall back to Earth in two to four years, agency officials wrote in an update last week. That update also stated that the pallet will burn up "harmlessly in the atmosphere," but not everyone is convinced that's the case.

You, too, can enjoy reading books on an e-ink screen without that sour aftertaste left in the back of your throat. And it starts with buying yourself a different e-reader.

McConnell then began to lay out how Republicans will respond if the filibuster is eliminated. Via Daily Wire:

“They are arguing for a radically less stable and less consensus-driven system of government. Forget about enduring laws with broad support. Nothing in federal law would ever be settled.

“Does anyone really believe the American people were voting for an entirely new system of government by electing Joe Biden to the White House and a 50-50 Senate?

“This is 50-50 Senate. There was no mandate to completely transform America by the American people on November 3.” //

McConnell said the notion that the filibuster is the only thing that stands in the way of Democrats ramming through their entire agenda is false.

“So, let me say this very clearly for all 99 of my colleagues: Nobody serving in this chamber can even begin to imagine what a completely scorched-earth Senate would look like.

“None of us have served one minute in a Senate that was completely drained of comity and consent. This is an institution that requires unanimous consent to turn the lights on before noon.”

Given the 50-50 split, McConnell reminded Democrats that the vice president does not break ties in determining a quorum.

“I want our colleagues to imagine a world where every single task, every one of them, requires a physical quorum. […] Everything that Democratic Senates did to Presidents Bush and Trump… everything the Republican Senate did to President Obama… would be child’s play compared to the disaster that Democrats would create for their own priorities if they break the Senate.” //

McConnell listed the following, as noted by The Daily Wire:

Nationwide right-to-work for working Americans.
Defunding Planned Parenthood and sanctuary cities on day one.
A whole new era of domestic energy production.
Sweeping new protections for conscience and the right to life of the unborn.
Concealed-carry reciprocity in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Massive hardening of security on our southern border.
Tough talk. Would he follow through?

Earlier this week an all-star group of energy and climate scholars published a scientific article in a prestigious journal pointing out that a Stanford professor’s proposal for powering the United States entirely on renewable energy sources rests upon a gigantic lie.

Over the last several years, Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo and many politicians have pointed to Stanford scientist Mark Jacobson’s modeling as proof that we can quickly and cheaply transition to 100 percent renewables.

What is the lie? That we can increase the amount of power from U.S. hydroelectric dams ten-fold. According to the U.S. Department of Energy and all major studies, the real potential increase is just one percent of that.

Without all that additional hydroelectricity, Jacobson’s entire house of cards falls apart. That’s because there’s no other way to store all of that unreliable solar and wind energy, given the shortcomings of current battery technologies.

The authors diplomatically call Jacobson’s lie an “error,” but it is in fact a lie and everyone — Jacobson included — knows it.

In his response, Jacobson writes, “Increasing hydropower's peak instantaneous discharge rate was not a ‘modeling mistake’ but an assumption.”

What is an assumption? It is “a thing that is accepted as true or as certain to happen, without proof” [emphasis added].

But what have Jacobson, Gore, DiCaprio and politicians around the world been insisting for years? That Jacobson’s study proves not only that we can power the world with renewables-alone, but also that doing so would be cheaper and more environmentally friendly.

Upon the big lie rest others.

For example, around the world, politicians and renewables advocates seeking to close nuclear plants justify their actions by claiming Jacobson’s work proves that nuclear plants are not needed as an alternative to fossil fuels.

Jacobson himself told the audience during our debate at UCLA last year that California would replace our last nuclear plant, Diablo Canyon, entirely with renewables — and at a lower cost than keeping the plant running.

Jacobson says these things even though he knows perfectly well that everywhere in the world nuclear plants are closed, fossil fuels are burned instead.

The UK's Rolls-Royce and Estonia's Fermi Energia have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to study the potential for the deployment of small modular reactors in the Baltic country. The study will cover all aspects of deployment, including grid suitability, cooling, emergency planning, human resources, licensing feasibility, economics and the supply chain.

GE Steam Power announced today that it has designed and manufactured the largest-ever (75-inch) last-stage blade for its Arabelle low-pressure rotor. The blade will enable the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant under construction in Somerset, England to produce 3.2 GWe of CO2 free power, GE said. Once completed, this Arabelle steam turbine will be the most powerful nuclear steam turbine in operation. It was tested at GE's factory in Belfort, France. //

Inserted into a balancing pit specifically designed for large turbines, the 8-meter wide bladed module was rotated at a speed of 1500 revolutions per minute, similar to its future site conditions.

"This major turbine part is a first quarter 2021 milestone for Hinkley Point C achieved on time, despite the pandemic," said Guillaume Callewaert, EDF HPC programme director. "This large component will be delivered to site and support the mechanical and electrical ramp-up phase of our project in the coming months."

Last-stage blades are part of the low-pressure module in a steam turbine generator which converts steam into electricity in a nuclear power plant. Longer blades increase efficiency of a steam turbine and allow to further optimise backpressure, all of which contribute to greater power output from the nuclear power plant, GE Steam Power said.

[I]n California, Biden beat Trump by 5± million votes (2020), whereas Clinton beat Trump by 4± million (2016). Doing the arithmetic, the contrast is 833,843 votes. (Statisticians call this the Difference of the Differences, or DoD.) Note that Trump increased his California vote total [from 2016 to 2020] by 1.5± million votes. However, Biden increased the Democrat candidate’s vote total by 2.3± million [from 2016]. Where did California find 3.8± million more votes in 2020 than in 2016? Easy, you say: California’s population has increased.

That’s a good thought, but between 2016 and 2020, the Census Bureau says that the population of California increase by less than 700,000 people. (Note that this includes children not old enough to vote, non-citizens, non-registered citizens, etc.). However, as mentioned above, the 2020 vote total for the Democrat candidate increased by 2.3± million votes. On the face of it, that significant vote increase does not appear to be logically explainable. //

Trump did better than expected in Ohio and Florida while also improving over 2016 in Louisiana, Alabama, and Utah, each of which counted their absentee ballots BEFORE Election Day (no counting of absentee votes afterward). In other words, whatever transpired during “the Great Pause” in counting “new” Biden votes was precluded from happening in those five states. Is that just a coincidence?
New York lost over 304,000 residents from 2016 to 2020, yet the state provided approximately 300,000 more votes for Biden in 2020 than expected. How is that possible when Trump increased his vote totals in 2020 by over 461,000 from 2016? //

California gained 700,000± in population from 2016 to 2020, but gained 6,000,000± registered voters. Not bloody likely no matter how big of a voter registration drive there was.

Democrats want to use stimulus money to make you into the people populating Disney's cartoon 'Wall-E.' Instead, turn it into a weapon for antifragility.
By Joy Pullmann

Becket Adams wrote a piece that illustrates a part of what I’m talking about. He noted how so many newsrooms claimed to have “verified” the fake Trump quotes while they ran to repeat them.

The natural question is how you can verify something that is objectively false. The obvious answer is that you can’t. That means that NBC News, ABC News, CNN, and others who hid behind fake verification claims so they could repeat this false report did so knowing that they had no proof for what they were actually putting out there. They simply made it up, or they all got duped by the same source.

On that note, let me say this. If the Post and all these other outlets aren’t going to reveal who the lying source was, then I have no choice but to assume their “source” simply doesn’t exist and that they all made it up as a partisan political attack. There is no ethical reason to protect a source that provides false information. In fact, it’s unethical to print a false story and then refuse to even reveal how you came into the possession of that false story. I say that to mean when media flacks try to claim that the Post was lied to but that they didn’t lie by repeating it, you owe them zero benefits of the doubt. If they were lied to, then they should tell us who lied. If they won’t, then it’s logical to conclude that source doesn’t actually exist. //

Regardless, ask yourself this. How many times has this been done in the past? Yes, the Post got caught this time just like CNN got caught when they printed false claims about James Comey’s then-future. The Atlantic’s “suckers and losers” story also comes to mind. But for every time these outlets get caught, you have to assume they’ve gotten away with it hundreds of times. After all, how exactly can you disprove an anonymous source who doesn’t actually provide evidence of anything? You typically can’t. This latest case was an exception because audio happened to exist to directly contradict the account.

tsar becket adams
@BecketAdams
you all are missing the real story re: WaPo's correction of its Trump/Ga. investigations chief "scoop."

the real scandal is that a bunch of newsrooms claimed at the time they “confirmed” the details of the "scoop" with their own anon sourcing.
Audio shows the media got the Trump-Georgia story all wrong
washingtonexaminer.com //

That’s incredibly significant, and not just from a media malfeasance perspective (but that’s, of course, part of it). Here’s why: it was reported in January that Georgia State officials didn’t think a recording of the call existed, which is presumably why WaPo took bad quotes from a source they wouldn’t name but who was familiar with the conversation. They wanted the story and didn’t have the recording, so they reported what they were told. Not particularly impressive journalism.

That was readily apparent after the Wall Street Journal got their hands on the recording and published it last week, proving that the anonymous source essentially made up quotes and attributed them to the former president. And where was this recording discovered? In the trash folder on a device belonging to the lead investigator in the Secretary of State’s office, the very person Trump called.

Nuclear Energy and Global Climate Change are two controversial topics that are rarely debated in a professional or serious manner. Often political agendas take the front seat leaving citizens confused and frustrated. Today’s guest, Walter Horsting, is going to provide insight into the controversial side of these two issues; the side the mass media rarely discusses. He will share with us his views on why 4th generation Nuclear Energy is a positive move for society and why he believes the science shows that global warming is not occurring. 

After listening to his talk, it becomes evident that the verdict is not clear on where these issues stand. It is important that we continue to discuss these issues in a professional scientific way to flush out flaws and to figure out where the science really takes us. The truth, no matter how inconvenient, is important for our future. It will enable us to make informed and reasonable decisions. 

https://media.blubrry.com/business_game_changers/s/www.transformationtalkradio.com/files/Episode/23795/media/westall-20170508-horsting.mp3

Scientific Documents and Links on the issues:
Climate Charts and Information:

Whats up with That: https://wattsupwiththat.com/
NoTricksZone: http://notrickszone.com
Ice Age Now: https://www.iceagenow.info/
CO2 the Climate Supriese: http://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/The-Climate-Surprise-CO2C.pdf
JoNova: http://joannenova.com.au/
Climate Depot: http://www.climatedepot.com/
Icecap: http://icecap.us/index.php

4th Nuclear Generation Molten Salt Reactors:

http://www.thoriumenergyworld.com/
http://terrestrialenergy.com/
http://www.thoriumenergycheaperthancoal.com/
http://flibe-energy.com/

When we say that nuclear energy is a key element for sustainable development, we mean that:

• It can meet global demand. The International Energy Agency reports that more than 1 billion people worldwide live without electricity. Without electricity, basic human needs like clean water, food security and educational opportunities are difficult to obtain. Nuclear technology can help bring reliable electricity infrastructure to help improve the health and quality of life for a growing number of communities that live in poverty.
  ​* It protects our climate. In the U.S. alone, nuclear electricity prevents more than 506 million metric tons of carbon dioxide from entering our atmosphere every year. Nuclear facilities also require far less land than most other energy sources.
• It is reliable and stable. Unlike intermittent energy sources, nuclear power supply is available 24/7. And when unforeseen events interrupt the energy supply chain, nuclear facilities stay on line to continue providing power to vulnerable populations.
• It is affordable. A comparison study from IAEA found that nuclear power is one of the most affordable sources of electricity worldwide.
• It promotes health and well-being. NASA and Columbia University found that nuclear power may have saved 1.8 million lives that otherwise would have been lost to pollution from emissions worldwide. Nuclear electricity promotes people’s well-being by improving air quality, providing jobs and stimulating economies.

What can get D.C. politicos and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, environmentalists and business leaders, conservatives and liberals, national security experts and celebrities to finally agree?

Clean, reliable nuclear energy.

Nuclear energy provides nearly 20 percent of America’s electricity, all without carbon emissions. It powers and propels our way of life, protecting national security and clean air, providing millions of dollars in economic benefits and a pathway to sustainable development.

That must be why it unites a vast coalition of supporters from both sides of the aisle and across the country.

See what everyone is saying about America’s largest clean energy source.

Map and datasets showing global potential pumped hydro energy storage locations with estimated data and land footprint

As the proportion of wind and solar photovoltaics (PV) in an electrical grid extends into the 50-100% range a combination of additional long-distance high voltage transmission, demand management and local storage is required for stability [1, 2]. Pumped Hydro Energy Storage (PHES) constitutes 97% of electricity storage worldwide because of its low cost.

We found about 616,000 potentially feasible PHES sites with storage potential of about 23 million Gigawatt-hours (GWh) by using geographic information system (GIS) analysis. This is about one hundred times greater than required to support a 100% global renewable electricity system. Brownfield sites (existing reservoirs, old mining sites) will be included in a future analysis. //

An approximate guide to storage requirements for 100% renewable electricity, based on analysis for Australia, is 1 Gigawatt (GW) of power per million people with 20 hours of storage, which amounts to 20 GWh per million people [2]. This is for a strongly-connected large-area grid (1 million km2) with good wind and solar resources in a high-energy-use country. Local analysis is required for an individual country. For example, Australia needs about 500 GWh (and has storage potential that is 300 times larger) and the USA needs about 7000 GWh (and has storage potential that is 200 times larger).

Finding PHES sites
Potential sites for off-river PHES are identified using GIS algorithms [4] with defined search criteria. The surveyed latitude range is up to 60 degrees north and 56 degrees south [5]. For each reservoir the following attributes are identified:

• Latitude, longitude, and elevation of the reservoir
• Area of the reservoir (in hectares)
• Water volume of the reservoir (in Gigalitres)
• Length of the dam (in meters)
• Dam wall height (in meters): the maximum height of earth and rock wall; different wall heights will produce different dam and reservoir shapes and volumes
• Volume of rock in the dam wall (in Gigalitres) based on a 3:1 upstream and downstream slopes
• Water-to-rock (W/R) ratio: ratio between volume of the stored water and volume of rock in the dam wall; reservoirs with higher water-to-rock ratio are economically more competitive.

In his review of my new book, Apocalypse Never, at Yale Climate Connections, Peter Gleick accuses me of mischaracterizing environmentalism and misrepresenting climate science. He argues that I construct strawmen, promote nuclear energy above other energies, and engage in ad hominem (personal) attacks.

In fact, Gleick mischaracterizes Apocalypse Never, which accurately reflects the best available science and promotes energy progress, not nuclear to the exclusion of other sources, without making personal attacks.

Most troubling, Gleick writes, “if Malthusians are wrong, all they would have done is made the world a better place.” But in Apocalypse Never I show that, for Malthusians, making the world a “better place” has meant letting the poor starve, keeping poor nations dependent on wood fuel, and diverting World Bank funding from dams, roads, and fertilizer for development to charitable endeavors like solar panels for rural villagers aimed at making poverty sustainable. //

What we differ on is how to get there. In Apocalypse Never I show why poor people in Africa, Asia, and Latin America will enjoy higher standards of living, and protect the natural environment, by doing the exact same thing Americans and Europeans have done, which is to industrialize, urbanize, build flood control systems, modernize agriculture, and move up the energy ladder, from wood and dung to hydroelectric dams and fossil fuels to nuclear. 

I further argue that, if we continue to develop in these ways, deaths from natural disasters will continue to decline, food surpluses will continue to rise, and global carbon emissions will likely peak and decline soon, preventing temperatures from rising more than three degrees centigrade over pre-industrial levels.

Gleick disagrees and defends the Malthusian notion that future food surpluses are highly uncertain due to climate change, and argues that I ignore such risks. To get to the bottom of the disagreement, we need to review the best available science, as well as the history of Malthusian ideology. //

My point is, again, that human development and disaster preparedness massively outweigh whatever increase there’s been in hurricane wind speed, the length of forest fire season, or modestly more precipitation. “What most determines how vulnerable various nations are to flooding,” I note, “depends centrally on whether they have modern water and flood control systems, like my home city of Berkeley, California, or not, like the Congo.” //

What I note — again – is that however much climate change might be making extreme weather worse, it hasn’t made up for the huge improvements in resilience which have made natural disasters better. Deaths from natural disasters have declined over 90 percent in the last century, and there has been no increase in the cost of natural disasters once greater wealth and development are accounted for. //

In truth, a major theme of Apocalypse Never, is that what matters is the direction of travel. We should want to move up the energy ladder — from wood and dung to hydro-electric dams, liquified petroleum gas (to replace wood and dung), natural gas (to replace coal), and then, yes, nuclear energy — and not down the energy ladder, which is what Malthusian environmentalists advocate. //

Gleick writes, “Shellenberger no doubt believes in, and supports, the goal of a better future. So do environmental scientists, activists, and any decent human.” The question is what we mean by “better future.” For Malthus and Malthusian scientists, a better future is one where there are fewer people. “The land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than in England,” Malthus famously wrote, “and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.”

Conservationists and environmentalists defend Malthus by claiming that he wrote his famous book when it was still too early to know that the industrial revolution would radically increase food production. Malthus came of age in what historians call the “advanced organic economy,” which, due to its reliance on renewables, namely wood fuel and waterwheels, “condemned the majority of the population to poverty” for inherently physical reasons, notes Malthus biographer Robert Mayhew. //

Did Malthus’ ideas have any impact on the real world?

They did. British elites used Malthus’ ideas to justify letting one million people starve to death during the Great Irish Famine. To this day, when people think of the Great Famine, they tend to focus on the fungus that killed potatoes and overlook the fact that, between 1845 and 1849, Ireland exported food, including beef, to England. Irish families had to sell their pigs in order to pay the rent, even as their children were starving.

Malthus taught the British to blame the Irish. “The cheapness of this nourishing root [potatoes],” Malthus wrote, “joined to the ignorance and barbarism of the [Irish] people, have encouraged marriage to such a degree that the population has pushed much beyond the industry and present resources of the country.”

Thirty years later, the British governor-general of India argued that the Indian population “has a tendency to increase more rapidly than the food it raises from the soil.” Later he claimed the “limits of increase of production and of the population have been reached.”

Then, between 1942 and 1943, as India produced food and manufactured goods for the British war effort, local food shortages emerged. Food imports could have alleviated the crisis, but Prime Minister Winston Churchill refused to allow it. Why? “Much of the answer must lie in the Malthusian mentality of Churchill and his key advisors,” concludes Mayhew.

“Indians are breeding like rabbits and being paid a million a day by us for doing nothing about the war,” Churchill claimed, falsely. Partly as a result of his decisions, three million people died in the Bengali famine of 1942 to 1943, which was three times the death toll of the Great Irish Famine.

After World War II, American conservationists adopted the thinly-veiled Malthusian idea that making the world a better place involved letting poor people in poor nations starve to death. Top academic institutions helped make Malthusian ideas mainstream.

In 1972, an NGO called the Club of Rome published “The Limits to Growth,” a report concluding that the planet was on the brink of ecological collapse, which The New York Times covered on its front page. “The most probable result,” the report declared, “will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.” The collapse of civilization was “a grim inevitability if society continues its present dedication to growth and ‘progress.’” //

Ehrlich and Holdren argued that the world likely did not have enough energy to support the development aspirations of the world’s poor. “Most plans for modernizing agriculture in less-developed nations call for introducing energy-intensive practices similar to those used in North America and western Europe—greatly increased use of fertilizers and other farm chemicals, tractors, and other machinery, irrigation, and supporting transportation networks—all of which require large inputs of fossil fuels,” they noted.

A better way, they said, was “much greater use of human labor and relatively less dependence on heavy machinery and manufactured fertilizers and pesticides.” Such labor-intensive farming “causes far less environmental damage than does energy-intensive Western agriculture,” they claimed. In other words, the “secret” to “alternative farming methods” was for small farmers in poor nations to remain small farmers. //

In 1981, the Indian economist Amartya Sen published Poverty and Famines showing that famines are not caused by a lack in food, and occur primarily in times of war, political oppression, and the collapse of food distribution, not production, systems. Sen won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1998.

By 1987, demographers knew the number of humans added annually to the global population had reached its peak. Seven years later, the U.N. held its last Family Planning meeting. Between 1996 and 2006, United Nations family planning spending declined 50 percent.

As it became clear that the growth in the global birth rate had peaked, Malthusian thinkers started to look to climate change as a replacement apocalypse for overpopulation and resource scarcity. The influential Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider embraced the Malthusianism of John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich, and he invited them to educate his scientists. //

Gleick defends Holdren and the Ehrlichs as part of his broader defense of Malthusianism. Gleick claims they did not claim fossil fuels were scarce in the 1970s, and points to a book published in 2003 where Holdren said, “What environmentalists mainly say on this topic is not that we are running out of energy, but that we are running out of environment…”

But I make this exact point in Apocalypse Never. I show how Malthusians have used climate change to shift from claiming fossil fuels were scarce to claiming that the environment was scarce. “Where just a few years earlier, Malthusians had demanded limits on energy consumption by claiming fossil fuels were scarce; now they demanded limits by claiming the atmosphere was scarce.”

The Malthusians significantly modified Malthus. Where Malthus warned that overpopulation would result in a scarcity of food, Malthusians in the 1960s and 1970s warned that energy abundance would result in overpopulation, environmental destruction, and societal collapse. Where in 1977, Ehrlich and Holdren proposed international control of the “development, administration, conservation and distribution of all natural resources,” many Malthusian scientists, green NGOs, and U.N. agencies today similarly seek control over energy, food, and water policies in developing nations in the name of climate change and biodiversity.

In his 1989 book, The End of Nature, Bill McKibben argued that humankind’s impact on the planet would require the same Malthusian program developed by Ehrlich and Commoner in the 1970s. Economic growth would have to end. Rich nations must return to farming and transfer wealth to poor nations so they could improve their lives modestly but not industrialize. And the human population would have to shrink to between 100 million and 2 billion. //

It is notable that Malthusians have long opposed nuclear energy not because it is dangerous but it eliminates the scarcity and pollution problems that Malthusians ostensibly are so worried about.

Scientists had known since the early 20th Century that nuclear energy was the key not just to bountiful fertilizer, water, and food but also zero pollution and a radically reduced environmental footprint. Nuclear energy thus created a serious problem for Malthusians and anyone else who wanted to argue that energy, fertilizer, and food were scarce. Some Malthusians argued that the problem with nuclear was that it produced too much cheap and abundant energy.

“If a doubling of the state’s population in the next twenty years is encouraged by providing the power resources for this growth,” wrote the Sierra Club’s executive director, opposing Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, “[California’s] scenic character will be destroyed.”

Behind an advocacy ostensibly motivated by concerns for the environment lies a very dark view of human beings. “It’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of cheap, clean, and abundant energy,” said the Malthusian advocate of renewable energy, Amory Lovins, in a 1970 interview, “because of what we would do with it.” Ehrlich agreed. “In fact, giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”

And most of all they stoked fears of the bomb. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell argued that “nothing is more likely to lead to an H-bomb war than the threat of universal destitution through over-population.” They called the growing population in developing nations a “population explosion.” And Ehrlich titled his book, The Population Bomb. //

In Apocalypse Never, I point to a pattern. Malthusians raise the alarm about a resource or environmental problems and then attack the obvious technical solutions. Malthus had to attack birth control to predict overpopulation. Holdren and Ehrlich had to claim fossil fuels were scarce to oppose the extension of fertilizers and industrial agriculture to poor nations and to raise the alarm over famine. And climate activists today have to attack natural gas and nuclear energy, the main drivers of lower carbon emissions, in order to warn of climate apocalypse.

In his review of Apocalypse Never, Gleick does something similar. He suggests that I am wrong that hydro-electric dams, flood control systems, and nuclear power plants will allow human societies to both mitigate and adapt to climate change. I believe Gleick is wrong to do so, in both senses of the term “wrong.” I’m sad about that, not angry.

In the end, as I argue in the last chapter of Apocalypse Never, Malthusian scientists, activists, and journalists are lost souls seeking false gods. They are individuals in the grip of religion without knowing it. That’s not a personal attack. It’s a criticism of an ideology that has become the dominant religion of supposedly secular people.

Last November, Japan’s Environment Ministry issued a stark warning: the amount of solar panel waste Japan produces every year will rise from 10,000 to 800,000 tons by 2040, and the nation has no plan for safely disposing of it.

Neither does California, a world leader in deploying solar panels. Only Europe requires solar panel makers to collect and dispose of solar waste at the end of their lives.

All of which raises the question: just how big of a problem is solar waste? //

• Solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than do nuclear power plants.

• If solar and nuclear produce the same amount of electricity over the next 25 years that nuclear produced in 2016, and the wastes are stacked on football fields, the nuclear waste would reach the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa (52 meters), while the solar waste would reach the height of two Mt. Everests (16 km).

• In countries like China, India, and Ghana, communities living near e-waste dumps often burn the waste in order to salvage the valuable copper wires for resale. Since this process requires burning off the plastic, the resulting smoke contains toxic fumes that are carcinogenic and teratogenic (birth defect-causing) when inhaled. //

To make these calculations, EP estimated the total number of operational solar panels in 2016 and assumed they would all be retired in 25 years — the average lifespan of a solar panel. EP then estimated the total amount of spent nuclear fuel assemblies that would be generated over a 25 year period. EP then divided both estimates by the quantity of electricity they produced to come up with the waste per unit of energy measure.

While nuclear waste is contained in heavy drums and regularly monitored, solar waste outside of Europe today ends up in the larger global stream of electronic waste.

Solar panels contain toxic metals like lead, which can damage the nervous system, as well as cadmium, a known carcinogen. Both are known to leach out of existing e-waste dumps into drinking water supplies.

OfflineIMAP is a GPLv2 software to dispose your mailbox(es) as a local Maildir(s).

For example, this allows reading the mails while offline without the need for your mail reader (MUA) to support disconnected operations.

OfflineIMAP will synchronize both sides via IMAP.

An Ebola outbreak in Guinea that has so far sickened at least 18 people and killed nine has stirred difficult memories of the devastating epidemic that struck the West African country between 2013 and 2016, along with neighboring Liberia and Sierra Leone, leaving more than 11,000 people dead.

But it may not just be the trauma that has persisted. The virus causing the new outbreak barely differs from the strain seen 5 to 6 years ago, genomic analyses by three independent research groups have shown, suggesting the virus lay dormant in a survivor of the epidemic all that time. “This is pretty shocking,” says virologist Angela Rasmussen of Georgetown University. “Ebolaviruses aren’t herpesviruses”—which are known to cause long-lasting infections—“and generally RNA viruses don’t just hang around not replicating at all.” //

The Guinea Center for Research and Training in Infectious Diseases (CERFIG) and the country’s National Hemorrhagic Fever Laboratory have each read viral genomes from four patients; researchers at the Pasteur Institute in Dakar, Senegal, sequenced two genomes. In three postings today on the website virological.org, the groups agree the outbreak was caused by the Makona strain of a species called Zaire ebolavirus, just like the past epidemic. A phylogenetic tree shows the new virus falls between virus samples from the 2013–16 epidemic. //

Another ongoing outbreak of Ebola in North Kivu, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was also started by transmission from someone infected during a previous outbreak, Delaporte notes. (The survivor had tested negative for Ebola twice after his illness in 2020.) Taken together, that suggests humans are now as likely to be the source of a new outbreak of Ebola as wildlife, he says. “This is clearly a new paradigm for how these outbreaks start.” Outbreaks sparked by survivors may even become more likely, now that increasing mobility and other factors have caused each eruption of Ebola to become bigger, resulting in more survivors, says Fabian Leendertz, a wildlife veterinarian who was involved in the sequencing.