Princeton’s Net Zero America: Potential Pathways, Infrastructure and Impacts charts five challenging, tortuous, investment-intensive paths to “net-zero” by 2050. A presentation that contains 345 slides of text, colorful graphs and wide area maps provides details about the selected scenarios. The Princeton research team promises peer-reviewed journal articles in the near future.

According to sponsor organization promotional materials, the slide deck was released before the journal articles “in recognition of the urgency to cut greenhouse gas emissions and the need for immediate federal, state, and local policy making efforts.” There’s little doubt that the project sponsors and the authors have a strong policy-influence agenda.

All five chosen scenarios involve technology and infrastructure deployments “at historically unprecedented rates across most sectors.” They represent “expansive impacts on landscapes” that have not yet been planned in communities whose permission has not yet been obtained.
Overlooked path

The NZA study ignores a straight, wide, blazed trail. As documented in Goldstein and Qvist’s 2019 book titled A BRIGHT FUTURE: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow, several major electricity grids have successfully eliminated coal and been nearly completely decarbonized.

In those grids–France, Sweden, and Ontario–a combination of nuclear power and hydroelectricity did the job. In each case, it took about two decades of sustained effort.

None of history’s successful decarbonization efforts required a complete reordering of the economy. The nuclear energy portion of the country- or providence-wide efforts that now provide reliable, abundant electricity from non-combustion sources that do not dump carbon dioxide to the environment did not result in “expansive impacts on landscapes.”
Electricity can do most of the work

Though electricity is only a part of total energy use, the Princeton study makes the reasonable assumption that decarbonized electricity grids can be expanded to supply the energy services needed to decarbonize most of the rest of the energy supply.

That same assumption continues to work if the electricity decarbonization path includes a successful effort to improve nuclear energy products and projects. Unlike wind and solar, atomic energy is a thermal energy source that can directly supply heat energy useful for industrial processes. Some of the electrification expansions that NZA assumes to be necessary to supply all energy demands might be accomplished more affordably with direct heat use.

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Lorries are parked on the runway at Manston airport at sunrise as part of Operation Brock to stack lorries waiting to cross the English Channel in Kent, England, on Dec. 22, 2020.

Even fitness trackers ruled a big risk due to potential for record-matching identifying your family

As we feared, the “Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act”—the CASE Act—that we’ve been fighting in various forms for two years has been included in a "must-pass" spending bill. This new legislation means Internet users could face up to $30,000 in penalties for sharing a meme or making a video, with liability determined not by neutral judges but by biased bureaucrats.

What if chkdsk already borked your system?
Assuming you’re staring at a system that refuses to start up like it normally would, don’t panic. Or, rather, you’ve probably already been panicking, so it’s good that you’ve gotten most of the stress out of your body already. There is a fix for the issue, even if you can’t get into Windows 10 to address it with any lingering updates. As Microsoft describes:

The device should automatically start up into the Recovery Console after failing to start up a few times.
Select Advanced options.
Select Command Prompt from the list of actions.
Once Command Prompt opens, type: chkdsk /f
Allow chkdsk to complete the scan, this can take a little while. Once it has completed, type: exit
The device should now start up as expected. If it restarts into Recovery Console, select Exit and continue to Windows 10.

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In the spring of 1991, I began contemplating ways to combine the benefits of gas turbine power plants with the incredible advantages of nuclear fuels like uranium, plutonium and thorium.

That effort has continued sporadically for many years with many interesting impacts on my life. It was impetus for a small modular reactor start-up company that never gained sufficient traction. It has led to many fascinating conversations and more than a few close friendships.

I thought it would be worthwhile to share an updated version of a concept paper first published on the Adams Atomic Engines, Inc. web site in 1995.

This is the kind of (expletive deleted) garbage (expletive deleted) legislation these (expletive deleted) politicians concoct in the name of serving the public. Impeach them all, burn the place to the ground, and salt the swamp when finished. This is utter and consummate trash.

The world the pilgrims made is a testament to their resolve and daring, without which this country and the people we love so much would not exist.

Archaeologists in Jerusalem have uncovered the remains of a long-lost Byzantine church and the foundations of a 2,000-year-old Jewish ritual bath not far from an area believed to have been the site of the Last Supper.

The church, also known as the Church of the Agony and the Church of All Nations, was built on the spot where Judas is thought to have betrayed Jesus with a famous kiss before handing him off to Roman soldiers.

The church is decorated with finely carved stone elements, indicating its importance. Alluding to Jesus’s sacrifice, Greek inscriptions on the building’s floor read: “for the memory and repose of the lovers of Christ… accept the offering of your servants and give them remission of sins.”