Kansans head to the polls Tuesday to vote on the proposed “Value Them Both” constitutional amendment that seeks to overturn the Kansas Supreme Court’s decision in Hodes & Nauser v. Schmidt that declared that the state constitution guarantees a “fundamental right to abortion.” Many Kansans may not realize, however, that the votes they cast on Tuesday may have been heavily influenced by out-of-state abortion apologists who contributed a whopping 71 percent of the $6.54 million spent by the lead group campaigning against the amendment. //

Kansas voters may not recognize the outside influences in play, however, but if they take the time to actually read the proposed amendment before marking their ballots tomorrow, they’ll realize that the “no” side of the debate has been lying to them for the last year-and-a-half. Or Kansas voters can instead learn the truth the hard way when, once the amendment has been defeated, abortion activists turn to the state courts to start striking the current abortion regulations on the books and obtain taxpayer-funded abortion. Conservative Kansans will then learn what so-called “abortion access” really means.

On some moonless nights, enormous patches of the Northwest Indian Ocean and seas around Indonesia begin to glow. This event has been witnessed by hundreds of sailors, but only one research vessel has ever, by pure chance, come across this bioluminescent phenomenon, known as milky seas. Thanks to that vessel, samples showed that the source of the light was a bacteria called V. harveyi, which had colonized a microalgae called Phaocystis. But that was back in 1988, and researchers have yet to be in the right place and the right time to catch one of these events again.

Both the bacteria and algae are common to those waters, so it’s not clear what triggers these rare events. To help understand why milky seas form, researchers have gotten much better at spotting these swaths of bioluminescence from the skies. With the help of satellites, Stephen Miller, a professor of atmospheric science, has been collecting both images and eyewitness accounts of milky seas for nearly 20 years. Thanks to improvements in the imaging capabilities over the past decades, Miller published a compilation last year of probable milky seas in the time frame of 2012 to 2021, including one occurrence south of Java, Indonesia, in summer 2019. //

Although milky seas can be massive—greater than 100,000 square kilometers in the case of the 2019 sighting—the intensity of this bioluminescence is still relatively faint. By comparison, the better-known sea sparkle from marine plankton (dinoflagellates) is 10 times stronger—and even that can be hard to spot. //

“When waking up at 2200 the sea was white. There is no moon, the sea is apparently full of ? plankton ? but the bow wave is black! It gives the impression of sailing on snow!” the Ganesha crew wrote in their logs.

This glow was continuous as far as they could see, and they also compared the effect to glow-in-the-dark stickers. When they collected some of the water in a bucket they found that the light extinguished when stirred, which is the opposite of dinoflagellate behavior.

“I was surprised by their description of the pinpoints of light that vanished upon stirring and the sense that the glow was coming from depth,” writes Miller. “The disappearing glow may be due to bacterial communities being broken up that made their individual glow less apparent than when concentrated on a particle, or a change in the water that shut off that glow… not sure!” //

“I would also like to point out that while we look in collective awe at the incredible photos from James Webb Space Telescope coming from the edges of our universe, there still somehow remain these fascinating mysteries down below, waiting to be discovered, appreciated, and learned about,” adds Miller.

But beyond the textual argument, which the federal court will likely consider in the next week or so on an expedited time frame, the underlying rationale for the Speech or Debate Clause should provide a stark warning to Democrats that what Willis is doing is destructive to our democratic republic and should be denounced.

As Graham’s attorneys stressed in his motion, the framers believed the Speech or Debate Clause was “‘indispensably necessary’ for the independence of the legislature, and ultimately for the ‘rights of the people.’” Only by protecting members of Congress from being questioned about their legislative activity could the integrity of the legislative process be assured. “By ‘enabling these representatives to execute the functions of their office without fear’ of interference from prosecutors, grand juries, or courts, the Framers understood that the ‘rights of the people’ would, in turn, be protected.”

But here, we don’t truly have a “prosecutor” or a “grand jury”; we have an inquisitor and her trial of Republicans by publicity. And the Fulton County court seems but a rubber stamp for the subpoenas Willis seeks.

And Willis is but one county D.A. Imagine the mischief if every prosecutor with political ambitions followed her lead.

NuScale will get the final approval nearly six years after starting the process.

On Friday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) announced that it would be issuing a certification to a new nuclear reactor design, making it just the seventh that has been approved for use in the US. But in some ways, it's a first: the design, from a company called NuScale, is a small modular reactor that can be constructed at a central facility and then moved to the site where it will be operated.

The move was expected after the design received an okay during its final safety evaluation in 2020. //

Small modular reactors have been promoted as avoiding many of the problems that have made large nuclear plants exceedingly expensive to build. They're small enough that they can be assembled on a factory floor and then shipped to the site where they will operate, eliminating many of the challenges of custom, on-site construction. In addition, they're structured in a way to allow passive safety, where no operator actions are necessary to shut the reactor down if problems occur. //

The NRC will still have to weigh in on the sites where any of these reactors are deployed. Currently, one such site is in the works: a project called the Carbon Free Power Project, which will be situated at Idaho National Lab. That's expected to be operational in 2030 but has been facing some financial uncertainty. Utilities that might use the power produced there have grown hesitant to commit money to the project. //

C.M. AllenArs Tribunus Militumreply2 days agoReader Favreportignore user
Wheels Of Confusion wrote:

Would have been even better 20 years ago. But then again, so would EVERY non-fossil fuel-based power source being rolled out at scale. We're just so late on everything, and most of the blame lies with politicians allergic to governing and rich, subsidized industry allergic to changing.

If it can bring the cost of nuclear power down by an order of magnitude and reduce the lagtime between facility approval and initial production, it might have a legitimate place in the effort to eliminate CO2 pollution. A nuclear plant coming online start producing electricity in a couple years, while still scaling up to its full production levels as more reactors get built, also gives it a serious edge against other nuclear technologies in addition to fossil fuel plants, which are more or less 'all or nothing' projects //

raxx7Ars Legatus Legioniset Subscriptorreply2 days agoReader Favreportignore user
itfa wrote:

Initial estimates have it within a few percentage points of natural gas in price per megawatt, both from the manufacturer and the operator of the first project these are supposed to go into.
Personally, I think this type of design has a far better chance of being on budget than traditional nuclear construction.
MegalodonArs Legatus Legioniset Subscriptorreply2 days agoReader Favreportignore user
quamquam quid loquor wrote:
SMNRs are a fundamentally flawed technology. They don't benefit from efficiencies of scale and can't benefit from manufacturing economies of scale, because an SMNR is still more expensive than natural gas.

I don't follow this argument. Economies of scale come from regularizing construction by doing more in the factory rather than on-site, and from shrinking the size of a unit of generation until you're building enough of them to get good at it. We can see this from the fact that nobody builds gigawatt natural gas turbines, they build them to a smaller size and when they want a gigawatt they order a larger number of them. But as far as nuclear reactors are concerned, a gigawatt is about the smallest you can get. That seems like the wrong way to get good economics.

You need to build about 12 of the NuScale reactor to get a gigawatt, and it seems to me you're going to be a lot better at building them by the 12th unit than you will be with the 3rd or 4th larger reactor. But an entire country would be lucky to build 4 full size reactors reactors per decade so nobody gets good at it. //

ORcoderSmack-Fu Master, in traininget Subscriptorreply2 days agoreportignore user
ZenBeam wrote:
Here's hoping this pans out, and gives us one more low-carbon power source knob to turn, to use to replace higher carbon sources.

Do these have any capability to vary their power generation, trading lower output for a longer lifetime? If so, how much can they vary it?

They probably won’t be great at it- likely can bypass the turbines to load follow as necessary (like many current nuclear plants can), but it won’t help fuel life. Even if they load follow by lowering the power of the reactor, which is possible but slower, thanks to fuel damage it also probably won’t save much uranium.

Designs that will be better at this are Natrium, which incorporates thermal storage for load following, and molten salt reactors, which don’t have to worry about fuel damage.

Per megawatt (power) or per megawatt·hour?

The first would be pure fantasy.
There's no way the cost per MW of a pure steam cycle plant can get within a factor 3 of a combined cycle gas turbine plant no matter what heat source we use to boil the water.

The second I'm willing to hold my judgement. //

scientists began to wonder if Amyloid was the cause of the disease, or merely a sign of the damage the actual cause was doing to the brain; the difference between, say, a terminal disease and the tombstone left behind after it’s taken its toll.

The science, however, was settled, and alternative hypotheses would no longer be considered.

“In more than two dozen interviews,” a 2019 STAT News expose revealed, “scientists whose ideas fell outside the dogma recounted how, for decades, believers in the dominant hypothesis suppressed research on alternative ideas: They influenced what studies got published in top journals, which scientists got funded, who got tenure, and who got speaking slots at reputation-buffing scientific conferences.”

Straying outside the dogma would get you marked as a “traitor,” one prominent scientist explained, and could cost the heretic published articles, prominent posts, grant money for research, and speaking slots at prestigious conferences. //

The 100-year anniversary of Dr. Alzheimer’s discovery might have been the year for skeptics to have their say, pointing out that despite decades of research and money, no cure yet existed. //

Over the next 15 years, the 2006 study would be cited in more than 2,000 other scholarly works.

Then in 2022, it would be exposed as seemingly fraudulent by a host of credible scientific investigators.

Fraudulent, as in, literally using falsified images to make its case. The “substance,” it turns out, might not even exist.

The damage, however, was done. Since the study was first published, millions of manhours and billions of dollars had been spent chasing its conclusions. Minds that could have been working toward actual progress had instead been led astray. Conclusions based on false presumptions had been compromised — as have any studies based on those now-compromised studies that worked off of the 2006 findings.

The reality is while one (or a few) dishonest players certainly caused a great deal of damage, they couldn’t have done it without the assistance of a cabal of senior scientists who jealously guarded their theory — and put down those rebels who dared question it. //

The above is the story of how quickly greed, pride, and groupthink can get out of hand in even a strictly scientific field of research — one so many Americans across all parties and incomes and races are personally interested in figuring out.

How much easier, then, could this be in more politically fractious fields? In fields that allow the top scientists access to more than simple money and prestige, but also power.

In fields like global warming, where dissenters (or even mere skeptics) are labeled “deniers”? Just this week, Al Gore compared those skeptics to the Ulvade, Texas police, whose inaction contributed to the murder of 19 schoolchildren and two teachers.

Billions more dollars flow into this field than into Alzheimer’s research. In the name of global warming, organizations like the United Nations join powerful state actors across the planet in shaping policy and economics based on the favored research.

From its very beginning, global warming scientists’ most alarmist claims have been disproven, yet still they march on, confident as ever.

https://twitter.com/DanielTurnerPTF/status/1549737575954399233

Edgar Allan EsquireArs Tribunus Militumreply2 days agoReader Favreportignore user

The Addams family meets the Flintstones for power tools.

The change coupled enhanced photosynthesis with improved nitrogen use. //

Nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas. Extracting and burning natural gas is harming life on our planet, so we should probably stop doing it (or at least try to cut back considerably). But food crops, like all plants, need that nitrogen. It’s quite the conundrum, especially since the human population relying on those crops is slated to grow over the next few decades, while the acreage of arable land is slated to drop.

In response, genetic engineers in China have been developing crops that can thrive with less nitrogen, and they made a strain of rice with a yield that’s 40 to 70 percent higher than that of regular rice. It has more grain per branch, each grain particle is bigger and denser, and the plants flowered earlier. Most breeding methods currently used in cereal crops can only generate a yield increase of less than 1 percent, so this is a pretty big deal.