Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, December 5, 2024
Posted: 5th December 2024
June 2021 photo showing ITER vacuum vessel sector #6, with two panels of thermal shielding ready to slide into place. (Image courtesy of ITER / Chang Hyun Noh).
ROBERT J. GOLDSTON
An overview of the fusion landscape
45 different private companies around the globe (with total financing of $7.1 billion) are engaged in developing fusion energy—and it can feel like there are 45 different ways to try to do it. The former head of the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab surveys the scene, and gives some highlights of the different approaches. For a limited time, this magazine article is available to all readers.
JOSEPH WINTERS
‘The process is broken’: Major oil producing countries kill UN plastics treaty over cap on production
Nearly 100 countries had signed onto a statement saying they would not accept a treaty unless it included binding global phaseouts for plastic products and so-called “chemicals of concern.” Read more.
IN THE NEWS
Bulletin nuclear affairs editor quoted in The Washington Post
François Diaz-Maurin, the Bulletin’s associate editor for nuclear affairs, was quoted in a Washington Post article on the Russian Oreshnik missile. “Once launched, this missile gets to European capitals within 12 to 16 minutes. It’s very little time to be able to react, to detect it. And then added to that is a possibility that it could have a nuclear warhead inside of several of them.” Read more.
VALERIE BROWN
A rising danger in the Arctic: Microbes unleashed by climate change
As permafrost melts, microbes emerge. “Pathogens are moving both southward from and northward into Arctic regions through many routes, and people in the Arctic are bearing the brunt of them. Indigenous residents and mobile workers in mining and fossil fuel extraction industries face the most immediate risks from the mingling of previously separated ecologies.” Read more.
Shipping of ore from the Mary River mine begins at the Baffinland mining company’s Milne Inlet port. As the permafrost melts, microbes emerge and can hitch rides in ships’ ballast water. (Credit: Baffinland).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“Even in permanently protected areas like Archbold, jay populations face ever-worsening odds of persistence. We’ve spent decades managing habitat for the Florida scrub-jay, but there is one thing we can’t control and that is climate.”
— Sahas Barve, lead study author and director of avian ecology at Archbold Biological Station, “How climate change is impacting this iconic Florida bird species,” ABC News
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