A vast array of critical new technologies rely on rare earth metals, a group of elements that are difficult to mine because they are so well dispersed in the earth and often contain radioactive elements such as thorium and uranium.

Over the last 20 years, demand for these elements in the U.S. has increased while domestic supply and production have fallen off. And globally, the supply chain is tightly controlled by just a few countries.

To explore the significant challenges created by this imbalanced supply chain, Gorakh Pawar, a visiting scholar at CISAC, and CISAC Co-Director Rod Ewing edited “Rare Earth Elements in Material Science,” a special theme issue of the MRS Bulletin, a journal of the Materials Research Society.

“With China's rapid rise and the reemergence of Russia as a major power, the global stage is set for multipolar competition to secure the critical materials supply chains and control the rare earth elements (REE) derived high-end products and relevant technologies,” Ewing and Pawar write in the introduction to the issue.

The issue includes six articles that delve into the material science aspects of the rare earth elements supply chain. Researchers from Australia, Germany, Korea and the US contributed articles on mineralogy, separation and extraction, mining economics and the environmental impact of rare earth element mining.

“REE recycling is no longer just a choice, but it has become necessary in a world where resources are constrained,” Pawar and Ewing write.

The MRS Bulletin includes recommendations that the US and other countries can follow to reduce dependence on China for rare earth elements.

The March issue of the MRS Bulletin can be found here. 

A recent study has found small modular reactors (SMRs) may actually produce more radioactive waste than larger conventional nuclear power reactors has drawn reaction from vendors and supporters of SMRs.

Small modular reactors are often described as nuclear energy’s future. Nuclear power can generate electricity with limited greenhouse gas emissions, but large reactor plants are expensive, and they also create radioactive waste that pose a threat to people and the environment for hundreds of thousands of years. In an attempt to address this challenge, the nuclear industry is developing smaller reactors that industry analysts say will be cheaper, safer and yield less radioactive waste than the larger ones.

The study on SMRs noted above was conducted by Lindsay Krall, lead author and a former MacArthur Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), and co-authors Allison Macfarlane, professor and director of the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia, and Rodney Ewing, the Frank Stanton Professor in Nuclear Security at Stanford and co-director of CISAC.

Summing up their findings, Krall wrote in the study, “Our results show that most small modular reactor (SMR) designs will actually increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal, by factors of 2 to 30 per unit of energy generated for the reactors in our case study. These findings stand in sharp contrast to the cost and waste reduction benefits that advocates have claimed for advanced nuclear technologies.”

In a recent interview, Krall, Macfarlane and Ewing elaborated on the fuller context of and industry reaction to their study:

What have you learned from publishing this research?

Lindsay Krall: I would like to emphasize the positive responses to this article, particularly among experts in Europe’s nuclear waste management and disposal community, who found the results surprising and very important. It appears that the article has swiftly brought the discussion of SMR waste issues (or lack thereof) to the forefront and attracted the attention of decision- and policy-makers in certain European countries. This makes me hopeful that the results of this study and follow-up research will have a real-world impact and improve the viability of nuclear energy, at least in Europe.

Nevertheless, it is also apparent that the scarcity of practical expertise in nuclear waste management in the U.S., exacerbated by the 12 year-long absence of a waste management and disposal strategy, may make it difficult for the results of the study to reach policy- and decision-makers here.

Did your research involve contacting NuScale for information or clarifications regarding NuScale fuel burnup. If yes or no, please describe why?

Lindsay Krall: As part of the background research to the study, I attended advanced nuclear events around Washington, D.C., where I discussed the study with vendors, NGOs, university researchers, national laboratories, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). The reactor certification application that NuScale had already submitted to the NRC contained much of the information needed to estimate and characterize the waste streams for their reactor, with the exception of the fuel burnup, which was redacted.  In an attempt to obtain the fuel burnup, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the NRC, but the burnup was not released. Therefore, I calculated the burnup as described in the appendix that was published with the article.

Why was the 160 MWth NuScale iPWR design chosen for study?

Lindsay Krall: The design certification application submitted to and reviewed by the NRC provided a comprehensive, high quality dataset for the iPWR analysis. In general, the analysis aimed to assess SMR designs that are undergoing or have undergone the regulatory approval process, rather than hypothetical future SMR designs that might be achievable provided significant technical or policy breakthroughs. Although the industry tends to market the benefits of SMRs around the latter “ideal” designs, these are not as “technologically ready” as the certified designs. Therefore, SMR vendors have levied some unfair criticism against this study, because the article and its accompanying appendix clearly state our preference for NRC-reviewed designs.

Please describe the challenges of completing your analysis in light of the lack of access to relevant design specifications?

Allison Macfarlane: It’s essential that quantitative analyses of waste production and management for new reactor designs be completed.  Our paper was an attempt to do so in an open way, to provide the beginning of the discussion of this issue.  Availability of quality data to do such analyses, especially by independent academic researchers, such as ourselves, will improve public confidence in small modular reactors.

What is your response to NuScale’s claim that its 250-MWt design does not produce more spent nuclear fuel than the small quantities typically observed in the existing light-water reactor fleet?

Rod Ewing: The fundamental point is that the information on the design and operational parameters for the 250MWth have not yet been submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Our understanding is that the application will be submitted in December of this year. When the required data are available, then it will be possible to do the analysis.

What responsibility do the vendors, who are proposing and receiving federal support to develop advanced reactors, have in addressing concerns about the waste and conducting research that can be reviewed in open literature settings?

Allison Macfarlane: Vendors should have first-hand knowledge of all issues associated with their reactor designs.  These include waste production, of course (and all wastes – low-, intermediate-, and high-level), as well as fuel supply issues, supply chain issues, awareness of security challenges, and proliferation hazards (one assumes they understand safety issues already).  Many of these designers are early in their progress towards one day making their reactors a reality and so, perhaps, the blanks will be filled.  It will be important to do so transparently and in dialogue with other experts and the public to ensure public support of this technology.

What were your most significant findings in this research that people and the nuclear industry should be aware of?

Rod Ewing: The most important point of our paper is that with different reactor designs with new and more complex fuels and coolants, there will be an impact on the approaches that are required for the safe, final disposal of fuels and activated materials. Of particular significance is that at this time the United States has no long-term strategy for dealing with its highly radioactive waste streams, even from its present reactor fleet.

What have you learned from the reaction to this paper?

Rod Ewing: That many of the negative comments have been misplaced in that our paper has been taken as being anti-nuclear. Our paper had a simple purpose, that is to understand the implications of SMRs for the back-end of the nuclear fuel cycle, particularly for the permanent and safe disposal of nuclear wastes from SMRs. Although the question is a reasonable and an obvious question to ask, I now understand that it was an unwelcomed question to pose. We have been criticized for not seeing and acknowledging the bigger picture – the role of nuclear power in reducing greenhouse gas emissions – and instead focusing only on the nuclear waste issue. I see no reason why a paper about nuclear waste and disposal should also be a cheerleader for nuclear power. These are really two separate issues.

Another surprise was the lack of a technical response. Letters were written to the editor of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (which published the study), but these letters were not copied to the authors. Letters appeared on the web, but were not copied to the authors. This was a public relations response not a technical, scientific response. Public relations may win the day, but I do not think that this builds public confidence in nuclear power. The public has to see that important issues are discussed openly and in a way that converges on solutions rather than polarized positions.

There was one important, bright spot during the past week. Jose Reyes (chief technology officer and co-founder) of NuScale published his letter to the editor of PNAS in the Nuclear Newswire of the American Nuclear Society. We prepared a response to Dr. Reyes and submitted it to Nuclear Newswire, and it was accepted and published promptly on June 13.  This effort to foster discussion certainly reflects well on the American Nuclear Society.

Any other points?

Allison Macfarlane: I would like to emphasize a point Lindsay Krall made: no country has an operating geologic repository for spent nuclear fuel yet.  A few countries are moving in that direction, but the U.S. has fallen to the back of the pack in this regard.  The U.S. is at a stalemate with regards to developing a deep geologic repository for high-level nuclear waste and is largely uninterested in solving this problem.  Since a waste issue essentially brought us the climate catastrophe, is it responsible to ignore the waste problem from another energy source?

The 12th main directorate of the Russian Ministry of Defense operates a dozen central storage facilities for nuclear weapons. Known as “Object S” sites and scattered across the Russian Federation, they contain thousands of nuclear warheads and hydrogen bombs with a wide variety of explosive yields. For the past three months, President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials have been ominously threatening to use nuclear weapons in the war against Ukraine. Read more at The Atlantic.

The June 16, 2021 meeting in Geneva between U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin gave a positive impulse to a bilateral U.S.-Russia relationship that was plumbing post-Cold War depths. Both sides made modest progress in the following months, only to be wholly derailed by Putin’s war of choice against Ukraine. It will be a long time before the U.S.-Russia relationship can approach anything that resembles “normal.”

Early on in the Biden presidency in 2021, administration officials made clear their readiness to push back against Russian overreach, including with the use of additional sanctions. At the same time, they noted the value of guardrails to keep in check the adversarial aspects of the relationship. Less than one week after Biden took office, he and Putin agreed to extend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty to 2026.

Read the rest at brookings.edu.

During a period of greater hope for Russia tempered by uncertainties, President Bill Clinton sought both to enlarge NATO and build a strategic partnership between the Alliance and Moscow. As part of his National Security Council staff, we three worked on the approach that produced the 1997 “Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation and Security between NATO and the Russian Federation.” It formalized a NATO-Russia relationship that we thought of as a potential “alliance with the Alliance” and contained security assurances for Moscow.

While the Founding Act produced tangible results in its early years, Europe today faces an aggressive, revanchist Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s actions have destroyed the basis for cooperation. NATO should suspend the Founding Act and, in particular, renounce its assurance regarding the stationing of conventional forces on the territory of new member states.

Read the rest at The Hill

In 1999 Nina Tannenwald, a political scientist at Brown University, wrote a paper analysing something she had observed among generals, politicians and strategists: the “nuclear taboo”. This was not, she argued, simply a matter of general queasiness or personal moral qualms; it had important consequences. The lack of nuclear wars in the years since America’s destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she argued, was not simply a matter of deterrence. It had also relied on a growing sense of the innate wrongness of nuclear weapons putting their use beyond the pale.

Read the rest at The Economist

Usually, increasing agricultural productivity depends on adding something, such as fertilizer or water. A new Stanford University-led study reveals that removing one thing in particular – a common air pollutant – could lead to dramatic gains in crop yields. The analysis, published June 1 in Science Advances, uses satellite images to reveal for the first time how nitrogen oxides – gases found in car exhaust and industrial emissions – affect crop productivity. Its findings have important implications for increasing agricultural output and analyzing climate change mitigation costs and benefits around the world.

“Nitrogen oxides are invisible to humans, but new satellites have been able to map them with incredibly high precision. Since we can also measure crop production from space, this opened up the chance to rapidly improve our knowledge of how these gases affect agriculture in different regions,” said study lead author David Lobell, the Gloria and Richard Kushel Director of Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment.

A NOx-ious problem

Nitrogen oxides, or NOx, are among the most widely emitted pollutants in the world. These gases can directly damage crop cells and indirectly affect them through their role as precursors to formation of ozone, an airborne toxin known to reduce crop yields, and particulate matter aerosols that can absorb and scatter sunlight away from crops.

While scientists have long had a general understanding of nitrogen oxides’ potential for damage, little is known about their actual impacts on agricultural productivity. Past research has been limited by a lack of overlap between air monitoring stations and agricultural areas, and confounding effects of different pollutants, among other challenges to ground-based analysis.

To avoid these limitations, Lobell and his colleagues combined satellite measures of crop greenness and nitrogen dioxide levels for 2018-2020. Nitrogen dioxide is the primary form of NOx and a good measure of total NOx. Although NOx is invisible to humans, nitrogen dioxide has a distinct interaction with ultraviolet light that has enabled satellite measurements of the gas at a much higher spatial and temporal resolution than for any other air pollutant.

“In addition to being more easily measured than other pollutants, nitrogen dioxide has the nice feature of being a primary pollutant, meaning it is directly emitted rather than formed in the atmosphere,” said study co-author Jennifer Burney, an associate professor of environmental science at the University of California, San Diego. “That means relating emissions to impacts is much more straightforward than for other pollutants.”

Image

Calculating crop impacts

Based on their observations, the researchers estimated that reducing NOx emissions by about half in each region would improve yields by about 25% for winter crops and 15% for summer crops in China, nearly 10% for both winter and summer crops in Western Europe, and roughly 8% for summer crops and 6% for winter crops in India. North and South America generally had the lowest NOx exposures. Overall, the effects seemed most negative in seasons and locations where NOx likely drives ozone formation.

“The actions you would take to reduce NOx, such as vehicle electrification, overlap closely with the types of energy transformations needed to slow climate change and improve local air quality for human health,” said Burney. “The main take-home from this study is that the agricultural benefits of these actions could be really substantial, enough to help ease the challenge of feeding a growing population.”

Previous research by Lobell and Burney estimated reductions in ozone, particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, and sulfur dioxide between 1999 and 2019 contributed to about 20% of the increase in U.S. corn and soybean yield gains during that period – an amount worth about $5 billion per year.

Future analysis could incorporate other satellite observations, including photosynthetic activity measured through solar-induced fluorescence, to better understand nitrogen dioxide’s effects on crops’ varying degrees of sensitivity to the gas throughout the growing season, according to the researchers. Similarly, more detailed examination of other pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide and ammonia, as well as meteorological variables, such as drought and heat, could help to explain why nitrogen dioxide affects crops differently across different regions, years, and seasons.

“It’s really exciting how many different things can be measured from satellites now, much of it coming from new European satellites,” said study coauthor Stefania Di Tommaso, a research data analyst at Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment. “As the data keep improving, it really drives us to be more ambitious and creative as scientists in the types of questions we ask.”
 

Lobell is also a professor of Earth system science in Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences, the William Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Burney also holds the Marshall Saunders Chancellor’s Endowed Chair in Global Climate Policy and Research at UC San Diego and is a research affiliate at UC San Diego’s Policy Design and Evaluation Laboratory, a fellow at the Stanford Center on Food Security and the Environment, and head of the Science Policy Fellows Program at UC San Diego.

On June 1, 1996, two trains arrived in Russia transporting the last nuclear warheads that had been deployed in Ukraine when the Soviet Union collapsed. That concluded the process in which Kyiv gave up what was then the world’s third-largest nuclear weapons arsenal—exceeding Britain, France, and China combined. The Ukrainian government did so in large part because of Russia’s assurances that it would respect Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and refrain from the use of force against Ukraine.

Twenty-six years later, Russia is more than three months into a massive invasion of Ukraine. This has understandably led Ukrainians to question the wisdom of giving up those nuclear arms, and Vladimir Putin’s war has dealt a blow to future efforts to arrest nuclear proliferation.

Read the rest at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists