The provincial government is supporting Ontario Power Generation (OPG) to go ahead with the refurbishment of units 5-8 at the Pickering nuclear power plant. OPG will now begin the initiation phase of the project.

Announcing the government's support for the plan, Ontario Minister of Energy Todd Smith said refurbishing the four Candu units would enable the plant to produce "at least" another 30 years of safe, reliable and clean electricity while creating thousands of new jobs. "With global business looking to expand in jurisdictions with reliable, affordable and clean electricity, a refurbished Pickering Nuclear Generating Station would help Ontario compete for and land more game-changing investments," he said.

The government is supporting OPG's CAD2 billion (USD1.5 billion) budget for the initiation phase of the project, which will include engineering and design work as well as securing long-lead components to ensure materials are available when needed and to help keep costs down. OPG and its business partners will also identify potential Indigenous engagement opportunities in contracting, employment and other economic benefits related to the project, the government said...

...OPG is more than half-way through a CAD12.8 billion project to refurbish the four units at its Darlington plant, which is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2026. The "thousands" of lessons learned from that, and from Bruce Power's ongoing major project to refurbish six Candu units at its plant, are a "major advantage" to help ensure the project's success, OPG President and CEO Ken Hartwick said.

"Our experience refurbishing Darlington, a highly complex project that remains on time and on budget, will be invaluable as we begin the work necessary so Pickering can continue to help meet the growing electricity demands of this thriving province for another three-plus decades," he said...

By 2025, global nuclear generation is forecast to exceed its previous record set in 2021. Even as some countries phase out nuclear power or retire plants early, nuclear generation is forecast to grow by close to 3% per year on average through 2026 as maintenance works are completed within France, Japan restarts nuclear production at several power plants, and new reactors begin commercial operations in various markets, including China, India, Korea, and Europe. Many countries are making nuclear power a critical part of their energy strategies as they look to safeguard energy security while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. At the COP28 climate change conference that concluded in December 2023, more than 20 countries signed a joint declaration to triple nuclear power capacity by 2050. Achieving this goal will require tackling the key challenge of reducing construction and financing risks in the nuclear sector. Momentum is also growing behind small modular reactor (SMR) technology. The technology’s development and deployment remains modest and is not without its difficulties, but R&D is starting to pick up...

A journalist probes tensions surrounding two minerals that are key to green technologies

The mineral anatomy of technology has become a fascination for scholars and journalists alike in recent years. Popular writings on the topic have also gained traction because of a rise in “resource nationalism” surrounding mining practices for metals critical for both defense purposes and green technologies. Adding to this canon, journalist Ernest Scheyder’s The War Below presents a fine-grained account of the environmental and social conflicts that permeate the landscape where two key minerals for the green energy transition—copper and lithium—are found. [For those interested, journalist Henry Sanderson’s recent book Volt Rush includes two additional minerals—cobalt and nickel—in its coverage (1).]

Scheyder’s choice of copper and lithium for his deep-dive analysis is partially determined by the field ethnography that he aims to provide of his travels to mining projects within the United States. These materials are at the forefront of critical mineral conflicts in the US. Although he also includes coverage of international projects, such as the Uyuni lithium fields of Bolivia, Scheyder’s storyline most acutely reveals the fault lines and contradictions of American critical minerals policy.

The book begins in the 1980s, with the discovery of a distinctive plant species in the Nevada wilderness—Eriogonum tiehmii, commonly known as Tiehm’s buckwheat. He interviews the discoverer of the species, botanist Jerry Tiehm, for the prologue of the book to understand the salience of such emblems of biodiversity. Four decades later, the species’ habitat is the battleground for the development of one of the United States’ most lucrative lithium deposits, and Tiehm’s buckwheat has become a saber for environmentalists and Native Americans in the fight against mining development.

In many ways, the past 40 years have been the most consequential period in the development of complex mineral supply chains for the transition to green energy technologies. We have come to understand the urgency of climate change during this period and to appreciate the need to find new means of energizing human civilization. Yet, as biologist Barry Commoner warned in one of his “laws of ecology,” “there is no such thing as a free lunch” in the Universe (2). The War Below successfully depicts why this aphorism is so apt for thinking about mineral resources. Even with recycling and circular economies, we must have enough stocks of metals to recycle. With lithium, which is flammable, there is also the challenge of transporting concentrated used material over long distances...

The Panelists: Invited to speak this year were Harold T. Conner, Dari Gabriel, and Jasmine Toy.

Conner has enjoyed a career of more than 55 years in nuclear energy. After being the first African American to earn a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Tennessee, he went on to hold high-level positions at Department of Energy sites across the United States. Now “retired,” he serves as a consultant for United Cleanup Oak Ridge (UCOR), a contractor specializing in nuclear deactivation and decommissioning, and for Strata-G, an Oak Ridge company that supports DOE projects...

...He talked about the stress that he experienced in college. “In those days, I had a huge afro. . . . You know, I had a bunch of hair, and I thought I was going to change the world. I got to college and I found out, hey, things are different here. . . . I'm thinking I'm cool. But then, after I started taking graphics and statistics and trig and the preparatory courses for starting my chemical engineering degree, the pressure mounted and it was like, where did the hair go? So it started falling out. Actually, it did fall out, at 18, I guess. But it grew back. I got my afro back, but there was the stress and strain of being this first little black boy in this University of Tennessee.”

He continued, “People ask me, well, how did you deal with that? . . . And the thing that I remember the most is the friends that I made, the instructors, all the people I collaborated with. You just learn to deal with it. People say, how was it? How did you make it? Well, like you're doing now, sitting around the room with people that you loved, relationships that you built, and doing things together. And so, I made it through that start...

...So, I had a chance to get that experience as a co-op student working at the Oak Ridge National Lab and the K-25 site in Oak Ridge...”

...Conner’s career took off after that. “I ended up working all around the country, and from this little black kid that integrated the University of Tennessee–Martin, to supervising and leading several thousand people in many parts of this country. The thing I would say to you as you consider engineering at the University of Tennessee and beyond is to be collaborative, work in teams regardless of nuclear or chemical or electrical, mechanical, biomolecular, molecular, whatever you choose, you will have to work as a team. Much like your family unit, much like your high school. When you get out into the industrial world, you will be uniquely part of the team...”

Earlier this month the Department of Defense released its first-ever National Defense Industrial Strategy, setting forth a framework for revitalizing the sinews of American economic strength most critical to military preparedness...

... The Biden strategy recommends many of the same steps, reflecting concern over industrial base weaknesses that became apparent during the global pandemic and subsequent efforts to support Ukraine’s military campaign against Russian invaders.

Both documents single out the sorry state of the U.S. commercial shipbuilding industry, which largely ceased to produce commercial oceangoing vessels even as the U.S. became heavily dependent on ocean transit for supplies of everything from pharmaceuticals to rare earths to digital devices...

...The pace of submarine production at the nation’s two nuclear shipyards is lagging due to workforce challenges and a fragile domestic supply chain that contains numerous “single points of failure...”

... Shipbuilding is a particularly egregious example of how Washington has allowed U.S. industrial strength to erode, but there are analogous challenges in every sector that produces industrial goods relevant to defense.

For instance, only one domestic smelter remains that produces aluminum of sufficient purity to build military aircraft, and planners discovered during the Iraq war that there was only one steel mill making plates suitable for armoring trucks...

The record-setting Mars helicopter Ingenuity broke during a final, fatal flight.

NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter, the first aircraft to fly on another world, has died. It perished on 18 January during its 72nd flight in Jezero Crater on Mars. Ingenuity was nearly three years old (if you count its time on the red planet).

The helicopter, a box-shaped drone with a pair of 1.2-metre-long carbon-fibre blades, was a trailblazer for interplanetary spacecraft. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, built it as a test to see whether powered flight was possible in the thin atmospheres of other worlds. It accompanied NASA’s Perseverance rover to Mars, where both landed in February 2021 and began studying Jezero.

“Ingenuity absolutely shattered our paradigm of exploration by introducing this new dimension of aerial mobility,” says Lori Glaze, head of NASA’s planetary sciences division in Washington DC.

Ingenuity was supposed to make only five flights and last about a month, but ultimately it traversed 17 kilometres of the red planet and flew for a total of nearly 129 minutes between 2021 and 2024. During its final journey, something fatal happened — perhaps the rotor blades striking the ground, NASA announced on 25 January. An image that the helicopter took of the ground after the flight ended shows the shadow of one of the blades, with at least one-quarter of it missing. The helicopter can still communicate with Earth, at least for now, but it will not fly again...

Nature talks to Sholto David about his process for flagging image manipulation and his tips for scientists under scrutiny.

The prestigious Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) in Boston, Massachusetts, acknowledged this week that it would seek retractions for 6 papers and corrections for an additional 31 — some co-authored by DFCI chief executive Laurie Glimcher, chief operating officer William Hahn and several other prominent cancer researchers. The news came after scientific-image sleuth Sholto David posted his concerns about more than 50 manuscripts to a blog on 2 January.

In the papers, published in a range of journals including Blood, Cell and Nature Immunology, David found images from western blots — a common test for detecting proteins in biological samples — in which bands seemed to be spliced, stretched and copied and pasted. He also found images of mice duplicated across figures where they shouldn’t have been. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent of its publisher, Springer Nature, and of other Nature-branded journals.)

It was not the first time that some of these irregularities had been noted; some were flagged years ago on PubPeer, a website where researchers comment on and critique scientific papers. The student newspaper The Harvard Crimson reported on David’s findings on 12 January.

The DFCI, an affiliate of Harvard University, had already been investigating some of the papers in question before David’s blogpost was published, says the centre’s research-integrity officer, Barrett Rollins. “Correcting the scientific record is a common practice of institutions with strong research-integrity processes,” he adds. (Rollins is a co-author of three of the papers that David flagged and is not involved in investigations into them, says DFCI spokesperson Ellen Berlin.) The DFCI is declining requests for interviews with its researchers about the retractions.

David, based in Pontypridd, UK, spoke to Nature about how he uncovered the data irregularities at the DFCI and what scientists can do to prevent mix-ups in their own work...