Infrastructure

  • U.S. water infrastructure is in a serious state of disrepair

    The U.S. water system is in a state of disrepair, and is deteriorating further every year for lack of money for maintenance and upkeep. The results include an estimated 240,000 water main breaks each year and nearly 14,000 dams — or one out of every seven dams — in the United States rated as “high hazard,” meaning that the flush of water from a broken dam would likely kill people.

  • Draft cybersecurity bill to increase penalties for hacking substantially

    A draft of a cybersecurity bill circulating among House Judiciary Committee members would strengthen a computer hacking law. The draft would stiffen penalties for cyber crimes and establish a standard for companies to tell consumers when their personal information has been hacked. The bill would also change an existing law, making a cyber crime attempt punishable as an actual offense.

  • U.K. outlines its long-term nuclear future

    Over the next two decades it is forecast that, globally, there will be £930 billion investment in building new reactors and £250 billion in decommissioning those that are coming off line. The nuclear new build program in the United Kingdom alone could generate up to 40,000 jobs in the sector at its peak. Government publishes industrial strategy to enable the UK to seize the opportunities for economic growth in the nuclear industry.

  • Coming soon: fuel made directly from CO2 in the atmosphere

    Excess carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere created by burning of fossil fuels is a major driving force of global climate change. Now, researchers have found a way to transform the carbon dioxide trapped in the atmosphere into useful industrial products – including biofuels made directly from the carbon dioxide in the air.

  • Fluctuating wind power as a solution rather than a problem

    Incorporating wind power into existing power grids is challenging because fluctuating wind speed and direction means turbines generate power inconsistently. Coupled with customers’ varying power demand, many wind-farm managers end up wasting power-generation capacity and limiting the service life of turbines through active control in order to avoid any possible damage to the power grid from spikes in supply.

  • Day of the nuclear battery nears

    Experts in nuclear physics have helped develop research toward a “nuclear battery,” which could revolutionize the concept of portable power by packing in up to a million times more energy compared to a conventional battery.

  • U.S. infrastructure grade raised from D to a D+, but problems loom

    The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), in its just-released 2013 Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, gave the U.S. infrastructure an overall grade of D+, showing slight progress from the D in the last Report Card issued in 2009. The Report Card concludes that to raise the grades and get U.S. infrastructure to an acceptable level, a total investment of $3.6 trillion is needed by 2020. Currently, only about $2 trillion in infrastructure spending is projected, leaving a shortfall of approximately $1.6 trillion.

  • Improved weather, climate predictions strengthen the U.S. economy

    The economic costs of damaging weather events have an immense and increasing impact on the U.S. economy. These costs could be anticipated and mitigated by improved weather and climate predictions, say a range of experts in the public and private sectors. These experts will meet in early April in an American Meteorological Society event to discuss the economic benefits of how environmental forecast, prediction, and observation programs and services strengthen the U.S. economy.

  • New technology for carbon-dioxide capture, clean coal reaches milestone

    An innovative new process which releases the energy in coal without burning — while capturing carbon dioxide, the major greenhouse gas — has passed a milestone on the route to possible commercial use.

  • Instead of a renaissance, U.S. nuclear energy industry is facing tough times

    Five years ago, U.S. nuclear industry executives and energy industry analysts talked about an American nuclear renaissance, with up to twenty new reactors to be added to the nation’s stock. Things are very different today, however, and the U.S. nuclear energy industry, rather than expanding, is fighting to hold on.

  • NRC rejects plan for Maryland nuclear reactor

    A plan to build a third nuclear reactor in southern Maryland was postponed last week as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) upheld an earlier decision to squash the project. the primary reason for the rejection is the fact that the applicant’s parent company, Electricite de France, is 85 percent owned by the French government. U.S. law forbids foreign ownership of U.S. nuclear reactors.

  • Does warmer climate mean stormier, or only wetter, weather?

    Many scientists argue that the climate has warmed since people began to release massive amounts greenhouse gases to the atmosphere during the Industrial Revolution. These scientists, however, are less sure that warming climate creates stormier weather. The reason: nobody has done the quantitative analysis needed to show this is indeed happening. Until now.

  • “Dirty blizzard” accounts for missing Deepwater Horizon oil

    The Deepwater Horizon disaster spilled more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Microbes likely processed most of the oil within months of the spill, but these microbes do not account for all of the spilled oil. Scientists have now found what happened to the oil not processed by microbes: the oil acted as a catalyst for plankton and other surface materials to clump together and fall to the sea floor in a massive sedimentation event that researchers are calling a “dirty blizzard.” The oily sediments deposited on the sea floor could cause significant damage to ecosystems and may affect commercial fisheries in the future.

  • 2012 economic losses from disasters set new record at $138 billion

    The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR) reported that for the first time in history, the world has experienced three consecutive years in which annual economic losses have exceeded $100 billion. The losses are the result of an enormous increase in exposure of industrial assets and private property to extreme disaster events.

  • Building stronger, greener concrete with biofuel byproducts

    The world uses nearly seven billion cubic meters of concrete a year, making concrete the most-used industrial material after water. Even though making concrete is less energy intensive than making steel or other building materials, we use so much of it that concrete production accounts for between 3 to 8 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions.