• New Jersey faces costly water infrastructure upgrades

    Before Hurricane Sandy hit New Jersey, state officials knew they had much work ahead of them to update the state’s water infrastructure. The damage Sandy inflicted only highlighted the inadequacies of New Jersey’s outdated wastewater, stormwater, and drinking water infrastructure. Upgrading the system will be costly, but not doing so will be costlier.

  • Increased U.S. crude oil production leads to dramatic fall in oil imports

    The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) issued its Annual Energy Outlook 2013 (AEO2013), which shows that under the assumption of crude oil production  of about ten million bbl/d between 2020 and 2040 – which means total U.S. liquid fuels production (which includes crude oil, natural gas liquids (NGL), refinery gains, biofuels, and other liquid fuels) of more than eighteen million bbl/d in 2040 – net import of oil drops to 7 percent or less of total demand compared to 40 percent in 2012.

  • Georgia’s Plant Vogtle may determine future of nuclear energy

    Analysts say that the future of the U.S. nuclear industry, and of nuclear power generation in the United States, will largely depend on the success of two reactors, called Vogtle 3 and 4, at the Alvin Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia. For the nuclear industry, the Plant Vogtle project and another project in South Carolina may be the last hope of what many analysts consider to be a dying energy source.

  • Defense companies turn their attention to border security

    The U.S. involvement in the Iraq war is over, and the country will soon withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. Federal budgets cuts shrink agencies’ ability to conduct research and development. Faced with these realities, military contractors have begun to focus on border security. What many defense companies find especially appealing is the fact that the Senate immigration bill conditions any move toward legalizing the status of more than eleven million illegal immigrants in the United States on the strengthening of security along the U.S.-Mexico border.

  • House panel to unveil cybersecurity bill

    Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee are close to finalizing a long-awaited cybersecurity bill, following extensive discussions with private companies.The bill formally establishes DHS’s already-operating National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center, to circulate cyberthreat and vulnerability data.

  • ACLU files lawsuit challenging NSA's phone surveillance

    In the wake of the past week’s revelations about the NSA’s surveillance of phone calls, the yesterday American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit charging that the program violates Americans’ constitutional rights of free speech, association, and privacy.

  • Making jet fuel from switchgrass

    The Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is partnering with Cobalt Technologies, U.S. Navy, and Show Me Energy Cooperative to demonstrate that jet fuel can be made economically and in large quantities from a renewable biomass feedstock such as switch grass. The project could spur jobs in rural America, lead to less reliance of foreign oil.

  • California’s San Onofre nuclear power plant retired due to safety concerns

    Southern California Edison (SCE) has decided it will retire the San Onofre nuclear power plant located on the California coast. The decision comes after officials debated for over a year whether the twin reactors could be safely restarted. The power plant is located in a populated area, with millions living near it.

  • Second NSA domestic surveillance scheme revealed: data mining from nine U.S. ISPs

    A day after it was revealed that the NSA was collecting communication information on millions of Verizon’s U.S. customers, another NSA domestic surveillance scheme was exposed: the NSA and the FBI have been tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet service providers for the purpose of harvesting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs. The information collected allowed intelligence analysts to track an individual’s movements and contacts over time.

  • Insurers face minimum $4 billion payout from May U.S. storm damage

    Total economic losses from the Oklahoma tornado – in fact, the event comprised at least sixty-one confirmed tornado touchdowns — are preliminarily estimated at $5.0 billion, amid insured losses of at least $2.5 billion. Total economic losses from flash flooding in the Plains and Midwest, and from damaging winds in the Northeast, are expected to exceed $2.0 billion, with insured losses above $1.0 billion.

  • Studying rare Earth elements in Alaska may help make them less rare

    A unique deposit of heavy rare Earth elements (REE) at Alaska’s Bokan Mountain could help scientists understand how rare Earth element deposits form, according to new research. Rare Earth elements are important, but scarce, elements used in components in many cutting edge electronic and defense technologies.

  • NSA collecting information on Verizon customers’ communications

    The National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting massive amounts of “metadata,” or transactional information, on millions of Verizon’s U.S. customers. A court granted the NSA permission to begin information collection on 25 April, stipulating the collection must end by 19 July. The court order instructs Verizon to “continue production on an ongoing daily basis thereafter for the duration of this order.” It specifies that the records to be produced include “session identifying information,” such as “originating and terminating number,” the duration of each call, telephone calling card numbers, trunk identifiers, International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) number, and “comprehensive communication routing information.”

  • Smarter energy use by industry could cut U.K. electricity demand by 75 percent

    As the U.K. government debates the U.K. Energy Bill, new research has found that turning down non-essential services, such as heating, air-conditioning, and pumping equipment, at times of peak electricity demand could play a far greater role in helping the United Kingdom achieve future energy security.

  • BugBuster automatically finds bugs in applications

    To overcome problems associated with using Web sites, problems which range from the annoying to those which inflict severe financial pain on large companies, a Swiss start-up has developed the first intelligent tool which finds out on its own how to interact with an application whose code it tests according to various possible scenarios.

  • U.S. unlikely to meet its biofuel goals

    The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) mandates that by 2022 the United States derive fifteen billion gallons per year of ethanol from corn to blend with conventional motor fuels. A new study says that if the climate continues to evolve as predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United States stands little to no chance of satisfying its biofuel goals.