Going Nuclear by Tim Gregory review – a boosterish case for atomic energy.Safety concerns demand more space and consideration in this otherwise excellent work of popular science. Guardian 11 July 2925 There is something biblical about the fraternal relationship between the atomic bomb and the nuclear reactor. Both involve bombarding uranium-235 atoms with neutrons to produce a chain reaction via nuclear fission. Both were made possible in the same instant, at 3.25pm on 2 December 1942, when the Manhattan Project’s Enrico Fermi orchestrated the first human-made chain reaction in the squash court of the University of Chicago. “The flame of nuclear fission brought us to the forked road of promise and peril,” writes Tim Gregory.

The bomb came first, of course, but atomic dread coexisted with tremendous optimism about what President Eisenhower dubbed “atoms for peace”: the potential of controlled fission to generate limitless energy. As David Lilienthal of the US Atomic Energy Commission observed, atom-splitting thus inspired a pseudo-religious binary: “It would either destroy us all or it would bring about the millennium.” Nuclear optimism was shattered by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster but, as the subtitle of his book advertises, Gregory is determined to bring it back. A nuclear chemist at Sellafield, where the Queen opened the world’s first commercial nuclear reactor in 1956, he’s a cheerleader for Team Millennium. Writing in a Promethean spirit of “rational and daring optimism”, this self-proclaimed “nuclear environmentalist” believes nuclear energy is the only viable route to net zero by 2050. “The nucleus could power the world securely, reliably, affordably, and – crucially – sustainably,” he declares.

Gregory is an excellent popular science writer: clear as a bell and gently humorous. If you want to understand the workings of fission or radioactivity, he’s your man. But he is also an evangelical pitchman whose chapters on the atom’s myriad wonders can read rather like high-end sales brochures. Radiation? Not a problem! Less dangerous, in fact, than radiophobia, “the irrational fear of radiation”. High-level nuclear waste? It can be buried in impregnable catacombs like Finland’s state-of-the-art Onkalo or, better yet, recycled through breeder reactors. Gregory wants the reader to learn to stop worrying and love the reactor.

Of course, there is a radioactive elephant in the room, which Gregory eventually confronts in the chapter We Need to Talk About Chernobyl. Like Three Mile Island (1979) and Fukushima (2011), the Soviet disaster caused reactor construction to crash. Europe built more reactors in the five years before Chernobyl than it has in the four decades since. The Fukushima meltdown spooked Germany into dismantling its entire nuclear programme. Whereas France, which has one-eighth of the planet’s 441 active reactors, currently generates two-thirds of its electricity from nuclear, Germany produces none, cancelling out its gains from renewables and making it painfully reliant on Russian gas. Gregory argues that the construction of reactors like Hinkley Point C in Somerset runs behind schedule and over budget because we’ve lost the habit, even as China and South Korea streak ahead. To Gregory, all this is a tragic case of radiophobia. Only around 50 fatalities have been directly attributed to radiation from Chernobyl, while the official death tolls for Fukushima and Three Mile Island are one and zero respectively. Roll them all together and the same number of people are lost roughly every three minutes to air pollution caused by burning fossil fuels. No doubt, the kneejerk The more land that was set aside for feeding draft animals for industry and transport, the less was available for feeding humans. It was the 17th-century equivalent of today's biofuels crisis. The same applied to heating fuel. As EA Wrigley points out in his book Energy and the English Industrial Revolution, the 11m tonnes of coal mined in England in 1800 produced as much energy as 11m acres of woodland (one third of the land surface) would have generated.    https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jun/02/going-nuclear-by-tim-gregory-review-a-boosterish-case-for-atomic      

How can DRI deliver on decarbonisation?  Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is touted as a solution to reduce emissions from DRI plants. However, its history of underperformance and failure indicates it cannot play a role in decarbonising the steel sector. Midrex is the leading provider of gas-based direct reduction (DR) shafts, with 80% market share. The company has emphasised that deploying CCS with this technology faces significant challenges. In a recent article, Midrex questioned the role of CCS in decarbonising the steel sector and specifically the DRI pathway: “For now, CCS remains a niche technology for steel and is likely to work only in very specific locations and under particular circumstances… Despite being promoted as a decarbonization tool for heavy industry, CCS has delivered limited success in practice… Most Direct Reduction plants lack access to users or local CO2 [carbon dioxide] storage sites on a scale that could make CCS commercially viable. Transporting the CO2 long distances to such sites is too expensive.”

EMSTEEL is the host of the only commercial-scale CCS facility in the steel sector, launched in 2016. The Al Reyadah CCS facility, operated by ADNOC, captures only about 25% of the total emissions from the EMSTEEL mill, which uses fossil gas to produce DRI. The captured carbon is used for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), helping to release more carbon emissions. Without the EOR element of the project, the CCS plant would probably never have been constructed. In the nine years since Al Reyadah became operational, not a single other commercial-scale CCS plant for iron and steelmaking has come online. EMSTEEL is now shifting to using hydrogen to produce low-emissions steel.Green hydrogen To produce green iron via DR technology, the use of green hydrogen is inevitable; no other reducing agent can yield truly green iron. Gas-based DRI falls short of the threshold to be considered green iron – at best it can only be classified as “grey iron”. “Blue hydrogen” – made using fossil fuels coupled with CCS – suffers from the same issues faced by any use of CCS. In Sweden, Stegra is currently constructing the first commercial-scale DRI-EAF [electric arc furnace] plant designed to run on hydrogen from the outset, scheduled to commence operations next year. The plant has already installed 200 megawatts (MW) of its planned 740MW of electrolysers, and from late 2026 it will be in continuous operation producing green steel. One of the most recent entrants to Australia’s green iron sector, Progressive Green Solutions (PGS), has appointed thyssenkrupp nucera, also the supplier for Stegra, as its preferred partner for 1.4 gigawatts of electrolysers. In its first phase, the project targets production of 7Mt of iron ore pellets and 2.5Mt of hot briquetted iron (HBI), using green hydrogen.........read on     https://ieefa.org/resources/which-dri-solutions-can-deliver-green-iron-australia

This ‘climate-friendly’ fuel comes with an astronomical cancer risk. Almost half of products cleared so far under a new US federal ‘biofuels’ program are not, in fact, biofuels.ProPublica, Sharon Lerner Feb. 23, 2023, The Environmental Protection Agency recently gave a Chevron refinery the green light to create fuel from discarded plastics as part of a “climate-friendly” initiative to boost alternatives to petroleum. But, according to agency records obtained by ProPublica and The Guardian, the production of one of the fuels could emit air pollution that is so toxic, 1 out of 4 people exposed to it over a lifetime could get cancer. “That kind of risk is obscene,” said Linda Birnbaum, former head of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. “You can’t let that get out.”That risk is 250,000 times greater than the level usually considered acceptable by the EPA division that approves new chemicals. Chevron hasn’t started making this jet fuel yet, the EPA said. When the company does, the cancer burden will disproportionately fall on people who have low incomes and are Black because of the population that lives within 3 miles of the refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi.

ProPublica and The Guardian asked Maria Doa, a scientist who worked at the EPA for 30 years, to review the document laying out the risk. Doa, who once ran the division that managed the risks posed by chemicals, was so alarmed by the cancer threat that she initially assumed it was a typographical error. “EPA should not allow these risks in Pascagoula or anywhere,” said Doa, who now is the senior director of chemical policy at Environmental Defense Fund. In response to questions from ProPublica and The Guardian, an EPA spokesperson wrote that the agency’s lifetime cancer risk calculation is “a very conservative estimate with ‘high uncertainty,’” meaning the government erred on the side of caution in calculating such a high risk. Under federal law, the EPA can’t approve new chemicals with serious health or environmental risks unless it comes up with ways to minimize the dangers. And if the EPA is unsure, the law allows the agency to order lab testing that would clarify the potential health and environmental harms. In the case of these new plastic-based fuels, the agency didn’t do either of those things. In approving the jet fuel, the EPA didn’t require any lab tests, air monitoring or controls that would reduce the release of the cancer-causing pollutants or people’s exposure to them.

In January 2022, the EPA announced the initiative to streamline the approval of petroleum alternatives in what a press release called “part of the Biden-Harris Administration’s actions to confront the climate crisis.” While the program cleared new fuels made from plants, it also signed off on fuels made from plastics even though they themselves are petroleum-based and contribute to the release of planet-warming greenhouse gases. Although there’s no mention of discarded plastics in the press release or on the EPA website’s description of the program, an agency spokesperson told ProPublica and The Guardian that it allows them because the initiative also covers fuels made from waste. The spokesperson said that 16 of the 34 fuels the program approved so far are made from waste. She would not say how many of those are made from plastic and stated that such information was confidential. All of the waste-based fuels are the subject of consent orders, documents the EPA issues when it finds that new chemicals or mixtures may pose an “unreasonable risk” to human health or the environment. The documents specify those risks and the agency’s instructions for mitigating them.

But the agency won’t turn over these records or reveal information about the waste-based fuels, even their names and chemical structures. Without those basic details, it’s nearly impossible to determine which of the thousands of consent orders on the EPA website apply to this program. In keeping this information secret, the EPA cited a legal provision that allows companies to claim as confidential any information that would give their competitors an advantage in the marketplace. Nevertheless, ProPublica and The Guardian did obtain one consent order that covers a dozen Chevron fuels made from plastics that were reviewed under the program. Although the EPA had blacked out sections, including the chemicals’ names, that document showed that the fuels that Chevron plans to make at its Pascagoula refinery present serious health risks, including developmental problems in children and cancer and harm to the nervous system, reproductive system, liver, kidney, blood and spleen......read on    https://www.propublica.org/article/chevron-pascagoula-pollution-future-cancer-risk