Decarbon Weekly: The Comeback of Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing, the Recycling Dream of Terracycle, Big Oil’s Stake in Carbon Capture Gigantic and the 70 ft Nuclear Fusion Gun that Could Change the World
It is markets, not government that will provide the cure for climate change, The startup using volcanic rock dust to capture carbon on farms, Better to mine the world’s rainforests than farm them?
Fellow Agents of Change:
Today marks the 66th edition of the Decarbon Weekly newsletter and its met with the fun and spooky spirit of Halloween.
As our first Halloween with my 10month old son, we decided to make it special and channel our inner space ambitions: The NASA scientist, our little boy astronaut and my lovely wife as the martian. Hope you all enjoyed as much as we did with family and friends.
On to this week’s newsletter:
WHAT CAUGHT OUR EYE:
— Big Oil’s Journey in the World of Carbon Capture
— U.S. Nuclear Fuel Recycling is Making a Comeback—Here’s Why 🔥
— This Startup uses Volcanic Rock Dust to Capture Carbon on Farms
— The Warehouses of Plastic Behind TerraCycle’s Recycling Dream 🔥
— Gigantic, 70-Foot Nuclear Fusion Gun Could Change the World
— Climate Change: Markets, not Government, Will Provide the Cure 🔥
— It’s Better to Mine the World’s Rainforests Than Farm Them
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WHAT CAUGHT OUR EYE:
Big Oil’s Journey in the World of Carbon Capture: The Houston Ship Channel along the Gulf Coast in Texas is the global economy’s petrol station. Tankers stream up and down the channel, which snakes from the Gulf of Mexico to within a few miles of downtown Houston, stopping by one of the 200-plus oil refineries, chemical plants and fuel depots that line its waters. Once filled, they carry supplies off to a world desperate for fuel amid a global energy crunch. Those facilities also pump out tens of millions of tonnes of CO₂ every year, making it one of America’s largest concentrations of GHG emissions, and a challenge to a world confronting a climate crisis. ExxonMobil, the western world’s largest oil supermajor, thinks it has a solution to this problem — and it does not involve solar panels or wind turbines.
“Exxon has put forward a $100bn idea to keep the fuel flowing while trapping the carbon dioxide spewing from the plants, running it through miles of new pipelines to be stored in reservoirs deep under the nearby Gulf of Mexico’s seabed. Oil and industrial giants Shell, Chevron, Dow Chemical, Ineos and others with facilities in the area are backing the plan.”
U.S. Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing is Making a Comeback—Here’s Why: Today, the US taxpayer spends $500B/year managing and storing the country’s nuclear spent fuel. If this fuel was fully utilized, its capacity could power the entire country for 100 years. Enter reprocessing. The U.S. has explored reprocessing for decades—starting with WWII-era Manhattan Project’s recovery of plutonium from irradiated metallic uranium fuel discharged from the Hanford production reactors—yet commercial reprocessing attempts have encountered technical, economic, and regulatory issues. And though the U.S. has for decades mulled the reprocessing option as a potential pathway forward, nuclear waste research priorities in recent years have fluctuated under different administrations, until now. Today, nuclear spent fuel reprocessing is facing a renaissance. The DOE through its new CURIE progam has ramped up efforts to explore recycling spent nuclear fuel (SNF), or used nuclear fuel (UNF), from the nation’s fleet of light water reactors (LWRs), doling out $38 million in federal awards to a dozen projects. CURIE’s proposed closed nuclear fuel cycle envisions reprocessing UNF, essentially by separating UNF to recover reusable actinides—uranium and plutonium, among them—and then recycling them into new fuel.
8090 Industries portfolio company Oklo has won four DOE awards to date with an array of partners and has plans to leverage its learnings from these projects to roll out a first-of-a-kind fuel recycling facility.
“The fuel recycling facility will enable Oklo to convert nuclear waste from existing used nuclear fuel into clean energy, as well as to recycle fuel from Oklo’s plants, allowing for a dramatic cost reduction and solving for a key supply chain need,” he said. “A commercial-scale fuel recycling facility will change the economic paradigm for advanced fission,” he added. Jacob DeWitte, Oklo co-founder and CEO
This Startup uses Volcanic Rock Dust to Capture Carbon on Farms: On a Midwestern farm growing corn and beans, a tractor will soon spread 1,543 tons of rock dust over 140 acres. The goal: fighting climate change. Over the next two growing seasons, the dust—crushed basalt—is expected to capture 384 tons of carbon on the farm while helping crops grow. The farm is one of 14 that are working with Lithos, a new startup pioneering an unusual approach to carbon capture on more than 1,000 acres of farmland. Covered by Fast Company, this is a fascinating look into a novel nature based solution for carbon capture.
“While some companies build large-scale technology to pull CO2 from the air, Lithos is speeding up a process that already happens in nature: When rain falls, it combines with atmospheric CO2 dioxide to make it slightly acidic, and when the combination hits certain kinds of rocks, it causes a chemical reaction that slowly removes CO2 from the atmosphere.”
The Warehouses of Plastic Behind TerraCycle’s Recycling Dream 🔥
This is great investigative work penned by Bloomberg writer, Liz Kauffman, digging deep into the extremely difficult challenges in the plastic recycling industry through the lens of one of its new pioneers Tom Szaky and his company TerraCycle. In the piece, Kauffman highlights the work TerraCycle promises in making use of plastic garbage that almost no one else wants to touch, and its founder, Tom Szaky, is really stressed out right now as he and his company face more scrutiny than ever before.
“The sparkling adulation is all the more impressive because he’s built his fame from trash. More specifically, on promising to recycle items others have given up as pure junk—among them cigarette butts and dirty diapers. He positions himself as a man who can innovate his way out of a plastic bag. Sort of Silicon Valley meets your dumpster.”
Gigantic, 70-Foot Nuclear Fusion Gun Could Change the World: On a quiet industrial estate in England, the silence is occasionally broken by the thump of a 72-foot-long gun. At the end of the barrel, a star is born. The Big Friendly Gun (BFG) is a prototype for what U.K.-based nuclear fusion company First Light Fusion hopes will be the future of energy production. The video in the article shows a test-fire at the company's facility. From a safe distance and separated from it by a thick wall of concrete, the team look on as data pours in from the gun's sensors. Each test-fire takes the world a step closer to what will potentially be an effectively limitless source of clean power.
Climate Change: Markets, not Government, Will Provide the Cure: Bret Louis Stephens is an American conservative journalist, editor, and columnist and when it comes to addressing the challenge of climate change, I deeply resonate with his perspective. After a journey North of the Arctic Circle in Greenland accompanied with a bold crew and Pulitzer prize winning photographer, Damon Winter, Stephens reflects his candor and constructive thoughts on the actions needed by the masses in this deeply thoughtful Op-ed piece in the New York Times. One of my favorite excerpts below:
“Industrialization may be the leading cause of climate change. But we cannot and will not reverse it through some form of deindustrialization, which would send the world into poverty and deprivation. Instead, economic growth should be seen as an ally in the fight against climate change, because it creates both the wealth that can mitigate the effects of climate change and the technological innovation needed to address its causes. That’s especially true of poorer countries, for which foreign investment, free trade, market-oriented reforms and good regulatory frameworks will do more to build climate resilience than additional billions in foreign aid.”
It’s Better to Mine the World’s Rainforests Than Farm Them: As the energy transition unfolds, the role of mining and the harvesting of metals and minerals necessary has been elevated as a hot and controversial topic. This has invited a barrage of questions of just how harmful or resource efficient mining is when compared to other commodities addressing the full gamut of the energy transition. David Fickling of Bloomberg, pens a very timely piece providing a deep dive on the full landscape of energy transition commodities and encapsulates that minerals are a highly efficient use of space, and represent a tiny environmental footprint compared to agriculture.
“The quantity of base metals produced each year pales into insignificance next to fossil fuels and farm products. “
https://open.substack.com/pub/finiche/p/portfolio-insights?r=1s05vd&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post