nuclear-news

Another one bites the dust: New York’s Fukushima-clone Fitzpatrick reactor will close permanently next year.

In mid-September, I wrote a piece delving into prognostication–always a dangerous endeavor–identifying (with tongue slightly in cheek) the nation’s most troubled nuclear reactors and dividing them into two piles: pawn or toast. Toast was those reactors most likely to shut down; pawn indicated that while on the precipice, the utilities would go to great lengths to avoid shutting them down.

Only six weeks or so later, enough has happened to revisit that list and see how we’ve done.

I wrote then that Entergy’s Fitzpatrick reactor was toast. Yesterday, Entergy announced that Fitzpatrick will close permanently at the end of its current fuel cycle–sometime toward the end of next year. Pretty good prediction, though I wrote that Entergy wouldn’t make the announcement until December. As it turns out, the reactor is losing so much money…

Science and Technology:

¶ Germany’s dash away from nuclear power and toward renewables has helped to create new industries. About 370,000 Germans work in the renewable energy industry, twice the number who work in fossil fuels, according to the Heinrich Böll Foundation. In the change, cities with employment problems are being revived. [The Guardian] ‘

Solar panel roofs in Vauban in Freiburg, Germany Photograph: Imagebroker/Rex Shutterstock

¶ Ravaged by months of war, Yemen is now being battered by the first tropical storm on record to make landfall in the impoverished Arab country. Tropical Cyclone Chapala slammed into Yemen’s central coast early Tuesday, lashing the area with maximum sustained winds of around 85 mph and over a year’s rain in one day. [CNN]

World:

¶ A study published in Nature by scientists at Stanford and UC Berkeley has made waves for its finding that thus far we…

One thousand six hundred and eighteen (1618) — that’s how many months we have in all of the global temperature record starting in 1880. And early indications are that October of 2015 was possibly the hottest month out of them all. A record hot month, during a record hot year, in a record hot world. A new extreme temperature record that may just stand for one or two months as temperatures are likely to continue to climb coordinate with the peak of a Monster El Nino in the Pacific.

As of today’s NOAA El Nino report, sea surface temperatures in the key Nino 3.4 zone had hit a range of 2.7 degrees Celsius above the climatological average. These temperatures are about equal to maximum weekly values achieved during the 1997 El Nino — which in many respects was considered to be the strongest on record. This most recent heat spike…