WASHINGTON — Wildfires are bigger, and starting earlier in the year. Heat waves are more frequent. Seas are warmer, and flooding is more common. The air is getting hotter. Even ragweed pollen season is beginning sooner.
Climate change is already happening around the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency said on Wednesday. And in many cases, that change is speeding up.
Last week, two major papers on sea-level rise were published. Both try to answer the greatest outstanding questions about sea-level rise: How much will the oceans rise, and how fast? Their conclusions are either reassuring or frightening, depending on your optimism about how quickly the world will get a handle on its carbon pollution.
The first paper, written by 84 scientists, shares the results from a portfolio of the newest climate models and is clearly meant to shape the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report. If countries follow the path they have currently committed to under the Paris Agreement, the world’s average temperature will rise about 3 degrees Celsius by 2100. That will induce about 25 centimeters, or about 10 inches, of sea-level rise, according to the median model run, the new paper finds. But if countries manage to hold warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, as they now aspire to do, then the median sea-level rise falls to about half that amount.
While the shutdown has so far had little impact on supplies of gasoline, diesel or jet fuel, some energy analysts warned that a prolonged suspension could raise prices at the pump along the East Coast and leave some smaller airports scrambling for jet fuel.
Colonial Pipeline, the pipeline operator, said on Sunday afternoon that it was developing “a system restart plan” and would restore service to some small lines between terminals and delivery points but “will bring our full system back online only when we believe it is safe to do so.”
The company, which shut down the pipeline on Friday, acknowledged on Saturday that it had been the victim of a ransomware attack by a criminal group, meaning that the hacker may hold the company’s data hostage until it pays a ransom. Colonial Pipeline, which is privately held, would not say whether it had paid a ransom. By failing to state a timeline for reopening on Sunday, the company renewed questions about whether the operations of the pipeline could still be in jeopardy.
Thirty-five years after the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine exploded in the world’s worst nuclear accident, fission reactions are smoldering again in uranium fuel masses buried deep inside a mangled reactor hall. “It’s like the embers in a barbecue pit,” says Neil Hyatt, a nuclear materials chemist at the University of Sheffield. Now, Ukrainian scientists are scrambling to determine whether the reactions will wink out on their own—or require extraordinary interventions to avert another accident.
Sensors are tracking a rising number of neutrons, a signal of fission, streaming from one inaccessible room, Anatolii Doroshenko of the Institute for Safety Problems of Nuclear Power Plants (ISPNPP) in Kyiv, Ukraine, reported last week during discussions about dismantling the reactor. “There are many uncertainties,” says ISPNPP’s Maxim Saveliev. “But we can’t rule out the possibility of [an] accident.” The neutron counts are rising slowly, Saveliev says, suggesting managers still have a few years to figure out how to stifle the threat. Any remedy he and his colleagues come up with will be of keen interest to Japan, which is coping with the aftermath of its own nuclear disaster 10 years ago at Fukushima, Hyatt notes. “It’s a similar magnitude of hazard.”
The specter of self-sustaining fission, or criticality, in the nuclear ruins has long haunted Chernobyl. When part of the Unit Four reactor’s core melted down on 26 April 1986, uranium fuel rods, their zirconium cladding, graphite control rods, and sand dumped on the core to try to extinguish the fire melted together into a lava. It flowed into the reactor hall’s basement rooms and hardened into formations called fuel-containing materials (FCMs), which are laden with about 170 tons of irradiated uranium—95% of the original fuel.
A few years ago my refrigerator stopped working but the outlet was fine. I could get the refrigerator working by plugging in a space heater in my bedroom but the space heater didn’t put out much heat. My electric stove and water heater was working fine. As where my lights and other small appliances.
What was wrong?
Basically, what happened is the power company was working on the line and disconnected the center tap on the utility transformer from the ground temporarily. 240 volts worked fine, and more less loaded half of 120-volt split phase worked normally, while the more loaded half of the phase only passed as much current as the less loaded portion of the split phase.
With split phase, if the center tap is disconnected, the maximum amperage that can flow is equal to what is on both sides of the phase. So the heavier load on phase “A” will only be able to pass as much current, and therefore voltage, as phase “B”. If you are pulling 34 amps on phase “A” and 10 amps on phase “B”, the center tap is returning the 24 amps not pulled on phase “B”. No center tap, then phase “A” can only pull 10 amps. As voltage is current times resistance, as the current reduces, so does voltage.
So the refrigerator wasn’t getting enough voltage to run, without space heater providing a return path to utility transformer. Split phase transformers rely on their center tap to balance out current between the split phases.
