Institute for Energy and Environmental Research

On December 13, 2022, Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm, announced a historic scientific achievement; President Biden would call it a “BFD” she said. Eight days before, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had aimed its 192 lasers at a single tiny capsule of deuterium and tritium and achieved “ignition”; that meant the nuclear fusion…

Millions of low-income families already face crushingly high burdens of energy costs. High energy costs burdens as a percentage of income are a principal cause of financial distress, creating conflicts between paying utility bills or rent or buying medicines and food. The consequences include ill-health, insecurity, and, in many cases, evictions and mortgage foreclosures. Six percent of income is…

Three major electricity grid disasters in just over a year are exemplary of the havoc that climate extremes are causing and what needs to be done about it: (i) the howling winds of the 2020 derecho, when hundreds of thousands lost power in Iowa and Illinois in August 2020; (ii) the February 2021 breakdown of much of the Texas grid in the maelstrom of a winter polar vortex; and (iii) the failure o…

For decades, there has been an argument in the United States every August 6 and 9, the anniversaries of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One side says the Japanese militarists were brutal and determined to fight to the end; there is substantial evidence for this. The United States captured Saipan and Tinian in the summer of 1944, about a year before Japan surrendered. The critical i…

There is not much argument now about whether the United States can get to a 100% carbon-free electricity sector in the next 15 years or so. But many still believe that nuclear energy will be needed for the job as a complement to wind and solar. Their arguments center on the following: 1. It will take too much storage to make up for the variability of solar and wind. Therefore, dispatchable sourc…

Today, January 22, 2021, is a historic day. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons enters into force, three months after the 50th country, Honduras, ratified it. Nuclear weapons are now illegal under international law in every aspect. Possession is illegal; manufacture is illegal; use is illegal; threatening to use is illegal; transfer is illegal; aiding and abetting any of these things…

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2017, about 50 million U.S. households were under such economic stress that they could not cover an unexpected $400 expense, like the breakdown of a car or a sudden health problem, without borrowing; many are unable to cover it at all. As is well-recognized, the pandemic has exacerbated these problems, which fall disproportionately hard on the Black, Indigeno…

In 2017, the United Nations General Assembly convened a conference to consider a treaty on a complete ban on nuclear weapons — including their manufacture, possession, use, transfer, and testing. On July 7, 2017, 122 countries voted to adopt the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, with one abstention and one vote against. The treaty required 50 countries to ratify it to enter into force…

Nagasaki was destroyed by a plutonium atomic bomb seventy five years ago, on August 9, 1945. Called “Fat Man,” it was the same design that had been tested in the New Mexico desert less than a month before, spreading intense radioactive fallout over a wide area. A day before, on August 8, 1945, the Soviet Union had declared war on Japan, having been neutral until then. Japanese wartime leaders had…

When was the decision made to use atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Was it one decision — or several that made their use inexorable and inevitable? What were the forums in which those decisions were made? When was Japan targeted? And Germany? Seventy-five years after those cities were obliterated, these remain insistent questions. The first step, the establishment of the Uranium Committee in …