Breaking News: Nuclear Fusion is thirty years away! (and always has been)
A sparrow farts
After almost 70 years of effort, and $billions spent, in a world first, net energy gain has been achieved in the lab., but it is far far away from being practical.
As proof of principal, powerful lasers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories have managed to heat a deuterium pellet to instantaneous temperatures and pressures where fusion occurs, releasing greater energy than the energy needed to run the colossal lasers that achieved this feat. Unfortunately, none of the released fusion energy was in a form that could be used to power the lasers. (that energy still came from the grid).
Drawing power from the grid, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory can heat one deuterium pellet a day. A sparrow fart could generate more 'usable' energy. To get any usable net energy gain from this process they need to heat up to 50 deuterium pellets a second.
A nuclear fusion cheerleader interviewed this morning on TVNZ Breakfast said it will take 30 years of research and development to get over the engineering hurdles required to heat 50 pellets a second.
The first time I mentioned fusion on the standard probably 8 years ago, I was basically laughed at because all the bright people here said it had always been 10 years away, now it's here it's proven watch capitalism pick the batten up and run .
I would have said that ‘it is always at least 20 years away’ to get to a proof of concept. In fact I did back in 2009. So 13 years on we haven’t further than proving more than we could get more energy out for a short time period.
They haven’t even got close to recovering the energy cost to start the reaction
“It is a big scientific step,” says Ryan McBride, a nuclear engineer at the University of Michigan. But, McBride adds, that does not mean that NIF itself is producing power. For one thing, he says, the lasers require more than 300 megajoules worth of electricity to produce around 2 megajoules of ultraviolet laser light. In other words, even if the energy from the fusion reactions exceeds the energy from the lasers, it’s still only around one percent of the total energy used.
They don’t have anything like the ability to maintain a continuous reaction suitable for generating power.
Moreover, it would take many capsules exploding over and over to produce enough energy to feed the power grid. “You’d have to do this many, many times a second,” McBride says. NIF can currently do around one laser “shot” a week.
Above all, they have no method to make it self-sustaining because they have no way to actually generate power off the excess energy released. There is no transfer mechanism from energy being released from fusion and an ability to use that to power the reaction, or to feed electricity to the grid.
Betti agrees that the timeline to building a fusion plant is “definitely decades”. But, he adds, that could change. “There’s always a possibility of breakthrough,” he says. And the new NIF results could help spur that breakthrough forward. “You’re going to get more people to look into this form of fusion, to see whether we can turn it into an energy-making system.”
They’d also have to figure out how to get their raw material costs down from hundreds of thousands of dollars down to pence (as one report put it). This is a engineering research breakthrough rather than an production engineering breakthrough. It isn’t even a scientific breakthrough – that was achieved in the 1950s when the release of energy from fusion agreed with the theoretical results.
It is of interest – yes. Worth getting excited about – no.
It is hard to see how without those power generating basics there could be any use from fusion within the time frame to do anything of use for a more immediate problems like dropping greenhouse gas emissions over the next 20 years to 2042.
My first degree was a science degree. But by the end of second year the requirement to spend a further 8-10 years at university before I could get hired to actually do something was somewhat dispiriting.
It died completely except as a interest topic after I found out what the employment stats in your speciality were like for PhDs. I really don't have that level of myopia. I like working wide rather than really really narrow. Went into management because I was naturally good at kit, then sidetracked into programming because I liked the persistent learning curve and humility it induces, and these days (for some reason) I keep getting called an engineer in my job titles.
It is of interest – yes. Worth getting excited about – no.
Totally agree. It will likely be a few more weeks before we see some sober, balanced assessment of the implications of this particular announcement. It is not yet clear to me whether it is the result of some fundamental new insight that can be scaled up rapidly, or it is more the culmination of existing programs finally making good on the net energy milestone. Too much hype, not enough detail.
I have always said fusion is a bright, shiny goal absolutely worth chasing; but frankly a small fraction of the monumental budgets being spent on it directed toward more immediately achievable goals in the Gen 4 nuclear fission space – would be money better spent.
Ultimately fusion is likely to be a power source if you need a large plant. Less of an issue with heavy metal radioactive waste with long (by human historical and even up geological) half lives.
But in many ways some of the micro-fusion reactor projects look more interesting than these progresses towards large fusion. But currently they often look optimistic because I get the sense that they're concentrating on the output above input and not so much on how to get a usable electricity source from it. But this article caught my eye if only because this level of engineering is way faster to determine results and issue than building PoC projects costing in their billions.
If you can do it at a micro level it probably gets easier to scale by addition. Which in essence is what the solar panels / battery systems are showing. We just don’t have particularly smart grids and probably won’t quite a while.
With fission, as I keep repeating, we have had engineers building new generation toys every few decades since the 1940s. They have continually neglected to planning in how to clean up their toys and the waste products behind themselves. I'm currently of the opinion that they should demonstrate that they can do really truly do that before letting rip on generating a whole new round of waste.
how to clean up their toys and the waste products behind themselves.
Which is a fair question. Personally I have taken a reasonably deep dive for a lay person into this topic, but I will attempt to keep this response concise. This is after all a political blog, not a nuclear engineering one.
The critical insight is that our current nuclear waste repositories are actually a priceless fuel reserve. They arise merely because Gen 2 and 3 reactor technologies using solid fuel systems use barely 3% of the uranium fuel before the assembly must be discarded for purely for reasons of mechanical integrity. 97% of the uranium and energy potential is left sitting literally on the table.
There are a number of pathways to access this energy, and in the process burn up almost all of the more hazardous, long-lived photon emitting fission by-products. And reducing the volume of high-level waste by a factor of 100 and the storage timeframe to about 300 years. Which is highly achievable.
The more I learned about radiation, the less I came to fear it. The problem is that we have been told two fatal lies about it:
One is that it is possible to build reactors that have a vanishingly small chance of ever releasing any radiation. This is demonstrably untrue because we have had Three Miles Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima events that demonstrably contract this claim and undermine trust. And while I firmly believe Gen 4 or better reactors are inherently far less likely to suffer failure events, the number will never be zero.
But the other big lie is the Linear No Threshold (LNT) model. It told us that any amount of ionising radiation , no matter how small, was harmful and worse still the impact was cumulative in a linear fashion. For this reason the As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA) mandate was regulated – which has proved insanely expensive to implement. Despite the fact of the model being utter bullshit.
We live on a planet bathed in background radiation. Life likely needs radiation to evolve efficiently. More importantly it turns out living cells have very effective cellular repair mechanisms that work to repair DNA damage at levels remarkably higher levels of exposure than most people imagine. (Even more interestingly it is the rate of exposure that matters as well.) And for all conceivable nuclear power reactor accident scenarios, the magnitude and rate of ionising exposure is so low as to be well below the threshold of causing any harm whatsoever.
(Indeed many studies have shown that people fortunate enough to live in places with relatively high background levels may well have somewhat lower levels of cancers than normal. This reality stands in contradiction to all the activist scaremongering thrust on us for several generations now.)
Once you understand that radiation releases from nuclear power plants are not going to be cataclysmic, that the waste streams are not going to reduce entire continents to unlivable wastelands – then it is no longer necessary to pretend we can make perfect nuclear reactors or waste streams with zero radiation. Once we renounce the Cataclysm Lie, we no longer have any need for the patently false, trust sapping It Will Never Fail lie. An occasional release is tolerable. Now nuclear power can regulated much like any other highly beneficial, hazardous activity.
And we can get on with building a human future that does not stand in contradiction with a habitable planet.
A reasonable question that I can respond to in three broad directions.
One is embedded in my comment above. Essentially the reason why current nuclear tech is more expensive on a nameplate basis than solar and wind is that we have loaded layers of unnecessary costs onto it. All analysis I have seen suggest we have made nuclear at least 3 times more expensive than needed in a pointless, futile effort to reduce radiation releases to levels far, far below the threshold where they might cause harm.
The other broad answer is that solar wind battery is only cheap on a nameplate basis – in most places in the world a combination of a very low capacity factor (less than 10%) and the necessary complexity and costs of integrating the inherent intermittency into the grid – has meant that everywhere it has been implemented so far, the cost of electricity to the consumer has risen dramatically. Germany vs France being a prime example.
Another factor rarely mentioned is the relatively short lifespans of solar wind installations. Being exposed to the elements these large scale installations are going to be doing well to survive 20 or so years. And then they need replacing at huge cost all over again. By contrast building a nuclear plant with an 80 yr life span is very doable.
But perhaps the biggest constraint in my mind is that so far we have been exploiting highly productive locations where there is lots of sunshine and wind. Most of the world, and especially close to where people live, is not like this. We are picking the low hanging fruit for the moment, but there is not an unlimited supply of it.
Yet globally the demand for high quality energy over this coming century can be reasonably projected to increase by a factor of 3 – 8 times our current total consumption depending on the assumptions you make. Yet so far all the new solar wind capacity we have installed so far, even when in ideal locations, is barely keeping pace with the rate at which we are closing nuclear plants – often for no good reason.
The idea that we can use renewables to both cheaply and fully supply our current total demand, much less our future requirements, is a very long stretch of the bow indeed.
This is how you lie if you're a idiot blogger like Jack with an agenda and no conscience.
First of all you put up a straw man alternate villain (coal ash) without any details and call it something (in this case 'toxic') without specifying how. Then minimise the danger of your villain with words like 'only 500 years' – ie roughly 20 generations of humans. While never actually show in what happens if either villain escapes.
Then you praise the incarceration of your villain without showing the relative levels of incarceration against a level of escape. Never talk about the effects relative or otherwise of either in the event that they do escape.
Then emphasise that your villain is stored wealth and should be left easily accessible for future generations. Jez I wonder how long it is before someone cuts open the little fence and breaks it out?
//—–
Doing a comparison to coal waste is kind of ridiculous. That gets buried and for good reason. Coal ash mostly gets buried in pits these days and has done for a long time. It only needs a decent hard to leach through flooring and walls and a reasonably hard to penetrate top cover. It isn't stacked high because that just makes it vulnerable. It doesn't need a fully leach proof separation because the idea is to diminish but not stop leachates.
But it simply isn't that toxic except for locally. There are mountains of coal ash already stored, it can be toxic because it contains small quantities of contamination of heavy metals like cadmium, mercury, arsenic, etc. This is only a problem when it gets leached or blown away too fast and concentrates.
Heavy metals are in all environments – the problem happens when they are too concentrated. The biosphere has long adapted to them. It is safer to not live near granite (a known source of heavy metals) or river flood plains (a known collector of heavy metals). But biological organisms are good at encapsulating and excreting them in low doses.
This isn't the case for heavy metals with any kind of strong radioactivity of any kind. That is because while they bind to biological matter like most heavy metals (and eventually get excreted) , they also irradiate and damage DNA, RNA, proteins, tissues, and the defence mechanisms around them even when wrapped up for excretion.
Id they leach into water or the biosphere, it isn't like holding them in a jar and running them against you most radio-protective organ of your body (the skin). Even the idiot Jack Devanneyis aware of this…
Few can penetrate the outer layer of skin. In order for alpha particles or electrons to do any damage, they must be ingested or inhaled. Being a bit rhetorical here. To be precise, the alpha and electron emitters must be swallowed for the particles to be harmful.
The problem is that is exactly what happens when the containment is cracked and they leak into the water table or biosphere? Because they absolutely will. None of the containment systems have been tested for centuries of inattention
So how do you keep these exposed repositories safe for 500+ years. Stop something like a orbital crowbar in a late 21st century orbital war being used to cracking them open. Nuclear waste dumps are a really cool 'accident' deniability target in enemy territory.
Make sure that the next New Madrid earthquake doesn't tilt the hillside sideways. Massive continental crust earthquakes in 'stable' areas may not happen often but they are surface changing. You can literally find a nice rolling hill becoming a river bed in an instant.
That they can withstand being abraded in the sand storms blasting and eroding their exteriors for a century or so. etc
For some reason Jack doesn't describe any layered defence if the cylinder get cracked and stated to leach or abrade. That is because there isn't any. These are destroyable cylinders sitting out in the weather and the rain. Easily targetable looking at google earth or over the net.
It also doesn't account for things like the 140 tonnes of extracted weapons grade plutonium at Sellafield. Which has value in 5kg lots with a little bit if fast acting explosive and fast detonators.
Breeder reactors have been developed and looked at since the 1950s. What is notable about their waste is that it produces some real monster dangerous radioactives in its waste. Lower weight elements like radioactive strontium, cesium, and cadmium may not have the longer lives. What they do have is a strong ability to get bound into biological bodies and sit there irradiating them.
I'd suggest that you look less at the physics and more at the chemistry, biological, geological and historical aspects of nuclear waste disposal.
Shit happens, and containment like this or the 20m above sealevel at Sellafield at present simply aren't realistically designed for containment. They just designed for convenience by some really stupid engineers.
The best thing about renewable energy is that they are pretty damn safe if you look across 500+ years. Sure they can kill people when they fail. Dams drop. Windmills cartwheel downhill etc.. They can’t just keep poisoning the biosphere for 20+ human generations in the future when containment fails.
From a systems perspective and if you ignore the possibility of a bit of carnage in the short term. Renewable power systems are pretty much inherently safe over historical time. Nuclear power systems are the opposite.
The point of Delvany's comparison with coal ash was primarily to compare the relative volume of material produced:
If Connecticut Yankee had been a coal plant, it would have produced between 3,000,000 and 6,000,000 tons of toxic ash in its operating life, not to mention 110 million tons of CO2. If we attempted to store this ash on the CY fuel cask pad, we would have a column of ash about 7000 feet high. The volume of solid waste per unit power produced by a nuclear power is 100,000 times less than that produced by a coal plant.
That is scarcely a strawman – obviously the nature of the nuclear and coal waste streams are very different – but it is entirely valid to point out that the volume is also very different as well – by four orders of magnitude.
A volume that would be reduced by another two orders when properly consumed in the new Gen 4 reactors designed and operated for this purpose. Comparison with Gen 2 breeder reactors from the early days of the industry is not useful.
Nor would I neglect to mention that air pollution from fossil fuelburning is reliably estimated by to cause the pre-mature death of about 10,000 people per day. Somehow we manage to live with this astonishing hazard, yet the vanishingly tiny risk of nuclear waste is amplified into a monster.
And if we have orbital crowbars capable of disrupting geologic repositories many hundreds of metres deep – then I would politely suggest we have bigger problems to worry about.
…..The net energy gain achievement applied to the fusion reaction itself, not the total amount of power it took to operate the lasers and run the project.
This greatly lauded proof of principal experiment is an excuse to continue heating up the climate by burning fossil fuels in the hope that we will be saved from total biosphere collapse at the 11th hour by the miraculous advent of this technology.
I feel this will be a plus for the PM, as it breaks her sometimes tiring, goody-good head-prefect persona, to show a more usual human response underneath. The apology was spot-on, slightly toothy. A bit more of the relatable Jacinda, please.
If this is the story you're referring to, it's yet another example of Luxon being … well, just a little bit weird. He talks and keeps talking and ends up saying things like:
"David was my neighbour for many years. He was a very good neighbour I can tell you that. He was very well behaved, kept his music under control."
OK. Music. That's the issue. Jolly good. What are you on about, man?
In all seriousness, the more Luxon talks the worse for National. His mouth runs away from him, he has no verbal discipline. He’s a gaffe-aholic, and in an election campaign he has to talk a lot more. Good.
Totally, the guy's an idiot. The only trouble is that too few NZers see it. They love the fact 'National's back' with 'a man as their leader'. And it looks like there ain't a thing Labour can do about it.
I don't think it's as bad as that. The details of polling won't make headlines, but they are quite revealing. The latest poll tells us that Luxon is negative 29 with undecided voters.
Right now National is 'Other'. People are dissatisfied for various reasons, and the Opposition reap the benefit. The 'Not Government' party.
But the more people learn about the alternative PM, the less impressed they are. They want … another 'Other'.
However, how many of those 'undecideds' will get out and vote? If they like Ardern, but don't like her government's policies – it seems to me that they're more likely to just stay home.
I agree that there is still an opportunity for Labour to turn this around. But it's going to take some radical pruning of unpopular policies (and politicians).
it was fun watching dave seemore get squelched by the speaker yesterday. eemore wanted AR to sanction the PM over something somebody had heard on the radio and rung him up about. no dice dave. hansard is the record and poo must be raised at the time.
That report shows you how so much of the crime "debate" is completely missing the point. Rhetoric versus reality.
Look at what happened (allegedly, we're obliged to say). Man commits (potentially) aggravated robbery. Offence has potential sentence of 10 years' jail.
He then returns to the same shop, even after the alarm has gone off. He is (not surprisingly) caught, minutes later. He does all this for no material gain.
Very high risk, very low reward, and nobody who thinks about it would attempt such a crime. So the "deterrent" is totally irrelevant. Stupid people do stupid crimes. Issues like drugs, alcohol etc may be a factor too.
Crimes like this would happen even if we had capital punishment for stealing Fanta.
Aggravated robbery is a maximum of 14 years if that's where it ends up, but agree with your general points. On the capital punishment point, it wasn't unknown in earlier times in England and Great Britain for pickpockets to be publicly executed (usually by hanging), and for other pickpockets to be active in the crowd at the public execution.
Watched the Zelensky address to parliament this morning. Good speeches all round bar one. Yes, David Seymour. He used the occasion to pour contempt on the $3 million dollars of extra aid announced by Jacinda Ardern. Ignored the fact we have given nearly $60 million in aid of one sort or another and we are a very small country in the scheme of things.
The aid is in addition to almost $8m in humanitarian help already provided, and $48m of military spending including on training deployments, donation of surplus equipment, and procurement of weapons and ammunition.
I just keep thinking of him as rather strategically stupid.
The one bit of amusement I have if National finally win the election in 2026 (maybe 2023 – but it seems unlikely) is just how useless the prick will be at combining the demands of his caucus with what is possible to negotiate with a larger coalition partner.
He really isn't a Prebble or Hide or even a Banks. It is hard to see him managing both sides of that management role of being small party within government with a rather diverse pile of hungry fringe nut-bars with varying objectives to satisfy.
Might get mocked, but after a move he's my electorate mp. (was in Mt Roskill previously). Anywhere I ran into a bit of an issue and contacted his office for some help. He went into bat for me via a phone call and letter and had my issue sorted quick smart. Will be weird but he's earnt my electorate vote.
Realistically, that has to be his road to retaining the electorate, being a good electorate MP, but it's always good to hear about it actually happening.
I do hear anecdotally, that he's a very good electorate MP. Door knocks regularly. Turns up at events. Goes in to bat with the bureaucracy for his constituents.
I believe Anderton was, as well (don't have direct knowledge of either of them).
I think it's something that's often overlooked. And, is, actually, a really important part of being an electorate MP. Some MPs are really good at it. Others are just not.
Which of the current crop of MPs do you think are good electorate ones? I’m hearing good things about Swarbrick – which will certainly help cement her hold on Auckland Central.
Standardistas, I’m thinking about putting up periodic current affairs debate topic posts, short intro and links from me and some guidelines for debate. On days when there are no new posts.
Haven’t talked with the other authors yet, but hoping for some suggestions from commenters for a name. eg
Today’s Debate: [name of topic].
where ‘today’s debate’ is replaced with something catchier.
Fair. If it's a daily post, synonyms for daily are quite obscure, but debate has a few options that people will have heard of. Discourse was the one I posted, but even something like discussion is fine. That said, daily debate is alliterative, so it has that going for it.
It is also yet another failure by a journalist to ask the obvious question: "What do the words actually mean? What are the implications here?"
He provided some insight into his view of the world in light of the war, advocating for muscular militaries and criticising a “weak” United Nations. … (says) “But this war has proved that when you have to fight for what you believe in, you need an army, weapons, ammunition, and friends to help defend your interests.”
Luxon is calling for a stronger military. That means spending more money. Taxpayers' money. Now that is a position that can be debated and/or defended but Luxon is never asked to.
He says the same thing about health, education, transport, police/justice … everything really. Do more = invest more = spend more.
I don't mind having an opposition that wants to spend more. But they claim to be wanting to spend less. It's a fraud and yet Luxon is rarely challenged on it.
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Donald Trump’s return to the White House and aggressive posturing is undermining global diplomacy, and New Zealand must stand firm in rejecting his reckless, fascist-driven policies that are dragging the world toward chaos.As a nation with a proud history of peacekeeping and principled foreign policy, we should limit our role ...
Sunday marks three months since Donald Trump’s inauguration as US president. What a ride: the style rude, language raucous, and the results rogue. Beyond manners, rudeness matters because tone signals intent as well as personality. ...
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Taiwan has an inadvertent, rarely acknowledged role in global affairs: it’s a kind of sponge, soaking up much of China’s political, military and diplomatic efforts. Taiwan soaks up Chinese power of persuasion and coercion that ...
The Ukraine war has been called the bloodiest conflict since World War II. As of July 2024, 10,000 women were serving in frontline combat roles. Try telling them—from the safety of an Australian lounge room—they ...
Following Canadian authorities’ discovery of a Chinese information operation targeting their country’s election, Australians, too, should beware such risks. In fact, there are already signs that Beijing is interfering in campaigning for the Australian election ...
This video includes personal musings and conclusions of the creator climate scientist Dr. Adam Levy. It is presented to our readers as an informed perspective. Please see video description for references (if any). From "founder" of Tesla and the OG rocket man with SpaceX, and rebranding twitter as X, Musk has ...
Back in February 2024, a rat infestation attracted a fair few headlines in the South Dunedin Countdown supermarket. Today, the rats struck again. They took out the Otago-Southland region’s internet connection. https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/360656230/internet-outage-hits-otago-and-southland Strictly, it was just a coincidence – rats decided to gnaw through one fibre cable, while some hapless ...
I came in this morning after doing some chores and looked quickly at Twitter before unpacking the groceries. Someone was retweeting a Radio NZ story with the headline “Reserve Bank’s budget to be slashed by 25%”. Wow, I thought, the Minister of Finance has really delivered this time. And then ...
So, having teased it last week, Andrew Little has announced he will run for mayor of Wellington. On RNZ, he's saying its all about services - "fixing the pipes, making public transport cheaper, investing in parks, swimming pools and libraries, and developing more housing". Meanwhile, to the readers of the ...
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming, 1921ALL OVER THE WORLD, devout Christians will be reaching for their bibles, reading and re-reading Revelation 13:16-17. For the benefit of all you non-Christians out there, these are the verses describing ...
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In the week of Australia’s 3 May election, ASPI will release Agenda for Change 2025: preparedness and resilience in an uncertain world, a report promoting public debate and understanding on issues of strategic importance to ...
Yesterday, 5,500 senior doctors across Aotearoa New Zealand voted overwhelmingly to strike for a day.This is the first time in New Zealand ASMS members have taken strike action for 24 hours.They are asking the government tofund them and account for resource shortfalls.Vacancies are critical - 45-50% in some regions.The ...
For years and years and years, David Seymour and his posse of deluded neoliberals have been preaching their “tough on crime” gospel to voters. Harsher sentences! More police! Lock ‘em up! Throw away the key. But when it comes to their own, namely former Act Party president Tim Jago, a ...
Judith Collins is a seasoned master at political hypocrisy. As New Zealand’s Defence Minister, she's recently been banging the war drum, announcing a jaw-dropping $12 billion boost to the defence budget over the next four years, all while the coalition of chaos cries poor over housing, health, and education.Apparently, there’s ...
I’m on the London Overground watching what the phones people are holding are doing to their faces: The man-bun guy who could not be less impressed by what he's seeing but cannot stop reading; the woman who's impatient for a response; the one who’s frowning; the one who’s puzzled; the ...
You don't have no prescriptionYou don't have to take no pillsYou don't have no prescriptionAnd baby don't have to take no pillsIf you come to see meDoctor Brown will cure your ills.Songwriters: Waymon Glasco.Dr Luxon. Image: David and Grok.First, they came for the Bottom FeedersAnd I did not speak outBecause ...
The Health Minister says the striking doctors already “well remunerated,” and are “walking away from” and “hurting” their patients. File photo: Lynn GrievesonLong stories short from our political economy on Wednesday, April 16:Simeon Brown has attacked1 doctors striking for more than a 1.5% pay rise as already “well remunerated,” even ...
The time is ripe for Australia and South Korea to strengthen cooperation in space, through embarking on joint projects and initiatives that offer practical outcomes for both countries. This is the finding of a new ...
Hi,When Trump raised tariffs against China to 145%, he destined many small businesses to annihilation. The Daily podcast captured the mass chaos by zooming in and talking to one person, Beth Benike, a small-business owner who will likely lose her home very soon.She pointed out that no, she wasn’t surprised ...
National’s handling of inflation and the cost-of-living crisis is an utter shambles and a gutless betrayal of every Kiwi scraping by. The Coalition of Chaos Ministers strut around preaching about how effective their policies are, but really all they're doing is perpetuating a cruel and sick joke of undelivered promises, ...
Most people wouldn't have heard of a little worm like Rhys Williams, a so-called businessman and former NZ First member, who has recently been unmasked as the venomous troll behind a relentless online campaign targeting Green Party MP Benjamin Doyle.According to reports, Williams has been slinging mud at Doyle under ...
Illustration credit: Jonathan McHugh (New Statesman)The other day, a subscriber said they were unsubscribing because they needed “some good news”.I empathised. Don’t we all.I skimmed a NZME article about the impacts of tariffs this morning with analysis from Kiwibank’s Jarrod Kerr. Kerr, their Chief Economist, suggested another recession is the ...
Let’s assume, as prudence demands we assume, that the United States will not at any predictable time go back to being its old, reliable self. This means its allies must be prepared indefinitely to lean ...
Over the last three rather tumultuous US trade policy weeks, I’ve read these four books. I started with Irwin (whose book had sat on my pile for years, consulted from time to time but not read) in a week of lots of flights and hanging around airports/hotels, and then one ...
Indonesia could do without an increase in military spending that the Ministry of Defence is proposing. The country has more pressing issues, including public welfare and human rights. Moreover, the transparency and accountability to justify ...
Former Hutt City councillor Chris Milne has slithered back into the spotlight, not as a principled dissenter, but as a vindictive puppeteer of digital venom. The revelations from a recent court case paint a damning portrait of a man whose departure from Hutt City Council in 2022 was merely the ...
That's the conclusion of a report into security risks against Green MP Benjamin Doyle, in the wake of Winston Peters' waging a homophobic hate-campaign against them: GRC’s report said a “hostility network” of politicians, commentators, conspiracy theorists, alternative media outlets and those opposed to the rainbow community had produced ...
That's the conclusion of a report into security risks against Green MP Benjamin Doyle, in the wake of Winston Peters' waging a homophobic hate-campaign against them: GRC’s report said a “hostility network” of politicians, commentators, conspiracy theorists, alternative media outlets and those opposed to the rainbow community had produced ...
National Party MP Hamish Campbell’s ties to the secretive Two By Twos "church" raises serious questions that are not being answered. This shadowy group, currently being investigated by the FBI for numerous cases of child abuse, hides behind a facade of faith while Campbell dodges scrutiny, claiming it’s a “private ...
National Party MP Hamish Campbell’s ties to the secretive Two By Twos "church" raises serious questions that are not being answered. This shadowy group, currently being investigated by the FBI for numerous cases of child abuse, hides behind a facade of faith while Campbell dodges scrutiny, claiming it’s a “private ...
The economy is not doing what it was supposed to when PM Christopher Luxon said in January it was ‘going for growth.’ Photo: Lynn Grieveson / The KākāLong stories short from our political economy on Tuesday, April 15:New Zealand’s economic recovery is stalling, according to business surveys, retail spending and ...
This is a guest post by Lewis Creed, managing editor of the University of Auckland student publication Craccum, which is currently running a campaign for a safer Symonds Street in the wake of a horrific recent crash.The post has two parts: 1) Craccum’s original call for safety (6 ...
NZCTU President Richard Wagstaff has published an opinion piece which makes the case for a different approach to economic development, as proposed in the CTU’s Aotearoa Reimagined programme. The number of people studying to become teachers has jumped after several years of low enrolment. The coalition has directed Health New ...
The growth of China’s AI industry gives it great influence over emerging technologies. That creates security risks for countries using those technologies. So, Australia must foster its own domestic AI industry to protect its interests. ...
Unfortunately we have another National Party government in power at the moment, and as a consequence, another economic dumpster fire taking hold. Inflation’s hurting Kiwis, and instead of providing relief, National is fiddling while wallets burn.Prime Minister Chris Luxon's response is a tired remix of tax cuts for the rich ...
Girls who are boys who like boys to be girlsWho do boys like they're girls, who do girls like they're boysAlways should be someone you really loveSongwriters: Damon Albarn / Graham Leslie Coxon / Alexander Rowntree David / Alexander James Steven.Last month, I wrote about the Birds and Bees being ...
Australia needs to reevaluate its security priorities and establish a more dynamic regulatory framework for cybersecurity. To advance in this area, it can learn from Britain’s Cyber Security and Resilience Bill, which presents a compelling ...
Deputy PM Winston Peters likes nothing more than to portray himself as the only wise old head while everyone else is losing theirs. Yet this time, his “old master” routine isn’t working. What global trade is experiencing is more than the usual swings and roundabouts of market sentiment. President Donald ...
After stonewalling requests for information on boot camps, the Government has now offered up a blog post right before Easter weekend rather than provide clarity on the pilot. ...
More people could be harmed if Minister for Mental Health Matt Doocey does not guarantee to protect patients and workers as the Police withdraw from supporting mental health call outs. ...
The Green Party recognises the extension of visa allowances for our Pacific whānau as a step in the right direction but continues to call for a Pacific Visa Waiver. ...
The Government yesterday released its annual child poverty statistics, and by its own admission, more tamariki across Aotearoa are now living in material hardship. ...
Today, Te Pāti Māori join the motu in celebration as the Treaty Principles Bill is voted down at its second reading. “From the beginning, this Bill was never welcome in this House,” said Te Pāti Māori Co-Leader, Rawiri Waititi. “Our response to the first reading was one of protest: protesting ...
The Green Party is proud to have voted down the Coalition Government’s Treaty Principles Bill, an archaic piece of legislation that sought to attack the nation’s founding agreement. ...
A Member’s Bill in the name of Green Party MP Julie Anne Genter which aims to stop coal mining, the Crown Minerals (Prohibition of Mining) Amendment Bill, has been pulled from Parliament’s ‘biscuit tin’ today. ...
Labour MP Kieran McAnulty’s Members Bill to make the law simpler and fairer for businesses operating on Easter, Anzac and Christmas Days has passed its first reading after a conscience vote in Parliament. ...
Nicola Willis continues to sit on her hands amid a global economic crisis, leaving the Reserve Bank to act for New Zealanders who are worried about their jobs, mortgages, and KiwiSaver. ...
Today, the Oranga Tamariki (Repeal of Section 7AA) Amendment Bill has passed its third and final reading, but there is one more stage before it becomes law. The Governor-General must give their ‘Royal assent’ for any bill to become legally enforceable. This means that, even if a bill gets voted ...
Abortion care at Whakatāne Hospital has been quietly shelved, with patients told they will likely have to travel more than an hour to Tauranga to get the treatment they need. ...
Thousands of New Zealanders’ submissions are missing from the official parliamentary record because the National-dominated Justice Select Committee has rushed work on the Treaty Principles Bill. ...
Today’s announcement of 10 percent tariffs for New Zealand goods entering the United States is disappointing for exporters and consumers alike, with the long-lasting impact on prices and inflation still unknown. ...
The National Government’s choices have contributed to a slow-down in the building sector, as thousands of people have lost their jobs in construction. ...
Willie Apiata’s decision to hand over his Victoria Cross to the Minister for Veterans is a powerful and selfless act, made on behalf of all those who have served our country. ...
Residents of a seaside suburb in Auckland have been campaigning to reverse the reversal of speed limit reductions on their main road, for fear the changes may end in a fatality. The Twin Coast Discovery Highway passes through a number of suburbs on the Hibiscus Coast. Like all major roads, ...
It’s billed as the passport to the economy, but a cross-section of New Zealand’s population can’t access one.It’s the humble bank account, a rite of passage for most Kiwis, but for prisoners, refugees, and the homeless, among other vulnerable marginalised people, it’s in the too-hard basket.So, in a bid to ...
The former Labour leader’s entry into the race makes life more difficult for Tory Whanau, but there are silver linings for her campaign. Andrew Little launched his campaign, a new political party insisted it wasn’t a political party, and the Greens found a new star candidate. It’s been a big ...
After Easter, an obscure kind of resurrection. West Virginia University Press has announced the reissue of a book they claim is “the earliest known work of urban apocalyptic fiction”, The Doom of the Great City (1860), by British author William Delisle Hay, set in…New Zealand.The narrator tells ofthe destruction ...
A close friend and business associate of Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown, has gone from being an unpaid volunteer in the mayoral office, to a contractor paid more than $300,000 a year.Chris Mathews had managed Brown’s successful 2022 election campaign, and is now employed via his own company, to provide “specialist ...
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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra The imbroglio over the reported Russian request to Indonesia to base planes in Papua initially tripped Peter Dutton, and now is dogging Anthony Albanese. After the respected military site Janes said a request had ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mathew Schmalz, Professor of Religious Studies, College of the Holy Cross Cardinals attend Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica, before they enter the conclave to decide who the next pope will be, on March 12, 2013, in Vatican City.Photo by Franco Origlia/Getty ...
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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joel Hodge, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Theology and Philosophy, Australian Catholic University Pope Francis has died on Easter Monday, aged 88, the Vatican announced. The head of the Catholic Church had recently survived being hospitalised with a serious bout of double pneumonia. ...
Of the 1500 new places, 1000 were last week allocated to five housing providers through 'strategic partnerships' to make contracting the homes more efficient. ...
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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Frank Rindert Algra-Maschio, PhD Candidate, Social and Political Sciences, Monash University Three weeks into the federal election campaign and both major parties have already pledged to spend billions in taxpayer dollars if elected on May 3. But with so many policies ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Albert Palazzo, Adjunct Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at UNSW Canberra, UNSW Sydney For more than a century, Australia has followed the same defence policy: dependence on a great power. This was first the United Kingdom and then ...
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Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Susan Hazel, Associate Professor, School of Animal and Veterinary Science, University of Adelaide Lucigerma/Shutterstock Caring for a new puppy can be wonderful, but it can also bring feelings of depression, extreme stress and exhaustion. This is sometimes referred to as “the ...
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This Easter Sunday harassment of the victim’s family is part of a deliberate tactic to silence the victims, who were wrongfully duped of their money, efforts and hopes for a better future. ...
Māori own huge areas of land in Aotearoa but as climate change accelerates and carbon markets take hold, many are being backed into a corner.Māori connections to the whenua and ngahere run deep, rooted in whakapapa and sustained through generations. Today, that whenua is at a crossroads – squeezed ...
Comment: Two decades ago, I drove from Germany to Southern Belgium to visit the Commonwealth Memorial at Tyne Cot. The remains of my great grandmother’s brother, Private Robert Macalister, lay there. I didn’t know what to expect.Even in early summer, nine decades later, Passchendaele was blanketed in a thick, low ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra As it seeks to gain some momentum for its campaign, the Coalition on Monday will focus on law and order, announcing $355 million for a National Drug Enforcement and Organised Crime Strike Team to fight ...
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Report by Dr David Robie – Café Pacific. – COMMENTARY: By Caitlin Johnstone Israel assassinated a photojournalist in Gaza in an airstrike targeting her family’s home on Wednesday, the day after it was announced that a documentary she appears in would premier in Cannes next month. Her name was ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Whittaker, Senior Lecturer in Physics, Nottingham Trent University Darryl Fonseka/Shutterstocl What do you think of when it comes to extra terrestrial life? Most popular sci-fi books and TV shows suggest humanoid beings could live on other planets. But when astronomers ...
https://i.stuff.co.nz/science/300764379/nuclear-fusion-breakthrough-is-a-milestone-for-climate-clean-energy
Yeah baby!!
The game changer is getting closer
Breaking News: Nuclear Fusion is thirty years away! (and always has been)
A sparrow farts
After almost 70 years of effort, and $billions spent, in a world first, net energy gain has been achieved in the lab., but it is far far away from being practical.
As proof of principal, powerful lasers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories have managed to heat a deuterium pellet to instantaneous temperatures and pressures where fusion occurs, releasing greater energy than the energy needed to run the colossal lasers that achieved this feat. Unfortunately, none of the released fusion energy was in a form that could be used to power the lasers. (that energy still came from the grid).
Drawing power from the grid, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory can heat one deuterium pellet a day. A sparrow fart could generate more 'usable' energy. To get any usable net energy gain from this process they need to heat up to 50 deuterium pellets a second.
A nuclear fusion cheerleader interviewed this morning on TVNZ Breakfast said it will take 30 years of research and development to get over the engineering hurdles required to heat 50 pellets a second.
Whoop-de-doo.
The first time I mentioned fusion on the standard probably 8 years ago, I was basically laughed at because all the bright people here said it had always been 10 years away, now it's here it's proven watch capitalism pick the batten up and run .
Actually 4 years ago in 2018 unless you have changed handles.
I would have said that ‘it is always at least 20 years away’ to get to a proof of concept. In fact I did back in 2009. So 13 years on we haven’t further than proving more than we could get more energy out for a short time period.
Right now in the wake of todays news, I’d still say the same.
They haven’t even got close to recovering the energy cost to start the reaction
They don’t have anything like the ability to maintain a continuous reaction suitable for generating power.
Above all, they have no method to make it self-sustaining because they have no way to actually generate power off the excess energy released. There is no transfer mechanism from energy being released from fusion and an ability to use that to power the reaction, or to feed electricity to the grid.
They’d also have to figure out how to get their raw material costs down from hundreds of thousands of dollars down to pence (as one report put it). This is a engineering research breakthrough rather than an production engineering breakthrough. It isn’t even a scientific breakthrough – that was achieved in the 1950s when the release of energy from fusion agreed with the theoretical results.
It is of interest – yes. Worth getting excited about – no.
It is hard to see how without those power generating basics there could be any use from fusion within the time frame to do anything of use for a more immediate problems like dropping greenhouse gas emissions over the next 20 years to 2042.
Feels like I've banged in about it for longer .
I live this stuff should have been a scientist but the chip on my shoulder weighed me down in 4th form .
Still gonna get excited though 🤪
My first degree was a science degree. But by the end of second year the requirement to spend a further 8-10 years at university before I could get hired to actually do something was somewhat dispiriting.
It died completely except as a interest topic after I found out what the employment stats in your speciality were like for PhDs. I really don't have that level of myopia. I like working wide rather than really really narrow. Went into management because I was naturally good at kit, then sidetracked into programming because I liked the persistent learning curve and humility it induces, and these days (for some reason) I keep getting called an engineer in my job titles.
Totally agree. It will likely be a few more weeks before we see some sober, balanced assessment of the implications of this particular announcement. It is not yet clear to me whether it is the result of some fundamental new insight that can be scaled up rapidly, or it is more the culmination of existing programs finally making good on the net energy milestone. Too much hype, not enough detail.
I have always said fusion is a bright, shiny goal absolutely worth chasing; but frankly a small fraction of the monumental budgets being spent on it directed toward more immediately achievable goals in the Gen 4 nuclear fission space – would be money better spent.
Ultimately fusion is likely to be a power source if you need a large plant. Less of an issue with heavy metal radioactive waste with long (by human historical and even up geological) half lives.
But in many ways some of the micro-fusion reactor projects look more interesting than these progresses towards large fusion. But currently they often look optimistic because I get the sense that they're concentrating on the output above input and not so much on how to get a usable electricity source from it. But this article caught my eye if only because this level of engineering is way faster to determine results and issue than building PoC projects costing in their billions.
If you can do it at a micro level it probably gets easier to scale by addition. Which in essence is what the solar panels / battery systems are showing. We just don’t have particularly smart grids and probably won’t quite a while.
With fission, as I keep repeating, we have had engineers building new generation toys every few decades since the 1940s. They have continually neglected to planning in how to clean up their toys and the waste products behind themselves. I'm currently of the opinion that they should demonstrate that they can do really truly do that before letting rip on generating a whole new round of waste.
Which is a fair question. Personally I have taken a reasonably deep dive for a lay person into this topic, but I will attempt to keep this response concise. This is after all a political blog, not a nuclear engineering one.
Rather than type it all out here, I will reference this excellent link that gives a sound explanation of the problem and one obvious solution.
The critical insight is that our current nuclear waste repositories are actually a priceless fuel reserve. They arise merely because Gen 2 and 3 reactor technologies using solid fuel systems use barely 3% of the uranium fuel before the assembly must be discarded for purely for reasons of mechanical integrity. 97% of the uranium and energy potential is left sitting literally on the table.
There are a number of pathways to access this energy, and in the process burn up almost all of the more hazardous, long-lived photon emitting fission by-products. And reducing the volume of high-level waste by a factor of 100 and the storage timeframe to about 300 years. Which is highly achievable.
The more I learned about radiation, the less I came to fear it. The problem is that we have been told two fatal lies about it:
One is that it is possible to build reactors that have a vanishingly small chance of ever releasing any radiation. This is demonstrably untrue because we have had Three Miles Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima events that demonstrably contract this claim and undermine trust. And while I firmly believe Gen 4 or better reactors are inherently far less likely to suffer failure events, the number will never be zero.
But the other big lie is the Linear No Threshold (LNT) model. It told us that any amount of ionising radiation , no matter how small, was harmful and worse still the impact was cumulative in a linear fashion. For this reason the As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA) mandate was regulated – which has proved insanely expensive to implement. Despite the fact of the model being utter bullshit.
We live on a planet bathed in background radiation. Life likely needs radiation to evolve efficiently. More importantly it turns out living cells have very effective cellular repair mechanisms that work to repair DNA damage at levels remarkably higher levels of exposure than most people imagine. (Even more interestingly it is the rate of exposure that matters as well.) And for all conceivable nuclear power reactor accident scenarios, the magnitude and rate of ionising exposure is so low as to be well below the threshold of causing any harm whatsoever.
(Indeed many studies have shown that people fortunate enough to live in places with relatively high background levels may well have somewhat lower levels of cancers than normal. This reality stands in contradiction to all the activist scaremongering thrust on us for several generations now.)
Once you understand that radiation releases from nuclear power plants are not going to be cataclysmic, that the waste streams are not going to reduce entire continents to unlivable wastelands – then it is no longer necessary to pretend we can make perfect nuclear reactors or waste streams with zero radiation. Once we renounce the Cataclysm Lie, we no longer have any need for the patently false, trust sapping It Will Never Fail lie. An occasional release is tolerable. Now nuclear power can regulated much like any other highly beneficial, hazardous activity.
And we can get on with building a human future that does not stand in contradiction with a habitable planet.
But solar and offshore wind are now cheaper so why would we bother?
A reasonable question that I can respond to in three broad directions.
One is embedded in my comment above. Essentially the reason why current nuclear tech is more expensive on a nameplate basis than solar and wind is that we have loaded layers of unnecessary costs onto it. All analysis I have seen suggest we have made nuclear at least 3 times more expensive than needed in a pointless, futile effort to reduce radiation releases to levels far, far below the threshold where they might cause harm.
The other broad answer is that solar wind battery is only cheap on a nameplate basis – in most places in the world a combination of a very low capacity factor (less than 10%) and the necessary complexity and costs of integrating the inherent intermittency into the grid – has meant that everywhere it has been implemented so far, the cost of electricity to the consumer has risen dramatically. Germany vs France being a prime example.
Another factor rarely mentioned is the relatively short lifespans of solar wind installations. Being exposed to the elements these large scale installations are going to be doing well to survive 20 or so years. And then they need replacing at huge cost all over again. By contrast building a nuclear plant with an 80 yr life span is very doable.
But perhaps the biggest constraint in my mind is that so far we have been exploiting highly productive locations where there is lots of sunshine and wind. Most of the world, and especially close to where people live, is not like this. We are picking the low hanging fruit for the moment, but there is not an unlimited supply of it.
Yet globally the demand for high quality energy over this coming century can be reasonably projected to increase by a factor of 3 – 8 times our current total consumption depending on the assumptions you make. Yet so far all the new solar wind capacity we have installed so far, even when in ideal locations, is barely keeping pace with the rate at which we are closing nuclear plants – often for no good reason.
The idea that we can use renewables to both cheaply and fully supply our current total demand, much less our future requirements, is a very long stretch of the bow indeed.
This is how you lie if you're a idiot blogger like Jack with an agenda and no conscience.
First of all you put up a straw man alternate villain (coal ash) without any details and call it something (in this case 'toxic') without specifying how. Then minimise the danger of your villain with words like 'only 500 years' – ie roughly 20 generations of humans. While never actually show in what happens if either villain escapes.
Then you praise the incarceration of your villain without showing the relative levels of incarceration against a level of escape. Never talk about the effects relative or otherwise of either in the event that they do escape.
Then emphasise that your villain is stored wealth and should be left easily accessible for future generations. Jez I wonder how long it is before someone cuts open the little fence and breaks it out?
//—–
Doing a comparison to coal waste is kind of ridiculous. That gets buried and for good reason. Coal ash mostly gets buried in pits these days and has done for a long time. It only needs a decent hard to leach through flooring and walls and a reasonably hard to penetrate top cover. It isn't stacked high because that just makes it vulnerable. It doesn't need a fully leach proof separation because the idea is to diminish but not stop leachates.
But it simply isn't that toxic except for locally. There are mountains of coal ash already stored, it can be toxic because it contains small quantities of contamination of heavy metals like cadmium, mercury, arsenic, etc. This is only a problem when it gets leached or blown away too fast and concentrates.
Heavy metals are in all environments – the problem happens when they are too concentrated. The biosphere has long adapted to them. It is safer to not live near granite (a known source of heavy metals) or river flood plains (a known collector of heavy metals). But biological organisms are good at encapsulating and excreting them in low doses.
This isn't the case for heavy metals with any kind of strong radioactivity of any kind. That is because while they bind to biological matter like most heavy metals (and eventually get excreted) , they also irradiate and damage DNA, RNA, proteins, tissues, and the defence mechanisms around them even when wrapped up for excretion.
Id they leach into water or the biosphere, it isn't like holding them in a jar and running them against you most radio-protective organ of your body (the skin). Even the idiot Jack Devanney is aware of this…
The problem is that is exactly what happens when the containment is cracked and they leak into the water table or biosphere? Because they absolutely will. None of the containment systems have been tested for centuries of inattention
So how do you keep these exposed repositories safe for 500+ years. Stop something like a orbital crowbar in a late 21st century orbital war being used to cracking them open. Nuclear waste dumps are a really cool 'accident' deniability target in enemy territory.
Make sure that the next New Madrid earthquake doesn't tilt the hillside sideways. Massive continental crust earthquakes in 'stable' areas may not happen often but they are surface changing. You can literally find a nice rolling hill becoming a river bed in an instant.
That they can withstand being abraded in the sand storms blasting and eroding their exteriors for a century or so. etc
For some reason Jack doesn't describe any layered defence if the cylinder get cracked and stated to leach or abrade. That is because there isn't any. These are destroyable cylinders sitting out in the weather and the rain. Easily targetable looking at google earth or over the net.
It also doesn't account for things like the 140 tonnes of extracted weapons grade plutonium at Sellafield. Which has value in 5kg lots with a little bit if fast acting explosive and fast detonators.
Breeder reactors have been developed and looked at since the 1950s. What is notable about their waste is that it produces some real monster dangerous radioactives in its waste. Lower weight elements like radioactive strontium, cesium, and cadmium may not have the longer lives. What they do have is a strong ability to get bound into biological bodies and sit there irradiating them.
I'd suggest that you look less at the physics and more at the chemistry, biological, geological and historical aspects of nuclear waste disposal.
Shit happens, and containment like this or the 20m above sealevel at Sellafield at present simply aren't realistically designed for containment. They just designed for convenience by some really stupid engineers.
The best thing about renewable energy is that they are pretty damn safe if you look across 500+ years. Sure they can kill people when they fail. Dams drop. Windmills cartwheel downhill etc.. They can’t just keep poisoning the biosphere for 20+ human generations in the future when containment fails.
From a systems perspective and if you ignore the possibility of a bit of carnage in the short term. Renewable power systems are pretty much inherently safe over historical time. Nuclear power systems are the opposite.
The point of Delvany's comparison with coal ash was primarily to compare the relative volume of material produced:
That is scarcely a strawman – obviously the nature of the nuclear and coal waste streams are very different – but it is entirely valid to point out that the volume is also very different as well – by four orders of magnitude.
A volume that would be reduced by another two orders when properly consumed in the new Gen 4 reactors designed and operated for this purpose. Comparison with Gen 2 breeder reactors from the early days of the industry is not useful.
And besides I would not be so blase about coal ash waste.
Nor would I neglect to mention that air pollution from fossil fuelburning is reliably estimated by to cause the pre-mature death of about 10,000 people per day. Somehow we manage to live with this astonishing hazard, yet the vanishingly tiny risk of nuclear waste is amplified into a monster.
And if we have orbital crowbars capable of disrupting geologic repositories many hundreds of metres deep – then I would politely suggest we have bigger problems to worry about.
8 years ago it was ten years away?
And now it is 30 years away?
Talk about moving the goalposts.
And it gets worse.
From the link you supplied:
This alleged techno-fix to climate change some time in the future sounds like a lame excuse not to knuckle down in the here and now.
At the Wright Brother's stage but yes
Awesome! We'll be able to crank on! Monorail through Fiordland National Park!
we can also get much more efficient at strip mining the seas of life.
And BUILDING MOAR ROADS.
all good then I guess.
We'll be able to go faster, further and more often, move more stuff, have twice as much!
We're biggering and biggering!
If it embiggens the monorail, it must be good!
This greatly lauded proof of principal experiment is an excuse to continue heating up the climate by burning fossil fuels in the hope that we will be saved from total biosphere collapse at the 11th hour by the miraculous advent of this technology.
Good luck with that.
Solar, wind, electric, hydrogen and now this breakthrough, I would of thought you would be excited and way less sad sack about it.
Monorail from q town to milford, shit that's a good idea. 👍
You might want to regress to an arboreal life my leafy freind buy we don't,
Imagine a clean energy system that could desalinate so much see water we could green desert ares.
I want to progress to a life that's founded upon the principles displayed by managed woodlands, yes.
I recognise that you don't, but that's because you haven't yet understood what it means.
Greening "desert areas" must and will happen – then we'll be able to build the most wonderful Los Vegas imaginable!! Go us!!!!
Bolsonaro’s legacy.
https://twitter.com/tomphillipsin/status/1602224120158191616
The Herald heading today has Luxon reckoning that the PM's "arrogant prick" comment is telling. I agree with him. It's telling me what I already know.
I feel this will be a plus for the PM, as it breaks her sometimes tiring, goody-good head-prefect persona, to show a more usual human response underneath. The apology was spot-on, slightly toothy. A bit more of the relatable Jacinda, please.
what would the reaction have been if Luxton had called Jacinda a arrogant cow ????
Some on The left would milk that cow as hard as you are now
If this is the story you're referring to, it's yet another example of Luxon being … well, just a little bit weird. He talks and keeps talking and ends up saying things like:
"David was my neighbour for many years. He was a very good neighbour I can tell you that. He was very well behaved, kept his music under control."
OK. Music. That's the issue. Jolly good. What are you on about, man?
In all seriousness, the more Luxon talks the worse for National. His mouth runs away from him, he has no verbal discipline. He’s a gaffe-aholic, and in an election campaign he has to talk a lot more. Good.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/nationals-luxon-says-pm-jacinda-arderns-arrogant-prick-david-seymour-comment-sign-of-pressure/DMR5WHD46BF23LXM7O3FO5J2VE/
Totally, the guy's an idiot. The only trouble is that too few NZers see it. They love the fact 'National's back' with 'a man as their leader'. And it looks like there ain't a thing Labour can do about it.
I don't think it's as bad as that. The details of polling won't make headlines, but they are quite revealing. The latest poll tells us that Luxon is negative 29 with undecided voters.
Right now National is 'Other'. People are dissatisfied for various reasons, and the Opposition reap the benefit. The 'Not Government' party.
But the more people learn about the alternative PM, the less impressed they are. They want … another 'Other'.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/national-and-act-in-government-on-latest-poll/GQ3QPZBNUJAQRKEEFDXAUPMW6I/
However, how many of those 'undecideds' will get out and vote? If they like Ardern, but don't like her government's policies – it seems to me that they're more likely to just stay home.
I agree that there is still an opportunity for Labour to turn this around. But it's going to take some radical pruning of unpopular policies (and politicians).
Thank you Observer for making me laugh out loud in a Spanish motorway cafe …the locals think I am a weirdo like Luxon too.
it was fun watching dave seemore get squelched by the speaker yesterday. eemore wanted AR to sanction the PM over something somebody had heard on the radio and rung him up about. no dice dave. hansard is the record and poo must be raised at the time.
I do hope lprent is working on a plugin which notifies somebody in David's orbit by text every time Seymour's name comes up in a comment here.
Does this mean he had his phone on in class?
nope. But I did have a flash of yellow when I read that.
What's the world coming to when people are prepared to threaten people with a machete all for a bottle of Fanta and an packet of chips!
Watch: Machete-wielding thief flees from Upper Hutt dairy fog cannon – NZ Herald
That report shows you how so much of the crime "debate" is completely missing the point. Rhetoric versus reality.
Look at what happened (allegedly, we're obliged to say). Man commits (potentially) aggravated robbery. Offence has potential sentence of 10 years' jail.
He then returns to the same shop, even after the alarm has gone off. He is (not surprisingly) caught, minutes later. He does all this for no material gain.
Very high risk, very low reward, and nobody who thinks about it would attempt such a crime. So the "deterrent" is totally irrelevant. Stupid people do stupid crimes. Issues like drugs, alcohol etc may be a factor too.
Crimes like this would happen even if we had capital punishment for stealing Fanta.
Aggravated robbery is a maximum of 14 years if that's where it ends up, but agree with your general points. On the capital punishment point, it wasn't unknown in earlier times in England and Great Britain for pickpockets to be publicly executed (usually by hanging), and for other pickpockets to be active in the crowd at the public execution.
Watched the Zelensky address to parliament this morning. Good speeches all round bar one. Yes, David Seymour. He used the occasion to pour contempt on the $3 million dollars of extra aid announced by Jacinda Ardern. Ignored the fact we have given nearly $60 million in aid of one sort or another and we are a very small country in the scheme of things.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/480691/ukrainian-president-volodymyr-zelensky-addresses-new-zealand-parliament
Living up to his newly found fame as an "arrogant prick".
I just keep thinking of him as rather strategically stupid.
The one bit of amusement I have if National finally win the election in 2026 (maybe 2023 – but it seems unlikely) is just how useless the prick will be at combining the demands of his caucus with what is possible to negotiate with a larger coalition partner.
He really isn't a Prebble or Hide or even a Banks. It is hard to see him managing both sides of that management role of being small party within government with a rather diverse pile of hungry fringe nut-bars with varying objectives to satisfy.
Might get mocked, but after a move he's my electorate mp. (was in Mt Roskill previously). Anywhere I ran into a bit of an issue and contacted his office for some help. He went into bat for me via a phone call and letter and had my issue sorted quick smart. Will be weird but he's earnt my electorate vote.
Realistically, that has to be his road to retaining the electorate, being a good electorate MP, but it's always good to hear about it actually happening.
I do hear anecdotally, that he's a very good electorate MP. Door knocks regularly. Turns up at events. Goes in to bat with the bureaucracy for his constituents.
As was Peter Dunne.
I believe Anderton was, as well (don't have direct knowledge of either of them).
I think it's something that's often overlooked. And, is, actually, a really important part of being an electorate MP. Some MPs are really good at it. Others are just not.
Which of the current crop of MPs do you think are good electorate ones? I’m hearing good things about Swarbrick – which will certainly help cement her hold on Auckland Central.
Everything I've heard in Christchurch is that he was excellent, as is Dr Megan Woods. Poto Williams is also an excellent electorate MP.
Yes, you tend to hear about the 'local' ones – not so much the ones in other cities.
Standardistas, I’m thinking about putting up periodic current affairs debate topic posts, short intro and links from me and some guidelines for debate. On days when there are no new posts.
Haven’t talked with the other authors yet, but hoping for some suggestions from commenters for a name. eg
Today’s Debate: [name of topic].
where ‘today’s debate’ is replaced with something catchier.
hit me with your good ideas.
Circadian Discourse:
clever but probably a bit obscure for a regular post title
Fair. If it's a daily post, synonyms for daily are quite obscure, but debate has a few options that people will have heard of. Discourse was the one I posted, but even something like discussion is fine. That said, daily debate is alliterative, so it has that going for it.
I am a fan of alliteration.
Hot Topic of the Day
Hot Potatoe of the Day
Today's Special Topic
Today's Noteworthy Topic (TNT)
Stuff not even bothering to hide it any more:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/130757871/christopher-luxon-the-statesman-emerges-as-the-ukraine-war-beams-into-parliament
Shilling for a strongly disliked oppo leader is as pathetic as it is boring.
That article/opinion is so blatantly pro-National that it would almost warrant a complaint to the Media Council (if there is such a body)!
I listened to Luxy's speech and thought it just stuck it's head above the mediocre!
It is also yet another failure by a journalist to ask the obvious question: "What do the words actually mean? What are the implications here?"
He provided some insight into his view of the world in light of the war, advocating for muscular militaries and criticising a “weak” United Nations. … (says) “But this war has proved that when you have to fight for what you believe in, you need an army, weapons, ammunition, and friends to help defend your interests.”
Luxon is calling for a stronger military. That means spending more money. Taxpayers' money. Now that is a position that can be debated and/or defended but Luxon is never asked to.
He says the same thing about health, education, transport, police/justice … everything really. Do more = invest more = spend more.
I don't mind having an opposition that wants to spend more. But they claim to be wanting to spend less. It's a fraud and yet Luxon is rarely challenged on it.
I concluded he didn't write it. Someone with much more speech composing flair than him wrote it. But he delivered it well.