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🔗 North America 🔗 Energy

The Northeast blackout of 2003 was a widespread power outage throughout parts of the Northeastern and Midwestern United States, and the Canadian province of Ontario on August 14–28, 2003, beginning just after 4:10 p.m. EDT.

Some power was restored by 11 p.m. Most did not get their power back until two days later. In other areas, it took nearly a week or two for power to be restored. At the time, it was the world's second most widespread blackout in history, after the 1999 Southern Brazil blackout. The outage, which was much more widespread than the Northeast blackout of 1965, affected an estimated 10 million people in southern and central Ontario, and 45 million people in eight U.S. states.

The blackout's proximate cause was a software bug in the alarm system at the control room of FirstEnergy, an Akron, Ohio–based company, which rendered operators unaware of the need to redistribute load after overloaded transmission lines drooped into foliage. What should have been a manageable local blackout cascaded into the collapse of the entire Northeast region.

🔗 Environment 🔗 Biology 🔗 Physics 🔗 Guild of Copy Editors 🔗 Energy 🔗 Chemical and Bio Engineering

Artificial photosynthesis is a chemical process that biomimics the natural process of photosynthesis to convert sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into carbohydrates and oxygen. The term artificial photosynthesis is commonly used to refer to any scheme for capturing and storing the energy from sunlight in the chemical bonds of a fuel (a solar fuel). Photocatalytic water splitting converts water into hydrogen and oxygen and is a major research topic of artificial photosynthesis. Light-driven carbon dioxide reduction is another process studied that replicates natural carbon fixation.

Research of this topic includes the design and assembly of devices for the direct production of solar fuels, photoelectrochemistry and its application in fuel cells, and the engineering of enzymes and photoautotrophic microorganisms for microbial biofuel and biohydrogen production from sunlight.

🔗 Environment 🔗 Energy

Dry cask storage is a method of storing high-level radioactive waste, such as spent nuclear fuel that has already been cooled in a spent fuel pool for at least one year and often as much as ten years. Casks are typically steel cylinders that are either welded or bolted closed. The fuel rods inside are surrounded by inert gas. Ideally, the steel cylinder provides leak-tight containment of the spent fuel. Each cylinder is surrounded by additional steel, concrete, or other material to provide radiation shielding to workers and members of the public.

There are various dry storage cask system designs. With some designs, the steel cylinders containing the fuel are placed vertically in a concrete vault; other designs orient the cylinders horizontally. The concrete vaults provide the radiation shielding. Other cask designs orient the steel cylinder vertically on a concrete pad at a dry cask storage site and use both metal and concrete outer cylinders for radiation shielding. Until 2024/25, there was no long term permanent storage facility anywhere in the world, and most countries still don't have a facility; dry cask storage is designed as an interim safer solution than spent fuel pool storage.

Some of the cask designs can be used for both storage and transportation. Three companies – Holtec International, NAC International and Areva-Transnuclear NUHOMS – are marketing Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installations (ISFSI) based upon an unshielded multi-purpose canister which is transported and stored in on-site vertical or horizontal shielded storage modules constructed of steel and concrete.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Energy 🔗 Globalization

Petrodollar recycling is the international spending or investment of a country's revenues from petroleum exports ("petrodollars"). It generally refers to the phenomenon of major petroleum-exporting nations, mainly the OPEC members plus Russia and Norway, earning more money from the export of crude oil than they could efficiently invest in their own economies. The resulting global interdependencies and financial flows, from oil producers back to oil consumers, can reach a scale of hundreds of billions of US dollars per year – including a wide range of transactions in a variety of currencies, some pegged to the US dollar and some not. These flows are heavily influenced by government-level decisions regarding international investment and aid, with important consequences for both global finance and petroleum politics. The phenomenon is most pronounced during periods when the price of oil is historically high.

The term petrodollar was coined in the early 1970s during the oil crisis, and the first major petrodollar surge (1974–1981) resulted in more financial complications than the second (2005–2014).

In August 2018, Venezuela declared that it would price its oil in Euros, Yuan and other currencies.

🔗 Climate change 🔗 Economics 🔗 Politics 🔗 Energy 🔗 International development 🔗 Mining

The resource curse, also known as the paradox of plenty or the poverty paradox, is the phenomenon of countries with an abundance of natural resources (such as fossil fuels and certain minerals) having less economic growth, less democracy, or worse development outcomes than countries with fewer natural resources. There are many theories and much academic debate about the reasons for and exceptions to the adverse outcomes. Most experts believe the resource curse is not universal or inevitable but affects certain types of countries or regions under certain conditions.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Energy 🔗 Microsoft

The data furnace is a method of heating residential homes or offices by running computers in them, which release considerable amounts of waste heat. Data furnaces can theoretically be cheaper than storing computers in huge data centers because the higher cost of electricity in residential areas (when compared to industrial zones) can be offset by charging the home owner for the heat that the data center gives off. Some large companies that store and process thousands of gigabytes of data believe that data furnaces could be cheaper because there would be little to no overhead costs. The cost of a traditional data storage center is up to around $400 per server, whereas the overhead cost per server of a home data furnace is around $10. Individuals had already begun using computers as a heat source by 2011.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Energy

This article lists notable military accidents involving nuclear material. Civilian accidents are listed at List of civilian nuclear accidents. For a general discussion of both civilian and military accidents, see nuclear and radiation accidents. For other lists, see Lists of nuclear disasters and radioactive incidents.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Energy

Thorium-based nuclear power generation is fueled primarily by the nuclear fission of the isotope uranium-233 produced from the fertile element thorium. According to proponents, a thorium fuel cycle offers several potential advantages over a uranium fuel cycle—including much greater abundance of thorium found on Earth, superior physical and nuclear fuel properties, and reduced nuclear waste production. However, development of thorium power has significant start-up costs. Proponents also cite the low weaponization potential as an advantage of thorium due to how difficult it is to weaponize the specific uranium-233/232 and plutonium-238 isotopes produced by thorium reactors, while critics say that development of breeder reactors in general (including thorium reactors, which are breeders by nature) increases proliferation concerns. As of 2020, there are no operational thorium reactors in the world.

A nuclear reactor consumes certain specific fissile isotopes to produce energy. Currently, the most common types of nuclear reactor fuel are:

• Uranium-235, purified (i.e. "enriched") by reducing the amount of uranium-238 in natural mined uranium. Most nuclear power has been generated using low-enriched uranium (LEU), whereas high-enriched uranium (HEU) is necessary for weapons.
• Plutonium-239, transmuted from uranium-238 obtained from natural mined uranium.

Some believe thorium is key to developing a new generation of cleaner, safer nuclear power. According to a 2011 opinion piece by a group of scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology, considering its overall potential, thorium-based power "can mean a 1000+ year solution or a quality low-carbon bridge to truly sustainable energy sources solving a huge portion of mankind’s negative environmental impact."

After studying the feasibility of using thorium, nuclear scientists Ralph W. Moir and Edward Teller suggested that thorium nuclear research should be restarted after a three-decade shutdown and that a small prototype plant should be built.

🔗 Climate change 🔗 Environment 🔗 Books 🔗 Systems 🔗 Futures studies 🔗 Energy

The Limits to Growth (often abbreviated LTG) is a 1972 report that discussed the possibility of exponential economic and population growth with finite supply of resources, studied by computer simulation. The study used the World3 computer model to simulate the consequence of interactions between the Earth and human systems. The model was based on the work of Jay Forrester of MIT,^: 21 as described in his book World Dynamics.

Commissioned by the Club of Rome, the study saw its findings first presented at international gatherings in Moscow and Rio de Janeiro in the summer of 1971.^: 186 The report's authors are Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, representing a team of 17 researchers.^: 8

The report's findings suggest that, in the absence of significant alterations in resource utilization, it is highly likely that there will be an abrupt and unmanageable decrease in both population and industrial capacity. Despite the report's facing severe criticism and scrutiny upon its release, subsequent research consistently finds that the global use of natural resources has been inadequately reformed since to alter its basic predictions.

Since its publication, some 30 million copies of the book in 30 languages have been purchased. It continues to generate debate and has been the subject of several subsequent publications.

Beyond the Limits and The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update were published in 1992 and 2004 respectively; in 2012, a 40-year forecast from Jørgen Randers, one of the book's original authors, was published as 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years; and in 2022 two of the original Limits to Growth authors, Dennis Meadows and Jørgen Randers, joined 19 other contributors to produce Limits and Beyond.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Energy

Standard battery nomenclature describes portable dry cell batteries that have physical dimensions and electrical characteristics interchangeable between manufacturers. The long history of disposable dry cells means that many different manufacturer-specific and national standards were used to designate sizes, long before international standards were reached. Technical standards for battery sizes and types are set by standards organizations such as International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Popular sizes are still referred to by old standard or manufacturer designations, and some non-systematic designations have been included in current international standards due to wide use.

The complete nomenclature for the battery will fully specify the size, chemistry, terminal arrangements and special characteristics of a battery. The same physically interchangeable cell size may have widely different characteristics; physical interchangeability is not the sole factor in substitution of batteries.

National standards for dry cell batteries have been developed by ANSI, JIS, British national standards, and others. Civilian, commercial, government and military standards all exist. Two of the most prevalent standards currently in use are the IEC 60086 series and the ANSI C18.1 series. Both standards give dimensions, standard performance characteristics, and safety information.

Modern standards contain both systematic names for cell types that give information on the composition and approximate size of the cells, as well as arbitrary numeric codes for cell size.