Day: December 13, 2022

A South African researcher has developed a way to remove contaminants from water used in mining that could help clean up the dirty industry. The award-winning ion exchange method not only cleans the water but captures polluting metals that can then be re-purposed.

At a Johannesburg laboratory, researchers from the University of the Witwatersrand have developed a way to clean acid mine drainage (AMD).

AMD is the runoff of pollutants like sulfuric acid and heavy metals that secrete into waterways, affecting wildlife and rural mining communities.

AMD is often found at gold and coal mines, which are plentiful in South Africa.

Tamlyn Naidu is a post-doctoral research fellow involved in the project.

“What we wanted to do is minimize environmental impact for a lot of these communities that are afflicted by AMD. They have been born into mining communities, they work in mining communities, they’re either scared to report it or to complain about it, because this is their livelihood,” she said.

The ion exchange filtration system that Naidu and her colleagues have developed uses countless polystyrene beads, each the size of a pinhead, which the water passes through.

Unlike a coffee filter, which physically blocks coffee grounds from passing through with water, the beads grab the contaminants in the water chemically.

The passing water, which can be scaled up to clean 1,000 liters an hour, then comes out clear.

“This project though, does something extra. It also wants to extract from the water valuable materials. So what has been identified in some of these streams, especially coal mining streams, is that the acid that’s produced from the mine waters actually dissolves out some rare earth metals,” says Ed Hardwick, the owner of Cwenga Technologies, which is a partner in the research.

Rare earth metals are in huge demand globally because they can be used in new technology like electric vehicles. Being able to extract them adds a financial incentive to cleaning up AMD.

Naidu said she hopes this can empower communities by monetizing the extracted materials from the AMD.

“Ultimately, from this project, we want community members to be involved in something that’s easy for them to operate, that they can extract value from and start, you know, seeing the value that companies have been taking onto the land and taken away from them. And yeah, I guess adding to their quality of life,” she says.

A method to clean up AMD that can be monetized would be good news for the government and communities that are now burdened with the costly task.

“If this was going to be an incentive, it should be on the incentive of the state and that any monies that are obtained from the separation of those minerals that can be repurposed, that can be used, is then fed back into one rehabilitation, but also two, into creating sustainable economies for the communities that are impacted,” says Tarisai Mugunyani, an attorney with the Center for Environmental Rights in Johannesburg.

Researchers say they are hopeful their filtration system, which can be adapted to clean the unique chemistry of AMD at any site, will soon be adopted widely.

It has already gained international attention with Naidu taking the first prize for emerging talents breakthroughs at the Falling Walls Science Summit in Berlin last month.

Naidu said several companies in mining and technology sectors have contacted her about becoming involved.
…

Fighting between the Democratic Republic of Congo’s military and rebels has since March displaced nearly 400,000 people, with most IDP camps in Nyiragongo territory, where health centers are struggling to cope. Ruth Omar Esther visited a medical center in Nyiragongo and has this report.
…

New Zealand on Tuesday passed into law a unique plan to phase out tobacco smoking by imposing a lifetime ban on young people buying cigarettes.

The law states that tobacco can’t ever be sold to anybody born on or after January 1, 2009.

It means the minimum age for buying cigarettes will keep going up and up. In theory, somebody trying to buy a pack of cigarettes 50 years from now would need ID to show they were at least 63 years old.

But health authorities hope smoking will fade away well before then. They have a stated goal of making New Zealand smoke-free by 2025.

The new law also reduces the number of retailers allowed to sell tobacco from about 6,000 to 600 and decreases the amount of nicotine allowed in tobacco that is smoked.

“There is no good reason to allow a product to be sold that kills half the people that use it,” Associate Minister of Health Dr. Ayesha Verrall told lawmakers in Parliament. “And I can tell you that we will end this in the future, as we pass this legislation.”

She said the health system would save billions of dollars from not needing to treat illnesses caused by smoking, such as cancer, heart attacks, strokes, and amputations. She said the bill would create generational change and leave a legacy of better health for youth.

Lawmakers voted along party lines in passing the legislation 76 to 43.

The libertarian ACT party, which opposed the bill, said many small corner stores, known in New Zealand as dairies, would go out of business because they would no longer be able to sell cigarettes.

“We stand opposed to this bill because it’s a bad bill and its bad policy, it’s that straightforward and simple,” said Brooke van Velden, ACT’s deputy leader. “There won’t be better outcomes for New Zealanders.”

She said the gradual ban amounted to “nanny-state prohibition” that would end up creating a large black market. She said prohibition never worked and always ended with unintended consequences.

The law does not affect vaping, which has already become more popular than smoking in New Zealand.

Statistics New Zealand reported last month that 8% of New Zealand adults smoked daily, down from 16% ten years ago. Meanwhile, 8.3% of adults vaped daily, up from less than 1% six years ago.

Smoking rates remain higher among Indigenous Māori, with about 20% reporting they smoked.

New Zealand already restricts cigarette sales to those aged 18 and over, requires tobacco packs to come with graphic health warnings and cigarettes to be sold in standardized packs.

New Zealand in recent years also imposed a series of hefty tax hikes on cigarettes.

The law change was welcomed by several health agencies. Health Coalition Aotearoa said the new law represented the culmination of decades of hard-fought advocacy by health and community organizations.
…

The Department of Energy planned an announcement Tuesday on a “major scientific breakthrough” at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of several sites worldwide where researchers have been trying to develop the possibility of harnessing energy from nuclear fusion. 

It’s a technology that has the potential to one day accelerate the planet’s shift away from fossil fuels, which are the major contributors to climate change. The technology has long struggled with daunting challenges. 

Here’s a look at exactly what nuclear fusion is, and some of the difficulties in turning it into the cheap and carbon-free energy source that scientists believe it can be. 

What is nuclear fusion? 

Look up, and it’s happening right above you — nuclear fusion reactions power the sun and other stars. 

The reaction happens when two light nuclei merge to form a single heavier nucleus. Because the total mass of that single nucleus is less than the mass of the two original nuclei, the leftover mass is energy that is released in the process, according to the Department of Energy. 

In the case of the sun, its intense heat — millions of degrees Celsius — and the pressure exerted by its gravity allow atoms that would otherwise repel each other to fuse. 

Scientists have long understood how nuclear fusion has worked and have been trying to duplicate the process on Earth as far back as the 1930s. Current efforts focus on fusing a pair of hydrogen isotopes — deuterium and tritium — according to the Department of Energy, which says that particular combination releases “much more energy than most fusion reactions” and requires less heat to do so. 

How valuable would this be?

Daniel Kammen, a professor of energy and society at the University of California at Berkeley, said nuclear fusion offers the possibility of “basically unlimited” fuel if the technology can be made commercially viable. The elements needed are available in seawater. 

It’s also a process that doesn’t produce the radioactive waste of nuclear fission, Kammen said. 

How are scientists trying to do this? 

One way scientists have tried to recreate nuclear fusion involves what’s called a tokamak — a doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber that uses powerful magnets to turn fuel into a superheated plasma (between 150 million and 300 million degrees Celsius) where fusion may occur. 

The Livermore lab uses a different technique, with researchers firing a 192-beam laser at a small capsule filled with deuterium-tritium fuel. The lab reported that an August 2021 test produced 1.35 megajoules of fusion energy — about 70% of the energy fired at the target. The lab said several subsequent experiments showed declining results, but researchers believed they had identified ways to improve the quality of the fuel capsule and the lasers’ symmetry. 

“The most critical feature of moving fusion from theory to commercial reality is getting more energy out than in,” Kammen said. 
…

A Franco-U.S. satellite is due for launch this week on a mission to survey with unprecedented accuracy nearly all water on Earth’s surface for the first time and help scientists investigate its impact on Earth’s climate.

For NASA and France’s space agency CNES, which have worked together in the field for 30 years, it’s a landmark scientific mission with a billion-dollar budget.

French President Emmanuel Macron went to NASA’s Washington headquarters at the end of November alongside U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris.

He highlighted the liftoff — scheduled for early Thursday on the U.S. West Coast — of the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission to monitor the levels of oceans, lakes and rivers, including in remote locations.

Its predecessor, TOPEX/Poseidon, launched in 1992, was also a Franco-U.S. joint venture that measured ocean surface to an accuracy of 4.2 centimeters (1.7 inches).

It aided the forecast of the 1997-1998 El Nino weather phenomenon and improved understanding of ocean circulation and its effect on global climate.

The 2.2-metric ton SWOT mission will be put into orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The satellite’s primary payload is an innovative instrument to measure the height of water called KaRin, or Ka-band radar interferometer. Its two antennas, separated by a big boom, create parallel swaths of data.

“We’re going to get 10 times better resolution than with current technologies to measure sea-surface height and understand the ocean fronts and eddies that help shape climate,” said NASA Earth Science Division Director Karen St. Germain.

“It’s like looking at a car number plate from space when before we could only see a street,” added Thierry Lafon, SWOT project leader at the CNES.

The stakes are high. While the impact of major ocean currents such as the Gulf Stream is known, more local flows and eddies covering dozens of kilometers remain more of a mystery.

But they too affect sea water surface temperatures and heat transfer as well as the absorption by the oceans of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

SWOT will improve weather and climate modeling, the observation of coastal erosion and help track how fresh and saltwater bodies change over time.

With an “optimal” orbit of 890 kilometers (about 550 miles) above Earth, Lafon said SWOT will “take in all the components that affect water levels such as tides and the sun.”

NASA said SWOT will survey nearly all water on Earth’s surface for the first time.

It will monitor water levels, surface areas and quantities at more than 20 million lakes with shores of more than 250 meters. The entire length of rivers more than 100 meters wide will also be observed.

Water management, flood and drought prevention will be improved, said Lafon.

Flying the satellite to Vandenberg from the Thales Alenia Space (TAS) site in Cannes, southern France, proved a headache.

“Due to the conflict in Ukraine, there were no more Antonov 124s available, and the 747 cargo is too small,” said TAS project leader Christophe Duplay. “We decided to ask the [U.S. Air Force] to provide one of its C-5 Galaxies.”

And that meant counting on NASA to have the air force supply one of its rare giant aircraft to ship the huge payload.

SWOT has an estimated three-year lifetime — although Lafon said “nothing precludes the mission to last five to eight years” — and is set to become the first satellite to make a controlled reentry into Earth’s atmosphere, reducing the amount of space debris, in line with the French space operations act.

Nearly 80% of the 400 kilos (880 pounds) of onboard fuel will be used to that end.
…