When it comes to summer learning, the benefits are well documented. Students who consistently attend well-planned, high-quality programs achieve higher scores on math and language arts testing. They also earn higher ratings from teachers on their social and emotional skills, research shows. Unfortunately, research also shows that students from low-income and minority backgrounds are less likely to attend – and benefit from – summer learning programs than their affluent and white peers.
Summer learning can play a crucial role in helping these students – and all kids – recover learning lost during the pandemic. The federal government has also acknowledged the importance of summer learning through its Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund, or ESSER. The fund infused states with nearly US$190.5 billion, with 20% allocated to academic recovery, including summer programs.
So how can school districts capitalize on the crucial summer months and make learning more equitable?
In partnership with the Wallace Foundation and the District Summer Learning Network implemented by the nonprofit development organization FHI 360, our team at the Center for Policy, Research, and Evaluation at New York University is studying how districts implement high-quality summer programs with an eye toward equity. We analyzed 2022 summer planning documents from 26 districts and identified four strategies they’re using to make the programs more equitable.
1. Strategically target students
Of the summer learning plans we analyzed, we found that half prioritized students who need academic or behavioral support. Additionally, 42% mentioned English-language learners, and 35% mentioned students with disabilities.
Other distinct groups included low-income students, migrants, racial and ethnic minorities and gifted and talented students. Among districts that prioritized special groups, almost all of them included more than one group in their strategic outreach.
Which students get served in summer learning programs, and how they are served, has implications for equity. For instance, research has found that middle-income students often benefit more from summer learning programs than lower-income students.
This could be because high-quality programs tend to serve higher-income students, which raises concerns that summer learning programs may actually increase the summer gap if they are not targeted. High-quality programs that target lower-income students and other minority students can move the needle toward equity.
2. Reduce barriers to access
For students to access programs outside of the regular school day in an equitable way, simple accommodations, such as transportation, are key.
Several district summer learning plans we analyzed went above and beyond academics. They provided not just transportation but also free and nutritious meals, outreach material in different languages and extended day care services to support working families.
3. Design courses for specific student populations
Students learn best when they feel a sense of safety and belonging. By affirming and nurturing the unique identities of students, districts can make summer programming more equitable and accelerate learning. Research shows, for instance, that summer supports for English-language learners are key for their overall academic development.
Some districts tailored their programming to the individual interests and cultural needs of their students. For example, three districts – in both urban and rural communities – provided language classes for English-language learners, including adults.
Another district designed an arts program for students to explore and celebrate their culture. The program featured programming around ethnic and racial identities.
Despite a shortage of teacher applicants across the country, some districts also made efforts to hire teachers who are not only effective and well credentialed but also reflect the demographics of the student body they serve.
4. Engage families in planning and programming
Some districts held regular family education sessions to provide updates about student needs and progress. Some also engaged families by offering information sessions on topics such as immigration and health.
Programs that include the whole family or community are particularly helpful for racially, ethnically and linguistically diverse populations and families in rural areas, where young people have limited access to adults other than their caregivers.
When parents are included in the planning process, programs can be designed to better fit their schedules. This might mean districts offer full-day, six-week camps to support children throughout the summer while their parents work. This type of arrangement makes it more likely that kids will be able to attend summer programs – and stave off summer learning loss.
These four approaches help make summer learning programs more culturally responsive, accessible and inclusive. Over the next two years, our research will dive deeper into how districts strengthen equity-based practices and strategies to sustain them long term.
New research suggests that to maintain a healthy brain, we should tend our gut microbiome. The best way to do that right now is not through pills and supplements, but better food.
By Tim Vernimmen -Neuroscientist John Cryan Q&A
It is increasingly well understood that the countless microbes in our guts help us to digest our food, to absorb and produce essential nutrients, and to prevent harmful organisms from settling in. Less intuitive — perhaps even outlandish — is the idea that those microbes may also affect our mood, our mental health and how we perform on cognitive tests. But there is mounting evidence that they do.
For nearly two decades, neuroscientist John Cryan of University College Cork in Ireland has been uncovering ways in which intestinal microbes affect the brain and behavior of humans and other animals. To his surprise, many of the effects he’s seen in rodents appear to be mirrored in our own species. Most remarkably, research by Cryan and others has shown that transplanting microbes from the guts of people with psychiatric disorders like depression to the guts of rodents can cause comparable symptoms in the animals.
These effects may occur in several ways — through the vagus nerve connecting the gut to the brain, through the influence of gut bacteria on our immune systems, or by microbes synthesizing molecules that our nerve cells use to communicate. Cryan and coauthors summarize the science in a set of articles including “Man and the Microbiome: A New Theory of Everything?,” published in the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology. Cryan told Knowable Magazine that even though it will take much more research to pin down the mechanisms and figure out how to apply the insights, there are some things we can do already.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
“Man and the Microbiome: A New Theory of Everything?” — with all due respect, isn’t that a wee bit ambitious?
That title is admittedly a bit overstated. But the point we are trying to make is that it isn’t really so odd that the microbiome is involved in everything, because the microbes were there first, and so our species has evolved in their presence. We have been able to show that growing up in a germ-free environment really affects the development of the mouse brain, for example, in a variety of ways.
Our immune system is also completely shaped by microbial signals. Via that route, inflammation in our gut can affect our mood and cause symptoms of sickness behavior that are quite similar to important aspects of depression and anxiety. Many psychiatric disorders are also known to be associated with various gastrointestinal issues, though cause and effect often aren’t clear yet. So if you study the body, including the brain, you ignore microbes at your own peril.
Most people are on board with the idea that gut microbes affect our health, but it may be more difficult to accept that they also influence how we feel and think. How did you convince yourself this was true?
I’m a stress neurobiologist, so I was trained in stress-related disorders like depression and anxiety, and my interest was really in using animal models of stress to look for novel therapeutic strategies.
When I moved to University College Cork in 2005, I met a clinical researcher, Ted Dinan, and we started working together to study irritable bowel syndrome, a very common disorder that is characterized by alterations in bowel habits and abdominal pain.
That was interesting to me, as it had become very clear that this is also a stress-related disorder. So we started working on an animal model called the maternal separation model, where rat pups are separated from their moms early in life and develop a stress-like syndrome when they grow up.
Siobhain O’Mahony, a graduate student at the time, also wanted to look at the microbiome, and I remember telling her, “No! Focus, focus!” But she went ahead anyway and found a signature of this early-life stress in the microbiome of adult rats. That was kind of a eureka moment for me.
The next part of the puzzle came when we showed that mice born in a germ-free environment have an exaggerated stress response when they grow up. So we’d already shown that stress was affecting the microbiome, and now we’d shown that the microbiome is regulating how a mouse responds to stress. It turned out that a very nice study from Japan had already shown this.
The third part of the puzzle for me was to ask whether we could alter the microbiome to alleviate some of the effects of stress. In 2011, we were able to show that a specific strain of the bacterium Lactobacillus, when given to normal, healthy mice in a stressful situation, was able to dampen down the stress response, and that the vagus nerve connecting the gut to the brain was required for that.
These three things together, from 2006 to 2011, really crystallized my interest in the link between the gut microbiome, brain and behavior. Since then, we’ve been on this magical journey to try and understand these discoveries, uncover the mechanisms and find how they translate to humans.
Can you explain what a depressed or anxious mouse looks like, and how you quantify that?
One way to look at fear is to quantify how often mice venture into wide open areas, which they normally avoid. If we give a mouse Valium or another anxiety-reducing drug, it will go out and explore and be carefree, not to say a bit reckless. Depression is often studied by looking at mice in a cylinder of water. They are good swimmers, but they don’t like swimming, so after a while, they’ll stop and adopt an immobile posture. Yet if you give them antidepressant drugs, they keep going.
These types of paradigms have shown their validity in studies of pharmacological agents used in human psychiatry, and so they’re ideal to explore whether microbiome manipulations have similar effects. This can be done by transplanting the microbes from a mouse model for a psychiatric disease to a healthy mouse to see whether that creates similar issues, or vice versa, to see if it can resolve them.
Following a similar logic, we have shown that the microbiome can be important in brain aging and cognitive decline. We took the microbiome from eight-week-old mice and gave it to 22-month-old animals — these are very old mice. And we were able to show wide-scale changes across the body — in the microbiome and the immune system, but also in the hippocampus, a brain structure involved in memory.
In the old animals that received the microbiome from young ones, the hippocampus looked completely rejuvenated in its chemical composition. They also performed significantly better in mazes designed to test their memory. This finding has now been replicated in two other labs, giving it further credence.
Such experiments are difficult if not impossible to do in people. How to make that jump?
One thing we can do is to transplant microbes from the guts of people with psychiatric disorders to rodents, to see if they cause comparable behaviors. This has now been done for depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, social anxiety disorder and even Alzheimer’s disease. In one of our own studies, we transferred fecal microbiota from depressed patients to a rat model. This resulted in behavior reminiscent of that in rat models for depression, such as increased anxiety and an uninterest in rewards, in addition to inflammation.
In addition, we can see if bacterial strains we’ve identified as troublemakers in rodents also occur in people with psychiatric issues, and if strains that are beneficial in rodents can help humans as well.
What I’d really like to do is follow a large group of healthy people for a couple of years and track their mental and brain health as well as the changes in their microbiome, and regularly transplant their gut microbes into mice. This would give us a much better view on how this relationship evolves.
Do you think some of the probiotics available in stores today might be helpful, or not quite?
In my opinion, many so-called probiotics aren’t probiotics at all. Probiotics, per definition, are live microorganisms that, when taken in adequate amounts, can confer a health benefit. Most of what’s for sale in shops would never meet that criterion. To demonstrate that something confers a health benefit, you need clinical trials to show it is more effective than a placebo. That’s the first thing. Second, you have to show that the microbes are alive, and that they can survive the stomach acid.
There have been properly randomized controlled trials for some products. But for most products available over the counter today, such studies haven’t been done, because the regulatory authorities do not require them for probiotics as they would for medicines.
There’s a lot of snake oil out there. For most people, it’s probably harmless, but if you are immunosuppressed, it could be dangerous: Even beneficial bacteria can cause great harm if your immune system does not function properly.
Don’t get me wrong, I think there are many promising findings, but this field is very much in its infancy. I’m much more enthusiastic right now about whole-food approaches that adjust people’s diets to include more fermented foods — a source of beneficial bacteria — and the fibers that many beneficial members of our microbiome need to survive. And this, everyone can already do.
Have you done any experiments that show such a diet can improve mental health?
We’ve just done a small study with what we call a psychobiotic diet. Kirsten Berding, a German dietician who did a post-doc in my group, took a group of people with bad diets who were stress-sensitive — namely, our student population — and put them on a one-month diet to really ramp up fermented foods and fibers to the benefit of the microbiome. What we showed was that the better individuals followed the diet, the greater the reduction in stress.
The study wasn’t perfectly blinded, because people knew what they were eating, but they didn’t know what they were eating it for. And this was just the beginning: We’re now doing a much longer study trying to really untangle this.
We’ve also done a small randomly controlled study with a polydextrose fiber that was shown to improve the performance of healthy volunteers on a range of cognitive tests.
Obviously, more work of this kind is necessary. But in this case, I don’t think we should wait for that. Think about the experiment where we’ve transplanted microbes from young to old mice, for example: I’m not advertising poop transplants for aging adults. What we’ve found is that the more diverse your diet, the more diverse your microbiome, and the better your health when you get old. If you look at the beige, bland food served in many nursing homes and hospitals today, that is not the kind of diet that helps people to maintain a healthy microbiome and therefore a healthy brain.
“Perhaps if you’re thinking of having a midlife crisis, forget about the motorbike and start growing vegetables.”
— JOHN CRYAN
We’ve done a study in mice where we adjusted their diet to contain much more inulin, a fiber that we know supports the growth of beneficial bacterial strains, and found we could dampen down the neuroinflammation that is often associated with cognitive decline in aging. This fiber is present in our everyday diet — there is a lot of it in vegetables like leeks, artichokes and chicory. So perhaps if you’re thinking of having a midlife crisis, forget about the motorbike and start growing vegetables.
This is all in healthy patients. Do you think the diet might also help people with mental health issues?
I do, but we need to test it, of course.An earlier study of ours showed that students born by C-section, who missed out on some of the microbes that newborns acquire during vaginal birth, had an elevated immune and psychological response to both chronic and acute stress, in line with our findings in mice. It would be very interesting to test if a psychobiotic diet might benefit them.
As I said, many psychiatric disorders are also associated with inflammation and other problems in the gut. Of course, this relationship works both ways, and it’s not always clear to what extent the irregularities in the gut are the cause or the result of the mental issues — or whether it’s a bit of both. But if we can show a healthier microbiome can improve mental health, that would be great news.
This is what’s appealing about the microbiome: It’s probably more modifiable than the rest of our body. If we understand how it works, that might give people more options to improve their health, even if they didn’t have the best start, microbially speaking. That’s what we hope to achieve.
Working on a college campus is arguably one of the biggest exercises in collaboration and teamwork. There are multiple stakeholders in every decision made on campus -- from students and parents to alumni to various departments (or even specific employees) who may be impacted. We don't operate in a vacuum. Collaboration is the name of the game, so it is no surprise that building relationships and exercising emotional intelligence (or EQ) play a key role in one's success in the higher ed workspace.
"Anyone in higher education will tell you that your ability to be successful in your role (regardless of the department or division) is related to your ability to build relationships and collaborate with your intercampus colleagues," confirms Eric Mochnacz of Red Clover, a strategic HR and change management consulting firm based in New Jersey.
Mochnacz, who worked in university housing for 15 years at different levels (live-in and mid-level management), says "EQ is your ability to know your own emotions and manage them, understand the emotions of others, and use that knowledge to navigate relationships and inevitable campus politics."
Emotional intelligence isn't something you gain overnight, though. So, how can you boost your EQ, and what phrases frequently used by people with high EQ could you incorporate into your daily workplace interactions?
Tap into Your Natural Curiosity
The Cambridge Dictionary defines curiosity as "an eager desire to know or learn about something." This characteristic is a hallmark of emotional intelligence. Curiosity drives us to learn more about our own emotional responses and motivations, as well as seek information about that of others. Fostering your own sense of curiosity about what drives human behavior -- specifically your own and your colleagues' and boss's -- is a great place to start.
The next time a colleague responds in a way that is unexpected, consider their motivations or what they are possibly feeling. Inquire if you're unsure, so you can get a better understanding of their point of view. Knowing this can help you work through any conflicts and build a foundation for stronger collaboration in the future.
Take time to analyze your own responses as well -- did you have a knee-jerk reaction to something? If so, why? Was something particularly triggering to you? Seeking to understand your own emotional responses in the workplace can help you recognize trigger points and eventually better self-regulate in future situations.
4 Phrases Demonstrating High EQ to Start Using
So, what exactly does emotional intelligence look like in practice? It's about asking the right questions and then using the information you glean to respond effectively and kindly. Here are four emotionally intelligent phrases you can start incorporating into your daily interactions at work to lay the foundation for better relationships.
1."What do you think?" or "How do you feel about this?"
Again, collaboration is key in the higher ed workspace. No matter how good you think your idea or solution might be, it can't be a one-sided conversation.
These questions, in particular, create a safe space, encouraging others to share their opinions and raise any concerns they may have. While they may seem like simple questions, they are some of the most important ones you can ask on a regular basis. Not every person is comfortable raising their voice without being prompted. You may be working with introverts, young professionals who may be afraid of 'rocking the boat,' or people who have been burned before by voicing a difference of opinion. Asking for feedback is a clear and direct way to show that you are truly open to collaboration and value your colleagues' opinions. Showing empathy for their thoughts and working to find solutions if they have concerns helps to build a foundation for more fruitful collaboration in the future.
"When it comes to others, your level of social awareness and social regulation plays a key part in building bonds across campus to drive mutual success," Mochnacz says. "Social awareness is your ability to read a room and social regulation is your ability to recognize the importance of the emotions around you and be able to facilitate understanding to build relationships and networks. Someone who is not developed in these areas will struggle to be successful on a college campus, but those environments tend to be incredibly collaborative."
2."Let me see if I understand."
This phrase signals a desire to understand another person's point of view. Clarifying how a person feels ensures that you are avoiding assumptions, have a full picture of their concerns or feelings, and can address them effectively. Everyone wants to be understood, and taking the time to rephrase what you're hearing from them and confirming understanding shows that you're making an effort.
3."I feel (X, Y, Z)…"
Recognizing your own emotions is key to building and maintaining effective relationships. Before you can ask someone else how they feel about something, it's important to be able to recognize your own emotions at any given point -- and be able to manage them.
"Do you know and understand your feelings, and can you articulate them effectively?," Mochnacz asks. "And can you regulate yourself so your emotions don't adversely impact others?"
Additionally, being open about your feelings can build trust and encourage others to speak up.
4."How can I help you?"
This question is commonly asked by emotionally intelligent people because they have a knack for noticing others' emotions (or as Mochnacz says, they have social awareness). In this case, they may sense a colleague is feeling stressed or overwhelmed. Part of being a team is pitching in when and where you can. If you notice someone struggling, see if there's something you can do for them. Lending a hand is a great way to build bridges and strengthen your relationships across campus.
Final Words
These phrases aren't silver bullets by any means, but incorporating some of them into your daily interactions at work can have a tremendous impact on your relationships. They serve as powerful building blocks for better understanding your colleagues, collaborating with them in the future, and ultimately working together effectively to further your institution's mission.
This article is republished from HigherEdJobs® under a Creative Commons license.
Rents across the U.S. have climbed to staggering levels in recent years. Millions of renters spend more than 30% of their income on rent and utilities, a situation that housing experts call being cost burdened.
High rents affect almost all segments of the population but are an especially heavy burden for immigrants, particularly those who have not yet become U.S. citizens. Immigrants, both documented and undocumented, play important roles in the U.S. economy. They often provide the cheapest labor in the riskiest of industries. Yet they are still not broadly accepted or supported in many U.S. cities.
We are geographers who study housing market issues, including racial-ethnic diversity and housing affordability. Our research on Nashville, which has emerged as an immigrant metropolis in the Southern U.S., suggests that foreign-born residents who are not yet citizens are far more burdened by high rents than other groups.
Many immigrant workers in Nashville spend more than 50% of their incomes on rent. This makes it hard for them to afford education and job training, healthy food, health care and other necessities that can help them participate as productive residents. Heavy rent burdens undermine their ability to have a higher standard of living and to be included in mainstream society.
As immigrants increasingly fan out across the U.S., we believe cities receiving new foreign-born residents should anticipate a growing need for affordable housing.
A 2022 study found that immigrant families in San Diego faced some of the highest rent burdens in the surrounding county.
Today about 37% of U.S. homes are occupied by renters. By 2020, almost 46% of U.S. renters paid more than 30% of their household income toward rent. As of June 2021, the median monthly rent in the 50 largest U.S. cities was $1,575 – an 8.1% increase from June 2020.
The heaviest rent burdens fall disproportionately on minorities. Almost 46% of African American-led renter households are rent burdened, compared with 34% of white households.
The COVID-19 pandemic worsened housing insecurity for people of color because of longstanding racially targeted policies and widespread health and economic disparities. Renters of color faced higher cost burdens and eviction rates. In Nashville, this was especially true in Latino and Somali communities.
Foreign-born residents make up 7.15% of the U.S. population today. Most of these immigrants are not citizens, although more than 878,000 people became citizens in 2023. The median length of time these new citizens spent in the U.S. before becoming naturalized was seven years.
Nashville is the largest metropolis in Tennessee and one of the fastest-growing immigrant gateways in the South. It is home to over 37% of Tennessee’s Latino population and has been a major destination for Latinos and other foreign-born residents since the early 2000s.
For our research, we used census data estimates for 2015-19 from the National Historical Geographic Information System covering metro Nashville’s 13 counties, which contain 372 census tracts. We found that Nashville’s most racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods had the highest levels of rent burden.
This includes census tracts with high shares of foreign-born residents who are not yet citizens, especially if those residents are Black or Latino. Our analysis of the 37 census tracts (10% of the region’s total) with the largest shares of foreign-born residents who are not yet citizens shows that the average monthly rent paid by a household in these tracts was $1,306.20, compared with $1,288.70 metrowide.
In the 37 tracts with the largest shares of Latino residents and Black residents, we found that about 21% of households spent more than 50% of their household income on rent.
Our findings corroborate other scholarly analyses of Nashville’s Somali refugees, who tend to be clustered in communities that also house other diverse groups, including Egyptians and other African immigrants. In these areas, gentrification and urban renewal have forced several Black and Somali communities from ownership into renting.
More encouragingly, we found that tracts with newer housing stock, built since 2000, have relatively lower rent burdens even though those tracts are home to many Black and non-Asian minority residents. This suggests that newer development has an important role to play in mitigating rent, especially in suburban, relatively affordable locations. In the 37 census tracts with the most foreign-born residents who are not yet citizens, about 28% of the total housing stock was built in 2000 or later, compared with 23% across Nashville.
Federal, state and city officials break ground in 2022 on a mixed-income residential development at Cayce Place, Nashville’s largest subsidized housing property. The city is replacing aging structures on the site, built between 1941 and 1954.Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency, CC BY-ND
Easing rent burdens
One of the best ways to mitigate rent burdens is to build more housing and create affordable housing. However, communities sometimes oppose affordable housing projects and pro-development zoning because of fears of crime, traffic congestion or populations viewed as undesirable. Nashville is not immune to this syndrome.
However, critics argue that the council gives too much weight to anti-development arguments. And there is little discussion of specific ways to help groups that are ineligible for benefits and assistance that are available to U.S. citizens.
Members of the Tennessee Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition celebrate on March 26, 2019, after the defeat of a state bill that would have barred most landlords from renting housing to people in the U.S. illegally.AP Photo/Jonathan Mattise
A priority for cities
Our research shows that creating more rental opportunities can help reduce rent burdens for all. We see great potential to take this research further through community-based investigations of local nuances that may add to rent burdens, especially factors and processes that can’t be adequately captured in quantitative data analysis. Many local actors have important roles to play, including elected officials and local nonprofits and community organizations that work to promote rights for immigrants and refugees.
Given the important role that immigrants play in filling jobs and contributing to local economies, we believe that helping them afford housing is a smart strategy, especially for growth-oriented cities.
Madhuri Sharma, Associate Professor of Geography, University of Tennessee and Mikhail Samarin, Lecturer in Geography and Sustainability, University of Tennessee
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
Many people in the U.S. will have an opportunity to witness nearly four minutes of a total solar eclipse on Monday, April 8, 2024, as it moves from southern Texas to Maine. But in the U.S., over 7 million people are blind or visually impaired and may not be able to experience an eclipse the traditional way.
Of course they, like those with sight, will feel colder as the Sun’s light is shaded, and will hear the songs and sounds of birds and insects change as the light dims and brightens. But much of an eclipse is visual.
The guide, called “Getting a Feel for Eclipses,” illustrates the paths of the 2017 total, 2023 annular and 2024 total solar eclipses. In a total eclipse, the Moon fully blocks the Sun from Earth view, while during an annular eclipse, a narrow ring of sunlight can be seen encircling the Moon.
The tactile graphics and associated online content detail the specific alignment of the Earth, Moon and Sun under which eclipses occur.
To date, we have distributed almost 11,000 copies of this book to schools for the blind, state and local libraries, the Library of Congress and more.
‘The Getting A Feel for Eclipses’ guide helps blind and visually impaired people learn about the eclipse.NASA SSERVI
Why publish a tactile book on eclipses?
NASA has lots of explanatory material that helps people visualize and understand rare phenomena like eclipses. But for people with visual impairments, maps and images don’t help. For tactile readers, their sense of touch is their vision. That’s where this guide and our other tactile books come in.
Over 65,000 students in the U.S. are blind or visually impaired. After working with several of our students who are totally blind, we wanted to find out how to make events like eclipses as powerful for these students as they are for us. We also wanted to help our students visualize and understand the concept of an eclipse.
These aims resulted in the three tactile graphics, which are physical sheets with textures and raised surfaces that can be interpreted through touch, as well as online content.
The first tactile graphic models the alignment of the Earth, Moon and Sun. The second illustrates the phases of an eclipse as the Moon moves in between the Earth and Sun to full totality, and then out of the way. The third includes a map of the continental U.S. that illustrates the paths of three eclipses: the Aug. 21, 2017, total eclipse, the Oct. 14, 2023, annular eclipse and the Apr. 8, 2024, total eclipse. We used different textures to illustrate these concepts.
Each book includes a QR code on the front cover, outlined by a raised square boundary. The code links to an online guide that leads the user through the content behind the graphics while also providing background information. With the online content, users may opt to print the information in large font or have it read to them by a device.
Although initially created to assist visually impaired audiences, these books are still helpful resources for those with sight. Some students can see but might learn better when able to explore the tactile parts of the guide while listening to the audio. Often it’s helpful for students to get the same information presented in different styles, with options to read or have the content information read to them.
Students at Florida School for the Deaf and Blind in St. Augustine explore tactiles 1 and 2.Florida School for the Deaf and Blind
How are the books made?
We hand-make each book starting by identifying which science concepts the user will likely want to know, and which illustrations can support those concepts.
Once identified, the next step is to create a tactile master, or model, which has one or more raised textures that help to define the science concepts. We pick a set of unique textures to use on the master to signify different items, so the Sun feels different than the Earth. This way, the textures of the graphics become part of the story being shared.
For example, in a model of the Sun’s surface, we use Spanish moss to create the dynamic texture of the Sun. In past projects, we’ve used textures like doll hair, sand and differently textured cardboard to illustrate planet features, instruments on spacecraft, fine surface features and more. Then, we add Braille labels for figure titles, key features and specific notes.
The tactile master – Spanish moss – used for the Sun.Cassandra Runyon
Once we’ve finished making the masters and laying out each page, a small family print shop – McCarty Printing in Erie, Pennsylvania – prints the page titles and key feature labels on Brailon, a type of plastic paper.
Once printed, we place the masters and the Brailon sheets on a thermoform Machine, which heats up the sheets and creates a vacuum that forms the final tactile graphics. Then, we return the pages to McCarty Printing for binding.
Viewing and experiencing the eclipse
Like fully sighted people, people with partial vision should avoid looking directly at the Sun. Instead, everyone should use eclipse glasses. If you don’t have eclipse glasses, you can use an indirect viewing method such as a colander or pinhole projector.
As the eclipse approaches totality, take time to enjoy your surroundings, feel the changes in temperature and light, and note how the animals around you react to the remarkable event using another of your senses – sound.
Cassandra Runyon, Professor of Geology & Environmental Geosciences, College of Charleston and David Hurd, Professor of Geosciences, Pennsylvania Western University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
The current system of supervised release in lieu of imprisonment may do more harm than good, some experts say. How can society do a better job of rehabilitating law-breakers while keeping them from re-offending?
By Lola Butcher
Marcella Soto had four children by the time she was 22 and was on and off welfare during the years they were growing up. By 2018, she was working a government job in California when she was charged with six counts of welfare fraud. Unable to prove that she had not misreported her income many years earlier, she pleaded guilty to a single felony count.
Soto was sentenced to the maximum probation term — five years — and was required to check in with a supervisor every month. Because of the conviction, she lost her job; because of the conditions of her probation, she was unable to travel to Texas to attend the birth of her first grandchild.
Being sentenced to probation put Soto in the largest group of people in America’s criminal justice system. About 1.9 million US residents are behind bars, and 3.7 million are being monitored while they are on probation in lieu of incarceration or on parole after being let out of lockup.
Probation and parole — collectively known as community supervision — were originally conceived as alternatives to incarceration, allowing convicted criminals to be rehabilitated under supervision. But criminal justice leaders say the practices have strayed from that original mission and become so ineffective that, ironically, they contribute to America’s overcrowded prisons. These critics call for an overhaul of community supervision, including shorter terms and more support for rehabilitation. In some states, new laws are making headway.
“Nearly half of the people going into jails and prisons are coming in from a failed and broken probation and parole system,” says Robert Rooks, chief executive officer of Reform Alliance, a nonprofit advocacy group. “So if you want to address mass incarceration in this country, you have to address the phase of probation and parole.”
Changing goals
Parole and probation were originally intended as opportunities to rehabilitate offenders through support, such as help finding jobs or housing. This focus on rehabilitation began to recede in the 1970s when a tough-on-crime public sentiment emerged. Parole and probation morphed instead into systems of surveillance — intense scrutiny over long periods of time — supposedly in support of public safety.
With this shift, critics say, community supervision became a form of “net-widening,” keeping people in the criminal justice system rather than easing them back into society. “In many people’s minds, this is a good thing you get instead of going to prison,” says Vincent Schiraldi, a former commissioner of the New York City Department of Probation. “But this is a bad thing. It’s got a lot of bad outcomes for a lot of people.”
For instance, probationers must comply with a growing, often complex list of conditions — which typically number 18 to 20 — that can be difficult to meet, Schiraldi says. Avoiding contact with anyone who has a criminal conviction is hard if an offender’s family or support network includes convicts; returning home by curfew can interfere with keeping a job. In Pennsylvania, where a released prisoner could be on parole for the rest of their life, probationers are prohibited from leaving the state, which means an Uber driver on probation in Philadelphia cannot drive into the suburbs that spill into Delaware.
“That right there shows you that our current policies are arbitrary, unnecessary and hinder people’s ability to do the things they need to do to become stable, get back to work and provide for their families,” Rooks says. “And that’s the opposite of what probation and parole should be doing.”
Indeed, a 1993 survey of people imprisoned in Texas found that 66 percent said they would choose incarceration over a 10-year probation sentence. When Schiraldi was New York City’s probation commissioner in 2010, he saw a woman give up her probation, choosing instead to go to Rikers Island jail, because she was unable to find childcare that she needed for her probation check-ins, where children were not allowed.
All these problems might be acceptable if probation and parole were meeting the goal of reducing incarceration without leading to more crime. Schiraldi and two colleagues examined that proposition in the 2023 Annual Review of Criminology — and concluded that they are not.
Community supervision clearly fails at reducing incarceration. The more people living under probation and parole in one year, the higher the incarceration rate the following year, according to work by Schiraldi and his coauthors. That reflects, in part, the fact that failing to comply with terms of supervision can mean a ticket to jail. In 2017, revocation of parole or probation accounted for 45 percent of prison admissions, and in 20 states, more than half of those revocations were not for new crimes, but for violating the terms of supervision.
The evidence on public safety is more equivocal. If releasing people on parole and probation poses a risk of further crime, then the more people released on supervision in a given year, the higher the crime rate would be in the following year. But that isn’t the case. Overall, a state’s probation, parole and total supervision rate in one year does not predict the state’s rate of index crime — a term that includes violent crime plus several kinds of property crimes — in the following year.
For parole alone, however, the researchers found that the more parolees in a given year, the more violent crime the next year. That implies that parole could be risky.
But looking at the issue in a different way, Urban Institute researchers showed no clear risk, as well as no benefits, from parole. The team reviewed long-term Bureau of Justice Statistics data on 38,624 prisoners from 14 states released from prison in 1994 and found that parole supervision does not substantially affect recidivism or public safety. People simply released from prison without supervision were no more likely to be rearrested than those who were required to complete a term of parole after their sentence, they found — though people paroled before the end of their prison sentences did have lower rearrest rates.
Other evidence also suggests that recidivism may arise early, so long supervision terms may not be helpful in reducing crime. For example, among felony probationers in Oregon who were rearrested within three years of their probation, 69 percent were arrested in the first year, according to data from the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission. That suggests that the early months of probation and parole may be a critical period for helping offenders change their behavior and connecting them with community services.
In addition, making community supervision less punitive has been shown to work. One in-depth study of 283 offenders in an intensive supervision program in Wyoming compared the effect of rewards, such as praise or removal of electronic monitoring, to punishments, such as reprimands or tightened curfew. The offenders were most likely to complete their supervision successfully if they received at least four times as many rewards as sanctions.
Several studies show that employment for people under supervision helps to reduce recidivism. A transitional job program in New York City for people leaving prison led to a 9 percentage-point reduction in any type of recidivism (arrest, conviction or jail) over the three-year follow-up period compared to results with parolees not in the program. That suggests that supporting employment — rather than making it difficult by travel restrictions — is a good idea.
Evidence like this led Schiraldi and Barbara Broderick, former chief probation officer for Maricopa County in Arizona, to launch Exit, a group made up of current and former community supervision leaders, victims, prosecutors and others who want to see probation and parole downsized and returned to their original purpose of rehabilitation.
Among other aims, they want people on probation to be able to earn time off supervision if they maintain good behavior and achieve milestones like graduating from high school or keeping a job. They want the money saved from reduced supervision to be invested in community-based services that support people on probation or parole. They want incarceration for technical violations to be eliminated in favor of more and better supportive services that help people on parole and probation reintegrate into their communities.
A better way
Some of the greatest progress has been in California, where a series of reform laws since 2007 has transformed the incarceration and community supervision landscape, Rooks says. The reforms reduced prison sentences and supervision periods for many offenses and encouraged the use of evidence-based supervision strategies such as needs assessments, tailoring the intensity of supervision to a probationer’s risk of recidivism, and increased referrals to counseling, substance abuse treatment and employment services.
“In many people’s minds, [probation] is a good thing you get instead of going to prison. But this is a bad thing.”
— VINCENT SCHIRALDI
Because of these and other reforms, the number of Californians under community supervision fell from 477,733 in 2006 to 306,500 in 2020, a decrease of 42 percent. Meanwhile, reported crime declined by 7.4 percent during those years — and a study found the reforms had no measurable effect on violent crime, suggesting that less-punitive treatment did not increase crime.
Another California reform, passed in 2020, limits most probation sentences for misdemeanors to one year and most probation sentences for felonies to two. The change is projected to reduce the number of people on probation by a third, avert more than 48,000 prison stays because of technical violations and save the state $2.1 billion over five years, according to calculations by Recidiviz, a nonprofit organization that compiles and analyzes data to support criminal justice reform.
The saved money could be used to address the root causes of criminal behavior. For example, in early 2021 the El Dorado County Probation Department opened a house where probationers experiencing or at risk of homelessness can live and receive support services. “It allows you to free up the resources to give people the help that they need, which is what probation really should be about,” Rooks says.
When Soto learned about California’s new probation term limits in 2021, her probation officer did not support reducing her probation sentence, so Soto went to court. “The judge right away said, ‘You know what? I got her report. She’s never been in trouble and she’s working,’” she recalls. “And they let me off three years early.”
Now living in Oklahoma, where she works as a warehouse manager and lives with her daughter and the grandson whose birth she missed, Soto remembers that day. “I could travel and be free, and I didn’t have to worry about the visitation from the officer,” she said. “I was able to get my life back.”
Love. Community. Belonging. Pets offer people the chance to explore friendships and connections they didn’t always think were possible.
Pets provide companionship and help bring people together. In fact, according to Mars’ “Pets Connect Us” report 73% of pet parents have made connections despite generational, cultural or ethnic differences because of their four-legged pals.
Learn more about the report, which leveraged consumer insights to shed light on the future of pet parenthood in the U.S. and Canada, at BetterCitiesForPets.com/2023report.
Cooking for a small crowd can be daunting. With this recipe for Caramel French Toast, you can prepare it the night before, bake in the morning and satisfy your guests without going overboard in the kitchen.
Find more breakfast and brunch recipes at Culinary.net.
Watch video to see how to make this recipe!
Caramel French Toast
6 slices white bread, halved
1/4 cup butter, cubed
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 tablespoon corn syrup
3 eggs
3/4 cup half-and-half
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon salt
powdered sugar (optional)
Cut bread slices in half.
In saucepan, melt butter. Add brown sugar and corn syrup. Bring to boil, stirring frequently.
Pour into 8-inch square baking dish. Arrange bread slices over caramel mixture.
In small bowl, whisk eggs, half-and-half, vanilla extract, cinnamon and salt. Pour over bread slices. Cover with aluminum foil and refrigerate overnight.
Heat oven to 350 F.
Remove from refrigerator 30 minutes before baking and remove aluminum foil.
Bake 25-35 minutes, or until toothpick inserted into center comes out clean.
There are no alarms set and you are cuddled up in bed after a good night’s sleep. It’s late morning and there is nowhere to go, no rushing around to do. No school bus, no work to be done, just relaxing at home with loved ones. However, breakfast is calling your name.
Your stomach rumbles as your stumble toward the kitchen. You need something quick and effortless. The kids will be up soon and you know food will be on their minds.
When you’re in a pinch, there is nearly nothing better to make than something sweet and filling for a weekend family breakfast.
Try these simple and delicious Caramel Sticky Rolls for an easy breakfast for all. The rolls are fluffy, a little crunchy and drizzled with caramel topping.
Start by sprinkling some flour on the countertop. Roll out one sheet of puff pastry. Drizzle and spread caramel sauce on the puff pastry.
Sprinkle 1/2 cup of chopped walnuts on top then roll up the puff pastry and cut it into about nine pieces to place inside a muffin tin.
Bake for 22 minutes and cool. If you like your rolls super sweet, drizzle with some extra caramel sauce.
The result is a pan full of warm, gooey and delightful rolls that are perfect for a large family or to save leftovers to enjoy throughout the week.
Next time you slept in a little too late or your family wants something more than the daily norm for breakfast, try this scrumptious and tasty recipe.
Your family will love it and don’t be surprised if you get a request or two for this breakfast again.
Sprinkle flour on work surface. Flatten pastry sheet and roll into rectangle.
Drizzle caramel sauce over pastry and spread within 1/2 inch of edges.
Sprinkle chopped walnuts over caramel sauce.
Starting on short end, evenly roll pastry with filling to other end.
Cut pastry into nine pieces. Place pastries cut side up into muffin cups.
Bake 22 minutes, or until golden brown. Immediately remove from pan to wire rack. Let cool 10 minutes. Drizzle with additional caramel sauce and dust with powdered sugar.
Is nuclear power a necessary part of the energy transition away from fossil fuels? As the debate rages on, new technologies and smaller reactors may be shifting the balance.
By Nicola Jones
In an online video from Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation, a cartoon simulation shows a tsunami wiping out one of their future nuclear power stations and cutting off power. What happens next? Not much: The reactor quietly shuts itself down. “It cools off just by sitting there, no moving parts or fluids, no operator actions,” says the reassuring video. “We’ve designed a reactor that is inherently safe no matter the events.”
The Seattle-based Ultra Safe and dozens of other companies like it are at the forefront of a global nuclear energy revival. As the world urgently needs to wean itself off fossil fuels, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and get the planet’s temperature under control, policymakers, companies and researchers are reexamining nuclear energy as a green alternative that can help bolster the power produced by renewables like wind and solar. Today the industry is emerging from a period of stagnation, with a promise to double or triple its capacity by 2050.
That revival is undergirded by two hot technology trends. Companies like Ultra Safe are aiming to build small modular reactors (SMRs) designed to be just a fraction of the size of former plants, to reduce both building costs and the scope of possible disasters. And many are aiming to utilize new technologies designed to make meltdown accidents impossible and to create less long-lived waste.
This video (from Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation, a nuclear power company) shows the safety features built into a design for a small modular reactor.
CREDIT: ULTRA SAFE NUCLEAR CORPORATION
But the surge in interest is not without controversy. As with everything in the nuclear landscape, debate rages about whether society actually needs nuclear to tackle climate change, and whether the new systems are as shiny as they seem — with reasonable arguments for and against every promise and risk. Some say the new technologies could offer a fantastic solution to our energy woes; others say nuclear is beset with so many environmental, social and economic problems that it is best abandoned in favor of other ways to meet the globe’s energy demands.
The next few years will decide what course nuclear power takes in the world’s energy future. “This is a moment of truth,” says Francesca Giovannini, a nuclear policy expert at the Harvard Kennedy School. Over the next few decades, nuclear power is “either going to make it, or that industry is fundamentally done for. ... It’s 50/50 how this goes.”
Ups and downs in nuclear power output
Nuclear power poses some obvious risks — meltdown accidents, nuclear fuel being diverted to weapons programs, environmental issues posed by mining for uranium, the problems of storing nuclear waste. Against a backdrop of such concerns, alongside shifting economics of energy production, nuclear power production started to level off in the early 2000s and even dipped briefly after the Fukushima power plant accident of 2011. Some nations, most notably Germany, decided to shutter their nuclear programs entirely. But global nuclear power production is now starting to inch upward again.
Today, nuclear plants produce about 10 percent of global electricity, making nuclear the second largest source of non-fossil-fuel energy after hydropower. There are about 440 nuclear power plants in operation globally; another 60 or so are now being built, and around 100 are on order or planned.
Most Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scenarios for keeping the world below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming include some kind of increase in nuclear power capacity. In the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) pathway to net zero, global nuclear power production doubles over 2022 levels by 2050. A key reason for this is that nuclear is seen as a good way to provide consistent baseload power to prop up more variable renewable sources of energy like wind or solar. Without nuclear, advocates say, we would need to build far more wind and solar power plants to ensure reliable supplies, doubling or tripling costs over power networks that include nuclear.
Nuclear has plenty of advantages: It produces no carbon emissions (and, counterintuitively, releases less radioactive uranium and other elements into the environment than burning coal does). It takes up a lot less land than renewables, a not insignificant consideration. If the goal is to decarbonize quickly and with as little social pain as possible, “nuclear is essential,” says Kai Vetter, a nuclear physicist at the University of California, Berkeley.
At the UN’s Convention on Climate Change meeting in Dubai in December 2023, more than 20 nations signed a declaration to triple nuclear capacity by 2050. And cash is flowing into this effort. In 2020, the US Department of Energy (DOE) notably gave $160 million for two demonstration plants to get up and running by 2027. And in 2022, the European Union declared that some nuclear projects could call themselves “green” in the same way as renewables, opening the door to environmental financing mechanisms.
But as with almost every issue relating to nuclear power, the arguments in favor of nuclear have their detractors. Public policy expert M.V. Ramana at the University of British Columbia is one of many, for example, who say that baseload power is an outdated concept. A smart, diverse and flexible electric grid, they argue, can assure a reliable power supply by shunting power among sources and storage facilities.
And with the cost of renewables falling fast, today’s economic estimates about the relative costs of power sources may not mean much in the future.
Then there’s the question of safety. The grand total of lives lost from all nuclear power generation to date, while hard to quantify, is certainly far lower than the number of people killed by air pollution related to the burning of fossil fuels; a recent paper by NASA scientists concluded that nuclear power saved roughly 1.8 million lives from 1971 to 2009 thanks to avoided air pollution. By some accounts nuclear power has also proved less deadly than wind power, which has been linked to drownings at offshore wind farm sites and helicopter collisions with turbines.
But fatality is arguably a blunt way to measure the impacts of the nuclear industry, which also include the risk of accidents contaminating large tracts of land, plus numerous other effects related to such things as mining and waste storage. Ramana has documented how the burden of these last issues falls disproportionately on Indigenous anddisempowered communities, working against the goals of social justice. Nuclear power, he writes, “does not fit with any idea of a responsible and cleaner energy system.”
Small and shiny: New nuclear technologies
If we are to pursue nuclear power at the scale called for by the IEA, it will take a herculean effort. The IEA’s pathway requires the world to ramp up from building five big nuclear plants per year to 20 per year over the next decade. Big plants typically cost billions of dollars and come with big financial risks. Westinghouse Electric Company, for example, recently filed for bankruptcy in the face of billions of dollars of cost overruns during the construction of four nuclear plants in the United States.
One plan for reducing those epic and prohibitive costs is to build small modular reactors, ranging from reactors that can be shipped on a truck and produce a couple of hundred megawatts, to tiny single-megawatt sizes that are more akin to hefty diesel generators. The modules could be pre-built in a factory and shipped to a site for installation. All this should make these reactors less frightening prospects for investors (though the end price per unit of electricity might wind up higher than that from a larger nuclear power plant).
A handful of SMRs are already in operation in Russia, China and India. Dozens more are in development. Canada has a national SMR action plan, and as of 2021 there were 10 SMR proposals under review (including one from Ultra Safe).
But so far, the promise of enticingly low costs for SMR builds hasn’t materialized, says Granger Morgan, a physicist and codirector of the Center for Climate and Energy Decision Making at Carnegie Mellon. Morgan has crunched the numbers for nuclear in the US and was disappointed. “I thought SMRs were going to hold much more promise, but we can’t make the numbers wash,” he says.
That message was hammered home in November 2023 when the company NuScale scrapped its high-profile advanced plans to build an underground SMR in Idaho in the face of cost hikes. “Would it be nice to have nuclear? Yes absolutely,” says Morgan. “Will it be affordable? That’s very much an open question.”
Others argue that small isn’t always beautiful. While smaller plants present a smaller risk from smaller potential accidents, this strategy also means more plants overall, which means more facilities to protect against theft and terrorism. “You have way more fissile material dispersed; you will have to secure way more infrastructure,” says Giovannini. “I mean, that becomes a mess.”
Next generation nuclear
While some are focusing on making nuclear plants smaller, there’s a parallel movement to make them safer and more efficient. The next generation of reactor designs — Generation IV, in the industry’s lingo — includes a suite of six major reactor families, all very different from today’s standard, each with many possible variants under development. Much of the attention (particularly in the US) has been focused on three of these: high-temperature gas-cooled, molten salt and sodium-cooled.
The ideas behind these technologies, and even some early-stage power plants, have been around for decades. But the new variants of these old ideas combine novel fuels and designs, promising to be safer, more efficient and environmentally friendly. “They’re doing all kinds of whizz-bang, high-tech stuff,” says Morgan, who has no doubt that newer reactors can be made safer than old ones.
Most existing reactors are water-cooled uranium systems, which were chosen as the dominant technology largely as a quirk of history. Like all reactor types, they have their pros and cons. They need high pressures to stop their coolant waters from boiling off at typical operating temperatures around 300 degrees Celsius. And they are designed to work with relatively slow-moving neutrons — the subatomic particles that collide with nuclear fuel to initiate nuclear fission. Slow-moving neutrons are more likely to interact with fuel particles, but systems that use them are also limited in the kinds of fuels they can use. Catastrophe can strike if the fission reaction runs amok or the reactor gets too hot and the core “melts down,” as happened at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, spewing radiation into the environment.
The latest models of water-cooled reactors (sometimes called Gen III Plus, including many SMRs) use new design tricks to reduce the number of safety systems that require human intervention, aiming to stop accidents in their tracks automatically. Gen IV reactors, though, use entirely different coolant materials, are usually designed to operate at higher, more efficient temperatures, and often use faster-speed neutrons that can convert the most prevalent natural isotopes of uranium into usable fuel, or even feed on nuclear waste.
High-temperature gas-cooled reactors, for example, run at temperatures up to 950°C, making them 20 to 33 percent more thermally efficient than water-cooled reactors. Since the core materials used in these reactors are typically stable up to 1,600°C, which is hotter than lava, there’s a large margin of safety. The reactor in Ultra Safe’s video is an SMR that falls into this category; its small size helps, too, with passive cooling. Ultra Safe also makes their own fuel pellets, encased in a bespoke material that they say retains radioactive materials even in extreme conditions. They’re hoping to build their first commercial micro-reactor in Canada.
In molten salt reactors, both fuel and coolant are already liquid. So meltdowns, in the traditional sense, are impossible. And liquid-sodium-cooled reactors have a built-in safety feature: If they heat up, the liquid sodium expands and allows more neutrons to escape through the gaps between atoms, so the reaction (which is driven by neutrons) naturally winds down. The US Department of Energy has funded the US company TerraPower (which has Bill Gates as a major investor) to build a demonstration plant of its sodium-cooled Natrium reactor in Wyoming by 2030.
Nuclear waste not, want not
Waste is one area where the new designs really see some significant improvements, says Giovannini. “None of the reactors have entirely solved the problem of nuclear waste, but they do provide some significant solutions in terms of quantity,” she says. The spent fuel from traditional light water reactors needs to be buried in special repositories for hundreds of thousands of years, because of the production of long-lived radioactive byproducts. Some Gen IV reactors, on the other hand, can transform spent fuel into more fissile isotopes and use it for further fission reactions. This can improve efficiency and produce waste that need only be stored for hundreds of years.
Not everyone, though, thinks all these systems are as shiny as they seem. In 2021, the Union of Concerned Scientists published a report entitled “‘Advanced’ Isn’t Always Better,” in which they highlighted issues with safety, sustainability and nuclear proliferation. They concluded that nearly all the Gen IV reactor types “fail to provide significant enough improvements over [light water reactors] to justify their considerable risks.”
The report was criticized by some for being ideologically antinuclear, says Giovannini. But, she says, “it was very fair” to point out that new tech comes with new worries. Liquid salt, the report pointed out, is corrosive; liquid sodium metal can burst into flame when in contact with water or air. High-temperature gas-cooled reactors, the report concluded, while tolerant of high temperatures, are “far from meltdown-proof, as some claim.”
Hot idea
Many of these Gen IV systems offer another key benefit: Their higher temperatures can provide not just electricity but also useful heat. This could be used in many industrial processes, such as the production of steel, cement and fertilizer, which currently burn a lot of fossil fuels in their furnaces.
“That heat is pretty much for free,” says Vetter, who sees a particular utility for nuclear heat in desalination, getting clean drinking water out of saltwater as is done at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California. Indeed, X-energy, a leading US Gen IV nuclear company funded by the DOE, has partnered with Dow chemical company to build its first high-temperature gas-cooled reactor at a Dow chemical production site by 2030. Morgan, though, thinks that most industries will balk at the set-up costs.
Even if Gen IV reactors turn out to be technically superior, though, it may be decades before they can be thoroughly tested, passed by regulators and built at commercial scale. With little time to spare in the fight against climate change, the world might be better off simply ramping up old reactor designs that are already proven, says Esam Hussein, a retired nuclear engineer from the University of Regina, Canada.“We have the operating experience, we have the regulatory framework,” he says. “If the goal is to fight climate change, why don’t you go with the devil you know?”
In response to why we need a devil at all, many are quick to point out that no energy solution is problem-free, including renewables. Giovannini says she agrees with the nuclear industry’s criticism that we have “jumped on renewables in a very uncritical way.” Wind and solar require electronics and battery banks to store their energy; these in turn need elements like lithium and cobalt that can come with environmental and social justice issues from mining. “Nothing is 100 percent safe,” says Vetter.
It is hard for many to swallow data, assurances and statistics about nuclear, given its history and the huge amounts of money at stake. “I think the nuclear industry is selling a bunch of bullshit most of the time,” says Giovannini, who has been critical of how the industry deals with public concerns. But her own main worry about nuclear is “they’re moving too slow.” If companies like Ultra Safe, X-Energy, TerraPower and others are going to help fight climate change with Gen IV technologies and fleets of small reactors, she and others say, they’re going to have to ramp up fast.
Editor’s note: This story was updated on March 20, 2024, to change a name: Granger Morgan was referred to as Granger instead of Morgan in one reference. It was updated on March 21, 2024, to correct the specialty of Esam Hussein. He is a retired nuclear engineer, not a retired nuclear physicist.
