The rainbow atomic symbol T-shirt should have been a clue.
Sam Brinton, the allegedly sticky-fingered Biden administration nuclear official, was captured on security footage making off with a woman’s bag worth more than $3,670 from a Las Vegas airport on July 6, KLAS News reported.
A surveillance snap from Harry Reid International Airport shows a stern-faced Brinton wearing the white T-shirt with the colorful symbol, a black backpack, and black jeans, rolling the suitcase in question through the airport.
The distinctive tee — which Brinton sported in a selfie posted to Instagram that same day — led the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department to issue a warrant for Brinton’s arrest on grand larceny charges, according to a detective’s declaration.
Last month Brinton, the deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition at the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, was charged in the September theft of a woman’s suitcase from a Minneapolis airport.
The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department to issue a warrant for Brinton’s arrest on grand larceny charges, according to a detective’s declaration. radioactivenerd1/Instagram
The Las Vegas security footage from that showed the luggage — containing $1,700 worth of jewelry, clothing valued at $850, and $500 of makeup, police said — being removed from the airport’s baggage carousel by “a white male adult wearing a white T-shirt with a large rainbow-colored atomic nuclear symbol design,” the detective wrote.
The man “demonstrated several signs of abnormal behavior while taking the victim’s luggage which are cues suspects typically give off when committing luggage theft,” according to the declaration, then grabbed the bag off the carousel and walked away with it quickly.
The victim, who filed a police report on July 10, described her missing bag as a gray, hard-shell “Away” brand “Bigger Carry-On” valued at $320.
Last month Brinton was charged in the September theft of a woman’s suitcase from a Minneapolis airport.CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty ImagThe Las Vegas security footage from that showed the luggage containing $1,700 worth of jewelry, $850 worth of clothing, and $500 of makeup, police said.CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Imag
Police were initially unable to identify the thief from the footage and closed the case. But on Nov. 29, when the Las Vegas investigator saw media reports of the Minneapolis accusation against Brinton, the officer “immediately recognized” the Energy Department employee “as the suspect pertaining to this case.”
Police found that Brinton had traveled on the victim’s flight from Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C. to Las Vegas on July 6, and uncovered the nuclear-rainbow selfie.
“Thank you to @americannuclear for selling such a great shirt for me to wear on my flight today,” Brinton wrote in the post. “My professional society continues to grow and learn and I’m proud of them. Goodness how we have changed since my service as a chapter president and then on the National Board of Directors. #NuclearPride.”
Police found that Brinton had traveled on the victim’s flight from Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C. to Las Vegas on July 6. Sam Brinton/Instagram
Brinton spoke during The Trevor Project Trevor at Cipriani Wall Street. Getty Images for The Trevor Proj
Brinton, who uses they/them pronouns, has been feted as one of the federal government’s first gender non-binary officials — but a group of House Republicans is clamoring for Brinton’s removal over the alleged thefts.
“We demand the resignation of Sam Brinton, and we implore you to set aside petty politics and appoint only the most qualified and dedicated individuals to influence America’s energy sector,” Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia and 15 other Republicans wrote to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm Tuesday.
Brinton, who faces up to five years in prison for the Minnesota theft and up to 10 years jail time for the Las Vegas heist, was placed on leave when the first allegation came to light, according to an Energy Department spokesperson.
Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida photographed during a news conference on Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2022.
Rodrigo Reyes-Marin | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The prime minister of Japan said Wednesday that his country would restart more idled nuclear power plants and look into the feasibility of developing next-gen reactors.
Fumio Kishida’s comments, reported by Reuters, build upon remarks he made back in May, and come at a time when Japan — a big importer of energy — is looking to bolster its options amid ongoing uncertainty in global energy markets and the war between Russia and Ukraine.
If fully realized, the move would represent a turnaround for the country’s energy policy following 2011’s Fukushima disaster, when a powerful earthquake and tsunami resulted in a meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
Most of Japan’s nuclear plants have remained idle since then, but attitudes appear to be shifting. Earlier this month, a former executive director of the International Energy Agency said public support in Japan for a nuclear restart now stood at over 60%.
Japan is targeting carbon neutrality by 2050. Under an “ambitious outlook,” the country’s 6th Strategic Energy Plan envisages renewables accounting for 36% to 38% of its power generation mix in 2030, with nuclear responsible for 20% to 22%.
“Stable use of nuclear power will be promoted on the major premise that public trust in nuclear power should be gained and that safety should be secured,” according to an outline of the plan.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is playing hardball with the European Union — cutting off gas deliveries to some of Russia’s best customers in a howl of rage at the sanctions imposed after invading Ukraine.
It’s putting enormous political pressure on governments, threatens to leave Europeans freezing if this winter is a cold one, and potentially undermines the bloc’s climate goals as countries replace gas-fired power with coal. It could even tip the Continent into recession.
Simone Tagliapietra, an analyst with the Bruegel think tank, calls Russia’s policies “energy blackmail.”
Only 40 percent of the normal amount of gas is flowing along the undersea Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream pipeline, which is affecting deliveries to France, Italy and Austria as well as Germany. Russia’s gas export monopoly Gazprom has already halted all deliveries to Poland, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Finland and Denmark after energy companies in those countries refused to kowtow to Kremlin demands to pay for deliveries in rubles.
In response, some countries are planning to fire up coal-fired power stations.
“It must be acknowledged that Putin is reducing the gas supply to Europe bit by bit, also to drive up the price, and we must respond with our measures,” German Economy and Climate Minister Robert Habeck said in a television interview late Sunday, adding that “it’s a tense, serious situation.”
Austria plans to covert a shuttered power plant to again burn coal.
Poland aims to subsidize coal used for home heating.
The Netherlands on Monday decided to scrap earlier plans to limit production from its four coal-fired power stations.
“If these were not special times, we would never do this,” said Climate Minister Rob Jetten.
Italy’s government is planning a crisis meeting on Tuesday and Prime Minister Mario Draghi has ordered two regasification units for liquefied natural gas and has been talking to countries including Qatar, Angola and Algeria to sign gas supply deals in a desperate bid to secure supplies in case of a Russian shut-off.
Brussels is keen to project confidence but the worry is clear.
“We take the situation we’re in very serious. But we are prepared,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a meeting with reporters on Monday. “We are in difficult times. Times are not getting easier,” she added.
Dirty deals
The rush to burn coal to secure energy supply is symbolically awkward for climate conscious Europeans. But few expect it to blow the EU or its member states far off course in their efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
In Germany, officials are adamant that the return of coal will be short-lived and does not jeopardize the country’s track to zero out coal power by 2030. Coal will act as a reserve supply for the power sector, allowing the country to build up its stores of gas ahead of winter. Meanwhile, the government is planning to rapidly increase clean power.
The Neurath coal-fired power plant in Germany | Andreas Rentz/Getty Images
Russia’s invasion has hardened political support for renewables in Germany, said Simon Müller, director of the Agora Energiewende think tank.
“This additional layer of urgency that we now have in the face of this situation helps to provide the political momentum that we need for some very important accelerations in the renewable build out,” said Müller. The German parliament is considering 10 energy efficiency and renewable energy measures and Müller said the three-party coalition was broadly aligned on the importance of removing barriers to green power.
Green groups were also sanguine. “There is no plan at all in Germany at the moment to put the coal exit date in doubt,” said Christoph Bals, the policy director of NGO Germanwatch.
But the need to rapidly change tack on scrapping coal is ramping up political tensions.
In Berlin, the conservative opposition lambasted Habeck for allowing an increase in coal use while ruling out keeping Germany’s three remaining nuclear power plants operating past the end of this year.
“I don’t understand that the Green climate minister prefers to let more coal plants run longer, rather than carbon neutral nuclear power plants,” Jens Spahn, deputy head of the Christian Democrats in parliament, told German television on Monday. The nuclear shutdown policy was one adopted by his party’s former leader, Angela Merkel.
The policy is also causing stress within the governing coalition.
“What is necessary is to keep the three remaining nuclear power plants running longer,” said Bijan Djir-Sarai, general secretary of the liberal Free Democrats. “This is a fact that the economy minister cannot simply ignore.”
Admitting the step was “breaking a taboo,” Habeck said coal was still better than reviving atomic energy, arguing that a change in nuclear policy would only have an impact at the end of next year — too late to help this winter. He was backed up by Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who said in an interview published Monday that “nuclear power won’t help us now, not in the next two years, which is what matters.”
Political leaders are calling on their people to conserve energy and cut gas use, while governments work to boost storage levels to allow the Continent to weather a winter Russian gas cutoff. As a last resort, they’re mulling gas rationing.
A halt in gas supplies would almost certainly tip the bloc into a recession. The European Central Bank warned that the eurozone would contract by 1.7 percent next year should Russia close the tap entirely.
“The energy supply disruptions and the low possibilities for an immediate substitution of gas supplies from Russia would likely require some rationing and reallocation of resources, resulting in production cuts in the euro area, in particular in energy-intensive sectors,” the bank said, predicting if that happened, the bloc’s economy would recover next year.
But the ECB also had a word of warning for Putin.
“Regarding the Russian economy, the scenario features a severe recession with a contraction in output similar to the contraction experienced when the Soviet Union collapsed.”
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This is a close up view of an X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy system being used at the Idaho National Lab measuring surface chemistry on a potential candidate material to use for fusion.
Masashi Shimada has been researching nuclear fusion since 2000, when he joined the graduate program at University of California San Diego. He’s currently the lead scientist at the Safety and Tritium Applied Research (STAR) facility in Idaho National Laboratory, one of the federal government’s premier scientific research laboratories.
The field has changed a lot.
Early on in his career, fusion was often the butt of jokes, if it was discussed at all. “Fusion is the energy of future and always will be” was the crack Shimada heard all the time.
But that’s changing. Dozens of start-ups have raised almost $4 billion in private funding, according to the Fusion Industry Association, an industry trade group.
Investors and Secretary of the Department of Energy Jennifer Granholm have called fusion energy the “holy grail” of clean energy, with the potential to provide nearly limitless energy without releasing any greenhouse gasses and without the same kind of long-lasting radioactive waste that nuclear fission has.
There’s a whole bumper crop of new, young scientists working in fusion, and they’re inspired.
“If you talk to young people, they believe in fusion. They are going to make it. They have a very positive, optimistic mindset,” Shimada said.
For his part, Shimada and his team are doing research now into the management of tritium, a popular fuel that many fusion start-ups are pursuing, in hopes of setting up the U.S. for a bold new fusion industry.
“As part of the government’s new ‘bold vision’ for fusion commercialization, tritium handling and production will be a key part of their scientific research,” Andrew Holland, CEO of the Fusion Industry Association told CNBC.
Masashi Shimada
Photo courtesy Idaho National Lab
Studying the tritium supply chain
Fusion is a nuclear reaction when two lighter atomic nuclei are pushed together to form a single heavier nucleus, releasing “massive amounts of energy.” It’s how the sun is powered. But controlling fusion reactions on Earth is a complicated and delicate process.
In many cases, the fuels for a fusion reaction are deuterium and tritium, which are both forms of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe.
Deuterium is very common and can be found in sea water. If fusion is achieved at scale on Earth, one gallon of sea water would have enough deuterium to make as much energy as 300 gallons of gasoline, according to the Department of Energy.
Tritium, however, is not common on Earth and has to be produced. Shimada and his team of researchers at the Idaho National Lab have a small tritium lab 55 miles west of Idaho Falls, Idaho, where they study how to produce the isotope.
“Since tritium is not available in nature, we have to create it,” Shimada told CNBC.
Currently, most of the tritium the United States uses comes from Canada’s national nuclear laboratory, Shimada said. “But we really cannot rely on those supplies. Because once you use it, if you don’t recycle, you basically use up all the tritium,” Shimada said. “So we have to create tritium while we are running a fusion reactor.”
There’s enough tritium to support pilot fusion projects and research, but commercializing it would require hundreds of reactors, Shimada said.
“That’s why we have to invest right now on tritium fuel cycle technologies” to create and recycle tritium.
A scientist at Idaho National Lab, Chase Taylor, measuring the surface chemistry of a potential material to use in fusion with X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy.
Photo courtesy Idaho National Lab
Safety protocols
Tritium is radioactive, but not in the same way that the fuel for nuclear fission reactors is.
“Tritium’s radioactive decay takes the form of a weak beta emitter. This type of radiation can be blocked by a few centimeters of water,” Jonathan Cobb, spokesperson for the World Nuclear Association, told CNBC.
The half-life, or time it takes for half of a radioactive material to decay, is about 12 years for tritum, and when it decays, the product released is helium, which is not radioactive, Cobb explained.
By comparison, the nuclear fission reaction splits uranium into products such as iodine, cesium, strontium, xenon and barium, which themselves are radioactive and have half-lives that range from days to tens of thousands of years.
That said, it is still necessary to study the behavior of tritium because it is radioactive. In particular, the Idaho National Lab studies how tritium interacts with the material that is used to build a fusion-containing machine. In many cases, this is a donut-shaped machine called a tokamak.
For a fusion reaction to occur, the fuel sources have to be heated up into a plasma, the fourth state of matter. These reactions happen at exceptionally high temperatures, as high as 100 million degrees, which can potentially impact how much and how fast tritium can get into the material holding the plasma, Shimada said.
Most fusion reaction containers are made of a special stainless steel with a thin layer of tungsten on the inside. “Tungsten has been chosen because it has the lowest tritium solubility in all elements in the periodic table,” Shimada said.
But the high-energy neutrons being generated from the fusion reaction can cause radiation damage even in tungsten.
Here, at the Idaho National Lab, a collaborator from Sandia National Laboratories, Rob Kolasinski, is working with a glove box for the Tritium Plasma Experiment.
Photo courtesy Idaho National Lab
The team’s research is meant to give fusion companies a dataset to figure out when that might happen, so they can establish and measure the safety of their programs.
“We can make a fusion reaction for 5, 10 seconds probably without too much worry” about the material that would be used to contain the fusion reaction, Shimada told CNBC. But for commercial-scale energy production, a fusion reaction would need to be maintained at high temperatures for years at a time.
“The goal of our research is to help the designer of fusion reactors predict when the tritium accumulation in the materials and tritium permeation through the vessel reach unacceptable levels,” Shimada told CNBC. “This way we can set protocols to heat the materials (i.e., bake-out) and remove tritium from the vessel to reduce the risks of potential tritium release in the case of an accident.”
While Idaho National Lab is investigating the behavior of tritium to establish safety standards for the burgeoning industry, its waste is a lot less problematic than today’s fission-powered nuclear facilities. The federal government has been studying how to create a permanent repository for fission-based waste for more than 40 years, and has yet to come up with solution.
“Fusion does not create any long-lived radioactive nuclear waste. This is one of the advantages of fusion reactors over fission reactors,” Shimada told CNBC.
Elizabeth Muller, the CEO, and Richard Muller, the chief technology officer, of Deep Isolation, in Texas for their 2019 demonstration.
Photographer: Roman Pino, Courtesy Deep Isolation
There is no permanent nuclear waste depository in the United States. Instead, nuclear waste is stored in dry casks at the locations of currently operating and former nuclear power plants around the country.
Deep Isolation, a start-up founded by a daughter-father team in Berkeley, California, is aiming to change that.
Deep Isolation plans to commercialize technology to dig 18-inch-diameter holes deep into the surface of the Earth, then slide radioactive nuclear waste in 14-foot-long canisters down into the deep boreholes. In a deep geologic repository, like a mine or a borehole, nuclear waste can slowly lose its radioactivity over the course of thousands of years without causing harm.
Fixing a key problem for the nuclear industry
Although nuclear energy generates negligible greenhouse gas emissions, many governments and environmental activists don’t consider it a source of clean energy because there’s no permanent repository to store nuclear waste.
For example, on Feb. 2, when the European Union released its updated taxonomy of sustainable energy sources, it included nuclear energy as a transitional green energy source only if countries can certify safe disposal of the radioactive waste from nuclear reactors (among other requirements).
An artist rendering of Deep Isolation’s borehole drilling technology.
Artist rendering by Joseph Rule of Raconteur, Courtesy Deep Isolation
In Europe, several deep geologic repositories are under construction. “Finland is constructing a permanent nuclear waste disposal at Olkiluoto which is expected to be ready in 2023. Sweden is expected to construct a similar kind of nuclear waste disposal starting sometime in the 2020s at Östhammar and France aims to have its own geologic repository for nuclear waste by the 2030s, according to Jonathan Cobb, a spokesperson for the World Nuclear Association.
In the United States, Yucca Mountain in Nevada was the front-runner for a geologic disposal for nuclear waste in the United States. But in 2010, President Barack Obama cut funding for Yucca Mountain, satisfying a long-standing effort from a powerful member of Congress from that state, Sen. Harry Reid.
One solution to this stalemate is using directional borehole drilling instead of mines to bury radioactive nuclear waste underground.
Deep Isolation has been pursuing this idea since 2016.
“We didn’t invent the idea of using boreholes for disposal — that has been around since the 1980s,” CEO Elizabeth Muller told CNBC. “Nobody had thought of using directional drilling. And so that was the key innovation that Deep Isolation brought.”
Directional drilling makes it possible to bore holes horizontally as well as vertically. Nuclear waste can’t be buried too deep because it can’t get too hot or be under too much pressure. The sweet spot is between 1 and 4 kilometers below the earth’s surface, Muller said.
“That’s a really nice range where you can, depending on the rock type, be very sure that the nuclear waste will be safe, and that you’re not getting issues of high pressure and hot rock.”
Moving horizontally into a rock for disposal allows more space for burial under the same acreage of land, and also means that the waste won’t fall straight down.
“It’s like a kid going down the slide and gently coming to a rest at the bottom without crashing into anything,” Muller said.
An artist rendering of Deep Isolation’s borehole drilling technology going down deep into the surface of the Earth.
Artist rendering by Joseph Rule of Raconteur, Courtesy Deep Isolation
Peter Burns, director of the Center for Sustainable Energy at Notre Dame University, had never heard of Deep Isolation until CNBC contacted him to get his take on the idea. He thinks it has promise.
“Deep borehole disposal of nuclear waste has been recognized as a viable approach for some types of waste for many years,” he said. “Deep Isolation is proposing a novel twist on the idea with directional borehole drilling. This appears to have promise as it will allow emplacement in carefully selected geologic horizons so that the geology itself is the protective barrier.”
A father-daughter duo digs in
Deep Isolation was started in 2016 by Elizabeth Muller and her father, Richard Muller, a physicist and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, who serves as chief technology officer.
Before they started Deep Isolation, the Mullers founded a nonprofit called Berkeley Earth, which collects and distributes information about the climate, such as world air pollution data and global temperature data.
“We’ve been working together for, gosh, close to 15 years now,” Elizabeth Muller told CNBC. “He’s a scientist, I’m not,” Elizabeth Muller said.
After launching Berkeley Earth, the Mullers thought they could have a large impact on slowing global warming by getting China to burn less coal and more natural gas. The Mullers named their company Global Shale, but it didn’t get very far. Chinese bureaucracy thwarted their ambitions.
However, that detour taught the Mullers about directional drilling, which oil companies use.
The technology for drilling has improved significantly, according to Elizabeth Muller. “You can drill down a mile deep, and then have a horizontal section that goes multiple miles,” Elizabeth Muller said. “And this is all just really quite standard. And you’re going into levels of areas of rock where there has been no movement for millions of years.”
So far, Deep Isolation has raised $21 million, $20 million of which came in a round closed at the end of 2020 and led by NAC International, a company which transports and stores nuclear fuel.
In March, Deep Isolation was awarded $3.6 million by the Department of Energy as part of a larger, $36 million grant for 11 companies all looking to promote the use of advanced nuclear waste. Deep Isolation is leading the effort to establishing a cannister for minimizing the costs of storing fuel and waste management.
The Department of Energy had been researching the feasibility of using deep boreholes both for nuclear waste disposal and for geothermal research. But opposition from local communities foiled the project and in 2017, the DOE announced it was ending the project.
The government ought to pick its research into boreholes back up, according to Matt Bowen, a research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.
“There hasn’t been any disposal of spent nuclear fuel assemblies in deep boreholes anywhere in the world just yet. Many people — myself included — think there is a lot of promise to the deep borehole approach, and that the U.S. government should carry out work in this direction to address research gaps,” Bowen told CNBC.
Deep boreholes are cheaper and therefore better suited to countries with smaller quantities of nuclear waste, or where countries have small amounts of high-level nuclear waste that needs to be disposed of, like at the Hanford site in Benton County, Washington.
Deep Isolation’s technology demonstration in Texas in 2019.
Photographer: Roman Pino, Courtesy Deep Isolation
In 2019, Deep Isolation did a test of its borehole drilling technology near Cameron, Texas, putting an empty canister into a bore hole and then retrieving it.
The demonstration was more important for its political success — the technology was already proven, but the start-up managed to gain support of local communities.
“It really demonstrated, I think, that private companies who take a more nimble approach can succeed even when the government has failed again and again,” Elizabeth Muller said. “And that’s the same approach that we’re trying to now bring to actual disposal.”
Getting local communities to agree to have a borehole dug in their proximity will continue to be a challenge, according to David W. Shoesmith, a chemistry professor emeritus at Western University in Ontario, who studies nuclear waste disposal. Although he thinks the company and the people associated with Deep Isolaion are “credible,” he said the process of lining up many small distributed sites could be “a licensing nightmare.”
“The identification and selection of appropriate disposal sites has proven a long and tedious technical process in many countries and has been fraught with political and social issues. Yucca Mountain is only the most extreme example,” Shoesmith said.
Five to 10 years out
Deep Isolation has completed project assessment and design work for customers including the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute, Slovenia, the multinational ERDO Association and Estonia. The next step is drilling a borehole, testing its safety, going through licensing and begin disposing of nuclear waste. That’s still five to 10 years out, Muller said.
Nuclear industry watchers are optimistic, even as they don’t see Deep Isolation’s solution as the answer for all nuclear waste.
“I’m not a geologist, but I see no reason why the approach would not be feasible,” said Steve Nesbit, president of the American Nuclear Society. “I don’t think it is the complete, one-size-fits-all solution for all radioactive waste disposal needs, but it appears to be well suited for some applications.”
Brett Rampal, director of nuclear innovation at the nonprofit Clean Air Task Force, agrees. “More options beyond a deep geologic repository or interim storage may offer a lot of potential opportunities and values,” Rampal told CNBC.
The biggest barrier for Deep Isolation is the conservative and cautious nature of the nuclear industry. But pressure is building for the nuclear industry to come up with permanent solutions for how to safely dispose of nuclear waste.
“That is coming because of climate change, global warming, and people wanting to have a future for the nuclear industry, and recognizing that nuclear waste disposal has to happen first if we’re going to have a future for the nuclear industry,” said Elizabeth Muller.
