Norway, where skiing is the country’s favourite sport and a useful form of winter transport, is hoping to come to the rescue with a new way of producing snow that heats buildings at the same time.

The work is being supported with a 2.3 million krone ($300,000) grant from the Norwegian Ministry of Culture. It argues that skiing is engrained in the country’s culture – Norwegians say they are “born with skis on their feet” – so they cannot afford to lose the sport.

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Fake snow

Conventional snow-making involves spraying water into cold air and letting physics do the rest. But even the recent advances, where water is “seeded” with a protein from a bacterium that allows snow to be made at temperatures around freezing, are not sufficient to keep up with the warming climate. Once the temperatures are above freezing the method does not work.

The Norwegians believe they can get round this problem by using heat pumps. Heat taken out of air can be used to warm buildings in a ski resort, and the cold air that is produced can be used outside to make artificial snow.

Researchers at SINTEF, Scandinavia’s largest independent research institute, and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) believe that an adaptation of the technology used in domestic fridges and freezers will solve the problem.

Petter Nekså, an energy research scientist at SINTEF, says: “At higher temperatures, you need a refrigeration plant to make snow. The advantage is that this process is independent of air temperatures. One of the main aims of the project will be to find out how we can produce snow regardless of the outdoor temperature, and to develop energy-efficient ways of doing it.”

What can make the process energy-efficient is heating a building with the heat generated by the pump as it cools water to be made into snow, Nekså says.

“In this way, we can heat indoor facilities while also making artificial snow for ski slopes outside – virtually cost-free,” he claims.

The approach involves adapting current heat-pump technology, says Jacob Stang, one of Nekså’s colleagues at SINTEF. “A traditional snow-production facility that makes snow at zero degrees outdoors has no ‘hot side’,” Stang says. “That means we need a heat pump that has the properties of a refrigeration plant. We have to adapt components, such as an evaporator and condenser, to get them to work together.”

The project will be conducted in collaboration with the city of Trondheim, where SINTEF and NTNU are based, and the Norwegian Ski Federation (NSF).

The researchers are also hoping to develop better ways of storing snow, which is an approach many ski resorts use as a precaution against warmer temperatures. Currently, sawdust is used to store artificial snow that can be spread on slopes and trails when the weather doesn’t deliver. While this is a proven approach, over time the sawdust loses its insulating properties and has to be replaced.

“Norway has a long tradition and expertise in this field,” says Trygve M Eikevik, a professor in NTNU’s Department of Energy and Process Engineering. “The fishery sector produces around 300,000 tonnes of ice each year for fish export. This is enough to cover an 8-metre-wide, 150-kilometre-long ski trail with a layer of ice that is half a metre thick. It is, therefore, more than possible to manufacture snow for skiing.”

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Norwegian pastime

The NSF hopes the project will increase Norway’s chances of hosting skiing world championships in the future, but officials are most concerned about maintaining the sport as a pastime in Norway.

“The challenges posed by climate change represent perhaps the greatest threat to ski sports. This is why we’re very pleased that this project is taking off,” says Marit Gjerland, a ski run consultant for the NSF. “Good results from the project will mean a lot for the future of ski sports.”

She says the technology could also expand the popularity of skiing, by making snow available in places where it didn’t naturally occur. “Just like we have artificial football pitches, we could also create future snow parks,” she says.

One of the aims of the project is to establish a snow technology research centre based in Trondheim, where both Norwegian and international projects could be carried out.

This article originally appeared on the Climate News Network

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But centuries of breeding different varieties have meant that some are more resistant to drought than others, and scientists from Spain and Colombia have now analysed and identified these survival strategies.

With the world heading for food shortages as the population grows and the climate changes, researchers from Spain’s Universitat Autònoma de Barcelonaand the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Colombia report in Frontiers in Plant Science journal that they gathered as many different varieties together as possible.

Cross-breeding

After cross-breeding, they then evaluated 36 different advanced bean lines, to understand how they dealt with drought.

Because it is one of the world’s oldest cultivated crops, the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) comes in many forms – green and dried – and is a vegetable for all seasons.

Most bean crops are cultivated by small-scale farmers in areas affected by drought, where 400 million people rely on them for most of their protein and energy. The UN, which has designated 2016 as International Year of Pulses, estimates that dried bean production was more than 23 million tons in 2010. India, Brazil, Mynanmar, China, the US and Mexico are the main producers.

What the researchers have now found is that the plants have developed two distinct strategies, depending on the soil in which they were planted and the length of the dry periods they had to endure.

One group has developed deeper roots so they can reach the available moisture in soil that retained water even when there was no rain.

The second group has smaller leaves and closes down their operations to wait for better times. Some varieties use what little resources they have left to grow as many beans as possible, to ensure the survival of the next generation.

Savers and spenders

José Arnulfo Polanía, one of the CIAT researchers, says: “The experiments demonstrate that there is no dominant morph-physiological characteristic [linking form and function], but rather a strategic combination of several characteristics that confers this resistance to drought onto specific varieties of beans.

“We determined which specific characteristics belonged to each area, depending on whether or not the land retained moisture and whether the droughts were intermittent or ongoing.”

The researchers called the two types of beans water savers and water spenders. Because the pattern of droughts and soil types in different regions in Africa and Central America vary, the researchers can recommend which varieties would be likely to produce better crops in the prevailing conditions.

In regions where the climatic conditions are well established, the recommendations are easier to make. The savers, for example, are best suited to the south of Mexico, while the spenders fare best in the deep soils of South America.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network.

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The market for decommissioning nuclear sites is unbelievably large. Sixteen nations in Europe alone face a €253 billion waste bill, and the continent has only just begun to tackle the problem.

Among the many difficulties the industry faces is lack of trained people to do the highly-paid work. Anyone who enters the business is likely to be sought after for the rest of their career because the job of decommissioning Europe’s nuclear sites alone will take more than 100 years – even if no new nuclear power stations are ever built.

Add to the European nuclear legacy the dozens of old nuclear power stations in North America, Japan, Russia and central Asia, and nuclear decommissioning could already be classed as one of the biggest industries in the world, and it can only grow.

And this does not count the millions of dollars still being spent annually to contain the damage from the nuclear accidents in Chernobyl, Russia, in 1986, and Fukushima, Japan, in 2011.

Longer-term problem

So far, the nuclear industry has largely avoided drawing too much attention to this legacy, emphasising that its sites are safe, and concentrating instead on claiming that new nuclear stations are the answer to climate change.

But this approach has not solved the longer-term problem of how to safely contain the radioactivity of old sites to avoid damaging future generations.

The UK, one of the countries with the largest nuclear waste problem, is also currently spending most money trying to make it safe. One site alone − Sellafield in Cumbria, northwest England − is spending £2 billion a year on cleaning up its waste and expects the total bill to be around £50 billion.

But that is almost certain to rise. There are 240 operational nuclear buildings on the site, and 11 major construction projects aimed at containing the waste problem.

Twelve other old nuclear sites in the UK, where reactors have already been shut down, are costing £600 million a year to clean up, a process that will take until 2027.

Even then, the job will not be finished. All that money will have been spent on reducing the hulks to a “care and maintenance basis” so they can be guarded for decades until it is decided to demolish them altogether when it is safe to do so.

It is probably because the UK is spending so much money already that the Nuclear Decommissioning Conference for Europe is being held in the northern England city of Manchester on May 31 to June 1. All the major nuclear companies in Europe, and many international businesses hoping to cash in on this new industry, will be attending.

But the UK is only one major market, and France is potentially even larger. Although it has not yet decommissioned its nuclear stations, it is about to start doing so and has 58 reactors to dismantle. Germany, like the UK, has already begun its programme, with nine reactors shut down and another eight to be closed by 2022.

Primary task

In total, there are 200 reactors worldwide due to be shut down by 2025.

But while the primary task of the current decommissioning programme is to make reactors safe by removing their old fuel and storing it, one of the major problems of the industry is nowhere near solved.

All over the world, governments have tried and failed to find sites where they can store the vast quantities of radioactive waste that has arisen from nuclear weapons programmes, nuclear submarine and ship propulsion systems, and the civil nuclear industry. The waste needs to be isolated from human beings for as much as 250,000 years to make it safe.

Only one country, Sweden, has a workable plan for a deep disposal repository. Elsewhere, many plans have been tried and abandoned, either because of political opposition or unfavourable geology.

So nobody knows yet how much this problem is going to cost, or how many decades will pass before it is under control. As the brochure for the conference puts it: “Estimating lifetime costs is a journey into uncharted territory.”

No wonder executives from many companies are paying up to £1,500 each to attend.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network.

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Without building any new power stations, engineers believe they could use the existing network to instantly boost European supplies and avoid other countries having to switch on fossil fuel plants to make up shortfalls.

Norway has 937 hydropower plants, which provide 96% of its electricity, making it the sixth largest hydropower producer in the world − despite having a population of only five million.

Europe already has 400 million people in 24 countries connected to a single grid, with power surpluses from one country being exported to neighbours or imported as national needs change.

Supply and demand

As more and more renewables are installed across the continent, the problem of balancing supply and demand gets more difficult.

Because supply from wind and sun sources fluctuates, the grid needs back-up plants to keep the power constant. At present, this means that many countries have to keep gas and coal plants on standby to make up any shortage.

However, the Hydraulic Laboratory at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology(NTNU) in Trondheim believes it can engineer the country’s vast power plants so that they can themselves be a giant standby battery that can be turned on and off.

When there is surplus wind or solar power in Europe, the electricity it generates can be imported to pump water uphill to keep re-filling the Norwegian reservoirs. This is, in effect, electricity that is stored, because when energy is needed again the generators can be turned back on to produce hydropower.

The problem at the moment is that even hydropower is not instant. This is because water takes time to flow through the vast network of pipes and the turbines to reach the correct speed to provide stable power to the grid at the correct frequency of alternating current.

Norway currently has more kilometres of pipes carrying water to its hydroelectricity plants than it has miles of road, so controlling the flow is the key.

But Kaspar Vereide, a doctoral student in the department of hydraulic and environmental engineering at NTNU, has designed a model solution, with funding from the Centre for Environmental Design of Renewable Energy.

By creating a sealed surge chamber in rock close to the turbines, engineers can feed electricity, at the right frequency, into the grid immediately. The empty chamber contains air that is compressed as the space is filled with water. So, when the valves are open, the water can instantly turn turbines at the correct speed.

Vereide says: “Norwegian mountains are full of water tunnels. It’s like an anthill.”

The length of the waterway, he says, can be many kilometres, though this will require the engineers to accelerate the water to reach the turbines.

His solution involves blowing out a cavern inside the water tunnel near the turbine where the electricity is to be generated, creating a surge chamber where water at the correct velocity can reach the turbines immediately.

Fluctuations in power

He admits that his design is still at the early stages of development. The surge chambers have to be designed to avoid fluctuations in power needs, which can cause uncontrolled blowouts of air into the power plants, risking damage.

“We have to be able to control these load fluctuations that occur,” he says. “Among other things, it’s important to determine how big surge chambers need to be to function best. My task is to figure out the optimal design for the chambers.”

Vereide says that plants have traditionally been run very smoothly and quietly, with few stops and starts to create these fluctuations. But to become the green battery of Europe, the power plants would need to be started and stopped much more often − and then the problem of load fluctuations would increase significantly.

“We’ll benefit a lot from developing these new technologies, both in order to keep electrical frequency stable and to run power plants more aggressively to serve a large market,” he says.

This article was produced by the Climate News Network.

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