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      in Environment

      Satellite-based method measures carbon in peat bogs

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      Peat bogs in the tropics store vast amounts of carbon, but logging, plantations, road building, and other activities have destroyed large swaths of these ecosystems in places like Indonesia and Malaysia. Peat formations are essentially permanently flooded forestland, where dead leaves and branches accumulate because the water table prevents their decomposition.

      The pileup of organic material gives these formations a distinctive domed shape, somewhat raised in the center and tapering toward the edges. Determining how much carbon is contained in each formation has required laborious on-the-ground sampling, and so has been limited in its coverage.

      Now, researchers from MIT and Singapore have developed a mathematical analysis of how peat formations build and develop, that makes it possible to evaluate their carbon content and dynamics mostly from simple elevation measurements. These can be carried out by satellites, without requiring ground-based sampling. This analysis, the team says, should make it possible to make more precise and accurate assessments of the amount of carbon that would be released by any proposed draining of peatlands — and, inversely, how much carbon emissions could be avoided by protecting them.

      The research is being reported today in the journal Nature, in a paper by Alexander Cobb, a postdoc with the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART); Charles Harvey, an MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering; and six others.

      Although it is the tropical peatlands that are at greatest risk — because they are the ones most often drained for timber harvesting or the creation of plantations for palm oil, acacia, and other crops — the new formulas the team derived apply to peatlands all over the globe, from Siberia to New Zealand. The formula requires just two inputs. The first is elevation data from a single transect of a given peat dome — that is, a series of elevation measurements along an arbitrary straight line cutting across from one edge of the formation to the other. The second input is a site-specific factor the team devised that relates to the type of peat bog involved and the internal structure of the formation, which together determine how much of the carbon within remains safely submerged in water, where it can’t be oxidized.

      “The saturation by water prevents oxygen from getting in, and if oxygen gets in, microbes breathe it and eat the peat and turn it into carbon dioxide,” Harvey explains.

      “There is an internal surface inside the peat dome below which the carbon is safe because it can’t be drained, because the bounding rivers and water bodies are such that it will keep saturated up to that level even if you cut canals and try to drain it,” he adds. In between the visible surface of the bog and this internal layer is the “vulnerable zone” of peat that can rapidly decompose and release its carbon compounds or become dry enough to promote fires that also release the carbon and pollute the air.

      Through years of on-the-ground sampling and testing, and detailed analysis comparing the ground data with satellite lidar data on surface elevations, the team was able to figure out a kind of universal mathematical formula that describes the structure of peat domes of all kinds and in all locations. They tested it by comparing their predicted results with field measurements from several widely distributed locations, including Alaska, Maine, Quebec, Estonia, Finland, Brunei, and New Zealand.

      These bogs contain carbon that has in many cases accumulated over thousands of years but can be released in just a few years when the bogs are drained. “If we could have policies to preserve these, it is a tremendous opportunity to reduce carbon fluxes to the atmosphere. This framework or model gives us the understanding, the intellectual framework, to figure out how to do that,” Harvey says.

      Many people assume that the biggest greenhouse gas emissions from cutting down these forested lands is from the decomposition of the trees themselves. “The misconception is that that’s the carbon that goes to the atmosphere,” Harvey says. “It’s actually a small amount, because the real fluxes to the atmosphere come from draining” the peat bogs. “Then, the much larger pool of carbon, which is underground beneath the forest, oxidizes and goes to the air, or catches fire and burns.”

      But there is hope, he says, that much of this drained peatland can still be restored before the stored carbon all gets released. First of all, he says, “you’ve got to stop draining it.” That can be accomplished by damming up the drainage canals. “That’s what’s good about this mathematical framework: You need to figure out how to do that, where to put your dams. There’s all sorts of interesting complexities. If you just dam up the canal, the water may flow around it. So, it’s a neat geometric and engineering project to figure out how to do this.”

      While much of the peatland in southeast Asia has already been drained, the new analysis should make it possible to make much more accurate assessments of less-well-studied peatlands in places like the Amazon basin, New Guinea and the Congo basin, which are also threatened by development.

      The new formulation should also help to make some carbon offset programs more reliable, because it is now possible to calculate accurately the carbon content of a given peatland. “It’s quantifiable, because the peat is 100 percent organic carbon. So, if you just measure the change in the surface going up or down, you can say with pretty good certainty how much carbon has been accumulated or lost, whereas if you go to a rainforest, it’s virtually impossible to calculate the amount of underground carbon, and it’s pretty hard to calculate what’s above ground too,” Harvey says. “But this is relatively easy to calculate with satellite measurements of elevation.”

      “We can turn the knob,” he says, “because we have this mathematical framework for how the hydrology, the water table position, affects the growth and loss of peat. We can design a scheme that will change emissions by X amount, for Y dollars.”

      The research team included Rene Dommain, Kimberly Yeap, and Cao Hannan at Nanyang Technical University in Singapore, Nathan Dadap at Stanford University, Bodo Bookhagen at the University of Potsdam, Germany, and Paul Glaser at the University of Minnesota. The work was supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore through the SMART program, by the U.S. National Science Foundation, and Singapore’s Office for Space Technology and Industry. More

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      in Environment

      Unlocking the secrets of natural materials

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      Growing up in Milan, Benedetto Marelli liked figuring out how things worked. He repaired broken devices simply to have the opportunity to take them apart and put them together again. Also, from a young age, he had a strong desire to make a positive impact on the world. Enrolling at the Polytechnic University of Milan, he chose to study engineering.

      “Engineering seemed like the right fit to fulfill my passions at the intersection of discovering how the world works, together with understanding the rules of nature and harnessing this knowledge to create something new that could positively impact our society,” says Marelli, MIT’s Paul M. Cook Career Development Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

      Marelli decided to focus on biomedical engineering, which at the time was the closest thing available to biological engineering. “I liked the idea of pursuing studies that provided me a background to engineer life,” in order to improve human health and agriculture, he says.

      Marelli went on to earn a PhD in materials science and engineering at McGill University and then worked in Tufts University’s biomaterials Silklab as a postdoc. After his postdoc, Marelli was drawn to MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental in large part because of the work of Markus Buehler, MIT’s McAfee Professor of Engineering, who studies how to design new materials by understanding the architecture of natural ones.

      “This resonated with my training and idea of using nature’s building blocks to build a more sustainable society,” Marelli says. “It was a big leap forward for me to go from biomedical engineering to civil and environmental engineering. It meant completely changing my community, understanding what I could teach and how to mentor students in a new engineering branch. As Markus is working with silk to study how to engineer better materials, this made me see a clear connection with what I was doing and what I could be doing. I consider him one of my mentors here at MIT and was fortunate to end up collaborating with him.”

      Marelli’s research is aimed at mitigating several pressing global problems, he says.

      “Boosting food production to provide food security to an ever-increasing population, soil restoration, decreasing the environmental impact of fertilizers, and addressing stressors coming from climate change are societal challenges that need the development of rapidly scalable and deployable technologies,” he says.

      Marelli and his fellow researchers have developed coatings derived from natural silk that extend the shelf life of food, deliver biofertilizers to seeds planted in salty, unproductive soils, and allow seeds to establish healthier plants and increase crop yield in drought-stricken lands. The technologies have performed well in field tests being conducted in Morocco in collaboration with the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Ben Guerir, according to Marelli, and offer much potential.

      “I believe that with this technology, together with the common efforts shared by the MIT PIs participating in the Climate Grand Challenge on Revolutionizing Agriculture, we have a  real opportunity to positively impact planetary health and find new solutions that work in both rural settings and highly modernized agricultural fields,” says Marelli, who recently earned tenure.

      As a researcher and entrepreneur with about 20 patents to his name and awards including a National Science Foundation CAREER award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers award, and the Ole Madsen Mentoring Award, Marelli says that in general his insights into structural proteins — and how to use that understanding to manufacture advanced materials at multiple scales — are among his proudest achievements.

      More specifically, Marelli cites one of his breakthroughs involving a strawberry. Having dipped the berry in an odorless, tasteless edible silk suspension as part of a cooking contest held in his postdoctoral lab, he accidentally left it on his bench, only to find a week or so later that it had been well-preserved.

      “The coating of the strawberry to increase its shelf life is difficult to beat when it comes to inspiring people that natural polymers can serve as technical materials that can positively impact our society” by lessening food waste and the need for energy-intensive refrigerated shipping, Marelli says.

      When Marelli won the BioInnovation Institute and Science Prize for Innovation in 2022, he told the journal Science that he thinks students should be encouraged to choose an entrepreneurial path. He acknowledged the steepness of the learning curve of being an entrepreneur but also pointed out how the impact of research can be exponentially increased.

      He expanded on this idea more recently.

      “I believe an increasing number of academics and graduate students should try to get their hands ‘dirty’ with entrepreneurial efforts. We live in a time where academics are called to have a tangible impact on our society, and translating what we study in our labs is clearly a good way to employ our students and enhance the global effort to develop new technology that can make our society more sustainable and equitable,” Marelli says.

      Referring to a spinoff company, Mori, that grew out of the coated strawberry discovery and that develops silk-based products to preserve a wide range of perishable foods, Marelli says he finds it very satisfying to know that Mori has a product on the market that came out of his research efforts — and that 80 people are working to translate the discovery from “lab to fork.”

      “Knowing that the technology can move the needle in crises such as food waste and food-related environmental impact is the highest reward of all,” he says.

      Marelli says he tells students who are seeking solutions to extremely complicated problems to come up with one solution, “however crazy it might be,” and then do an extensive literature review to see what other researchers have done and whether “there is any hint that points toward developing their solution.”

      “Once we understand the feasibility, I typically work with them to simplify it as much as we can, and then to break down the problem in small parts that are addressable in series and/or in parallel,” Marelli says.

      That process of discovery is ongoing. Asked which of his technologies will have the greatest impact on the world, Marelli says, “I’d like to think it’s the ones that still need to be discovered.” More

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      in Environment

      Forging climate connections across the Institute

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      Climate change is the ultimate cross-cutting issue: Not limited to any one discipline, it ranges across science, technology, policy, culture, human behavior, and well beyond. The response to it likewise requires an all-of-MIT effort.

      Now, to strengthen such an effort, a new grant program spearheaded by the Climate Nucleus, the faculty committee charged with the oversight and implementation of Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade, aims to build up MIT’s climate leadership capacity while also supporting innovative scholarship on diverse climate-related topics and forging new connections across the Institute.

      Called the Fast Forward Faculty Fund (F^4 for short), the program has named its first cohort of six faculty members after issuing its inaugural call for proposals in April 2023. The cohort will come together throughout the year for climate leadership development programming and networking. The program provides financial support for graduate students who will work with the faculty members on the projects — the students will also participate in leadership-building activities — as well as $50,000 in flexible, discretionary funding to be used to support related activities. 

      “Climate change is a crisis that truly touches every single person on the planet,” says Noelle Selin, co-chair of the nucleus and interim director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. “It’s therefore essential that we build capacity for every member of the MIT community to make sense of the problem and help address it. Through the Fast Forward Faculty Fund, our aim is to have a cohort of climate ambassadors who can embed climate everywhere at the Institute.”

      F^4 supports both faculty who would like to begin doing climate-related work, as well as faculty members who are interested in deepening their work on climate. The program has the core goal of developing cohorts of F^4 faculty and graduate students who, in addition to conducting their own research, will become climate leaders at MIT, proactively looking for ways to forge new climate connections across schools, departments, and disciplines.

      One of the projects, “Climate Crisis and Real Estate: Science-based Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies,” led by Professor Siqi Zheng of the MIT Center for Real Estate in collaboration with colleagues from the MIT Sloan School of Management, focuses on the roughly 40 percent of carbon dioxide emissions that come from the buildings and real estate sector. Zheng notes that this sector has been slow to respond to climate change, but says that is starting to change, thanks in part to the rising awareness of climate risks and new local regulations aimed at reducing emissions from buildings.

      Using a data-driven approach, the project seeks to understand the efficient and equitable market incentives, technology solutions, and public policies that are most effective at transforming the real estate industry. Johnattan Ontiveros, a graduate student in the Technology and Policy Program, is working with Zheng on the project.

      “We were thrilled at the incredible response we received from the MIT faculty to our call for proposals, which speaks volumes about the depth and breadth of interest in climate at MIT,” says Anne White, nucleus co-chair and vice provost and associate vice president for research. “This program makes good on key commitments of the Fast Forward plan, supporting cutting-edge new work by faculty and graduate students while helping to deepen the bench of climate leaders at MIT.”

      During the 2023-24 academic year, the F^4 faculty and graduate student cohorts will come together to discuss their projects, explore opportunities for collaboration, participate in climate leadership development, and think proactively about how to deepen interdisciplinary connections among MIT community members interested in climate change.

      The six inaugural F^4 awardees are:

      Professor Tristan Brown, History Section: Humanistic Approaches to the Climate Crisis  

      With this project, Brown aims to create a new community of practice around narrative-centric approaches to environmental and climate issues. Part of a broader humanities initiative at MIT, it brings together a global working group of interdisciplinary scholars, including Serguei Saavedra (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering) and Or Porath (Tel Aviv University; Religion), collectively focused on examining the historical and present links between sacred places and biodiversity for the purposes of helping governments and nongovernmental organizations formulate better sustainability goals. Boyd Ruamcharoen, a PhD student in the History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS) program, will work with Brown on this project.

      Professor Kerri Cahoy, departments of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (AeroAstro): Onboard Autonomous AI-driven Satellite Sensor Fusion for Coastal Region Monitoring

      The motivation for this project is the need for much better data collection from satellites, where technology can be “20 years behind,” says Cahoy. As part of this project, Cahoy will pursue research in the area of autonomous artificial intelligence-enabled rapid sensor fusion (which combines data from different sensors, such as radar and cameras) onboard satellites to improve understanding of the impacts of climate change, specifically sea-level rise and hurricanes and flooding in coastal regions. Graduate students Madeline Anderson, a PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), and Mary Dahl, a PhD student in AeroAstro, will work with Cahoy on this project.

      Professor Priya Donti, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science: Robust Reinforcement Learning for High-Renewables Power Grids 

      With renewables like wind and solar making up a growing share of electricity generation on power grids, Donti’s project focuses on improving control methods for these distributed sources of electricity. The research will aim to create a realistic representation of the characteristics of power grid operations, and eventually inform scalable operational improvements in power systems. It will “give power systems operators faith that, OK, this conceptually is good, but it also actually works on this grid,” says Donti. PhD candidate Ana Rivera from EECS is the F^4 graduate student on the project.

      Professor Jason Jackson, Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP): Political Economy of the Climate Crisis: Institutions, Power and Global Governance

      This project takes a political economy approach to the climate crisis, offering a distinct lens to examine, first, the political governance challenge of mobilizing climate action and designing new institutional mechanisms to address the global and intergenerational distributional aspects of climate change; second, the economic challenge of devising new institutional approaches to equitably finance climate action; and third, the cultural challenge — and opportunity — of empowering an adaptive socio-cultural ecology through traditional knowledge and local-level social networks to achieve environmental resilience. Graduate students Chen Chu and Mrinalini Penumaka, both PhD students in DUSP, are working with Jackson on the project.

      Professor Haruko Wainwright, departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) and Civil and Environmental Engineering: Low-cost Environmental Monitoring Network Technologies in Rural Communities for Addressing Climate Justice 

      This project will establish a community-based climate and environmental monitoring network in addition to a data visualization and analysis infrastructure in rural marginalized communities to better understand and address climate justice issues. The project team plans to work with rural communities in Alaska to install low-cost air and water quality, weather, and soil sensors. Graduate students Kay Whiteaker, an MS candidate in NSE, and Amandeep Singh, and MS candidate in System Design and Management at Sloan, are working with Wainwright on the project, as is David McGee, professor in earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences.

      Professor Siqi Zheng, MIT Center for Real Estate and DUSP: Climate Crisis and Real Estate: Science-based Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies 

      See the text above for the details on this project. More

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      in Environment

      Bringing the environment to the forefront of engineering

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      In a recent podcast interview with MIT President Sally Kornbluth, Associate Professor Desirée Plata described her childhood pastime of roaming the backyards and businesses of her grandmother’s hometown of Gray, Maine. Through her wanderings, Plata noticed a disturbing pattern.

      “I was 7 or 8 when I caught wind of all the illness,” Plata recalls. “It seemed like in every other house there was somebody who had a neurological disorder or a cancer of some sort.”

      While driving home one night with her mom, Plata made her first environmental hypothesis from the back seat. “I told my mom, ‘I think there’s something in the water or air where these people live.’”

      The conversation happened in the late 1980s. Plata was a little older when she learned her intuition was correct: The Environmental Protection Agency determined that a waste disposal facility had contaminated drinking water in the area while processing more than 1 million gallons of waste between 1965 and 1978.

      “There was a New York Times article on it, but it was sort of buried in a Sunday paper and a lot of folks up in Maine didn’t hear about it,” Plata says.

      What most struck Plata was that Gray was a tight-knit community, and the people who owned the waste disposal facility were friends with everybody. Eventually, some of the owner’s children even got sick.

      “People don’t poison their neighbors on purpose,” Plata says. “A lot of industrial contamination happens either by accident or because the engineers don’t know better. As an environmental scientist and engineer, it’s part of my job to help industrial engineers of any variety design their systems and processes such that they are thinking about what’s going into the environment from the start.”

      The insight led Plata to MIT, first as a PhD student, then as a visiting professor, and today as the newly tenured associate professor of civil and environmental engineering.

      These days Plata’s work is a bit more complex than her early backseat musings. In fact, her efforts extend far beyond research and include mentoring students, entrepreneurship, coalition-building, and coordination across industry, academia, and government. But the work can still be traced back to the childhood insight that environmental optimization needs to be a more tangible and important part of everyone’s thinking.

      “People think sustainability is this nebulous thing they can’t get their hands around,” Plata says. “But there are actually a set of rigorous principles you can use, and each one of those has a metric or a thing you can measure to go with it. MIT is such an innovative place. If we can incorporate environmental objectives into design at a place like MIT, the hope is the world can engage as well.”

      Taking the plunge

      Plata was first introduced to environmental research in high school, but it wasn’t until she attended Union College and got to work in a research lab that she knew it was what she’d do for the rest of her life.

      After graduating from Union, Plata decided to skip a master’s degree and “take the plunge” into the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) joint doctoral program.

      “Talk about drinking from a firehose,” Plata says. “Everybody you bump into knows something that can help you solve the very hard problem you’re working on.”

      Plata began the program studying oil spills, and a paper she co-authored helped spur a law that changed the way oil is transported off the coast of Massachusetts. But developments in her personal life made her want to prevent environmental disasters before they happen.

      In her last year at Union, Plata’s aunt was diagnosed with breast cancer — a disease that’s been linked to one of the chemicals dumped in Gray, Maine. While Plata was at MIT, her aunt was receiving treatment at Massachusetts General Hospital down the road, so Plata would work at the lab at night, stay with her aunt during treatments all day, and go home with her on the weekends.

      “As I’m sampling oil, I’m recognizing that nothing I’m doing is going to help women like her escape the illness,” Plata recalls.

      In her third year of the MIT-WHOI program, Plata shifted her research to explore how industrial emissions generated during the creation of materials known as carbon nanotubes could inform how those valuable new materials were forming. The work led to a dramatically more sustainable way to make the materials, which are needed for important environmental applications themselves.

      After earning her PhD, Plata served as a visiting professor at MIT for two years before working in faculty positions at Duke University and Yale University, where she studied green chemistry and green optimization. She returned to MIT as an assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering in 2018.

      Working beyond academia

      While at Yale, Plata started a company, Nth Cycle, which uses electric currents to extract critical minerals like cobalt and nickel from lithium-ion batteries and other electronic waste. The company began commercial production last year.

      Plata also works extensively with government and industry, serving on a Massachusetts committee that published a roadmap to decarbonizing the state by 2050 and advising companies both formally and informally. (She estimates she gets a call every two weeks from a new company working on a sustainability problem.)

      “It’s undeniable that industry has an enormous impact on the environment,” Plata says. “Some like to think the government can wave a magic wand and make some regulation and we won’t be in this situation, but that’s not the case. There are technical challenges that need to be solved and businesses play an incredibly important role as agents of change.”

      Plata’s research at MIT, meanwhile, is focused increasingly on methane. Last year she helped create the MIT Methane Network, which she directs.

      Plata’s research has explored ways to convert methane into less harmful carbon dioxide and other fuels in places like dairy farms and coal plants. This past summer she took a team of students to dairy barns to conduct field tests.

      “If you could take methane from coal mining out of the air globally, it’s equivalent to taking all of the combustion engine vehicles off the road, even accounting for the small generation of CO2 that we have [as the result of our process],” Plata says. “If you can fix the problem at dairy farms, it’s like all the combustion engine vehicle emissions times three. It’s a hugely impactful number.”

      Taking action

      When Plata was in fourth grade, her teacher had students pick up trash around a nearby bay. She’s since done the exercise with other fourth graders.

      “You ask them what they think they’ll find, and they say, ‘Nothing. I didn’t see any trash on the way to school today,’ but when you ask them to look, everybody fills their bag by the end of the trip, and you start to realize how much fugitive emissions of waste exists, and then you start to start thinking about all of the chemical contamination that you can’t see,” Plata says.

      One of Plata’s chief research goals can be summed up with that exercise: getting people to appreciate the importance of environmental criteria and motivating them to take action.

      “Today, I see people looking for these silver bullet solutions to solve environmental problems,” Plata says. “That’s not how we got into this mess, and it’s not how we’re going to get out of it. The problem is really distributed, so what we really need is the sum of a lot of small actions to change the system.” More

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      in Energy

      3 Questions: What should scientists and the public know about nuclear waste?

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      Many researchers see an expansion of nuclear power, which produces no greenhouse gas emissions from its power generation, as an essential component of strategies to combat global climate change. Yet there is still strong resistance to such expansion, and much of that is based on the issue of how to safely dispose of the resulting radioactive waste material. MIT recently convened a workshop to help nuclear engineers, policymakers, and academics learn about approaches to communicating accurate information about the management of nuclear waste to students and the public, in hopes of allaying fears and encouraging support for the development of new, safer nuclear power plants around the world.

      Organized by Haruko Wainwright, an MIT assistant professor of nuclear science and engineering and of civil and environmental engineering, the workshop included professors, researchers, industry representatives, and government officials, and was designed to emphasize the multidisciplinary nature of the issue. MIT News asked Wainwright to describe the workshop and its conclusions, which she reported on in a paper just published in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity.

      Q: What was the main objective of the this workshop?

      A: There is a growing concern that, in spite of much excitement about new nuclear reactor deployment and nuclear energy for tackling climate change, relatively less attention is being paid to the thorny question of long-term management of the spent fuel (waste) from these reactors. The government and industry have embraced consent-based siting approaches — that is, finding sites to store and dispose nuclear waste through broad community participation with equity and environmental justice considered. However, many of us in academia feel that those in the industry are missing key facts to communicate to the public.

      Understanding and managing nuclear waste requires a multidisciplinary expertise in nuclear, civil, and chemical engineering as well as environmental and earth sciences. For example, the amount of waste per se, which is always very small for nuclear systems, is not the only factor determining the environmental impacts because some radionuclides in the waste are vastly more mobile than others, and thus can spread farther and more quickly. Nuclear engineers, environmental scientists, and others need to work together to predict the environmental impacts of radionuclides in the waste generated by the new reactors, and to develop waste isolation strategies for an extended time.

      We organized this workshop to ensure this collaborative approach is mastered from the start. A second objective was to develop a blueprint for educating next-generation engineers and scientists about nuclear waste and shaping a more broadly educated group of nuclear and general engineers.

      Q: What kinds of innovative teaching practices were discussed and recommended, and are there examples of these practices in action?

       A: Some participants teach project-based or simulation-based courses of real-world situations. For example, students are divided into several groups representing various stakeholders — such as the public, policymakers, scientists, and governments — and discuss the potential siting of a nuclear waste repository in a community. Such a course helps the students to consider the perspectives of different groups, understand a plurality of points of view, and learn how to communicate their ideas and concerns effectively. Other courses may ask students to synthesize key technical facts and numbers, and to develop a Congressional testimony statement or an opinion article for newspapers. 

      Q: What are some of the biggest misconceptions people have about nuclear waste, and how do you think these misconceptions can be addressed?

      A: The workshop participants agreed that the broader and life-cycle perspectives are important. Within the nuclear energy life cycle, for example, people focus disproportionally on high-level radioactive waste or spent fuel, which has been highly regulated and well managed. Nuclear systems also produce secondary waste, including low-level waste and uranium mining waste, which gets less attention.

      The participants also believe that the nuclear industry has been exemplary in leading the environmental and waste isolation science and technologies. Nuclear waste disposal strategies were developed in the 1950s, much earlier than other hazardous waste which began to receive serious regulation only in the 1970s. In addition, current nuclear waste disposal practices consider the compliance periods of isolation for thousands of years, while other hazardous waste disposal is not required to consider beyond 30 years, although some waste has an essentially infinite longevity, for example, mercury or lead. Finally, there is relatively unregulated waste — such as CO2 from fossil energy, agricultural effluents and other sources — that is released freely into the biosphere and is already impacting our environment. Yet, many people remain more concerned about the relatively well-regulated nuclear waste than about all these unregulated sources.

      Interestingly, many engineers — even nuclear engineers — do not know these facts. We believe that we need to teach students not just cutting-edge technologies, but also broader perspectives, including the history of industries and regulations, as well as environmental science.

      At the same time, we need to move the nuclear community to think more holistically about waste and its environmental impacts from the early stages of design of nuclear systems. We should design new reactors from the “waste up.”  We believe that the nuclear industry should continue to lead waste-management technologies and strategies, and also encourage other industries to adopt lifecycle approaches about their own waste to improve the overall sustainability. More

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      in Environment

      Desirée Plata appointed co-director of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium

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      Desirée Plata, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, has been named co-director of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC), effective Sept. 1. Plata will serve on the MCSC’s leadership team alongside Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of the MIT School of Engineering, the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and MCSC chair; Elsa Olivetti, the Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering, a professor of materials science and engineering, and associate dean of engineering, and MCSC co-director; and Jeremy Gregory, MCSC executive director.Plata succeeds Jeffrey Grossman, the Morton and Claire Goulder and Family Professor in Environmental Systems, who has served as co-director since the MCSC’s launch in January 2021. Grossman, who played a central role in the ideation and launch of the MCSC, will continue his work with the MCSC as strategic advisor.“Professor Plata is a valued member of the MIT community. She brings a deep understanding of and commitment to climate and sustainability initiatives at MIT, as well as extensive experience working with industry, to her new role within the MCSC,” says Chandrakasan. The MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium is an academia-industry collaboration working to accelerate implementation of large-scale solutions across sectors of the global economy. It aims to lay the groundwork for one critical aspect of MIT’s continued and intensified commitment to climate: helping large companies usher in, adapt to, and prosper in a decarbonized world.“We are thrilled to bring Professor Plata’s knowledge, vision, and passion to our leadership team,” says Olivetti. “Her experience developing sustainable technologies that have the potential to improve the environment and reduce the impacts of climate change will help move our work forward in meaningful ways. We have valued Professor Plata’s contributions to the consortium and look forward to continuing our work with her.”Plata played a pivotal role in the creation and launch of the MCSC’s Climate and Sustainability Scholars Program and its yearlong course for MIT rising juniors and seniors — an effort that she and Olivetti were recently recognized for with the Class of 1960 Innovation in Education Fellowship. She has also been a member of the MCSC’s Faculty Steering Committee since the consortium’s launch, helping to shape and guide its vision and work.Plata is a dedicated researcher, educator, and mentor. A member of MIT’s faculty since 2018, Plata and her team at the Plata Lab are helping to guide industry to more environmentally sustainable practices and develop new ways to protect the health of the planet — using chemistry to understand the impact that industrial materials and processes have on the environment. By coupling devices that simulate industrial systems with computation, she helps industry develop more environmentally friendly practices.To celebrate her work in the lab, classroom, and community, Plata has received many awards and honors. In 2020, she won MIT’s prestigious Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award, recognizing her innovative approach to environmentally sustainable industrial practices, her inspirational teaching and mentoring, and her service to MIT and the community. She is a two-time National Academy of Sciences Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow, a two-time National Academy of Engineers Frontiers of Engineering Fellow, and a Caltech Young Investigator Sustainability Fellow. She has also won the ACS C. Ellen Gonter Environmental Chemistry Award, an NSF CAREER award, and the 2016 Odebrecht Award for Sustainable Development.Beyond her work in the academic space, Plata is co-founder of two climate- and energy-related startups: Nth Cycle and Moxair, illustrating her commitment to translating academic innovations for real-world implementation — a core value of the MCSC.Plata received her bachelor’s degree from Union College and her PhD from the MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (MIT-WHOI) joint program in oceanography/applied ocean science and engineering. After receiving her doctorate, Plata held positions at Mount Holyoke College, Duke University, and Yale University.  More

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      in Energy

      Jackson Jewett wants to design buildings that use less concrete

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      After three years leading biking tours through U.S. National Parks, Jackson Jewett decided it was time for a change.

      “It was a lot of fun, but I realized I missed buildings,” says Jewett. “I really wanted to be a part of that industry, learn more about it, and reconnect with my roots in the built environment.”

      Jewett grew up in California in what he describes as a “very creative household.”

      “I remember making very elaborate Halloween costumes with my parents, making fun dioramas for school projects, and building forts in the backyard, that kind of thing,” Jewett explains.

      Both of his parents have backgrounds in design; his mother studied art in college and his father is a practicing architect. From a young age, Jewett was interested in following in his father’s footsteps. But when he arrived at the University of California at Berkeley in the midst of the 2009 housing crash, it didn’t seem like the right time. Jewett graduated with a degree in cognitive science and a minor in history of architecture. And even as he led tours through Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and other parks, buildings were in the back of his mind.

      It wasn’t just the built environment that Jewett was missing. He also longed for the rigor and structure of an academic environment.

      Jewett arrived at MIT in 2017, initially only planning on completing the master’s program in civil and environmental engineering. It was then that he first met Josephine Carstensen, a newly hired lecturer in the department. Jewett was interested in Carstensen’s work on “topology optimization,” which uses algorithms to design structures that can achieve their performance requirements while using only a limited amount of material. He was particularly interested in applying this approach to concrete design, and he collaborated with Carstensen to help demonstrate its viability.

      After earning his master’s, Jewett spent a year and a half as a structural engineer in New York City. But when Carstensen was hired as a professor, she reached out to Jewett about joining her lab as a PhD student. He was ready for another change.

      Now in the third year of his PhD program, Jewett’s dissertation work builds upon his master’s thesis to further refine algorithms that can design building-scale concrete structures that use less material, which would help lower carbon emissions from the construction industry. It is estimated that the concrete industry alone is responsible for 8 percent of global carbon emissions, so any efforts to reduce that number could help in the fight against climate change.

      Implementing new ideas

      Topology optimization is a small field, with the bulk of the prior work being computational without any experimental verification. The work Jewett completed for his master’s thesis was just the start of a long learning process.

      “I do feel like I’m just getting to the part where I can start implementing my own ideas without as much support as I’ve needed in the past,” says Jewett. “In the last couple of months, I’ve been working on a reinforced concrete optimization algorithm that I hope will be the cornerstone of my thesis.”

      The process of fine-tuning a generative algorithm is slow going, particularly when tackling a multifaceted problem.

      “It can take days or usually weeks to take a step toward making it work as an entire integrated system,” says Jewett. “The days when that breakthrough happens and I can see the algorithm converging on a solution that makes sense — those are really exciting moments.”

      By harnessing computational power, Jewett is searching for materially efficient components that can be used to make up structures such as bridges or buildings. These are other constraints to consider as well, particularly ensuring that the cost of manufacturing isn’t too high. Having worked in the industry before starting the PhD program, Jewett has an eye toward doing work that can be feasibly implemented.

      Inspiring others

      When Jewett first visited MIT campus, he was drawn in by the collaborative environment of the institute and the students’ drive to learn. Now, he’s a part of that process as a teaching assistant and a supervisor in the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.  

      Working as a teaching assistant isn’t a requirement for Jewett’s program, but it’s been one of his favorite parts of his time at MIT.

      “The MIT undergrads are so gifted and just constantly impress me,” says Jewett. “Being able to teach, especially in the context of what MIT values is a lot of fun. And I learn, too. My coding practices have gotten so much better since working with undergrads here.”

      Jewett’s experiences have inspired him to pursue a career in academia after the completion of his program, which he expects to complete in the spring of 2025. But he’s making sure to take care of himself along the way. He still finds time to plan cycling trips with his friends and has gotten into running ever since moving to Boston. So far, he’s completed two marathons.

      “It’s so inspiring to be in a place where so many good ideas are just bouncing back and forth all over campus,” says Jewett. “And on most days, I remember that and it inspires me. But it’s also the case that academics is hard, PhD programs are hard, and MIT — there’s pressure being here, and sometimes that pressure can feel like it’s working against you.”

      Jewett is grateful for the mental health resources that MIT provides students. While he says it can be imperfect, it’s been a crucial part of his journey.

      “My PhD thesis will be done in 2025, but the work won’t be done. The time horizon of when these things need to be implemented is relatively short if we want to make an impact before global temperatures have already risen too high. My PhD research will be developing a framework for how that could be done with concrete construction, but I’d like to keep thinking about other materials and construction methods even after this project is finished.” More

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      in Environment

      Technologies for water conservation and treatment move closer to commercialization

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      The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) provides Solutions Grants to help MIT researchers launch startup companies or products to commercialize breakthrough technologies in water and food systems. The Solutions Grant Program began in 2015 and is supported by Community Jameel. In addition to one-year, renewable grants of up to $150,000, the program also matches grantees with industry mentors and facilitates introductions to potential investors. Since its inception, the J-WAFS Solutions Program has awarded over $3 million in funding to the MIT community. Numerous startups and products, including a portable desalination device and a company commercializing a novel food safety sensor, have spun out of this support.

      The 2023 J-WAFS Solutions Grantees are Professor C. Cem Tasan of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Professor Andrew Whittle of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Tasan’s project involves reducing water use in steel manufacturing and Whittle’s project tackles harmful algal blooms in water. Project work commences this September.

      “This year’s Solutions Grants are being award to professors Tasan and Whittle to help commercialize technologies they have been developing at MIT,” says J-WAFS executive director Renee J. Robins. “With J-WAFS’ support, we hope to see the teams move their technologies from the lab to the market, so they can have a beneficial impact on water use and water quality challenges,” Robins adds.

      Reducing water consumption by solid-state steelmaking

      Water is a major requirement for steel production. The steel industry ranks fourth in industrial freshwater consumption worldwide, since large amounts of water are needed mainly for cooling purposes in the process. Unfortunately, a strong correlation has also been shown to exist between freshwater use in steelmaking and water contamination. As the global demand for steel increases and freshwater availability decreases due to climate change, improved methods for more sustainable steel production are needed.

      A strategy to reduce the water footprint of steelmaking is to explore steel recycling processes that avoid liquid metal processing. With this motivation, Cem Tasan, the Thomas B. King Associate Professor of Metallurgy in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and postdoc Onur Guvenc PhD created a new process called Scrap Metal Consolidation (SMC). SMC is based on a well-established metal forming process known as roll bonding. Conventionally, roll bonding requires intensive prior surface treatment of the raw material, specific atmospheric conditions, and high deformation levels. Tasan and Guvenc’s research revealed that SMC can overcome these restrictions by enabling the solid-state bonding of scrap into a sheet metal form, even when the surface quality, atmospheric conditions, and deformation levels are suboptimal. Through lab-scale proof-of-principle investigations, they have already identified SMC process conditions and validated the mechanical formability of resulting steel sheets, focusing on mild steel, the most common sheet metal scrap.

      The J-WAFS Solutions Grant will help the team to build customer product prototypes, design the processing unit, and develop a scale-up strategy and business model. By simultaneously decreasing water usage, energy demand, contamination risk, and carbon dioxide burden, SMC has the potential to decrease the energy need for steel recycling by up to 86 percent, as well as reduce the linked carbon dioxide emissions and safeguard the freshwater resources that would otherwise be directed to industrial consumption. 

      Detecting harmful algal blooms in water before it’s too late

      Harmful algal blooms (HABs) are a growing problem in both freshwater and saltwater environments worldwide, causing an estimated $13 billion in annual damage to drinking water, water for recreational use, commercial fishing areas, and desalination activities. HABs pose a threat to both human health and aquaculture, thereby threatening the food supply. Toxins in HABs are produced by some cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, whose communities change in composition in response to eutrophication from agricultural runoff, sewer overflows, or other events. Mitigation of risks from HABs are most effective when there is advance warning of these changes in algal communities. 

      Most in situ measurements of algae are based on fluorescence spectroscopy that is conducted with LED-induced fluorescence (LEDIF) devices, or probes that induce fluorescence of specific algal pigments using LED light sources. While LEDIFs provide reasonable estimates of concentrations of individual pigments, they lack resolution to discriminate algal classes within complex mixtures found in natural water bodies. In prior research, Andrew Whittle, the Edmund K. Turner Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, worked with colleagues to design REMORA, a low-cost, field-deployable prototype spectrofluorometer for measuring induced fluorescence. This research was part of a collaboration between MIT and the AMS Institute. Whittle and the team successfully trained a machine learning model to discriminate and quantify cell concentrations for mixtures of different algal groups in water samples through an extensive laboratory calibration program using various algae cultures. The group demonstrated these capabilities in a series of field measurements at locations in Boston and Amsterdam. 

      Whittle will work with Fábio Duarte of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, the Senseable City Lab, and MIT’s Center for Real Estate to refine the design of REMORA. They will develop software for autonomous operation of the sensor that can be deployed remotely on mobile vessels or platforms to enable high-resolution spatiotemporal monitoring for harmful algae. Sensor commercialization will hopefully be able to exploit the unique capabilities of REMORA for long-term monitoring applications by water utilities, environmental regulatory agencies, and water-intensive industries.  More