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      in Energy

      Study: Shutting down nuclear power could increase air pollution

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      Nearly 20 percent of today’s electricity in the United States comes from nuclear power. The U.S. has the largest nuclear fleet in the world, with 92 reactors scattered around the country. Many of these power plants have run for more than half a century and are approaching the end of their expected lifetimes.

      Policymakers are debating whether to retire the aging reactors or reinforce their structures to continue producing nuclear energy, which many consider a low-carbon alternative to climate-warming coal, oil, and natural gas.

      Now, MIT researchers say there’s another factor to consider in weighing the future of nuclear power: air quality. In addition to being a low carbon-emitting source, nuclear power is relatively clean in terms of the air pollution it generates. Without nuclear power, how would the pattern of air pollution shift, and who would feel its effects?

      The MIT team took on these questions in a new study appearing today in Nature Energy. They lay out a scenario in which every nuclear power plant in the country has shut down, and consider how other sources such as coal, natural gas, and renewable energy would fill the resulting energy needs throughout an entire year.

      Their analysis reveals that indeed, air pollution would increase, as coal, gas, and oil sources ramp up to compensate for nuclear power’s absence. This in itself may not be surprising, but the team has put numbers to the prediction, estimating that the increase in air pollution would have serious health effects, resulting in an additional 5,200 pollution-related deaths over a single year.

      If, however, more renewable energy sources become available to supply the energy grid, as they are expected to by the year 2030, air pollution would be curtailed, though not entirely. The team found that even under this heartier renewable scenario, there is still a slight increase in air pollution in some parts of the country, resulting in a total of 260 pollution-related deaths over one year.

      When they looked at the populations directly affected by the increased pollution, they found that Black or African American communities — a disproportionate number of whom live near fossil-fuel plants — experienced the greatest exposure.

      “This adds one more layer to the environmental health and social impacts equation when you’re thinking about nuclear shutdowns, where the conversation often focuses on local risks due to accidents and mining or long-term climate impacts,” says lead author Lyssa Freese, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).

      “In the debate over keeping nuclear power plants open, air quality has not been a focus of that discussion,” adds study author Noelle Selin, a professor in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) and EAPS. “What we found was that air pollution from fossil fuel plants is so damaging, that anything that increases it, such as a nuclear shutdown, is going to have substantial impacts, and for some people more than others.”

      The study’s MIT-affiliated co-authors also include Principal Research Scientist Sebastian Eastham and Guillaume Chossière SM ’17, PhD ’20, along with Alan Jenn of the University of California at Davis.

      Future phase-outs

      When nuclear power plants have closed in the past, fossil fuel use increased in response. In 1985, the closure of reactors in Tennessee Valley prompted a spike in coal use, while the 2012 shutdown of a plant in California led to an increase in natural gas. In Germany, where nuclear power has almost completely been phased out, coal-fired power increased initially to fill the gap.

      Noting these trends, the MIT team wondered how the U.S. energy grid would respond if nuclear power were completely phased out.

      “We wanted to think about what future changes were expected in the energy grid,” Freese says. “We knew that coal use was declining, and there was a lot of work already looking at the impact of what that would have on air quality. But no one had looked at air quality and nuclear power, which we also noticed was on the decline.”

      In the new study, the team used an energy grid dispatch model developed by Jenn to assess how the U.S. energy system would respond to a shutdown of nuclear power. The model simulates the production of every power plant in the country and runs continuously to estimate, hour by hour, the energy demands in 64 regions across the country.

      Much like the way the actual energy market operates, the model chooses to turn a plant’s production up or down based on cost: Plants producing the cheapest energy at any given time are given priority to supply the grid over more costly energy sources.

      The team fed the model available data on each plant’s changing emissions and energy costs throughout an entire year. They then ran the model under different scenarios, including: an energy grid with no nuclear power, a baseline grid similar to today’s that includes nuclear power, and a grid with no nuclear power that also incorporates the additional renewable sources that are expected to be added by 2030.

      They combined each simulation with an atmospheric chemistry model to simulate how each plant’s various emissions travel around the country and to overlay these tracks onto maps of population density. For populations in the path of pollution, they calculated the risk of premature death based on their degree of exposure.

      System response

      Play video

      Courtesy of the researchers, edited by MIT News

      Their analysis showed a clear pattern: Without nuclear power, air pollution worsened in general, mainly affecting regions in the East Coast, where nuclear power plants are mostly concentrated. Without those plants, the team observed an uptick in production from coal and gas plants, resulting in 5,200 pollution-related deaths across the country, compared to the baseline scenario.

      They also calculated that more people are also likely to die prematurely due to climate impacts from the increase in carbon dioxide emissions, as the grid compensates for nuclear power’s absence. The climate-related effects from this additional influx of carbon dioxide could lead to 160,000 additional deaths over the next century.

      “We need to be thoughtful about how we’re retiring nuclear power plants if we are trying to think about them as part of an energy system,” Freese says. “Shutting down something that doesn’t have direct emissions itself can still lead to increases in emissions, because the grid system will respond.”

      “This might mean that we need to deploy even more renewables, in order to fill the hole left by nuclear, which is essentially a zero-emissions energy source,” Selin adds. “Otherwise we will have a reduction in air quality that we weren’t necessarily counting on.”

      This study was supported, in part, by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. More

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      in Environment

      Victor K. McElheny Award in science journalism honors series on poultry farming and the environment

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      The Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT has announced that the investigative series “Big Poultry,” published by The Charlotte Observer and The Raleigh News & Observer, has been chosen as the 2023 winner of the Victor K. McElheny Award for local and regional journalism. This series of articles uncovered the wide-ranging, unregulated impact of the poultry industry in North Carolina — from odors to pollution to the predatory nature of poultry contract farming.

      The series draws from more than 130 interviews and involved extensive analysis of satellite imagery, industry finances, and state laws, among other data. It expertly merges personal stories and hard data and creates a cohesive and comprehensive deep dive into an underreported, but pervasive, phenomenon in North Carolina. The series has engaged tens of thousands of readers and sparked a debate about the poultry industry in the state legislature.

      “With remarkable enterprise and persistence, these reporters from the Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer penetrated the secrecy that obscures the scope and impact of thousands of industrial-scale poultry production farms in North Carolina, which together generate billions of pounds of unchecked agricultural waste,” a judge said of the series.

      “Big Poultry” was reported and written by Charlotte Observer investigative reporters Gavin Off and Ames Alexander and News & Observer environmental reporter Adam Wagner. The series was edited by McClatchy Southeast Investigations Editor Cathy Clabby and was supported by the work of News & Observer investigative reporters David Raynor and Tyler Dukes, and McClatchy newspapers visual journalists.

      “The Victor K. McElheny award recognizes the remarkable science reporting done at the local level by American journalists, and ‘Big Poultry’ is an outstanding example of that,” says Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT. “We are proud to honor this series, which raises such important issues and reminds us of the essential role of journalists in protecting our country by illuminating such problems.”

      The 2023 McElheny Award received a robust and diverse pool of submissions from around the United States. Also on the short list of finalists for the award are four other exceptional journalism projects: “Undermined,” a collaboration between Navajo Times, Santa Fe Reporter, Source New Mexico, Capital & Main, and USA Today that uncovered the link between uranium poisoning and increased vulnerability to the Covid-19 virus in the Navajo Nation; “Fighting for Air,” from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which examines the intersection of asthma with substandard housing and health systems; “When the Heat is Unbearable but There’s Nowhere to Go,” a collaboration between High Country News and Type Investigations, which exposed the impact of extreme heat on the incarcerated population of Washington State; and “There Must be Something in the Water,” published by the Minnesota Reformer, which investigated how the company 3M obscured the impact of chemical contamination in the water of Washington Country, Minnesota, and the ongoing health impacts of said contamination on the population.

      Named after the Knight Science Journalism Program’s founding director, the Victor K. McElheny Award was established to honor outstanding coverage of science, public-health, technology, and environmental issues at the local and regional level. The winning team will receive a $10,000 prize. The winners will be honored at the Knight Science Journalism Program’s 40th anniversary celebration on Saturday, April 22.

      The Knight Science Journalism Program extends a special thanks to the 2022 McElheny Award jurors: Jeff DelViscio (senior multimedia editor, Scientific American); Robert Lee Hotz (president, Alicia Patterson Foundation); Brant Houston, (Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting, University of Illinois); Amina Khan (science editor, National Public Radio); and Maya Kapoor (assistant professor of English, North Carolina State University). The program also extends warm appreciation to the award’s screeners: Mary-Rose Abraham, Sebastien Malo, Wojtek Brzezinski, and Kelly Servick.

      The McElheny Award is made possible by generous support from Victor K. McElheny, Ruth McElheny, and the Rita Allen Foundation.

      A complete list of 2023 Victor K. McElheny Award honorees:

      Winner

      “Big Poultry,” by Gavin Off , Ames Alexander, and Adam Wagner (The Charlotte Observer and The Raleigh News & Observer)

      Finalists

      “Undermined,” by Eli Cahan (Navajo Times, Santa Fe Reporter, Source New Mexico, Capital & Main, and USA Today)

      “Fighting for Air,” by Talis Shelbourne (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

      “When the Heat is Unbearable but There’s Nowhere to Go,” by Sarah Sax (High Country News and Type Investigations)

      “There Must be Something in the Water,” by Deena Winter (Minnesota Reformer) More

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      in Environment

      Fieldwork class examines signs of climate change in Hawaii

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      When Joy Domingo-Kameenui spent two weeks in her native Hawaii as part of MIT class 1.091 (Traveling Research Environmental eXperiences), she was surprised to learn about the number of invasive and endangered species. “I knew about Hawaiian ecology from middle and high school but wasn’t fully aware to the extent of how invasive species and diseases have resulted in many of Hawaii’s endemic species becoming threatened,” says Domingo-Kameenui.  

      Domingo-Kameenui was part of a group of MIT students who conducted field research on the Big Island of Hawaii in the Traveling Research Environmental eXperiences (TREX) class offered by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The class provides undergraduates an opportunity to gain hands-on environmental fieldwork experience using Hawaii’s geology, chemistry, and biology to address two main topics of climate change concern: sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions and forest health.

      “Hawaii is this great system for studying the effects of climate change,” says David Des Marais, the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and lead instructor of TREX. “Historically, Hawaii has had occasional mild droughts that are related to El Niño, but the droughts are getting stronger and more frequent. And we know these types of extreme weather events are going to happen worldwide.”

      Climate change impacts on forests

      The frequency and intensity of extreme events are also becoming more of a problem for forests and plant life. Forests have a certain distribution of vegetation and as you get higher in elevation, the trees gradually turn into shrubs, and then rock. Trees don’t grow above the timberline, where the temperature and precipitation changes dramatically at the high elevations. “But unlike the Sierra Nevada or the Rockies, where the trees gradually change as you go up the mountains, in Hawaii, they gradually change, and then they just stop,” says Des Marais.

      “Why this is an interesting model for climate change,” explains Des Marais, “is that line where trees stop [growing] is going to move, and it’s going to become more unstable as the trade winds are affected by global patterns of air circulation, which are changing because of climate change.”

      The research question that Des Marais asks students to explore — How is the Hawaiian forest going to be affected by climate change? — uses Hawaii as a model for broader patterns in climate change for forests.

      To dive deeper into this question, students trekked up the mountain taking ground-level measurements of canopy cover with a camera app on their cellphones, estimating how much tree coverage blankets the sky when looking up, and observing how the canopy cover thins until they see no tree coverage at all as they go further up the mountain. Drones also flew above the forest to measure chlorophyll and how much plant matter remains. And then satellite data products from NASA and the European Space Agency were used to measure the distribution of chlorophyll, climate, and precipitation data from space.

      They also worked directly with community stakeholders at three locations around the island to access the forests and use technology to assess the ecology and biodiversity challenges. One of those stakeholders was the Kamehameha Schools Natural and Cultural Ecosystems Division, whose mission is to preserve the land and manage it in a sustainable way. Students worked with their plant biologists to help address and think about what management decisions will support the future health of their forests.

      “Across the island, rising temperatures and abnormal precipitation patterns are the main drivers of drought, which really has significant impacts on biodiversity, and overall human health,” says Ava Gillikin, a senior in civil and environmental engineering.

      Gillikin adds that “a good proportion of the island’s water system relies on rainwater catchment, exposing vulnerabilities to fluctuations in rain patterns that impact many people’s lives.”

      Deadly threats to native plants

      The other threats to Hawaii’s forests are invasive species causing ecological harm, from the prevalence of non-indigenous mosquitoes leading to increases in avian malaria and native bird death that threaten the native ecosystem, to a plant called strawberry guava.

      Strawberry guava is taking over Hawaii’s native ōhiʻa trees, which Domingo-Kameenui says is also contributing to Hawaii’s water production. “The plants absorb water quickly so there’s less water runoff for groundwater systems.”

      A fungal pathogen is also infecting native ōhiʻa trees. The disease, called rapid ʻohiʻa death (ROD), kills the tree within a few days to weeks. The pathogen was identified by researchers on the island in 2014 from the fungal genus, Ceratocystis. The fungal pathogen was likely carried into the forests by humans on their shoes, or contaminated tools, gear, and vehicles traveling from one location to another. The fungal disease is also transmitted by beetles that bore into trees and create a fine powder-like dust. This dust from an infected tree is then mixed with the fungal spores and can easily spread to other trees by wind, or contaminated soil.

      For Gillikin, seeing the effects of ROD in the field highlighted the impact improper care and preparation can have on native forests. “The ‘ohi’a tree is one of the most prominent native trees, and ROD can kill the trees very rapidly by putting a strain on its vascular system and preventing water from reaching all parts of the tree,” says Gillikin.

      Before entering the forests, students sprayed their shoes and gear with ethanol frequently to prevent the spread.

      Uncovering chemical and particle formation

      A second research project in TREX studied volcanic smog (vog) that plagues the air, making visibility problematic at times and causing a lot of health problems for people in Hawaii. The active Kilauea volcano releases SO2 into the atmosphere. When the SO2 mixes with other gasses emitted from the volcano and interacts with sunlight and the atmosphere, particulate matter forms.

      Students in the Kroll Group, led by Jesse Kroll, professor of civil and environmental engineering and chemical engineering, have been studying SO2 and particulate matter over the years, but not the chemistry directly in how those chemical transformations occur.

      “There’s a hypothesis that there is a functional connection between the SO2 and particular matter, but that’s never been directly demonstrated,” says Des Marais.

      Testing that hypothesis, the students were able to measure two different sizes of particulate matter formed from the SO2 and develop a model to show how much vog is generated downstream of the volcano.

      They spent five days at two sites from sunrise to late morning measuring particulate matter formation as the sun comes up and starts creating new particles. Using a combination of data sources for meteorology, such as UV index, wind speed, and humidity, the students built a model that demonstrates all the pieces of an equation that can calculate when new particles are formed.

      “You can build what you think that equation is based on first-principle understanding of the chemical composition, but what they did was measured it in real time with measurements of the chemical reagents,” says Des Marias.

      The students measured what was going to catalyze the chemical reaction of particulate matter — for instance, things like sunlight and ozone — and then calculated numbers to the outputs.

      “What they found, and what seems to be happening, is that the chemical reagents are accumulating overnight,” says Des Marais. “Then as soon as the sun rises in the morning all the transformation happens in the atmosphere. A lot of the reagents are used up and the wind blows everything away, leaving the other side of the island with polluted air,” adds Des Marais.

      “I found the vog particle formation fieldwork a surprising research learning,” adds Domingo-Kameenui who did some atmospheric chemistry research in the Kroll Group. “I just thought particle formation happened in the air, but we found wind direction and wind speed at a certain time of the day was extremely important to particle formation. It’s not just chemistry you need to look at, but meteorology and sunlight,” she adds.

      Both Domingo-Kameenui and Gillikin found the fieldwork class an important and memorable experience with new insight that they will carry with them beyond MIT.  

      How Gillikin approaches fieldwork or any type of community engagement in another culture is what she will remember most. “When entering another country or culture, you are getting the privilege to be on their land, to learn about their history and experiences, and to connect with so many brilliant people,” says Gillikin. “Everyone we met in Hawaii had so much passion for their work, and approaching those environments with respect and openness to learn is what I experienced firsthand and will take with me throughout my career.” More

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      in Energy

      An education in climate change

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      Several years ago, Christopher Knittel’s father, then a math teacher, shared a mailing he had received at his high school. When he opened the packet, alarm bells went off for Knittel, who is the George P. Shultz Professor of Energy Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the deputy director for policy at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI). “It was a slickly produced package of materials purporting to show how to teach climate change,” he says. “In reality, it was a thinly veiled attempt to kindle climate change denial.”

      Knittel was especially concerned to learn that this package had been distributed to schools nationwide. “Many teachers in search of information on climate change might use this material because they are not in a position to judge its scientific validity,” says Knittel, who is also the faculty director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR). “I decided that MIT, which is committed to true science, was in the perfect position to develop its own climate change curriculum.”

      Today, Knittel is spearheading the Climate Action Through Education (CATE) program, a curriculum rolling out in pilot form this year in more than a dozen Massachusetts high schools, and eventually in high schools across the United States. To spur its broad adoption, says Knittel, the CATE curriculum features a unique suite of attributes: the creation of climate-based lessons for a range of disciplines beyond science, adherence to state-based education standards to facilitate integration into established curricula, material connecting climate change impacts to specific regions, and opportunities for students to explore climate solutions.

      CATE aims to engage both students and teachers in a subject that can be overwhelming. “We will be honest about the threats posed by climate change but also give students a sense of agency that they can do something about this,” says Knittel. “And for the many teachers — especially non-science teachers — starved for knowledge and background material, CATE offers resources to give them confidence to implement our curriculum.”

      Partnering with teachers

      From the outset, CATE sought guidance and hands-on development help from educators. Project manager Aisling O’Grady surveyed teachers to learn about their experiences teaching about climate and to identify the kinds of resources they lacked. She networked with MIT’s K-12 education experts and with Antje Danielson, MITEI director of education, “bouncing ideas off of them to shape the direction of our effort,” she says.

      O’Grady gained two critical insights from this process: “I realized that we needed practicing high school teachers as curriculum developers and that they had to represent different subject areas, because climate change is inherently interdisciplinary,” she says. This echoes the philosophy behind MITEI’s Energy Studies minor, she remarks, which includes classes from MIT’s different schools. “While science helps us understand and find solutions for climate change, it touches so many other areas, from economics, policy, environmental justice and politics, to history and literature.”

      In line with this thinking, CATE recruited Massachusetts teachers representing key subject areas in the high school curriculum: Amy Block, a full-time math teacher, and Lisa Borgatti, a full-time science teacher, both at the Governor’s Academy in Byfield; and Kathryn Teissier du Cros, a full-time language arts teacher at Newton North High School.

      The fourth member of this cohort, Michael Kozuch, is a full-time history teacher at Newton South High School, where he has worked for 24 years. Kozuch became engaged with environmental issues 15 years ago, introducing an elective in sustainability at Newton South. He serves on the coordinating committee for the Climate Action Network at the Massachusetts Teachers Association. He also is president of Earth Day Boston and organized Boston’s 50th anniversary celebration of Earth Day. When he learned that MIT was seeking teachers to help develop a climate education curriculum, he immediately applied.

      “I’ve heard time and again from teachers across the state that they want to incorporate climate change into the curriculum but don’t know how to make it work, given lesson plans and schedules geared toward preparing students for specific tests,” says Kozuch. “I knew that for a climate curriculum to succeed, it had to be part of an integrated approach.”

      Using climate as a lens

      Over the course of a year, Kozuch and fellow educators created units that fit into their pre-existing syllabi but were woven through with relevant climate change themes. Kozuch already had some experience in this vein, describing the role of the Industrial Revolution in triggering the use of fossil fuels and the greenhouse gas emissions that resulted. For CATE, Kozuch explored additional ways of shifting focus in covering U.S. history. There are, for instance, lessons looking at westward expansion in terms of land use, expulsion of Indigenous people, and environmental justice, and at the Baby Boom period and the emergence of the environmental movement.

      In English/language arts, there are units dedicated to explaining terms used by scientists and policymakers, such as “anthropogenic,” as well as lessons devoted to climate change fiction and to student-originated sustainability projects.

      The science and math classes work independently but also dovetail. For instance, there are science lessons that demystify the greenhouse effect, utilizing experiments to track fossil fuel emissions, which link to math lessons that calculate and graph the average rate of change of global carbon emissions. To make these classes even more relevant, there are labs where students compare carbon emissions in Massachusetts to those of a neighboring state, and where they determine the environmental and economic costs of plugging in electric devices in their own homes.

      Throughout this curriculum-shaping process, O’Grady and the teachers sought feedback from MIT faculty from a range of disciplines, including David McGee, associate professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. With the help of CATE undergraduate researcher Heidi Li ’22, the team held a focus group with the Sustainable Energy Alliance, an undergraduate student club. In spring 2022, CATE convened a professional development workshop in collaboration with the Massachusetts Teachers Association Climate Action Network, Earth Day Boston, and MIT’s Office of Government and Community Relations, sponsored by the Beker Foundation, to evaluate 15 discrete CATE lessons. One of the workshop participants, Gary Smith, a teacher from St. John’s Preparatory School in Danvers, Massachusetts, signed on as a volunteer science curriculum developer.

      “We had a diverse pool of teachers who thought the lessons were fantastic, but among their suggestions noted that their student cohorts included new English speakers, who needed simpler language and more pictures,” says O’Grady. “This was extremely useful to us, and we revised the curriculum because we want to reach students at every level of learning.”

      Reaching all the schools

      Now, the CATE curriculum is in the hands of a cohort of Massachusetts teachers. Each of these educators will test one or more of the lessons and lab activities over the next year, checking in regularly with MIT partners to report on their classroom experiences. The CATE team is building a Climate Education Resource Network of MIT graduate students, postdocs, and research staff who can answer teachers’ specific climate questions and help them find additional resources or datasets. Additionally, teachers will have the opportunity to attend two in-person cohort meetings and be paired with graduate student “climate advisors.”

      In spring 2023, in honor of Earth Day, O’Grady and Knittel want to bring CATE first adopters — high school teachers, students, and their families — to campus. “We envision professors giving mini lectures, youth climate groups discussing how to get involved in local actions, and our team members handing out climate change packets to students to spark conversations with their families at home,” says O’Grady.

      By creating a positive experience around their curriculum in these pilot schools, the CATE team hopes to promote its dissemination to many more Massachusetts schools in 2023. The team plans on enhancing lessons, offering more paths to integration in high school studies, and creating a companion resource website for teachers. Knittel wants to establish footholds in school after school, in Massachusetts and beyond.

      “I plan to spend a lot of my time convincing districts and states to adopt,” he says. “If one teacher tells another that the curriculum is useful, with touchpoints in different disciplines, that’s how we get a foot in the door.”

      Knittel is not shying away from places where “climate change is a politicized topic.” He hopes to team up with universities in states where there might be resistance to including such lessons in schools to develop the curriculum. Although his day job involves computing household-level carbon footprints, determining the relationship between driving behavior and the price of gasoline, and promoting wise climate policy, Knittel plans to push CATE as far as he can. “I want this curriculum to be adopted by everybody — that’s my goal,” he says.

      “In one sense, I’m not the natural person for this job,” he admits. “But I share the mission and passion of MITEI and CEEPR for decarbonizing our economy in ways that are socially equitable and efficient, and part of doing that is educating Americans about the actual costs and consequences of climate change.”

      The CATE program is sponsored by MITEI, CEEPR, and the MIT Vice President for Research.

      This article appears in the Winter 2023 issue of Energy Futures, the magazine of the MIT Energy Initiative. More

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      in Energy

      Helping the cause of environmental resilience

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      Haruko Wainwright, the Norman C. Rasmussen Career Development Professor in Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) and assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering at MIT, grew up in rural Japan, where many nuclear facilities are located. She remembers worrying about the facilities as a child. Wainwright was only 6 at the time of the Chernobyl accident in 1986, but still recollects it vividly.

      Those early memories have contributed to Wainwright’s determination to research how technologies can mold environmental resilience — the capability of mitigating the consequences of accidents and recovering from contamination.

      Wainwright believes that environmental monitoring can help improve resilience. She co-leads the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Advanced Long-term Environmental Monitoring Systems (ALTEMIS) project, which integrates technologies such as in situ sensors, geophysics, remote sensing, simulations, and artificial intelligence to establish new paradigms for monitoring. The project focuses on soil and groundwater contamination at more than 100 U.S. sites that were used for nuclear weapons production.

      As part of this research, which was featured last year in Environmental Science & Technology Journal, Wainwright is working on a machine learning framework for improving environmental monitoring strategies. She hopes the ALTEMIS project will enable the rapid detection of anomalies while ensuring the stability of residual contamination and waste disposal facilities.

      Childhood in rural Japan

      Even as a child, Wainwright was interested in physics, history, and a variety of other subjects.

      But growing up in a rural area was not ideal for someone interested in STEM. There were no engineers or scientists in the community and no science museums, either. “It was not so cool to be interested in science, and I never talked about my interest with anyone,” Wainwright recalls.

      Television and books were the only door to the world of science. “I did not study English until middle school and I had never been on a plane until college. I sometimes find it miraculous that I am now working in the U.S. and teaching at MIT,” she says.

      As she grew a little older, Wainwright heard a lot of discussions about nuclear facilities in the region and many stories about Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

      At the same time, giants like Marie Curie inspired her to pursue science. Nuclear physics was particularly fascinating. “At some point during high school, I started wondering ‘what are radiations, what is radioactivity, what is light,’” she recalls. Reading Richard Feynman’s books and trying to understand quantum mechanics made her want to study physics in college.

      Pursuing research in the United States

      Wainwright pursued an undergraduate degree in engineering physics at Kyoto University. After two research internships in the United States, Wainwright was impressed by the dynamic and fast-paced research environment in the country.

      And compared to Japan, there were “more women in science and engineering,” Wainwright says. She enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley in 2005, where she completed her doctorate in nuclear engineering with minors in statistics and civil and environmental engineering.

      Before moving to MIT NSE in 2022, Wainwright was a staff scientist in the Earth and Environmental Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). She worked on a variety of topics, including radioactive contamination, climate science, CO2 sequestration, precision agriculture, and watershed science. Her time at LBNL helped Wainwright build a solid foundation about a variety of environmental sensors and monitoring and simulation methods across different earth science disciplines.   

      Empowering communities through monitoring

      One of the most compelling takeaways from Wainwright’s early research: People trust actual measurements and data as facts, even though they are skeptical about models and predictions. “I talked with many people living in Fukushima prefecture. Many of them have dosimeters and measure radiation levels on their own. They might not trust the government, but they trust their own data and are then convinced that it is safe to live there and to eat local food,” Wainwright says.

      She has been impressed that area citizens have gained significant knowledge about radiation and radioactivity through these efforts. “But they are often frustrated that people living far away, in cities like Tokyo, still avoid agricultural products from Fukushima,” Wainwright says.

      Wainwright thinks that data derived from environmental monitoring — through proper visualization and communication — can address misconceptions and fake news that often hurt people near contaminated sites.

      Wainwright is now interested in how these technologies — tested with real data at contaminated sites — can be proactively used for existing and future nuclear facilities “before contamination happens,” as she explored for Nuclear News. “I don’t think it is a good idea to simply dismiss someone’s concern as irrational. Showing credible data has been much more effective to provide assurance. Or a proper monitoring network would enable us to minimize contamination or support emergency responses when accidents happen,” she says.

      Educating communities and students

      Part of empowering communities involves improving their ability to process science-based information. “Potentially hazardous facilities always end up in rural regions; minorities’ concerns are often ignored. The problem is that these regions don’t produce so many scientists or policymakers; they don’t have a voice,” Wainwright says, “I am determined to dedicate my time to improve STEM education in rural regions and to increase the voice in these regions.”

      In a project funded by DOE, she collaborates with the team of researchers at the University of Alaska — the Alaska Center for Energy and Power and Teaching Through Technology program — aiming to improve STEM education for rural and indigenous communities. “Alaska is an important place for energy transition and environmental justice,” Wainwright says. Micro-nuclear reactors can potentially improve the life of rural communities who bear the brunt of the high cost of fuel and transportation. However, there is a distrust of nuclear technologies, stemming from past nuclear weapon testing. At the same time, Alaska has vast metal mining resources for renewable energy and batteries. And there are concerns about environmental contamination from mining and various sources. The teams’ vision is much broader, she points out. “The focus is on broader environmental monitoring technologies and relevant STEM education, addressing general water and air qualities,” Wainwright says.

      The issues also weave into the courses Wainwright teaches at MIT. “I think it is important for engineering students to be aware of environmental justice related to energy waste and mining as well as past contamination events and their recovery,” she says. “It is not OK just to send waste to, or develop mines in, rural regions, which could be a special place for some people. We need to make sure that these developments will not harm the environment and health of local communities.” Wainwright also hopes that this knowledge will ultimately encourage students to think creatively about engineering designs that minimize waste or recycle material.

      The last question of the final quiz of one of her recent courses was: Assume that you store high-level radioactive waste in your “backyard.” What technical strategies would make you and your family feel safe? “All students thought about this question seriously and many suggested excellent points, including those addressing environmental monitoring,” Wainwright says, “that made me hopeful about the future.” More

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      in Environment

      Low-cost device can measure air pollution anywhere

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      Air pollution is a major public health problem: The World Health Organization has estimated that it leads to over 4 million premature deaths worldwide annually. Still, it is not always extensively measured. But now an MIT research team is rolling out an open-source version of a low-cost, mobile pollution detector that could enable people to track air quality more widely.

      The detector, called Flatburn, can be made by 3D printing or by ordering inexpensive parts. The researchers have now tested and calibrated it in relation to existing state-of-the-art machines, and are publicly releasing all the information about it — how to build it, use it, and interpret the data.

      “The goal is for community groups or individual citizens anywhere to be able to measure local air pollution, identify its sources, and, ideally, create feedback loops with officials and stakeholders to create cleaner conditions,” says Carlo Ratti, director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab. 

      “We’ve been doing several pilots around the world, and we have refined a set of prototypes, with hardware, software, and protocols, to make sure the data we collect are robust from an environmental science point of view,” says Simone Mora, a research scientist at Senseable City Lab and co-author of a newly published paper detailing the scanner’s testing process. The Flatburn device is part of a larger project, known as City Scanner, using mobile devices to better understand urban life.

      “Hopefully with the release of the open-source Flatburn we can get grassroots groups, as well as communities in less developed countries, to follow our approach and build and share knowledge,” says An Wang, a researcher at Senseable City Lab and another of the paper’s co-authors.

      The paper, “Leveraging Machine Learning Algorithms to Advance Low-Cost Air Sensor Calibration in Stationary and Mobile Settings,” appears in the journal Atmospheric Environment.

      In addition to Wang, Mora, and Ratti the study’s authors are: Yuki Machida, a former research fellow at Senseable City Lab; Priyanka deSouza, an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Colorado at Denver; Tiffany Duhl, a researcher with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and a Tufts University research associate at the time of the project; Neelakshi Hudda, a research assistant professor at Tufts University; John L. Durant, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Tufts University; and Fabio Duarte, principal research scientist at Senseable City Lab.

      The Flatburn concept at Senseable City Lab dates back to about 2017, when MIT researchers began prototyping a mobile pollution detector, originally to be deployed on garbage trucks in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The detectors are battery-powered and rechargable, either from power sources or a solar panel, with data stored on a card in the device that can be accessed remotely.

      The current extension of that project involved testing the devices in New York City and the Boston area, by seeing how they performed in comparison to already-working pollution detection systems. In New York, the researchers used 5 detectors to collect 1.6 million data points over four weeks in 2021, working with state officials to compare the results. In Boston, the team used mobile sensors, evaluating the Flatburn devices against a state-of-the-art system deployed by Tufts University along with a state agency.

      In both cases, the detectors were set up to measure concentrations of fine particulate matter as well as nitrogen dioxide, over an area of about 10 meters. Fine particular matter refers to tiny particles often associated with burning matter, from power plants, internal combustion engines in autos and fires, and more.

      The research team found that the mobile detectors estimated somewhat lower concentrations of fine particulate matter than the devices already in use, but with a strong enough correlation so that, with adjustments for weather conditions and other factors, the Flatburn devices can produce reliable results.

      “After following their deployment for a few months we can confidently say our low-cost monitors should behave the same way [as standard detectors],” Wang says. “We have a big vision, but we still have to make sure the data we collect is valid and can be used for regulatory and policy purposes,”

      Duarte adds: “If you follow these procedures with low-cost sensors you can still acquire good enough data to go back to [environmental] agencies with it, and say, ‘Let’s talk.’”

      The researchers did find that using the units in a mobile setting — on top of automobiles — means they will currently have an operating life of six months. They also identified a series of potential issues that people will have to deal with when using the Flatburn detectors generally. These include what the research team calls “drift,” the gradual changing of the detector’s readings over time, as well as “aging,” the more fundamental deterioration in a unit’s physical condition.

      Still, the researchers believe the units will function well, and they are providing complete instructions in their release of Flatburn as an open-source tool. That even includes guidance for working with officials, communities, and stakeholders to process the results and attempt to shape action.

      “It’s very important to engage with communities, to allow them to reflect on sources of pollution,” says Mora. 

      “The original idea of the project was to democratize environmental data, and that’s still the goal,” Duarte adds. “We want people to have the skills to analyze the data and engage with communities and officials.” More

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      in Environment

      Study: Smoke particles from wildfires can erode the ozone layer

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      A wildfire can pump smoke up into the stratosphere, where the particles drift for over a year. A new MIT study has found that while suspended there, these particles can trigger chemical reactions that erode the protective ozone layer shielding the Earth from the sun’s damaging ultraviolet radiation.

      The study, which appears today in Nature, focuses on the smoke from the “Black Summer” megafire in eastern Australia, which burned from December 2019 into January 2020. The fires — the country’s most devastating on record — scorched tens of millions of acres and pumped more than 1 million tons of smoke into the atmosphere.

      The MIT team identified a new chemical reaction by which smoke particles from the Australian wildfires made ozone depletion worse. By triggering this reaction, the fires likely contributed to a 3-5 percent depletion of total ozone at mid-latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere, in regions overlying Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Africa and South America.

      The researchers’ model also indicates the fires had an effect in the polar regions, eating away at the edges of the ozone hole over Antarctica. By late 2020, smoke particles from the Australian wildfires widened the Antarctic ozone hole by 2.5 million square kilometers — 10 percent of its area compared to the previous year.

      It’s unclear what long-term effect wildfires will have on ozone recovery. The United Nations recently reported that the ozone hole, and ozone depletion around the world, is on a recovery track, thanks to a sustained international effort to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals. But the MIT study suggests that as long as these chemicals persist in the atmosphere, large fires could spark a reaction that temporarily depletes ozone.

      “The Australian fires of 2020 were really a wake-up call for the science community,” says Susan Solomon, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies at MIT and a leading climate scientist who first identified the chemicals responsible for the Antarctic ozone hole. “The effect of wildfires was not previously accounted for in [projections of] ozone recovery. And I think that effect may depend on whether fires become more frequent and intense as the planet warms.”

      The study is led by Solomon and MIT research scientist Kane Stone, along with collaborators from the Institute for Environmental and Climate Research in Guangzhou, China; the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research; and Colorado State University.

      Chlorine cascade

      The new study expands on a 2022 discovery by Solomon and her colleagues, in which they first identified a chemical link between wildfires and ozone depletion. The researchers found that chlorine-containing compounds, originally emitted by factories in the form of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), could react with the surface of fire aerosols. This interaction, they found, set off a chemical cascade that produced chlorine monoxide — the ultimate ozone-depleting molecule. Their results showed that the Australian wildfires likely depleted ozone through this newly identified chemical reaction.

      “But that didn’t explain all the changes that were observed in the stratosphere,” Solomon says. “There was a whole bunch of chlorine-related chemistry that was totally out of whack.”

      In the new study, the team took a closer look at the composition of molecules in the stratosphere following the Australian wildfires. They combed through three independent sets of satellite data and observed that in the months following the fires, concentrations of hydrochloric acid dropped significantly at mid-latitudes, while chlorine monoxide spiked.

      Hydrochloric acid (HCl) is present in the stratosphere as CFCs break down naturally over time. As long as chlorine is bound in the form of HCl, it doesn’t have a chance to destroy ozone. But if HCl breaks apart, chlorine can react with oxygen to form ozone-depleting chlorine monoxide.

      In the polar regions, HCl can break apart when it interacts with the surface of cloud particles at frigid temperatures of about 155 kelvins. However, this reaction was not expected to occur at mid-latitudes, where temperatures are much warmer.

      “The fact that HCl at mid-latitudes dropped by this unprecedented amount was to me kind of a danger signal,” Solomon says.

      She wondered: What if HCl could also interact with smoke particles, at warmer temperatures and in a way that released chlorine to destroy ozone? If such a reaction was possible, it would explain the imbalance of molecules and much of the ozone depletion observed following the Australian wildfires.

      Smoky drift

      Solomon and her colleagues dug through the chemical literature to see what sort of organic molecules could react with HCl at warmer temperatures to break it apart.

      “Lo and behold, I learned that HCl is extremely soluble in a whole broad range of organic species,” Solomon says. “It likes to glom on to lots of compounds.”

      The question then, was whether the Australian wildfires released any of those compounds that could have triggered HCl’s breakup and any subsequent depletion of ozone. When the team looked at the composition of smoke particles in the first days after the fires, the picture was anything but clear.

      “I looked at that stuff and threw up my hands and thought, there’s so much stuff in there, how am I ever going to figure this out?” Solomon recalls. “But then I realized it had actually taken some weeks before you saw the HCl drop, so you really need to look at the data on aged wildfire particles.”

      When the team expanded their search, they found that smoke particles persisted over months, circulating in the stratosphere at mid-latitudes, in the same regions and times when concentrations of HCl dropped.

      “It’s the aged smoke particles that really take up a lot of the HCl,” Solomon says. “And then you get, amazingly, the same reactions that you get in the ozone hole, but over mid-latitudes, at much warmer temperatures.”

      When the team incorporated this new chemical reaction into a model of atmospheric chemistry, and simulated the conditions of the Australian wildfires, they observed a 5 percent depletion of ozone throughout the stratosphere at mid-latitudes, and a 10 percent widening of the ozone hole over Antarctica.

      The reaction with HCl is likely the main pathway by which wildfires can deplete ozone. But Solomon guesses there may be other chlorine-containing compounds drifting in the stratosphere, that wildfires could unlock.

      “There’s now sort of a race against time,” Solomon says. “Hopefully, chlorine-containing compounds will have been destroyed, before the frequency of fires increases with climate change. This is all the more reason to be vigilant about global warming and these chlorine-containing compounds.”

      This research was supported, in part, by NASA and the U.S. National Science Foundation. More

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      in Environment

      Improving health outcomes by targeting climate and air pollution simultaneously

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      Climate policies are typically designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that result from human activities and drive climate change. The largest source of these emissions is the combustion of fossil fuels, which increases atmospheric concentrations of ozone, fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and other air pollutants that pose public health risks. While climate policies may result in lower concentrations of health-damaging air pollutants as a “co-benefit” of reducing greenhouse gas emissions-intensive activities, they are most effective at improving health outcomes when deployed in tandem with geographically targeted air-quality regulations.

      Yet the computer models typically used to assess the likely air quality/health impacts of proposed climate/air-quality policy combinations come with drawbacks for decision-makers. Atmospheric chemistry/climate models can produce high-resolution results, but they are expensive and time-consuming to run. Integrated assessment models can produce results for far less time and money, but produce results at global and regional scales, rendering them insufficiently precise to obtain accurate assessments of air quality/health impacts at the subnational level.

      To overcome these drawbacks, a team of researchers at MIT and the University of California at Davis has developed a climate/air-quality policy assessment tool that is both computationally efficient and location-specific. Described in a new study in the journal ACS Environmental Au, the tool could enable users to obtain rapid estimates of combined policy impacts on air quality/health at more than 1,500 locations around the globe — estimates precise enough to reveal the equity implications of proposed policy combinations within a particular region.

      “The modeling approach described in this study may ultimately allow decision-makers to assess the efficacy of multiple combinations of climate and air-quality policies in reducing the health impacts of air pollution, and to design more effective policies,” says Sebastian Eastham, the study’s lead author and a principal research scientist at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. “It may also be used to determine if a given policy combination would result in equitable health outcomes across a geographical area of interest.”

      To demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of their policy assessment tool, the researchers showed that outcomes projected by the tool within seconds were consistent with region-specific results from detailed chemistry/climate models that took days or even months to run. While continuing to refine and develop their approaches, they are now working to embed the new tool into integrated assessment models for direct use by policymakers.

      “As decision-makers implement climate policies in the context of other sustainability challenges like air pollution, efficient modeling tools are important for assessment — and new computational techniques allow us to build faster and more accurate tools to provide credible, relevant information to a broader range of users,” says Noelle Selin, a professor at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems and Society and Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and supervising author of the study. “We are looking forward to further developing such approaches, and to working with stakeholders to ensure that they provide timely, targeted and useful assessments.”

      The study was funded, in part, by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Biogen Foundation. More