Science, Technology, and Public Policy

Michael Lipin interviews Project on Managing the Atom Associate Nicole Grajewski on why Iran may not benefit much from its new membership of Shanghai Cooperation Organization.

Joel Clement characterizes the growing greenhouse-gas emissions from the commercial shipping industry as well as the efforts of the United Nations body, the International Maritime Organization, to reduce these emissions as unacceptable.

The Icelandic Ministry for Foreign Affairs recently published an extensive report with a detailed analysis on the current relationship between Greenland and Iceland with 99 recommendations on how to strengthen their co-operation. Halla Hrund Logadóttir moderated the discussion.

If Joe Biden defeats Donald Trump in November, the question he will face is not whether to restore the liberal international order. It is whether the United States can work with an inner core of allies to promote democracy and human rights while cooperating with a broader set of states to manage the rules-based international institutions needed to face transnational threats.

The authors argue that more determined efforts to globalize renewable energy transmission can confer significantly higher economic and environmental benefits from renewables on billions of people. This can be done by exploiting spatial differences between electricity loads and net renewable generation across time zones (temporal arbitrage) and latitude (seasonal arbitrage). Using very long distance, ultra-high voltage (UHV) transmission infrastructure, temporal and spatial arbitrage can move low-cost clean electricity from areas with excess capacity to high demand zones in other countries and even continents.

After many years of productive service, industrial plants reach the end of their useful life and must be dismantled. This complex and costly process, know as decommissioning (commissioning refers to the beginning of a plant useful life), is a confluence of economic, environmental, physical, and regulatory challenges.