James' World 2

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Burning Man, the transient bacchanal that attracts more than 70,000 partygoers to the remote Nevada desert for eight days every August, prides itself on its environmental bona fides. One of the festival’s main operational tenets is “leave no trace,” an essentially impossible feat for an event of its size. The Burning Man Project, the organization that runs the festival, has set a goal of becoming “carbon negative” — removing more emissions from the environment than the festival produces — by 2030. 

It’s a tall order: The festival generates around 100,000 tons of carbon dioxide every year, the equivalent of burning over 100 million pounds of coal. A series of disasters at this year’s festival have brought the gap between Burning Man’s rhetoric and reality into sharp relief: First, a half dozen protesters demanding stronger environmental commitments from the organization blocked the festival’s entrance for roughly an hour before they were forcibly removed. Days later, torrential rain — the kind of event made more likely and extreme by climate change — stranded revelers in a dystopian free-for-all. But the greatest irony of all may be Burning Man’s less-publicized opposition to renewable energy in its own backyard.

Burning Man’s problems began on August 27, the first day of this year’s festival, when a blockade of climate protesters created a miles-long traffic jam on the two-lane highway into the dry lakebed of the Black Rock Desert, about 120 miles north of Reno, Nevada, where Burning Man takes place. In addition to calling for “systemic change,” they demanded that festival organizers take immediate steps to decrease the event’s carbon footprint. Burning Man, which started out as a small gathering of artists on a beach in San Francisco in the 1980s, has grown into a massive event that attracts a growing percentage of the world’s ultra-wealthy every year. The protestors, who were ultimately dispersed by police, demanded the festival “ban private jets, single-use plastics, unnecessary propane burning, and unlimited generator use per capita,” among other requests. 

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When University of Maryland physicist Timothy Koeth received a mysterious heavy metal cube from a friend as a birthday gift several years ago, he instantly recognized it as one of the uranium cubes used by German scientists during World War II in their unsuccessful attempt to build a working nuclear reactor. Had there been any doubt, there was an accompanying note on a piece of paper wrapped around the cube: “Taken from Germany, from the nuclear reactor Hitler tried to build. Gift of Ninninger.”

Thus began Koeth’s six-year quest to track down the cube’s origins, as well as several other similar cubes that had somehow found their way across the Atlantic. Koeth and his partner in the quest, graduate student Miriam “Mimi” Hiebert, reported on their progress to date in the May issue of Physics Today. It’s quite the tale, replete with top-secret scientific intrigue, a secret Allied mission, and even black market dealers keen to hold the US hostage over uranium cubes in their possession. Small wonder Hollywood has expressed interest in adapting the story for the screen.

Until quite recently, Koeth ran the nuclear reactor program at UMD, which is how he met his co-author. Hiebert is completing a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering, specializing in the study of historical materials in museum collections (glass in particular) and the methods used to preserve them, using the reactor facility for neutron imaging of a few samples. Koeth told her about his research into his cube’s origins, and she started collaborating with him as a side project.

A quest for cubes

So far they have tracked down ten cubes around the US. For instance, the Smithsonian Institute had a German uranium cube in storage. “We wound up in a warehouse that looked like the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, wooden crates from floor to ceiling,” said Koeth. “And in one of those crates, there was another German cube.” There was also a piece of uranium from the original Chicago Pile-1—the first sustained nuclear chain reaction achieved by US physicists. They tracked a third cube to Harvard University, where it regularly gets passed around to students in introductory physics classes as a curiosity. (The cubes are only slightly radioactive and don’t pose a health concern, according to Koeth. Since uranium is so dense, “It winds up shielding itself,” he said. “The radiation you measure from it is only coming from the surface.”)

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This is likely one of 664 uranium cubes from the failed nuclear reactor that German scientists tried to build in Haigerloch during World War II.Photo by John T. Consoli/University of Maryland.

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If you read about the energy industry in the ’00s and ’10s, you probably caught some excited, hopeful stories about geothermal, the renewable energy source that harnesses heat hundreds of meters below the earth’s surface. “Enhanced geothermal” — a novel approach in which fluids are poured deep underground, heat up, and then are recovered for their steam heat and used to generate electricity — got particular attention, because it promised a geothermal technique that could work most places on earth, not just in volcanic areas like Iceland or Indonesia.

Enhanced geothermal is “increasingly being eyed as an enormous potential source of pollution-free energy,” science journalist David Biello wrote all the way back in 2008. Enhanced geothermal has “often been touted as the answer to the tepid growth of the geothermal industry,” reporter Megan Geuss wrote in Ars Technica in 2014, already with a bit of jaded weariness that the promises were yet unfulfilled. Startups like AltaRock Energy got press for their promises of a clean energy source, deployable in any geography, that still worked when the sun wasn’t shining and the wind wasn’t blowing.

But as of 2022, a mere 0.4 percent of US electricity generation came from geothermal. That’s some eight times less than solar, 25 times less than wind, and 45 times less than nuclear. If that weren’t depressing enough, consider those numbers still meant the US produced more geothermal electricity than any other country that year, even surpassing heavily volcanic Indonesia.

But some significant breakthroughs have recently earned geothermal renewed attention. Fervo Energy, an enhanced geothermal company, announced that it was able to build and perform tests on a well in Nevada for 30 days, which it claims is capable of generating 3.5 megawatts of power. That’s not a lot (a typical natural gas power block produces over 800 megawatts), and it’s still much more expensive to produce than solar or gas power, but it’s the furthest an enhanced geothermal project has gotten to date. Last year, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced a major initiative promising to slash the cost of geothermal generation by 90 percent by 2035. That announcement put the current cost at about $450 per megawatt-hour, compared to around $30 to $50 for onshore wind and solar.

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Fervo’s test well in Nevada. Fervo Energy

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How can we live a good life? It’s a question psychologist Dacher Keltner has spent much of his professional career trying to answer. In his latest book, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life, he argues that an appreciation of the world — whether through experiencing the natural beauty of Yosemite National Park or simply being with a friend — not only benefits us mentally and emotionally but is a crucial part of our physiological health. A big part of well-being, he says, comes from what primatologist Jane Goodall calls “being amazed at things outside yourself.” And his studies show this is a skill we can cultivate.

A professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, Keltner has authored more than two hundred research papers examining emotion, neuroscience, aesthetics, morality, and decision-making. His other books — including The Power Paradox, The Compassionate Instinct, and Born to Be Good — offer a science-based, optimistic view of human behavior and culture. Pushing back against philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s description of life as “nasty, brutish, and short,” Keltner believes evolution has given Homo sapiens emotions like gratitude, joy, amusement, and compassion because they help us survive and build cooperative, ethical societies.

Although he spends a lot of time designing experiments in his laboratory, Keltner’s work often takes him outside of academia. He was the scientific adviser for the Pixar animated feature Inside Out, which personifies the emotions of an eleven-year-old girl experiencing a disruptive move with her family. He has also consulted extensively for Google, Apple, and Pinterest.

Born in Jalisco, Mexico, Keltner was raised in California by parents who were part of the counterculture: his father was an artist; his mother, a literature professor. He received his BA in psychology and sociology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his PhD from Stanford. He did postdoctoral work with pioneering psychologist Paul Ekman, and in 1996 he joined the faculty at UC Berkeley, where he directs the Greater Good Science Center.

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Nadya Pajarillo

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