Canada's first Indigenous-owned bioenergy facility opens
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Canada’s first Indigenous-owned bioenergy facility opens

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As the temperature dips to -28 C, Paul Opikokew is ready for the unexpected at the newly-built Meadow Lake Tribal Council Bioenergy Centre in northwestern Saskatchewan, now being tested by its first winter in operation.

Opikokew, 44, a process operator, monitors 980 alarms on a computer system that tracks every part of the $100-million facility — from the wood chips coming in from the nearby sawmill to the power going out to roughly 5,000 homes.

“It’s something new, something that I’m excited about because it’s new technology and good for the environment,” Opikokew told CBC News during an interview at the facility located on the outskirts of Meadow Lake, 250 kilometres northwest of Saskatoon.

Opikokew, who grew up at Canoe Lake Cree Nation, is thrilled that NorSask Forest Products, the largest First Nations-owned sawmill in Canada, is ditching a dirty habit.

In the control room, Paul Opikokew, left, and Logan Crookedneck monitor 980 alarms that would indicate a trouble spot. Opikokew, a member of Canoe Lake Cree Nation, is proud to work for a First Nations-owned bioenergy facility. (Chanss Lagaden/CBC)

Half century of spewing smoke and ash

For 50 years, the sawmill has simply burned its wood waste — including bark, wood chips, and sawdust — in what’s known as a beehive burner. The free-standing conical steel structure, notorious for air pollution, has been phased out or banned in most parts of Canada. Yet, NorSask Forest Products continued to dump 56,000 tonnes of leftover wood inside the antiquated incinerator, spewing out smoke and ash.

The Meadow Lake Tribal Council (MLTC), made up of nine First Nations in northwestern Saskatchewan — including Opikokew’s band — became a part-owner of the NorSask sawmill in 1988, then the sole owner in 1998. And while it has prided itself on generating jobs and revenue for its communities, the beehive burner has been a nagging stain on its environmental record.

 

A beehive burner is a conical-shaped incinerator used for the disposal of wood residue. They’ve been phased out or banned in most provinces. This one, at NorSask Forest Products near Meadow Lake, Saskatchewan, burned wood waste for 50 years until it was shut down in late 2022. (Submitted by Tina Rasmussen)

 

The now-defunct beehive burner sits idle next to NorSask Forest Products sawmill. It will store leftover wood waste in the event of a breakdown at the bioenergy facility. (Bonnie Allen/CBC)

 

Tina Rasmussen, the chief business officer for MLTC and a member of Flying Dust First Nation, said elders, in particular, expressed their discomfort with wasting a quarter of each tree harvested from traditional land.

The bioenergy centre changes that.

“[Wood waste] is now being combusted in a closed-loop system that produces both combined heat and energy that allows us to make use of 100 per cent of that tree. So it’s incredible. We’ve fulfilled what our communities have expected, which is making use of that resource. If you’re taking it, then you need to use it all and not waste it.”

“It’s pretty amazing,” she said, “that this whole facility is 100 per cent Indigenous-owned.”

Any time wood is burned, it produces greenhouse gas emissions. However, the bioenergy plant uses air pollution control devices, including a filter to remove particulate matter and extremely high combustion temperatures that break down harmful pollutants into ash that’s sold to farmers.

Rasmussen and others argue that replacement forests will gradually soak up any carbon dioxide emitted when the wood waste was burned for energy, making the whole process carbon neutral.

Not all bioenergy facilities are universally celebrated. Those that harvest trees for the sole purpose of creating wood pellets to generate electricity have faced mounting criticism, both for what is happening in the forest and for the carbon emissions produced by burning the pellets. However, this facility uses leftover wood from trees that were already cut down for lumber that’s used to build homes or furniture.

Electricity for roughly 5,000 homes

Our CBC News crew was the first to be shown the bioenergy facility, now operational after months of delays.

Through a small window, it’s possible to see into the blazing red combustion chamber, where temperatures reach nearly 1,000 degrees C. The fire slowly heats tubes that are filled with thermal oil, and that heat energy is converted to electrical energy.

The MLTC Bioenergy Centre generates 8.3 megawatts of power, 6.6 of which is fed into the provincial grid, purchased by SaskPower, and used to power roughly 5,000 homes. The rest of the energy runs the bioenergy centre and heats a sawmill kiln that dries lumber.

The Meadow Lake Tribal Council’s sawmill feeds its wood waste, including wood chips, bark, and sawdust, to the newly-constructed bioenergy centre adjacent to the sawmill. (Bonnie Allen/CBC)

Clean energy project not cheap, easy, or quick

The MLTC began exploring the idea of a biomass power plant in 2008.

Its goal was to phase out its beehive burner, generate carbon-neutral green power, and create jobs and revenue for its nine First Nations.

In 2012, the Harper government announced $499,000 in federal dollars to cover project design and environmental assessments. At that time, the proposed facility was expected to generate 36 megawatts of clean energy, enough to power roughly 30,000 homes. It would take another seven years to get to the point in 2019 that Trudeau’s government approved $52.5 million from its Investing in Canada green infrastructure program for a scaled down version of the project.

Al Balisky is the chief executive officer at MLTC Industrial Investments based in Meadow Lake, Sask. He stands in front of the $100-million bioenergy centre constructed near the northern city. (Bonnie Allen/CBC)

“The project is expected to decrease greenhouse gas emissions by more than one million tonnes over 25 years, and reduce smoke and other harmful matter to significantly improve air quality for residents,” said a Government of Canada release from that announcement.

The pandemic and supply-chain issues inflated prices, driving the total cost just above $100 million, and added delays to construction and commissioning. The facility was initially slated to open in February 2022, but didn’t get running until late October.

Of that total price, about $35 million in contracts went to Indigenous companies, according to Al Balisky, who oversees all of MLTC’s investment projects.

“Indigenous participation, in terms of ownership, in terms of construction and now in terms of operation … from start to finish was the goal and we’ve achieved that,” said Balisky, adding that seven of 13 employees are Indigenous.

The MLTC Bioenergy Centre uses a combustion furnace that burns wood waste at 970 C and thermal oil heat exchangers to generate heat and power. (Bonnie Allen/CBC )

Balisky said the “biggest challenge” was getting the money to “pull it all together.” He said it wouldn’t make commercial sense for a private company to pursue this kind of clean energy project without taxpayer funding.

“These are very expensive projects to undertake so without that assistance, this project would not have happened,” he said.

The MTLC business team says it hopes the bioenergy facility will yield profits over time that can be returned to their communities to support health, education and housing programs.

At the MLTC Bioenergy Centre, plant manager Jason Rasmussen eyes a pile of shredded wood waste that’s feeding into a biomass-fired power plant. (Bonnie Allen/CBC)

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STD epidemic slows as new syphilis and gonorrhea cases fall in US

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NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. syphilis epidemic slowed dramatically last year, gonorrhea cases fell and chlamydia cases remained below prepandemic levels, according to federal data released Tuesday.

The numbers represented some good news about sexually transmitted diseases, which experienced some alarming increases in past years due to declining condom use, inadequate sex education, and reduced testing and treatment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before — the first substantial decline in more than two decades. Gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.

“I’m encouraged, and it’s been a long time since I felt that way” about the nation’s epidemic of sexually transmitted infections, said the CDC’s Dr. Jonathan Mermin. “Something is working.”

More than 2.4 million cases of syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia were diagnosed and reported last year — 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 600,000 of gonorrhea, and more than 209,000 of syphilis.

Syphilis is a particular concern. For centuries, it was a common but feared infection that could deform the body and end in death. New cases plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when infection-fighting antibiotics became widely available, and they trended down for a half century after that. By 2002, however, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected.

The new report found cases of syphilis in their early, most infectious stages dropped 13% among gay and bisexual men. It was the first such drop since the agency began reporting data for that group in the mid-2000s.

However, there was a 12% increase in the rate of cases of unknown- or later-stage syphilis — a reflection of people infected years ago.

Cases of syphilis in newborns, passed on from infected mothers, also rose. There were nearly 4,000 cases, including 279 stillbirths and infant deaths.

“This means pregnant women are not being tested often enough,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California.

What caused some of the STD trends to improve? Several experts say one contributor is the growing use of an antibiotic as a “morning-after pill.” Studies have shown that taking doxycycline within 72 hours of unprotected sex cuts the risk of developing syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.

In June, the CDC started recommending doxycycline as a morning-after pill, specifically for gay and bisexual men and transgender women who recently had an STD diagnosis. But health departments and organizations in some cities had been giving the pills to people for a couple years.

Some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak — which mainly hit gay and bisexual men — may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023, or at least on people’s willingness to get tested when strange sores appeared.

Another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment. Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years, including $600 million to states, cities and territories that get STD prevention funding from CDC.

Last year had the “most activity with that funding throughout the U.S.,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.

However, Congress ended the funds early as a part of last year’s debt ceiling deal, cutting off $400 million. Some people already have lost their jobs, said a spokeswoman for Harvey’s organization.

Still, Harvey said he had reasons for optimism, including the growing use of doxycycline and a push for at-home STD test kits.

Also, there are reasons to think the next presidential administration could get behind STD prevention. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced a campaign to “eliminate” the U.S. HIV epidemic by 2030. (Federal health officials later clarified that the actual goal was a huge reduction in new infections — fewer than 3,000 a year.)

There were nearly 32,000 new HIV infections in 2022, the CDC estimates. But a boost in public health funding for HIV could also also help bring down other sexually transmitted infections, experts said.

“When the government puts in resources, puts in money, we see declines in STDs,” Klausner said.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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World’s largest active volcano Mauna Loa showed telltale warning signs before erupting in 2022

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists can’t know precisely when a volcano is about to erupt, but they can sometimes pick up telltale signs.

That happened two years ago with the world’s largest active volcano. About two months before Mauna Loa spewed rivers of glowing orange molten lava, geologists detected small earthquakes nearby and other signs, and they warned residents on Hawaii‘s Big Island.

Now a study of the volcano’s lava confirms their timeline for when the molten rock below was on the move.

“Volcanoes are tricky because we don’t get to watch directly what’s happening inside – we have to look for other signs,” said Erik Klemetti Gonzalez, a volcano expert at Denison University, who was not involved in the study.

Upswelling ground and increased earthquake activity near the volcano resulted from magma rising from lower levels of Earth’s crust to fill chambers beneath the volcano, said Kendra Lynn, a research geologist at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory and co-author of a new study in Nature Communications.

When pressure was high enough, the magma broke through brittle surface rock and became lava – and the eruption began in late November 2022. Later, researchers collected samples of volcanic rock for analysis.

The chemical makeup of certain crystals within the lava indicated that around 70 days before the eruption, large quantities of molten rock had moved from around 1.9 miles (3 kilometers) to 3 miles (5 kilometers) under the summit to a mile (2 kilometers) or less beneath, the study found. This matched the timeline the geologists had observed with other signs.

The last time Mauna Loa erupted was in 1984. Most of the U.S. volcanoes that scientists consider to be active are found in Hawaii, Alaska and the West Coast.

Worldwide, around 585 volcanoes are considered active.

Scientists can’t predict eruptions, but they can make a “forecast,” said Ben Andrews, who heads the global volcano program at the Smithsonian Institution and who was not involved in the study.

Andrews compared volcano forecasts to weather forecasts – informed “probabilities” that an event will occur. And better data about the past behavior of specific volcanos can help researchers finetune forecasts of future activity, experts say.

(asterisk)We can look for similar patterns in the future and expect that there’s a higher probability of conditions for an eruption happening,” said Klemetti Gonzalez.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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Waymo’s robotaxis now open to anyone who wants a driverless ride in Los Angeles

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Waymo on Tuesday opened its robotaxi service to anyone who wants a ride around Los Angeles, marking another milestone in the evolution of self-driving car technology since the company began as a secret project at Google 15 years ago.

The expansion comes eight months after Waymo began offering rides in Los Angeles to a limited group of passengers chosen from a waiting list that had ballooned to more than 300,000 people. Now, anyone with the Waymo One smartphone app will be able to request a ride around an 80-square-mile (129-square-kilometer) territory spanning the second largest U.S. city.

After Waymo received approval from California regulators to charge for rides 15 months ago, the company initially chose to launch its operations in San Francisco before offering a limited service in Los Angeles.

Before deciding to compete against conventional ride-hailing pioneers Uber and Lyft in California, Waymo unleashed its robotaxis in Phoenix in 2020 and has been steadily extending the reach of its service in that Arizona city ever since.

Driverless rides are proving to be more than just a novelty. Waymo says it now transports more than 50,000 weekly passengers in its robotaxis, a volume of business numbers that helped the company recently raise $5.6 billion from its corporate parent Alphabet and a list of other investors that included venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz and financial management firm T. Rowe Price.

“Our service has matured quickly and our riders are embracing the many benefits of fully autonomous driving,” Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana said in a blog post.

Despite its inroads, Waymo is still believed to be losing money. Although Alphabet doesn’t disclose Waymo’s financial results, the robotaxi is a major part of an “Other Bets” division that had suffered an operating loss of $3.3 billion through the first nine months of this year, down from a setback of $4.2 billion at the same time last year.

But Waymo has come a long way since Google began working on self-driving cars in 2009 as part of project “Chauffeur.” Since its 2016 spinoff from Google, Waymo has established itself as the clear leader in a robotaxi industry that’s getting more congested.

Electric auto pioneer Tesla is aiming to launch a rival “Cybercab” service by 2026, although its CEO Elon Musk said he hopes the company can get the required regulatory clearances to operate in Texas and California by next year.

Tesla’s projected timeline for competing against Waymo has been met with skepticism because Musk has made unfulfilled promises about the company’s self-driving car technology for nearly a decade.

Meanwhile, Waymo’s robotaxis have driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles and provided more than 2 million rides to passengers without encountering a serious accident that resulted in its operations being sidelined.

That safety record is a stark contrast to one of its early rivals, Cruise, a robotaxi service owned by General Motors. Cruise’s California license was suspended last year after one of its driverless cars in San Francisco dragged a jaywalking pedestrian who had been struck by a different car driven by a human.

Cruise is now trying to rebound by joining forces with Uber to make some of its services available next year in U.S. cities that still haven’t been announced. But Waymo also has forged a similar alliance with Uber to dispatch its robotaxi in Atlanta and Austin, Texas next year.

Another robotaxi service, Amazon’s Zoox, is hoping to begin offering driverless rides to the general public in Las Vegas at some point next year before also launching in San Francisco.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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