Jonathan Garland’s fascination with architecture started early: He spent much of his childhood designing Lego houses and gazing at Boston buildings on rides with his father away from their largely minority neighborhood. But when Garland looked around at his architectural college, he didn’t see many who looked like him. There were few black faces among students, and fewer teaching skills or giving lectures. “If you do something simple like Google ‘architects’ and you go to the images tab, you’re primarily going to see white males,” said Garland, 35, who’s worked at Boston and New York architectural firms. “That’s the image, that’s the brand, that’s the look of an architect.” And that’s not uncommon in other lucrative fields, 50 years after the Reverend Martin Luther King, a leader in the fight for equal employment opportunities, was assassinated. An Associated Press analysis of government data has found that black workers are chronically underrepresented compared with whites in high-salary jobs in technology, business, life sciences and engineering, among other areas. Instead, many black workers find jobs in low-wage, less prestigious fields where they’re overrepresented, such as food service or preparation, building maintenance and office work, the AP analysis found. ‘Other America’ In one of his final speeches, King described the “Other America,” where unemployment and underemployment created a “fatigue of despair” for African-Americans. Despite economic progress for blacks in areas such as incomes and graduation rates, some experts say many African-Americans remain part of this “Other America,” with little hope of attaining top professional …
Scientists Track Chinese Space Station’s Final Hours in Orbit
Scientists are monitoring a defunct Chinese space station that is expected to fall to Earth sometime this weekend — the largest man-made object to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere in a decade. The head of the European Space Agency’s debris office, Holger Krag, says China’s Tiangong-1 space station likely will fall to Earth Sunday. Krag said it still not yet known where the space station will hit Earth, but said it would be extremely unlikely for anyone to be injured when it does. “Our experience is that for such large objects typically between 20 and 40 percent of the original mass, of 8.5 tons, will survive re-entry and then could be found on the ground, theoretically,” he said. “However, to be injured by one of these fragments is extremely unlikely. My estimate is that the probability to be injured by one of these fragments is similar to the probability of being hit by lightning twice in the same year,” Krag added. China’s first space lab, Tiangong-1 — or “Heavenly Palace 1″ — was launched in 2011 as a facility for testing docking capabilities with other Chinese spacecraft and to explore the possibilities for building a larger permanent space station by 2023. Chinese astronauts visited it several times flying aboard the Shenzhou spacecraft. It was scheduled for a controlled de-orbit and eventual crash into the Pacific Ocean, but in September 2016 China’s space agency conceded it had lost contact with the station. Krag, says the 8-and-a-half ton craft will re-enter the atmosphere at …
Australian Project to Probe Links Between Head Injuries in Sport, Disease
Researchers in Australia have begun an ambitious task to learn more about the long-term impacts of head injuries suffered by athletes. This week, the Australian Sports Brain Bank was launched in Sydney, and experts are encouraging players who have participated in all levels of sport – whether or not they’ve had a head injury – to donate their brains to the cause after they die. The Brain Bank has been set up to investigate links between concussion, head injuries and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE. It is a neurodegenerative disease found in people with a history of repetitive brain trauma. The Australian study is being supported by American researchers, who set up a similar brain bank a decade ago. Dr. Chris Nowinski, head of the Boston-based Concussion Legacy Foundation which has examined the brains of deceased National Football League players, says the presence of CTE among them is pervasive. “Any contact sport where you receive repetitive brain trauma puts you at risk for this disease. We do not know at what risk but we have seen CTE in 110 of the first 111 players that we have studied, which has really surprised us.” Nowinski believes energy from blows to the head during competition causes brain tissue to move. Symptoms of CTE include depression, aggression and memory loss, and can take years or decades to appear. The cause of CTE has yet to be established, but the disease has prompted a class action lawsuit in the U.S. Australia’s Brain Bank is …
Helping the Planet, One Burger at a Time
Chef Rob Morasco didn’t set out to make a planet-friendly burger. But the 25 percent mushroom burger he created at food service company Sodexo not only has a lower carbon footprint, it’s also lower in calories, fat and salt. It’s juicier, too. “When you bite into it, it’s kind of like a flavor explosion,” Morasco said. “And you don’t taste the mushrooms, either.” And because mushrooms are cheaper than beef, he could answer customer demand for antibiotic- and hormone-free burgers “without having to jack up the price,” he said. Mushroom-blended burgers have been catching on among both chefs and environmentalists. In March, Sonic Drive-In became the first fast-food chain to offer them. WATCH: These Burgers Are Better for the Planet, but You’d Never Know It 2 million cars Americans eat about 10 billion hamburgers each year, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI). All those burgers take a toll on the planet. Beef is “the most resource-intensive food that we commonly eat,” Richard Waite of WRI said. Beef accounts for about half the greenhouse gases produced by the American diet, he added. Cows take far more feed, land and water than any other source of protein. If every burger in America were blended with mushrooms, WRI estimates the greenhouse-gas savings would be like taking more than 2 million cars off the road. It would save as much water as nearly 3 million American households use in a year. And it would reduce the demand for farmland by an area larger …
These Burgers Are Better for the Planet, but You’d Never Know It
As the world’s population heads toward 10 billion by midcentury, experts are wrestling with how to feed the world without wrecking the planet. It’s not easy to find foods with lower environmental impact that still taste as good as the ones they are intended to replace. But chefs and environmentalists are both cheering one new menu item: the mushroom-blended burger. VOA’s Steve Baragona has more. …
Traditional Pakistani Bamboo Curtains Gaining Popularity
Traditional handicrafts from Pakistan are exported to many countries around the world. One item that appears to be gaining in popularity are the country’s hand-made bamboo curtains. VOA’s Saman Khan has more in this report from Lahore, Pakistan, narrated by Sarah Zaman. …
NY’s Immigrant Taxi Drivers Despair as Taxi Industry Slumps
A financially distraught yellow cab driver from Romania recently hanged himself in his New York garage, marking the fourth suicide among city taxi drivers in as many months. In the tragedy’s aftermath, members of New York’s taxicab drivers union are renewing their calls for a cap on the number of app-based for-hire vehicles, such as Uber and Lyft, which they say are driving workers of a once-thriving industry into the ground. VOA’s Ramon Taylor reports. …
Trump EPA Expected to Roll Back Auto Gas Mileage Standards
The Trump administration is expected to announce that it will roll back automobile gas mileage and pollution standards that were a pillar in the Obama administration’s plans to combat climate change. It’s not clear whether the announcement will include a specific number, but current regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency require the fleet of new vehicles to get 36 miles per gallon in real-world driving by 2025. That’s about 10 mpg over the existing standard. Environmental groups, who predict increased greenhouse gas emissions and more gasoline consumption if the standards are relaxed, say the announcement could come Tuesday at a Virginia car dealership. EPA spokeswoman Liz Bowman said in an email Friday that the standards are still being reviewed. Legal showdown Any change is likely to set up a lengthy legal showdown with California, which currently has the power to set its own pollution and gas mileage standards and doesn’t want them to change. About a dozen other states follow California’s rules, and together they account for more than one-third of the vehicles sold in the US. Currently the federal and California standards are the same. Automakers have lobbied to revisit the requirements, saying they’ll have trouble reaching them because people are buying bigger vehicles due to low gas prices. They say the standards will cost the industry billions of dollars and raise vehicle prices due to the cost of developing technology needed to raise mileage. When the standards were first proposed, the government predicted that two-thirds of new vehicles …
UN Blacklists Dozens of Ships, Businesses Over N. Korea Smuggling
The U.N. Security Council on Friday blacklisted 27 ships, 21 companies and a businessman for helping North Korea circumvent sanctions, keeping the pressure on Pyongyang despite its recent diplomatic opening to talks, a diplomat said. Acting on a request from the United States, a council committee approved the largest-ever package of sanctions designations on North Korea, the council diplomat said on condition of anonymity. The move is part of a global crackdown on the smuggling of North Korean commodities in violation of U.N. sanctions resolutions, which were adopted in response to Pyongyang’s nuclear and ballistic missile tests. Thirteen North Korean oil tankers and cargo vessels were banned from ports worldwide, along with 12 other ships for helping Pyongyang smuggle banned commodities or supplying oil and fuel shipments, according to a U.N. document obtained by AFP. Two other North Korean vessels were hit with a global assets freeze but were not banned from port entry. Twenty-one shipping and trading firms were hit by an assets freeze. Three of them are based in Hong Kong, including Huaxin Shipping, which delivered shipments of North Korean coal to Vietnam in October. 12 North Korean firms hit Twelve North Korean firms were blacklisted for running ships involved in illegal transfers of oil and fuel, according to the document. Two other companies — Shanghai Dongfeng Shipping and Weihai World Shipping Freight, also based in China — were blacklisted for carrying North Korean coal on their vessels. The remaining firms are in based Singapore, Samoa, the Marshall Islands …
South Sudan Dispute With Mobile Firm Disrupts Service
Hundreds of thousands of South Sudanese remained without mobile phone service Friday, as network operator Vivacell continued a standoff with the government over a licensing dispute. The government cut the network’s signal to its roughly 900,000 subscribers just after midnight Tuesday, alleging that Vivacell owed tens of millions of dollars in licensing fees. The government’s information minister, Michael Makuei, told VOA earlier this week that Vivacell previously had been exempted from taxes and licensing fees. “We want them to pay a sum of up to $66 million for their license, and up to now they are dragging their feet,” he said. The licensing fee dispute underscores the mounting financial pressures facing the government in a country ravaged by civil war since late 2013. Ruling party holds Vivacell stake Pagan Amum – the former secretary general of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), the country’s ruling party – said Vivacell already pays for a valid license it has held for years. “There is no way Vivacell can be required to pay for another license,” he told VOA’s “South Sudan in Focus” radio program on Thursday. Amum said that, as secretary general, he had helped negotiate the original deal with Lebanon’s Fattouch Investment Group – Vivacell’s majority owner – giving the SPLM party a minority share in the telecom firm. Vivacell has operated in South Sudan since 2008 under a license issued to the SPLM, Amum said. He added that, since 2012, the ruling SPLM has received $100,000 a month from Vivacell …
Пенсійна реформа вивела з тіні 400 тисяч українців – міністр
Близько 400 тисяч українців завдяки пенсійній реформі додалися до числа платників єдиного соціального внеску (ЄСВ). Про це заявив міністр соціальної політики Андрій Рева в програмі «Свобода в деталях» (спільний проект Радіо Свобода та Радіо НВ), повна версія якої вийде на Радіо НВ 1 квітня о 19:04. «Після проведеної реформи з’явилося близько 400 тисяч нових платників єдиного соціального внеску, які почали платити. Зараз питання, яке ставлять люди, коли влаштовуються на роботу – навіть не «яка заробітна плата?», а «чи буду я отримувати її легально?» Люди починають розуміти, що це важлива річ», – вказав міністр. Він відзначив, що нині в Україні «співвідношення тих, хто платить ЄСВ і тих, хто отримує пенсію один до одного, але якщо ви візьмете працездатне населення, яке б могло платити», то на одного пенсіонера припадає двоє працездатних – «26 мільйонів працездатних людей і 12 мільйонів пенсіонерів». «З 26 мільйонів офіційно зайнятих 16 мільйонів, ЄСВ платять 12 мільйонів, 4 мільйони абсолютно легально не платять ЄСВ. Далі за методикою МОП врахуємо 1 мільйон 800 тисяч безробітних… Тобто додаємо ще 2 мільйони до 16 і отримуємо 18 мільйонів, а де ще 8 мільйонів? В тіні, за кордоном і так далі», – додав Андрій Рева. Раніше Радіо Свобода повідомило, що близько 100 тисяч громадян України пенсійного віку не отримують пенсію зараз і не отримуватимуть її надалі. …
China’s Defunct Space Lab Hurtling Toward Earth for Re-Entry
China’s defunct and reportedly out-of-control Tiangong 1 space station is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere sometime this weekend. It poses only a slight risk to people and property on the ground, since most of the bus-size, 8.5-ton vehicle is expected to burn up on re-entry, although space agencies don’t know exactly when or where that will happen. Below are some questions and answers about the station, its re-entry, and the past and future of China’s ambitious space program. What will happen and how great is the danger? The European Space Agency predicts the station will re-enter the atmosphere between Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon — an estimate it calls “highly variable,” likely because the ever-changing shape of the upper atmosphere affects the speed of objects falling into it. The Chinese space agency’s latest estimate puts re-entry between Saturday and Wednesday. Western space experts say they believe China has lost control of the station. China’s chief space laboratory designer Zhu Zongpeng has denied Tiangong was out of control, but hasn’t provided specifics on what, if anything, China is doing to guide the craft’s re-entry. Based on Tiangong 1’s orbit, it will come to Earth somewhere between latitudes of 43 degrees north and 43 degrees south, or roughly somewhere over most of the United States, China, Africa, southern Europe, Australia and South America. Out of range are Russia, Canada and northern Europe. Based on its size, only about 10 percent of the spacecraft will likely survive being burned up on re-entry, mainly …
Amid Flood of Chinese Products, India Wants Fairness
Sampad Yadav, who sells electrical goods in a shop in the business hub of Gurugram on the outskirts of New Delhi, says Chinese goods such as LED lamps are popular with customers. “When people make a price comparison, and want to move towards the cheapest goods, those are usually Chinese products.” As in many other countries, Chinese products such as lamps, electronics, smartphones and engineering goods from the manufacturing giant have flooded Indian markets. However India has long fretted that areas in which it is strong such as generic drugs and Information Technology services, which make up some of its main exports to Western markets, remain shut out of China. That has made it difficult to bridge a ballooning trade deficit of about $50 billion between the two countries. But there is optimism this could change following a meeting this week between the commerce ministers of the two countries in New Delhi. “The Chinese side have agreed to work on the issue, prepare a road map to bring the trade to balanced level over a period of time,” Indian Commerce Minister Suresh Prabhu said after discussions with his Chinese counterpart, Zhong Shan. Trade experts hope the growing tensions on trade issues between the United States and China will prompt Beijing to open up its markets more to Indian exports. “I think China is definitely under pressure now, looking into the kind of initiation which has happened against China,” says Ajay Sahai, who heads the Federation …
Гривня зміцнилася на міжбанку: долар подешевшав більш як на 20 копійок
Українська національна валюта 30 березня посилила свої позиції на міжбанківському валютному ринку. Торги розпочалися зі зростання пропозиції долара за рахунок обов’язкових продажів – 30 березня є останнім у першому кварталі днем для таких операцій експортерів, повідомляє сайт «Мінфін». Натомість покупці були менш активними, оскільки торги відбувалися в режимі tomorrow – зарахування валюти відбудеться лише наступного тижня через великодні святкування у США. Національний банк України з метою не допустити надмірних коливань вийшов із «запитом найкращого курсу» і викупив частину долара за ціною 26,285 гривні. «На 13:00 зареєстровано 396 угод на суму 280,74 мільйона доларів по середньозваженому курсу 26,3074», – вказують експерти. 29 березня Національний банк України вперше з 5 березня встановив курс гривні до долара США на рівні понад 26 гривень 50 копійок за одиницю американської валюти. Офіційний курс на 30 березня становить 26 гривень 54 копійки за долар. …
Vietnam Stands to See Modest Wins if China, U.S. Start Trade War
A wider Sino-U.S. trade dispute would help export-reliant Vietnam compete against Chinese companies but put the country at risk of any global fallout, analysts say. The numerous exporters in Vietnam that ship manufactured goods to the United States would save money compared with Chinese peers if not subject to American tariffs, said Dustin Daugherty, senior associate with business consultancy Dezan Shira & Associates in Ho Chi Minh City. The U.S. government said this month it would develop a list of tariffs on up to $60 billion in Chinese imports. China has threatened to impose its own in response. “Let’s say (the United States) went the more traditional route, tensions kept escalating and more tariffs are slapped on Chinese products,” Daugherty said. “In that case Vietnam’s export sector definitely benefits. We’re already seeing the U.S. being very warm to Vietnam and U.S. businesses keen on doing business with Vietnam.” But Chinese firms hit by tariffs might flood Vietnam with raw materials for local manufacturing, while overall world market volatility caused by a Sino-U.S. trade dispute could hamper the country’s trade, said Carl Thayer, emeritus professor at the University of New South Wales in Australia. A tariff-free Vietnam scenario Vietnamese exporters would save money compared to their Chinese peers if the U.S. government placed tariffs on Chinese firms alone without touching their cross-border supply chains, Daugherty said. The government of U.S. President Donald Trump calls China unfair in its trade practices, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative says on its website. …
NY Auto Show Features Electric, Self-Driving Cars
A recent fatality involving one of Uber’s self-driving cars may have created uncertainty and doubt regarding the future of autonomous vehicles, but it’s not stopping automakers who say autonomous and self-driving vehicles are here to stay. At the New York International Auto Show this week, autonomous vehicles and electric cars were increasingly front and center as VOA’s Tina Trinh reports. …
Tech Giants Tackle Online Wildlife Trafficking
A new coalition of tech giants and conservationists is looking to drastically reduce the amount of wild, and often endangered, animals that are trafficked via online services. As Veronica Balderas Iglesias reports, they hope to cut 80 percent of the illegal trade by the end of the decade. …
Social Media Use in Tween Girls Tied to Well-Being in Teen Years
Girls who spend the most time on social media at age 10 may be unhappier in their early teens than peers who use social media less during the tween years, a U.K. study suggests. Researchers looked at social media use and scores on tests of happiness and other aspects of well-being among boys and girls at age 10 and each year until age 15. Overall, well-being decreased with age for boys and girls, but more so for girls. And high social media use early on predicted sharper increases in unhappiness for girls later. For boys, social media use at 10 had no association with well-being in the midteens, which suggests that other factors are more important influences on well-being changes in boys, the authors note in BMC Public Health. A pattern for girls “Our findings suggest that young girls, those aged 10, who are more interactive with social media have lower levels of well-being by age 15 than their peers who interact with social media less at age 10. We did not find any similar patterns for boys, suggesting that any changes in their well-being may not be due to social media,” said lead author Cara Booker, a researcher at the University of Essex. Booker’s research group had done a previous study of social media use and well-being in adolescents, but wanted to explore how it changes over time, she said in an email. They had also noticed gender differences and wanted to look more closely at them, she added. …
UN: US on Track to Meet Climate Accord Targets
The United States is on track to meet the targets of the Paris climate agreement despite President Donald Trump’s plan to withdraw from the accord, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Thursday. Guterres said emissions-cutting plans put in motion by American businesses, regional governments and cities meant that the goals set by the former U.S. administration, which signed the deal in 2016 were within reach. “We have seen in the cities, and we have seen in many states, a very strong commitment to the Paris agreement, to the extent that some indicators are moving even better than in the recent past,” Guterres told reporters at UN headquarters in New York. “There are expectations that, independently of the position of the administration, the U.S. might be able to meet the commitments made in Paris as a country.” Greenhouse gas emissions Under the deal, the administration of former president Barack Obama pledged to cut domestic greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. Nearly 200 countries and parties have signed the landmark agreement after intense negotiations in Paris, where all nations made voluntary carbon-cutting pledges running to 2030. The agreement is aimed at limiting global warming to within two degrees Celsius, but Guterres warned that more action was needed by 2020 to reach that goal. Withdrawal notice due in 2019 Trump faced condemnation when he announced in June 2017 that the United States was pulling out, painting the accord as a “bad deal” for the U.S. economy. Under the …
Judge Orders Coffee Sellers in California to Put Cancer Warning on Products
A Los Angeles judge Thursday ordered coffee companies to abide by California state law and put cancer warning labels on their products. A nonprofit group called the Council for Education and Research on Toxics is suing such popular coffee roasters and retailers as Starbucks, Dunkin’ Donuts and McDonald’s. They say the companies fail to warn consumers that roasting coffee naturally produces a carcinogen called acrylamide. In the first part of the three-phase trial, Superior Court Judge Elihu Berle ruled the coffee companies failed to prove their assertion that there is no significant risk from acrylamide. In Thursday’s ruling after the second phase, Berle said the companies failed to adequately show coffee is a healthy drink. “Defendants failed to satisfy their burden of proving by a preponderance of evidence that consumption of coffee confers a benefit to human health,” he wrote. An upcoming third phase would decide what civil penalties the coffee companies would have to pay. Company officials have not yet responded to the judge’s ruling. Acrylamide forms naturally when such foods as coffee, hot wheat cereals and potatoes are cooked or deep fried. Most medical studies show no increased risk of cancer from eating such foods. Some recent studies have shown possible benefits from drinking coffee, including protection against liver disease, some diabetes and Parkinson’s disease. …
Ads Pulled from Ingraham Show After She Mocked Parkland Survivor
At least three companies said Thursday they were pulling advertisements from a Fox News show hosted by conservative pundit Laura Ingraham, heeding a call from a teenage survivor of the Florida school massacre whom Ingraham mocked on Twitter. Parkland student David Hogg, 17, tweeted a list of a dozen companies that advertise on The Ingraham Angle and urged his supporters to demand that they cancel their ads. Hogg is a survivor of the Feb. 14 mass shooting that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in the Parkland suburb of Fort Lauderdale. Since then, he and other classmates have become the faces of a new youth-led movement calling for tighter restrictions on firearms. Hogg took aim at Ingraham’s advertisers after she taunted him Wednesday on Twitter, accusing him of whining about being rejected by four colleges to which he had applied. On Thursday, Ingraham tweeted an apology “in the spirit of Holy Week,” saying she was sorry for any hurt or upset she had caused Hogg or any of the “brave victims” of Parkland. “For the record, I believe my show was the first to feature David … immediately after that horrific shooting and even noted how ‘poised’ he was given the tragedy,” Ingraham tweeted, adding that Hogg was welcome back for another interview. But her apology did not stop at least three companies from parting ways with her show. U.S. celebrity chef Rachael Ray’s pet food line Nutrish, travel website TripAdvisor and online home furnishings seller Wayfair …
NASA Intensifying Search for Planets Orbiting Stars Beyond Solar System
The search for worlds circling star far beyond our solar system will intensify in the coming weeks with NASA’s launch of a spacecraft scientists hope will enlarge the known catalog of so-called exoplanets believed capable of supporting life. NASA plans to send the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, into orbit from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket set for blast-off on April 16 on a two-year, $337-million mission. The latest NASA astrophysics endeavor is designed to build on the work of its predecessor, the Kepler space telescope, which discovered the bulk of some 3,500 exoplanets documented during the past 20 years, revolutionizing one of the newest fields in space science. NASA expects TESS to detect thousands more previously unknown worlds, perhaps hundreds of them Earth-sized or “super-Earth”-sized — no larger than twice as big as our home planet. One of a kind orbit Such worlds are believed to stand the greatest chance of having rocky surfaces or oceans, and are thus considered the most promising candidates for the evolution of life, as opposed to gas giants similar to Jupiter or Neptune. Astronomers said they hope to end up with about 100 more rocky exoplanets for further study. The new probe will take about 60 days to attain its highly elliptical, first-of-a-kind orbit that will loop TESS between Earth and the moon every two and a half weeks. Kepler’s positioning system broke down in 2013 about four years after its launch, and though scientists …
In Cuba, Vietnam Communist Party Chief Advocates Economic Reforms
The head of Vietnam’s Communist Party advocated for the importance of market-oriented economic reforms on a two-day visit to old ally Cuba, which is struggling to liberalize its poorly Soviet-style command economy. Vietnam and Cuba are among the last Communist-run countries in the world but Hanoi set about opening up its centralized economy in the 1980s, two decades before Havana started to do so in earnest under President Raul Castro. Castro leaves office on April 19 after two consecutive five-year mandates without having been able to unleash in Cuba the same kind of rapid economic growth as that experienced by Vietnam. He remains head of the Cuban Communist Party (PCC) until 2021. “The market economy of its own cannot destroy socialism,” Communist Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong said in a lecture at Havana University. “But to build socialism with success, it is necessary to develop a market economy in an adequate and correct way.” Hanoi had managed to lift around 30 million Vietnamese out of poverty over 20 years, Trong said. The PCC this week admitted a slowdown in its market reforms it attributed to the complexity of the process, low engagement of the bureaucracy and mistakes in oversight. The number of self-employed workers in the Caribbean island nation of 11.2 million residents has more than tripled to around 580,000 workers since the start of the reforms. But the government last year froze the issuance of licenses for certain activities amid fears of rising inequality and a loss of …
Utility Plans to Close Nuclear Plants in Ohio, Pennsylvania
FirstEnergy Corp. said it will shut down three nuclear plants in Ohio and Pennsylvania within the next three years, making it the latest U.S. utility to announce closings as the nuclear industry struggles to compete with electricity plants that burn plentiful and inexpensive natural gas. The company announced the closings Wednesday and a day later appealed to the U.S. Department of Energy for help, asking that it be allowed to get more money for electricity produced by its nuclear and coal-fired plants. It said in its request that the closings of its nuclear plants could threaten the reliability of the electric grid across the East Coast. FirstEnergy said Wednesday that it would be willing to work with both Ohio and Pennsylvania to find a way to keep the plants open, but lawmakers remain unwilling to offer a financial rescue and it appears the plants are nearing a shutdown. The natural gas boom and increasing use of renewable energy have combined in recent years to squeeze the nation’s aging nuclear reactors, which are expensive to operate and maintain. New York and Illinois have responded by giving out billion-dollar bailouts that will be paid by ratepayers to stop unprofitable nuclear plants from closing prematurely. But similar proposals have met with resistance in Connecticut and New Jersey, as well as in Ohio and Pennsylvania, because such subsidies would cause utility bills to increase. Some proponents of nuclear power say the plants are needed to maintain a diverse lineup of energy sources, arguing that …