BURN: Listen

BURN’s new hour-long special “The Switch” is about our aging electric power grid: a half century-old patchwork system – stretched to capacity – that transmits and distributes electricity from plants to consumers. Host Alex Chadwick and BURN’s producers and reporters explore how the grid works, and what happens when it breaks under storms and floods. We talk to the people who help fix it, a family that’s left the whole thing behind, and the innovators working to make our national grid safer and smarter.

A little-known Army agency is making big changes in how soldiers fight. Among its latest innovations: new, lighter energy sources for outposts around the world.

2 years after Japan’s nuclear meltdowns, many people still won’t eat anything from Fukushima. So one Tokyo restaurant is deliberately offering food from the region, to help disaster victims and to dispel fears about food safety. Catherine Winter reports.

2 years after an earthquake, tsunami, & a nuclear disaster hit Japan, concerns about radiation contaminated food persist. Catherine Winter reports.

BURN Host Alex Chadwick reports on concerns over how well dozens of US nuclear reactors – built like those that melted down in the Fukushima crisis – would withstand natural disasters.

Mike Pethel has pieced together what may be the fastest electric car anywhere, using enough batteries to power 750 homes. The inventor and race car buff is on a never-ending quest to make his pristine 70s BMW super powerful and totally green. LISTEN.

Batteries are essential energy storage devices for anything touted as clean tech but right now they’re limited to a few hours of performance. Chemist Amy Prieto has designed a battery that seemingly has the right stuff, but she still has to solve some big challenges. Alex visits Amy Prieto and her team to learn just what the Prieto Battery is about and why creating a better battery is so difficult.

This year’s election is about power — the power to shape the nation’s domestic and foreign priorities; the power to lead, to legislate, to govern. Energy policy, defining how we use energy to power our economy and our lives, is among the most pressing issues for the next four years.

To understand how a nuclear facility came to rest at this far edge of the high plains, you first have to understand what else is here. Hear that sound? That’s the rhythmic squeak of a horse head oil pump. There’s a pump jack every few blocks in Eunice, and thousands more stretching east, all the way past Odessa, Texas.

In 2010 the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico — 11 people were killed, the rig was destroyed, and by the time the wellhead was capped 87 days later, nearly 5 million barrels of crude had poured into the Gulf. One of the big questions people are trying to answer is where all the oil went.