BURN: Marketplace Stories

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.

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.

We have, in this country alone, something like 70,000 tons of high level nuclear waste — 250,000 worldwide, give or take. What we don’t have, here or anywhere else, is a place to put it all. And figuring that out means you have to convince people it’ll be okay to store nuclear waste where they live.

Oil’s been good to Roxana, Ill.. Once upon a time, three refineries, along with steel mills and manufacturing plants, employed tens of thousands of people. But then the factories and two of the refineries shut down. And in 1986, a pipeline broke and the town has been living with the consequences ever since.