Month: August 2022

Enlarge / Rimac Automobili brought the Nevera over to the US, allowing us to try out the car on familiar California roads. (credit: Rimac)

The performance benefits of electric powertrains are now well understood. Thanks to near-instantaneous torque delivery and continuous advances in everything from software to motor design, cars like the Tesla Model S Plaid have rewritten the production car hierarchy when it comes to acceleration.

Yet many traditionalists have been slow to come around on electric vehicles, complaining that the driving experience is too clinical and performance is too circumstantial. They say that EVs lack emotion. Well, the Rimac Nevera is about to change all of that.

Rimac may not be a household name today, but over the past decade, the Croatian startup has been hard at work quietly establishing itself as a key player in high-performance EV development. What began in 2010 with a handful of employees in a converted warehouse has expanded into a 1,700-employee operation with a 200,000 m² campus in Kerestinec, Croatia. The site, which is currently under construction, will house the company's research and development centers and production facilities when it opens in 2023. The company's rapid growth has been aided by its various EV development projects for automakers like Porsche, Hyundai, Aston Martin, Pininfarina, and Koenigsegg, leading Rimac to split the company into two distinct entities (Rimac Automobili and Rimac Technology) last year. (Rimac Group also now owns Bugatti, with Porsche.)

Enlarge / An artist's impression of Rocket Lab's proposed mission to Venus. (credit: MDPI Aerospace/Rocket Lab)

Never let it be said that Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck lacks a flamboyant streak.

Although his Electron launch vehicle is one of the smallest orbital rockets in the world, Beck gleans every bit of performance from the booster he can. On just the rocket's second launch, in January 2018, he added a disco-ball like geodesic sphere called "Humanity Star" to give humans a small and bright shining object to, however briefly, gaze upon in the night sky.

"The whole point of the program is to get everybody looking up at the star, but also past the star into the Universe, and reflect about the fact that we’re one species, on one planet," he said at the time.

Enlarge / A tunnel in Finland’s nuclear waste repository. (credit: Posiva)

Even if all nuclear power plants were shut down today, there’s a mountain of radioactive waste waiting to be disposed of. Yet only Finland has an approved solution for nuclear waste disposal, while projects in the US, UK, and Germany have failed for decades, and progress is also slow in other countries. With growing calls to extend the life of existing nuclear power stations and build new ones, that mountain of radioactive waste sitting in temporary, vulnerable, and expensive storage will keep growing.

The challenge is daunting. “High-level” nuclear waste, which includes spent nuclear fuel, stays radioactive for hundreds of millennia, so a waste facility must keep it safely away from aquifers, violent weather, war, plane crashes, sea level rise, future ice sheets, volcanic activity, and even curious future humans for a time span that dwarfs all of previous human history.

Ultimately, it’s the geology of a proposed disposal site that determines if it's a safe place to entrust nuclear waste for millennia. We talked to people involved in the Finnish, US, and UK programs about what investigations of the rock and groundwater at those sites revealed about their suitability—or lack thereof.