The U.S. Department of Energy awarded nearly $1.5 million to the University of Minnesota’s Natural Resources Research Institute to develop carbon-free methods of readying iron mined in the state for steelmaking.

NRRI, which has labs in Hermantown and Coleraine, received $575,000 as part of a $2.8 million grant to work with the University of Minnesota to develop a microwave hydrogen plasma process to replace blast furnaces. It also received $900,000 as part of a $3 million grant to work with Tufts University in Medford, Mass., to develop a method to directly reduce iron ore concentrates with ammonia.

Both processes would eliminate carbon emissions from that step in the steelmaking process. Reduction of greenhouse gases, namely carbon dioxide, is key in slowing or preventing the worst effects of a warming climate.

The global steelmaking industry accounted for approximately 7% of carbon dioxide emissions in 2020, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

“It’s a huge amount of greenhouse gas emissions from just iron and steel alone,” said Matt Mlinar, research group leader for minerals processing and metallurgy at NRRI. “They (the Department of Energy) are trying to look for alternative ways to produce the same products while not emitting CO2.”

Both methods the NRRI will help research replace carbon with hydrogen, either through the microwave hydrogen plasma process or with ammonia, which is a nitrogen and hydrogen compound.

Typically, coal or natural gas is used to remove oxygen from iron before a traditional oxygen furnace or, increasingly, an electric arc furnace converts it to steel.

Carbon monoxide in fossil fuels can pick an oxygen atom off the iron oxide, removing it from the iron but forming carbon dioxide and other gases as a byproduct. Those gases are then released into the atmosphere. But if hydrogen is used instead, two hydrogen atoms can bond with one oxygen atom from the iron oxide and form water, and water vapor is a far more desirable byproduct than greenhouse gases.

“We want hydrogen to do the reduction, and not the CO (carbon monoxide) because then the CO2 (carbon dioxide) will form, and herein lies the problem,” said Brett Apigarelli, a senior research scientist at NRRI.

The projects were part of $28 million in funding announced last week by the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, under the Revolutionizing Ore to Steel Impact Emissions, or ROSIE, program.

“Iron and steel production are among the most difficult industrial sectors to decarbonize, which is why ARPA-E is laser focused on accelerating game-changing technological breakthroughs to lower emissions from these critical sectors,” ARPA-E director Evelyn N. Wang said in a news release. “Today’s announcement will help the nation achieve President Biden’s ambitious clean energy and net-zero goals while also reinforcing America’s global leadership in clean manufacturing for generations to come.”

Separately, the NRRI last year received a $2.1 million grant from the Department of Energy to study different lower-carbon technologies for the iron and steel industries. That includes using biochar, wood heated to a high temperature in a low-oxygen setting, to replace coal in the steelmaking process.

Mlinar said ARPA-E, which is funding the hydrogen projects, is known for backing “moonshot” research.

“They fund a lot of really, really high-risk, high-reward projects that otherwise it’s hard to get funding for,” Mlinar said.

Eric Enberg, a volunteer for the Northland Chapter of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby, said carbon dioxide emissions from the iron ore and steelmaking industries were long considered difficult to abate.

But that’s changing.

“How do we ever decarbonize these things?” Enberg said. “Well, it’s turning out that it’s a lot easier than we thought. There’s a lot of things we can do — not as cheaply perhaps right now versus carbon-based fuels.”

Enberg said federal funding could help ideas advance beyond the so-called “valley of death” when new technologies under development putter out.

Citizens Climate Lobby has also been arguing for a price on carbon. Enberg if the industry sees traditional carbon-intensive methods and processes becoming cost-prohibitive, it could spur them to adopt lower-carbon or carbon-free processes.

“You need to have the push and the pull,” Enberg said.

If the hydrogen processes work, and are then scaled up, they could transform the state’s iron mining industry again.

First, high-grade was mined, and it could be added directly to a blast furnace. When that was depleted, processing lower-grade ores into concentrated pellets became the norm.

But lower-carbon or carbon-free methods could take pellets out of the equation.

Enberg said the industry should be quick to adopt new technologies in Minnesota because if pellets aren’t needed, there’s nothing stopping ore mined on the Iron Range from being shipped out of state for processing somewhere else.

“We really need to take advantage of this opportunity; otherwise, it’s going to be gone,” Enberg said. “And if it’s gone, then the Iron Range is going to be stuck with the technology from the last century. It will not have moved forward, and the technology and the jobs and all that are going to be somewhere else.”

 

If fears about “the bomb” permeated life in the mid-20th century, the video game “Fallout” takes that premise to its worst conclusion. In a post-nuclear wasteland, some survivors have been recreating their 1950s-era idyll underground in elaborate bomb shelters called vaults. Those less lucky have been eking out a life on the surface, where it is dusty and brutal, and nasty oddities abound in the form of ghouls, who exist in a liminal space between human and zombie. How the hell did we get here? The Amazon TV adaptation explains by toggling between two timelines: Los Angeles of 2077 and what remains of the place a couple of centuries into the future.

Inside Vault 33, the community’s cult-like tranquility is invaded by surface dwellers who kidnap the man in charge (Kyle MacLachlan) and this sets the story in motion. His daughter Lucy ventures outside for the first time on a mission to save him and learns some ugly truths about the inevitable consequences of end-stage capitalism along the way.

Played by Ella Purnell, Lucy is perky and naive but exceptionally skilled with a weapon. Her trek on the surface is one long rude awakening, but what do you expect? She’s literally been sheltered all her life. She’s more or less introduced as a character worthy of “Leave It to Beaver” who is unceremoniously yanked into a darker show by the end of the first episode. That’s typical of “Fallout’s” sense of humor, a lot of which comes through in the production design (which takes a page from the 1999 comedy “Blast From the Past” in amusing ways) and the intentional tonal discord that is irony-drenched and kitschy but not actually funny (a missed opportunity). Chris Parnell and Matt Berry show up separately, and briefly, for comic relief as well.

A scene from “Fallout,” the Prime Video series based on the video game franchise. (JoJo Whilden/Prime Video/TNS)

I haven’t played “Fallout,” but it came up when I wrote about Marvel’s “WandaVision” in 2021. I was curious if younger generations would understand its parodies of shows like “I Love Lucy” and Northwestern professor and screenwriter Brett Neveu was convinced many viewers would, thanks to this game specifically, where “only the pop culture from the 1950s has remained behind. So the jokes that are in the game, the references, they are all part of a culture that is long gone. And if you invest in this puzzle, you have to know these reference points.” Stylistically, the show has stuck with this idea to an extent, primarily through its old-school needle drops.

The hellscape on the surface is unpredictable and dangerous. This has left a power vacuum to be exploited by a brutal militia called the Brotherhood of Steel, in which knights don enormous metal exoskeletons and travel with lowly squires. One of those squires is Maximus (Aaron Moten), who is as out of his element as Lucy. Their individual journeys are the show’s weakest portions, but once they finally team up, the pair starts to feel like more than narrative conceits.

It is Walton Goggins, with his ever-present drawl, who gives “Fallout” its real reason for being. He is the third main character and arguably the most important because his arc serves as a through line. Before the nuclear apocalypse, he is a Hollywood star named Cooper Howard who is famous for his good-guy roles in Westerns. In the future, he has transformed into a leathery, noseless, centuries-old survivor who has shed the moral compass of his former self. His character in both timelines gets all the complexity that’s otherwise missing in the series (which has been renewed for a second season). Nothing is as interesting as when Goggins is on screen. The gory violence in “Fallout” isn’t my speed, and there’s far too much of it in the early going. But the show won me over when his ghoul forcibly asserts his will over someone who, mid-tussle, bites off his index finger. In return, he slices off their index finger: “Now that right there is the closest thing we’ve had to honest exchange so far.”

It’s such a wonderfully weird moment (don’t worry, they both somehow get their respective fingers reattached) and I wish there were more like it. When someone asks, “How do you live like this? Why keep going?,” he offers no answer. His quest is revealed late in the season, but his wanderings up to that point are fascinating all the same. When he stumbles into an abandoned store called Super Duper Mart (repurposed for nefarious doings), he finds a copy of an old movie he starred in that has somehow survived all these years on videotape and he sits there slack-jawed, watching footage of his former self.

Production designer Howard Cummings gives distinctive looks to each time and place, and the vaults in particular aim to recreate a sunny normality with a hermetically sealed twist. But nothing about the show, from creators Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, has a light touch. “Westworld” creators Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan are executive producers here and you can sense some of that show’s DNA here as well.

The storytelling doesn’t fully gel at first. But if you’re patient, “Fallout” reveals itself to be a show with some potent things to say about where we’re headed if we allow corporate interests to dictate the future. Companies with a business model predicated on prepper-style scare tactics (like the show’s fictitious Vault-Tec) will always need to justify their existence. Where “Fallout” stumbles is what it leaves out. It paints a vision of a colorblind world but also introduces a eugenics plotline, which rings hollow considering the show erases the racism and other bigotries that have historically been used to justify this kind of mindset.

Before the apocalypse, Cooper Howard contemplates what it means to be a “pitchman for the end of the world.” Hollywood is over, a fellow actor tells him: “Hollywood is the past. Forget Hollywood. The future, my friend, is products. You’re a product, I’m a product, the end of the world is a product.”

Just don’t think too hard about the real-world corporate interests pushing us in that direction, including the one streaming this very series.

‘Fallout’

3 stars (out of 4)

Rating: TV-MA

How to watch: Prime Video

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Now that the House of Representatives, acting in an unusually bipartisan way, finally passed a $61 billion aid package for Ukraine, the big question is what the Ukrainians should spend it on.

This aid comes not a minute too soon. Russia has been gathering momentum both on the ground and in the air, threatening a summer offensive that could crack the Ukrainians’ lines and threaten their major cities. These include Kharkiv — the major city nearest to the Russian border — and possibly Kyiv itself, forcing the government of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy out of the capital.

Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns, a former ambassador to Russia, understands Russian President Vladimir Putin well. Burns said last week that unless the new tranche of U.S. aid was forthcoming, Ukraine was in danger of losing the war within the year. But he also said, “with the boost that would come from military assistance, both practically and psychologically, the Ukrainians are entirely capable of holding their own through 2024 and puncture Putin’s arrogant view that time is on his side.”

So, with the $61 billion of “forgivable loans” approved this week by the Senate and White House, what are Ukraine’s most crucial needs? How fast can the pipeline move more weapons and ammunition into the hands of Kyiv’s brave, overachieving military?

The good news is that both the U.S. and European defense establishments have been primed for this moment over the past months. My successor as supreme allied commander at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, General Chris Cavoli, has said that it is largely a matter of turning on the spigot once President Joe Biden signs the aid bill. Cavoli’s vast command — eight full battlegroups in Eastern Europe alone — is poised to swing fully into action to deliver assistance.

Fortunately, nearly 90% of money for Ukraine will be spent on purchases from the U.S. defense industrial base. This means that procurement and logistics should run relatively smoothly down well-trodden paths. Storehouses in Europe — run by U.S. European Command and our NATO partners in Germany, Poland and other sites in Eastern Europe — are already full of weapons, particularly artillery shells, that could move quickly into Ukrainian hands.

At the top of the list will be replenishing Ukraine’s air defenses.

This means more surface-to-air missiles, ranging from the smaller systems like the National Advanced Surface-to-Air System (NASAMS) and the MIM-23 HAWK systems, to the big Patriot batteries that proved so effective in defending Israel during the Iranian air attack earlier this month. The Patriots and even larger Terminal High Altitude Defense systems (THAAD) can defend against Russian cruise and ballistic missiles over broader areas. These systems will protect not only civilians and critical infrastructure like the electric grid, but will be useful against Russian aircraft.

Next on the shopping list will be artillery ammunition.

All along the hundreds of miles of battlefront separating the combatants, daily artillery duels are being fought. Russia is getting the better of the Ukrainians through sheer volume of fire. As in World War I, defensive trenches can help hold off the waves of cannon-fodder foot soldiers the Russians use (including many conscripts and convicts), but their artillery can pin down and ultimately overcome the dug-in Ukrainians. The most pressing need for the Ukrainian artillery is millions of traditional 155 millimeter howitzer rounds, alongside ammo for smaller-caliber guns.

Ukraine will also want to use the funds to help finally get the 45 or so F-16 fighters previously promised by the West into the skies.

These versatile combat aircraft are capable of solid air-to-air defense against Russian fighters and bombers; pinpoint air-to-ground attacks against Russian troops in the field and in their trenches; and electronic warfare and jamming that can deceive and defeat Russian cruise missiles. Ukrainian pilots have been training for months to fly them.

Another high priority will be long-range surface-to-surface missiles.

The U.S. Army’s High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) is mobile and lethal. It can use precise targeting data at ranges of 50-plus miles, and has been deployed with great effect on the Ukrainian battlefield. Even better is the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), a ballistic weapon with ranges of 150-plus miles. Both can strike behind Russian front lines and destroy logistics centers and command-and-control hubs, notably in Crimea.

The war in Ukraine has also become the first lengthy conflict in which drones are playing a major role.

Unmanned aerial vehicles have been crucial for the Ukrainians in stopping Russian advances. These drones rely on exquisite command and control — much of it provided over the internet and connected to constellations of satellites. This may be less glamorous than ballistic missiles flying toward Crimea and fighters swooping down on Russian forces, but it is just as critical. The U.S. loan package could allow the Ukrainians to field a stronger offensive drone force with commensurate cybersecurity abilities.

Given that this $61 billion is under 7% of the massive U.S. defense budget, it represents excellent return on investment for U.S. taxpayers. Nearly all of the money will be spent back in the U.S., providing jobs and helping the economy, and it will help decimate the military capability of an aggressive dictator without putting a single U.S. service member at risk. These funds, along with the billions of dollars the European allies have already provided and pledged (in total military and economic assistance, the Europeans have given far more aid to Ukraine than the U.S.), give Ukraine a fighting chance.

In 1941, UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill said to the U.S., “Give us the tools and we will finish the job,” referring to defeating Nazi Germany. Today, another rapacious foe is attacking a sovereign European state and seeking to undermine Western values globally. Putin must be stopped, and with the right set of tools provided by the U.S. and Europe together, Ukraine too can do the job.

James Stavridis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a retired U.S. Navy admiral, former supreme allied commander of NATO, and dean emeritus of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Stavridis is also vice chairman of global affairs at the Carlyle Group. He is on the boards of Fortinet, NFP, Ankura Consulting Group and Neuberger Berman, and has advised Shield Capital, a firm that invests in the cybersecurity sector.

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