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Weather: Mostly sunny. A chance of showers in the morning, then showers with thunderstorms likely in the afternoon. Highs in the lower 90s. Southeast winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80 percent. Monday Night: Mostly cloudy in the evening, then becoming partly cloudy. A chance of thunderstorms. Showers, mainly in the evening. Lows in the mid 70s. Southeast winds 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 80 percent.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
Labor Day at the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse, 4931 South Peninsula Drive, Ponce Inlet. 10:30 AM to 2:30 PM. Take a break from the beach and visit the Ponce De Leon Inlet Lighthouse and Museum on Labor Day! We will be open from 10 a.m. – 9 p.m. with special activities on site from 10:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m. included with regular admission. Adults (age 12+): $6.95, Children (age 3-11): $1.95, Infants (age 0-2): Free.
Alan Dalton & Terry Campbell at Colonial Oak Music Park, 33 St George St, St Augustine, 2 to 5 p.m. Bluegrass, Newgrass, Acoustic Country, Contemporary.
Nar-Anon Family Groups offers hope and help for families and friends of addicts through a 12-step program, 6 p.m. at St. Mark by the Sea Lutheran Church, 303 Palm Coast Pkwy NE, Palm Coast, Fellowship Hall Entrance. See the website, www.nar-anon.org, or call (800) 477-6291. Find virtual meetings here.
Notably: At 755 East Flamingo Road in Las Vegas, a couple of blocks off the Strip but not far from the Silver Sevens Hotel and Casino, the Embassy Suites and, a few steps to the south, the campus of the University of Nevada Las Vegas, you’ll find the Atomic Museum. “A Smithsonian Affiliate.” You can experience a simulated atomic blast. You can see a replica of Little Boy, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, or a replica of Trinity, the bomb that exploded in the New Mexico desert in July 1945, and that drew this reaction from Emilio Segre, one of the Manhattan Project physicists: “The most striking impression was that of an overwhelmingly bright light… I was flabbergasted by the new spectacle. We saw the whole sky flash with unbelievable brightness in spite of the very dark glasses we wore…. I believe that for a moment I thought the explosion might set fire to the atmosphere and thus finish the earth, even though I knew that this was not possible.” Now you can live a simulation. You can enjoy it between a slurpee and a bet. You can maybe–maybe–find out that 200,000 people were killed with the two bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The museum’s mission is to “preserve and foster public accessibility to the history associated with the Nevada Test Site,” which is no longer called the Nevada Test Site, “ and the nation’s nuclear weapons program.” Not that it has anything to do with it, but you can also “the lifesaving equipment that the Department of Homeland Security develops for our nation’s first responders.” All for just $29.
—P.T.
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The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
June 2025
Nar-Anon Family Group
July 2025
Flagler Beach Library Writers’ Club
Flagler Beach Planning and Architectural Review Board
Palm Coast City Council Meeting
Bunnell Planning, Zoning and Appeals Board
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
For the full calendar, go here.
By graduate school, he was devouring historical records from the facility he’d vowed never to return to. He was particularly fond of stories of former lab director Norris Bradbury. “What Norris used to say was, ‘We don’t build nuclear weapons to kill people. We build them to buy time for our political leaders to find a better way,” says Martz. “If the products of our work are ever again used in anger, we will have failed in our mission.”
–From Sarah Scoles, Countdown (2024).
Ray W. says
Per Live Science, the Department of Energy announced the approval of $147 million in grants to fund in part the construction of a “novel” bulky modular iron-air battery system that uses “reversible rusting” to charge and discharge. The receiving company, Form Energy, has five other such projects underway, with the pilot program under construction in Minnesota. Each battery storage module, the size of a washer-dryer set, contains iron and air electrodes immersed in a water-based, non-flammable, electrolyte solution.
The battery uses no lithium, reducing the pollution and expense of that metal when compared to the use of iron. When discharging, oxidization rusts the iron and releases oxygen. When charging, the process reverses and oxygen binds with the iron, eliminating the rust.
Charge and discharge rates are comparatively low, making the battery of little use for personal or commercial transportation, but for bulk energy storage from wind or solar facilities, the battery is much better suited to the task.
The project, located in Maine, will create the world’s largest battery storage facility, at 8,500 megawatt hours of energy. One megawatt hour can power 750 homes for one hour. 8,500 megawatt-hours should power 265,500 homes for 24 hours.
According to a company representative, the iron-air battery stores electricity at 1/10th the cost of a lithium-ion battery.
Make of this what you will. Me? A reliable battery based on oxidation, a long understood chemical process, using commonly available, less pollutive, and relatively cheap iron instead of expensive, pollutive, and the relatively rare heavy metal lithium? A battery that stores electricity at 10% of the operating cost of a comparable lithium-ion battery? As former President Trump would say, “Way!”
Technological advances continue coming at a rapid pace. The problem once was attracting private investment dollars toward renewable energy opportunities that had few cost advantages over alternative and established carbon-based energy sources. Now that solar and wind power have become price-advantageous, the field is shifting. Government grants will keep the field shifting towards renewable energy. If the projects prove feasible on their own, there may no longer be a need for government grants, though I don’t doubt that private companies will try to extract incentives from local governments to place their plants nearest the biggest dollar source.
Ray W. says
According to TechRadar, Zeekr, a subsidiary corporation linked with Geely, one of China’s bigger EV car companies, is releasing a five-seat SUV to the Chines market late next month. The company plans to export to multiple overseas regions, including Europe, but no plans for export to the U.S. currently exist, perhaps due to existing tariffs.
The base model SUV sprints to 62 mph (100 kph) in 3.8 seconds, “faster than most modern sports cars.” Its 75kWh lithium-iron-phosphate battery charges from 10% to 80% in 10.5 minutes if an ultra-fast charger is utilized. Range? 376 miles.
The high-end model has a 100kWh nickel manganese cobalt battery pack extends range to 484 miles.
Make of this what you will. Me? We are years, perhaps decades behind Chinese battery companies because of political stupidity on both sides, though the party that manufactured fear and loathing after the Solyndra failure is primarily responsible for American companies failing to cash in on the manufacture of batteries for all kinds of use. The tariffs exist because we are so far behind the Chinese in this manufacturing sector. The gullible among us fell for the fearmongering.