Ahmed Abdulla

University of California, San Diego | UCSD · School of Global Policy and Strategy

A central challenge for sustaining international cooperation to cut global greenhouse gas emissions is confidence that national policy efforts are leading to a meaningful impact on the climate. Here, we apply a detection protocol to determine when the measurable signal of atmospheric CO2 can be distinguished from the noise of the carbon cycle and u...

Though highly motivated to slow the climate crisis, governments may struggle to impose costly polices on entrenched interest groups, resulting in a greater need for negative emissions. Here, we model wartime-like crash deployment of direct air capture (DAC) as a policy response to the climate crisis, calculating funding, net CO2 removal, and climat...

Most studies of deep decarbonization find that a diverse portfolio of low-carbon energy technologies will be required, including carbon capture and storage (CCS) that mitigates emissions from fossil fuel power plants and industrial sources. While many projects essential to commercializing the technology have been proposed, most (>80%) end in failur...

Historically, the U.S. has sought to use commercial trade in nuclear technologies to influence international nuclear security standards and promote nonproliferation. Concern has grown that, with a stagnating domestic nuclear industry and declining export industry, the U.S. will lose a significant tool of foreign policy and leverage in maintaining s...

Decarbonization will require deployment of low-carbon technologies, but analysts have struggled to quantify which ones could be deployed in practice—especially where technologies have faced public opposition. For nuclear power, some analysts have tried to solve this problem with caps on deployment or nuclear-free scenarios; however, social science...

Objectives: All organizations seek to minimize the risks that their operations pose to public safety. This task is especially significant if they deal with complex or hazardous technologies. Five decades of research in quantitative risk analysis have generated a set of risk management frameworks and practices that extend across a range of such dom...

In many jurisdictions, policy makers are seeking to decentralize the electric power system while also promoting deep reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG). We examine the potential roles for residential energy storage (RES), a technology thought to be at the epicenter of these twin revolutions. We model the impact of grid-connected RES...

Nuclear power holds the potential to make a significant contribution to decarbonizing the US energy system. Whether it could do so in its current form is a critical question: Existing large light water reactors in the United States are under economic pressure from low natural gas prices, and some have already closed. Moreover, because of their grea...

The Paris Agreement highlights the need for local climate leadership. The University Of California’s approach to deep decarbonization offers lessons in efficiency, alternative fuels and electrification. Bending the emissions curve globally requires efforts that blend academic insights with practical solutions.

Deep decarbonization in the U.S. will require a shift to an electrified society dominated by low-carbon generation. Many studies assume a role for nuclear power in the new energy economy, and the nuclear industry anticipates an eventual transition from light water reactors to advanced, non-light water designs. The development of these advanced reac...

Deep decarbonization of the global energy system will require large investments in energy innovation and the deployment of new technologies. While many studies have focused on the expenditure that will be needed, here we focus on how government has spent public sector resources on innovation for a key carbon-free technology: advanced nuclear. We fo...

It is hard to see how our energy system can be decarbonized if the world abandons nuclear power, but equally hard to introduce the technology in nonnuclear energy states. This is especially true in countries with limited technical, institutional, and regulatory capabilities, where safety and proliferation concerns are acute. Given the need to achie...

Small modular reactors (SMRs) may provide an energy option that will not emit greenhouse gases. From a commercial point-of-view, SMRs will be suitable to serve smaller energy markets with less developed infrastructure, to replace existing old nuclear and coal power plants, and to provide process heat in various industrial applications. In this pape...

Small modular reactors (SMRs) hold the potential to make carbon-free nuclear energy available at smaller scales that would be more affordable than large conventional reactors. If they could be manufactured in a factory, and shipped to the site as a completed unit, it might also be possible to reduce the cost per kWh. If the core could be fueled in...

Analysts and decision makers frequently want estimates of the cost of technologies that have yet to be developed or deployed. Small modular reactors (SMRs), which could become part of a portfolio of carbon-free energy sources, are one such technology. Existing estimates of likely SMR costs rely on problematic top-down approaches or bottom-up assess...

The capability to build nuclear weapons is a key national security factor that has a profound influence on the balance of international relations. In addition to longstanding players, regional powers and peripheral countries have sought for ways of acquiring and/or developing them. The authors postulate that to express the capabilities, relative po...

The energy efficiency of hydrogen recovery from mixtures of CO2, H2O, and H2 by a polymer electrolyte hydrogen pump (PEHP) has been evaluated. The PEHP pumps protons across the polymer electrolyte, producing >99.99% pure H2 and a concentrated CO2 stream. Single stage PEHP experiments recovered 65% of the hydrogen with an energy efficiency of 50%. T...

Steam reforming of hydrocarbons or coal followed by the water gas shift reaction produces a mixture of H2, CO2 and H20. The most common approaches to purify the hydrogen are by alkaline scrubbing of the gas mixture to remove the CO2 or pressure swing adsorption. We report here an alternative method of electrochemical pumping of hydrogen from mixtur...