Dungeness
This week residents of the 99 Dungeness houses many of them built on top of Victorian railway carriages dragged on to the shingle a century ago will attend a public meeting with Kent county council and EDF, the company operating the Dungeness B plant, to discuss a controversial planning application that would see this landscape change dramatically. The proposal, from EDF and the Environment Agency, is to have between 50 and 100 quarry lorries a day, each weighing 30 tonnes and three metres wide, coming along the 3.1-metre wide unmade road for five days a week, trundling right past their front doors. Diggers will be out too, along a 300-metre stretch of seafront, pulling out up to 30,000 tonnes of shingle a year to dump it back into the sea a few miles away down the coast.
Observer 15th Jan 2012 more >>
Heysham
SAFETY reassessments undertaken at UK nuclear power stations including Heysham following last years tsunami in Japan have revealed no fundamental weaknesses. A report published by the Office for Nuclear Regulation, the UKs independent nuclear safety regulator, confirms that UK sites have identified and made improvements to safety by learning from events in Japan.
The Visitor 14th Jan 2012 more >>
Radwaste
The earliest known cave paintings date from about 30,000 years ago, and the earliest bone tools found so far predate those paintings by another 40,000 years. Go back 100,000 years, and Homo sapiens us lot are only just emerging, though the fossil record suggests our ancestors back then had larger molars and thicker and heavier bones than we do. Danish filmmaker Michael Madsen made a documentary about an attempt in Finland that involves the construction of a disposal facility intended to keep people millennia in the future safe from the radioactive waste we are producing today.
Japan Times 15th Jan 2012 more >>
France
A decision by France to spend billions of euros making its vast network of ageing reactors safe is once again making environmentalists question the future of nuclear energy. “This is more evidence that nuclear energy is commercially, as well as environmentally, unviable in the long term. We have always opposed nuclear energy on grounds of cost as well as safety. That nuclear energy is far costlier than alternative energy is something we have always argued,” Graham Thompson, a spokesman for the environmental lobby group Greenpeace, says.
The National 14th Jan 2012 more >>
Japan
Fukushima update 10th – 12th Jan.
Greenpeace International 13th Jan 2012 more >>
About 2,000 demonstrators hit the streets of Yokohama on Saturday calling for an end to nuclear energy in Japan. They marched in the port city, chanting in chorus: We dont need nuclear power. Give back our hometown. Protect our children.
Japan Today 15th Jan 2012 more >>
Iran
William Hague has warned that “intensifying” tensions with Iran could escalate into a crisis that destabilises the entire Middle East unless the country abandons its nuclear enrichment programme.
Telegraph 14th Jan 2012 more >>
Iran said Saturday it has evidence that the United States was behind the assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist this week in Tehran, state media reported.
Daily Mail 14th Jan 2012 more >>
Iran has accused the US and Britain of being behind the assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist this week in Tehran.
Guardian 14th Jan 2012 more >>
In Tehran, the anger on show at the funeral of Mostafa Roshan, when thousands screamed “Death to Israel! Death to America!”, grows. Yesterday, Iran’s official news agency, IRNA, said the country was holding Britain and the US responsible for the assassination.
Independent 15th Jan 2012 more >>
Gas
A discovery by scientists may have more than doubled the worlds energy reserves. They have found vast amounts of natural gas frozen into the sea bed, potentially containing more energy than all the worlds known coal, oil and gas reserves combined. The methane gas is mixed with water, and frozen solid by the high pressure and low temperatures in the deep sea. Methane hydrate, as the substance is known, has long been regarded by oil and gas companies as a nuisance, because it can block marine drilling rigs. Now a study by Statoil, Norways state oil firm and a leading global gas producer, suggests it should be reclassified as a significant fuel resource, with enough buried in the oceans to power the world for decades or even centuries. There are, however, huge technical and environmental hurdles to overcome. A key fear is that the chemical instability of methane hydrate deposits means mining them could generate a runaway reaction that would send millions of tons of methane bubbling into the sea. Such leaks would also be disastrous for the climate, because methane is a global warming gas many times more potent than CO2. Douglas Parr, chief scientist for Greenpeace UK, said that in a world already threatened by climate change, it was ridiculous to seek out and burn yet more fossil fuels.
Sunday Times 15th Jan 2012 more >>
Renewables
In the next few weeks, two huge Archimedes screws placed in the River Thames a few hundred yards from Windsor castle will be switched on to provide a steady stream of green electricity for the royal household. But the company behind the Queens turbines has suspended all new hydropower projects, claiming it can no longer trust the government to continue backing renewable energy.
Sunday Times 15th Jan 2012 more >>
