Appeals court: Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been violating federal law by delaying a decision on a proposed nuclear waste dump in Nevada - Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a rebuke to the Obama administration, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been violating federal law by delaying a decision on a proposed nuclear waste dump in Nevada.

By a 2-1 vote, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ordered the commission to complete the licensing process and approve or reject the Energy Department's application for a never-completed waste storage site at Nevada's Yucca Mountain.

In a sharply worded opinion, the court said the nuclear agency was "simply flouting the law" when it allowed the Obama administration to continue plans to close the proposed waste site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The action goes against a federal law designating Yucca Mountain as the nation's nuclear waste repository.

"The president may not decline to follow a statutory mandate or prohibition simply because of policy objections," Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote in a majority opinion, which was joined Judge A. Raymond Randolph. Chief Judge Merrick B. Garland dissented.

The appeals court said the case has important implications for the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches of government.

"It is no overstatement to say that our constitutional system of separation of powers would be significantly altered if we were to allow executive and independent agencies to disregard federal law in the manner asserted in this case by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission," Kavanaugh wrote. "The commission is simply defying a law enacted by Congress ... without any legal basis."

A spokesman for the NRC said Tuesday the agency was reviewing the decision. He declined further comment.

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said the Energy Department was not a party to the lawsuit, but he characterized the Yucca Mountain project as "a complete stalemate." He said he saw no evidence of that changing.

"Currently we do not have funding," he told reporters at a clean energy conference Tuesday in Las Vegas.

The court's decision was hailed by supporters of the Yucca site, which has been the focus of a dispute that stretches back more than three decades. The government has spent an estimated $15 billion on the site but has never completed it. No waste is stored there.

"This decision reaffirms a fundamental truth: The president is not above the law," said South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson. The Obama administration "cannot pick and choose which laws to follow and which to ignore," Wilson said.

Please read full and follow at:

http://news.yahoo.com/appeals-court-obama-violating-law-nuke-153924603.html

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This is bad...China about to become world’s largest oil importer | via @SmartPlanet

SmartPlanet: China is calling for the oil can. So much so that the Asian economic giant will surpass the U.S. as the world's largest oil importer in October, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

"The imminent emergence of China as the world's largest net oil importer has been driven by steady growth in Chinese demand, increased oil production in the United States, and a flat level of demand for oil in the U.S. market," EIA said in a press release.

With China yearning for so much foreign oil, it makes you wonder how geopolitics will change, and which flags might fly from the ships patrolling places like Middle East sea lanes.

Photo from theiranproject.com. Chart from U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Read on from China about to become world's largest oil importer |

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World changing technology enables crops to take nitrogen from the air

A major new technology has been developed by The University of Nottingham, which enables all of the world's crops to take nitrogen from the air rather than expensive and environmentally damaging fertilisers.

Nitrogen fixation, the process by which nitrogen is converted to ammonia, is vital for plants to survive and grow. However, only a very small number of plants, most notably legumes (such as peas, beans and lentils) have the ability to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere with the help of nitrogen fixing bacteria. The vast majority of plants have to obtain nitrogen from the soil, and for most crops currently being grown across the world, this also means a reliance on synthetic nitrogen fertiliser.

Read on from World changing technology enables crops to take nitrogen from the air - The University of Nottingham 

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Study: US debt six times greater than declared - $211 trillion

...The real shocker in the report, however, came with the cost of Medicare and Social Security, which ran at $27.6 trillion and $26.5 trillion respectively.   

Hamilton could not conceal his surprise at the findings.

"These numbers are so huge it is hard even to discuss them in a coherent way," he said before providing a caveat on the US demographic situation. "The US population is aging, and an aging population means fewer people paying in and more people expecting benefits. This reality is unambiguously going to be a key constraint on the sustainability of fiscal policy for the United States.

"One would think we should be saving as a nation today as preparation for retirement, and if in fact we are not, the current enormous on-balance-sheet federal debt is all the more of a concern."

It is not just the sick and elderly, however, who are adding to the US debt burden. Government loans for students also featured high in the report.

The US Department of Education approved $714 billion at the end of 2012, which is a significant jump from the $104 billion issued at the end of 2007.  But with the US economy failing to generate new jobs, many of these now college graduates lack the financial means to return their debt.

Although the report paints an extremely worrisome picture of America's fiscal situation, some say it may actually be overly optimistic.

The US debt burden is much greater says Boston University economics professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff, who served on President Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers.

"If you add up all the promises that have been made for spending obligations, including defense expenditures, and you subtract all the taxes that we expect to collect, the difference is $211 trillion. That's the fiscal gap," Kotlikoff said in an interview with National Public Radio. "That's our true indebtedness." Please continue reading at:

http://rt.com/usa/us-debt-study-hamilton-economy-103/

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Eating raw garlic just twice a week can almost halve the risk of lung cancer, new research shows.

A study carried out in China found adults regularly consuming raw garlic as part of their diet were 44 per cent less likely to suffer the disease.

Even when researchers allowed for whether people smoked – the biggest single cause of lung cancer – they found garlic still seemed to reduce the dangers by around 30 per cent.

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The Battle for Water - #water = #life

Brahma Chellaney: The sharpening international geopolitical competition over natural resources has turned some strategic resources into engines of power struggle. Transnational water resources have become an especially active source of competition and conflict, triggering a dam-building race and prompting growing calls for the United Nations to recognize water as a key security concern.

Water is different from other natural resources. After all, there are substitutes for many resources, including oil, but none for water. Similarly, countries can import fossil fuels, mineral ores, and resources from the biosphere like fish and timber; but they cannot import water, which is essentially local, on a large scale and on a prolonged – much less permanent – basis. Water is heavier than oil, making it very expensive to ship or transport across long distances even by pipeline (which would require large, energy-intensive pumps).

The paradox of water is that it sustains life but can also cause death when it becomes a carrier of deadly microbes or takes the form of a tsunami, flash flood, storm, or hurricane. Many of the greatest natural disasters of our time – including, for example, the Fukushima catastrophe in 2011 – have been water-related.

...Rapid economic and demographic expansion has already turned adequate access to potable water into a major issue across large parts of the world. Lifestyle changes, for example, have spurred increasing per capita water consumption, with rising incomes promoting dietary change, for example, especially higher consumption of meat, production of which is ten times more water-intensive, on average, than plant-based calories and proteins.

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 The Battle for Water by Brahma Chellaney - Project Syndicate | shared via feedly mobile

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Splenda goes from 'safe' to 'caution' after leukemia found in mice #Health

Source: MSN

The Center for Science in the Public Interest is urging caution in the use of the artificial sweetener Splenda.

A food safety advocacy group has downgraded its rating for sucralose, the artificial sweetener better known as Splenda, from "safe" to "caution" in its chemical guide to food additives.

The Washington-based Center for Science in the Public Interest announced Wednesday that it had long rated sucralose as "safe" but is now categorizing it with a "caution," pending peer review of an unpublished study by an independent Italian lab that found the sweetener caused leukemia in mice.

Previously, the only long-term animal-feeding studies were done by sucralose's manufacturers, the CSPI said.

Other artificial sweeteners such as saccharin, aspartame and acesulfame potassium have received the center's lowest rating, "avoid."

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Dogs Trained To Sniff Out Ovarian Cancer

Slashdot Dogs have been trained to sniff out drugs, explosives, cadavers, mobile phones, firearms, and money but now AP reports that researchers havestarted training canines to sniff out the signature compound that indicates the presence of ovarian cancer. If the animals can isolate the chemical marker, scientists at the nearby Monell Chemical Senses Center will work to create an electronic sensor to identify the same odorant. "Because if the dogs can do it, then the question is, Can our analytical instrumentation do it? We think we can," says organic chemist George Preti. More than 20,000 Americans are diagnosed with ovarian cancer each year. When it's caught early, women have a five-year survival rate of 90 percent. But because of its generic symptoms — weight gain, bloating or constipation — the disease is more often caught late.

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Hybrd wind-current turbine world's first capable of maximizing the harvesting of ocean energy from wind and current".

Tree Hugger -Combining a three-bladed Darrieus turbine on top, a Savonius turbine underneath, and a generator in between, the SKWID power generation concept is claimed to be the world's first hybrid system "capable of maximizing the harvesting of ocean energy from wind and current".

The SKWID, from the Japanese company Mitsui Ocean Development & Engineering Company, is designed to capitalize on the energy potential available both in the winds above the ocean, and in the currents flowing beneath the waves. The device uses an omnidirectional Darrieus wind turbine sitting 47 meters above the sea on one end of a vertical shaft, with a different type of omnidirectional turbine design, a 15 meter diameter Savonius, spinning at the other end under the surface.

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Six Japanese nuclear reactors likely to resume operating by March next year and a total of 16 reactors by March 2015 [feedly]

Six Japanese nuclear reactors likely to resume operating by March next year and a total of 16 reactors by March 2015

The Institute of Energy Economics Japan says that their forecast is that the first nuclear reactor of the new batch (of about ten applicant reactors) will restart by July 2014.

Out of Japan's 50 reactors, only two have been online since they were forcibly shut down in 2011, following the nuclear meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. With the rising costs of fossil fuel imports and the country's strong reliance on nuclear power for its electricity supply, there is an enormous pressure to bring the reactors back online. This is in spite of the growing public disapproval of nuclear power.

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Taking pills for unhappiness reinforces the idea that being sad is not human

The Raw Story....The same thing has happened with depression and drugs like Prozac; though calling it depression is already to classify a particular kind of experience as something quasi-medical, thus leading one to think in terms of medical treatment. Sometimes I am just sad. Sometimes pissed off. Sometimes smothered in darkness. But we often lump all these experiences together simply because pharmaceutical companies have developed a certain sort of treatment. And, once you have a hammer in your hand, it is convenient to see every problem in terms of its being a nail. We have found the solution, now let's make the problem fit the solution we have available. It's a form of reverse engineering.

It is significant that psychoactive drugs were originally developed for other purposes. Drugs such as Thorazine, Miltown and Marsilid were developed in the 50s as ways to treat infections. But they were also seen to have mood-altering side-effects – though scientists had no idea why or how. So, as several writers have pointed out, "instead of developing a drug to fit an abnormality an abnormality was postulated to fit a drug". Thus we are encouraged to think of our problems in terms of the lucrative solutions to problems we didn't know we had. In this way, the pharmaceutical companies are responsible for the very conditions they propose to alleviate

Forget the fact that some people are miserable because they are struggling on zero-hours contracts, or have lost their partner or have been watching the news too much – if we translate misery into some sort of chemical imbalance then someone can make big money out of it. But unhappiness is often a perfectly proper response to the state of the world. If you have a shit job or a shit home life, being unhappy is hardly inappropriate. At best, many of the drugs we are popping only deal with the symptoms of all this, not the causes. At worst, they pathologise deviations for normalcy, thus helping to police the established values of consumer capitalism, and reinforcing the very unhappiness that they purport to cure.

Please continue reading at: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/10/taking-pills-for-unhappiness-reinforces-the-idea-that-being-sad-is-not-human/

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China faces its worst economic crisis: water - uses 4 to 10 times more water per unit of GDP than similar economies

MarketWatch... According to China's own water-resources officials, more than 400 Chinese cities lacked enough water last year, with 110 of those facing "serious scarcity."

The key culprit is industry, which Economy said uses 4 to 10 times more water per unit of GDP than similar economies and is polluting the nation's existing water resources at an alarming rate. She cited a February 2013 report by the Geological Survey of China saying a full 90% of the country's groundwater was polluted, while the Ministry of Environmental Protection said the water from about 25% of China's major river systems was so filthy that it couldn't be even used for industry or agriculture.

Tap water is mostly undrinkable, and those who do drink it run major health risks. And the contamination is making it into the food system, resulting in cadmium-tainted rice among other threats, she said.

It's not like the government isn't aware of the problem, but solutions such as raising the price of water have moved ahead at a snail's pace. And "of the 1.3% of GDP that Beijing currently spends on environmental protection … half finds its way into other local priorities such as infrastructure development," Economy told U.S. lawmakers.

Please continue reading: China faces its worst economic crisis: water - The Tell - MarketWatch 

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A Material That Could Make Solar Power “Dirt Cheap” | MIT Technology Review

MIT Technology Review...Researchers developing the technology say that it could lead to solar panels that cost just 10 to 20 cents per watt. Solar panels now typically cost about 75 cents a watt, and the U.S. Department of Energy says 50 cents per watt will allow solar power to compete with fossil fuel.

In the past, solar researchers have been divided into two camps in their pursuit of cheaper solar power. Some have sought solar cells that can be made very cheaply but that have the downside of being relatively inefficient. Lately, more researchers have focused on developing very high efficiency cells, even if they require more expensive manufacturing techniques.

The new material may make it possible to get the best of both worlds—solar cells that are highly efficient but also cheap to make.

One of the world's top solar researchers, Martin Green of the University of New South Wales, Australia, says the rapid progress has been surprising. Solar cells that use the material "can be made with very simple and potentially very cheap technology, and the efficiency is rising very dramatically," he says.

Perovskites have been known for over a century, but no one thought to try them in solar cells until relatively recently. The particular material the researchers are using is very good at absorbing light. While conventional silicon solar panels use materials that are about 180 micrometers thick, the new solar cells use less than one micrometer of material to capture the same amount of sunlight. The pigment is a semiconductor that is also good at transporting the electric charge created when light hits it.

"The material is dirt cheap," says Michael Grätzel, who is famous within the solar industry for inventing a type of solar cell that bears his name. His group has produced the most efficient perovskite solar cells so far—they convert 15 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity, far more than other cheap-to-make solar cells. Based on its performance so far, and on its known light-conversion properties, researchers say its efficiency could easily rise as high as 20 to 25 percent, which is as good as the record efficiencies (typically achieved in labs) of the most common types of solar cells today. The efficiencies of mass-produced solar cells may be lower. But it makes sense to compare the lab efficiencies of the perovskite cells with the lab records for other materials. Grätzel says that perovskite in solar cells will likely prove to be a "forgiving" material that retains high efficiencies in mass production, since the manufacturing processes are simple.

Please continue reading at: MIT Technology Review 

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Sweden does not have enough garbage and imports it but fortunately they are paid to take garbage [feedly]

Due to Sweden's innovative waste-to-energy program and highly efficient recycling habits, the Scandinavian nation faces an interesting dilemma. They have run out of trash.

Only four percent of Sweden's waste ends up in landfills while the EPA reports over half of the waste produced by U.S. households ends up in landfills.

In order to continue fueling the waste-to-energy factories that provide electricity to a quarter of a million homes and 20 percent of the entire country's district heating, Sweden is now importing trash from the landfills of other European countries. In fact, those countries are paying Sweden to do so.

Countries are paying Sweden to get rid of a source of fuel they themselves produced so that Sweden can continue to have the energy output they need. You don't have to be an economist to know that's one highly enviable energy model. Aside from the economic benefit, Sweden's system of sustainability clearly has vast environmental benefits. Aside from traditional recycling programs, their waste-to-energy system ensures minimal environmental impact from the country's waste.

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Healthier for people, more environmentally friendly and more efficient fish farming that is independent of any wild fish feedstocks

Australian CSIRO scientists have perfected the Novacq™ prawn feed additive. Farmed prawns fed with Novacq grow on average 30 per cent faster, are healthier and can be produced with no fish products in their diet, a world-first achievement in sustainability. 

Until now, Australian prawn farmers have needed to feed their prawns with a pellet that includes some sustainably sourced fish meal or fish oil, in order to ensure that the prawns grew fast, and were a healthy and high quality product for consumers.

Novacq is an entirely natural food source based on the smallest organisms in the marine environment, the marine microbes which are the foundation of the marine food pyramid.

Production of Novacq relies on the controlled production of these marine microbes. CSIRO researchers have discovered how to feed and harvest them, and convert them into a product that can then be added to feeds as a bioactive ingredient, like a dietary supplement for prawns.

Including Novacq in the diet of farmed prawns has shown for the first time that fish meal and fish oil can be completely replaced in the prawn diet, potentially freeing the prawn aquaculture industry from reliance on wild fishery resources.

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China's Pollution Fighting Budget Will Have to Be Bigger than its Military Budget

China will spend $275 billion over the next five years improving air quality—roughly the same as the GDP of Hong Kong, and twice the size of the annual defence budget [40% of the defence budget over the same five years]. China is also spending to clean up water pollution. 

China plans to invest 2.3 trillion yuan ($375 billion) in energy saving and emission-reduction projects in the five years through 2015 to clean up its environment. This is about 54% of the projected $685 billion that China will spend on its military over 5 years. The plan, which has been approved by the State Council, is on top of a 1.85 trillion yuan investment in the renewable energy sector. Combined the energy saving and emission-reduction projects and the renewables buildup is $675 billion. China would benefit more by shifting military budget into pollution fighting. China has sufficient military and has nuclear and military to deter any attack and to meet basic military goals. China's pollution is harming its economy now and harming the health of everyone and killing upwards of 1 million people each year.

The health costs of air and water pollution in China amount to about 4.3 percent of its GDP. By adding the non-health impacts of pollution, which are estimated to be about 1.5 percent of GDP, the total cost of air and water pollution in China is about 5.8 percent of GDP.

China's economy will go from $8.5 trillion this year to about $12-20 trillion in 2018 (depending upon RMB currency appreciation). The cost to China will be $490 billion to 1.2 trillion in each of the years. It will be in the range of $3-5 trillion over the 5 year timeframe.

In January 2013 the air of Beijing hit a level of toxicity 40 times above what the World Health Organization deems safe. A tenth of the country's farmland is poisoned with chemicals and heavy metals. Half of China's urban water supplies are unfit even to wash in, let alone drink. In the northern half of the country air pollution lops five-and-a-half years off the average life.

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How unsustainable our techno future is...25 times more power efficiency is needed for exaflop supercomputers with reasonable energy needs

How unsustainable our techno future is...An exascale system built with NVIDIA Kepler K20 co-processors would consume about 150 megawatts. That's nearly 10 times the amount consumed by Tianhe-2, which is composed of 32,000 Intel Ivy Bridge sockets and 48,000 Xeon Phi boards.

Theoretically, an exascale system – 100 times more computing capability than today's fastest systems – could be built with only x86 processors, but it would require as much as 2 gigawatts of power.

That's the entire output of the Hoover Dam.

Instead, HPC system developers need to take an entirely new approach to get around the power crunch, Dally said. The NVIDIA chief scientist said reaching exascale will require a 25x improvement in energy efficiency. So the 2 gigaflops per watt that can be squeezed from today's systems needs to improve to about 50 gigaflops per watt in the future exascale system.

Relying on Moore's Law to get that 25x improvement is probably not the best approach either. According to Dally, advances in manufacturing processes will deliver about a 2.2x improvement in performance per watt. That leaves an energy efficiency gap of 12x that needs to be filled in by other means.

Dally sees a combination of better circuit design and better processor architectures to close the gap. If done correctly, these advances could deliver 3x and 4x improvements in performance per watt, respectively.

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Bill Gates Promotes Vaccine Projects, Swipes At Google

In a new interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Bill Gates discussed his Foundation's work to eradicate polio and malaria, while suggesting that vaccine programs and similar initiatives to fight disease and poverty will ultimately do much more for the world than technology projects devoted to connecting everybody to the Internet. While Gates professes his belief in the so-called digital revolution, he doesn't think projects such as Google's Internet blimps (designed to transmit WiFi signals over hundreds of miles, bringing Internet to underserved areas in the process) will do the third world nearly as much as good as basic healthcare. "When you're dying of malaria, I suppose you'll look up and see that [Internet] balloon, and I'm not sure how it'll help you," he said. "When a kid gets diarrhea, no, there's no website that relieves that." Gates then sharpened his attack on the search-engine giant: "Google started out saying they were going to do a broad set of things. They hired Larry Brilliant, and they got fantastic publicity. And then they shut it all down." Google focusing on its core mission is fine, he added, "but the actors who just do their core thing are not going to uplift the poor." The Microsoft co-founder also has no intention of following Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and other tech entrepreneurs into the realm of space exploration. "I guess it's fun, because you shoot rockets up in the air," he said. "But it's not an area that I'll be putting money into."

Navigated from Slashdot | shared via feedly mobile

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60% of Federal Student Loan Borrowers, or 17 million, don't pay the US government a single cent!

...Said otherwise, of the 28 million Americans with federal student loans, 60%, or 17 million, don't pay the US government a single cent!

  Only 40% Of Federal Student Loan Borrowers Are Currently Making A Payment | Zero Hedge | shared via feedly mobile

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Why we can kiss the US economy goodbye

By Wayne Allyn Root...The results are in. The picture is grim. 

Here are some frightening economic numbers to think about the next time ....mainstream media tells you that we are in "recovery."

First, almost 50% of Americans have less than $500 in savings. Not surprisingly 1 out of 3 residents of Obama's home state of Illinois live in poverty. A mind numbing 4 of 5 Americans are either experiencing poverty, foreclosure or welfare, or will in their lifetime. Four out of five.Say goodbye to the myth of the American Dream. It's only a nightmare now.

Ditto for the American middle class. Obama has massacred them. Our middle class now ranks 27^thin the world. 

...More grim news just in: Auto sales are collapsing. Construction jobs are falling off a cliff. And U.S. factory orders just suffered the biggest drop in a year.

Almost 80% of the jobs created in Obama's America are part-time jobs that won't pay the bills of an average middle class lifestyle.

What about jobs? Isn't that picture getting rosier by the minute? 

Well actually, no. Let's analyze the REAL numbers: Since the start of 2013 we've gained 953,000 jobs, but amazingly 731,000 of them are crummy low-wage part time jobs. That means almost 80% of the jobs created in Obama's America are part-time jobs that won't pay the bills of an average middle class lifestyle.

High quality jobs under Obama they are losing out by 10 to 1 versus crummy low-paying jobs. Facts don't lie: So far this year over 246,000 low-paying waiter or bartender jobs have been added to the U.S. economy, versus only 24,000 high-paying manufacturing jobs.

How bad is it? Well here's a Hall of Fame Triple Play:

The Obama administration just hired a company to promote ObamaCare over the phone to Americans -- guess what? Even those jobs are part-time, with no health insurance!

The head of the IRS just testified in front of Congress that he'd rather keep his own health insurance, rather than switch to ObamaCare. The IRS is in charge of ObamaCare, and even they don't want any part of it.

And, the second biggest employer in America is now a temp agency! 

Good luck looking for a quality job in this Obama economy.

Still not convinced? 

Food stamp rolls are growing seventy-five times as fast as employment. The national debt has increased by 50% under Barack Obama. Obama promised to reduce health insurance bills for an average American family by $2,500 per year, instead your health bills went up by $3,000 per year. 

Meanwhile, labor participation by men is at the lowest rate ever measured – since they started tracking it in 1948. And here's the clincher: 90 million able-bodied, working-age Americans are not working.

Please continue reading at:

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/08/05/why-can-kiss-us-economy-goodbye/

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U.S. has most people in prison of any country despite crime rates declining 25%

Which country in the world has the most people in prison?

You might think it would be China (with 1+ billion people and a restrictive government) or former Soviets still imprisoned in Russia.

Wrong. The United States has the most people in prison by far of any country in the world. With 5% of the world's population, we have 25% of the world's prisoners – 2.3 million criminals. China with a population 4 times our size is second with 1.6 million people in prison.

In 1972, 350,000 Americans were in imprisoned. In 2010, this number had grown to 2.3 million. Yet from 1988 – 2008, crime rates have declined by 25%.

Isn't anyone in the liberal media interested in why so many people are in prison when crime has dropped? WTF "liberal media"?

Source: Wikipedia/Justice Policy Institute Report.

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Where the jobs went... about 20% of the labor force disappeared overseas. Outsourcing of America #greed

Where the jobs went.

Outsourcing (or offshoring) is a bigger contributor to unemployment in the U.S. than laziness.

Since 2000, U.S. multinationals have cut 2.9 million jobs here while increasing employment overseas by 2.4 million. This is likely just the tip of the iceberg as multinational corporations account for only about 20% of the labor force.

When was the last time you saw a front-page headline about outsourcing?

Source: Wall Street Journal via Think Progress.

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Nuclear Plant Safety Enhancements - Fukushima lessons learned and plant safety enhancements presentations

Fukushima lessons learned and plant safety enhancements presentations.

Case Study: The Duke Energy Implementation Plan

and Lessons Learned from Fukushima Accident and Application to Brazilian Nuclear Power Plants

If you have had problems viewing the presentations you can access both presentations here: http://www.nuclearenergyinsider.com/us-plant-safety-enhancements/content2.php 

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Senator Barbara Boxer's Own Experts Contradict Obama On Global Warming - Forbes

During yesterday's Environment and Public Works hearings, Sen. David Vitter asked a panel of experts, including experts selected by Boxer, "Can any witnesses say they agree with Obama's statement that warming has accelerated during the past 10 years?"

For several seconds, nobody said a word. Sitting just a few rows behind the expert witnesses, I thought I might have heard a few crickets chirping, but I couldn't tell for sure. We'll give Obama the benefit of the doubt and count the crickets in the "maybe" camp.

After several seconds of deafening silence, global warming activist Heidi Cullen, who formerly served as a meteorologist for the Weather Channel, attempted to change the subject. Cullen said our focus should be on longer time periods rather than the 10-year period mentioned by Obama. When pressed, however, she contradicted Obama's central assertion and said warming has slowed, not accelerated.

Several minutes later, Sen. Jeff Sessions returned to the topic and sought additional clarity. Sessions recited Obama's quote claiming accelerating global warming during the past 10 years and asked, "Do any of you support that quote?"

Again, a prolonged and deafening silence ensued. Neither Cullen nor any of the other experts on the panel spoke a word, not even in an attempt to change the subject.

Navigated from Senator Barbara Boxer's Own Experts Contradict Obama On Global Warming - Forbes 

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$60 trillion reasons to Worry About an Arctic Methane Bomb.

Mother Jones: It was a stunning figure: $60 trillion.

Such could be the cost, according to a recent commentary in the journal Nature, of "the release of methane from thawing permafrost beneath the East Siberian Sea, off northern Russia...a figure comparable to the size of the world economy in 2012." More specifically, the paper described a scenario in which rapid Arctic warming and sea ice retreat lead to a pulse of undersea methane being released into the atmosphere. How much methane? The paper modeled a release of 50 gigatons of this hard-hitting greenhouse gas (a gigaton is equal to a billion metric tons) over the space of 10 years between 2015 and 2025. This, in turn, would trigger still more warming and gargantuan damage and adaptation costs.

The $60 trillion figure went everywhere, and no wonder. It's jaw dropping. To provide some perspective, 50 gigatons is ten times as much methane as currently exists in the atmosphere. Atmospheric methane levels have more than doubled since the industrial revolution, but this would amount to a much sharper increase in a dramatically shorter time frame.

According to the Nature commentary, that methane "is likely to be emitted as the seabed warms, either steadily over 50 years or suddenly." Such are the scientific assumptions behind the paper's economic analysis. But are those assumptions realistic—and could that much methane really be released suddenly from the Arctic?

Please continue reading at:

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/08/arctic-methane-hydrate-catastrophe

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Metabolix engineers plants to make cheaper, cleaner bioplastic

Petroleum-based plastic may be fantastic, but due to the durability that makes the material so popular it may take hundreds of years to break down. Plastic made from renewable biomass, known as bioplastic, is a biodegradable alternative to fossil fuel versions. A company called Metabolix, based in Cambridge (MA), has been working on a technology to genetically engineer plants such as switchgrass to create a biodegradable polymer that can be extracted directly from the plant... Continue Reading Metabolix engineers plants to make cheaper, cleaner bioplastic 

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Researchers preserve cancer-fighting properties in frozen broccoli

Broccoli is one of those foods we're told to eat as youngsters because it's good for us. Unfortunately, researchers at the University of Illinois (U of I) found some of that goodness, namely the vegetable's cancer-protective benefits, doesn't survive the process its subjected to before reaching the freezers at supermarkets. Thankfully, the researchers followed up their initial research and found a simple way to preserve broccoli's cancer-fighting properties... Continue Reading Researchers preserve cancer-fighting properties in frozen broccoli 

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Toxin Found in Most U.S. Rice Causes Genetic Damage - | DiscoverMagazine

It's been more than a decade since scientists first raised an alarm about arsenic levels in rice—an alarm based on the realization that rice plants have a natural ability to absorb the toxic element out of the soil.

Since then study after study has confirmed that rice products contain more arsenic than those of any other grain. In response, consumer health advocates have pushed for regulatory agencies to set a safety standard for rice (more on that story in my forthcoming feature story in the October 2013 issue of Discover).

China, a high rice-consumption country, has already moved to do so. The World Health Organization is currently taking comments on a proposed safety standard. And last year—in a somewhat grudging response to pressure from activist groups in this country—the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced that it was also studying the issue.

Waiting for Regulation

And studying and studying, apparently. Although the FDA released some data on arsenic contamination of rice last fall—in direct response to a comprehensive report on the issue from Consumers Union researchers—the agency has yet to provide any further information or to set a deadline on when it might set a protective limit.

In frustration, public health researchers at Consumers Union and the attorney general of Illinois, Lisa Madigan, last month wrote to the FDA asking why the agency was moving so slowly to protect American consumers, underlining the point that the agency's preliminary results found the taint of arsenic in pretty much every rice product tested.

In the weeks since then the FDA has neither budged nor attempted to clarify the situation for the public. A story on the subject by the Chicago Tribunenoted that when queried the FDA refused to provide any information (my experience with this agency, by the way). And the USA Rice Federation insisted,  "no arsenic related health effects from eating rice are known" (also my experience with the association).

However those assertions—and the agency's apparently reluctant approach—may need revising: A study released last week has shown the first direct link between rice consumption and arsenic-induced genetic damage.

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Global Water Shortages Grow Worse but Nations Have Few Answers | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network [feedly]

Scientific American - As we have been hearing, global water shortages are poised to exacerbate regional conflict and hobble economic growth. Yet the problem is growing worse, and is threatening to deal devastating blows to health, according to top water officials from the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) who spoke before a House panel hearing today.

Ever-rising water demand, and climate change, are expected to boost water problems worldwide, especially in countries that are already experiencing shortages. Globally, the world is on track to meet the Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of people unable to reach or afford safe drinking water by 2015, but it still must make strides to improve global sanitation, says Aaron Salzberg, the State Department's Special Coordinator for Water Resources. In addition to supply problems, unclean water causes more than four billion cases of diarrhea a year which lead to roughly 2.2 million deaths, and most are in children under the age of five.

"The magnitude of it is extraordinary." says Christian Holmes, global water coordinator for USAID.

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Renewable energy? Burning US forests in UK power stations

Excerpt: Environmentalists are trying to block the expansion of a transatlantic trade bringing American wood to burn in European power stations. The trade is driven by EU rules promoting renewable energy to combat climate change. … The implications are complicated and disputed, but it is clear that EU leaders did not have burning American wood in mind when they mandated that 20% of Europe's energy should come from "renewable" sources.

Read on http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22630815

 

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Still Have Doubts Combustible Dust is Primarily a Fire Problem? Combustible dust exposure: lessons learned

Still Have Doubts Combustible Dust is Primarily a Fire Problem?

All these catastrophic ComDust related incidents resulting in fire-fighter injuries and fatalities began as a Level One (fire) and escalated into a Level Three (primary explosion). 

Use the HAL Chart to minimize severity of consequence.

http://www.slideshare.net/watermon/hal-chart

Combustible dust exposure: lessons learned 

Firefighting operations can inadvertently increase the chance of a combustible dust explosion if they: Use tactics that cause dust clouds to form or reach the explosible range; use tactics that introduce air, creating an explosible atmosphere;... 

http://www.ishn.com/articles/96472-combustible-dust-exposure-lessons-learned

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Molten Salt Reactor review with benefits like very little waste and 2000 energy return on invested energy

The non-profit Weinberg Foundation has a 23 page report on the status and background on Thorium Fuelled Molten Salt Reactors.

Thorium-fuelled Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs) offer a potentially safer, more efficient and sustainable form of nuclear power. Pioneered in the US at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in the 1960s and 1970s, MSRs benefit from novel safety and operational features such as passive temperature regulation, low operating pressure and high thermal to electrical conversion efficiency. Some MSR designs, such as the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR), provide continuous online fuel reprocessing, enabling very high levels of fuel burn-up. Although MSRs can be fuelled by any fissile material, the use of abundant thorium as fuel enables breeding in the thermal spectrum, and produces only tiny quantities of plutonium and other long-lived actinides.

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Greentec Awards could not handle the truth that Molten Salt Reactors would be good for the environment and that German Public liked it, but a German Court Overturns disqualification

The Dual-Fluid Reactor, a MSR (Molten Salt Reactor) was entered into the Greentec contest by Berlin's Institute for Solid-State Nuclear Physics. MSRs and other advanced nuclear designs auger a CO2-free energy future and represent clear improvements in nuclear safety, efficiency, and waste management when compared to conventional nuclear. The Dual-Fluid Reactor (DFR) can also be used as a source of industrial process heat to make hydrogen and synthetic fuels.

Greentec did not like a result from voting in the court of public opinion. Then they decide to cheat to boot the voting winner. Then they lost in a real legal court.

Clearly, a significant portion of the German public understands this. The Dual-Fluid Reactor (DFR) made it to the finals on the strength of an open, online voting round. Under the rules of the competition, GreenTec judges select two finalists in each of the contest's eight categories, and the public selects the third.

On June 4, Dual fuel Molten salt was disqualified and denominated by the jury, with no explanation.

Outrage ensued, as DFR supporters accused GreenTec of changing the voting rules to suit their own interests.

German blogger Rainer Klute - a regular commenter on Weinberg blogs - noted:

"People who had campaigned for the award and for the DFR were heavily shocked. Not only they found the decision as such completely incomprehensible, but also the procedure to make it. Changing rules in the course of the game is something that is usually considered less than fair. Most of us (but obviously not all) learned this early in our childhood. No wonder the award's makers were criticized violently in blogs and social media, especially on their own Facebook page."


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It's a $6 trillion dollar market.... The User's Guide to Energy

Alexis Madrigal explains how energy really works in America  Read more

The energy system is vast. How big? It's a $6 trillion dollar market. Trillion! Such a big industry consumes vast amounts of natural resources and processes them through a dizzying array of infrastructure. And all that stuff working together keeps us zipping across cities and nations, while pulling power from the grid to power anything from a lightbulb to a computer.

But despite all the complexity, there are some basics that make the rest of it all easier to understand. So, in our new video series, we tried to break down some of the fundamentals of the American energy system. We're going to break down the numbers on how Americans use energy and dive to the microscopic level to see the components of crude oil.

...So, we asked six basic questions about energy, and answered them in animated explainers voiced by me and (beautifully) illustrated byLindsey Testolin. This is our first deep collaboration with The Atlantic's new, expanded video team, and we couldn't be happier about how it came out. Stay tuned for the videos and several other posts in this special report.

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In response to explosion at fertilizer plant, president Obama orders review of all chemical facilities

"Less than four months after a fertilizer plant explosion leveled the town of West, Tex., President Obama ordered federal agencies Thursday to review safety rules at chemical facilities nationwide," David Jackson reports for USA Today. In an executive order, Obama wrote: "Chemicals, and the facilities where they are manufactured, stored, distributed, and used, are essential to today's economy. Past and recent tragedies have reminded us, however, that the handling and storage of chemicals are not without risk." (Texas Tribune photo by David Bowser: Amarillo facility, near residences, houses ammonium nitrate)

The explosion in West, where 2,400 tons of potentially explosive ammonium nitrate was being stored, killed 15 people, injured more than 200, damaged or destroyed at least 150 buildings, and caused $100 million in property damage. At least 800,000 people live within one mile of sites that store similar chemicals, and many small towns and cities, especially in the south and southwest, have largestockpiles of ammonium nitrate.

"The executive order also calls for better coordination among federal, state and local agencies in the regulation of chemical plants," Jackson reports. Obama wrote: "The federal government has developed and implemented numerous programs aimed at reducing the safety risks and security risks associated with hazardous chemicals. However, additional measures can be taken by executive departments and agencies with regulatory authority to further improve chemical facility safety and security in coordination with owners and operators."

Sen. Barbara Boxer, (D-Calif.), who chairs the Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement: "As I told the president, the EPA has not updated its alert since 1997, and the best practices recommended by other federal agencies such as OSHA are not being uniformly followed. This progress shows that when we use our mandated oversight role to solve serious problems facing the American people -- and the President agrees with our solutions -- we can move forward without changing laws to protect our families and communities." (Read more)

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