Finland’s government issued a construction license to nuclear disposal consortium Posiva last week, Reuters reported. The license gives the group approval to build a storage facility on Olkiluoto Island, Finland, designed to last 100,000 years.
The facility would be the first of its kind in the world. Since the beginning of the nuclear power age, energy firms have paid to store nuclear waste in temporary holding ponds unlikely to last more than a couple of centuries. The Posiva facility, decades in the planning, may pioneer a more sustainable era of disposal. (See “Finland’s Nuclear Waste Solution,”IEEE Spectrum, December 2009.)
Where there’s oil, there’s a way. This summer the federal government showed that it is willing to approve drilling operations in U.S. waters off Alaska. In addition to legislation, other barriers to Arctic development are disappearing: summers at the North Pole could be ice-free as soon as 2020, reducing the need for ice-breaking vessels and opening the way for faster and cheaper trading routes. An increase in shipping across the top of the world, however, could have “significant regional impacts by accelerating ice melt,” according to a recent government report by the Canadian Northwest Territories. And that aggravated melting could raise global sea levels. Continue reading A Sooty North Pole Ahead→
In late September, Volkswagen admitted to using software that activated hardware to scrub nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions during required emissions tests, but not during normal driving. The deception improved the cars’ gas mileage at the cost of emitting between 10 and 40 times the legal limit of NOx, a precursor gas to nitrogen dioxide (NO2), ammonia (NH3), and other gases that cause respiratory problems. In the last few years, newly maturing instruments of several kinds have converged on a single message: diesel exhaust in the real world is far higher than what carmakers advertise and what is permitted by the law in many countries.
Palaeontologists who attend the annual International Cave Bear Symposium (ICBS) can usually count on at least one expedition to a bear cave. The meeting allows scientists to report the latest fossil findings of Pleistocene animals such as cave bears and big cats — whose best-preserved samples are often found in caves.
But the 2015 meeting on 10–13 September took place instead near the North Sea coast in the Netherlands, with no caves in sight. Palaeontologist Natasja den Ouden of the Naturalis Biodiversity Center, a museum in Leiden, tells Nature how fossil samples from the North Sea are shedding light on mammals’ movements during the last ice age. Continue reading Fishing for fossils in the North Sea→
Journalist covering global development by way of science and technology.
