Tag Archives: Environment

When being colourful doesn’t pay

Nuclear accidents can have devastating consequences for the people and animals living in the vicinity of the damaged power plants, but they also give researchers a unique opportunity to study the effects of radiation on populations that would be impossible to recreate in the lab.

Tim Mousseau, who directs the Chernobyl Research Initiative at the University of South Carolina in Columbia, together with an international team, is studying the long-term ecological and health consequences of the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine. Mousseau has been studying Chernobyl since 1998 and his latest work, carried out with colleagues in France and published in Oecologia last month, finds that bird species with orange feathers living in the fallout zone seem to be more susceptible to radiation than their drabber gray and black fellows. They suggest that production of the more colourful pigments consumes antioxidant molecules that would otherwise confer protection against radiation damage, and that this molecular trade-off is shaping bird populations around the former nuclear power plant.
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Solar incentives cut

Spain is the latest European government to reduce state incentives for solar power, after its industry ministry on 1 August confirmed cuts to feed-in tariffs — the price an electricity utility must pay to generators of solar energy. A draft law, now under review with the national energy regulator CNE, would cut subsidies by 45% for new large, ground-based photovoltaic plants, and by 25% and 5% for large or small roof-top panels, respectively. Existing plants might also have their subsidies cut, once the law’s details are clarified later this year. Germany and Italy have also announced solar subsidy cuts this year.

See this news briefing in Nature [html] [pdf]

Country Cooking

A wood-burning stove that uses sound to generate electricity and refrigeration could one day make waves in developing countries. That’s the hope of an international team headed by engineer Paul Riley of the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. This month, the U.K. government and the U.S.’s Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico awarded the team almost $4 million to develop a Stove for Cooking, Refrigeration, and Electricity (SCORE). The appliance would rely on external combustion, such as a wood fire, to heat one end of a tube of compressed gas, inducing sound waves that can be harnessed to generate enough electricity to power a light bulb and a small refrigeration unit.

The principle isn’t new, but the technology has been too expensive for general use, says thermoacoustician Steven Garrett of Pennsylvania State University in State College. The SCORE team hopes to make it cost-effective with cheaper materials: Compressed air could replace high-pressure helium, for example. “If anybody can pull this off, it’s got to be these guys,” says Garrett. The device may not cut down on wood consumption, but tests suggest that it will make use of up to 30% of a wood fire’s energy, much more than a typical stove’s 7% efficiency.

Originally appeared in Science Magazine as a Random Sample: [html] [pdf]