Archive for the 'Environment' Category
U.S. Dumped Tens of Thousands of Steel Drums Containing Atomic Waste Off Coastlines
January 2nd, 2014Via: Wall Street Journal (Mirror): More than four decades after the U.S. halted a controversial ocean dumping program, the country is facing a mostly forgotten Cold War legacy in its waters: tens of thousands of steel drums of atomic waste. From 1946 to 1970, federal records show, 55-gallon drums and other containers of nuclear waste […]
Japan’s Homeless Recruited for Murky Fukushima Clean-Up
December 30th, 2013Via: Reuters: Seiji Sasa hits the train station in this northern Japanese city before dawn most mornings to prowl for homeless men. He isn’t a social worker. He’s a recruiter. The men in Sendai Station are potential laborers that Sasa can dispatch to contractors in Japan’s nuclear disaster zone for a bounty of $100 a […]
Velkess: New Residential Scale Flywheel Design
December 21st, 2013Via: Scientific American: Renewables could be the world’s primary source of energy if only someone could solve the storage problem—how to store lots of electricity cheaply on a wide scale? Batteries are too expensive and don’t last long enough. Pumped hydro is cheap but not feasible for most locations. Thermal storage is promising but still […]
Chinese Pilots Must Learn to Land in Thick Smog
December 12th, 2013Via: Guardian: Chinese authorities have told pilots who fly to Beijing they must be qualified to land their aircraft in the low visibility bought about by smog – the latest missive related to the capital’s heavy air pollution, which the government this week lauded as a beneficial shield against missile attacks. From 1 January pilots […]
This Week in Acidic Radioactive Slurry
December 10th, 2013Via: Sydney Morning Herald: The chemical spill at Ranger Uranium Mine last weekend was the second such incident in a week for the mine’s parent company, Rio Tinto, placing further scrutiny on the company’s uranium mining operations. Processing at the Ranger site, in Kakadu National Park, was suspended by the federal government on Tuesday. Environment […]
Fukushima: Outdoor Radiation Reading 25 Sieverts Per Hour
December 9th, 2013Via: news.com.au: WELCOME to Fukushima, where the radiation’s so bad it can be fatal within 20 minutes. The tsunami may have happened some 33 months ago, but the fallout just keeps getting worse. Japanese media is reporting that the intensity of radiation levels in the nuclear powerplant devastated by the earthquake – and subsequent tidal […]
Vast, Nonrenewable Freshwater Reserves Found Beneath the Oceans
December 9th, 2013So let’s just get this straight: The same expensive equipment that’s used to drill for oil would be used to drill… for water. Man, sometimes, I just love coming to work at Cryptogon for the comedy factor alone. Oh yeah, these are nonrenewable aquifers and prone to damage by drilling operations. Maybe buy some canned […]
Birds Will Attack Amazon’s Delivery Drones
December 7th, 2013Amazon is just one potential operator. Once the rules are formalized in 2015, tens of thousands of organizations are going to be operating similar aircraft. Via: Slate: Birds already cause a lot of problems for other things in the airspace. The FAA has tracked more than 121,000 instances of bird-aircraft collisions since 1990. These are […]
Typhoons Spread Fukushima Fallout
November 29th, 2013Via: AFP: Typhoons that hit Japan each year are helping spread radioactive material from the Fukushima nuclear disaster into the country’s waterways, researchers say. Contaminated soil gets washed away by the high winds and rain and deposited in streams and rivers, a joint study by France’s Climate and Environmental Science laboratory (LSCE) and Tsukuba University […]
Atmospheric Electricity Powers Small Motor
November 27th, 2013Update: Atmospheric Powered Motor 2.0 Via: LaserHacker: — Via: Laser Hacker:
