[News] from [guardian.co.uk]
[World news > Nuclear weapons]
MoD sacks advisers in row over disposing of old nuclear subs
Decommissioning project in turmoil as others threaten to resign in protest
Rob Edwards
The Observer, Sunday 13 September 2009 Article history
An 11-year investigation into how to safely dismantle 15 decommissioned nuclear-powered submarines has been thrown into turmoil after two of the environmental experts brought in as advisers were sacked. Deep disagreements have split the 25-member advisory group, with eight consultants now considering resignation, the Observer understands.
Since 1998, the Ministry of Defence has been looking for ways of dismantling the submarines and storing their radioactive waste on land. Ministers set up the Interim Storage of Laid Up Submarines (Isolus) programme to look into what plans would be acceptable to the public.
Jane Hunt and Bill Thompson, of Lancaster University's Centre for the Study of Environmental Change, ran two consultations for Isolus in 2001 and in 2003.
But, according to Hunt, the MoD did not understand the need for close public scrutiny of radioactive waste management. She also claimed officials dismissed worries about the health effects of low-level radiation from dismantling reactors.
Public concerns about the risks of privatisation and about the lack of public involvement in selecting dismantling and storage sites had been similarly rejected by the MoD, as had anxieties about recycled metals contaminated with low-level radioactivity being sold on the open market, she said.
"The MoD won't inspire public confidence if they carry on like this," Hunt told the Observer. "They seem intent on doing what the industry wants, despite earlier consultations objecting to this."
Ministers rejected several of the consultation's recommendations and Hunt and Thompson were later sacked from Isolus after a PR company hired earlier this year carried out a study that concluded they were no longer needed. Green Issues Communications, based in Reading, then rebranded Isolus as the Submarine Dismantling Project.
The advisory group heard in July that Hunt and Thompson had been dismissed. It unanimously called for them both to be reinstated, according to members present.
An MoD spokeswoman said: "We reviewed membership of this MoD-funded group in order to ensure value for money. In the area of communications, work was being duplicated and the appropriate action was taken to reduce staff numbers."
[Comment is free> Cif America]
Sustainable cities are the solution
Despite our romantic ideas about nature, it will be well-run, energy-efficient cities that ultimately save us from ourselves
David Lepeska
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 13 September 2009 13.00 BST Article
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled a $25m, energy-efficient office building on the Brooklyn waterfront a few months back. The Perry Avenue Building features solar panels, rainwater-fed toilets and six rooftop windmills, which will produce 10% of its energy supply. "Wind power in this city," said the mayor, "is one of the solutions to our problem."
That problem – devising more sustainable cities – has rightfully drawn a great deal of attention of late. In February, Barack Obama created the White House office of urban affairs and quickly set about staffing it with experienced urban planners, to complement what many have called his "green dream team" on environmental policy.
Earlier this year in Strasburg, Obama acknowledged that the US bears the brunt of the responsibility for climate change. Combined with nearly $50bn in infrastructure spending in the stimulus package, the new administration's emphasis on building better cities is clear.
As for New York, the new Brooklyn building is part of a $250m programme to make Brooklyn's Navy Yard a hub for green industry, just one aspect of the mayor's broader plan to make the city more eco-friendly. When he launched PlanNYC two years ago, Bloomberg pointed out that the world's cities were responsible for 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Former US president Bill Clinton and UN officials have quoted the same figure.
This bit of data would mean city dwellers emit nearly four times as much as their rural counterparts. (The UN estimates that humanity became more urban than rural in 2008. Right now, the global populations of urban and rural folk are roughly the same.) Put another way, living in a city is almost four times as polluting as living outside of one.
Thankfully, the figure turns out to be wildly inaccurate.
The carbon footprint of urban dwellers is relatively light, says a report by David Dodman in the April issue of Environment and Urbanisation. Dodman, a researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development, examined emissions reports from cities in the Americas, Asia and Europe.
He found that New Yorkers emit a third less greenhouse gases than the average American and that Barcelonans and Londoners emit about half of their national averages. And urban Brazilians are truly green: the residents of Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro are responsible for only one-third the national emissions average. Dodman's paper complements an earlier study by IIED senior fellow David Satterthwaite, who argued that cities emit about 40% of all greenhouse gases, as opposed to the oft-cited 80%.
On average, then, people who live in small towns and rural areas emit 50% more greenhouse gases than city folk. That cities may be part of the solution, however, does not mean that efforts like Bloomberg's PlanNYC are misplaced. Precisely the opposite is true.
By 2050, some 70% of us will live in urban settings, and it will ultimately be well-managed urban environments, with smart, energy-efficient buildings, power systems, transport and planning, that will save us from ourselves. Seeking better ways to do precisely that, a constellation of designers, architects and academics gathered at a conference on "ecological urbanism" at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design earlier this year.
Mitchell Joachim, who teaches architecture and design at Columbia University and was selected by Wired magazine as one of 15 people Obama should listen to, presented his vision for a collapsible and stackable electric city car, which would hang at public recharging stations, available for shared use.
He also explained "meat tectonics". Aiming to use meat proteins developed in a lab as building material, Joachim presented a digital rendering of an armadillo-shaped, kidney-coloured home. "It's very ugly, we know that," he said. "We're not sure what a meat house is supposed to look like."
Dorothee Imbert, associate professor in landscape architecture at Harvard, pointed to urban farming, a trend that has taken root in Detroit, New York, Milwaukee and a handful of international cities. Imbert mentioned her own student-assisted organic farms in Boston, yet acknowledged that adequate food supplies for future cities "would require rethinking of landscape in the building process".
Pritzker-winning Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is thinking regionally. The Harvard professor and designer of the MC Escher-esque CCTV building in Beijing talked about his Zeekracht ("sea power" in Dutch), a plan for oceanic wind farms across the North Sea that would provide energy to much of northern Europe. With its constant high winds, shallow waters and advanced renewable industries, Koolhaas believes the North Sea offers energy potential approaching that of Persian Gulf oil.
His plan, which includes production belts in a half-dozen urban centres on or near the sea, energy cooperation and clean-tech research centres, is the type of project that, ideally, will both preserve green spaces and increase urban sustainability.
Another is a recently approved high-speed rail project in California, which will link that state's southern and northern hubs. Obama's stimulus package contains $8bn for high-speed and urban rail projects. That amount is nowhere near enough to install networks on a European scale, but, like windmills on the Brooklyn waterfront, it's a step in the right direction.
Henry David Thoreau moved to Walden Pond "to live deliberately", as he put it. But shortly thereafter the American naturalist and philosopher accidentally burned over a hundred acres of pristine Massachusetts woodlands. We can no longer afford to be like Thoreau. If we want to continue to romanticise our natural world, we, as a civilisation, must also avoid it.
[World news > Nuclear weapons]
MoD sacks advisers in row over disposing of old nuclear subs
Decommissioning project in turmoil as others threaten to resign in protest
Rob Edwards
The Observer, Sunday 13 September 2009 Article history
An 11-year investigation into how to safely dismantle 15 decommissioned nuclear-powered submarines has been thrown into turmoil after two of the environmental experts brought in as advisers were sacked. Deep disagreements have split the 25-member advisory group, with eight consultants now considering resignation, the Observer understands.
Since 1998, the Ministry of Defence has been looking for ways of dismantling the submarines and storing their radioactive waste on land. Ministers set up the Interim Storage of Laid Up Submarines (Isolus) programme to look into what plans would be acceptable to the public.
Jane Hunt and Bill Thompson, of Lancaster University's Centre for the Study of Environmental Change, ran two consultations for Isolus in 2001 and in 2003.
But, according to Hunt, the MoD did not understand the need for close public scrutiny of radioactive waste management. She also claimed officials dismissed worries about the health effects of low-level radiation from dismantling reactors.
Public concerns about the risks of privatisation and about the lack of public involvement in selecting dismantling and storage sites had been similarly rejected by the MoD, as had anxieties about recycled metals contaminated with low-level radioactivity being sold on the open market, she said.
"The MoD won't inspire public confidence if they carry on like this," Hunt told the Observer. "They seem intent on doing what the industry wants, despite earlier consultations objecting to this."
Ministers rejected several of the consultation's recommendations and Hunt and Thompson were later sacked from Isolus after a PR company hired earlier this year carried out a study that concluded they were no longer needed. Green Issues Communications, based in Reading, then rebranded Isolus as the Submarine Dismantling Project.
The advisory group heard in July that Hunt and Thompson had been dismissed. It unanimously called for them both to be reinstated, according to members present.
An MoD spokeswoman said: "We reviewed membership of this MoD-funded group in order to ensure value for money. In the area of communications, work was being duplicated and the appropriate action was taken to reduce staff numbers."
[Comment is free> Cif America]
Sustainable cities are the solution
Despite our romantic ideas about nature, it will be well-run, energy-efficient cities that ultimately save us from ourselves
David Lepeska
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 13 September 2009 13.00 BST Article
New York mayor Michael Bloomberg unveiled a $25m, energy-efficient office building on the Brooklyn waterfront a few months back. The Perry Avenue Building features solar panels, rainwater-fed toilets and six rooftop windmills, which will produce 10% of its energy supply. "Wind power in this city," said the mayor, "is one of the solutions to our problem."
That problem – devising more sustainable cities – has rightfully drawn a great deal of attention of late. In February, Barack Obama created the White House office of urban affairs and quickly set about staffing it with experienced urban planners, to complement what many have called his "green dream team" on environmental policy.
Earlier this year in Strasburg, Obama acknowledged that the US bears the brunt of the responsibility for climate change. Combined with nearly $50bn in infrastructure spending in the stimulus package, the new administration's emphasis on building better cities is clear.
As for New York, the new Brooklyn building is part of a $250m programme to make Brooklyn's Navy Yard a hub for green industry, just one aspect of the mayor's broader plan to make the city more eco-friendly. When he launched PlanNYC two years ago, Bloomberg pointed out that the world's cities were responsible for 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Former US president Bill Clinton and UN officials have quoted the same figure.
This bit of data would mean city dwellers emit nearly four times as much as their rural counterparts. (The UN estimates that humanity became more urban than rural in 2008. Right now, the global populations of urban and rural folk are roughly the same.) Put another way, living in a city is almost four times as polluting as living outside of one.
Thankfully, the figure turns out to be wildly inaccurate.
The carbon footprint of urban dwellers is relatively light, says a report by David Dodman in the April issue of Environment and Urbanisation. Dodman, a researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development, examined emissions reports from cities in the Americas, Asia and Europe.
He found that New Yorkers emit a third less greenhouse gases than the average American and that Barcelonans and Londoners emit about half of their national averages. And urban Brazilians are truly green: the residents of Sao Paolo and Rio de Janeiro are responsible for only one-third the national emissions average. Dodman's paper complements an earlier study by IIED senior fellow David Satterthwaite, who argued that cities emit about 40% of all greenhouse gases, as opposed to the oft-cited 80%.
On average, then, people who live in small towns and rural areas emit 50% more greenhouse gases than city folk. That cities may be part of the solution, however, does not mean that efforts like Bloomberg's PlanNYC are misplaced. Precisely the opposite is true.
By 2050, some 70% of us will live in urban settings, and it will ultimately be well-managed urban environments, with smart, energy-efficient buildings, power systems, transport and planning, that will save us from ourselves. Seeking better ways to do precisely that, a constellation of designers, architects and academics gathered at a conference on "ecological urbanism" at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design earlier this year.
Mitchell Joachim, who teaches architecture and design at Columbia University and was selected by Wired magazine as one of 15 people Obama should listen to, presented his vision for a collapsible and stackable electric city car, which would hang at public recharging stations, available for shared use.
He also explained "meat tectonics". Aiming to use meat proteins developed in a lab as building material, Joachim presented a digital rendering of an armadillo-shaped, kidney-coloured home. "It's very ugly, we know that," he said. "We're not sure what a meat house is supposed to look like."
Dorothee Imbert, associate professor in landscape architecture at Harvard, pointed to urban farming, a trend that has taken root in Detroit, New York, Milwaukee and a handful of international cities. Imbert mentioned her own student-assisted organic farms in Boston, yet acknowledged that adequate food supplies for future cities "would require rethinking of landscape in the building process".
Pritzker-winning Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is thinking regionally. The Harvard professor and designer of the MC Escher-esque CCTV building in Beijing talked about his Zeekracht ("sea power" in Dutch), a plan for oceanic wind farms across the North Sea that would provide energy to much of northern Europe. With its constant high winds, shallow waters and advanced renewable industries, Koolhaas believes the North Sea offers energy potential approaching that of Persian Gulf oil.
His plan, which includes production belts in a half-dozen urban centres on or near the sea, energy cooperation and clean-tech research centres, is the type of project that, ideally, will both preserve green spaces and increase urban sustainability.
Another is a recently approved high-speed rail project in California, which will link that state's southern and northern hubs. Obama's stimulus package contains $8bn for high-speed and urban rail projects. That amount is nowhere near enough to install networks on a European scale, but, like windmills on the Brooklyn waterfront, it's a step in the right direction.
Henry David Thoreau moved to Walden Pond "to live deliberately", as he put it. But shortly thereafter the American naturalist and philosopher accidentally burned over a hundred acres of pristine Massachusetts woodlands. We can no longer afford to be like Thoreau. If we want to continue to romanticise our natural world, we, as a civilisation, must also avoid it.
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