Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Worker Health and Safety During the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Cleanup in Alaska in 1989


This cleanup was the first done under OSHA's then recent Hazwoper regulation and maybe the first time an OSHA program went into voluntary compliance mode (like the agency later did during the World Trade Center cleanup and Katrina). Contact me for more information on worker health and safety issues during this spill. I was living in Alaska at the time and worked with the Alaska Laborers Union on occupational health and safety concerns during the cleanup. My email is mdcatlin@earthlink.net . For a detailed federal government review of worker health and safety issues, read the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) report, Alaska Oil Spill Health Hazard Evaluation (HETA 89-200 & 89-273-2111), published in May 1991 and available on the NIOSH website at http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/hhe/reports/pdfs/1989-0200-2111.pdf . For more information on the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill go to the Website - Sound Truth and Corporate Myths: The Legacy of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill at http://www.soundtruth.info/ This website is from Riki Ott, PhD, a marine oil pollution expert and former commercial fisherman in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. She was on the scene before, during, and after the Exxon Valdez oil spill and experienced firsthand the spill’s effects, including environmental devastation, economic losses to the fishing industry, and psychosocial trauma to the close-knit community

Saturday, September 19, 2009

Africa town gets hydro boost

Sep 8 - A South African power company is building mini hydro plants to help power small communities, but the potential is finite.

NuPlanet, the company behind a 7 megawatts hydro project supplying the town of Bethlehem, said such plants are unlikely to contribute much to the country's overall power


Documentary soars with condors

Sep 7 - Using a paraglider to carry the cameraman, the team behind "El Camino del Condor" has produced innovative images of one of the world's most majestic birds.


A solar car for Cambodia

Sep 8 - A Cambodian mathematics teacher has invented the country's first solar car, which he hopes to sell in the motorcycle obsessed local market.

Painted bright yellow, the technology packed vehicle looks like a golf buggy.

Lemurs for lunch causes eco woes

Sep 8 - Madagascar's endangered lemurs are facing a new threat - they are being hunted down and eaten as delicacies.

Recycling electrical vans launched

Sep 8 - A new fleet of carbon-neutral electric recycling vans are unveiled in London to promote awareness of reducing waste on the streets and reducing the public's carbon footprint.

U.N. optimistic pre-climate talks

Sep 11 - The U.N. says December's Copenhagen talks will provide an opportunity for developing countries to enter the greenhouse gas debate.

Crane boosts tree top studies

Sep 11 - Scientists at the University of Washington have taken to the tree-tops to measure the effects of global warming on forests.

"No Impact Man" cuts the power

Sep 11 - No fridge, no TV and no elevator? A new documentary, "No Impact Man", tells the story of a New York City family who try to go "off the grid" for one year.

Crane boosts tree top studies

Sep 11 - Scientists at the University of Washington have taken to the tree-tops to measure the effects of global warming on forests.

Trabant green revival in Frankfurt

Sep.15 - Communist East Germany's infamous Trabant gets a modern makeover at the Frankfurt car show, as car makers look to the future with green technologies.

Roof garden blossoms in NYC

Sep 15 - The global trend toward going green has seen an explosion in the popularity of rooftop gardens, particularly in big cities where most people live in apartments.

India's river of death Report

Sep 16 - Thousands of fish die as pollution levels in the Yamuna River beside the Taj Mahal rise.

Cold war foes team up in arctic

Sep 17 - Scientists from the United States and Russia are studying water and sea life in the Bering Straight and Arctic waters off Russian's northeast coast.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

First hydrogen-powered aircraft takes to the air

The world’s first piloted aircraft capable of taking to the air using only power from fuel cells took off in Germany on Tuesday producing zero carbon dioxide emissions, its makers said.

“We have improved the performance capabilities and efficiency of the fuel cell to such an extent that a piloted aircraft is now able to take off using it,” said Johann-Dietrich Woerner from the German Aerospace Centre (DLR).

“This enables us to demonstrate the true potential of this technology, also and perhaps specifically for applications in the aerospace sector,” he said.

Developed by the DLR, Lange Aviation, BASF Fuel Cells and Denmark’s Serenergy, the Antares DLR-H2 motor glider has a range of 750 kilometres and can fly for five hours.

The system uses hydrogen as its fuel, and this is converted into electrical energy in a direct, electrochemical reaction with oxygen in the ambient air, without any combustion occurring.

The only by-product is water, and if the hydrogen fuel is produced using renewable energy sources, then the motor glider is genuinely CO2-free, the DLR said.

“Although the fuel cell may still be a long way from becoming the primary energy source for the propulsion of commercial aircraft, it does already constitute an interesting and important alternative to existing energy systems as a form of reliable on-board power supply,” the DLR said. —AFP

Monday, June 8, 2009

Just 4 years to save the Earth! What have you done with


Only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action that could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth.

Soaring carbon emissions are already causing ice-cap melting and threaten to trigger global flooding, widespread species loss and major disruptions of weather patterns in the near future. "We cannot afford to put off change any longer," said Hansen at the eve of the new president swearing in. "We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead."

Hansen said current carbon levels in the atmosphere were already too high to prevent runaway greenhouse warming. Yet the levels are still rising despite all the efforts of politicians and scientists.

Only the US now had the political muscle to lead the world and halt the rise, Hansen said. Having refused to recognise that global warming posed any risk at all over the past eight years, the US now had to take a lead as the world's greatest carbon emitter and the planet's largest economy. Cap-and-trade schemes, in which emission permits are bought and sold, have failed, he said, and must now be replaced by a carbon tax that will imposed on all producers of fossil fuels. At the same time, there must be a moratorium on new power plants that burn coal - the world's worst carbon emitter.

Hansen - head of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies and winner of the WWF's top conservation award - first warned Earth was in danger from climate change in 1988 and has been the victim of several unsuccessful attempts by the White House administration of George Bush to silence his views.

Hansen's institute monitors temperature fluctuations at thousands of sites round the world, data that has led him to conclude that most estimates of sea level rises triggered by rising atmospheric temperatures are too low and too conservative. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says a rise of between 20cm and 60cm can be expected by the end of the century.

However, Hansen said feedbacks in the climate system are already accelerating ice melt and are threatening to lead to the collapse of ice sheets. Sea-level rises will therefore be far greater - a claim backed last week by a group of British, Danish and Finnish scientists who said studies of past variations in climate indicate that a far more likely figure for sea-level rise will be about 1.4 metres, enough to cause devastating flooding of many of the world's major cities and of low-lying areas of Holland, Bangladesh and other nations.

As a result of his fears about sea-level rise, Hansen said he had pressed both Britain's Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences to carry out an urgent investigation of the state of the planet's ice-caps. However, nothing had come of his proposals. The first task of Obama's new climate office should therefore be to order such a probe "as a matter of urgency", Hansen added.

Saturday, June 6, 2009

AIR FRANCE FLIGHT - AF447 SEARCH UPDATES


TIME LINES

  • Flight AF 447 left Rio at 1900 local time (2200 GMT) on Sunday
  • Airbus A330-200 carrying 216 passengers and 12 crew
  • Contact lost 0130 GMT
  • Missed scheduled landing at 1110 local time (0910 GMT) in Paris
The hunt for clues as to the fate of the Air France plane lost over the Atlantic has intensified with the arrival of the first Brazilian navy vessel. French officials have said that they may never find the black box data recorders from flight AF447, which could be under 3,700m of water. Aerial searches have not reported bodies but Brazil's air force has seen more, and larger, debris. The jet was carrying 228 people from Rio to Paris when it was lost on Monday. Several aircrafts have now been deployed to the area, about 1,100km northeast of the Brazilian coast.
The oil debris found in the sea believed to be from the missing plane













Aerial view of the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, northeast of Brazil. The flight had last emitted a series of failure signals near this island, around which search missions are concentrated.








A Brazilian search team on the mission














The kins of the bereaved still donot know what to believe or hope for ! !

Sunday, May 3, 2009

MMC to up electric car output

Mitsubishi Motors' shares jumped Friday on a report the Japanese automaker would double its annual electric car output plan.
The Nikkei business daily said Mitsubishi would lift its production target for i-Miev cars to 20,000 as well as more than double lithium ion battery output.


The green business of pig poop

Pig farmers in Sweden are trialing a new network to sell the combustible gasses emitted by their fertilizer, raising cash and helping the environment.
Eighteen Swedish farmers and the 130,000 tonnes of excrement produced at their farms each year are part of a pilot bio-gas project in which methane gas is extracted from the pig by-product before it is put out in the fields as fertilizer.
Once infrastructure is in place, methane gas will be pumped to a purifying installation via a network of underground pipes and turned into bio-gas.
According to the project managers, the amount of energy they expect to be developed in the first phase lasting two years and using 130,000 tonnes of excrement, will be the equivalent of 2.1 million liters of petrol that is enough to run 30 trucks, 30 busses and 250 cars per year.
(SOUNDBITE)(Swedish) PIG FARMER GUNNAR JOHANSSON: "I have a lot of fertilizer from all my pigs and if one could create gas and fuel for cars and buses from my fertilizer I thought it would be a great idea. That is why I got interested you see."
(SOUNDBITE)(Swedish) BIOGAS BRALANDA PROJECT MANAGER KARIN STENLUND: "No one has done this before. We see an enormous interest from all of Sweden, today we have a visit from Scotland and we have inquiries from different parts of the world as well. And what is unique is that everyone else has been thinking in the opposite way, to move the fertilizer to a big plant. And then you drive away all profit and environmental gains on the way there."
"We haven't been thinking like this. That this could be a source of fuel, not gasoline, but still to power buses and cars. We simply haven't understood the potential until now. So we are taking this with us to other places exporting the knowledge."
(SOUNDBITE)(Swedish) PIG FARMER GUNNAR JOHANSSON: "There is steaming methane from wells and mounds of fertilizer around here all the time. And if we can extract that and make fuel out of it… That would be brilliant both for the environment and for my wallet I hope."
"Well I hope that I will be able to make loads of money. I hope that I will become a proper oil sheikh…"

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Japan's hybrid battle

The battle for car consumers on the eco-highway is heating up, with world No.1 Toyota and Honda going at it with new hybrid models.
Toyota's third generation Prius, due out in May in Japan, is reportedly to sell for around $21,000, with Honda's month-old hybrid Insight a key factor in price.
Dan Sloan reports

Artichokes To Produce Clean Fuel In Northern Greece

Artichoke

Prefectural officials in the northern city of Kozani yesterday heralded the launch of a pilot program to produce biomass fuel from wild artichokes in a bid to reduce dependence on local power production from highly polluting low-grade lignite.

The wild artichoke is a high-yield perennial crop that can be cultivated without pesticides and would diversify the energy mix of the Public Power Corporation (PPC), which runs lignite-fueled power plants in the area, officials told a press conference.

PPC would pay producers the market value of the biomass fuel they yield, the officials said, adding that producers would also be entitled to a state subsidy. Local producers are to have priority but the opportunity to join the program, for which cultivation costs will be covered during the first two years, will be extended to other producers.


artichoke.jpg

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Reducing Computer Power Consumption

Researchers at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorkstown, NY have announced a breakthrough which they feel could revolutionize power consumption in computers. Today's computers are power hungry: a typical computer consumes hundreds of watts of power. Not only does this power consumption add up to a lot of wasted power, but increasingly the amount of heat generated by the machines is a significant barrier to building faster more powerful computers. The researchers at IBM say they've made a breakthrough in how computers consume power which will dramatically lower power consumption at the cost of only slightly longer time to perform computations.

"Computation is inherently a power consuming process. Every time a transistor performs a calculation in your computer, you generate a little bit of heat. Want to add two plus two? That will cost you some energy," said lead researcher Charlie Tennett in explaining the teams new approach. "But what we realized was, that this is a two way street. What happens if, instead of adding two plus two, you take four and break it up into two twos?"

The heart of the IBM researchers breakthrough is the observation that if "computing" costs energy then "uncomputing" can be used to generate energy. "By performing a computation, copying the answer, and then unperforming the computation, we only consume power during the copying procees" says Dr. Tennett. "Since that copying doesn't consume much energy we get huge efficiencies in power consumption."

As a demonstration of this breakthrough, Dr. Tennett showed a prototype computer built by team members John Swolin and Barbara Shareal. "We took an ordinary laptop and changed its programming. Every time we execute a program on the computer, the program copies over the answer and then does the same program, but running backward. We then hooked up our laptop to a power meter, and watched, in amazement, as almost all of the power consumed by the program was fed back into the electrical system when we ran the program backward!"

The team believes that there is a great potential for the use of their technology even in fields outside of computation. "Think of all the vast amounts of computation that has been performed over the last few decades," dreams Dr. Tennett, "if we could just undo all of those computations, we could easily ween America off of its oil addition."

Friday, March 13, 2009

Brief Wind Bursts Propel Spain to 40% Wind Power Generation


wind-turbines2The duration was short, but the effects were real. Especially strong winds blew hard enough in Spain to allow wind power to generate 40 percent of the electricity needed to run the nation.

High winds blew through northwest Spain in early March, generating 11,180 MW in that region alone.

On average, Spain derives about 11.5 percent of its overall energy from wind turbines, according to this story.

When the high winds came through, the turbines were spinning at 69% of their maximum theoretical potential.

By 2010 Spain has set a goal of obtaining 30 percent of its electricity from renewable resources.

At 16,000 MW, Spain produces the third-most wind power in the world, behind the United States (25,000 MW) and Germany (24,000 MW).

With the lagging economy, some economists predict U.S. wind turbine additions to fall behind.

Coal Plants May Add Solar Thermal Power

solarthermal2As a way to reduce their greenhouse gases, as a percentage of total electricity produced, some coal-fired power plants are considering adding solar power, according to the Department of Energy.

The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), along with utilities, is studying whether it makes sense to add solar power to existing power plants in order to help cut greenhouse gas emissions. EPRI will collaborate with Tri-State Generation & Transmission Association Inc. and Progress Energy to evaluate the addition of solar thermal energy production to Tri-State’s power plants in Prewitt, N.M., and Roxboro, N.C., according to a press release.

EPRI is also considering the addition of solar thermal energy systems to natural-gas fired power plants owned by Dynergy Inc. and NV Energy. Those plants are in Kingman, Ariz., and Las Vegas.

The utilities would construct fields of mirrors, placed adjacent to power plants, that would focus the sun’s heat and boil water into steam, which would be integrated into the steam cycle of the fossil-fueled power plant, thus either reducing the burning of fossil fuel or increasing power production.

Monday, February 9, 2009

New technology purifies exhaust gas from diesel engines

The bulk of Danish vehicles fleet runs on diesel, which is causing air pollution in urban areas, from carbon particles, nitrogen oxides
and unburned hydrocarbons.

A new four-year project at Risø DTU (Danish Technical University) is developing an effective method for purifying flue gases, especially exhaust gases, from diesel engines. Existing solutions to air pollution require the installation of particulate filters and either an SCR catalyst (selective catalytic reduction), a nitrogen oxides (NOx) absorber or recirculation of the exhaust gas. This leads to additional expenditure when modifying diesel vehicles to be less polluting.

Electrochemical flue gas purification has a number of advantages over existing filters making it attractive to target this research at the car industry. Purification of carbon particles, toxic nitrogen oxides (NOX) and unburned hydrocarbons from the exhaust can all happen in the same filter unit.

Another advantage of using electrochemical methods is that it is not necessary to add other substances to the fuel. In addition, the filter can be produced without the use of precious metals. The current SCR technology typically uses the nitrogen-containing urea as a reducing agent to remove NOx from the exhaust.

The purification of exhaust gas will therefore be conducted independently of the engine operation. This technology could lead to significant fuel savings compared with leading alternative technologies. The technology could also be applied in the purification of flue gas from power plants, and possibly in the shipping industry.

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Indian electric car company Reva revs up to launch two models

Reva Electric Car Co. Pvt. Ltd, is developing a new two-door, roomier car designed to seat four adults, against the two adults in front and two children in the back the current model accommodates.

India’s only electric car maker, Reva Electric Car Co. Pvt. Ltd, is reworking its product line with two new models planned for launch over the next two years to tap a growing market for eco-friendly motoring alternatives, particularly in developed economies such as Europe and the US.
The Bangalore-based firm is developing a new two-door, roomier car designed to seat four adults, against the two adults in front and two children in the back the current model accommodates. The new model is expected to be ready for launch by end-2009.

Reva is also in advanced trials for a new lithium ion battery to replace the lead acid batteries that its cars are fitted with. “Deliveries of the first cars fitted with lithium ion batteries will commence by May,” said R. Chandramouli, president of sales and marketing at the company.

The company is also working on a four-door, entry-level car that it hopes to launch by the end of 2010, said a person close to the development who didn’t want to be named. In India, the car will compete with products such as the 800 model from Maruti Suzuki India Ltd and Santro from Hyundai Motor India Ltd. Other car makers such as Toyota Motor Corp., Honda Motor Co.and Ford Motor Co. are expected to launch new small cars in India beginning 2010.
On Wednesday, Reva Electric Car announced a tie-up with Reliance Digital, the electronics unit of the retailer, to drive sales of its cars in India.

Reva’s new launch plans dovetail with a global economic slowdown, greater environmental awareness and fluctuating oil prices that are moving customers in advanced economies from large, gas-guzzling vehicles to smaller, more energy-efficient cars.

The lithium ion battery, currently being tested on Reva cars that are on a cross-country Kashmir-to-Kanyakumari journey, can be charged within an hour using fast chargers and run for up to 120km on a single charge. The existing batteries take up to 8 hours to charge and deliver 80km to a single charge. Additionally, the new batteries will weigh about half of the 250kg that the lead batteries do. The current weight accounts for one-third of the car’s total weight.
Reva Electric, which exports its car to 13 countries, expects the new battery to drive sales, especially in Europe, where demand for smaller cars that are environment-friendly and cheaper to run is growing.

The new batteries, however, won’t be cheap and at Rs3 lakh a piece, will put the car in the Rs7-8 lakh bracket, at the bottom of the executive-class petrol sedan segment.
“For individuals, the price can be on the higher side and so we will offer it as a technology option to them (lead acid or lithium ion batteries). We expect fleet owners and car clubs to buy it in Europe,” Chandramouli said.