After the discovery of explosives on the premises of Swedish nuclear power plant Ringhals south of Gothenburg on Wednesday afternoon, authorities quickly raised the threat level at all Swedish nuclear facilities.
"They have all raised the threat level as a precaution," said Maria Stråhle at the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority (Strålsäkerhetsmyndigheten) to news agency TT.
A small amount of explosives without a triggering device was found on a forklift on the grounds of the country's largest atomic power station, authorities said. Police were investigating possible sabotage, but insisted that even if there had been a blast it would not have posed any great danger.
With police providing little information, a terror expert speculated it might have been an attempt to test the security system of the Ringhals power plant with a later attack in mind.
Capturing carbon dioxide from smokestack emissions and pumping it deep underground may not be as useful a tool for dealing with rising greenhouse-gas levels as advocates suggest, according to a new analysis. You mean they finally tumbled to the fact it's an expensive waste of time? And money?
The reason: Rising pressure from the enormous amounts of CO2, which would have to be stored until the next ice age for centuries to a few thousand years, could trigger earthquakes. The temblors might do little more than rattle Grandma's china at the surface, but they still could be strong enough to crack rock above the formations used for storage, providing pathways for the buoyant CO2 to leak back into the atmosphere. Which I think everybody would agree is a waste of money... Champ could always talk about job saved in carbon sequestration...
Moreover, while some underground formations are well-suited for sequestration, they could represent far less storage capacity globally than required if the approach is to be a significant tool for holding down atmospheric concentrations, according to a geophysicist at Stanford University, and the lead author of the analysis, which appears in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
If the goal is to sequester 1 billion tons a year of CO2 globally by 2050, and utilities were to aim only at the most-suitable formations, some 3,500 such sites would have to be uncovered and at spots convenient enough to be economical, Zoback and Stanford colleague Steven Gorelick found in their analysis. Some 85 sites a year would have to come on line between now and 2050 to meet that goal.
Yet by some estimates, 3.5 billion tons a year would need to be sequestered to reach emissions goals countries have been discussing internationally to curb global warming.
It might be possible to find large-scale formations that could serve an entire region, the researchers say. One such formation lies beneath the southern border of Indiana and Illinois. But the formation borders on a fault zone known for quakes that have reached magnitude 7. Maybe they're thinking of the New Madrid Fault which rang bells in Boston and changed the course of the Mississippi River.
If 100 million tons of CO2 were injected into the formation each year through 2050, the sequestered carbon would place a large amount of pressure on the fault zone. The 100 million ton figure is a small fraction of the amount power plants in the region emit today, the researchers estimate.
span style=background-color:yellow;>More studies are needed. Hey! That means more grant money is needed, come to think of it!
Posted by: Bobby ||
06/21/2012 15:00 ||
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#1
The law of unintended consequences always bites planners in the ass.
#2
Turn the co2 into something useful instead of putting it in a landfill so to speak. Waste streams are resource streams that have not yet been utilized.
Sequestering CO2 is really stupid. And expensive. For nothing.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
06/21/2012 15:58 Comments ||
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#3
...except for providing a revenue stream for the Bureau of Silly Walks the usual suspects.
#5
CO2 can be helpful at getting additional oil out of some formations - but it costs more to do than the oil is worth in most cases.
Nature sequesters most CO2 by combining it with calcium - how many tons of limestone and marble are there in the world?
#6
How would YOU like to be sequestered for a million years or more, hmmmmmm??? Free the carbonate ions now!
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
06/21/2012 20:42 Comments ||
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#7
#6 LOL.
On a separate note, it would be more funny iff I'd never had any childhood dreams or visions of Land/Islands-sinking EQ Bombs being linked to Pro-US-vs-Anti-US OWG-NWO.
[Daily Nation (Kenya)] Togo briefly tossed in the clink Drop the gat, Rocky, or you're a dead 'un! former prime minister and opposition figure Agbeyome Kodjo Tuesday over protests held last week, the latest in a series of such arrests, officials said.
Kodjo was taken in for questioning and released later in the day in connection with an investigation into alleged violence committed during the protests, a statement from prosecutors said.
"... One of the signatories to the declaration involving the holding of the protests, Agbeyome Kodjo, was locked away Drop the rosco and step away witcher hands up! today by the gendarmerie," the statement said.
"He was questioned like other previously placed in durance vile I ain't sayin' nuttin' widdout me mout'piece! organisers and immediately released."
Posted by: Fred ||
06/21/2012 00:00 ||
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[Daily Nation (Kenya)] Zim-bob-we President Bob Muggsy Mugabe Octogenarian President-for-Life of Zim-bob-we who turned the former Breadbasket of Africa into the African Basket Case... has denied reports that he is building a luxurious mansion with an underground bunker in neighbouring South Africa.
According to weekend reports, the KwaDukuza municipality in South Africa obtained a court order to stop the Zim-bob-wean ruler's former personal pilot from constructing the R200 million mansion citing environmental concerns.
Retired Air Vice Marshal Robert Mhlanga was rumoured to be building the mansion on be behalf of President Mugabe. A private newspaper, The Standard speculated that the Zim-bob-wean ruler wanted to use it as a "bolt hole."
But President Mugabe's spokesperson Mr George Charamba dismissed the reports. "There is no substance to that," he told the paper.
"The only relationship between them (President Mugabe and (Mr Mhlanga) is the name Robert and that they are Zim-bob-weans."
Posted by: Fred ||
06/21/2012 00:00 ||
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The Jihad in Central Africa continues unabated, hence a realistic NT or LT strategic threat to Zimbabwe proper - is "Muggsy" planning to bug out + go where US-NATO Forces are most likely to be sent???
["GET SMART'S" SIEGFRIED, AKA "THE FIRST MAN OUT OF EL ALAMEIN" here].
[An Nahar] Kuwait's constitutional court on Wednesday declared February's legislative polls in which the opposition swept to victory illegal and reinstated the previous pro-government parliament, state media said.
Nothing like making life infinitely more interesting for all involved.
Leading opposition MP Mussallam al-Barrak described the verdict as "a coup against the constitution" and called for the opposition to take a united stand.
"The court declared that the emiri decree that called for the 2012 election was unconstitutional and ordered reinstating the previous assembly," the state-run KUNA news agency reported.
Rulings by the Gulf state's highest court are final and cannot be challenged.
Kuwait Emir Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah issued a decree in early December dissolving the parliament following youth-led street protests calling for reforms and for the sacking of former prime minister Sheikh Nasser Mohammad al-Ahmad al-Sabah.
A few days later, the emir issued another decree inviting Kuwaitis to elect a new parliament on February 2.
The court ruled that the second decree was "unconstitutional," thus nullifying the results of the general elections in which the opposition scored an impressive victory.
The previous parliament was controlled by a pro-government majority.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/21/2012 00:00 ||
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#1
Islamists won. The eventual result would have been the kind of standoff where Iran's Mossadegh tried usurp the Shah's power back in the 50's. What Kuwait needs is a non-troglodyte electorate. Short of a Muhammad-style conquest by a foreign power and mass executions of hundreds of thousands of devout believers accompanied by a renounce Islam-or-die policy, it's hard to see how the Kuwaiti populace will self-moderate.
Support for the doctors' strike was crumbling on Wednesday night after a public backlash caused many who voted for action to have second thoughts.
In May, the British Medical Association insisted it had a "strong" mandate for industrial action -- its first strike in nearly 40 years -- when half its members responded to a ballot with 79 per cent of votes in favour.
The slump in support for industrial action over pensions follows fierce public criticism and claims that doctors are being "greedy and immoral".
But a survey by The Daily Telegraph found that two thirds of GP surgeries expected to have all their doctors working on Thursday and would be open for business as usual. The vast majority of hospitals said few or no operations would be cancelled.
The slump in support for industrial action over pensions follows fierce public criticism and claims that doctors are being "greedy and immoral". One poll on Wednesday found that only a third of Britons backed the action.
David Cameron said doctors should not strike as most already had gold-plated pensions which people working in the private sector "can only dream of".
The BMA, representing two thirds of doctors, is fighting cuts to their £1million pension pots. Under government proposals, new doctors will have to work until 68 and make bigger contributions to earn a pension worth £68,000 a year.
Britain may give more millions more pounds to the controversial European Court of Human Rights, despite the Government's promise to rein it in.
The Strasbourg court is asking countries to give it extra money in an attempt to deal with a backlog of 150,000 cases. Britain already pays £20million a year to the Council of Europe, which is responsible for the court, but is considering increasing this sum,
In an unusual move, the ECHR is even telling states that they can stipulate that they want their funds to be spent specifically on cases against them.
The request for more money has come just two months after ministers claimed to have secured lasting reform of the court at a summit in Brighton.
It is likely to prompt fresh claims that judges at Europe's most powerful human rights court are out of control, and that Britain should pull out of it.
[Al Ahram] Austria's central bank head has issued an unusually stark warning about too much austerity, amid the eurozone's debt crisis, saying such an approach contributed to the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.
"The single-minded concentration on austerity policy (in the 1920s and 30s) led to mass unemployment, a breakdown of democratic systems and, at the end, to the catastrophe of Nazism," Wald Nowotny said in comments confirmed by his office on Wednesday.
The remarks were initially made at an event on Monday in Vienna.
Germany in particular has championed painful spending cuts to balance budgets and reduce debts as the principle way of restoring investor confidence in eurozone members' solvency and ending the bloc's sovereign debt crisis.
But as evidenced in recent elections in Greece, too much emphasis on cutting spending is hugely unpopular, and new French President Francois Hollande wants to water down Berlin's austerity drive with more focus on generating growth.
British historian Niall Ferguson and US economist Nouriel Roubini drew a similar historical parallel to Nowotny in the Financial Times on June 8, attacking Germany's "wait and see" approach to the eurozone crisis.
German policy, they wrote in a joint opinion piece, "risks a repeat of precisely the crisis of the mid-20th century that European integration was designed to avoid."
The said: "We find it extraordinary that it should be Germany, of all countries, that is failing to learn from history."
They also said: "Fixated on the non-threat of inflation, today's Germans appear to attach more importance to 1923 (the year of hyperinflation) than to 1933 (the year democracy died)."
Posted by: Fred ||
06/21/2012 00:00 ||
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#1
and there I was thinking it was forcing Germans to pay France and other foreign countries vast amounts of it's GDP.
#4
This is true but the left really fears nationalism. They (I have been told) believed that the route cause of nazism was nationalism. With the EU breakup nationalism will happen. That is why Europe and here fought the Tea party. They feared its strength. True grass routes not controlled like a union.
#6
BP & (g)romky, I, too, thought that the humiliation and looting of the ToV were the major issues. Those are what led to the rise of a leftist, nationalist dictatorship (aka Naziism).
Hmmm, leftist dictatorship in Europe? Now why does that sound familiar?
#9
I recall the expression Socialism Democrat conferred upon Europe. Well we have that here now.
I'd bet you many loyal Democrats will refuse to vote since they have no home to go to now.
#13
Reporters laughed when Pelosi said she could have had Rove arrested whenever she liked . Im not kidding. Theres a prison here in the Capitol If we had spotted him in the Capitol, we could have arrested him.
They do have their dreams and fantasies which often get confused with reality.
The Dutch upper house, the Senate, on Tuesday rejected a bill that would have banned the ritual slaughter of animals and had been criticised by both Muslim and Jewish groups.
The bill, proposed by the small Party for the Animals, stipulates that livestock must be stunned before being slaughtered, contrary to Muslim halal and Jewish kosher laws, which require animals to be conscious.
[Dawn] A three member bench of the Supreme Court headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry on Wednesday concluded the suo moto case taken over the Kohistan ...a backwoods district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa distinguished by being even more rustic than is the norm among the local Pashtuns.... killings case stating that the girls in question have been found alive and the claim of the killings was unverifiable, DawnNews reported.
The court stated that the investigative teams comprising a civil judge, MNA Bushra Gauhar, rights activist Farzana Bari (part of civil society) were sent twice to verify the claims aired on certain television channels and the report submitted by the team was found to be satisfactory according to the Chief Justice.
The Chief Justice, while giving his remarks, said that the court condemns the holding of any illegal jirga but no evidence was found that would suggest any error in the report and that he trusted the judicial officer working on the case.
Chaudhry also thanked former Interior Minister Rehman Malik Pak politician, current Interior Minister under the Gilani administration. Malik is a former Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) intelligence officer who rose to head the FIA during Benazir Bhutto's second tenure. He later joined the Pak Peoples Party and was chief security officer to Bhutto. Malik was tossed from his FIA job in 1998 after documenting the breath-taking corruption of the Sharif family. By unhappy coincidence Nawaz Sharif became PM at just that moment and Malik moved to London one step ahead of the button men. and the administration for their cooperation on the case.
He further directed rights activist Farzana Bari to present the court with any other evidence that she might posses and added that the case could be taken up again in case any evidence turned up.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/21/2012 00:00 ||
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#1
Umm.. yes, I too would think that if the murder victims were found to be "alive" then the murder trial should be dismissed...
I must be missing something.
Posted by: American Delight ||
06/21/2012 19:09 Comments ||
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A New York hospital worker and her spouse have filed a lawsuit saying spousal health benefits were denied to the same-sex couple.
The lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan sought past and future health care benefits and a declaration that the Westchester County couple is entitled to the benefits.
The lawsuit's plaintiffs remained anonymous. Defendants included Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield and St. Joseph's Medical Center. Neither immediately responded to messages for comment. The lawsuit says one of the women works at St. Vincent's Westchester, a division of St. Joseph's. The women's attorney, Randolph McLaughlin, said the lawsuit was unique because it challenges the federal Defense of Marriage Act to obtain health care benefits.
Posted by: Fred ||
06/21/2012 00:00 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Zim-bob-we President 
Britain may give more millions more pounds to the controversial European Court of Human Rights, despite the Government's promise to rein it in. 
Dutch upper house rejects ban on ritual slaughter
A New York hospital worker and her spouse have filed a lawsuit saying spousal health benefits were denied to the same-sex couple.
