Archive

KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union (EU) Council of Ministers has agreed to extend until December 2004 an existing agreement with Vietnam on preventing fraud in the international trade in footwear products. The deal in effect extends this Memorandum of Understanding agreement by two years, allowing time for the two sides to review the controls, if necessary.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE TENDER for the construction of a new shelter for the remnants of Chernobyl’s reactor 4 may be issued this year, according to Vince Novak, director of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development’s nuclear safety department. He was speaking after a meeting of the Chernobyl Shelter Fund (CSF) consortium, which is financing the US$768 million Shelter Implementation Plan.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has redrafted legislation allowing the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) to accede to the global Convention on Nuclear Safety. This follows a European Court of Justice declaration last year that the European Union Council of Ministers made mistakes when it ratified the treaty.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
REPORTS sent to the International Atomic Energy Agency by the Japan Safeguards Office are expected to show that discrepancies in figures on the amount of nuclear waste at the Tokai Reprocessing Plant are due to statistical differences between initial calculations of how much nuclear material had been received by the reactor operator compared with the amounts that were actually measured later on.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
AS AMERICAN and British military forces secure control of Iraq from the regime of dictator Saddam Hussein using the latest military technology, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has released a cautionary report confirming for the first time that depleted uranium shells can and have contaminated drinking water.…

KEITH NUTHALL
AN INITIATIVE to transform natural gas burnt off in Russia’s oil fields into electricity and consumable heat has been developed by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). It is granting a six year US$80 million loan to a key subsidiary of Russia’s Lukoil group – CSJC Lukoil-Perm – to help it cut gas flaring to 20 per cent by 2005, compared with 52 per cent at typical Russian oilfields.…

KEITH NUTHALL
A TECHNOLOGICALLY innovative development of geothermal energy in Iceland is expected to go ahead with the support of a planned loan of Euro 23.5 million from the European Investment Bank. The money would help extend the generating power of the City of Reykjavik’s existing Nesjavellir geothermal cogeneration plant by 30 MWe and 150 MWth.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE UNITED Nations Development Programme is implementing a plan to build 15 digester units to generate biogas from animal manure for home heating and cooking in and around Kazakhstan’s second city Karaganda, population 600,000. The UNDP says that the pilot project exploits an ancient technology that originated in China more than 2,000 years ago.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A EUROPEAN Union report has encouraged local authorities to take more environmental considerations into account in their public procurement programmes – especially for energy – claiming that if every EU public body switched to renewable sources, they would meet 18 per cent of Europe’s Kyoto Protocol obligations.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has announced that it will spend Euro 69 million this year on a major overhaul of Serbia’s Nikola Tesla A5 and B1 thermal power plants, as well as funding training programmes and making management improvements in its energy sector.…