Archive

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A JOINT letter signed by more than 100 environmental groups – including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, WWF and the European Environmental Bureau – has called for a “radical overhaul” of the European Union’s Euratom treaty in an ongoing review of EU institutions.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
SIGNIFICANT liberalisation of Denmark’s natural gas market has been agreed in a deal between the European Commission’s competition directorate and the key suppliers and producers in the Danish sector. Notably, Shell, AP Møller and ChevronTexaco, have agreed to stop jointly marketing their gas as part of the country’s dominant production group, called the Danish Underground Consortium (DUC).…

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
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.…

BY ALAN OSBORN
THE EUROPEAN Commission is to open a formal investigation into the provision of unlimited financial guarantees by the French government to its national electricity company Electricité de France (EdF). Brussels called last year for a phasing out of the guarantees because, it said, they amounted to illegal state aid.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
HAMBURG’S ageing and crumbling sewerage network is to be upgraded by a Euro 420 injection of funding, with the European Union’s (EU) European Investment Bank (EIB) planning to provide Euro 180 million of this money. The scheme involves a large number of small repair projects to improve the north German port’s waste water services, including the modernisation of its sewage treatment system and the reconstruction and upgrading of its sewerage networks.…

KEITH NUTHALL
INNOVATION from European Union-funded research has continued to offer improvements to the way that EU water utilities work. For instance, the European Commission-funded MicroChem initiative has developed miniaturised laboratory-on-a-chip systems suitable for rapid field testing of water streams. They examine water in tiny pictolitre quantities, flowing through microbore channels produced by photolithographic etching.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE FINNISH government is being threatened with legal action at the European Court of Justice for allegedly failing to protect the vulnerable Siberian flying squirrel (Pteromys volans). Finland is the only European Union home of this species, which lives in old forests.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Union is pushing for an acceleration of the phasing out of single hull tankers worldwide in the wake of the Prestige accident, where thousands of tonnes of crude oil spilled onto the pristine cost of Galicia, Spain.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A SUCCESSFUL trial of electronic tags for livestock has been announced by the European Commission, which has inspired a proposed regulation that would create a unified system for accurately monitoring farm animals across the European Union.

Brussels officials have unveiled in Italy the results of the IDEA project (Electronic IDentification of Animals), a one million animal trial spanning France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain.…