Archive

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A BRITISH footwear importer has won a case at the European Court of Justice (ECJ), which should lead it to hold onto GBPounds 38,085 in import duties repaid by the UK Customs and Excise, with judges saying customs officials could not reverse their earlier decision to return the money.…

Keith Nuthall
THE EUROPEAN Commission is to launch a joint review with the European Union’s (EU) footwear industry of EU policies and programmes designed to promote innovation and competition in the sector.

EU enterprise Commissioner Erkki Liikanen told the World Footwear Congress, in Brussels, that his officials and business representatives would “take a close look to these issues in the footwear industry of the enlarged EU,” which will include eastern European countries from 2005.…

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.…