Archive

BY KEITH NUTHALL
PLANS by American space agency NASA to develop nuclear energy sources that can be fitted onboard space ships have been discussed by the scientific and technical subcommittee of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs.

Its experts were informed of the earmarking of money in NASA’s 2003 budget for a new nuclear systems initiative.…

KEITH NUTHALL
IN a reversal of its earlier position, the European Commission has agreed that the German grid feed-in laws on the promotion of electricity from renewable energy sources and from combined heat and power are legal under EU state aid rules.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Investment Bank is developing plans to lend Euro 43 million to Danish company Leverandorforeningen af 1990 AmbA to build and operate a medium-sized CHP municipal waste incineration plant.

Consisting of one incineration line with a treatment capacity of 24t/h and an energy output capacity of 46 MWth and 16.5 Mwe, the plants would be sited in MÃ¥de, an industrial zone in the city of Esbjerg, on Denmark’s west coast.…

KEITH NUTHALL
A STUDY on the environmental performance of Estonia’s two main electricity generators has concluded that significant investment will be required to enable them to attain the European Union standards that they must achieve when the Baltic country becomes a EU Member State.…

KEITH NUTHALL
THE SALE of fallen energy giant Enron’s Wind Turbine Business to GE Power Systems, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the General Electric Company, has been approved by the European Commission, following a competition inquiry. Brussels concluded that the deal would not pose any threat to choice within the European power sector.…

BY JONATHAN THOMSON
TWO-THIRDS of those landlords and property owners responsible for non-domestic premises in Britain fail to manage the risks associated with asbestos in buildings, a Health and Safety Executive (HSE) official has claimed.

Bill Macdonald, who heads the HSE unit responsible for asbestos policy, told delegates at the RoSPA Congress 2002, in Birmingham, that legislation that will soon come into force was necessary because of the widespread failure to manage.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Parliament is expected to demand that celery and celery products are added to a list of potentially allergenic ingredients that must be named on labels for food products sold in the EU. Other adopted amendments agreed by the parliament’s environment committee to a new proposed directive now under discussion include an extension of the compulsory labeling list to include mustard.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THAT holy grail of environmentalists, an economy that grows, yet imposes a declining burden on the environment, has yet to be achieved in the European Union, although some important steps have been made in the right direction, claims the European Environment Agency.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
A RESEARCH project developing ways of feeding spaceship food plants with the recycled faeces of Mars-bound astronauts could have important spin-off applications for the disposal of municipal waste water.

The European Space Agency funded MELISSA (micro-ecological life support alternative) project is examining how to re-use the maximum amount of waste generated by spacemen on future long trips to the red planet.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL
THE EUROPEAN Commission has announced that it is spending Euro 20 million on research projects designed to unveil the real effects of endocrine disrupters on human health and the environment. Grants will be paid to 22 research teams from 10 European countries which will explore the effect of exposure from low doses and mixtures of disrupters on human beings, aquatic wildlife and laboratory animals, among other topics.…