Search Results for: Finland

By Lorraine Mallinder, in Montréal

As the polar ice cap continues to shrink, the five nations surrounding the Arctic Ocean are hurriedly positioning themselves for what is shaping up to be one of the biggest geopolitical brawls of the coming years.

Beneath the thinning ice lies the tantalising prospect of up to a quarter of the world’s untapped oil and gas reserves and the promise of new shipping routes between East and West. It’s enough to turn the heads of even the most placid nations.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

EUROPEAN Union (EU) ministers have been asked to swiftly write into EU law a multi-year stock protection plan for eastern bluefin tuna. It is based on an agreement forged last November at the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) at its annual meeting in Marrakech, Morocco.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL, EMMA JACKSON and ALAN OSBORN

IN the early 1990s the nuclear power industry faced a bleak outlook. High profile accidents such as in Chernobyl and Three Mile Island in, Pennsylvania, the USA, had raised public concern about the safety of the industry to all time high.…

BY MARK ROWE, ALAN OSBORN, CRISTINA MUNTEAN and KEITH NUTHALL

BRITAIN has long been something of a laggard when it comes to district heating. The only significant growth was mainly oil-fired network in local authority housing during the 1960s and 70s.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

THE PRESIDENT of the Brewers of Europe organisation Alberto da Ponte has warned of a "sharp decline in the beer market" across Europe. He told a Brussels symposium: "The recession…taken with other events, such as widespread and recently-introduced smoking bans in pubs and restaurants, is having a very negative impact."…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

BIOTECHNOLOGY companies will look carefully at the possible impact of a European Union (EU) Council of Ministers decision today to allow member states to block production f genetically modified (GM) foods previously approved by the EU. Ministers overwhelmingly threw out the latest bid by the European Commission to force Hungary to lift its national ban on the cultivation of Monsanto’s GM maize MON810 and Austria’s ban on MON810 and Bayer’s T25 maize.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL, EMMA JACKSON and ALAN OSBORN

DESPITE widespread initial scepticism about its viability, the ITER project to build the world’s first commercial nuclear fusion reactor is now under way. It is employing specialists (nearly 300 staff and rising at the end of 2008); releasing Euro millions in research and procurement funding; and in November of last year moved into its headquarters, in Cadarache, southern France, which is where the first nuclear fusion reactor will be built on a 180 hectare site.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

EVERY recession has a silver lining: inefficient competitors are unmasked and forced out of business; and governments usually spend freely to pump prime an ailing economy. And for major essential industries such as the power sector, economic slumps can be good times.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

EUROPEAN Union (EU) heads of government have approved Euro 3.9 billion in EU spending on energy investment projects, after they finally finished wrangling over the detail of this keystone of their economic stimulus package.

As expected, the final programme has more projects in southern and eastern Europe than in previous drafts.…

BY KEITH NUTHALL

A EUROPEAN Union (EU)-funded research project called SonoDrugs has united universities and high-tech businesses in developing tiny, image-guided medicine capsules which could target medicines to where they are needed in a patient’s body. The aim of the innovation is conveying doses through blood vessels to the centre of an infection or disease, after which the drugs are activated by ultrasound pulses.…