Archived material from historical editions of The Generator
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found even the worst-timed wind resource sites have a wholesale market value just 10 per cent below that of a flat block of baseload power; while the the best-timed sites had a wholesale market value of roughly 5 per cent above that of a flat block of power. The research plan:Ryan Continue Reading →
ollution of the soil, earth and air was still causing long-term damage 20 years after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, former Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev told a British all-party parliamentary group on climate change, reported Times Online, the web edition of The Times. President at time of disaster: Gorbachev, who was Soviet President at the Continue Reading →
Salisbury Council in South Australia said it had the ability to provide properly filtered stormwater fit for drinking to some of its residential areas and public acceptance remained the only hurdle, reported The Advertiser (15/6/2006, p.2).
Waste water likely in ten years: Council spokesperson Richard Watson on 14 June told a Property Council of Australia seminar that using treated waste water was also an option, but the council conceded any take-up of such measures would more likely be a decade away.
CSIRO to help with harvest: Mayor Tony Zappia said he was "very excited" by the project to harvest stormwater for filtration, which is underway in conjunction with the CSIRO. "This is simply reproducing nature’s own ways of filtering water," he said.
Six bores under construction: The council had begun work on six bores which would be injected with stormwater for the next 12 months. After this period the contents would pass through the aquifer and be extracted for quality testing by United Water and the CSIRO.
International funding taken up: The project has also received funding from organisations in the European economic community, the director of city projects and head of the council’s water recycling program, Colin Pitman, said. He said the results were being keenly awaited in the hope the system could be reproduced world-wide.
State approval needed: Once quality tests were complete, the council would seek State Government clearance for the recycled water to be used in the Salisbury Council area.
The Advertiser, 15/6/2006, p. 2
Source: Erisk Net
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article994070.ece
Israel has dismissed continuing calls for an independent international inquiry into the beachfront explosion which killed seven members of a Palestinian family in Gaza last Friday after its own internal military investigation decided it was not responsible for the blast.
As the military investigation team insisted that artillery fire had stopped by the time the explosion occurred and suggested it had been caused by a bomb planted in the sand, Amir Peretz, the Defence Minister, declared: " The accumulating evidence proves that this incident was not due to Israeli forces."
But the official interpretation was strongly challenged by a former Pentagon battle damage expert who has surveyed the scene of the beach explosion. He said yesterday that "all the evidence points" to a 155mm Israeli land-based artillery shell as its cause.
World oil production today stands at more than twice the 15-billion a-year maximum projected by Shell Oil in 1956 — and reserves are climbing at a faster clip yet. That leaves the question, Why this war?
Did Dick Cheney send us in to seize the last dwindling supplies? Unlikely. Our world’s petroleum reserves have doubled in just twenty-five years — and it is in Shell’s and the rest of the industry’s interest that this doubling doesn’t happen again. The neo-cons were hell-bent on raising Iraq’s oil production. Big Oil’s interest was in suppressing production, that is, keeping Iraq to its OPEC quota or less. This raises the question, did the petroleum industry, which had a direct, if hidden, hand, in promoting invasion, cheerlead for a takeover of Iraq to prevent overproduction?
It wouldn’t be the first time. If oil is what we’re looking for, there are, indeed, extra helpings in Iraq. On paper, Iraq, at 112 billion proven barrels, has the second largest reserves in OPEC after Saudi Arabia. That does not make Saudi Arabia happy. Even more important is that Iraq has fewer than three thousand operating wells… compared to one million in Texas.
That makes the Saudis even unhappier. It would take a decade or more, but start drilling in Iraq and its reserves will about double, bringing it within gallons of Saudi Arabia’s own gargantuan pool. Should Iraq drill on that scale, the total, when combined with the Saudis’, will drown the oil market. That wouldn’t make the Texans too happy either. So Fadhil Chalabi’s plan for Iraq to pump 12 million barrels a day, a million more than Saudi Arabia, is not, to use Bob Ebel’s (Center fro Strategic and International Studies) terminology, "ridiculous" from a raw resource view, it is ridiculous politically. It would never be permitted. An international industry policy of suppressing Iraqi oil production has been in place since 1927. We need again to visit that imp called "history."
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/726463.html
A Lebanese man has confessed to assassinating a series of senior Hezbollah and Palestinian militants over a seven-year period on behalf of Israeli intelligence, the Lebanese Army said on Tuesday.
It said Mahmoud Rafeh, arrested along with three others last week in connection with the May 26 killing of two Islamic Jihad officials, was a leading member of a "terrorist network" behind at least three other major assassinations in Lebanon.
"Investigations by military intelligence showed that the terrorist network that was discovered had links to the Israeli Mossad for several years and that its members underwent training both inside Israel and outside," the army statement said.
"The network was tasked by this agency with carrying out these operations and was given secret communication and monitoring devices for this purpose along with detailed maps of the target… forged documents and bags with secret pockets."