"The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates that the 14% of electricity currently produced by nuclear means worldwide will rise by 10–20% by 2050. Sixty-five nuclear plants are currently under construction, 27 in China alone. The United States is building one new reactor, and up to eight are scheduled to go online by 2020. Whether safety reviews ordered in response to the Fukushima events will slow the growth of the global nuclear fleet is not yet clear."
The briskly rising global demand for energy will require all available technologies, including nuclear, says Thierry Dujardin, deputy director for science and development at the Nuclear Energy Agency in Paris. “So whatever nuclear policies some countries may opt for,” he says, “the world will need a qualified nuclear workforce for decades to come.”
Economic Development Minister Paolo Romani said Italy would reconsider nuclear power "when Europe as a whole takes decisions shared by all countries," referring to planned "stress tests" on European nuclear power stations.
"Fukushima has shown us that major accidents are possible. I don't say that voluntarily, having said that I was and remain pro-nuclear," Romani said in a newspaper interview. "Nuclear power is not culturally acceptable at the moment."
Environmental activists have staged demonstrations and launched hunger strikes to call for the closure of the Unit 1 reactor at the Fessenheim nuclear power plant, one of France's oldest. Built in 1977, the reactor is in eastern France about 1 mile from the German border, in an area that experiences frequent earthquakes.
In the aftermath of the Japanese nuclear crisis, French President Nicolas Sarkozy ordered stress tests for all French reactors. He didn't call for abandoning nuclear power, and such a move would be hard to realize: The 58 French reactors produce around 80 percent of the domestic power demand and make France an electricity exporter.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor warned Democrats that he is willing to let the U.S. default to creditors if GOP demands for massive cuts to spending and budget process reforms are not met by President Obama and House Democrats, who are seeking to increase the debt ceiling to avoid another economic crisis.Economic Chernobyl: House Dems accuse GOP of playing kamikaze budget politics
‘With the debt-limit window fast approaching, House Republicans have made clear that, if the President and our Democratic colleagues refuse to accept serious reforms that immediately reduce federal spending and end the culture of debt in Washington, we will not grant their request for a debt limit increase,’ Cantor said is a statement Wednesday.
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has warned of catastrophic consequences if the ceiling is not raised, saying that it will lead to an even worse crisis then the recession that the country is just emerging from, as an increase in interest rates and borrowing costs would be seen for Americans nationwide.
Vermont Representative Peter Welch also hit back at Cantor yesterday, accusing Republicans of holding the country’s good credit hostage.
‘Mr Cantor believes he has found political leverage in mixing the retroactive debt ceiling debate with the forward looking debt reduction debate. What he is willing to risk for this so-called leverage is a mid-air stall in America’s fledgling economic recovery and the tarnishing of the full faith and credit of the United States of America,’ Welch said.
‘America pays its bills. It always has and it always will. Holding that solemn tradition hostage in a game of kamikaze budget politics is reckless, irresponsible and playing with fire,’ he added."
Miranda Kerr Post-Partum Bikini Body (TMZ)
Miranda Kerr Post-Baby Bikini Body (Just Jared)
Large-sized for a mandarin, the fruit has an orange rind color. The rind is thin and extremely smooth. The 10-11 segments in each fruit are fleshy and deep orange in color.
'KinnowLS' (the LS is short for low seeded) is a mandarin selection developed by mutation breeding of the mandarin cultivar 'Kinnow,' a mid-to-late season maturing variety developed by UC Riverside nearly 100 years ago. While 'Kinnow' has 15-30 seeds per fruit, 'KinnowLS' has only 2-3 seeds per fruit. Rarely, individual 'KinnowLS' fruit may have 4-7 seeds.
"People who like very sweet fruit are going to find 'KinnowLS' to be very appealing," said Mikeal Roose, a professor of genetics in, and chair of, the Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, who developed 'KinnowLS' along with staff scientist Timothy Williams.
“Most people understand that Washington doesn’t have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem,” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said on “The Early Show.” “We can’t raise taxes,” he said, “that was settled last November during the elections.”
"House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) made similar remarks on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” saying: “We don’t have a problem with our budget because Americans don’t pay enough taxes. We have problems with our budget because we spend too much money."
"Although the media seldom mention it, the cuts aren’t really a “down payment” on deficit reduction. They simply are a partial payment for the $700 billion, 10-year cost of the extension of the Bush top-end tax cuts that Republicans insisted on in December."
Republicans have doubled down on their reverse Robin Hood agenda. The plan put forth by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan calls for the wealthy to launch another offensive in the class war they’ve been winning. It would slash another 20 percent from domestic programs, end Medicare as we know it, cut a trillion from Medicaid, repeal protections for consumers and the environment. It would do this not to reduce the deficit — the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the Ryan plan would increase the deficit over 10 years — but to pay for extending the Bush tax cuts and further lowering tax rates on the rich and corporations."
Ryan’s proposal has spooked all the Republican presidential aspirants, save former senator Rick Santorum (R-Fugheddaboudit). Ideologues who defend the Ryan plan, such as former George W. Bush adviser Peter Wehner, attempt to argue that those who oppose it oppose any entitlement reform.
But even mainstream conservatives such as Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.), part of the Gang of Six, say the no-new-taxes Ryan plan is a nonstarter. “What he seeks to do is to, number one, balance the budget over about a 10-year period simply by reducing spending,” he said. “And you can’t do that. It’s not going to work.”
What Ryan has done, however, is boost prospects for the Bowles-Simpson plan as a reasonablealternative. “When folks look at the two plans side by side,” Bowles told me, “they see balance in ours.”
"The biggest challenge for Jordan is the cooling systems. How can a water-poor country like the kingdom build a nuclear plant?" [environment ministry advisor] Dabbas said.
With desert covering 92 percent of its territory, Jordan, one of the world's 10 driest countries, is battling to face chronic water shortages and meet needs for its increasing population of 6.3 million.
"Our entire region is exposed to earthquakes. We are a small country and any nuclear leak will remain in Jordan for 5,000 years," Dabbas said.
"There are alternative solutions, like building solar and wind power systems, which can produce thousands of megawatts. Also, we can always ration our energy consumption."
The most sensible American economists warn against cutting back spending and laying off workers now. Even fiscal hawks like the co-chairs of the president’s deficit commission, Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, opposed cuts in spending in the current fiscal year. Similarly, Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, the conservative appointee of George W. Bush, warned against cutting spending or raising taxes in December, arguing that the economy still was struggling to get going.
That’s all forgotten now. “So be it” was Speaker Boehner’s infamous response when asked if the House budget assault would cost federal jobs. Goldman Sachs and Moody’s projected the original Republican plan would cost 700,000 jobs over the next year; now we’ll lose only three-fourths of that number. Some triumph.
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Lost in this discussion is what the country needs: a clear strategy to build the economy and revive the middle class. That requires making the investments vital to our future and figuring out how to pay for them. It requires taxing what we have too much of (financial speculation and extreme concentration of income and wealth) and investing in what we have too little of (education programs such as pre-K, 21st-century infrastructure and renewable energy). And it would address the real —
and sole — source of our long-term debt crisis: not Social Security and Medicare, not “entitlements,” but a broken health-care system, dominated by powerful drug, insurance and hospital lobbies, that costs about twice as much per capita as the health systems of other industrial countries and ensures that while other systems may have bad results, our has worse.
(Erin Heatherton)The researchers studied the effect of blueberries (freeze dried blueberries crushed into a powder) that were mixed into the rat diet, as part of either a low- or high-fat diet. They performed many comparisons between the rats consuming the test diets and the control rats receiving no blueberry powder. All the rats were from a research breed that is prone to being severely overweight.
In all, after 90 days, the rats that received the blueberry-enriched powder, measured as 2 percent of their diet, had less abdominal fat, lower triglycerides, lower cholesterol, and improved fasting glucose and insulin sensitivity, which are measures of how well the body processes glucose for energy.
While regular blueberry intake reduced these risks for cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome, the health benefits were even better when combined with a low-fat diet.
"Science is not a luxury; it reaches deep into the national infrastructure - economic, physical, and intellectual - that makes modern civilization possible. It operates at every step of the development of cures for disease and new approaches to energy independence. Most scientific research performed in the nation's laboratories - academic, industrial, or federal - is 'trouble-shooting' research where highly trained men and women puzzle out unexpected occurrences of every kind and build a knowledge base available to other scientists, engineers, and innovators throughout the economy. Economists estimate that approximately half of post-WWII economic growth is directly attributable to R&D-fueled technological progress.
The U.S. excels at this kind of work, partly because at the most challenging level we combine it with advanced education. The largest fraction of federal research funds awarded to universities goes to support graduate students and postdocs who conduct research and then transfer their cutting edge knowledge to industry "on two legs." During their studies, guided by professors, they immerse themselves in the details of prior knowledge and of experiments they design and build to solve puzzles and cut through to new solutions. It is no accident that high-value-added industries cluster around research universities. They can find solutions to problems through access to the nation's most skilled and motivated people, and they recruit them as employees."
"The Senate Democratic leader said negotiators have basically agreed to the total level of cuts for the rest of fiscal 2011 but strong disagreement remains over controversial policy riders. These include proposals to defund Planned Parenthood and various Environmental Protection Agency initiatives."
“The numbers are basically there,” Reid said. “But I’m not nearly as optimistic — and that’s an understatement — as I was 11 hours ago. The numbers are extremely close. Our differences are no longer over how much savings we get on government spending.
“The only thing holding up an agreement is an ideology,” Reid told the Senate’s presiding chair. “I’m sorry to say, Mr. President, my friend the Speaker and the Republican leadership have drawn a line in the sand, not dealing with a deficit we know we have to deal with.
“The two main issues holding this matter up are the choice of women, reproductive rights, and clean air,” Reid said. “These matters have no place in a budget bill.”
Boehner, appearing on ABC's "Good Morning America," repeated that he was working to provide the "largest number of spending cuts possible."How many American people, John? And how do you quantify the EPA "being out of control"?
"When it comes to an out of control bureaucracy in Washington, we know that that's also getting in the way of creating jobs in America. The EPA's out of control. And the American people do not want taxpayer dollars used to fund elective abortions," he said.
But anyway, to my theory. I think the Boner Boehner is constantly changing the final negotiated "figure" for budget cuts to keep the media attention on that number, and less on the policy riders that haven't been removed from the negotiations.Now, here's some quotes from the HuffPost piece:
"Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the number-two Democrat in the upper chamber, said that Boehner was under pressure on social issues not from the Tea Party, but from senior Republicans. "It's not about reducing the deficit. It's about hitting programs. He's gotta cut programs. And we think still we can reach agreement on the money. But he is under enormous pressure and he says it's not from the Tea Party, it's from the old guard, the Republican guard, that wants to once and for all show that they can force through some of these social issues, like abortion," Durbin told reporters Thursday evening in the Capitol. "The rider list gets longer and longer and non-negotiable."
A GOP aide confirmed Durbin's claim that it's the senior members who are insisting on riders. Polls show that the public is likely to blame the Tea Party for any shutdown, but ironically, most new members are more passionate about spending than social issues. [OK, I did this:] Yet the public is likely to conflate the Tea Party with the culture wars if the government ultimately shuts down due to a dispute over funding for family planning. [And isn't that overall a bad thing for the GOP? If they were just about budget cutting - never mind that trying to do too much in one year of discretionary spending is stupid - we could at least sympathize with their goals. But hiding the social policy agenda behind the budget cut smokescreen -- that just smacks of old fashioned smoke-filled backroom politics. And it's screwing the entire nation in the process.]
"It's mostly a few older members who have seen an opportunity," said the GOP aide."
"The IISS report states that “The earth is warming, and has been for at least a century,” with this being “directly attributable to the increasing emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.” As a result, “Climate change may already be changing weather and precipitation patterns” and will continue to drive extreme weather events and changes in water resources (through flood, drought, and rising sea levels), and it will adversely affect global food and energy production." This quote comes not from an environmental pressure group but from security experts drawn from US and UK military and intelligence communities."
It might be considered unusual for the medical and military professions to concur. But on this subject we do. Climate change poses an immediate and grave threat, driving ill health and increasing the risk of conflict, such that each feeds on the other. And like all good medicine, prevention is the key. The IISS report stresses the need for “sustained investment in infrastructure and new technologies” of which “a shift to renewable energy sources will be the most visible effect of efforts to mitigate emissions.” Approaches that reduce demand, including efforts to increase efficiency, are also required."
A Fraunhofer consortium is currently driving the development of large-scale energy-storage systems known as redox flow batteries. The experts' long-term goal is to build a handball-court-sized battery installation with a capacity of 20 MWh -- enough energy to provide power to roughly 2000 households through a long winter's night or a cloudy day. The results have not advanced quite so far: At the moment, the largest laboratory facilities at the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology UMSICHT have an output of several kW.OK, so I guess it's a possibility. We'll see if it has legs (like Eva's).
“If liberals in the Senate would rather play political games and force a government shutdown, instead of accepting a modest down payment on fiscal discipline and reform, I say, ‘Shut it down!’ ” yelled Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) at a tea party rally at the Capitol.
Denial is a "valid response" of people when confronted with tough times, and this response explains climate change deniers. So said Graeme Pearman, a climate consultant at the Lowy Institute for International Policy in Sydney, during the Greenhouse 2011 conference in Cairns, Queensland, Australia today.
According to Pearman, a large proportion of sceptics are "the type of people" that deny any problems facing them. "It is a normal coping mechanism," he said.
Greg Withers, who works for the Queensland state government, told the conference that there is more than enough scientific evidence to justify government climate action:
"For policy-makers there's a certain amount of data and information that you require before you can make recommendations and take action... [with climate change]... that threshold has been reached and exceeded."
