China's smog problem!!!

With the winter months coming in China, the smog levels are skyrocketing. The amount of pollution this year is the worst in recorded history for China. Every winter the smog tends to increase quite a bit because of the country’s dependence on coal. But since winter has started, the amount of pollution in the air has jumped to 40 times the international safety standard. The smog is so bad you cannot see half a football field away from you, a housewife in china said she looked out her window and thought it was snowing but soon realized it was layers of built up smog, also saying that she has not seen the sun for a long time. This causes road closers; school closures and they are also advising the elderly and young with respiratory problems to stay inside as much as possible. China’s dependency sits at about 70% energy from coal; but the Cabinet of China has said they plan to reduce it to 65% by 2017. I guess that is better then nothing.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/21/super-smog-beijing-china_n_4134226.html?utm_hp_ref=green

UK’s first new nuclear power plant for a generation

The deal under which Britain will start building its first new nuclear power station for almost two decades is a devastating indictment of the muddled approach to energy policy under successive governments.
As other Western democracies, including France, Germany and the United States, are retreating from nuclear investment in the aftermath of the still unresolved 2011 Fukushima crisis in Japan, the UK heads in the opposite direction.
It is doing so bizarrely with the help of two state-owned French companies, EDF and nuclear designer Areva, investors from the People’s Republic of China.
It has only managed to push ahead by offering the rag-tag bunch of investors a guaranteed fee for the eventual electricity that is twice the current price.
Lib Dem Energy Secretary Ed Davey glibly declares the deal will have no effect on consumer or industry bills until the plant is finished in ten years time but he cannot possibly know that.

Furthermore, there can be no guarantee that EDF and its partners can deliver an operating nuclear power plant, with the necessary post-Fukushima safety requirements, in the ten-year timeframe.
Two similar new nuclear plants – in Finland and France – have been subject to long delays. The real tragedy is that the new nuclear energy will not start to come on stream for at least a decade.
It will do nothing to prevent the possibility that the lights will go out in two to three years.
Perhaps worst of all, the UK is effectively ceding control of a vital aspect of the nation’s economic and technological security to overseas owners. It is possible that the current or a future government in France will decide it is not the job of a state-owned enterprise to focus most of its new investment abroad.
This is precisely what happened last year when two big German power firms, E.on and RWE, reneged on their promise to invest in new nuclear at Anglesey. Instead, of the UK having control over its own electricity future the decision was taken for it in Berlin.
Another serious risk is that sophisticated technology for our nuclear plants, made by Rolls-Royce and other UK high-tech engineers, could be copied by Chinese firms, which George Osborne says could become the majority shareholders in new plants.

It will be terrifying to think of Britain’s electricity being held hostage to the whims of secretive and corrupt policymakers in Beijing, who take commercial revenge on anyone who dare question human rights outrages.
As some members of the Coalition government have told me, the biggest blunder was made by Gordon Brown when in 2006 British Nuclear Fuels sold off Westinghouse Electric Company, one of the two companies in the world with sophisticated nuclear technology, to Toshiba of Japan.
Now we are relying on Japanese investors – including Toshiba - to pick up the pieces of the Anglesey project abandoned by Germany’s finest.

Britain, the first country in the world to inaugurate a nuclear power plant at Calder Hall in Cumbria 57 years ago, finds itself at the wrong end of a foreign-owned supply chain over which we have little or no control.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f7dd71b2-3a82-11e3-9243-00144feab7de.html#axzz2iQIIU9kF

Another Dry Winter Could Be Bad For California

On Monday October 14, 2013, water managers urged Californians to step up their water conservation efforts. This is a warning that many parts of the state could face water shortages if this winter is dry. Although the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has not declared a statewide drought yet, this is a very real possibility if it stays as dry as it has been. Two dry years in a row have caused water levels in the state's biggest reservoirs to be below normal. Lake Shasta is at 66% of the average for this time of the year and Lake Oroville is at 73%. The fact that the Colorado River basin has had more than a decade of severe drought does not help. The Colorado River basin is a source of about a quarter of urban Southern California's supplies. The last two years on the Colorado have been some of the driest on record in about a century.

Being from California, this is very scary to hear about because I know the kinds of conservation efforts that have already been taking place. For the last few years, we have been urged to really take water conservation seriously. There have been restrictions in place for when lawns can be watered and many people have installed low flow fixtures in their houses. Being from Northern California, I know that we worry every winter when Tahoe gets less and less snow because we rely on the snow melt from Tahoe as a water source as well. This is a scary issue and not one that you usually hear about somewhere like Washington where water is always present. The MWD says that they have sufficient supplies in regional storage to avoid mandatory cutbacks for another year, but after that we're kind of screwed.  Hopefully this winter is not dry in California and a drought will not have to be declared.

You can read more about the issue and the water conservation efforts that are already being taken by those who live in California here:
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-water-conserve-20131014,0,6674448.story