Blue Planet News

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened today on a remote island in the Arctic Circle, receiving inaugural shipments of 100 million seeds that originated in over 100 countries. With the deposits ranging from unique varieties of major African and Asian food staples such as maize, rice, wheat, cowpea, and sorghum to European and South American varieties of eggplant, lettuce, barley, and potato, the first deposits into the seed vault represent the most comprehensive and diverse collection of food crop seeds being held anywhere in the world.

Built near the village of Longyearbyen on the island of Spitsbergen, the vault at its inception contains 268,000 distinct samples of seeds

PG&E has “launched” a billboard which is in fact a power plant. It’s solar powered and furnishes about 3.4kW/day, the average consumption of a normal 4 persons family. Nice initiative! They also sustain a project in the Mojave desert, building the biggest solar power plant in the world at the moment. Click here to continue…

A new nuclear plant is about to be built in Bulgaria. The environmentalists say the place is not safe for building such a plant, because of the risk of earthquake (there was one in 1977 that devastated especially the south part of Romania and a lot of Bulgaria). Still, the local scientists say it’s safe and they go on with its construction.

Bulgaria’s geophysical institute, found the 30km zone around the Belene site had never been subjected to any earthquakes equal to or exceeding magnitude four on the Medvedev-Sponheuer-Karnik scale. Magnitude four caused moderate ground shaking and no damage to buildings. “If there is an earthquake, flooding by the Danube, or even if a plane goes down on the site, the construction (of the plant at Belene) is designed to sustain this with no consequences,” said the chairperson of the non-governmental Bulgarian Atomic Forum, Bogomil Manchev.

This power plant would cover a part of Bulgaria’s economical crisis and debts. I don’t know what to say, whether it’s safe or not. I only know that the earthquake from ‘77 did a lot of harm to many people in Romania. And that’s a fact.

Greenland appears to be floating upwards

IBM has an ongoing program of recycling the silicon resulted from failed chips. Until now, the normal disposal procedure was to erase them with some acid and discard them. Now, they’re being cleaned using water and an abrasive material. 8 inches of silicon can be cleaned in one minute. The resulted “cleaned” wafers are used for testing purposes, aka “monitors”, and are not to be included in consumer commercial applications. Click here to continue…

Photos of the dirtiest cities of the world. Example of how people do not protect the surrounding nature

Chernobyl, Ukraine Chernobyl is famous for its long list of pollutants: uranium, plutonium, radioactive iodine, cesium-137, strontium and other heavy or radioactive metals. The amount of radiation leaked was 100 times the levels released in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Chernobyl’s 135,000 citizens have been evacuated, and there is a 19-mile exclusion zone where no one lives. It is hard to get dirtier that that. Click here to continue…