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Norway Builds Global Seed Bank
Norway will develop a safety net for key global food
supplies by collecting agricultural seeds for a depot
on its remote Svalbard Islands in the Arctic, the
government announced.
The Arctic seed bank, which will open next year, is intended
to protect the genetic materials of critical world food crops
from such threats as plant epidemics, climate change, war
and natural disasters, a foreign ministry news release said.
"The depot will be unique in the world," the ministry
said in a statement. "The depot will have examples of
seeds that are already stored in gene banks in other parts
of the world, and will serve as an extra safety net for the
world's food supplies."
Norway will operate the seed depot as if it were a bank vault.
Much like a bank account, countries can put seeds in and take
them out whenever they want to.
The Svalbard Archipelago, 500 kilometres north of the mainland,
was selected because of its remote location, cold climate
and permafrost.
Swedish Biogas train marketed
in India
Swedish makers of the world's first biogas train
hope to market it in India, where vast stretches
of rail tracks use diesel engines in the absence
of electricity.
Biogas train "Amanda" has been jointly developed
by Tekniska Verk, a Swedish biogas company, and Swedish railways
subsidiary EuroMaint.
The prototype has been built by replacing the diesel motors
in a 25-year-old engine with modern gas-driven motors, the
same used in some of the biogas-driven buses. A biogas train
can driven for 600 km, running at a maximum speed of 135 km
per hour. Sweden’s first biogas train will go into service
later this summer.
Biogas is renewable, and it reduces carbon dioxide emissions
by 98 percent as well as nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons
by two thirds compared to diesel.
Bjorn Sunden, executive vice president, EuroMaint, says that
India is exploring eco-friendly energy sources, with buses
and taxis running on compressed natural gas in capital New
Delhi.
Said Sunden: "We are on the threshold of a great advance
in industrial revolution. I feel just like (automobile innovator)
Henry Ford must have felt nearly a century ago."
France wins bid for nuclear reactor
France recently defeated a bid from Japan and signed
a deal to site the world’s first nuclear
fusion reactor.
The project will seek to turn seawater into fuel
by mimicking the way the sun produces energy. It
would be cleaner than current nuclear reactors
and would not rely on enriched uranium fuel or
produce plutonium.
Yet critics argue it could take at least 50 years
before a commercially viable reactor is built,
if at all. The project began in 1958, but challenges
in financing have caused prolonged delays. One
of the biggest challenges facing scientists is
to build a reactor that can sustain temperatures
of about 100 million Celsius for long enough to
generate power. “The engineering is very
difficult,” Ian Fells of Britian’s
Royal Academy of Engineering told The New York
Times. “If we can really make this work there
will be enough electricity to last the world for
the next 1,000 to 2,000 years.”
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