Bizarre ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker
Scientists describe workers trapped for years in "a hostile environment in total darkness."

ANNALEE NEWITZ - 9/2/2016, 12:45 PM


For the past several years, a group of researchers has been observing a seemingly impossible wood ant colony living in an abandoned nuclear weapons bunker in Templewo, Poland, near the German border. Completely isolated from the outside world, these members of the species Formica polyctena have created an ant society unlike anything we've seen before.

The Soviets built the bunker during the Cold War to store nuclear weapons, sinking it below ground and planting trees on top as camouflage. Eventually a massive colony of wood ants took up residence in the soil over the bunker. There was just one problem: the ants built their nest directly over a vertical ventilation pipe. When the metal covering on the pipe finally rusted away, it left a dangerous, open hole. Every year when the nest expands, thousands of worker ants fall down the pipe and cannot climb back out. The survivors have nevertheless carried on for years underground, building a nest from soil and maintaining it in typical wood ant fashion. Except, of course, that this situation is far from normal.

Polish Academy of Sciences zoologist Wojciech Czechowski and his colleagues discovered the nest after a group of other zoologists found that bats were living in the bunker. Though it was technically not legal to go inside, the bat researchers figured out a way to squeeze into the small, confined space and observe the animals inside. Czechowski's team followed suit when they heard that the place was swarming with ants. What they found, over two seasons of observation, was a group of almost a million worker ants whose lives are so strange that they hesitate to call them a "colony" in the observations they just published in The Journal of Hymenoptera. Because conditions in the bunker are so harsh, constantly cold, and mostly barren, the ants seem to live in a state of near-starvation. They produce no queens, no males, and no offspring. The massive group tending the nest is entirely composed of non-reproductive female workers, supplemented every year by a new rain of unfortunate ants falling down the ventilation shaft.

Like most ant species, wood ants are tidy animals who remove waste from their colony. In the case of the bunker ants, most of this waste is composed of dead bodies. The researchers speculate that mortality in the "colony" is likely much higher than under normal circumstances. "Flat parts of the earthen mound [of the nest] and the floor of the adjacent spaces ... were carpeted with bodies of dead ants," write Czechowski and colleagues. This "ant cemetery" was a few centimeters thick in places, and "one cubic decimeter sample contained [roughly] 8,000 corpses," which led the researchers to suggest that there were likely 2 million dead ants piled around the nest mound. The sheer numbers of dead bodies suggest that this orphaned wood ant nest has been active for many years.

The ant graveyard is also host to a tiny ecosystem...

Solar Sold in Chile at Lowest Ever, Half Price of Coal
August 31, 2016
By Vanessa Dezem

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The Spanish developer Solarpack Corp. Tecnologica won contracts to sell power from a 120-MW solar plant for $29.10 a MWh at an energy auction this month.

That’s the lowest price on record for electricity from sunshine, surpassing a deal in Dubai in May. It’s the cheapest to date for any kind of renewable energy, and was almost half the price of coal power sold in the same event. According to Solarpack General Director Inigo Malo de Molina, it’s one of the lowest rates ever for any kind of electricity, anywhere.

“Solar energy technology has evolved and proved it is competitive,” Molina said in a telephone interview from Santiago. “Prices for electricity generation have changed drastically in the last years. Solar energy in Chile is now the cheapest in the market.”

A key part of the low price is the ever-declining price for solar panels. The average price on the spot market declined this week to 44.7 cents a watt for standard polysilicon panels, a record low.

Ideal Location
The location for this particular power plant is also a factor, in northern Chile’s Atacama desert....

... Stewart, in her sixties, was easily brushed aside. She had been immersed in her research, scrambling around for funding, and she had raised two children (on her own); after her son’s death, she had helped care for his children — which left her little time to do the kind of networking that creates allies. Made unwelcome at Oxford, she accepted a position at Birmingham. But then came the question, what to do with the Oxford Survey, which by this time consisted of 23,000 manila envelopes. “Since my office in Birmingham was a trailer, a sort of hut, and the records were prodigious, it became a real problem.” She offered to leave the files at Oxford, feeling that the survey ought to continue: “We were building a database that would have allowed us to test several hypotheses about cancer. It ought to have been put on an ongoing basis. That’s what you have to do if you’re going to find the cause for cancer.” But Doll had no use for the files — even though he would, several years later, launch his own study of childhood cancer, with great fanfare and £6 million funding (some from the nuclear industry), announced in 1992 by the U.K. Co-ordinating Committee on Cancer Re-search, as a “new” and “unique nationwide investigation into the causes of cancer in children,” “the largest and most wide-ranging study” of its kind “to be carried out anywhere in the world.”

“It’s as though we’d never existed,” Stewart said, “though it was hard to see the difference between his study and ours. . . . It’s hard to describe, like a current I was swimming against. When the Medical Research Council put together a committee on epidemiology, Doll was made chairman, which gave him enormous influence. [He directed the MRC’s Statistical Research Unit from 1961 to1969.] After that, every department in the country was called in to consult — except us. We never got invited to official meetings, never got asked to give our point of view.” She was thus excluded from the processes, decisions, reviews, commentaries that shaped medical research in the United Kingdom, all the while she was developing an international reputation as an authority on radiation risk and receiving invitations to speak and consult from researchers throughout the world.

Omissions are difficult to document, but here’s one that leaps out. Doll, reminiscing (in “conversation” with Sarah Darby in 2003) about the early days of epidemiology, describes how he and several young men (all men) gathered around “those few senior people such as Professor Ryle at Oxford who were interested in developing the subject.” He makes no mention of Stewart, though she was one of those young scientists: in fact, she is the one Ryle chose, when he was made Regius Professor at Oxford in 1945, to help launch his program in Social Medicine — which set her on the path to epidemiology. Doll simply writes her out of the story.

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The Global Energy Storage Action Is Heading East

by Jason Deign
September 09, 2016

Forget Germany or America. India and China are set to lead growth in worldwide energy storage between now and 2024, a new study says.

The Global Energy Storage Forecast, 2016-24, published by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), predicts the Asia Pacific region will host a majority of the 45 gigawatts and 81.3 gigawatt-hours of non pumped-hydro storage due to be installed worldwide by 2024.

By then, the Asia-Pacific region will account for 53 percent of the world’s total capacity in megawatts. Three Asian countries -- Japan, India and China -- will be among the world’s top five markets for energy storage.

The top five markets, which also includes the United States and the whole of Europe apart from Germany, Italy and the U.K., will make up 71 percent of all storage installed.

Japan, which currently leads the world in terms of gigawatt-hours of storage...

NEC unveils new battery system to compete with Tesla, Schneider Electric
By Robert Walton | September 8, 2016

- NEC Energy Solutions this week announced it is seeking partners to install a new lithium-ion Distributed Energy Storage System (DESS).

- The systems are scalable from 85kWh to 510kWh of capacuty and offers from 30kW up to 650kW of power capability.

... the company strives to create a battery system "so simple that your average three-phase electrician would have no trouble installing it.” It is a segment becoming increasingly crowded in the energy storage space, with competing offerings from Gexpro, Tesla and Schneider Electric.

The NEC Corp. subsidiary describes its storage system as a standardized, UL safety-certified, AC-ready system that includes a power conversion system and is "compliant with all relevant regulatory and environmental requirements." And the company said the system's controls software package will offering different operating mode allowing them to switch from cost savings by demand charge management to revenue earning by providing system services....

Virginia homebuilder pursues a center for ‘zero-energy’ makeovers

WRITTEN BY
Jim Pierobon
September 1, 2016


Charley Juris, recently retired as a custom home builder, thought his career was behind him when took a phone call from a neighbor who thought her furnace was on fire. Fortunately, it wasn’t – but he enjoyed helping her find the most energy- and cost-efficient solution to replace it.

That experience launched him toward what is now a one-stop shop in Alexandria, Virginia designed to help owners of existing homes who want to cut their energy bills way back – to near-zero where possible – without sacrificing comfort.

Juris’ success in a state with relatively low electricity rates and virtually no government or utility incentives for conserving energy or renewable energy systems signals how a market for integrated and holistic energy solutions may be underserved in Virginia and perhaps elsewhere. Juris calls his answer to this market need the Energy House Solutions Center.

After fielding, and turning down, requests from potential clients for one-off installations of more efficient energy systems, “that’s where my idea of a solutions center hit me,” said Juris, who recently turned 62. Rather than take on one-off jobs, he embarked on recasting customers’ entire energy systems and supporting materials such as the latest insulation.

“The only way to make it work is to be part of the overall design and construction process. We help people design energy efficiency into the remodels and work with contractors we’ve vetted who have proven to us they’ll do it right and for a fair price.”...

Wells Fargo Fires 5,300 For Engaging In Massive Fraud, Creating Over 2 Million Fake Accounts

by Tyler Durden
Sep 9, 2016 5:11 AM

For years we have wondered why Wells Fargo, America's largest mortgage lender, is also Warren Buffett's favorite bank. Now we know why.

On Thursday, Wells Fargo was fined $185 million, (including a $100 million penalty from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the largest penalty the agency has ever issued) for engaging in pervasive fraud over the years which included opening credit cards secretly without a customer’s consent, creating fake email accounts to sign up customers for online banking services, and forcing customers to accumulate late fees on accounts they never even knew they had. Regulators said such illegal sales practices had been going on since at least 2011.

In all, Wells opened 1.5 million bank accounts and "applied" for 565,000 credit cards that were not authorized by their customers.

Wells Fargo told to CNN that it had fired 5,300 employees related to the shady behavior over the last few years. The firings represent about 1% of its workforce and took place over several years. The fired workers went to far as to create phony PIN numbers and fake email addresses to enroll customers in online banking services, the CFPB said.

How Wells perpetrated fraud is that its employees moved funds from customers' existing accounts into newly-created accounts without their knowledge or consent, regulators say. The CFPB described this ...

CHINA STILL NEEDS ‘FURTHER WORK’ TO IMPROVE NUCLEAR SAFETY, IAEA SAYS
Thursday, 08 September 2016

SHANGHAI: China has boosted safety regulation at its growing fleet of nuclear reactors but needs "further work" in areas such as waste management and handling ageing plants, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said on Thursday.

With 32 reactors in commercial operation and 24 under construction, China wants to build its manufacturing capability, not only to cut dependence on polluting fossil fuels, but also to dominate the lucrative nuclear reactor market.

...

But China's nuclear safety authorities still need to pour in the effort and resources for effective regulation of nuclear and radiation safety, said Ramzi Jammal, leader of a team of IAEA experts who spent 10 days assessing its nuclear safety rules.

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Despite China's strong efforts to increase its regulatory capacity in the past five years, he said, its regulation of ageing reactors could present the highest risk over the long term, and it must boost its nuclear waste management capacity...

Sellafield exposed: the nonsense of nuclear fuel reprocessing

Ian Fairlie 6th September 2016 Last night’s BBC Panorama programme did a good job at lifting the lid on Britain’s ongoing nuclear disaster that is Sellafield, writes Ian Fairlie. But it failed to expose the full scandal of the UK’s ‘reprocessing’ of spent fuel into 50 tonnes of plutonium, enough to build 20,000 nuclear bombs – while leaving £100s of billions of maintenance and cleanup costs to future generations.

Many readers will have seen the interesting Panorama programme on the poor safety record at Sellafield broadcast on BBC1 last night.

The BBC press release stated this was a “special investigation into the shocking state of Britain’s most hazardous nuclear plant” – and it certainly was.

The most important of several whistleblower revelations was that the previous US managers had been shocked at the state of the plant when they took over its running in 2008.

...

This article tries to give more background information, and importantly, more analysis and explanation. The full story would require several books, and provide exceedingly painful reading...

http://www.theecologist.org/reviews/2988095/sellafield_exposed_the_nonsense_of_nuclear_fuel_reprocessing.html

The Planet Is Going Through A ‘Catastrophic’ Wilderness Loss, Study Says
Just over 20 percent of the world can still be considered wilderness.

A tenth of the planet’s wilderness was eradicated in the last two decades and conservation efforts are failing to keep pace with the rate of wilderness loss, according to a new study.

The loss recorded since 1990 is equivalent to an area twice the size of Alaska and half the size of the Amazon, according to the study published Thursday in Current Biology. Most of the depletion is happening in South America, which experienced a nearly 30 percent loss, and Africa, which lost 14 percent of untouched ecosystems.

“Even though 10 percent is quite a small number in some ways, it really means that if we keep this trajectory going we will lose all wilderness in the next 50 years,” said James Watson, lead author and director of science and research initiative at the Wildlife Conservation Society, in an interview with ThinkProgress.

”Without any policies to protect these areas, they are falling victim to widespread development,” he said. “We probably have one to two decades to turn this around.”

Wilderness is defined as largely intact landscapes that are mostly free of human disturbance. These areas do not exclude people; instead, they are free of large-scale land conversion...
https://thinkprogress.org/most-wilderness-is-gone-thanks-to-humans-ad828409f4b6#.3uruqiuad

The Truth Behind The Kochs’ New Fossil Fuel PR Campaign
Behind the latest Koch-funded effort to hide the impacts of fossil fuels

By Jeremy Deaton

Is carbon dioxide racist? Can pollution discriminate? It seems an odd notion since after all — don’t we all breathe the same air?
Members of Black Lives Matter UK made headlines this week by chaining themselves together on the runway of the London City Airport to protest climate change. “Black people are the first to die, not the first to fly, in this racist climate crisis,” they said on Twitter.

Globally, the wealthiest people have the biggest carbon footprints, but it’s the poorest who are most vulnerable to climate change. They often live in the most dangerous places and lack the resources to adapt to rising temperatures and extreme weather. It’s a worldview that more and more people are coming to embrace.

But not if Koch Industries has anything to do with it. They have, unsurprisingly, a contrary argument that fossil fuels are friends of the disadvantaged. The company is funding a reported $10 million-a-year campaign that posits oil, gas, and coal fuels are needed to lift poor people of all colors out of poverty.

The campaign is called Fueling U.S. Forward, and it’s the latest effort to give oil and gas a cultural makeover. At the helm stands Charles Drevna, longtime oil lobbyist and former president of the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers....
https://thinkprogress.org/kochs-pr-campaign-fossil-fuels-good-e4a18803b476#.qs8l2ly0l

Can Koch Brothers Lock In Fatal Climate Delay For $889 Million In 2016 Election?

The multi-billionaire Koch brothers are planning to spend a staggering $889 million in the 2016 election cycle, more…
https://thinkprogress.org/can-koch-brothers-lock-in-fatal-climate-delay-for-889-million-in-2016-election-fb3fb83ea1d0#.7hlmbaagg