• Plan for Massachusetts LNG site faces growing opposition

    The Weaver’s Cove energy project will see up to seventy liquefied natural gas (LNG) tankers a year travel up Narragansett Bay to berth in Mt. Hope Bay; from there, a sub-sea pipe would carry the liquefied gas more than four miles up the Taunton River to a storage facility at a former oil terminal; Massachusetts and Rhode Island politicians work to block the Fall River storage facility, saying a terrorist attack or accident would place thousands of people in peril in the densely populated city and harm fish habitat and tourism

  • Engineers develop more earthquake-resistant building designs

    Virginia Tech researchers are developing a next generation of design criteria for buildings located in geographic regions where earthquakes are known to occur, either rarely or frequently; in the future, structural engineers will base their designs on the concepts of Performance Based Earthquake Engineering (PBEE), where the objective is to control damage and provide life-safety for any size of earthquake that might occur

  • New technology speeds cleanup of nuclear contaminated sites

    Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on cleanup of some major sites contaminated by radioactivity, primarily from the historic production of nuclear weapons during and after the Second World War; Oregon State University researchers have invented a new type of radiation detection and measurement device that will be particularly useful for cleanup of sites with radioactive contamination, making the process faster, more accurate and less expensive

  • Al Qaeda aiming at soft targets in U.S.

    DHS has ramped up its efforts to protect soft targets in the United States from terrorist attack this year; the department has issued bulletins to state and local law enforcement warning of the possibility terrorists could target religious gatherings, sports matches, and parades; the al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen puts out an online magazine in English that encourages U.S. residents to plan attacks. Suggestions include driving a truck into a crowded place or shooting into a restaurant

  • China says it has mastered the process of reprocessing nuclear fuel

    One way to extend to energy productivity of nuclear fuel is to reprocess it after it has been used; reprocessing nuclear fuel costs significantly more than using it once and storing it as waste; it is also controversial because extracted plutonium can be used in nuclear weapons; China has just announced that it has mastered the technology for reprocessing fuel from nuclear power plants, potentially boosting the supplies of carbon-free electricity to keep the country’s economy booming

  • Arizona County to fingerprint employees with access to sensitive facilities

    Pima County, Arizona, is moving to fingerprint more employees who work with kids and populations who need special assistance, who deal with sensitive data, or who have access to critical infrastructure facilities such as wastewater treatment plants; “We don’t want guys with criminal backgrounds knowing how our radio system is constructed. The same with wastewater, which could be compromised,” John Moffatt, the county’s director of Strategic Technology Planning, said

  • Wastewater treatment lowers pathogen levels

    New analysis shows that pathogens levels in municipal water have dropped since the implementation of federal regulations on treating sewage in 1993; these treatment guidelines have proven to be extremely effective with 94 percent to 99 percent of all pathogens in biosolids eliminated after wastewater treatment

  • Plastic homes for quick rebuilding after disaster

    Canadian company thinks it has an answer for Haitian relief; the company uses a rubber seal to attach the plastic structure to the concrete slab used as the foundation; the result is the structure “floats” atop the foundation in such a way it that can compensate for movements in the earth directly below, while the production process allows it to hold up against winds in excess of 240 kilometers per hour

  • Former Guyana politician sentenced in JFK terror plot

    Abdul Kadir, a former member of Guyana’s parliament, was sentenced to life in prison for participating in a plot to blow up the jet fuel supply tank system at JFK airport; the two other plotters are also of Guyanese origin: one, a former baggage handler at JFK, will be sentenced in late January; the other, Adnam Shukrijumah, has now been promoted to chief of al Qaeda’s global operations

  • N.Y.-N.J. PATH tunnels bomb-proofed

    If a small explosive — with enough power to blast a 50-foot hole in a tunnel — were detonated, more than a million gallons of Hudson River water per minute would surge into the PATH tubes; the Port Authority is hardening the tubes against terrorist attacks — placing water-absorbing pads around the tunnels, ringing the inside of the tunnels with blast-resistant steel, and building huge floodgates to seal off a tunnel in case water comes gushing in after a blast

  • Half of India's critical infrastructure providers cyber attack victims

    Symantec’s 2010 Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) Survey findings reveal that nearly 50 percent of India’s critical infrastructure providers are victims of cyber attacks; the attacks are said to have become more frequent and increasingly effective

  • China, U.K. pursue major rail projects; U.S. does not

    Unlike almost every other developed nation, the United States has no national transportation strategy; the nation fails to raise taxes that are supposed to pay for roads and rails. Gasoline taxes, for example, cover only about 50 percent of road projects, much lower than in the past, according to recent Federal Highway Administration figures; once the U.S. recognizes that it needs diversified and integrated air, rail and road transportation, it could well end up importing the technologies, products and expertise it has failed to develop

  • The best place for a wind turbine: 30,000 feet above ground

    At altitude of 2,000 feet (610 meters), wind velocity is two to three times greater than at ground level; since power production goes up with the cube of that wind velocity, this means that at 2,000 feet above ground, wind produces 8 to 27 times the power produced by wind at ground level; if we send turbines farther aloft, into the 150 mph (240 kph) jet stream at 30,000 feet (9,150 meters), than power production grows from 500 watts per meter for ground-based wind turbines to about 20,000, 40,000 watts per square meter; this is very high energy density — and NASA is examining the project’s feasibility

  • Giving crowds a lift with spiral escalator

    A monorail-inspired design could help create the world’s first continuous spiral escalator; the spiral escalator could transport larger numbers of people than a lift in a vertical space too narrow for a traditional escalator; this could reduce the floor space needed in buildings for personal transporters and cut the cost of putting escalators into underground railway stations