Tokyo (AFP) Dec 9, 2016 -
Japan has restarted one of its few operating nuclear reactors after a two-month safety checkup, despite still-heated debate over atomic power following the Fukushima disaster.
The unit was shut down in October for inspections and maintenance under stricter rules brought in after a quake-sparked tsunami swamped the Fukushima plant in 2011, sending some reactors into meltdown and causing the w ...
moreJapan switches on nuclear reactor after safety shutdown
Tokyo (AFP) Dec 9, 2016 -
Japan has restarted one of its few operating nuclear reactors after a two-month safety checkup, despite still-heated debate over atomic power following the Fukushima disaster.
The unit was shut down in October for inspections and maintenance under stricter rules brought in after a quake-sparked tsunami swamped the Fukushima plant in 2011, sending some reactors into meltdown and causing the w ...
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 Keeping electric car design on the right road 
Oslo, Norway (SPX) Dec 12, 2016 -
Does it really help to drive an electric car if the electricity you use to charge the batteries come from a coal mine in Germany, or if the batteries were manufactured in China using coal?
Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's Industrial Ecology Programme have looked at all of the environmental costs of electric vehicles to determine the cradle-to-grave enviro ...
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Washington DC (SPX) Dec 12, 2016 -
The storage of photogenerated electric energy and its release on demand are still among the main obstacles in artificial photosynthesis. One of the most promising, recently identified photocatalytic new materials is inexpensive graphitic carbon nitride. Scientists have now explored a modified form that can produce light-generated electrons and store them for catalytic hydrogen production even af ...
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Sofia (AFP) Dec 9, 2016 -
Bulgaria is looking for an investor ready to revive a long-delayed project for a new nuclear power plant on the Danube, the government announced Friday.
The announcement comes after Bulgaria's state-owned National Electricity Company on Thursday paid Russia's nuclear company Atomstroyexport a total of 601 million euros in compensation after cancelling the planned project to build a 2,000-meg ...
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Ottawa (AFP) Dec 9, 2016 -
The United States will stay on its current path toward a low-carbon economy after Donald Trump's inauguration, US Vice-President Joe Biden predicted Friday during a visit to Ottawa.
"Whatever uncertainty exists around the near-term policy choices of the next president, I am absolutely confident the United States will continue making progress to this path to a low-carbon future," Biden told C ...
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Houston TX (SPX) Dec 12, 2016 -
Bringing order to disorder is key to making stronger and greener cement, the paste that binds concrete. Scientists at Rice University have decoded the kinetic properties of cement and developed a way to "program" the microscopic, semicrystalline particles within. The process turns particles from disordered clumps into regimented cubes, spheres and other forms that combine to make the material le ...
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Shanghai (AFP) Dec 9, 2016 -
Apple has struck a partnership with the world's largest wind turbine maker, the American company said, marking the tech giant's largest clean energy project to date.
It bought a 30 percent stake in subsidiaries of China-based Goldwind to run four projects that will produce 285 megawatts of power.
The projects are located in Henan, Shandong, Shanxi and Yunnan provinces, Goldwind said in ...
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Vienna, Austria (SPX) Dec 12, 2016 -
Just like in normal road traffic, crossings are indispensable in optical signal processing. In order to avoid collisions, a clear traffic rule is required. A new method has now been developed at TU Wien to provide such a rule for light signals. For this purpose, the two glass fibers were coupled at their intersection point to an optical resonator, in which the light circulates and behaves as in ...
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Washington (UPI) Dec 9, 2016 -
Europe and China are expected to dominate the consumer electric vehicle market as the footprint grows into double-digit percent, a market report finds.
"Significant advances in battery technology, financial support from governments, regulations and values of millennials will be key factors leading to increases in electric vehicle adoption," Jim Burkhard, a energy research for IHS Markit ...
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Oak Ridge TN (SPX) Dec 12, 2016 -
Neutron scattering studies of a rare earth metal oxide have identified fundamental pieces to the quantum spin liquid puzzle, revealing a better understanding of how and why the magnetic moments within these materials exhibit exotic behaviors such as failing to freeze into an ordered arrangement even near absolute zero temperatures.
In a paper published in Nature Physics, a team of research ...
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