Archive by date | April 2011

Heater glitch grounds shuttle for three days or more

Heater glitch grounds shuttle for three days or more

Posted on behalf of Alexandra Witze KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida — The second-to-last space shuttle flight will have to wait a bit longer. Mission managers scrubbed the scheduled 29 April launch of Endeavour, its 25th and last planned journey into space. After the shuttle’s massive fuel tanks were filled and engineers were running through last-minute checks, NASA discovered a problem with a heater in an auxiliary power unit, or APU, which keeps the hydrazine fuel flowing through the orbiter. Endeavour has three APUs, with two heaters on each fuel line. “Had we not caught this pre-launch it would not have  … Read more

Chinese emissions: these, too, shall peak

Chinese emissions: these, too, shall peak

The largest source of uncertainty in global climate models isn’t clouds or ocean circulation but humans. And one of the largest sources of human uncertainty at present is China, whose spectacular rise has left the world awestruck and fearful of greenhouse gas emissions yet to come. Now a group of researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California suggests that there are limits to Chinese growth.  Read more

NIH to ask tough questions about US science workforce

NIH to ask tough questions about US science workforce

How many scientists does the country need, and are we doing a good job training them? Those are the big questions that the US National Institutes of Health is asking a panel of external advisers to tackle. The group, named on 27 April, will report its recommendations to NIH director Francis Collins’ advisory committee, possibly as early as next summer.  Read more

Fukushima update: TEPCO delays plans to submerge reactor vessels

The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) today postponed plans to add extra cooling to reactor number 1 – thought to be the most damaged reactor – by flooding the containment vessel that surrounds the reactor vessel with almost 8,000 tonnes of water.  Read more

Storms in US cause loss of external power at three nuclear reactors.

All three reactors at the Browns Ferry nuclear power plant in Alabama are in automatic shutdown after external power was cut to the plant. The powerful storms and tornadoes that swept the region yesterday, killing more than 100 people, downed much of the local transmission network, causing large blackouts. The Tennessee Valley Authority, which operates the plant, said in a statement today that: “Wednesday will go down in history as one of the worst outbreaks of tornadoes in a single day in American history.”

BP’s beach clean-up ‘contaminated clean sand’

BP’s beach clean-up ‘contaminated clean sand’

BP’s efforts to clean beaches soiled by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in some cases spread the oil to previously clean sand. Its method of finding pockets of buried oil and excavating and sieving sand were unproven and of questionable effectiveness, researchers who observed the efforts say in a new paper.  Read more