July 12, 2002
Longer summers in Arctic
Norway
Summers are two weeks longer
than 30 years ago, Norwegian researchers say, with plant development now starting
about 14 days earlier.
"According to climate
researchers’ predictions, it will become warmer and more humid [in Norway].
This means that in the future we will be able to cultivate plants that would
not thrive before in Norway. And that we can cultivate traditionally southern
Norwegian plants over greater parts of the country," Leif Sundheim of the
Norwegian Institute for Plant Research told the Aftenposten newspaper.
This year, Norway’s
northern regions experienced record-breaking temperatures, topping all averages
taken since 1866.
In June, the weather station
in Tromsø registered 394.4 hours of sun, just short of record of 397.8
in 1953.
TOP
July
12, 2002
Russia to dump nuclear
waste in Arctic
Russia intends to build
a dumpsite on an Arctic island to store spent nuclear fuel from its decommissioned
Northern Fleet submarines.
The dump may also accept
nuclear waste from other countries. Last summer, Russian president Vladimir
Putin signed a law allowing Russia to import spent nuclear fuel from other countries
for storage and reprocessing.
Building the dump could
take between five and seven years. When finished, at a cost about US$70 million,
it will hold up to 55,500 tons of waste.
The dump is to be located
at the southern tip of Novaya Zemlya, a place used for nuclear bomb tests until
1990.
The dump will store spent
fuel from 190 decommissioned nuclear submarines. To date, nuclear fuel has been
removed from only 97 submarines. Others have been docked for as long as 15 years
because there has been no money to pay for the dismantling and storage of spent
nuclear fuel.
The entire dismantling
job will cost from US$2.5 billion to US$3 billion.
Some European Union nations
have offered to provide funds for dismantling the submarines, but Russia has
refused to take full legal responsibility for any risks involved or give Western
inspectors unlimited access to all dismantling sites.
TOP
July
12, 2002
Wrong polar bears sent
up?
The commissioner of the
Svalbard Islands off Norway’s Arctic coast may have punished the wrong
family of bears when he recently decided to deport a polar bear and her two
young cubs to a deserted island.
The bears were caught last
year breaking in to several cabins around the community of Svea.
Wven though the bears are
gone, the break-ins have continued, and three polar bears were recently spotted
trashing more cabins in Svea.
"The break-in technique
is the same as last year. They force their way in under the windows. I’d
bet a year’s wages that the criminal is the same. So the commissioner deported
the wrong bears last year," a resident told the newspaper, Innenriks Svalbardposten.
Before being released last
year, the deported bears were marked with an X on their bottoms. According to
video footage, the polar bears involved in the recent break-ins have no such
marks.
"Their first visit
cost me NOK 80,000 ($20,000) in materials and repairs," said Egil Daleng,
who has been the victim of polar bear burglaries five times in the past 11 months.
Daleng intends to put up
a barbed wire fence around his cabin, but hopes the nuisance polar bears will
eventually be removed for good.
TOP
July
12, 2002
Siberia’s air highly
polluted
The highest levels of air
pollution in Russia are in the industrial regions of the Urals and Western Siberia,
Yury Tsaturov, first deputy head of the Russian Federal Service for Hydrometeorology
an Environmental Monitoring, told a recent news conference in Moscow.
In more than 30 Russian
cities, air pollution levels exceeded the highest acceptable levels by 400 per
cent. About 20,000 people die from poor environmental conditions each year,
Tsaturov said.
TOP
| 
Nunavut 99
