TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) — The Obama administration is proposing an updated blueprint for Great Lakes environmental restoration that puts greater emphasis on climate change and using science to select projects and measure their effectiveness.

Congress has appropriated roughly $1.6 billion for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, with the first installment in 2010. The administration is proposing to extend the program another five years.

The initiative is designed to accelerate progress toward dealing with the freshwater seas’ most pressing environmental threats, including toxic pollution, invasive species, loss of wildlife habitat and runoff that causes toxic and nuisance algae blooms.

 

June 2, 2014

Japan will on Monday start constructing an underground ice wall at  the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, freezing the soil under broken reactors to slow the build-up of radioactive water, officials said.

 

The wall is intended to block groundwater from nearby hillsides that  has been flowing under the plant and mixing with polluted water already  there.

 

The Nuclear Regulation Authority, the national watchdog, last week gave  the go-ahead to beginning the construction of the ice wall at Fukushima  Daiichi, owned and operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO).

 

June 2, 2014

The New York Times has reported that the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States plans to release a "draft proposal on Monday to cut carbon pollution from the nation's power plants".

 

According to an article by Coral Davenport, the goal will be to reduce emissions from these plants to 30 percent below 2005 levels by 2030.

 

 

A new coating that easily separates oil from water could make oil cleanup faster. Image: American Chemical Society

In the wake of recent offshore oil spills, and with the growing popularity of “fracking”—in which water is used to release oil and gas from shale—there’s a need for easy, quick ways to separate oil and water. Now, scientists have developed coatings that can do just that. Their report on the materials, which also could stop surfaces from getting foggy and dirty, appears in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

 

J.P.S. Badyal and colleagues point out that oil-spill cleanup crews often use absorbents, like clays, straw and wool to sop up oil, but these materials aren’t very efficient because they also sop up a lot of water. Extra steps and equipment also are needed to remove the oil from the absorbent, which is difficult to do on a ship. Recently, researchers have turned their attention to new smart materials called “oleophobic-hydrophilic” coatings that instead let the water through and repel the oil. However, the films that have been reported so far take several minutes to do the separation, are complicated to make or aren’t very good at repelling oil. So, Badyal’s team set out to improve these materials.