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"What used to happen is we used to get quite frequent high bounces and really low bounces … and in those high bounces, the biodiversity would have taken off, and would have had enough to respond and wait for the next big boom period. Kingsford uses the analogy of a bouncing ball to describe the way the river would oscillate between dry and wet. "There's no doubt that this flood will be fantastic for future generations. The question is how much of a bounce has happened." "We have an obligation to make sure that our future generations have something to springboard off, and at this present moment they are not going to have that."
In 1954, Lewis Strauss, the chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, predicted that nuclear energy would make electricity “too cheap to meter”. The main reason power companies and governments aren’t keener on nuclear power is not that activists are holding them back or that uranium is difficult to find, but that producing it safely is just proving too expensive. The Army’s Mobile Protected Firepower vehicles are in many ways smaller, lighter versions of the service’s M1 Abrams main battle tanks, and are designed to give light infantry and airborne units more muscle in combat.
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You can also view and update tasks from the Task page, which you can launch from a link in your email notification. In June, the Army awarded General Dynamics a $1.14 billion contract to build and field the first 96 Mobile Protected Firepower vehicles. Army units are expected to receive the first vehicles in late fiscal 2025. But for now she believes the large amount of water in storage will offer some reprieve for communities hit by back-to-back disasters. Smith says it's critical governments maintain a long-term perspective when it comes to water resource planning and water security. "If you enlarge a dam, you get a bigger surface area with more shallow water, so you'll increase the evaporation.
"With river regulation those bounces aren't as high because there's less water in the system and less flooding … the times when it's not bouncing, the dry times are more severe, so they're flatlining for longer." "When this event is over, we're going to have much better information available to understand how the river floods, and what levels we're going to expect if there's future flooding." "As far as I'm concerned the current system takes account of climate change exceptionally well, given its dealing with the climate as it is now." "You could actually allocate water based on the water that you've got in the storage, not on future anticipated inflows. But what that does is it means that there's less water allocated to irrigation.
Flood warning
I kept being told, at Sellafield, that science is still trying to rectify the decisions made in undue haste three-quarters of a century ago. Many of the earliest structures here, said Dan Bowman, the head of operations at one of Sellafield’s two waste storage ponds, “weren’t even built with decommissioning in mind”. Sellafield compels this kind of gaze into the abyss of deep time because it is a place where multiple time spans – some fleeting, some cosmic – drift in and out of view. Laid out over six square kilometres, Sellafield is like a small town, with nearly a thousand buildings, its own roads and even a rail siding – all owned by the government, and requiring security clearance to visit.
"The last drought was a big hint that the infrastructure that's involved in water, from a state point of view, or a government point of view, is lacking and I think we've been slow at a policy level to address that problem. "The impact of climate change is, if you like, a veneer on the top of river regulation. While there's no doubt climate change is playing a part in those trends, Kingsford believes river regulation is having a much bigger impact.
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If your administrator has enabled the Upcoming Tasks option, you can also see items in the upcoming workflow, as well as tasks currently available. When you click a link in the Tasks summary panel, the Tasks page opens, where you can further filter the list of tasks. We climbed a staircase in a building constructed over a small part of the pond. On one floor, we stopped to look at a remotely operated vehicle, or ROV – a steamer trunk-sized thing with a yellow carapace, floating in the algal-green water. “So it’ll float down to the bottom of the pond, pick up a nuclear rod that has fallen out of a skip, and put it back into the skip.” Sometimes, though, a human touch is required. Nuclear plants keep so much water on hand – to cool fuel, moderate the reactor’s heat, or generate steam – that a class of specialist divers works only in the ponds and tanks at these plants, inspecting and repairing them.
"I think that it's a fundamental problem in terms of policy, we have to have some buffers here. Most of all, to manage these rivers so that we can provide for human health, but also for the environment. For a long time, traditional owners up and down the basin say they've been excluded from government policies and contemporary water management. River ecologist Richard Kingsford has watched the Murray-Darling Basin through droughts and floods, surveying the system from the land and sky.
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In Sellafield, these nuclear divers will put on radiation-proof wetsuits and tidy up the pond floor, reaching the places where robotic arms cannot go. Not far from the silos, I met John Cassidy, who has helped manage one of Sellafield’s waste storage ponds for more than three decades – so long that a colleague called him “the Oracle”. Cassidy’s pond, which holds 14,000 cubic metres of water, resembles an extra-giant, extra-filthy lido planted in the middle of an industrial park. In the water, the skips full of used fuel rods were sometimes stacked three deep, and when one was placed in or pulled out, rods tended to tumble out on to the floor of the pond. Most of the atoms in our daily lives – the carbon in the wood of a desk, the oxygen in the air, the silicon in window glass – have stable nuclei. But in the atoms of some elements like uranium or plutonium, protons and neutrons are crammed into their nuclei in ways that make them unsteady – make them radioactive.
RELATED The Russian military has a new pop song celebrating its ‘Son of Satan’ nuclear ICBMs Because everyone knows ICBMs are a bop. The vehicles are so similar that Abrams tank crew members can be trained to learn how to operate an MPF vehicle very quickly, said Army Lt. Col. Peter George, product manager for Mobile Protected Firepower. The Army has awarded General Dynamics Land Systems a $1.14 billion contract to produce 96 Mobile Protected Firepower vehicles. "Even though there is a lot of water around, and water shortage is not the problem, we are seeing continued emphasis on being able to improve and continue to adapt to changing water supply." "You could ensure more secure town water supplies by allocating marginally less to irrigation, just marginally less."
The invisibility of radiation and the opacity of governments make for a bad combination. Sellafield hasn’t suffered an accident of equivalent scale since the 1957 fire, but the niggling fear that some radioactivity is leaking out of the facility in some fashion has never entirely vanished. In 1983, a Sellafield pipeline discharged half a tonne of radioactive solvent into the sea. British Nuclear Fuels Limited, the government firm then running Sellafield, was fined £10,000. Around the same time, a documentary crew found higher incidences than expected of leukaemia among children in some surrounding areas.
Skip No 9738 went into the map, one more hard-won addition to Sellafield’s knowledge of itself. Anywhere else, this state of temporariness might induce a mood of lax detachment, like a transit lounge to a frequent flyer. But at Sellafield, with all its caches of radioactivity, the thought of catastrophe is so ever-present that you feel your surroundings with a heightened keenness. At one point, when we were walking through the site, a member of the Sellafield team pointed out three different waste storage facilities within a 500-metre radius.
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