Brazil’s National Energy Policy Council (CNPE) this month authorized financial and environmental studies in connection with a proposed $2.5 billion project to build the country’s third nuclear power station—a 1,350-megawatt plant called Angra III. Though the move resurrects the controversial and long-stalled project, a final decision on a third reactor likely will fall to Brazil’s next president. The CNPE comprises seven government ministers as well as a representative of the power companies in Brazil’s states, a private-energy-sector representative and one civil society representative. In its Dec. 7 decision, the CNPE asked Eletronuclear, the state company that runs Brazil’s two existing nuclear plants (600-megawatt Angra I and 1,250-megawatt Angra II), to prepare the financial and environmental studies. It did...
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Belize’s National Environmental Appraisal Committee (Neac) has approved a Canadian-owned power company’s plan to build a small dam on the Macal river in western Belize. Environmentalists, alleging irregularities in the way Neac evaluated the company’s environmental-impact report, have asked the Natural Resources Minister to reconsider the board’s decision, reached in November in an 11-to-1 vote. Dam opponents say the public hearing provided for in laws governing the environmental-impact assessments was not held and that many comments sent in opposition to the dam project were never presented to Neac. They also complain that Neac approved the impact report on condition that the company complete mitigation plans—which, they argue, should have been finished and evaluated before the vote. But opponents’ main...
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Mexico has the second-worst rate of deforestation in the world, according to a new satellite study that suggests the country is losing its forests and jungles at twice the speed previously thought. The study, released by Mexico’s Environment and Natural Resources Secretariat (Semarnat), suggests that in the period 1993 to 2000, Mexico lost 19.5 million acres (7.9 million hectares) of forest—an area the size of Ireland. That gives an annual rate of loss of 2.79 million acres (1.13 million hectares) instead of the 1.5 million acres (600,000 hectares) scientists had assumed. At the current rate, Mexico will have run out of forests in 127 years and jungles in 58 years. Only Brazil is losing its forests and jungles faster. Mexico’s Environment and Natural...
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Brazil’s Peixoto de Castro group, owner of the Manguinhos refinery, has been fined $2 million in connection with an underwater-pipeline rupture that caused 20,700 gallons (100,000 liters) of oil to spew into Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay—the estuary’s second largest spill. On Nov. 26, Rio de Janeiro state’s environmental secretariat and the city of Niteroi respectively fined Peixoto de Castro $1.2 million (R$ 3 million) and $800,000 (R$ 2 million) for damaging the bay’s fauna, flora and shoreline. Rio de Janeiro’s fine was levied under a state environmental crimes law, while Niteroi’s fine was rooted in a city ordinance, according to Selma Barreto, a state government press official. The spill stemmed from two accidents. In the first, on Nov. 22, a tanker pumping...
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Police in the states of Michoacán and Mexico have closed down a half dozen clandestine sawmills in a series of raids dubbed Operation Monarch. More than 500 officers arrested three people caught felling trees and seized firearms, chain saws, hydraulic equipment, a tractor and timber. Named for the butterfly that makes its winter home in the woods of central Mexico, the October operation was initiated by Profepa, the enforcement arm of the Environment and Natural Resources Secretariat (Semarnat). It marks the first time Profepa and the Federal Preventive Police have launched a joint operation in the area, near the municipalities of Zitácuaro in Michoacán state and Villa Allende in Mexico state. Ecologists had warned that illegal logging in these areas would soon cause devastation unless...
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