NOv/11/2011

Environment Ministry gives nod to Lavasa hill city project

After put on hold for a year, Lavasa's controversial township project on the hills near Pune has been given the green signal subject to a list of conditions that activists say are not strong enough.

Ironically, it was last week's criminal complaint filed by the Maharashtra government against the Lavasa's promoters for violation of green norms that finally paved the way for clearance by the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) on Wednesday.

After issuing a show cause and stop-work order against Lavasa in November last, the MoEF found the company guilty of violating the Environment Protection Act, slapped a financial penalty on the promoters and demanded a fresh comprehensive environmental impact assessment and management plan.

June order

In a June order, the MoEF indicated that it was willing to clear Lavasa's first phase, subject to five preconditions. Lavasa promised to meet four of these, including an environmental restoration fund, profit percentage earmarked for the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and a revised development plan. However, the first pre-condition remained unfulfilled: that the State government take “credible action” against the company for violation of environmental law.

With the criminal case filed last week, the MoEF now considers that credible action has been taken. Accordingly, the environment clearance has been granted, subject to certain conditions.

However, the National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM), which has been leading those opposed to the project, is sceptical of the loosely worded conditions listed in the order. “These are very fishy conditions,” said NAPM's Vishambhar Chaudhary. “For example, it says that hill cutting should be avoided ‘as far as possible.' What does that mean?”

The order also says “appropriate measures” should be taken to restore the environment around the project, but does not appear to impose any measurable obligations on Lavasa for mitigation of environmental damage caused by its activities.

“The Expert Committee had made so many recommendations after its visit. For example, it said that the special planning authority status given to Lavasa should be withdrawn…Why was this not included in the clearance?” Mr. Chaudhary said.

As per the order, Lavasa is required to obtain clearances under the Air and Water Act, to minimise the discharge of sewage, effluents and hazardous waste, to regularly monitor the levels of contamination in the air, soil and water, and to conserve energy by 28-35 per cent.

Manmohan to meet Gilani on SAARC sidelines

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will leave on Wednesday for the Maldives on a four-day visit to attend the SAARC summit, during which four agreements are expected to be signed.

On the sidelines, he will also have several bilateral meetings, including an interaction with his Pakistani counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani, official sources said.

Dr. Singh will be accompanied by External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna, National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon and Foreign Secretary Ranjan Mathai. Senior officials have already reached Male to prepare for the summit and the bilateral meetings.

The summit, to be held for the first time south of the equator on one of the southern-most islands in the Maldives, will focus on connectivity and promoting trade. From there, Dr. Singh will go to the capital Male, on a bilateral visit.

Implementing the provisions of the South Asia Free Trade Agreement (SAFTA) remains central to the summit. In three days of preparatory meetings, negotiators would look at reducing the size of sensitive lists, especially for the Least Developed Country members of SAARC, and peak tariff rates for products covered by these lists.

The summit will finalise four agreements: two on regional standards, one to establish a rapid response mechanism to deal with natural disasters and the other to establish a SAARC seed bank.

“It is timely and appropriate that the theme for the 17th SAARC summit is ‘Building Bridges.' Literally and metaphorically, our region needs to improve the infrastructure of connectivity and trade. It also needs better people-to-people contact to entrench the habit of regional cooperation,” said Foreign Secretary Ranjan Mathai.

Describing SAARC as a key element in India's approach to the region, Mr. Mathai said the grouping was a vital platform for the quest for economic integration, and improving ties with the other members. So, India was committed to supporting SAARC projects even in an “asymmetrical and non-reciprocal manner.”

IAEA report a historic mistake: Iran

Divisions among the six global powers come out to the fore

Iran has slammed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for committing a “historic mistake” by releasing a controversial report, which has already sown divisions among the six global powers that are dealing with Tehran's nuclear programme.

Iran's representative to the IAEA, Ali Asgar Soltaniyeh, described the report released on Tuesday as “skewed, unprofessional and political”.

He stressed that the findings of IAEA Director-General Yukiya Amano had impaired the agency's credibility.

Mr. Soltaniyeh accused Mr. Amano of unprofessional conduct and behaving in a politically motivated manner, citing the Director-General's refusal to hold as requested, negotiations with Iran to clear the air.

Mr. Amano's report that was distributed among the 35 members of the IAEA Board on Tuesday evening contains a 15-page annexure, which focuses on Iran's alleged studies that appears to suggest that Tehran has been engaged in developing atomic weapons.

The report specifically refers to satellite pictures taken at Iran's Parchin military facility, of a steel container that can be used for testing explosives, triggering pressure waves that can detonate fissile material. It has also claimed that Tehran is building computer models of a missile cone that can carry a nuclear payload.

Besides, Iran has apparently benefited from foreign expertise in carrying out experiments with nuclear material.

On his part, Mr. Soltaniyeh has rubbished these claims. “Almost all of the items which have been reflected in the annex are obsolete and repetitive, and we have discussed them before,” he said while addressing the media in Vienna.

The Iranian envoy pointed out that Tehran had earlier released a 117-pages document, where “precise responses” had been given to the claims that have been repeated in the IAEA report that was released on Tuesday.

A Reuters report quotes Ali Vaez, an Iran specialist at the Federation of American Scientists think tank, as saying “the most important source in the past of the agency's information consisted of a collection of electronic files stored in the so-called “Laptop of Death”, that had been shown by U.S. intelligence officials to the IAEA in 2005.

But the Iranians point out that, despite their repeated requests, they have not been provided access to this data. Mr. Soltaniyeh pointed out that in an earlier report to the Board of Governors, former IAEA chief, Mohamed ElBaradei revealed that “a certain country” that “has provided the agency with the evidence on the allegations has not allowed the agency to submit the documents in question to Iran,” Iran's English language Press TV reported.

The latest IAEA report on Iran has already divided the six nations — the five permanent members of the Security Council and Germany — which have been dealing with Iran's nuclear file.

France has advocated tighter sanctions, the U.S has expressed readiness for “additional” pressure, including fresh sanctions and a spokesperson for Catherine Ashton, the European Union Chief has said that and the IAEA findings “strongly indicate the existence of a fully-fledged nuclear weapons development programme in Iran”.

But Russia has picked holes both in the timing as well as the content of Mr. Amano's report.

The Russian Foreign Ministry points out that the release of the report has dampened the chances of the revival of a dialogue with Iran, which had brightened recently.

The Russians have also expressed reservations about Mr. Amano's report, on whether it had indeed unearthed any new information regarding the Iranian nuclear programme.

“The analysis must take place in a calm atmosphere, since it is important to determine whether some new, reliable evidence strengthening suspicions of a military element in Iran's nuclear programme has really appeared, or whether we are talking about an intentional — and counterproductive — whipping up of emotions,” said the Ministry.

Ancient lunar dynamo may explain magnetised moon rocks

The “geodynamo” that generates Earth's magnetic field is powered by heat from the inner core, which drives complex fluid motions in the molten iron of the outer core. But the Moon is too small to support that type of dynamo, according to Christina Dwyer, a graduate student in Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

SINCE APOLLO PROGRAM

The presence of magnetized rocks on the surface of the Moon, which has no global magnetic field, has been a mystery since the days of the Apollo program. Now a team of scientists has proposed a novel mechanism that could have generated a magnetic field on the Moon early in its history.

The “geodynamo” that generates Earth's magnetic field is powered by heat from the inner core, which drives complex fluid motions in the molten iron of the outer core. But the Moon is too small to support that type of dynamo, according to Christina Dwyer, a graduate student in Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In the November 10 issue of Nature, Dwyer and her coauthors — planetary scientists Francis Nimmo at UC Santa Cruz and David Stevenson at the California Institute of Technology — describe how an ancient lunar dynamo could have arisen from stirring of the Moon's liquid core driven by the motion of the solid mantle above it.

“This is a very different way of powering a dynamo that involves physical stirring, like stirring a bowl with a giant spoon,” Dwyer said.

Dwyer and her coauthors calculated the effects of differential motion between the Moon's core and mantle. Early in its history, the Moon orbited the Earth at a much closer distance than it does today, and it continues to gradually recede from the Earth.

TIDAL INTERACTIONS

At close distances, tidal interactions between the Earth and the Moon caused the Moon's mantle to rotate slightly differently than the core. This differential motion of the mantle relative to the core stirred the liquid core, creating fluid motions that, in theory, could give rise to a magnetic dynamo.

“The Moon wobbles a bit as it spins — that's called precession — but the core is liquid, and it doesn't do exactly the same precession. So the mantle is moving back and forth across the core, and that stirs up the core, “ explained Nimmo, a professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UCSC.

The researchers found that a lunar dynamo could have operated in this way for at least a billion years. Eventually, however, it would have stopped working as the Moon got farther away from the Earth. “The further out the Moon moves, the slower the stirring, and at a certain point the lunar dynamo shuts off,” Dwyer said.

Rocks can become magnetized from the shock of an impact, a mechanism some scientists have proposed to explain the magnetization of lunar samples.

But recent paleomagnetic analyses of Moon rocks, as well as orbital measurements of the magnetization of the lunar crust, suggest that there was a strong, long-lived magnetic field on the Moon early in its history, says a University of California, Santa Cruz press release. “One of the nice things about our model is that it explains how a lunar dynamo could have lasted for a billion years,” Nimmo said. “It also makes predictions about how the strength of the field should have changed over the years, and that's potentially testable with enough paleomagnetic observations.”

More detailed analysis is needed, however, to show that stirring of the core by the mantle would create the right kind of fluid motions to generate a magnetic field.

Mars probe struck on Earth orbit

The daring Russian mission to fly an unmanned probe to Phobos, a moon of Mars, and fly samples of its soil back to Earth was derailed on Wednesday right after its launch by equipment failure.

A Russian space probe to a Mars moon launched early on Wednesday is stuck in the Earth's orbit after its engines failed to fire.

After the booster rocket put the spacecraft on a support orbit around the Earth, the probe's own engines were programmed to get started to put it on a trajectory to Mars, but they did not.

The Russian space agency said it may still be possible to put the probe back on track.

“Not a failure”

“I would not say it's a failure, it's a non-standard situation, but it is a working situation,” said Vladimir Popovkin, Russian space agency head.

According to Mr. Popovkin, the craft failed to fire its engines probably because it was unable to find its bearings by the stars. “We will attempt to reboot the programme. The fuel tanks have not been jettisoned, and the fuel has not been spent.”

The ground control has three days to start the on-board engine before the batteries run out.

The project, named Phobos-Grunt that means “soil from Phobos” after one of Mars' two moons, is dubbed the most challenging inter-planetary mission so far. It involves sophisticated manoeuvring to approach Phobos from a Mars orbit, soft-land on the surface of 22-km wide Phobos, collect samples of its soil and return to the Earth in 2014.

Nobody has yet attempted to bring rock samples from the moon of a planet. Scientists hope the mission could help solve the mystery of the origin of Phobos and the solar system.

Phobos-Grunt is carrying a Chinese mini-satellite that is to study Mars for two years in its orbit. The spacecraft has onboard a U.S. experiment with bacteria, plant seeds and microscopic invertebrates to find out whether life could have migrated between planets. The French and German space agencies also have provided instrumentation for the mission.

Russia had sent several probes to Mars in the past, but none reached its goal. The last attempt was mounted five years ago, when the Mars-96 spacecraft failed to reach even its support orbit and fell back to the Earth.