On November 29th, officials involved with the New Safe Confinement (NSC) project gathered near the site of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, to celebrate the installation of the massive NSC structure over top of the plant’s aging containment building. The NSC building, meant to isolate the entire power plant from the surrounding environment for the next century, required a major feat of engineering to bring into being.
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Earlier this year, we reported that the countries of Portugal and Germany had set new records by generating electricity using renewable resources, with Portugal running on 100 percent renewables for four-and-a-half days, and Germany reaching 95 percent over the duration of May 8, 2016. But a much bigger achievement made the previous year by Costa Rica went largely unnoticed, where electricity was generated for nearly the entire year of 2015 on renewable resources alone.
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It’s official: June of 2016 broke yet another global temperature record, coming in as the hottest June on record since global temperatures were first recorded in 1880, beating the previous record-holder’s departure from the norm, June 2015, by 0.02ºC (0.04ºF). This also marks the 14th consecutive record-breaking month, with global temperatures being 0.90ºC (1.62ºF) above the 20th century average.

This string of consecutive above-average months is not expected to continue forever, according to Deke Arndt, head of NOAA’s national Centers for Environmental Information climate monitoring division, but that doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods in regards to the long-term warming trend.
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Scientists have discovered a reliable way to extract renewable energy from ordinary seawater. The research team, from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne’s Laboratory of Nanoscale Biology in Switzerland, employed a natural process called osmosis, where a fluid permeates through a membrane from one side to another.
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