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China needs to reduce food production on its dry northern plains or aquifers will diminish to a "dire" level in 30 years, one the country's leading groundwater experts has warned.
Zheng Chunmiao, director of the Water Research Centre at Peking University, said the world's most populous country will have to focus more on demand-side restraint because it is becoming more expensive and difficult to tap finite supplies below the surface.
"The government must adopt a new policy to reduce water consumption," Zheng told the Guardian. "The main thing is to reduce demand. We have relied too much on engineering projects, but the government realises this is not a long-term solution."
Zheng's comments are based on his studies of the aquifers under the North China plain, one of the country's main wheat growing regions. He said the water table is falling at the rate of about a metre a year mainly due to agriculture, which accounts for 60% of demand.
China’s economy powers on. But the country is running out of water. This is not just an inconvenience. Unless the Chinese can find a powerful remedy, this is potentially a catastrophe. No water, or insufficient clean water supply, means much less economic growth, if any. Agriculture cannot survive without water, people in cities cannot survive and many industries will be in trouble, as they consume water and are also responsible for polluting the rest with their waste.
Desert expantion is now common in China. During 2003, China's Environmental Protectioncy Agency reported that the Gobi Desert had grown by 52,400 kilometers. About 900 square miles of land become deserts every year. It isn't because the weather is dry, but because the natural land cover has been destroyed. Many problems such as droughts,overgrazing, incorrect use of ground water, and logging erode the edges of China's deserts, making them able to spread. Also, dust storms are becoming common, contributing to the deserts. Dangerous sandstorms from China's growing deserts will affect other areas too. Expanding deserts take away almost a million acres of land every year. Soon, China will create even more dangerous challenges in every way.
Originally posted by Crakeur
they dumped it then they found it. now they can start working to fix the problems they caused by dumping it there.
The major powers of the world all have satellites in orbit designed to locate radiant nuclear energy. Some use it primarily for finding possible sites to exploit, others use it to track nuclear vessels (if they are poorly shielded) and such.
It is rumored that no nuclear material in fissile quantities can be transported anywhere on the globe without some intelligence agency being able to find it.
Now we are being told that a huge slag pile of spent rods, waste fuel, and contaminated materials has been sitting off the coast of Russia ... but no one knew. Really?
Originally posted by ImaFungi
this is why people who dont believe in government regulations and environmental precautions are right,,, right?
Originally posted by ModernAcademia
Originally posted by ImaFungi
this is why people who dont believe in government regulations and environmental precautions are right,,, right?
Umm... this IS the Govt.(russian govt.) who dumped it there though
You want the culprits to be the regulators, that is nothing less than insanity!
Originally posted by Crakeur
they dumped it then they found it. now they can start working to fix the problems they caused by dumping it there.
Originally posted by GarrusVasNormandy
Isn't water a good isolation against distance measurements? I believe the only way you can scope the oceans is if you have a submerged device. Anything other than that, only works well to surface objects.
If these were dumped in a lower depth, isn't it possible that even satellites are unable to detect it?
Originally posted by Xeven
Originally posted by TinfoilTP
Originally posted by Crakeur
they dumped it then they found it. now they can start working to fix the problems they caused by dumping it there.
Funny how a name change to the guilty Country can erase all responsibility so that they can "discover" what they themselves put there.
This is almost bad as being responcible for the genocide of the American Indian population.
Originally posted by TDawgRex
reply to post by ModernAcademia
Ive been curious for some time concerning nuclear waste, dumped in a vicinity of a oil deposit.
Since the artic has a supposed vast oil field, if it were drill and refined, would our cars then be spewing radioactive waste, not mention the other carbons?
Originally posted by starviego
I used to work at the downtown YMCA in San Diego in the mid '70s. I met one sailor who told me the Navy had one of their big aircraft carriers that had a nuclear reactor that had become totally contaminated. Their solution? The towed the ship out to the open ocean and just dumped the entire reactor overboard. So it's not just the Russians doing this.
Originally posted by TDawgRex
Originally posted by Crakeur
they dumped it then they found it. now they can start working to fix the problems they caused by dumping it there.
How do you all of a sudden find something you knew you threw away in the first place?
Then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the unattended automatic lighthouses did it job for some time, but after some time they collapsed too. Mostly as a result of the hunt for the metals like copper and other stuff which were performed by the looters. They didn’t care or maybe even didn’t know the meaning of the “Radioactive Danger” sign and ignored them, breaking in and destroying the equipment. It sounds creepy but they broke into the reactors too causing all the structures to become radioactively polluted.