Note book

Nuclear waste push

The UK government is pressing ahead with plans to ask local communities to volunteer sites where high-activity nuclear waste may be stored in vaults underground. Its June white paper has confirmed the strategy set in motion by recommendations of the Committee on radioactive waste management (CoRWM). 

Chemist to head Oxford 

Andrew Hamilton, the distinguished organic and biological chemist who is currently provost of Yale, has been nominated as the next vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford.  

Industries call for carbon cuts

Business leaders from more than 90 of the world’s largest companies, including major chemical companies such as Shell, Bayer, Akzo Nobel and Mitsubishi Chemical, have endorsed a policy framework for tackling climate change, ahead of July’s G8 summit in Japan and the subsequent agreement of a new climate policy to the Kyoto Protocol, by December 2009.  

Budapest wins EIT

The headquarters of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT) will be hosted by Budapest, Hungary. The EIT is expected to launch in 2010 (see  Chemistry World  , April 2008, p9) 

Say What?

It offends me to see fingers pointed at biofuels, when the fingers are coated in oil and coal   

Brazil’s president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva defends his country’s use of sugar cane biofuels and accuses critics of hypocrisy at a summit in Rome on the emerging food crisis (reported in The Guardian  , 4 June)