Free Republic

A potential plan by Israel to flood the Hamas tunnel network with seawater risks “ruining the basic conditions for life in Gaza”, one of the elements of the crime of genocide, a senior hydrologist has told the Guardian. Environmental experts have warned the strategy – which Israel has yet to commit to – risks causing an ecological catastrophe that will leave Gaza with no drinkable water and devastate what little agriculture is possible in the 141 sq mile territory. The UN special rapporteur for the right to water, Pedro Arrojo-Agudo, compared it to the legend of Romans’ salting of the...

New report says Israel has conducted initial tests and begun to fill Hamas's underground tunnels with water from the Mediterranean Sea. The Israeli military has begun pumping water from the Mediterranean Sea into Hamas' tunnel network, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, quoting US officials familiar with the operations. The move, still in its early stages, is one of several techniques Israel is using in its operation to eliminate the Hamas terror group. A spokesperson for Israel's Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (Likud) declined to comment to WSJ, telling the news outlet that "tunnel operations are classified." The Wall Street Journal...

Israel is pumping sea water into Hamas tunnels in Gaza to flush the terrorists out

Israel is said to have completed installing at least five pumps about a mile north of the Al-Shati refugee camp that could move thousands of cubic metres of water per hour - meaning they could flood the 300-mile network of tunnels within weeks. Their plan would be to drive out the terrorists from the tunnels and make them inoperable by flooding the system with seawater from the Mediterranean Sea. And now, images released by the IDF appear to show scores of Israeli soldiers setting up a series of black pipes on the sandy beaches of Gaza. Video shared by Israeli...

The IDF is planning to pump seawater into the Hamas tunnel network in Gaza according to a Wall Street Journal report. Five large pumps have been assembled north of the al-Shati refugee camp during the last month, with each one capable of pumping thousands of cubic meters of seawater into the tunnels. Israel informed US officials that they were considering this option last month and needed to weigh feasibility and environmental factors against military necessity. Some US officials expressed concern about the plan while others supported the plan.

A Toyota Project Portal hydrogen fuel cell electric semi-truck is shown during an event in San Francisco, Calif., on Sept. 13, 2018. (Stephen Lam/Reuters) Researchers have come up with a new system that turns seawater into hydrogen fuel—a development that could aid in the proliferation of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. The new method extracts hydrogen from the ocean by funneling seawater through a double membrane system, using electricity. The design was successful in generating hydrogen gas without the accompaniment of large quantities of harmful byproducts. Vehicles with hydrogen fuel cells are fed with compressed hydrogen gas. The fuel cells do...

Seawater makes up about 96% of all water on earth, making it a tempting resource to meet the world’s growing need for clean drinking water and carbon-free energy. And scientists already have the technical ability to both desalinate seawater and split it to produce hydrogen, which is in demand as a source of clean energy. But existing methods require multiple steps performed at high temperatures over a lengthy period of time in order to produce a catalyst with the needed efficiency. That requires substantial amounts of energy and drives up the cost. Researchers from the University of Houston have reported...

The dwarf planet Ceres – long believed to be a barren space rock – is an ocean world with reservoirs of sea water beneath its surface, the results of a major exploration mission showed on Monday. Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter and has its own gravity, enabling the Nasa Dawn spacecraft to capture high-resolution images of its surface. Now a team of scientists from the United States and Europe have analysed images relayed from the orbiter, captured about 35km (22 miles) from the asteroid. They focused on the 20-million-year-old Occator crater and...

The researchers found their watery prize while drilling sediment core samples out of the underwater limestone deposits that make up the Maldives archipelago in South Asia. After hauling each core onto their research vessel, the team sliced up the rock like a tube of cookie dough and put the pieces into a hydraulic press that squeezed any remnant moisture out of the pores. When the researchers tested the composition of these fresh-pressed water samples aboard their ship, they were surprised to find that the water was extremely salty — far saltier than the Indian Ocean is today. They did more...

Two Palestinians died Monday and several others injured after Egyptian troops pumped toxic fumes into a smuggling tunnel stretching into the Sinai Peninsula from the Gaza Strip. The Hamas-run Gaza Interior Ministry was quoted by Wafa news as identifying the two as 39-year-old Hamas officer Abdul Hamid al-Aker, who was killed during a “security mission to inspect the tunnel,” and 28-year-old Sobhi Abu Qarshin. Abu Qarshin was said to have died during a rescue attempt. Several other security personnel were rescued by civil defense teams from inside the tunnel and were rushed to hospital, where they were described as being...

The Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology Tuesday announced that it has developed the world’s first next generation seawater distillation technology that allows consumable water to be produced in low temperatures and under low pressure, which increases energy efficiency and production capacity. Additionally, the institution has set up the world’s largest seawater distillation plant. According to the institution, it developed a membrane distillation that only allows vapor to pass through while keeping the liquids contained. The vapor is compressed to create a liquid that can be consumed or used for industrial purposes such as irrigation by removing salt...

Scientists, including those from Northeastern University in the U.S., developed carbon nanotube pores that can exclude salt from seawater. The team found that water permeability in carbon nanotubes (CNTs) with diameters of 0.8 nanometre significantly exceeds that of wider carbon nanotubes. The nanotubes, hollow structures made of carbon atoms in a unique arrangement, are more than 50,000 times thinner than a human hair. The super smooth inner surface of the nanotube is responsible for their remarkably high water permeability, while the tiny pore size blocks larger salt ions. “We found that carbon nanotubes with diameters smaller than a nanometre bear...

Prime Minister Narendra Modi along with his Israeli counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday witnessed the demonstration of sea water purification technology pioneered by Israel at a water desalination unit on Olga Beach in Haifa. Gal-Mobile is an independent, integrated water purification vehicle, designed to produce high-quality drinking water. It can be useful in natural disasters like floods, earthquakes, military use in difficult terrain and rural areas to provide drinkable water, the Indian Prime Minister’s Office said. “It can purify up to 20,000 litres per day of sea water and 80,000 litres per day of brackish/muddy or contaminated river water and...

Producing fresh drinking water from the sea - desalination - has always seemed to be the most obvious answer to water shortages.Our oceans cover more than 70% of the earth's surface and contain 97% of its water. But the energy needed to achieve this seemingly simple process has been costly. Now, thanks to new technologies, costs have been halved and huge desalination plants are opening around the world.The largest seawater desalination plant ever, Israel's Sorek plant near Tel Aviv, just ramped up to full production. It will make 624 million litres of drinkable water daily, and sell 1,000 litres -...

A group of Mexican engineers from the Jhostoblak Corporate created technology to recover and purify seawater or wastewater from households, hotels, hospitals, commercial and industrial facilities, regardless of the content of pollutants and microorganisms in just 2.5 minutes. The system, PQUA, works with a mixture of dissociating elements, capable of separating and removing all contaminants, as well as organic and inorganic pollutants. "The methodology is founded on molecularly dissociating water pollutants to recover the minerals necessary and sufficient in order for the human body to function properly nourished," the researchers explained.Notably, the engineers developed eight dissociating elements, and after extensive...

Battling a big problem like climate change will require big ideas. And scientists in the U.K. have one of the biggest: take ocean water, shoot it up into the atmosphere, and let the resulting clouds cool the earth like a massive, wet blanket. Granted, these folks are not the first to float this incredible-sounding strategy, known as "marine-cloud brightening." In one example, the physicist John Latham wrote in 1990 that the life of clouds might be prolonged by artificially increasing their "droplet concentration." These thicker clouds would reflect more of the sun's radiation away from the planet, in theory allowing...

Navy researchers say they have turned seawater into fuel that could power military vehicles for less than $6 per gallon. The researchers announced this month that the seawater-based fuel successfully powered a remote-controlled model jet with a standard two-stroke internal combustion engine. Carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas extracted from Gulf of Mexico water were converted into liquid hydrocarbon fuel using gas-to-liquid technology. The renewable fuel mirrors its petroleum-based counterpart and could be used in standard military engines. “The potential payoff is the ability to produce JP-5 fuel stock at sea, reducing the logistics tail on fuel delivery with no environmental...

The U.S. Navy believes it has finally worked out the solution to a problem that has intrigued scientists for decades: how to take seawater and use it as fuel.

Cesium-137 flow into sea 30 times greater than stated by TEPCO: report PARIS (Kyodo) -- The amount of radioactive cesium-137 that flowed into the Pacific after the start of Japan's nuclear crisis was probably nearly 30 times the amount stated by Tokyo Electric Power Co. in May, according to a recent report by a French research institute. The Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety said the amount of the isotope that flowed into the ocean from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant between March 21 and mid-July reached an estimated 27.1 quadrillion becquerels. A quadrillion is equivalent to 1,000 trillion....

Kan halted seawater injection / Operations stopped for 55 minutes over fears of 're-criticality' The Yomiuri Shimbun The injection of seawater into the No. 1 reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant was stopped for nearly an hour soon after the Great East Japan Earthquake, at Prime Minister Naoto Kan's request, government sources have revealed. The prime minister feared that injecting seawater might cause re-criticality to occur inside the reactor, the sources said. Criticality refers to a self-sustaining chain reaction of nuclear fission in uranium atoms. Re-criticality is when a system achieves criticality despite mechanisms being in place...