The US and Russia have renewed a weakened form of the Cooperative Threat Reduction program – which since the fall of the Soviet Union has helped secured or scrap thousands of nuclear and chemical weapons – in an agreement that is watered down to the point of being nearly unrecognizable, experts said.

In a shocking reversal of its previous high profile announcements to the contrary, Russian gas giant Gazprom said at its board meeting Tuesday it will continue to develop the Shotkman gas condensate field in the Barents Sea, Russian media have reported.

Over the course of four years, the enormous Sellafield site on the English coast of the Irish Sea has managed to reduce by 40 percent the amount of liquid highly radioactive stored in tanks at the facility since 2009, a major sign of progress toward the site’s eventual decommissioning.

The NGO Shipbreaking Platform yesterday went online with a new website tracking ships that have been sent for environmentally unsound breaking on South Asian beaches, and allowing easier tracking of companies and nations that essentially abandon derelict vessels to substandard dismantling facilities on the shores of the developing world.

MURMANSK –Scientists in Murmansk Region in Russia’s far north are working on a map showing where Kola Bay, a fjord in the Barents Sea just off the northern coast of the Kola Peninsula, is most susceptible to oil spills and most in need of protection during oil pollution cleanup – hoping to create what is deemed a much-needed tool for better environmental safeguarding of the area.

Nearly 120 people including several volunteers from the local community were working to eliminate the residue of a months’ old spill into local rivers in the Northwest Russian Komi Republic after pipelines owned by the Rusvietpetro sprang a leak as far back as winter, officials in the region reported Tuesday.

China and the United States on Saturday agreed to scale back on the production of so-called “super greenhouse gases,” or Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) used in refrigeration and air conditioning, furthering joint efforts to combat climate change in a summit held in California, according to a White House statement.

MOSCOW –Head of South Korea’s nuclear power plant (NPP) operator company, Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power, resigned last Thursday following revelations of counterfeit safety cabling found in several reactors – a discovery that earlier led the country’s regulator to order shutdown of two reactors and delay the start of operation of another two, pending cable replacement.

MURMANSK – The Lepse vessel, the world’s most dangerous floating radioactive waste and spend nuclear storage ship continues to bob at dockside at the Nerpa Naval shipyard on Kola Bay, where its has remained for the last 10 months since being towed from Murmansk Harbor’s Atomflot port for dismantlement.