Spanish Companies Pay Developer To Reduce Greenhouse Gases at Chinese Landfill

Spanish companies are paying a Chinese developer to cover a landfill site with a plastic cap to collect the greenhouse gases it emits, the World Bank said Monday.

The deal is the latest the World Bank has brokered allowing Europe and Japan to meet their greenhouse gas reduction pledges under the Kyoto Protocol by cutting emissions in China.

About a dozen similar deals have been signed in China, and more than 500 others are in the works, said Andres Liebenthal, the environment coordinator for the World Bank office in Beijing.
The Tianjin Clean Energy and Environmental Engineering Co. will collect the methane and other greenhouse gases emitted by the landfill and use it to generate electricity to sell to the North China Power Grid, a World Bank statement said. Excess gases will be burned.

In addition to electricity revenues, the company will get money from a consortium of Spanish companies for reducing the amount of greenhouse gases the landfill generates, according to the statement and Liebenthal.

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More than 40 years on, Spain revisits a nuclear accident

The year was 1966, the height of the cold war and the final years of the Franco dictatorship, when an American B-52 bomber carrying four thermonuclear bombs collided with a supply plane above the village of Palomares in south-eastern Spain.
Two bombs landed intact, one just outside the village of 1,200 people in the province of Almería, the other salvaged, unscathed, by a fisherman five miles offshore in the Mediterranean, at a depth of 760 metres (2,500 feet). The third and fourth bombs were damaged by a chemical explosion on impact, releasing about 20kg (44lb) of plutonium into the centre of Palomares and surrounding hills.



Nobody died or is known to have developed cancer, but Spain's worst nuclear accident took three months and the work of 1,600 US specialists to clean up before it was promptly forgotten outside of Spain. The amnesia was helped along with a now legendary stunt by the former minister of tourism under Franco, Manuel Fraga, who took a much-photographed swim in the Mediterranean with the American ambassador to prove the waters - and budding tourist industry - were safe.
More than 40 years later, the Spanish nuclear regulatory agency and a national research centre on the environment, energy and technology, CIEMAT, have concluded the first large-scale study of the extent of radioactive contamination around the village, now perched in the middle of the nationwide building frenzy.


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