The Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (SKB) has chosen a site for permanent storage of highly adioactive spent fuel from Swedish plants. The site, near Forsmark, is 75 kilometers north of Stockholm. Estimated to cost between $2.5 billion and $3.2 billion, the repository includes 50 km of tunnels in granite bedrock 500 meters underground, requiring the excavation of 1.8 million cu m of rock. Spent fuel would reside in 25-tonne copper-coated canisters, surrounded by a buffer of bentonite clay that would act as a watertight barrier. SKB plans to submit two applications to Swedish environmental and nuclear authorities

After a delay lasting two years, construction began last month on a $2-billion chemical plant in Zhangzhou, in China’s Fujian Province. The plant site is on the Gulei peninsula, 50 miles from Zhangzhou, a city with 4 million people. Officials in neighboring Xiamen, the original site, cancelled the project in 2007 following protests over potential pollution and health problems. Central-government agencies reassessed the project, and in January the Ministry of Environmental Protection approved an environmental impact review. The plant owner is Tenglong Aromatic PX Co. Ltd., whose parent company is the Xianglu Group, from Taiwan. The plant will produce paraxylene

Zaha Hadid Architects, London, has unveiled its plan for a 525,000-sq-meter office and retail development in New Cairo, Egypt, a satellite district east of Cairo. The Stone Towers development will include 18 office buildings containing 28,000 employees and 1,400 luxury apartments within a 45-acre site surrounding sunken gardens. The project owner is the Rooya Group. New Cairo is already home to 350,000 residents and is targeted as a hub for multinationals living in Egypt. New Cairo’s population is projected to reach 2 million by 2020. Photo: Zaha Hadid Architects

Builders of the U.K.’s tallest skyscraper, London’s Shard, will save valuable time by excavating its three-floor basement while slipforming the core. A novel machine is now at work, plunging columns into pile tops some 15 meters below ground to prop up the rising core as soil beneath is removed. Slide Show Photo: Peter Reina / ENR The small site sits hard against the busy London Bridge railroad hub. Related Links: Top Down To Speed Shard Building With the core on the critical path, “the month or two” top-down exercise is “giving us breathing space,” says Bob Gordon, chief engineer of

The U.S. Energy Dept. said June 12 it would move forward to build a flagship clean-coal power plant in a small Illinois town, reversing a previous Bush administration decision to scrap the ambitious FutureGen project entirely in favor of smaller carbon-capture and storage projects (CCS) around the country. Energy Secretary Steven Chu and his industry partner, the FutureGen Industrial Alliance, a group of 20 leading power utilities and coal companies, reached agreement on the project, a 275-MW integrated gasification combined cycle power plant that could cost between $1.3 billion and $1.8 billion. The plant, to be sited in Mattoon, Ill.,

Under an extremely tight deadline mandated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, New York City is building its first-ever water filtration plant, which, once operational in 2012, will end a long, costly and often controversial saga that began nearly two decades ago. Slide Show Photo: New York Daily News / Howard Simmons Once crews have a section of the foundation set, they go vertical, resulting in a tiered site that is at base slab in some areas and roof level in others. Originally estimated at $992 million, the now $2.8-billion Croton Water Filtration Plant entailed more than 10 years of

Energy Northwest is gingerly wading back into the waters of nuclear energy. The Richland, Wash.-based not-for-profit “joint operating agency,” which supplies electricity at cost to its 25-member public utilities in Washington state, is the renamed Washington Public Supply System, which made history in 1983 with the largest municipal-bond default ever when it walked away from $2.25 billion in bonds issued to construct five nuclear powerplants. The agency now is cautiously polling its customer utilities about their interest in a new nuclear plant to come online between 2017 and 2020. The utility is considering a plant composed of six 45-MW light-water

Three years after the state of Connecticut failed to generate any bids on the nation’s first extradosed bridge project—a hybrid cable-stayed, box-girder structure—three firms now are competing for the superstructure work. The low bid is about $33 million below engineers’ estimate. Photo: URS Corp. Reduced bid package helped generate three bidders for Q bridge superstructure work. When bids were opened on June 3 for the Pearl Harbor Memorial Bridge, known as the Q bridge because it spans the Quinnipiac River, the joint venture of Walsh Construction Co., Sharon, Mass., and PCL Civil Constructors, Tampa, Fla., was the apparent low bidder

The Highway Trust Fund is in trouble again. Last September, Congress rescued the fund’s highway account with an $8-billion injection. Now a new shortfall, estimated at $5 billion to $7 billion, is looming in August. The picture is even darker for 2010, when an additional $8 billion to $10 billion will be needed. The search is on for more revenue, but the White House is insisting that any new money for the trust fund must be offset, presumably by spending cuts or a revenue-raising mechanism. Source: Federal Highway Administration Ending balance for FY 2008 includes $8.017 billion transferred from the

Anearly 7,000-ft-long railroad bridge is undergoing an extreme $35-million makeover over the Hudson River, thanks to hundreds of precast concrete panels, community zeal and the windblown determination of engineers and contractors. When completed by October, the revamped 121-year-old Poughkeepsie-Highland Railroad Bridge may be the world’s longest pedestrian bridge at 6,768 ft, say officials. Photo: Bergmann Associates Old railroad bridge will become a soaring walkway over the Hudson River when it opens later this year. Photo: Bergmann Associates Work in high winds over the river was a challenge. The historic bridge’s 3,094-ft-long, 25-ft-wide main span consists of seven trusses supported on