Authorities in Florida last week eliminated the threat of a dam breach protecting the village of Piney Point (near Tampa) from the liquid tailings of a bankrupt and inactive chemical plant. Had things gone wrong, nearly the entire contents of the huge man-made reservoir could have spilled onto nearby homes. Forpost decided to find out if industrial waste could turn from a threat to society into an additional tool for social and economic development.

In 2017, Rosneft adopted a five-year development strategy for its business. Among the tasks are to reduce well construction costs by 10%, increase the flow rate of new wells by 5%, and increase the efficiency of well workover crews by 20%. The target date of 2022 is inexorably approaching.

March marked the tenth anniversary of the accident at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Its consequences turned out to be not as catastrophic as might have been expected immediately after the accident. However, the area around the plant is still uninhabitable, and the radioactive waste collected in the contamination area is stored in temporary warehouses, and no one knows what to do with it.

Even though the political partnership between Moscow and London has "passed away", the business of the two countries has declared the need to develop cooperation.

Russia poses the greatest military threat to European security. This statement is contained in the new strategy for the modernization of the Armed Forces of the United Kingdom, published on the website of the Ministry of Defense of this state on Monday, March 22. The Forpost decided to find out whether the residents of Foggy Albion agree with such a definition.

A test site for energy technologies may be built in Sablino. It is necessary for testing the equipment designed for drilling of oil and gas wells, as well as the development of hydrocarbon deposits. Forpost decided to find out what this project is about, whether domestic companies are interested in it, and why they decided to implement it just near St. Petersburg.

Researchers at St. Petersburg Mining University have developed an effective technology for producing alumina by sintering kaolin ores with limestone and adding carbon-containing activating additives. The specialists have managed to find the optimal content of additives, at which the increase in aluminum oxide extraction was more than 7%. The highest efficiency is achieved when the proportion of carbon in the charge ranges from 1.5% to 3%, depending on the nature of the carbonaceous material.

Following the British QS, the second of the world’s three most authoritative companies for grading institutions of higher education noted the progress of St. Petersburg Mining University.

A delegation of the Indian Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas headed by Deputy Minister Tarun Kapoor paid a working visit to St. Petersburg Mining University. During the meeting with Rector Vladimir Litvinenko, they discussed such issues as training qualified specialists for the oil and gas industry and prospects of using hydrocarbons in the global fuel and energy balance.

St. Petersburg Mining University ranked 12th place in the QS subject ranking, improving its last year's result by 6 positions at once. This is a record: in the history of ranking, Russian universities have never risen so high in the prestigious international charts. The Speaker of the Federation Council Valentina Matvienko, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak and many other politicians, industrialists and public figures sent congratulations to Russia’s oldest higher technical school.