Coastal homeownership has its own challenges

OWNING A home on the coast shouldn’t be a lesson in dreams gone wrong. For Wayne Higson, the coastal environment offered peace, serenity and a place to get away from it all – until corrosion, wind and water created a nightmare in vacation homeownership. “People don’t really know how bad things can get until they [...]

How seawater could corrode nuclear fuel

Japan used seawater to cool nuclear fuel at the stricken Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant after the tsunami in March 2011 — and that was probably the best action to take at the time, says Professor Alexandra Navrotsky of the University of California, Davis. But Navrotsky and others have since discovered a new way in which seawater [...]

Corrosion a worry for Japanese refineries

The earthquake and ensuing tsunami that struck Japan on March 11 took untold thousands of lives and caused billions of dollars of damage – and for certain businesses, like oil refiners, the worst may be yet to come. That’s because the vast amounts of seawater that crashed ashore on the eastern edge of the island [...]