December 7, 2020 | International, Naval
By DAVE RESS
DAILY PRESS |
DEC 04, 2020 AT 5:14 PM
Norfolk Naval Shipyard can proceed with plans to build a plant to supply the steam and most of the electricity it uses, the State Air Pollution Control Board ruled.
The board found that the new facility would not boost pollutants — including sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide — above air-quality standards.
Its staff analyses also found increased emissions of those chemicals would not be significant, although the board staff did note that increases in very small particulate matter would be significant.
The shipyard wants to install two natural gas-powered turbines, each capable of generating 7 megawatts of electricity, as well as a boilers, heat-recovery generators and one 2.4 megwatt steam turbine.
The $30 million project would allow the yard to generate its own steam, instead of purchasing it from the nearby Wheelabrator plant. The plant also would supply most of the electricity the yard now receives from Dominion Energy.
James Boyd, president of the Portsmouth branch of the NAACP, said the project would add pollutants to the already bad air, raising serious environmental justice concerns.
In a letter to the board, he also said forecasts of emissions miscalculated totals, by reporting pollutant totals from one gas turbine and one burner from the steam generator, instead of calculating the total of all the turbines were operating.
University of Richmond geography professor Mary Finley-Brook noted that the shipyard is a Superfund site, which means its neighbors are more vulnerable to harm from emissions.
Finley-Brook said the assessment of impact on community health was inadequate.
A study for the board by two Massachusetts-based PhD toxicologists said air currently is safe and new plant would not change that, while board staff said air quality in the area had improved over the past 20 years.
Chesapeake Bay Foundation executive director Peggy Sanner said she is disappointed that the board did not require monitoring and reporting of actual emissions from the plant, once it is operating, in 2022.
“There are serious environmental justice concerns around building a new fossil fuel plant in this predominantly African-American community, which is overwhelmed by health risks from industrial pollution, she said, adding " Portsmouth residents already live near high concentrations of toxic waste at the nine Superfund sites within a 15-mile radius.”
September 24, 2019 | International, Aerospace, Naval
QUANTICO, Va--The Marine Corps on Monday detailed its program to find a new Attack Utility Replacement Aircraft (AURA) that will likely replace its AH-1Z and UH-1Y helicopters, with plans to award contracts through 2023 to advance concept designs. https://www.defensedaily.com/marines-release-rfi-future-attack-utility-aircraft-bell-interested-v-280/navy-usmc/
January 14, 2021 | International, Land, C4ISR
Nathan Strout WASHINGTON — The Army has issued agreements to Palantir Technologies and Raytheon Technologies in support of the design and software maturation of a new next-generation ground station. The Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN) is intended to be a key piece in the sensor-to-shooter chain, connecting sensors from all domains to war fighters and systems in the field to enable beyond-line-of-sight targeting. The system will be capable of downlinking data from multiple domains, processing it with artificial intelligence to create targeting data, and then delivering those solutions directly to the Fires networks, which can then determine the best available shooter to respond with. Palantir and Raytheon will each receive an $8.5 million other transaction authority (OTA) agreements for 12 months of work in the project's first phase. That early stage will include a series of design reviews, software demonstrations and soldier touchpoints as the vendors mature the TITAN software and work on system-level design. The Army will eventually move to a single vendor for complete system prototyping for phase 2. The next stage will cover refinement of prototype capabilities, and the fourth and final phase will prepare a prototype that is ready to integrate future sensors and technology advancements. The Army has been practicing with TITAN surrogates, most notably during its Project Convergence learning campaign last year. During that event, the Army was able to take overhead tactical satellite imagery and downlink it to a TITAN surrogate located at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington. The TITAN surrogate then used the Prometheus artificial intelligence program to create targeting solutions from that data. Next, those solutions were transported to the main demonstration area at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, where another AI program determined the best shooter to receive that targeting solution. “We found the threat rapidly. We were able to identify it as the real threat. We were able to put hit-grade coordinates on it in very near real time and then digitally send that from the TITAN surrogate unit at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, down to the firing units that were located down at Yuma via tactical satellite communications. And all of that happened within seconds,” Willie Nelson, director of Army Futures Command's Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing Cross-Functional Team, told C4ISRNET following the exercise. Northrop Grumman has been tapped to build two TITAN prototypes. Those are expected to be delivered in 2022. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/space/2021/01/13/army-issues-17-million-in-contracts-for-titan-development/
October 13, 2024 | International, Land
The follow-on contract has a six-year period of performance with a total ceiling value of $249 million.