Environment & Ecology GK Questions with Answers – Page 25

Reactor number four of the Chernobyl plant, in Ukraine in the then Soviet Union, exploded on 26 April 1986 and scattered radioactive iodine, caesium and strontium over a wide area of Europe.

The becquerel, symbol Bq, is the SI unit of activity and equals one disintegration per second.

Strontium lies just below calcium in the same group of the periodic table and behaves chemically like it, so strontium-90 taken in through milk, water or food is deposited in bone and in teeth in place of calcium.

A cooling tower releases the heat of used cooling water to the atmosphere by evaporation or by air flow, so that the water leaving the plant is close to the temperature of the receiving river or lake.

Thermal and nuclear power stations draw large volumes of water to condense steam and return it several degrees warmer, which makes them the single largest source of waste heat in rivers, lakes and coastal waters.

The solubility of a gas in water decreases as the temperature of the water rises, so hot water discharged from a power station holds less dissolved oxygen.

The Rules define a silence zone as the area up to 100 metres around a hospital, an educational institution or a court, and such an area has to be declared by the competent authority.

The Rules of 2000 lay down 55 decibel as the day-time limit and 45 decibel as the night-time limit for a residential area.

The Noise Pollution (Regulation and Control) Rules were notified in the year 2000 and they were framed under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986.

The decibel, written dB, is the unit in which the intensity level of sound is expressed, and it is named after Alexander Graham Bell.

The correct answer is C, 500 GW by 2030, the first of the five Panchamrit commitments placed before COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, the others being half of India's energy requirement from renewables by 2030, a billion tonnes off projected emissions by 2030, a 45 per cent cut in the…

The Union Budget for that year announced the intention, the Government published a Sovereign Green Bonds framework in 2022, and the Reserve Bank of India auctioned the first tranche on the Government's behalf in January 2023, with the proceeds earmarked for renewable energy, clean transport, energy efficiency, sustainable water management…

Each designated consumer in an energy-intensive industry such as cement, steel, aluminium, fertiliser or thermal power is given a specific energy consumption target; a plant that beats its target earns ESCerts, and a plant that misses it must buy them, which the power exchanges make possible.

In the same scheme the Grid Controller of India keeps the registry and the Central Electricity Regulatory Commission regulates trading.

The Energy Conservation (Amendment) Act, 2022 inserted the power for the Central Government to specify a Carbon Credit Trading Scheme, which is why the market sits with the Ministry of Power and its Bureau of Energy Efficiency rather than with the environment ministry.

The correct answer is C, COP26 in Glasgow, held in 2021, where India placed a five-part pledge known as the Panchamrit before the conference: 500 GW of non-fossil energy capacity by 2030, half its energy requirement from renewables by 2030, a cut of one billion tonnes in projected emissions by…

It holds all the market machinery of the Paris Agreement: Article 6.2 lets two countries cooperate bilaterally and transfer Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes with a corresponding adjustment so the same tonne is not counted twice, Article 6.4 establishes a centralised crediting mechanism supervised by a United Nations body as the…

India hosted a very large number of such projects and was among the world's biggest sellers of CERs.

Adopted in 1997 at COP3 in Japan and in force from 2005, it set binding emission targets for developed countries and gave them three flexible mechanisms to meet them; the Clean Development Mechanism, under Article 12, let a developed country fund an emission-reduction project in a developing country and claim…

The tonne is the standard trading unit in every carbon market, compliance or voluntary, and it is written as 1 tCO2e. The word equivalent matters: gases other than carbon dioxide are converted into carbon dioxide terms using their global warming potential, so a much smaller quantity of methane or nitrous…