No abstract available

[en] An updated revision is presented regarding fossil mammals of aquatic and terrestrial environments. This update includes up to year 2008. Those registrations of doubtful assignation or that couldn't be confirmed were not considered in this review. These new registrations are classified in four groups of time that extend from the Late Eocene-Early Oligocene to the Pleistocene-Recent. The evidence shows that the greatest quantity of fossils are concentrated from the Early Miocene to the Middle Miocene reaching 37 (41.5%) genus of a total of 77 and 54 (49.5%) fossil species of a total of 89. It is observed a significant increase in works devoted to paleontology of mammal fossils in Chile between 1981-2008. (Author)

[en] The texts of the Master Agreement between the Agency and the Government of Chile, and of Supplementary Agreement No. 1 thereto, in connection with the Agency's assistance to that Government in furthering projects by the supply of materials, are reproduced herein for the information of all Members. The Master Agreement entered into force on 16 March 1973, pursuant to its Article XIV, and the Supplementary Agreement on 14 June 1973, pursuant to its Article IV.

[en] Published in summary form only

No abstract available

[en] In 2007, the President of Chile, Dr. Michelle Bachelet, decided to take a serious look at the possibility of including the nuclear option in the country's energy mix. Mrs. Bachelet had a personal anti-nuclear stand and she had even established an agreement with the environmentalist movement not to include the nuclear energy option in Chile's energy matrix during her government. However, she was convinced that being a matter of national importance, the nuclear option required a careful and rational analysis in order to decide whether it should be considered or dismissed because of its supposedly inherently unsafe nature. Consequently, in February 2007, she established the Working Group on Nucleoelectric Generation (GTNE), panel of ten independent professionals from academia, the business sector and government, with diverse backgrounds, including mathematics, physics, biology, social sciences, engineering, economics, law and environmental sciences. The purpose of the commission was to make a preliminary assessment based on the international experience in order to establish whether the use of nuclear energy to generate electricity would be a sensible possibility in Chile. Why was this decision made? Like many countries, Chile needs to diversify its tight energy matrix. The country imports 95% of its coal, 75% of its gas and 90% of its oil. Traditionally, electric generation in this mountainous country was based on hydro power. However, the steady economic growth of the past quarter of a century has doubled the electricity demand every 10 or 12 years. At the moment, the possibilities of large dams in the central region of the country where more than 90% of the population live are exhausted. Only two large rivers in Patagonia -more than 2000 km south of Santiago- and a number of smaller ones elsewhere can still be used to provide base-load. This expansion would represent at best an addition of some 3GW to the country's current power generation capacity of about 12GW. In this scenario, the path of least resistance is the continued expansion of electric generation using coal-fired power plants which, together with other fossil fuels, currently account for about 60% of the country's electricity generation. The business as usual projection indicates that Chile's CO2 emissions are going to increase by more than 200% by the end of the next decade. This not only exposes our economy to the risk of carbon taxes, it is environmentally irresponsible and ethically unjustified. The other alternative to load base generation is nuclear power.

[en] This work was prepared by the Chilean and International Atomic Energy Agencies and covers the hydrodynamic functioning of sewage stability pools using tracers. The plant selected in the city of Cabrero, 500 km. south of Santiago, and is a rectangular facultative pool with a surface area of 7100 m² and a maximum volume of 12,327 m2 that receives an average flow of 20 l/s, serving a population of 7000 individuals. The work aims to characterize the runoff from the flow that enters the pool, using a radioactive tracer test, where the incoming water is marked, and its out-coming passage is determined, to establish the residence time distribution. Tritium was selected in the form of tritiated water as a tracer that is precisely emptied into the water flow from the distribution ravine at the lake entrance. Samples are taken at the outflow to determine the concentration of tritium after distillation, simultaneously measuring the flow, to be analyzed in a liquid flicker counter. An average test time of 5.3 days was obtained and an analysis of the residence time distribution for the tracer shows that it leaves quickly and indicates bad flow distribution in the lake with a major short circuit and probable dead zones

[en] The European Southern Observatory's New Technology Telescope (NTT) at La Silla, Chile, looking deep into an 'empty' part of the sky, has found it filled with many faint and remote galaxies. The limit images are at least 2.5 times fainter than any previously obtained by optical telescope, the signal being equivalent to the glow of a cigarette seen from the distance of the Moon!

[en] 650 accurate positions of asteroids are presented as obtained from observations performed during March 1986 at the GPO telescope of ESO, La Silla, Chile. Reductions were made using the dependence method with 6 reference stars taken from the AGK3 and SAO catalogues. Twenty-two new asteroids were detected. 1 ref., 3 tabs. (author)

[en] One important parameter on any sitting study for a heavy water plant installation is the deuterium content of the feed water. Deuterium data on surface waters from differents areas located in the south of Chile, are presented. These results allow to idently some potential areas for a future heavy water plant. One of these areas, Lago Llanquihue, was sampled more in detail to study the vertical distribution and spatial variations. (Author)