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The Prime Minister also caved in to demands for an external audit of water remaining in the drought-ravaged Murray-Darling Basin that spans Queensland, NSW, Victoria and South Australia.

Federal cabinet, meeting in Adelaide, a centre of the unfolding crisis, signed off on $50million in additional spending to accelerate the buyback of water rights, which has so far had minimal impact.

But the Opposition dismissed the package as "paper money", while South Australia's balance-of-power senator Nick Xenophon said it did not go far enough.

Under the deal, the federal Government will work with the states to acquire irrigation properties with large-scale water entitlements, especially in the upper reaches of the basin in NSW and Queensland.

This would build on a program trialed successfully in NSW, a spokeswoman for Water Minister Penny Wong said.

As well, Mr Rudd said the commonweath was willing to acquire the water entitlements of whole communities. But there was "no magic solution" to the emergency engulfing the lower Murray in South Australia, he warned. "I am not going to provide false promises, I am not going to provide false guarantees about there being some simple solution here," he said.

"I am trying to turn around a situation which has evolved over many years ... and we are dealing with the real consequences of climate change." Describing the river system as "very stressed", Mr Rudd said the Government was taking practical measures to accelerate and increase the buyback of water entitlements, which had been grossly over-allocated outside South Australia.

Central to the plan is expansion of a $350million offer for water rights in southern Queensland, where the headwaters of the Murray-Darling system are located. The $50million in additional funding approved by cabinet yesterday will take the program to $400million and extend it through NSW to the Menindee lakes, near Broken Hill, a back-up reservoir of drinking water for that town as well as Adelaide.

Mr Rudd played down the prospect of compulsory acquisition of water rights, saying "we are working within the market".

The effectiveness of the existing water buyback scheme was sharply drawn into question last week, when The Australian reported that it would return barely 10 megalitres to the river this year - the equivalent of 10 Olympic swimming pools.

Senator Wong's office said last night expenditure of the allocated funds would depend on the take-up of offers by irrigators and communities willing to cash in their water rights.

At the same time, pressure on the lower Murray would be eased by Mr Rudd's offer to co-fund with South Australia an expansion of Adelaide's new water desalination plant. The project, currently costed at $1.1 billion, is to provide 50 gigalitres of drinking water annually to Adelaide, about a quarter of the city's needs.

Mr Rudd said the commonwealth would partner the South Australian Government to increase the plant's capacity to up to 100 gigalitres.

Premier Mike Rann did not immediately commit to the expansion. His office said last night the state Government was considering the proposal, though Mr Rann noted yesterday there was provision in the design to accommodate it.

Mr Rudd said he wanted to end debate over whether there were untapped water reserves in the Murray-Darling Basin, which could be reallocated to top up the lower lakes at the mouth of the Murray. The two waterways, Lake Alexandrina and Lake Albert, could become acidic within months unless inflows drastically increase.

Last week, the Murray-Darling Basin Commission backed up Senator Wong's grim assessment that there was not enough water in the river system to provide volumes required to fill the lower lakes.

The river management agency reported that publicly controlled reserves of water had fallen to 4800 gigalitres, just a fifth of stored capacity across the basin.

This has been challenged in South Australia by communities on the lower lakes and by some water experts, who dispute the accuracy of data supplied to the commission.

Mr Rudd said estimates of publicly and privately owned water reserves in the basin would be checked by private auditors. Updates would be released quarterly.

Senator Xenophon, whose vote is needed by the Government to pass legislation opposed by the Coalition, yesterday backed a proposal by the Greens to hold a Senate inquiry into the issue.

"I've got real concerns about what is being proposed," he said. "What we need is an independent forensic audit which details where the water is, who controls it and what the best use of the water is."

Opposition climate change and environment spokesman Greg Hunt accused Mr Rudd of "running up Penny Wong's white flag" on the lower lakes.

The latest Murray package was "paper money" which would not deliver results, he said.

Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists director Peter Cosier said Mr Rudd had recognised the magnitude of the crisis.

Inland Rivers Network coordinator Amy Hankinson said the additional money was a good sign but more was needed to arrest the decline of the Murray-Darling Basin.

Mr Rudd said federal cabinet had agreed to back the flooding of the lower lakes with seawater as a last-ditch measure to stave off acidification. The South Australian Government has begun site preparation for a weir, upstream of the lakes, to implement the measure.

More than 400 dead zones were identified last year, covering a total area of 64,700sq km, about the size of New Zealand.

The dead zones suffer from hypoxia, a lack of oxygen, which scientists believe is caused by fertilisers washing off the land. When hypoxia sets in, it can drive away tens of thousands of marine animals and, in severe cases, kill them.

Scientists believe that hypoxia ranks with overfishing and habitat destruction as one of the most damaging problems facing sealife.

Since the 1960s, when there were 49 dead zones, the number has increased rapidly and from 1995 to last year it rose from 305 to 405. Among the most alarming outbreaks of hypoxia were in fishing areas of the Baltic, the Black Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and the East China Sea. One of the largest was identified at the mouth of the Mississippi River and was 22,000sq km.

"Dead zones were once rare. Now they're commonplace. There are more of them in more places," said Robert Diaz, of the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, in the US.

In a paper published in the journal Science, Professor Diaz and his colleague Rutger Rosenberg, of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, said that dead zones "now rank with overfishing, habitat loss and harmful algal blooms as major global environmental problems".

They wrote: "There is no other variable of such ecological importance to coastal marine ecosystems that has changed so drastically over such a short time."

According to the scientists, the dead zones occur when nutrients used to enhance farmland, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, wash into the sea and fertilise huge blooms of algae. When dead, the algae are eaten by bacteria, which absorb oxygen from the water as the algae decompose.

The mass development of genetically modified crops risks causing the world's worst environmental disaster, The Prince of Wales has warned.

In his most outspoken intervention on the issue of GM food, the Prince said that multi-national companies were conducting an experiment with nature which had gone "seriously wrong".

The Prince, in an exclusive interview with the Daily Telegraph, also expressed the fear that food would run out because of the damage being wreaked on the earth's soil by scientists' research.

He accused firms of conducting a "gigantic experiment I think with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong".

"Why else are we facing all these challenges, climate change and everything?".

Relying on "gigantic corporations" for food, he said, would result in "absolute disaster".

"That would be the absolute destruction of everything... and the classic way of ensuring there is no food in the future," he said.

"What we should be talking about is food security not food production - that is what matters and that is what people will not understand.

"And if they think its somehow going to work because they are going to have one form of clever genetic engineering after another then again count me out, because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time."

Small farmers, in particular, would be the victims of "gigantic corporations" taking over the mass production of food.

"I think it's heading for real disaster," he said.

"If they think this is the way to go....we [will] end up with millions of small farmers all over the world being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness."

The Prince of Wales's forthright comments will reopen the whole debate about GM food.

They will put him on a collision course with the international scientific community and Downing Street - which has allowed 54 GM crop trials in Britain since 2000.

His intervention comes at a critical time. There is intense pressure for more GM products, not fewer, because of soaring food costs and widespread shortages.

Many scientists believe GM research is the only way to guarantee food for the world's growing population as the planet is affected by climate change.

They will be dismayed by such a high profile and controversial contribution from the Prince of Wales at such a sensitive time.

The Prince will be braced for the biggest outpouring of criticism from scientists since he accused genetic engineers of taking us into "realms that belong to God and God alone" in an article in the Daily Telegraph in 1998.

In the interview the Prince, who has an organic farm on his Highgrove estate, held out the hope of the British agricultural system encouraging more and more family run co-operative farms.

When challenged over whether he was trying to turn back the clock, he said: "I think not. I'm terribly sorry. It's not going backwards. It is actually recognising that we are with nature, not against it. We have gone working against nature for too long."

The Prince of Wales cited the widespread environmental damage in India caused by the rush to mass produce GM food.

"Look at India's Green Revolution. It worked for a short time but now the price is being paid.

"I have been to the Punjab where you have seen the disasters that have taken place as result of the over demand on irrigation because of the hybrid seeds and grains that have been produced which demand huge amounts of water.

"[The] water table has disappeared. They have huge problems with water level, with pesticide problems, and complications which are now coming home to roost.

"Look at western Australia. Huge salinisation problems. I have been there. Seen it. Some of the excessive approaches to modern forms of agriculture."

He said that the scientists were putting too much pressure on nature.

"If you are not working with natural assistance you cause untold problems. which become very expensive and very difficult to undo.

It places impossible burdens on nature and leads to accumulating problems which become more difficult to sort out."

In a keynote speech last year the Prince of Wales warned that the world faces a series of natural disasters within 18 months unless a £15 billion action plan is agreed to save the world's rain forests.

He has set up his own rain forest project with 15 of the world's largest companies, environmental and economic experts, to try to find ways to stop their destruction.

Only two weeks ago British GM researchers lobbied ministers for their crops to be kept in high-security facilities or in fields at secret locations across the country to prevent them from being attacked and destroyed.

They spoke out after protesters ripped up crops in one of only two GM trials to be approved in Britain this year.

Scientists claim the repeated attacks on their trials are stifling vital research to evaluate whether GM crops can reduce the cost and environmental impact of farming and whether they will grow better in harsh environments where droughts have devastated harvests.

While methods to convert the energy into usable electricity still need to be developed, the sheets could one day be manufactured as lightweight "skins" that power everything from hybrid cars to iPods with higher efficiency than traditional solar cells, say the researchers, who report their findings Aug. 13 at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers 2008 2nd International Conference on Energy Sustainability in Jacksonville, Fla. The nanoantennas also have the potential to act as cooling devices that draw waste heat from buildings or electronics without using electricity.

The nanoantennas target mid-infrared rays, which the Earth continuously radiates as heat after absorbing energy from the sun during the day. In contrast, traditional solar cells can only use visible light, rendering them idle after dark. Infrared radiation is an especially rich energy source because it also is generated by industrial processes such as coal-fired plants.

"Every process in our industrial world creates waste heat," says INL physicist Steven Novack. "It's energy that we just throw away." Novack led the research team, which included INL engineer Dale Kotter, W. Dennis Slafer of MicroContinuum, Inc. (Cambridge, Mass.) and Patrick Pinhero, now at the University of Missouri.

The nanoantennas are tiny gold squares or spirals set in a specially treated form of polyethylene, a material used in plastic bags. While others have successfully invented antennas that collect energy from lower-frequency regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, such as microwaves, infrared rays have proven more elusive. Part of the reason is that materials' properties change drastically at high-frequency wavelengths, Kotter says.

The researchers studied the behavior of various materials -- including gold, manganese and copper -- under infrared rays and used the resulting data to build computer models of nanoantennas. They found that with the right materials, shape and size, the simulated nanoantennas could harvest up to 92 percent of the energy at infrared wavelengths.

The team then created real-life prototypes to test their computer models. First, they used conventional production methods to etch a silicon wafer with the nanoantenna pattern. The silicon-based nanoantennas matched the computer simulations, absorbing more than 80 percent of the energy over the intended wavelength range. Next, they used a stamp-and-repeat process to emboss the nanoantennas on thin sheets of plastic. While the plastic prototype is still being tested, initial experiments suggest that it also captures energy at the expected infrared wavelengths.

The nanoantennas' ability to absorb infrared radiation makes them promising cooling devices. Since objects give off heat as infrared rays, the nanoantennas could collect those rays and re-emit the energy at harmless wavelengths. Such a system could cool down buildings and computers without the external power source required by air-conditioners and fans.

But more technological advances are needed before the nanoantennas can funnel their energy into usable electricity. The infrared rays create alternating currents in the nanoantennas that oscillate trillions of times per second, requiring a component called a rectifier to convert the alternating current to direct current. Today's rectifiers can't handle such high frequencies. "We need to design nanorectifiers that go with our nanoantennas," says Kotter, noting that a nanoscale rectifier would need to be about 1,000 times smaller than current commercial devices and will require new manufacturing methods. Another possibility is to develop electrical circuitry that might slow down the current to usable frequencies.

If these technical hurdles can be overcome, nanoantennas have the potential to be a cheaper, more efficient alternative to solar cells. Traditional solar cells rely on a chemical reaction that only works for up to 20 percent of the visible light they collect. Scientists have developed more complex solar cells with higher efficiency, but these models are too expensive for widespread use.

Nanoantennas, on the other hand, can be tweaked to pick up specific wavelengths depending on their shape and size. This flexibility would make it possible to create double-sided nanoantenna sheets that harvest energy from different parts of the sun's spectrum, Novack says. The team's stamp-and-repeat process could also be extended to large-scale roll-to-roll manufacturing techniques that could print the arrays at a rate of several yards per minute. The sheets could potentially cover building roofs or form the "skin" of consumer gadgets like cell phones and iPods, providing a continuous and inexpensive source of renewable energy.