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Right up until practically the last minute, only an elite few knew about the building, testing and ultimate plans to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the "gadget" was about to be tested, project manager Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves - who ran the project from its inception - tried to explain it as the explosion of an ammunition dump. As a precaution, Groves alerted the governor of New Mexico that it might be necessary to evacuate the state if something went wrong. "The physicists working on the project jokingly bet that testing the gadget could set fire to the atmosphere," says Cameron Reed, a professor and chairman of the physics department at Alma College in Alma, Mich., and an expert on the Manhattan Project. "They didn't know what to expect."

Right up until practically the last minute, only an elite few knew about the building, testing and ultimate plans to drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When the "gadget" was about to be tested, project manager Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves - who ran the project from its inception - tried to explain it as the explosion of an ammunition dump. As a precaution, Groves alerted the governor of New Mexico that it might be necessary to evacuate the state if something went wrong. "The physicists working on the project jokingly bet that testing the gadget could set fire to the atmosphere," says Cameron Reed, a professor and chairman of the physics department at Alma College in Alma, Mich., and an expert on the Manhattan Project. "They didn't know what to expect."

One of the reactors at the Cruas nuclear power station in Ardèche, southern France was shut down on Tuesday after a problem with the cooling system. EDF, the French energy company, reported the incident just before midnight local time and shut down the reactor. Water from the Rhone river is used to cool the nuclear plant, which employs more than 1,000 people, and the French Nuclear Safety authority (ASN) said vegetation had blocked the intake. The flow of water was restored in the early hours of the morning and the emergency alert was lifted around 6:30 on Wednesday. The accident was classified as a level two situation on the seven point scale of international nuclear incidents.

One of the reactors at the Cruas nuclear power station in Ardèche, southern France was shut down on Tuesday after a problem with the cooling system. EDF, the French energy company, reported the incident just before midnight local time and shut down the reactor. Water from the Rhone river is used to cool the nuclear plant, which employs more than 1,000 people, and the French Nuclear Safety authority (ASN) said vegetation had blocked the intake. The flow of water was restored in the early hours of the morning and the emergency alert was lifted around 6:30 on Wednesday. The accident was classified as a level two situation on the seven point scale of international nuclear incidents.

"State officials reacted strongly last week when Vermont Yankee admitted it had underground pipes that could leak radioactivity. But the news should not have come as a complete surprise. A nuclear engineer who advises the legislature says he alerted the state last summer and fall about the potential problems with the underground pipes. VPR's John Dillon reports: (Dillon) Arnie Gundersen is a nuclear engineer who works as a consultant for the Legislature to keep track of Vermont Yankee issues. Gundersen also serves on a Public Oversight Panel that reviewed Yankee's reliability to operate for another 20 years. The oversight panel asked Yankee if it had underground pipes that could leak - and plant officials repeatedly said no. That information turned out not to be true. Yankee disclosed last week that it has underground pipes - and that the pipes could be the source of radioactive tritium found in a groundwater monitoring well 30 feet from the Connecticut River. "

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Hospital officials say a computer-resetting error caused radiation overdoses for 206 patients who underwent CT scans at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. In a written statement Monday, hospital officials said "a misunderstanding about an embedded default setting applied by the machine" resulted in a higher than expected amount of radiation. Officials say the 206 patients received eight times the normal dose of radiation - an error that went undetected for 18 months. A hospital spokesman says about 40 percent of the patients lost patches of hair as a result. The scanners' manufacturer, General Electric, says the machine was not defective. As a result of the discovery, the FDA issued an alert Thursday urging hospitals nationwide to review their safety protocols for CT scans.

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Hospital officials say a computer-resetting error caused radiation overdoses for 206 patients who underwent CT scans at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. In a written statement Monday, hospital officials said "a misunderstanding about an embedded default setting applied by the machine" resulted in a higher than expected amount of radiation. Officials say the 206 patients received eight times the normal dose of radiation - an error that went undetected for 18 months. A hospital spokesman says about 40 percent of the patients lost patches of hair as a result. The scanners' manufacturer, General Electric, says the machine was not defective. As a result of the discovery, the FDA issued an alert Thursday urging hospitals nationwide to review their safety protocols for CT scans.

Duke Energy says first two tests were sufficient, denies waning interest Duke Energy, which has been testing French-made mixed-oxide nuclear fuels in its Catawba 1 reactor to gauge the suitability of similar fuels to be made at Savannah River Site, has exercised an option not to conduct a third 18-month testing cycle. Sign up for breaking news alerts from The Chronicle "It was used for two operating cycles and we made a decision that an additional cycle is not required," said Rita Sipe, a nuclear media relations spokeswoman for Duke Energy. The reason, she said, is that the first two cycles provided sufficient data that will be analyzed as part of the evaluation process for MOX, which is made by blending plutonium from dismantled nuclear bombs with conventional reactor fuels.

Duke Energy says first two tests were sufficient, denies waning interest Duke Energy, which has been testing French-made mixed-oxide nuclear fuels in its Catawba 1 reactor to gauge the suitability of similar fuels to be made at Savannah River Site, has exercised an option not to conduct a third 18-month testing cycle. Sign up for breaking news alerts from The Chronicle "It was used for two operating cycles and we made a decision that an additional cycle is not required," said Rita Sipe, a nuclear media relations spokeswoman for Duke Energy. The reason, she said, is that the first two cycles provided sufficient data that will be analyzed as part of the evaluation process for MOX, which is made by blending plutonium from dismantled nuclear bombs with conventional reactor fuels.

"Some research is suspended at a Columbia University center, but experts fear the case could deter people from participating in crucial brain-imaging studies. The suspension of some research at a prominent Columbia University brain-imaging lab because of sloppy practices could have repercussions beyond that laboratory, potentially affecting brain-imaging studies nationwide and raising questions about the safety of participants, research experts said Saturday. The Kreitchman PET Center in Manhattan, part of Columbia University, halted brain-imaging studies after federal authorities reportedly found safety violations that could endanger patients and invalidate research findings. The center has admitted to poor manufacturing processes of radioactive compounds injected in patients and to sub-par record-keeping. Columbia authorities reported the findings of its own internal investigation in a July 6 letter to the Food and Drug Administration. Lab personnel are alleged to have used chemicals that had failed required purity tests when conducting brain scans of people with mental disorders. The scans, called PET scans, produce images of the brain and various neurological processes. » Don't miss a thing. Get breaking news alerts delivered to your inbox. The chemicals used at the Columbia center were found to have contained impurities at levels well above what is permitted under FDA protocols. The center has halted research using those locally manufactured chemicals; the lab itself remains open, is still conducting other types of research and continues to see patients. Experts disagree on whether the Columbia incident is an anomaly or if such slip-ups are widespread in research labs. But the documented lapses highlight apparent disregard for patient safety that rarely comes to light at major research institutions. No patients were harmed, according to a statement from Columbia University released Saturday. But the practices also include failure to report use of the su

Jan. 21 -- On Jan. 15, in his second to last full day in office, outgoing EPA Acting Administrator Marcus Peacock signed off on new Protective Action Guides (PAGs) for radioactive releases. They would permit radioactive concentrations in drinking water hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, and even millions of times higher than EPA's longstanding standards. Because it takes a few days after approval for such matters to be published in the Federal Register and be official, publication wasn't achieved before the Inauguration. Unless the Obama acts quickly, however, they will be published in the next few days. The Committee to Bridge the Gap (CBG) and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) today called on the new Obama Administration to pull back the PAGs before they are published in the Federal Register. Read the CBG-PEER news release. A detailed report by Committee to Bridge the Gap reveals, radionuclide by radionuclide, the astronomical concentrations of radioactive contamination in drinking water proposed, which are orders of magnitude higher than EPA's longstanding drinking water limits. Scores of organizations and individuals in October sent a letter to then-EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson strenuously objecting to plans to greatly increase permissible public exposures from a wide range of events resulting in release of radioactivity. The last-minute Bush Administration action would publish for public review and comment only about a third of the actual PAG text (see pre-publication draft here). The full, unexpurgated internal confidential EPA draft can be read here. Both were initially obtained by the trade publication Inside EPA. Previous correspondence criticizing the related Dept. of Homeland Security's "Dirty Bomb" Protective Action Guides - Relaxed Cleanup Standards can be viewed here and here. For more information, contact Dan Hirsch at 831-336-8003 or email: contact.cbg@gmail.com

Communities up and down the Savannah River and on both shores could be harmed by the 88 million gallons of water needed each day in running two proposed nuclear reactors near Waynesboro, Ga., an environmentalist group says. Sign up for breaking news alerts from The Chronicle State regulators shouldn't grant a permit for expansion of Plant Vogtle until more study is done, according to the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, a Georgia-based environmental group. The group issued its warning in written testimony it filed recently with the Georgia Public Service Commission, which is considering whether to permit construction of the reactors.

Box Elder residents should receive notices within the next week alerting them to the presence of radium, a naturally occurring type of radioactive metal, in one of the city's two water wells, Mayor Al Dial said. Box Elder's notice stems from a violation that occurred this summer, when high levels of radium 226 and radium 228 were detected during a routine test of a new well. The well has since passed another quarterly test, Dial said. After a water system fails a water test, the system is considered in violation of the standards. To bring a water system into compliance takes four quarterly tests with an annual average that is below the standard.

REGULAR loads of nuclear waste are travelling along Cheshire roads, it has been revealed. Emergency services went on full alert after a trailer carrying a load of low-level waste from Sellafield Ltd's Capenhurst decommissioning site to its repository at Drigg in Cumbria became unhitched from the HGV tractor towing it near the junction of the A41 and the A5117 at Great Sutton.

The Nov. 25 column by Robert Alvarez is full of assertions that require clarification and/or rebuttal. Sign up for breaking news alerts from The Chronicle First of all, reprocessing of used nuclear fuel is an issue because about 95 percent of the energy value in the original fuel remains in the "spent" fuel , so it begs the question of "shouldn't that valuable resource be recovered?" Secondly, the concept of fast reactors coupled with thermal reactors and reprocessing results in minimum waste and sustainable nuclear fuel supplies for hundreds of years.

The President intends to appoint the following individuals to be Members of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, for the remainder of four-year terms expiring 04/19/12: B. John Garrick, of California, and upon approval designate Chair; William Howard Arnold, of Michigan; George Milton Hornberger, of Virginia; Andrew C. Kadak, of Rhode Island; Ali Mosleh, of Maryland; Henry Petroski, of North Carolina.

TWENTY thousand families living near Devonport Dockyard will be called or sent a text message to warn them in the event of nuclear leaks or other emergencies, under council plans to be announced next year. The ground-breaking emergency notification system, called Informer, is being brought in because the dockyard's siren is not seen as an adequate 21st-century way of warning people living in what has been described as one of the most dangerous areas in Britain. In addition to the dockyard's nuclear facilities, Britain's 14th largest city has a Royal Navy weapons depot, a petrol terminal at Cattedown, a fuel depot at Torpoint and a gas pipeline.

Britain learned that apartheid South Africa was preparing to test an atomic bomb only after being alerted by the Russians. Previously secret papers released at the National Archives show how James Callaghan, the Labour prime minister, was informed in August 1977 of a secret test site in the Kalahari Desert in a personal letter from Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet president. A Soviet spy satellite had discovered the site at Vastrap, in a remote area south of South Africa's border with Botswana, a week earlier. Two 750-foot shafts had been drilled in preparation for underground explosions. The Americans appear to have possessed similar satellite imagery but failed to inform their closest ally until after the Brezhnev letter.

Some feel reminded of Kabul, or even Baghdad in the most dangerous times during the insurgency. Since a truck loaded with 600 kilograms of explosives was rammed into the Marriott hotel near the National Assembly building five weeks ago and killed dozens, Pakistan's capital Islamabad has been on high alert. The barricaded government district increasingly resembles a no-go zone. Concrete blocks along Constitution Avenue slow cars down to little more than walking speed, with police checkpoints set up at short distances from each other. Heavily armed security forces patrol side streets. Officials plan to erect a 15-kilometre concrete wall around Pakistan's centre of power, sealing off the ministries, parliament, the Supreme Court and an enclave of foreign embassies.

Both units at PPL's 2,360-MW Susquehanna nuclear plant in northeastern Pennsylvania were continuing to run at full power Monday afternoon after the operators reported an unusual event at Unit 2's pump room. The company declared an alert, the second-lowest of four emergency classifications established by the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

A big decision about nuclear weapons facing the next president will be "to build or not to build," but there's more to this story. The new president will need to decide whether to keep thousands of American nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, ready to be fired at a moment's notice, or to eliminate this potentially catastrophic cold war posture.

Sweden shut down one of its nuclear reactors on Tuesday to check the plant's control rods after cracks were found in the rods at an identical plant, the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority (SSM) reports. The agency said it had been alerted last week that a routine annual inspection at the Oskarshamn nuclear plant in eastern Sweden had turned up cracks in Reactor 3's control rods, which are used to control the rate of fission of uranium and plutonium.

TMI-Alert Inc. sharply disagrees with the results of a recent poll paid for and released by Exelon on the relicensing of Three Mile Island. At issue are the questions that were not asked. The poll also failed to note that a majority of the folks who actually testified before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission were against extending the license of TMI-1.

Germany's Asse nuclear storage facility is to get a new operator who will be responsible to the federal environment ministry following revelations this week of serious safety violations at the site. Germany's Federal Office for Radioactive Protection (BfS) is to take over the ailing Asse nuclear storage facility in the state of Lower Saxony after strong criticism of operators Helmholtz's German Research Center for Environmental Health in Munich for failing to alert the government to violations at the site.