Group items tagged

Belgian authorities have warned people in the south of the country not to eat locally grown produce after a leak from a nuclear research institute. A safety alert was issued after a leak of radioactive iodine gas from a laboratory in Fleurus, near the southern city of Charleroi.

Will the November 4, 2008, election doom the future of Nevada? That sounds ominous, I know, but this election could be a make-or-break moment in history for the Yucca Mountain Project. This is the ill-conceived plan to bury nuclear waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain. Everyone in this state knows the problems inherent in this project and should be on alert. But also this should serve as a "heads-up" to everyone in the country.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission recently denied a petition requesting it comprehensively review nuclear plants' emergency plans when plants apply for license extensions. Eric Epstein, who filed the petition and leads the nuclear-watchdog group Three Mile Island Alert, said the denial effectively clears the way for PPL Corp.'s Susquehanna Steam Electric Station in Salem Township to have its license extended 20 years. The station's two units face a renewal hearing Sept. 30 at the NRC's headquarters in Maryland.

* How many nuclear weapons are there in the world? 26,000 * How many nuclear weapons are on high alert, meaning they can be fired within minutes and detonated at the target site in less than an hour? 3,500 * How many nuclear weapons does it take to kill a million people? One * The last time nuclear weapons were used more than 200,000 people died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. * So when should we use nuclear weapons again?

LJUBLJANA, Slovenia (AFP) - Slovenia was caught in a nuclear controversy Thursday after admitting that it wrongly told other countries that a water leak that forced it to shut down a nuclear reactor was only an exercise. The shutdown on Wednesday led to the EU raising a Europe-wide radiation alert for the first time since the system was put in place in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster 22 years ago.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has called a meeting regarding the GE Plant in Castle Hayne. The commission is concerned about an alert the global nuclear fuels facility issued in January when moisture may have leaked into a container of uranium dioxide powder. The executive director of the environmental watchdog group NC Warn said it was most likely a human error. However Jim Warren voiced his concern, saying, "That's the NRC's clever way of saying there was no risk."

China and leading Western experts are on the alert against possible radiation leaks from the Sichuan earthquake as the main centers for designing, making and storing nuclear arms lie in the shattered earthquake zone.

First, an overflowing tub at a French nuclear plant spilled uranium into the groundwater. Then a burst pipe leaked uranium at another nuclear site, raising an alert on Friday. The two accidents within two weeks, both at sites run by French nuclear giant Areva, have raised questions about safety and control measures in one of the world's most nuclear-dependent nations, and given fodder to anti-nuclear activists.

Alert: Send comments to the NRC on expanding evacuation zones to 15 miles around reactors

As Pennsylvania approaches the 30th anniversary of Three Mile Island's (TMI) partial-core meltdown, the worst commercial nuclear accident in American history, experts gathered in Harrisburg yesterday to discuss nuclear power. They didn't spare it much criticism. Eric Epstein, chair of Three Mile Island Alert (TMIA), a group that advocates for alternatives to nuclear power before the state Public Utility Commission and other governmental bodies, said this technology's proponents understate its costs. Because of the promise public officials have seen in nuclear power, he said at a Commonwealth Foundation (CF) panel yesterday, more than 60 percent of all federal research subsidization of energy research went to nuclear analysis between 1950 and 1994. Some hoped nuclear power could shoulder America's energy burden so mush so that in the 1950s Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Louis Strauss said future generations might "enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter." Some policymakers foresaw a day when Americans would even use nuclear energy to fuel their automobiles.

Plan would bring 500 containers of plutonium to site Savannah River Site is exploring options to expand its K Area storage facility to accommodate 500 additional containers of plutonium from other nuclear weapons sites. Sign up for breaking news alerts from The Chronicle The plans stem from a 2007 decision by the U.S. Energy Department to consolidate surplus plutonium from three sites -- Hanford in Washington state, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The original plan called for shipping 2,300 containers from Hanford, 96 from Los Alamos and 115 from Lawrence Livermore, said Allen Gunter, senior technical adviser for Savannah River Site's Nuclear Materials Stabilization Project.

This small alert from Moody's Investor Service has been making the rounds these past two weeks. So we'd be remiss if we didn't throw it out there with schmear o' analysis. The "special comment" issued last month is pretty plain. Moody's analysts found that the construction of nuclear-power plants represents a huge financial gamble - a "bet the farm" proposition - that proceeds only at the whim of innumerable political factors over a lengthy time line.

This time around, U.S. Senate skeptics who killed the nuclear test-ban treaty a decade ago must take into account a new, $1-billion verification network underpinning the pact, the treaty chief said Wednesday. In 1999, "the system was a blueprint," Tibor Toth said of the high-tech web of stations on alert for nuclear bomb tests. Now "I could call it a `verification Manhattan Project," he said, referring to the all-out U.S. program that built the first bombs in the 1940s. Toth, who heads the U.N.-affiliated Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, spoke with The Associated Press on the eve of a conference of some 150 nations convened every other year to urge those that have not ratified the treaty, including the United States, to do so. The two-day session will be held in parallel Thursday with a summit of the 15 U.N. Security Council members on the subject of nuclear nonproliferation, presided over by U.S. President Barack Obama.

A former AmerenUE engineer is accusing the utility and the federal agency that regulates nuclear power of failing to adequately investigate a 2003 incident that led to a two-hour unplanned shutdown at the Callaway reactor. A Nuclear Regulatory Commission investigation found that control room operators delayed a move to insert control rods - equipment required to keep the reactor shut down - since the error occurred just before a scheduled shutdown for maintenance. The NRC called the delay "not prudent," but noted it did not threaten human safety. After discovering the problem four years after it occurred during a routine review and alerting plant managers, nuclear engineer Lawrence Criscione claimed retaliation by his supervisors, including a negative performance review and the loss of his operators' license. Criscione was paid more than $500,000 in a confidential settlement in exchange for his resignation in 2008 and an agreement to not pursue any future legal claims against the St. Louis-based utility, documents obtained by The Associated Press show.

An Italian court has ordered the recall of 10,000 tonnes of wood fuel pellets imported from Lithuania over fears that they could have dangerous levels of radioactivity, newspapers reported on Sunday. The alarm was raised after someone in the northern Aosta Valley region, who had bought the pellets, sent them for analysis because they did not burn well. The results showed that they contained caesium 137, a highly toxic radioactive substance normally produced by a nuclear explosion or from the combustion of a nuclear reactor. The contaminated pellets themselves are not dangerous to humans, said Salvatore Aprile of the Aosta Valley court: the dangers comes from the ashes and the smoke produced when they are burned. The court ordered their recall on Saturday. The pellets at the centre of the alert were imported from Lithuania last autumn and were sold in 11 regions in the north and south of Italy.