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Finnish officials have rejected claims that a missing Russian-manned freighter was carrying a 'secret nuclear cargo', as mystery surrounding the Arctic Sea's disappearance continues. Russia and NATO joined forces on Sunday in an international hunt for the ship that vanished from the radar after crossing the English Channel in late July. Jukka Laaksonen, Head of the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority, confirmed reports that firefighters had conducted radiation tests on the Arctic Sea before its departure from Finland.

A pair of Russian Tu-95 Bear strategic bombers carried out a routine patrol flight on Thursday over the Arctic Ocean off Alaska, an Air Force spokesman said. Lt. Col. Vladimir Drik told RIA Novosti that the bombers had been "accompanied for one hour by two [U.S.] F-15 fighters over the Arctic Ocean near the shores of Alaska."

Israel was linked to the interception of the missing cargo ship Arctic Sea last month, a senior figure close to Israeli intelligence has told the BBC. The source said Israel had told Moscow it knew the ship was secretly carrying a Russian air defence system for Iran. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has dismissed speculation that S-300 missiles were on board the ship. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, meanwhile, has denied making a secret visit to Moscow on Monday.

Top Russian officials on Wednesday acknowledged for the first time that a ship hijacked in the Baltic Sea might have been carrying a suspicious cargo, deepening the mystery around its seizure. Speculation has been raging that the Arctic Sea -- seized by pirates last month and missing for weeks before its recapture by the Russian navy in the Atlantic -- may have held weapons or even nuclear materials. The Maltese-flagged vessel with a crew of 15 Russian sailors was officially heading to Algeria with a cargo of timber. But Moscow's top investigator, Alexander Bastrykin, cast doubt on that theory. "We do not rule out the possibility that the Arctic Sea transported something other than wood," Bastrykin told the official government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta.

Russia is planning a fleet of floating and submersible nuclear power stations to exploit Arctic oil and gas reserves, causing widespread alarm among environmentalists. A prototype floating nuclear power station being constructed at the SevMash shipyard in Severodvinsk is due to be completed next year. Agreement to build a further four was reached between the Russian state nuclear corporation, Rosatom, and the northern Siberian republic of Yakutiya in February.

"The trackless tundra reaches a fork in the road this weekend as scrutiny begins of a massive uranium mine proposed for a pristine patch of the central Arctic. Sunday night will see the first of two weeks of community meetings in seven Arctic hamlets to set terms for an environmental review of the $1.5-billion Kiggavik project. The mine is proposed for just west of Baker Lake, Nunavut, by French uranium giant Areva. Everyone from federal scientists to Inuit hunters agrees the project could have major impacts on the land and wildlife. And with at least a dozen other major uranium projects in the pipeline for the area, there's agreement that how the Nunavut Impact Review Board balances Kiggavik's effects with the need for jobs will define the so-called barren lands for a generation. "Where do we draw the line?" asked Joan Scottie, a hunter from Baker Lake who has fought uranium development for 20 years."

"After a long period of inaction due to tight financing, the Russian nuclear fleet operator Atomflot gears up for decommissioning several of its old nuclear vessels - starting with the 1977-built nuclear icebreaker Siberia. Spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste have been removed from the ship, and works done to ensure the hull bottom is watertight. Next in line are the icebreaker Arktika and the nuclear maintenance vessels Lotta, Lepse, and Volodarsky. Alexey Pavlov, 29/06-2010 - Translated by Maria Kaminskaya Each nuclear icebreaker has its own finite useful life period - an estimated time frame that the vessel can remain in service. It is impossible to keep extending the life span of an icebreaker's various mechanisms without risking an increased incidence of equipment malfunctions and system failures. The first to be laid to rest on Atomflot's roster of nuclear icebreakers was the icebreaker Lenin: The veteran icebreaker is now permanently moored in the far northern city of Murmansk, retrofitted to function as a museum. Lenin's successors will be sent for complete dismantling, beginning with the Siberia. The vessel, which was put into commission in 1977 and broke Arctic ice until it was taken out of service in 1992, has been awaiting decommissioning for 18 years. Until very recently, Russia had no sufficient means to allocate to the costly procedure."

"The world's first floating nuclear power plant will be set afloat on Wednesday. The plant will be operational in the Russian Arctic by the end of 2012. The solemn ceremony marking the launching of the plant will take place at the Baltic shipyard in St. Petersburg on Wednesday June 30, reports the press office of Russia's State nuclear Agency Rosatom. After put on sea, the floating nuclear power plant, named Akademik Lomonosov, will be completed and undergo different stages of testing before it will sail to the north during the autumn 2012."

"THE POLITICIANS responsible for deciding on nuclear power have been tricked, according to one policy analyst. With the help of Finland's Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK), nuclear power companies have propagated a misleading image of emission-free, or at least low-emission, nuclear power. "Nuclear power companies employ a strategy familiar from the tobacco industry. There is always some argument against damaging claims, problems are downplayed and critics demonised. A sort of Finlandisation prevails with regard to the nuclear sector," argues Mika Flöjt, an environmental and energy policy analyst at the University of Lapland. Flöjt works in a unit linked to the university's Arctic Centre. According to Flöjt, the claim of emission-free power has been touted by nuclear power companies, STUK and the Ministry of Employment and the Economy, and accepted without scrutiny."

June days lengthen and snow melts to reveal tiny bright wildflowers and nutritious lichens. Thousands of pregnant caribou gather in tight circles. They are gaunt and exhausted from their six-hundred-mile migration from the boreal forests of Saskatchewan. They have traversed steep mountains through howling blizzards and crossed raging ice-choked rivers into the subarctic taiga, then in single file trudged on to the arctic tundra to offer the world a new generation. The castanet-clicking of heel bones mixes with groans of delivery. The thrumming of desperate mothers and the bleating of lost calves create a chaotic din that can be heard for miles across the treeless expanse.

In a 1968 plane crash, the US military lost an atom bomb in Greenland's Arctic ice. But this was no isolated case. Up to 50 nuclear warheads are believed to have gone missing during the Cold War, and not all of them are in unpopulated areas. It was a little early to be swimming in the Mediterranean that year. But in early March 1966, Manuel Fraga Iribarne, the Spanish information minister at the time, and Biddle Duke, the American ambassador in Madrid, together with their respective families, plunged into the chilly waters off the Costa Cálida. Journalists from around the world had gathered on the beach of the small village of Palomares to report on the two families' spring bathing outing. Their interest would have been surprising, if it hadn't been for the hydrogen bomb lying on the ocean floor only a few kilometers away, a bomb with more than 1,000 times the explosive force of the one that flattened Hiroshima.

Enough processed uranium to make six nuclear weapons was secretly transported thousands of miles by truck, rail and ship on a monthlong trip from a research reactor in Budapest, Hungary, to a facility in Russia so it could be more closely protected against theft, U.S. officials revealed Wednesday. The shipment, conducted under tight secrecy and security, included a three-week trip by cargo ship through the Mediterranean, up the English Channel and the North Sea to Russia's Arctic seaport of Murmansk, the only port Russia allows for handling nuclear material.

Enough processed uranium to make six nuclear weapons was secretly transported thousands of miles by truck, rail and ship on a monthlong trip from a research reactor in Budapest, Hungary, to a facility in Russia so it could be more closely protected against theft, U.S. officials revealed Wednesday. The shipment, conducted under tight secrecy and security, included a three-week trip by cargo ship through the Mediterranean, up the English Channel and the North Sea to Russia's Arctic seaport of Murmansk, the only port Russia allows for handling nuclear material. The 13 radiation-proof casks, each weighing 17,000 pounds, arrived by rail at the secure nuclear material facility at Mayak in Siberia on Wednesday, carrying 341 pounds of weapons usable uranium, said Kenneth Baker, a National Nuclear Security Administration official who oversaw the complex project.

In the course of summer, Russia removed another 46 strontium-fuelled lighthouses from the coast of the White Sea and the Barents and Kara Seas. With Norwegian project support, Russia has now removed 180 radioactive lighthouses between Murmansk and the Novaya Zemlya and replaced them with solar cell installations. Strontium-fuelled lighthouse (Fylkesmannen.no)The 46 lighthouses were all sent to the VNIITFA institute in Moscow, Rosbaltnord.ru reports with reference to RIA Novosti. Another 11 lighthouses will be brought from the island of Vaigach to Moscow next summer.

ST. PETERSBURG - Fifteen years ago, in March of 1994, a report was published which, in essence, saved the Arctic region from a nuclear catastrophe. The report by the then little-known Bellona Foundation uncovered the secrets that were for decades hidden by Soviet authorities, and later, the Russian military. Bellona, 18/03-2009 - Translated by Charles Digges The subject of the secret was some 150 decommissioned nuclear submarines languishing at dockside at the ports of the Russian Northern Fleet with their spent nuclear fuel still on board. These cast-off submarines were rusting and their terrifying cargo of spent nuclear fuel could well have ended up in the waters of the Barents and White Seas at any moment. The successor of the USSR - the Democratic Russia - had no money to devote to their dismantlement.

Finnish authorities dismissed talk Sunday that the Arctic Sea was bearing a cargo of nuclear material, as Russia and NATO joined forces in an international hunt for the missing vessel. Jukka Laaksonen, head of the Finnish Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority, said firefighters conducted radiation tests on the ship -- last reported off Cape Verde -- at a port in Finland before it began a voyage full of intrigue.

As the prospective price of new reactors continues to soar, and as the first "new generation" construction projects sink in French and Finnish soil, Republicans are introducing a bill to Congress demanding 100 new nuclear reactors in the US within twenty years. It explicitly welcomes "alternatives" such as oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and "clean coal." Though it endorses some renewables such as solar and wind power, it calls for no cap on carbon emissions. According to the New York Times, this is the defining GOP alternative to a Democratic energy plan headed for a House vote later this month. But niggling questions like who will pay for these reactors, who will insure them, where will the fuel come from, where will waste go and who will protect them from terrorists are not on the agenda. Given recent certain-to-prove-optimistic estimates of approximately $10 billion per reactor, the plan envisions a trillion-plus dollar commitment to a newly nuke-centered nation.

When the budget fight got underway earlier this year, Democrats hammered Republicans for criticizing President Obama's blueprint without a plan of their own. Now, as House Democrats work on cap-and-trade legislation to reform greenhouse gas emissions--one of Obama's main domestic priorities, along with health care and education--House Republicans have crafted an energy plan of their own before the debate has hit full swing. House Republicans unveiled their energy plan yesterday. It includes offshore drilling leases, 100 new nuclear reactors in the next 20 years (and an extended look at the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository), more Arctic drilling, and a $500 million prize for the first U.S. automaker to sell 50,000 cars that get 100 miles per gallon. Other prizes are included as well, administered by an energy trust fund.

House Republicans are calling for a hundred new nuclear power plants to be built in the next two decades as part of an energy plan they say is a better alternative than one championed by Democrats. The legislation unveiled by the GOP Wednesday would also increase production of oil and gas offshore, open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling and spur refinery construction. The money from the new drilling would go into a trust fund that would pay for the development of renewable energy.

The Murmansk Region and Norway's northerly Finnmark County will assists and finance the liquidation of 71 radiologically dangerous Radioisotope Thermal Electric Generators (RTGs) used to power military lighthouses for Russia's Baltic Sea. Russia will also assist in financing the project. Alexey Pavlov, 24/04-2009 - Translated by Charles Digges Eight years ago, the Finnmark province and the Murmansk Region agreed to jointly solve environmental problems in the region. Replacing RTGs with thermoelectric generators for lighthouses fell within the framework of this cooperative effort. The RTGs had fallen into decrepitude over many years and become a radiological hazards for the entire Arctic region, as well as an attractive source of radiological theft for would be terrorists because of their remote locations. The Russian Ministry of the Interior contributed 747 million roubles ($23.7 million).