Group items tagged

Progress Energy's road to building its proposed nuclear power plant in Levy County northwest of Dunnellon is becoming anything but smooth. On Wednesday, the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board - an arm of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission - ruled that the Green Party of Florida and two other environmental groups could challenge the utility company's plan for two new nuclear reactors and had successfully raised major concerns about the plant's potential environmental impact. That means Progress Energy will have to argue its case about those environmental issues during a legal hearing, including in oral arguments, or change some of its construction plans.

An environmental group Friday asked the state Supreme Court to block an application for South Carolina Electric & Gas Co. to build two nuclear reactors in Fairfield County. In the lawsuit, Friends of the Earth challenges the constitutionality of a 2007 law that allows utilities to charge customers higher rates to cover future building costs for reactors. The SCANA Corp. said it wasn't surprised that Friends of the Earth appealed a regulators' decisions allowing it move forward with a project expected to cost $10 billion.

Southern Co.'s Plant Vogtle in Burke County has moved into position to become the demonstration site for the federal licensing process required of all nuclear power plants with the new Westinghouse AP1000 reactors. Previously, the Tennessee Valley Authority's Bellefonte site was to be what the Nuclear Regulatory Commission refers to as the "reference site," from which other companies applying for "combined operating license" permits could duplicate documentation already approved by the NRC.

"30 October 2011 TOKYO - Thousands of people angered by Japan's nuclear power plant accident rallied in Fukushima on Sunday to demand full compensation for victims of the crisis, and swift decontamination of their neighbourhoods. The rally in Fukushima city, some 60 kilometres (40 miles) from the plant, was attended by around 10,000 people, its organisers estimated. 'Our town should be decontaminated at the earliest possible date and our life should be restored as it was before March 11,' Tamotsu Baba, mayor of Namie town, told the rally, according to Jiji Press. A 9.0-magnitude earthquake and monster tsunami on March 11 crippled the plant's cooling systems and sparked reactor meltdowns, a series of explosions and the release of huge amounts of radiation into the environment. All the 21,000 residents in Namie, just north of the Fukushima Daiichi plant, were forced to evacuate from their homes and remained sheltered in the region, also called Fukushima, and elsewhere in the country. More than seven months after the disaster, tens of thousands of people remain evacuated from homes and businesses in a 20 kilometre (12 mile) no-go zone around the plant and in pockets beyond. Fully decontaminating those areas is expected to take decades. "