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Xcel Energy says a monitoring well at its nuclear power plant in Monticello detected a radioactive element at higher levels than allowed under one of the company's permits. The monitoring well showed levels of tritium, a mildly radioactive type of hydrogen, that were below the Environmental Protection Agency's drinking water standards. But the amount exceeded what is allowed under Xcel's National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit. In reporting the incident to state and federal regulators on Thursday, Xcel said no elevated levels were detected in any other monitoring wells. The company also says there's no indication tritium has been released off the power plant site. Officials are investigating the source of the tritium.

Sellafield has pleaded guilty to health and safety breaches after two contractors were exposed to radiation. The workers were refurbishing a floor at the site's plutonium finishing and storage plant in July 2007 when they were exposed to airborne contamination. Sellafield Ltd admitted failing to discharge its duty under the Health and Safety Act 1974 at Whitehaven Magistrates' Court on Friday.

A helicopter is scheduled to fly low over the center of Hanford today looking for hot spots where animals have spread radioactive contamination in hundreds of places among the sagebrush. CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. will be conducting an aerial radiological survey of the "BC controlled area," 13.7 square miles that have had little human intrusion. But it is just south of the BC cribs and trenches that 50 million gallons of liquid waste contaminated with radioactive salts were discharged during the Cold War. Animals attracted to the salts spread the waste across miles of the Hanford desert.

THE government should halt all plans to build more nuclear power stations with immediate effect after it was revealed that Suffolk was just hours away from a nuclear accident, campaigners claimed last night. About 10,000 gallons of radioactively contaminated water was discharged into the North Sea in January 2007 after a pipe, carrying cooling water to an engineered pond containing highly radioactive spent fuel rods, burst at Sizewell A power station on the Suffolk coast. Now an independent consultant's report has said that the power station was about ten hours away from a serious accident which could have drained the cooling pond, uncovered the old fuel and started a fire which would have released highly radioactive products.

A LEAK of radioactivity at Sellafield which has lasted for half a century has finally been plugged. The radioactive water is known to have seeped into the ground under the nuclear site for up to 50 years. The public was first told about it in the 1970s, since which time it has been monitored regularly at safe levels. But it is one of the radiation sources which has led to contamination on local beaches. The liquid has seeped from a crack in one of four huge concrete waste tanks which, in the past, processed effluent before being discharged into the Irish Sea.

A former reactor operator at the Peach Bottom nuclear plant deliberately failed to report a drunk-driving arrest, according to an investigation by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In a second apparent violation of nuclear requirements, the NRC said a former maintenance supervisor at the plant who was given unescorted access privileges failed to report that he had been dishonorably discharged from the military. A letter noting the apparent violations was sent to Peach Bottom owner Exelon on June 5. Both alleged violations followed probes by the NRC's Office of Investigations. In the investigation of the reactor operator, the NRC said it was determined the operator deliberately failed to promptly report his drunk-driving arrest and criminal charges as required.

Swedish-based electricity group Vattenfall sacked the head of one of Germany's nuclear power stations on Tuesday, three days after a short circuit crippled the reactor he was in charge of. Although the fault did not involve the reactor itself, it has brought the controversial issue of nuclear power back into play just three months before the country's general election. The incident occured at the Kruemmel reactor east of Hamburg, one of Germany's 17 reactors. Vattenfall blamed the plant manager, whom it did not name, for failing to install discharge detectors on a transformer as promised to the German authorities. It added that the two electrical transformers supplying power to on-site machinery would not be repaired, but completely replaced after one of the units failed Saturday.

Paul Dorfman is with the Nuclear Consultation Group and a senior research fellow at the University of Warwick. The opinions expressed are his own. "Justification" of new-build nuclear power is a high-level assessment of whether the benefits of building new nuclear plants outweigh the detriments. Once the justification decision has been taken it will be difficult if not impossible to re-open this major issue. And there are real problems - for example, information on how radiation-waste and radiation spent fuel from any new nuclear build could possibly be managed, or the health impact of radiation-discharges will not be fully assessed until after the "Justification" decision is taken. "Justification" of new-build nuclear power will be decided even before the new reactor design is assessed.

RADIOACTIVITY leaking from a pipe, which was first spotted on the day of the Prime Minister's visit to Sellafield, had been escaping into the open for 14 months, it has been revealed. The incident has been raised to level two on the International Event scale - the highest at Sellafield since the major leak in Thorp four years ago. Sellafield Ltd said: "There is no relation between the two. The amount of radioactivity involved in this incident was very low." The leak was discovered on January 23 - the day the Prime Minister made his announcement about new reactors. The radioactivity came from an overhead ventilation duct carrying water vapour (condensate) from the Magnox reprocessing plant for dilution treatment before authorised discharge to the sea. There was a steady drip from a faulty valve flange contaminating a two metre square concrete slab. A walkway had to be cordoned off to prevent access. No workers are said to have been harmed and no contamination was found above normal background levels.

RADIOACTIVE waste from a new generation of nuclear power stations will have to be stored above ground for 100 years, the Government has been told. The claim comes as the possibility of a nuclear power station being built to replace the existing one at Wylfa on Anglesey continues to grow. Hugh Richards, of the Welsh Anti Nuclear Alliance (Wana), told officials at the Department for Environment and Climate Change: "Both the promoters of new reactors and the Government have largely ignored the implications of those reactors discharging high burn-up spent fuel. New-build spent fuel, already acknowledged as twice as hot and twice as radioactive as legacy-spent fuel, will have to cool down for 100 years on each site before it can go for deep underground disposal.

A report showing the cause of tritium contamination at the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant is being kept under wraps by plant and federal officials. It's unconscionable that they are choosing to withhold that information from the public. How are area residents supposed to rest easy knowing about the contamination and its possible spread, yet they are denied data about the cause of the problem? Advertisement Exelon, which said it believes it found the source - two pipes that have since been replaced - continues to investigate. But a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman said the plume of contamination is likely headed toward the plant's discharge canal, which sends water back to Barnegat Bay. That's frightening.

The operators of Sellafield are to be prosecuted after two contractors received a "higher than anticipated" dose of radiation. The workers were refurbishing a floor at the site's plutonium finishing and storage plant in July 2007 when they were exposed to airborne contamination. Sellafield Ltd is accused of failing to discharge its duty under Section 3 (1) of the Health and Safety Act 1974. The case will be heard at Whitehaven Magistrates' Court on 24 July.

An area of seabed equivalent in size to more than 10 football pitches is to be checked for radioactive particles during the summer using a remotely operated vehicle, known as Trol. Fathoms, a company based near Dounreay in Caithness, will use the device off to scan 75,000 sq metres of seabed near the old effluent discharge outlet from the nuclear plant, and retrieve particles detected in the sediment. It can work in water up to 30 metres in depth.

Twenty-three years have passed since The Day of April 26 divided human fates into "before" and "after" the disaster at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Until this day it is the world's worst anthropogenic catastrophe unmatched for its environmental impact. For Ukraine Chornobyl is an everyday reality and a host of global-scale problems. Unfortunately, the problems caused by the catastrophe are as acute today as they were 23 years ago. Can one get used to devastated villages and abandoned fertile land? Today nothing prevents us from learning in detail what was happening on the banks of the Prypiat in late April-November 1986. In May 1986 foreigners were the first to learn the truth: on April 30 a Geiger counter on a Swedish nuclear power plant detected an unacceptably high level of radiation. After the Swedish government ascertained that the discharge did not take place in Sweden, it made an official inquiry. Mikhail Gorbachev addressed the people only 18 days after the disaster, on May 14. And three years passed before the information on the radioactivity conditions was declassified and publicized. After the explosion at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the scientists at the Institute for Nuclear Research (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) identified two groups of radionuclides emitted from the damaged reactor. One of them included volatile radioactive substances carried up high in aerosols with the streams of warm air (iodine-131, iodine-135, cesium-134, cesium-137, and strontium-90). Nearly 30 percent of cesium accumulated in the reactor core was emitted.

Workers found an elevated level of radioactive tritium in water on the site of the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant in Lacey on Wednesday, according to plant officials. Advertisement The tritium level - 102,000 picocuries per liter - is five times higher than the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency limit for drinking water. A picocurie is a measure of radioactivity. "There was no discharge . . . or release of tritium on the state's soil or into the waters," said David Benson, an Oyster Creek spokesman. "Our experts . . . are working to determine how that tritium might have entered" a concrete vault at the plant, according to Benson and a plant statement.

The failure of TVA's fly ash retention pond late last year made Kingston a household word in places far from Tennessee and made everybody a little more aware of the potential hazards of earthen dams. It prompted me to ask a few more questions about White Oak Dam on the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge reservation. The dam was constructed during World War II to help contain the radioactive discharges associated with the early nuclear operations upstream at what became known as Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

"You could call it the seven-year itch, and it's getting under the skin of environmental and conservation groups who want to see cooling towers at the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station. A coalition of 10 groups sent representatives to Trenton on Wednesday for the second public hearing on the proposed state water discharge permit for Oyster Creek, and they shared a common message: they want the state Department of Environmental Protection to shrink the permit's seven-year time frame for converting the reactor's once-through cooling water flow to a closed loop system."

"Russia and Sweden have found themselves amid an international scandal stemming from allegations that Russia dumped radioactive waste and chemical weapons into the Baltic Sea in the early 1990s - and that Sweden disregarded later reports of the discharges. Bellona, 15/02-2010 The Russian military are responsible for chemical and radioactive pollution off the coast of the Swedish island of Gotland, the Swedish channel Sveriges Television (SVT) charged in early February. But Russia's prominent environmentalist, academician Alexei Yablokov, who served as an advisor to the late President Boris Yeltsin, and who further would be unflinching in casting stones at the Kremlin for shady radioactive waste dumping practices, told SVT that the allegations are dubious. In a documentary that aired on SVT, journalists quoted the former Swedish secret service officer Donald Forsberg, who said radioactive waste and chemical weapons were being unloaded into the area between 1989 and 1992. The materials buried there at sea had allegedly come from a Soviet military base in Liepaja, Latvia, following the Russians' hurried retreat from that Soviet republic after the break-up of the USSR."

"On July 21, 2009, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar proposed a two-year withdrawal of about 1 million acres of Federal land near the Grand Canyon from future mineral entry. These lands are contained in three parcels: two parcels on U.S. Bureau of Land Management land to the north of the Grand Canyon (North and East Segregation Areas) and one on the Kaibab National Forest south of the Grand Canyon (South Segregation Area). The purpose of the two-year withdrawal is to examine the potential effects of restricting these areas from new mine development for the next 20 years. This proposed withdrawal initiated a period of study during which the effects of the withdrawal must be evaluated. At the direction of the Secretary, the U.S. Geological Survey began a series of short-term studies designed to develop additional information about the possible effects of uranium mining on the natural resources of the region. Dissolved uranium and other major, minor, and trace elements occur naturally in groundwater as the result of precipitation infiltrating from the surface to water-bearing zones and, presumably, to underlying regional aquifers. Discharges from these aquifers occur as seeps and springs throughout the region and provide valuable habitat and water sources for plants and animals. Uranium mining within the watershed may increase the amount of radioactive materials and heavy metals in the surface water and groundwater flowing into Grand Canyon National Park and the Colorado River, and deep mining activities may increase mobilization of uranium through the rock strata into the aquifers. In addition, waste rock and ore from mined areas may be transported away from the mines by wind and runoff."

"The U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has repeatedly affirmed that any exposure to radioactivity, no matter how small, carries a health risk. In its 2006 BEIR VII report ("Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation," 7th iteration), NAS even reported mounting evidence that low dose radiation carries a supra-linear health hazard. That is, low doses are disproportionately more harmful, per unit dose, than high dose radiation. The bottom line is, exposure to low dose radiation, such as intentional "routine" discharges or "accidental" leaks of tritium into the Connecticut River and downstream drinking water supplies and food chains, risks human and wildlife health impacts. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's 20,000 picocuries per liter limit on tritium in drinking water is not a conservative health standard. The state of California has a goal to limit tritium in drinking water to 400 picocuries per liter, a fifty-fold strengthening. The state of Colorado's goal is 500 picocuries per liter, a forty-fold strengthening. EPA's and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission's (NRC) radiological health standards are inappropriately based on "Reference Man" faulty assumptions, which leaves more vulnerable women, children and fetuses at increased risk."