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"While most people trace the dawn of the nuclear era to August 6, 1945, and the dropping of the atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, it really began three weeks earlier, in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico, with the top-secret Trinity test. Its sixty-fifth anniversary will be marked-or mourned, if you will-this Friday, July 16. Entire books have been written about the test, so I'll just touch on one key issue here briefly (there's much more in my book with Robert Jay Lifton, Hiroshima in America). It's related to a hallmark of the age that would follow: a new government obsession with secrecy, which soon spread from the nuclear program to all military and foreign affairs in the cold war era. In completing their work on building the bomb, Manhattan Project scientists knew it would produce deadly radiation but weren't sure exactly how much. The military planners were mainly concerned about the bomber pilots catching a dose, but J. Robert Oppenheimer, "The Father of the Bomb," worried, with good cause (as it turned out) that the radiation could drift a few miles and also fall to earth with the rain."

"Between 1946 and 1958 the United States tested 66 nuclear weapons on or near Bikini and Enewetak atolls, which had previously been evacuated. Populations living elsewhere in the Marshall Islands archipelago were exposed to measurable levels of radioactive fallout from 20 of these tests. In this carefully considered analysis, National Cancer Institute (NCI) experts estimate that as much as 1.6% of all cancers among those residents of the Marshall Islands alive between 1948 and 1970 might be attributable to radiation exposures resulting from nuclear testing fallout. Due to uncertainly inherent to these analyses, the authors calculated a 90% confidence interval of 0.4% to 3.6%. Why did the NCI investigate this exposure? In June 2004, the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources asked the NCI to provide its expert opinion on the baseline cancer risk and number of cancers expected among residents of the Marshall Islands as a result of exposures to radioactive fallout from U.S. nuclear weapons tests that were conducted there from 1946 through 1958. In September 2004, the NCI provided the Committee with preliminary cancer risk estimates and a discussion of their basis in a report titled Estimation of the Baseline Number of Cancers Among Marshallese and the Number of Cancers Attributable to Exposure to Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Testing Conducted in the Marshall Islands. That analysis was based on a number of conservative assumptions designed to avoid underestimating the actual cancer risks and used information that could be collected quickly to provide a timely response. "

A BEACH may have to be partially covered in concrete to seal dangerous material that could give children a dose of radiation. The move could stop the area being officially designated as contaminated land, which residents fear would devastate the community. The news follows the discovery of 39 radioactive radium items in the latest survey of the foreshore at Dalgety Bay, Fife, which is close to a former airfield used in the Second World War. The largest of them was 4in across and weighed 8oz.

The desperate nuclear power industry has dropped a $50 billion stealth bomb meant to irradiate the Obama stimulus package. Harvey Wasserman: The nuclear power industry has dropped a $50 billion bomb into the Senate version of Obama's stimulus package for projects Wall Street wouldn't finance when it was flush. It comes in the form of a mega-loan guarantee package that would build new reactors Wall Street wouldn't finance even when it had cash. It will take a healthy dose of citizen action to stop it, so start calling your senators now. The vaguely worded bailout-in-advance provision was snuck through the Senate Appropriations Committee in the deep night of January 27. It would provide $50 billion in loan guarantees for "eligible technologies" that would technically include renewable sources and electric transmission. But the handout is clearly directed at nukes and "clean coal."

A public health assessment by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry concluded there were "no public health hazards" from airborne releases at the Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant (also known as the K-25 Site) and the early-era S-50 facility at the Oak Ridge site. The full report is available online and at local libraries. The agency is receiving public comment through Feb. 20. In a release distributed to the news media, the ATSDR said: "The study looked at the atmospheric releases of radioactive and nonradioactive hazardous substances from the K-25/ S-50 facilities between 1944 and 1995 when the facility closed. After evaluating potential chronic and acute exposure to ionizing radiation and uranium releases, ATSDR found those doses were not expected to cause adverse health effects for people living near the ORGDP. The ORGDP is currently known as the East Tennessee Technology Park (ETTP).

ABOUT THIS BOOK Japan's worst nuclear radiation accident took place at a uranium reprocessing facility in Tokaimura, northeast of Tokyo, on 30 September 1999. The direct cause of the accident was cited as the depositing of a uranyl nitrate solution--containing about 16.6 kg of uranium, which exceeded the critical mass--into a precipitation tank. Three workers were exposed to extreme doses of radiation. Hiroshi Ouchi, one of these workers, was transferred to the University of Tokyo Hospital Emergency Room, three days after the accident. Dr. Maekawa and his staff initially thought that Ouchi looked relatively well for a person exposed to such radiation levels. He could talk, and only his right hand was a little swollen with redness. However, his condition gradually weakened as the radioactivity broke down the chromosomes in his cells.

Officials at the Indian Point nuclear power plant in Buchanan can cross a big chore off their to-do list. A leaking waste-containment pool, containing 500,000 gallons of radioactive water and spent fuel rods, has been drained and cleaned. The bulk of the work was completed at the end of October, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The last step is for work crews to coat the pool and do some other maintenance-related work, thus solving a problem that surfaced several years ago. In August 2005, a dangerous dose of strontium-90, a carcinogenic isotope, was detected in storm drains and groundwater around the riverside power plant. The contamination was eventually traced back to a leaking spent fuel pool for reactor Unit 1, which was shut down in the 1970s.

Here in Arkansas with way above normal cancer rates, the survivors linked to radiation induced cancers ask me to find the source of radiation that caused their cancers. Radioactive fallout from the 1950's nuclear weapons tests in Nevada spread throughout most of the nation, but the hottest spots were in the Midwest and Northwest, according to government projections. Data, was compiled by the National Cancer Institute as part federal study over a decade ago. It was the first to show high exposure rates outside Nevada and Utah. Some of the highest doses of fallout were received by milk drinking children here in Arkansas. From earlier studies, exposure rates were highest in 12 states east and north of the Nevada desert: ARKANSAS, Missouri,Nevada,Utah, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa, Idaho, Montana, and Colorado.

A RENOWNED scientist urged Cumbrians to take action over nuclear power plants during a special meeting in Kendal. Dr Ian Fairlie gave a talk to the South Lakeland Friends of the Earth discussing the links between radiation from nuclear power plants and childhood leukaemia. He outlined some of the possible risks from the nuclear facilities at Heysham and Sellafield. Dr Fairlie urged the concerned audience to write to their local MP asking for information about doses of radiation in South Lakeland and the risks.

A new study of Hanford and other nuclear defense site workers found exposure to low levels of radiation slightly increased the risk that workers would die of leukemia. The study was conducted by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a federal research agency, and looked at doses that a worker at a nuclear site might receive over a lifetime of work. Previous studies that look at a correlation between exposure and leukemia typically have looked at higher levels of exposure, according to NIOSH.

A WAR veteran used as a guinea pig in secret nuclear tests has been granted his day in court. Ken McGinley, 70, blames the Ministry of Defence for leaving him seriously ill and unable to have children after being exposed to huge doses of radiation. If he and nine other ex-soldiers win their test cases at the High Court in London in January, they will sue for damages.

A U.S. House subcommittee heard testimony this week on a bill that would ban the importation of low-level radioactive waste, nullifying an attempt by EnergySolutions to turn Utah into Italy's, and potentially the world's, nuclear waste dump. But it was more than just a hearing. It was equal parts puppet show and magic act, with a dose of legislative legerdemain.

VERNON - Workers at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant are taking additional precautions when working around a 97-ton cask filled with high-level radioactive waste after a crane moving the cask malfunctioned last week. The cask still isn't in its final steel and concrete shroud or storage location, although its first shroud does protect workers from potentially deadly doses, a spokesman from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Monday.

The government has issued a $123,750 fine against B&W Technical Services, the contractor at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant, for safety violations related to a uranium chip fire in 2007. More than 100 workers received radiation doses due to inhalation of airborne radioactive material created by the fire, according to the report released today.

Dirk Bartlett, director of government relations for EnergySolutions, today released a copy of the incident report the company submitted to the state earlier this year following a contamination incident at the Bear Creek Road waste-processing facility. The worker who opened the package received by far the highest radiation dose (about 2.8 rems), although a few others were in the area at the time.

"Former and current nuclear weapons workers at Los Alamos National Laboratory have been dealt a setback in their attempts to collect on a 10-year-old promise to compensate them for illnesses and deaths related to their exposure to radiation and other hazardous materials. In a report to the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health recommends against easing a radiation-dose determination process for potentially thousands of workers. The agency's report said it is not necessary to grant what is called "special cohort status" to workers who were employed in certain parts of the plant between Jan. 1, 1976, and December 2005 and may have developed certain forms of cancers, making it more difficult for workers to prove they are entitled to benefits.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved a rule for allowable radiation levels at the proposed nuclear waste site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada for up to 1 million years, the NRC announced on Tuesday. The NRC is now accepting the radiation standards from Yucca Mountain as determined by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The NRC kept the EPA's rule of limiting the dose of radiation to 15 millirem for the first 10,000 years after disposal. Now, the NRC has adopted the EPA's limit of 100 millirem from 10,001 years to 1 million years.

A federal regulator has authorized the owner of Millstone Power Station in Waterford to adopt a new method for measuring radiation exposure to workers. The decision by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission also applies to Dominion's fleet of reactors around the country. The approach, established by the Health Physics Society, uses gauges known as dosimeters to measure the dose of radiation a worker has been exposed to in seven different areas of the body, said Neil Sheehan, an NRC spokesman. The measurements are taken in plant locations where higher exposure is likely, he said.

THERE'S "enough evidence" to designate parts of Dalgety Bay as 'radioactive contaminated land' and the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency (Sepa) has warned they'll be forced to do it if the Ministry of Defence doesn't take decisive action. That's the view of Sepa's radioactive substances unit manager, Byron Tilley, and a Sepa scientist said the problem was "much more serious than anyone thought" and particles which could give a radiation dose far higher than 'safe' levels have been found on the town's beach.

LAKES-based campaigners against nuclear energy have hailed an inquest verdict into a soldier's death as 'highly significant'. Last week a coroner's jury in the West Midlands found that depleted uranium caused the fatal colon cancer of Lance Corporal Stuart Dyson, who served in Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War. Marianne Birkby, for Radiation Free Lakeland, described it as an 'important verdict' for Cumbria, where new nuclear power plants are proposed. "It calls into doubt the validity of the argument of the International Committee on Radiological Protection that there is a 'safe dose' of radiation.