Group items tagged

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Energy Department will file an application in early June with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to operate a long-delayed nuclear waste dump in Nevada, Energy Secretary Sam Bodman said on Thursday.

MILAN (Reuters) - Italy should keep its ban on nuclear power and should boost solar and wind energy instead to resolve its energy supply problems, Italian environmentalists said on Thursday as nuclear revival debate heated up.

The government's nuclear programme will be a financial disaster according to a new report published today. It found UK taxpayers have lost £72 billion over the last 50 years to the country's failing nuclear industry. The report into the nuclear energy industry, published by Friends of the Earth, pours scorn on government claims about the potential of nuclear energy.

A WATERFRONT home on the site of an old uranium smelter at Hunters Hill is so radioactive that it is "unfit for human habitation", independent tests have found. Peter and Michelle Vassiliou, who bought their property at 11 Nelson Parade from the NSW Health Department seven years ago, are too scared to go home after radioactive soil next to their bedroom was measured at 350 times safe levels.

Madrid - Spain's Nuclear Safety Council (CSN) on Tuesday suggested that a November leak from a Spanish nuclear power plant may be worse than thought after radioactivity was found on a lorry that transported scrap metal from the plant. The discovery could mean that radioactive particles have been carried to a distance of dozens of kilometres outside the Asco I plant, instead of remaining within its confines, as had been believed so far, according to media reports. The lorry took scrap metal from the Asco I plant near the eastern coastal city of Tarragona to a nearby dumping site. The metal itself was not contaminated, the CSN said. The CSN said that some 1,600 people were undergoing health checks, twice as many as had initially been planned.

Madrid - For advocates of nuclear power in Spain, the recently discovered incident at the Asco I nuclear plant in the country's north-east could scarcely have come at a worse time. Just as global warming and rising oil prices were making nuclear energy seem more acceptable, the radioactive leak at the plant near the coastal city of Tarragona sparked new safety concerns. Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero's anti-nuclear government had appeared to be swimming against the tide in the West, where countries such as Britain, Finland and the United States are increasingly relying on nuclear power.

The world's first large-scale nuclear power plant opened at Calder Hall in Cumbria, England, in 1956 and produced electricity for 47 years. Nuclear power is generated using uranium, a metal that is mined as an ore in large quantities, with Canada, Australia and Kazakhstan providing more than half of the world's supplies.