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New Mexico-based Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) , the nation's leading nuclear weapons lab, once again finds itself the focus of concerns about potentially serious cybersecurity lapses. The Project on Government Oversight (POGO) , a watchdog group, Wednesday released a memo from the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) expressing concern over the theft of three computers from the home of an employee at Los Alamos National Security LLC (LANS) in January. LANS is a limited liability company comprising the University of California at Oakland, Bechtel National Inc. and two other firms that have been managing LANL since 2006.

Thanks to everyone who contacted the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) and their Members of Congress two weeks ago, urging an extension of DOE's public comment period on its proposed weakening of taxpayer protections in its nuclear loan guarantee program. Under pressure from concerned citizens and U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO), DOE extended the comment deadline from Sept. 8th to Sept. 22nd. Now we must take advantage of this extension to get our comments in! DOE's most clearly outrageous proposal is to give up its "first lien" in the event of a new reactor loan repayment default. This would mean that taxpayers would be placed behind other lenders, such as foreign export-import banks, in terms of receiving compensation. Thus, taxpayers likely would not be compensated at all, but rather left holding the bag for billions when a new reactor or uranium enrichment facility goes belly up. The Congressional Budget Office has predicted, based on the nuclear industry's history, that well over half of all new reactors could default on their loans. Taxpayers' liability for dozens of new reactor loan guarantees could reach into the hundreds of billions of dollars. DOE's rule change would increase, not decrease, taxpayer risk.

Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Involvement With the Navy's Remediation of the Hunters Point Shipyard Site in San Francisco, CA AGENCY: Nuclear Regulatory Commission. ACTION: Notice of jurisdiction and future involvement. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- SUMMARY: The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has decided that it will take a limited involvement approach to stay informed about the Navy's ongoing remediation of the Hunters Point Shipyard (HPS) site in San Francisco, California. NRC will rely on the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) process and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 9 oversight. This notice discusses NRC's jurisdiction and future limited involvement at the HPS site and how it plans on staying informed about the Navy's remediation in the future.

The Department of Energy has again awarded the Hanford Mission Support Contract worth about $3 billion to a team led by Lockheed Martin. "Good things can come to those who wait," Frank Figueroa, president and general manager of the winning team, said Tuesday. The transition from Fluor Hanford to the new team will begin sometime in May and will be completed within 90 days, said DOE. Lockheed Martin formed a limited liability company called Mission Support Alliance that included Lockheed Martin Integrated Technology, Jacobs Engineering Group and Wackenhut Services to bid on the contract. The contract award is for five years with a possible extension to 10 years. The Mission Support Contract covers sitewide services at the Hanford nuclear reservation such as security, fire protection, information technology, utilities, road services, pension administration and portfolio management, which includes integrating activities such as schedules and program performance across Hanford.

Charlie Wolf died on January 28, 2009, more than six years after he had been diagnosed with brain cancer and more than five and a half years after doctors said he would be dead. During that period, Wolf was not only fighting for his life, he was fighting the federal government for the compensation he was entitled to as a former worker in federal nuclear weapons facilities who contracted cancer as a result of exposure to radionuclides in the work place. Just as Wolf experienced the nightmare of radiation treatments, chemotherapy, and bone marrow transplants, he also experienced the nightmare of trying to negotiate a claim for compensation through a government bureaucracy clearly intent upon limiting its liability. The entire story of Wolf's battle with cancer and the government was graphically detailed in a July 22, 2008 Rocky Mountain News story by Laura Frank, and I urge readers to download the article and see for themselves the ordeal Wolf suffered through as a result of the government's attempts to avoid culpability. Sadly, even after providing copious documentation and successfully challenging the government's decision to deny his claim, Wolf died before receiving full compensation and benefits.

THE Bataan nuclear power plant, which never produced a single watt of electricity but cost taxpayers $155,000 a day for more than 30 years, has been sold for scrap for $2.859 million. A project of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, the plant in Morong, Bataan, was completed in 1984 at a cost of $2.3 billion on a debt of $1.06 billion. The plant-which later was found to have been overpriced and unsafe-was mothballed after Marcos was overthrown in 1986, but the debt payments on it continued until April 2007. The Power Sector Assets and Liabilities Management Corp., which sells off state-owned power plants, said the Bataan facility was sold through a negotiated sale to Rubenori Inc., a local scrap dealer.

Halliburton Energy Services, Inc., is one of the corporations from which the United States seeks to recover the response costs that it incurred due to releases and threatened releases of hazardous substances into the environment from facilities where radioactive materials were manufactured, repaired, reworked, stored, and processed for disposal. GE Healthcare Bio-Sciences Corp. and Pengo Industries, Inc., are among the other defendants in United States of America v. Halliburton Energy Services, Inc., (case number 4:07-cv-03795 in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas). The federal government, which filed the lawsuit in 2007, alleges that the defendants are liable under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980, commonly known as CERCLA, for more than $26.7 million in unreimbursed response costs for the cleanup of sites in Houston, Webster, and Odessa. The State of Texas intervened in the case to recover the response costs that it had contributed to the federal government.

The impact of a severe nuclear accident, should it occur, would not be confined to public safety. Insurance programmes have been in place for decades in the US and Europe to deal with potential liability claims. They might be a useful model for countries contemplating going nuclear. By Steve Kidd

"Its bid for a $2 billion federal loan guarantee is still pending, but the company trying to build a $3.5 billion uranium-enrichment plant in Piketon, Ohio, will get a promised infusion of $45 million from the Department of Energy. The promise to USEC was made in August when the Energy Department turned down the loan-guarantee application, with federal officials saying they didn't think the technology had been proven commercially viable. USEC says the loan guarantee is critical to its ability to build the plant, and the company won a temporary reprieve and the ability to reapply for the loan guarantee at a later date. That reapplication is expected to happen this year. In the meantime, the $45 million will help USEC keep working on the plant's technology, and the company says it will match the federal money with $45 million of its own. The federal cash comes from the Energy Department assuming $45 million worth of depleted uranium "tails" counted on USEC's books as a liability."

"Uniontown Industrial Excess Landfill Superfund site for sale (AKRON, Ohio) - Why is the Uniontown Industrial Excess Landfill Superfund site for sale, when there has never been a cleanup of the hundreds of thousands of tons of toxins, only the continued flushing into our groundwater? Residents aren't getting straight answers. They are only being told that a buyer would receive liability protections through a "covenant not to sue." Would this mean the new owner couldn't be sued if people got sick, or just that they couldn't be held liable for cleanup costs? Are the Lake Township trustees still considering buying the dump? Don't the taxpayers have the right to know if in fact this is still being planned before the public could be saddled with this toxic nightmare? Or, as seen elsewhere around the country, is a deep-pockets brownfields developer going to take over the IEL?"

"In a rare 90-minute session, the Supreme Court heard arguments Monday on whether North Carolina violated a radioactive waste storing agreement when it abandoned the deal but kept the investment amount of $80 million. "That's the deal. They can run away. But in addition, take $80 million?" asked a skeptical Justice Stephen Breyer. Justice Sonia Sotomayor also appeared concerned about the financial losses suffered from the other states. "The compact expressly says that none of the contracting states have any liabilities" North Carolina in 1999 pulled out of a deal with other southern states to cooperate in the storing of radioactive material. South Carolina had the only previously existing facility of the group, but North Carolina was next in line to develop and host a site, receiving almost $80 million in assistance over the course of 9 years."

"After reading Sen. Mike Crapo's glowing endorsement of nuclear energy, I feel inspired to remind your readers why no U.S. nuclear power plants have been built in the past 25 years. To begin with, the enormous financial cost to build a reactor is exceeded only by the cost of decommissioning it once it has depleted its 40- to 60-year life span. Regardless of whatever laws Congress may pass to: (1) subsidize nuclear power plant construction (2) remove standard liability requirements from nuclear construction contractors or (3) force long-lived toxic and radioactive wastes onto less populated states, the fact still remains that nuclear energy is not cheap, clean or safe. The primary reason nuclear power is being considered at this time is that it carries with it a "scale of economy" that translates into jobs, tax money and economic boon for specific, well-lobbied industries. This all seems so needless in light of life-friendly, alternative energy production technologies that do not place toxic-waste storage burdens, large-scale contamination issues and a mess of other problems and risks onto the environment and future generations. "

"The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) today called a new nuclear weapons agreement between the United States and Russia "a critical first step" to reduce the global nuclear threat. The so-called NEW START agreement will be signed on April 8 in Prague, Czech Republic, to coincide with the historic speech President Obama delivered there nearly one year ago calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons worldwide. "NEW START is a critical first step in a nuclear risk reduction agenda that has been embraced by countless world leaders and a bipartisan chorus of foreign policy heavyweights and former U.S. government officials," said David Wright, co-director of UCS's Global Security Program. "There is a growing recognition that nuclear weapons are now a liability, not an asset, and they don't make the world safer or address today's threats.""

"With over 20% of United States power production being of a nuclear nature, and all of this nuclear production generating high-level nuclear waste, the US has already accumulated large quantities of volatile nuclear waste and will only have more in the future (Schneider, 2009). Currently, there are few options for dealing with nuclear waste. Although research and development of storage/remediation methods is ongoing, current waste that has accumulated is stored in sealed casks mostly on-site at the plants at which they are generated. This scattering of radioactive waste throughout the country at ground level is seen as a liability for natural disasters and terrorist actions. One proposed solution for the management of nuclear waste is through underground sequestration in a major Department of Energy run facility. This would collect all of the nation's accrued nuclear wastes in one safe location underground to allow the waste to decay over time in a controlled environment isolated from environmental factors that could undermine their containment."

"The hypocrisy is astonishing! Some in Congress used fiscal responsibility as an excuse to oppose health care reform, yet they support an outrageous attempted money grab in risky taxpayer loans (tens of billions to a trillion) to the wealthy nuclear industry, when the Congressional Budget Office estimates more than 50 percent risk of default. Taxpayers should be outraged. The nuclear industry has already externalized most of its costs, risks, and liabilities onto taxpayers, ratepayers, and future generations, both financially and radiologically. Nuclear power is a dangerous distraction from real solutions to climate change and our energy needs, yet the nuclear industry, that already got the lion's share of energy subsidies for the past 50 years, is shamelessly attempting to rob the clean energy fund from the Climate Bill and Energy Bill. In reality, new nuclear plants are not the answer to global warming or the energy crisis."