Group items tagged

A Romanian officer has been killed in a blast at a military laboratory dealing with nuclear, biological and chemical research, Romanian officials say. The defence ministry says the man, aged 37, died of his injuries after the explosion in Bucharest. The cause of the blast was not immediately known, but the ministry says it "does not pose any threat to the population" and there was no fire.

President Obama plans deep new cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal at a time when the government faces a 15-year backlog of warheads already waiting to be dismantled and a need for billions of dollars in new facilities to store and dispose of the weapons' plutonium. The logjam of thousands of retired warheads will grow considerably based on a promise made in April by Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to get their stockpiles far below levels set by current disarmament pacts. Yet much of the infrastructure needed to dispose of those weapons don't exist yet, according to federal audits and other records reviewed by USA TODAY. Dismantling the retired warheads - not counting the additional weapons that Obama wants to eliminate - will take until 2024, according to the National Nuclear Security Administration, which runs the weapons program. The schedule for disposing of the plutonium cores from those weapons runs past 2030. Building the necessary plants and storage facilities "is expensive … (and) is going to take a long time," says Linton Brooks, a former arms negotiator who headed the nuclear security administration from 2002 to 2007. "That doesn't stop the president from taking more warheads off missiles and bombers and (adding to) to the backlog. It means the queue gets a lot longer."

Representatives of Central Asian governments have met at a conference in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek, to find ways of jointly tackling the issue of radioactive waste dumps and their environmental and health impacts. "The issue of uranium waste dumps and industrial waste in Central Asia is a very serious one and if there is not an urgent and effective solution to it, it can be the reason for serious implications for millions of people in the region. The mitigation of those implications might require dozens of years and substantial resources," Neal Walker, head of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and UN system in Kyrgyzstan, said.

Chinese officials say that potentially deadly radioactive material lost in north-western Shaanxi province may have been found at a steel mill. Officials told the BBC that they had detected what may be the missing Caesium-137, adding that it may have been melted down. The Caesium-137, encased in lead, was lost this week when workers at a cement plant demolished an old factory. The material was part of a measuring instrument and is extremely dangerous.

In 1953, eight years after the American nuclear bombing of Japan, President Dwight D Eisenhower laid out a vision that he called Atoms for Peace. The United States and the Soviet Union, he suggested, should make joint contributions from their stockpiles of uranium that would be allocated to serve the peaceful pursuits of mankind. It was too idealistic for its time. The Cold War was intensifying. At its heart was the competing strength of nuclear arsenals with the apocalyptic scenario of Mutually Assured Destructions - that nuclear conflict would obliterate both sides.

In 1953, eight years after the American nuclear bombing of Japan, President Dwight D Eisenhower laid out a vision that he called Atoms for Peace. The United States and the Soviet Union, he suggested, should make joint contributions from their stockpiles of uranium that would be allocated to serve the peaceful pursuits of mankind. It was too idealistic for its time. The Cold War was intensifying. At its heart was the competing strength of nuclear arsenals with the apocalyptic scenario of Mutually Assured Destructions - that nuclear conflict would obliterate both sides.