Group items tagged

Because New York State is a leader in monitoring radiotherapy and collecting data about errors, The Times decided to examine patterns of accidents there and spent months obtaining and analyzing records. Even though many accident details are confidential under state law, the records described 621 mistakes from 2001 to 2008. While most were minor, causing no immediate injury, they nonetheless illuminate underlying problems. Following are 18 accidents representing a variety of medical mistakes."

"Officials say poor welding work and pin-hole leaks are keeping one of the San Onofre's nuclear reactors from returning to service. That's not the only safety issue the plant has recently faced. Plant officials told our media partner The North County Times that the reactor's leak problems have now been repaired. Unfortunately, they have delayed the reactor from returning to service by about three weeks. And in an unrelated incident, a report surfaced this week that plant officials waited more than two weeks before reporting a minor safety issue to federal regulators. "

"Greenpeace said it had obtained partly classified documents which prove that Gorleben should not have been used as a nuclear waste site. The environmental activist group Greenpeace said on Wednesday that it had obtained official documents, which prove that the salt mines in the German town of Gorleben should not have been used as a disposal site for nuclear waste. "There was never a scientific selection procedure that concluded the salt mines in Gorleben would be the best choice," Greenpeace nuclear expert Mathias Edler told reporters at a press conference in Berlin. "Geological criteria for a nuclear disposal site in the salt mines played a minor role." Greenpeace said the more than 12,000 pages of partly classified documents, which date back to the mid-1970's, are from the Lower Saxony state chancellery, environment ministry, and the Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources. "

"A few weeks ago the New Mexico Environmental Law Center's media director, Juana Colon, suggested I should write a blog post about policymakers' recent embrace of nuclear power as just a way to enrich the world's economic elites while at the same time continuing to subject poor and minority communities to various kinds of radioactive pollution, and therefore continue to encourage wasteful energy consumption. Her words were actually a lot angrier and profanity-laced, largely because the office had been preoccupied with a series of preposterous pro-nuclear pieces of legislation during the state legislative session (Such as declaring nuclear power green energy [PDF] and seeking that it become part of the governor's clean energy efforts [PDF]) Adding to that, President Obama had also just announced his intention to increase the subsidies the public would lavish on the nuclear industry. I've thought a lot about Juana's suggestion and there are a lot of interesting aspects to the nuclear power puzzle that deserve some ink."

Radiation from Japan rained on Berkeley during recent storms at levels that exceeded drinking water standards by 181 times and has been detected in multiple milk samples, but the U.S. government has still not published any official data on nuclear fallout here from the Fukushima disaster. Dangers from radiation that is wafting over the United States from the Fukushima power plant disaster and falling with rain have been downplayed by government officials and others, who say its impacts are so fleeting and minor as to be negligible.

Events that have occurred since the March 11 Great East Japan Earthquake have reminded us of the reality Japan faces -- another powerful earthquake could occur anytime and anywhere, and we have no way to predict it. Fifty-four nuclear reactors are situated in coastal areas of Japan. Many experts have repeatedly pointed out how difficult it is to ensure the safety of nuclear power plants in this earthquake-prone country. Some scientists had predicted that radiation could leak from a nuclear power plant if it was damaged by a powerful quake and ensuing tsunami. One of them, Kobe University professor emeritus Katsuhiko Ishibashi, called such a potential accident an "earthquake-triggered nuclear power plant disaster." However, electric power suppliers as well as the government had dismissed such warnings as a "minority opinion." The consequences of this attitude are the serious crisis at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 Nuclear Power Plant operated by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO).