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Greenpeace activists in the Netherlands are up in arms. Dutch utility company Delta has applied to build a second nuclear power plant. The Netherlands already has one nuclear power plant and protesters think this is more than enough. [Maike Baretta, Greenpeace Campaigner]: "Greenpeace is here to show that building a second nuclear power plant in the Netherlands is a really bad idea because it will create an enormous amount of nuclear waste and we don't even know [what to] do with the waste of the first nuclear power plant." In the past, the Dutch government phased out nuclear power, leaving one plant in Borssele which is owned by Delta and Dutch company Essent. It's on this site that Delta plans to build its second plant. A draft proposal has been submitted to the Environment Ministry. Delta then hope to put forward a formal request.

The Dutch Foreign Affairs Ministry has announced that it has reached agreement with the Belarussian authorities on the continuation of the free visits to the Netherlands of children suffering health problems from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 23 years ago today. The first group will arrive in the Netherlands next week, in time to celebrate Queen's Day on 30 April. In October, Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko ruled that only children with cancer would be allowed to leave the country. The Belarus authorities reportedly feared the children would apply for asylum. Three private organisations fund trips for children from the Chernobyl region; over the years thousands of children have visited host families in the Netherlands.

Energy concern Delta is to block the sale of Essent's 50% stake in the Netherlands' only nuclear power plant to the German power giant RWE, reports the Financieele Dagblad on Thursday. Delta and Essent are joint owners of the Borssele nuclear power station. On Monday RWE made a bid of €9.3bn to takeover Essent's commercial activities.

The takeover of Holland's biggest energy utility Essent by the German power giant RWE announced yesterday includes the Dutch firm's 50% stake in the Netherlands' only nuclear power plant, Borssele, reports Tuesday's Financieele Dagblad. Dutch economic affairs minister Maria van der Hoeven said in October that the possibility of Dutch nuclear energy facilities coming into foreign hands was 'not an option', the paper says. The remaining 50% of Borssele is owned by the Dutch utility Delta.

What do you do when you have a barn-sized pile of nuclear waste materials that you have to store for 100 years while it loses its toxicity? In the Netherlands, the answer was to stick it inside a giant art project: specifically, this orange building called the Habog Facility, covered in physics formulas by Einstein and Planck. Every twenty years, the building will be repainted in a lighter color to symbolize the slowly decaying radiation in the waste.

A scrap metal company had to call in government officials after it discovered that some of its scrap metal was contaminated with uranium. KMR Stainless discovered the scrap was radioactive after it had been shipped from Saint Petersburg to Dordrecht, in the Netherlands at the end of 2008. The firm called in inspectors from the Dutch Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning and the Environment (VROM) after the discovery. Inspectors have now confirmed the scrap had been contaminated with low-grade enriched uranium and officials had informed the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Labour in the Dutch parliament wants the US to remove its nuclear weapons from the Netherlands. The presence of American nuclear arsenal at the Volkel airfield has never been officially admitted. A Dutch poster from the 1970s protested the deployment of nuclear weapons in Europe. A Dutch poster from the 1970s protested the deployment of nuclear weapons in Europe. Labour member of parliament Martijn van Dam on Thursday asked defence minister Maxime Verhagen, a Christian democrat, to officially call on Washington to remove its nuclear weapons from Dutch soil. Labour and the Christian democrats are coalition partners in the Dutch government, but Verhagen told parliament that he is not keen on following up on Van Dam's request. Verhagen said he opposes unilateral nuclear disarmament as long as international disarmament talks between the big powers are still ongoing.

Energy company Essent cannot transfer economic ownership of its half of the Netherlands only nuclear power station to Germany's RWE, a court in Arnhem ruled on Friday. Essent and RWE came up with the plan as part of Essent's €9.3bn takeover by RWE. According to its statutes, the Borssele plant cannot be owned by a foreign listed company. So Essent suggested giving economic ownership to RWE while its current shareholders - local and provincial councils - would retain legal ownership of the Zeeland facility. Power firm Delta, which owns the other half of Borssele, went to court to have the transfer stopped. It wants to take over Essent's 50% share in the plant and refuses to amend the statutes.

The Government's stake in Urenco, which owns nuclear fuel plants in Britain, Germany and the Netherlands, will be sold off to help to repay the country's escalating debt mountain, the Prime Minister will announce today. Gordon Brown will also announce plans to sell off the Dartford Crossing, the Channel Tunnel and the Tote and will signal that he is restarting the privatisation of the Student Loan book, which was shelved in March because of poor market conditions.

The Government's stake in Urenco, which owns nuclear fuel plants in Britain, Germany and the Netherlands, will be sold off to help to repay the country's escalating debt mountain, the Prime Minister will announce today. Gordon Brown will also announce plans to sell off the Dartford Crossing, the Channel Tunnel and the Tote and will signal that he is restarting the privatisation of the Student Loan book, which was shelved in March because of poor market conditions.

Inhabitat has a post on a massive new wind farm planned for the North sea - OMA Plans Massive North Sea Wind Farm to Power Europe. This week Rem Koolhaas' Office for Metropolitan Architecture announced plans for an incredible array of oceanic wind farms that may one day produce as much energy as the Persian Gulf. Dubbed Zeekracht (sea power), the masterplan comprises a massive ring of wind farms centered around the Netherlands that spans seven adjacent countries. By calling for such a large network of communal infrastructure and knowledge, the plan takes a giant step towards ensuring European energy independency by 2025. Thanks to its high and constant wind speeds, shallow waters, and cutting-edge renewable industries, the North Sea is one of the world's most suitable areas for large scale wind farming. OMA states that "The potential magnitude of renewable energy in the North Sea in fact, approaches that of fossil fuel production in the Persian Gulf states today."

Call it a case of having too many medical eggs in too few baskets. Just over a year ago, in December 2007, a nuclear reactor in Chalk River was in the news because of maintenance issues. The reactor had been shut down for repairs, and Canada's nuclear regulatory agency, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, would not allow it to restart until safety improvements were made. Problem was, the reactor produced most of the world's medical isotopes - used to test for cancer, heart problems and bone ailments. Faced with a massive diagnostics problem, the federal government passed legislation that allowed the reactor to be restarted, despite the regulatory body's objections. The 50-year-old reactor is crucial to the world supply of medical isotopes. Even though it was supposed to be decommissioned in 2005, it and another reactor in Petten, Netherlands, produce close to 85 per cent of the world's medical isotopes, through a process that involves the nuclear decay of molybdenum-99.

Up to 10,000 tons of depleted uranium hexafluoride are expected to travel through St. Petersburg in the next six months, according to the local branch of the international environmental pressure group Bellona. The next cargo is expected to arrive in town in early October. Arriving by sea, the radioactive material will then be sent by rail to the town of Novouralsk in Siberia for reprocessing and storage. Most of the cargo arrives in Russia from the Netherlands and Germany but Russia has signed contracts with India, Pakistan and China - states that are rapidly bolstering their nuclear programs - and looks set to receive even more spent nuclear fuel and uranium hexafluoride for reprocessing.

Norway may be planning on becoming Europe's battery, but based on what Reuters is saying about a new proposal from Greenpeace it won't just be Norway which supplies Europe with electricity, it will be the North Sea. The head of renewable energy for the European Commission, Hans Van Steen, has called the proposal "ambitious but realistic". 118 Wind Farms + €20 Billion Electric Grid There may be no actual plan in place, but the Greenpeace proposal goes like this: Build 118 offshore wind farms by 2030 in the North Sea off the coasts of Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway. Connect the 68 gigawatts of power these windfarms would produce to the mainland through a grid of power cables on the sea bed, the construction of which could cost €20 billion ($29 billion).

Discussion of nuclear power regularly leads to the issue of what to do with the waste created during power generation. One course of action many experts and scientists support is building geologic repositories where the dangerous, long-lived waste can be stored--for instance, inside of a mountain. Throughout the next year, the Bulletin's web-edition will present a country-by-country analysis of how certain nations are proceeding with the disposal of the waste produced by their nuclear power plants and reactors.

On April 26, 1986, Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station reactor number 4 exploded at 1:24 a.m. "Tons of radioactive dust was" unleashed "into the air…transported by winds, [and] it contaminated both hemispheres of our planet, settling wherever it rained. The emissions of radioactivity lasted [short-term] for 10 days."(1) On 29 April, "fatal levels of radioactivity were recorded…in Poland, Austria, Romania, Finland, and Sweden."(2) The day after (30 April), it hit Switzerland and Italy. By 2 May, it reached France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Great Britain, and Greece. The next day, Israel, Kuwait, and Turkey were contaminated. Then, over the next few days, "radioactive substances" were recorded in Japan (3 May), China (4 May), India (5 May), and the US and Canada (6 May). The radioactive spew from this explosion was "200 times greater than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima."(3) Not one person was safe from this catastrophic nuclear explosion; and "65-million people were contaminated...more than 400,000 people were forced to evacuate the area [around Chernobyl], losing their homes, possessions and jobs, as well as their economic, social, and family ties."(4) The long-term and hidden costs of radioactive contamination have never been adequately reported by mainstream news. According to the authors (including the distinguished Dr. Rosalie Bertell) of a new book, "Chernobyl: The Hidden Legacy" "[i]t will take millennia to recover…[before an area] as large as Italy, will return to normal radioactive levels in about 100,000 years time."(5)

Decommissioning of experimental nuclear reactors dating from 1959 at Ispra in northern Italy is costing more and taking longer than expected according to a report by the European Commission that is to be presented to the European Parliament Thursday. The EC is reporting to the Parliament's energy committee on the activities of the Joint Research Center on decommissioning of nuclear installations and management of radioactive waste under the Euratom treaty. The report covers the activities of the JRC between 2004 and 2008, when it was involved in decommissioning at sites in Belgium (Geel), Germany (Karlsruhe) and the Netherlands (Petten) as well as the Italian site. However, most of its work was focused on the Ispra site because decommissioning activities are currently relatively limited at the other sites as these continue to operate.

"European NATO allies are to urge President Barack Obama to remove all remaining US nuclear weapons from European soil, as domestic pressure grows to rid its soil of outdated Cold War-era aerial bombs. Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, The Netherlands and Norway will call "in the coming weeks" for more than 200 American warheads, mostly stocked in Italy and Turkey, to be taken back, a spokesman for Prime Minister Yves Leterme told AFP. A joint proposal by the five NATO members will demand "that nuclear arms on European soil belonging to other NATO member states are removed," Dominique Dehaene said."

"Urenco is investigating after a worker at Germany's Gronau enrichment plant was exposed to uranium hexafluoride. The incident occurred on 21 January when, during preparation of a container, a release of the radioactive substance occurred. One employee of who was operating at that time was admitted to hospital as a precaution for 24 hours for observation. The affected air was passed through filters and the readings on the plant stack were below the regulatory limits, Urenco said in a statement. The appropriate authorities were immediately informed. Meanwhile, Urenco, which operates enrichment plants in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands, has deemed 2009 "another year of strong business performance." The company also says its fourth enrichment plant in the USA is ready to start commercial operation, subject to receipt of regulatory approval."

"SELLAFIELD Ltd has just exported a shipment of recovered uranium to Russia for processing to allow its manufacture into new fuel. The uranium was recovered from spent nuclear power station fuel owned by European reprocessing customers in Germany and the Netherlands and sent to Sellafield for reprocessing at the Thorp plant. It was the eighth such shipment of material from Thorp."