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"The Monju prototype fast-breeder reactor was relaunched Tuesday after being suspended for four days for a scheduled checkup of data collected from the initial stage of operations following its restart nearly a month ago, the Japan Atomic Energy Agency said. The 280,000-kw reactor in Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture, restarted at 10:10 a.m. after staff pulled out control rods that had prevented nuclear reaction. The reactor resumed test operations May 6 following more than 14 years of suspension. The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency will soon conduct two days of checks required for full operation of the reactor planned for 2013."

"The Yakama Nation has filed a lawsuit challenging the state of Washington's actions to start construction of a cover over closed portions of private company US Ecology's waste disposal trenches at Hanford. Heart of America Northwest Research Center has joined the Yakamas in the lawsuit filed in Yakima County Superior Court. The state believes it has acted properly and that the Yakama Nation does not have a valid case, according to the Washington State Office of the Attorney General. The state has a lease from the federal government for 100 acres on the Hanford nuclear reservation subleased to US Ecology for the disposal of low-level radioactive waste from organizations such as universities, hospitals, biotech firms and electric utilities in western states. The plaintiffs maintain that the landfill contains at least 220 pounds of plutonium 239 plus irradiated fuel segments and other spent nuclear fuel. It also may contain two high-level radioactive fuel rods disposed of at the site around 2003, the plaintiffs said."

The cost of the controversial Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) project that Eskom wants to build at Koeberg is likely to run well beyond the government's present estimate of R16-billion - and that's without taking into account the cost of dealing with the resulting nuclear waste. So says Kommetjie architect and environmentalist Rod Gurzynski in a scathing critique of the specialist study on the financial aspects of the project.

lmost four years after saying they would examine the site, federal officials are still unsure whether they will clean up the radioactive legacy of their atomic weapons program. From 1943 to 1952, Joslyn Manufacturing and Supply Co. used its plant at 2400 Taylor St. to mill radioactive uranium into fuel rods for atomic power plants. The plant has changed hands several times since then; it is now owned by Valbruna Slater Stainless, a subsidiary of Italy-based Acciaierie Valbruna SpA.

An activist group has decided to appeal federal regulators' approval of a radioactive waste storage plan at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant near San Luis Obispo. Mothers for Peace suffered a setback in October when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission rejected their argument that there hadn't been sufficient study of whether planned storage casks for used nuclear fuel rods could survive a terrorist attack at the PG&E plant.

The possibility of the Atomic Plant site at Piketon becoming a storage and reprocessing site for spent nuclear fuel rods has brought opposition from environmental groups and a hearing by the U.S. Department of Energy for public comments. Piketon is on the short list, if not at the top, of a list of facilities around the country hoping to land the site, said Ivan Oelrich, Ph.D, vice president of the Strategic Security Program for the Federation of American Scientists out of Washington. Oelrich spoke at 5 p.m. Tuesday at the Vern Riffe Career Technology Center at Piketon. The DOE held its hearing at 7 p.m. in the same building, but in a different meeting room. Oelrich was funded by his own group and was working with the environmental groups SONG -- Southern Ohio Neighbors Group -- and the Ohio Chapter of the Sierra Club.

With Nevada storage site out, radioactive waste would have be kept in Jenkinsville SCE&G would have to store radioactive waste produced by new reactors at its Jenkinsville nuclear plant until the federal government finds a place to bury it, a utility executive said Wednesday. Steve Byrne, vice president of nuclear operations, said the plans for two new reactors the utility wants to build call for waste such as spent fuel rods to be stored above ground in concrete-enclosed casks. Byrne offered his remarks to the state Public Service Commission, which is hearing an application submitted by South Carolina Electric & Gas and its partner, state-operated Santee Cooper, to build two 1,117-megawatt reactor units, costing $9.8 billion, at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station.

The U.S. Department of Energy didn't get a lot of community support Tuesday at a public hearing to discuss its Global Nuclear Energy Partnership Program. The program, referred to as GNEP, would, at its most basic level, allow for research and development of the recycling of spent nuclear fuel rods. At its most active level, the program could include advanced nuclear recycling using advanced recycling reactors. The meeting was conducted in Piketon, where a GNEP program could be implemented in the future. The DOE already owns land and has facilities that would be good for recycling, and is one of many DOE sites being considered.

ENVIRONMENT Agency bosses have decided not to prosecute the operator of Sizewell A over an incident which saw thousands of gallons of water contaminated when radioactivity escaped into the North Sea. The incident, in January 2007, involved the fracture of a plastic pipe in a cooling pond building where highly radioactive spent fuel rods are stored under water prior to their despatch to the Sellafield reprocessing works in Cumbria.

Taiwan Power Company (Taipower) said Monday that it will soon submit a water and soil conservation plan to the Taipei County Government for the construction of a new, dry nuclear waste dump for its First Nuclear Power Plant. Once the Taipei County Government approves the water and soil conservation plan, Taipower will be able to start building the interim repository near the First Nuclear Power Plant for dry storage of its spent nuclear fuel rods, said Tu Yueh-yuan, chief engineer and Taipower spokesman. The First Nuclear Power Plant, located in the county's coastal Shihmen township, has been operational since 1978 and is expected to be decommissioned in 2018, according to Tu.

Tri-Valley CAREs Charges Department is "Locking in" Provocative Nuclear Weapons Decisions in Waning Days of Bush Administration; Calls on Government to Downsize Weapons Complex, Prioritize Removal of Bomb-making Materials from Livermore Lab LIVERMORE - In Federal Register notices published today, the U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) issued two legally-binding authorizations, called Records of Decision (RODs), to revitalize and rebuild the nuclear weapons complex, at Livermore Lab in California and other sites across the country.

Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. has started work on the next generation of above-ground radioactive waste storage systems. While still in the preliminary-design stage, the New Dry Storage System will be used to safely store spent fuel rods and other waste generated at its Chalk River site until such a time as it can be permanently disposed. Brodie Whitelaw, project leader, said the project is just getting started, with a preliminary design expected to be completed next year. Ideally, construction for the facility would start in 2013, with it becoming operational in 2015.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) will consider the issues raised in a petition for rulemaking (PRM) submitted by Mark Edward Leyse in the NRC's rulemaking process. The petition was dated March 15, 2007, and was docketed as PRM-50-84. The petitioner requests that the NRC amend its regulations to require that nuclear power reactors be operated in a manner to limit the thickness of crud layers and/or the thickness of oxide layers on fuel rod cladding surfaces to ensure that the facilities operate in compliance with the emergency core cooling system (ECCS) acceptance criteria. The petitioner also requests that the requirements pertaining to ECCS evaluation models be amended to explicitly require that the steady-state temperature distribution and stored energy in reactor fuel at the onset of a postulated loss-of-coolant accident (LOCA) be calculated by factoring in the role that the thermal resistance of crud and/or oxide layers on fuel cladding plays in increasing the stored energy of the fuel.

The Swedish nuclear safety regulator said Friday it had received letters it requested from the country's nuclear power plant operators confirming their plants were safe to continue operating. "We have received the letter from the licensees and are currently evaluating their statements," a spokesman for the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority told Platts in an email. Cracks were recently discovered in the control rods at the 1,155 MW Oskarshamn-3 nuclear reactor while it was undergoing maintenance. The 1,170 MW Forsmark-3 reactor, of the same type of design as Oskarshamn-3, was then shut down for checks.

Workers have removed spent nuclear fuel rods from Indian Point 1 and expect to drain 500,000 gallons of radioactive water from the dead reactor's storage pool by the end of the year. The move should end strontium 90 contamination at the plant, company and regulatory officials say. Advertisement "We've said from the beginning that an essential part of the strategy for reducing additional contamination was removing the fuel and draining the pool," said Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. "It's believed to be the primary source of strontium contamination at the site."

Officials at the Indian Point nuclear power plant in Buchanan can cross a big chore off their to-do list. A leaking waste-containment pool, containing 500,000 gallons of radioactive water and spent fuel rods, has been drained and cleaned. The bulk of the work was completed at the end of October, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The last step is for work crews to coat the pool and do some other maintenance-related work, thus solving a problem that surfaced several years ago. In August 2005, a dangerous dose of strontium-90, a carcinogenic isotope, was detected in storm drains and groundwater around the riverside power plant. The contamination was eventually traced back to a leaking spent fuel pool for reactor Unit 1, which was shut down in the 1970s.

A federal agency has taken the first step toward possibly fast-tracking compensation for sick workers at a defunct Jefferson County nuclear fuel rod plant. Former workers at United Nuclear Corp.'s plant in Hematite recently were notified that the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health has certified a petition they filed this summer. The federal agency now will begin evaluating the petition seeking a special designation that, if granted, would allow compensation claims to be approved without forcing Hematite workers to prove how they were exposed to radiation.

Berlin - As a trainload of nuclear waste crossed Germany Sunday, riot police drew batons to push back demonstrators who tried to block a railway line. On Saturday, the train had been delayed for more than 11 hours by three militants who chained themselves to a track near the French border. Police had to carefully dismantle a lump of concrete buried under the track to detach the trio. Protesters later tried to occupy another railway line, 500 kilometres to the north, where the train was expected to arrive on Monday. The remains of nuclear fuel rods are bound for a German nuclear waste warehouse.

Waste clean up at the former site of a nuclear fuel processing plant in Hematite could begin as early as 2009. The 228-acre site was closed by owner Westinghouse in 2002, after producing nuclear fuel rods for more than four decades.

The South Texas Project nuclear power plant in Matagorda County, which is located about 8 miles southwest of Wadsworth, wants to double its size to four reactors. Matagorda County nuclear power plant plans to expand October 13, 2008 View larger E-mail Clip More Video Inside the containment chamber at the plant, the core of Unit #2 is comprised of 193 bundles of fuel roads - each rod holding more than 300 uranium pellets. Every 18 months, a third of the bundles are removed and replaced as part of the refueling process.