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At 1:09 one afternoon last year, 90 metal rods slid into the cores of the two nuclear reactors at Turkey Point, part of an automatic shutdown that had been triggered by a utility worker's blunder moments earlier at a substation miles away. A million customers lost power. Florida Power & Light executives ordered that the reactors be back online within 12 hours, according to court documents. The plant's top nuclear operator, David Hoffman, said that would be dangerous. When FPL executives disagreed with him, he walked out at 8 p.m., refusing to participate in actions he felt were unsafe. At 11:49 that night, Feb. 26, 2008, he submitted a heated resignation letter, blasting FPL for constantly putting cost savings ahead of safety and creating a horrible morale problem. ''People are not valued and are treated like equipment and numbers,'' Hoffman wrote.

President Barack Obama's proposed budget all but kills the Yucca Mountain project, the controversial site where all of the U.S. nuclear industry's spent fuel rods once were supposed to end up in permanent storage deep below the Nevada desert. Since there are no other plans being developed, the waste will remain in 104 reactors across the country. Illinois holds the most nuclear waste.

The Spanish government has yet to decide when it will revive plans to find a site for storing spent nuclear fuel, Environment Minister Elena Espinosa said on Tuesday. Spain has for several years planned to build a facility to house high-level waste for 60 years. The country's nuclear power stations no longer have room to store much more than the 6,700 tonnes of spent fuel rods they have accumulated. "We have not discussed a date for this matter," Espinosa told journalists in response to questions on the planned Centralized Temporary Site, known as ATC in Spanish.

The top nuclear operator at Turkey Point resigned after a huge outage because he felt his bosses were demanding an unsafe restart. At 1:09 one afternoon last year, 90 metal rods slid into the cores of the two nuclear reactors at Turkey Point, part of an automatic shutdown that had been triggered by a utility worker's blunder moments earlier at a substation miles away. A million customers lost power. Florida Power & Light executives ordered that the reactors be back online within 12 hours, according to court documents. The plant's top nuclear operator, David Hoffman, said that would be dangerous. When FPL executives disagreed with him, he walked out at 8 p.m., refusing to participate in actions he felt were unsafe.

When visitors traipse through the two nuclear power plants at Bay City, the spent fuel pool is as sure a stop as the Alamo is on the Gray Line Tour. A ladder emerges, and visitors are encouraged to climb it. And so they ascend, one by one, and peer into a 26 x 52-foot pool. The pool - less than a third the dimensions of an Olympic-sized swimming pool, although it's deeper - contains used, radioactive uranium rods, stored beneath 20 feet of water. You can't see much from the top of the ladder, but the message is clear enough: See how small it is? In doing so, however, visitors peer into one of the deepest issues surrounding nuclear expansion - what to do with material that will stay extremely hazardous, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, for tens of thousands of years. It's a challenge the plant's operators, and those who want to build two new nuclear plants there, say has been settled to their satisfaction. "We're in a very good position down there to manage the waste at the site," David Crane, CEO of NRG Energy, one of the partners in the proposed South Texas Project expansion, said this week. NRG would continue to store spent fuel in the pool, then convert it to dry storage. That involves encasing it in concrete on-site. Adding two plants would increase the amount stored, but plant officials say they can do it safely.

Article Highlights * With the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain seemingly dead, reprocessing again is being proffered as a way to deal with U.S. nuclear waste. * But the reality is that reprocessing neither solves the waste problem nor reduces safety risks. * Research should continue into next-generation reactors that can burn spent fuel, but until then, dry casks and repositories must be pursued. There are 104 commercial nuclear power reactors in the United States, which supply about 20 percent of the nation's electricity. These are light water reactors (LWR) fueled with low-enriched uranium (LEU), containing initially about 5 percent of the fissile isotope uranium 235. Each nuclear plant receives about 25 tons of LEU fuel annually, in the form of long pencil-thin rods of uranium oxide ceramic enclosed in thin metal "cladding", that are bundled together (in bunches of 300) to form fuel elements. Each year, nearly the same amount of spent fuel is removed from each reactor, but it's now intensely hot, both thermally and radiologically. In fact, even after five years of cooling in the "swimming pool" associated with each reactor, a fuel element would soon glow red-hot in the atmosphere because of the continuing radioactive decay of the products of nuclear fission. At this point, spent-fuel elements can be loaded into dry casks and stored at reactor sites on outdoor concrete pads with two casks added each year per reactor.

State says material 'doesn't really present that much of a hazard'; plans to truck sulfuric acid into Montrose County site MONTROSE - Opponents of a proposed uranium mill in southwestern Colorado near the Utah state line may be relieved to hear that state officials in charge of overseeing the transport of incoming ore and outgoing yellowcake don't actually consider such things "nuclear materials." Uranium yellowcake and sulfuric acid would be carted along I-70 in Colorado By state statute, uranium ore and processed yellowcake, used to make fuel rods for nuclear reactors, are considered mere hazardous materials and therefore not limited to transportation along the state's designated nuclear materials routes. "When you're dealing with yellowcake shipments, they get carried in pretty much a dump truck," said Capt. Allan Turner of the Colorado State Patrol's Hazardous Materials Transport Safety and Response (HMTSR) team.

Bumbling nuclear waste disposal technicians opened spent reactor fuel rods and spilt radioactive material on the ground in front of the Delta Bessborough Hotel Thursday afternoon. And people laughed, because this political vaudeville act was a protest against the closed-door Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) hearings. The two-day meetings at the hotel were held as part of the search for a long-term nuclear waste storage facility. The NWMO, a not-for-profit established by Canada's nuclear industry, has identified Saskatchewan, Ontario and Quebec as possible sites for deep geological storage. Coalition for a Clean Green Saskatchewan held a protest with about 20 people outside the hotel. Some supporters jumped into a media scrum with reporters and posed their own questions to a NWMO spokesperson. "What gives you the hubris, the arrogance to make us think we can solve this problem," said Jim Penna, in reference to the U.S. government's failed $90 billion Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage project.

Montrose County commissioners delayed a decision on a controversial uranium mill proposal Wednesday after nearly six hours of public testimony that underscored deep divisions between longtime mining families and residents of neighboring Telluride and San Miguel County. The Pinon Ridge Mill would be located on the far western edge of Montrose County, in the Paradox Valley near the Utah border, but the uranium and vanadium processing mill - capable of producing enough fuel rods to power a city one and half times the size of Denver - has been meeting with stiff opposition from residents of Telluride and Ridgway. They argue the mill will re-stigmatize the area once known as the capital of the global uranium industry, irreparably damaging the region's new reputation as an outdoor recreation mecca and international tourism destination. Proponents counter the western end of Montrose County has been severely depressed for decades, struggling for jobs and a sustainable economy since the last big uranium boom tapered off in the 1970s and '80s in the wake of nuclear power-plant disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. They also say technology has changed dramatically since the days when Uravan produced uranium for the first atomic weapons but is now a toxic ghost town.

Article Highlights * With the nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain seemingly dead, reprocessing again is being proffered as a way to deal with U.S. nuclear waste. * But the reality is that reprocessing neither solves the waste problem nor reduces safety risks. * Research should continue into next-generation reactors that can burn spent fuel, but until then, dry casks and repositories must be pursued. There are 104 commercial nuclear power reactors in the United States, which supply about 20 percent of the nation's electricity. These are light water reactors (LWR) fueled with low-enriched uranium (LEU), containing initially about 5 percent of the fissile isotope uranium 235. Each nuclear plant receives about 25 tons of LEU fuel annually, in the form of long pencil-thin rods of uranium oxide ceramic enclosed in thin metal "cladding", that are bundled together (in bunches of 300) to form fuel elements. Each year, nearly the same amount of spent fuel is removed from each reactor, but it's now intensely hot, both thermally and radiologically. In fact, even after five years of cooling in the "swimming pool" associated with each reactor, a fuel element would soon glow red-hot in the atmosphere because of the continuing radioactive decay of the products of nuclear fission. At this point, spent-fuel elements can be loaded into dry casks and stored at reactor sites on outdoor concrete pads with two casks added each year per reactor.

A contract foreman with Columbia's Westinghouse nuclear fuel plant has been fired and the company cited by federal regulators after inspectors found that the foreman falsified safety records at the Bluff Road facility. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced a settlement Friday with Westinghouse in which the company said it will improve oversight of contractors hired to work the plant. It also agreed to an assessment of how well company employees are trained to investigate wrongdoing. Company spokesman Jackie McCoy said the contract foreman had been relieved of his duties, but she declined to name the person. She said the contract foreman oversaw fewer than 10 employees at the plant, near the Congaree River south of Interstate 77. Westinghouse Electric Co.'s 550,000-square-foot plant, one of the few of its kind in the United States, makes fuel rods for nuclear power stations across the country. The Bluff Road factory is one of the Columbia area's largest employers, with more than 1,000 workers.

Savannah River Site officials have taken corrective actions - and fired two workers - after two incidents in H Canyon in which bundles of highly enriched uranium were dropped by a crane. According to a Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board report - dated Aug. 21 and made public Thursday - the incidents "had potential criticality safety implications" and halted reprocessing operations for a week. A criticality accident is one in which a chain reaction occurs, said Charles Nickell, the site's nuclear materials disposition manager. "It is something we definitely don't want to happen." The H Canyon area is where highly enriched uranium is loaded by cranes into vats of acid, called "dissolvers," that help purify and convert the material from solid to a liquid form. The liquid is later blended with natural uranium to create low-enriched uranium and shipped off-site for use in the manufacture of fuel rods for commercial reactors.

A former AmerenUE engineer is accusing the utility and the federal agency that regulates nuclear power of failing to adequately investigate a 2003 incident that led to a two-hour unplanned shutdown at the Callaway reactor. A Nuclear Regulatory Commission investigation found that control room operators delayed a move to insert control rods - equipment required to keep the reactor shut down - since the error occurred just before a scheduled shutdown for maintenance. The NRC called the delay "not prudent," but noted it did not threaten human safety. After discovering the problem four years after it occurred during a routine review and alerting plant managers, nuclear engineer Lawrence Criscione claimed retaliation by his supervisors, including a negative performance review and the loss of his operators' license. Criscione was paid more than $500,000 in a confidential settlement in exchange for his resignation in 2008 and an agreement to not pursue any future legal claims against the St. Louis-based utility, documents obtained by The Associated Press show.

THE government should halt all plans to build more nuclear power stations with immediate effect after it was revealed that Suffolk was just hours away from a nuclear accident, campaigners claimed last night. About 10,000 gallons of radioactively contaminated water was discharged into the North Sea in January 2007 after a pipe, carrying cooling water to an engineered pond containing highly radioactive spent fuel rods, burst at Sizewell A power station on the Suffolk coast. Now an independent consultant's report has said that the power station was about ten hours away from a serious accident which could have drained the cooling pond, uncovered the old fuel and started a fire which would have released highly radioactive products.

Doug Rokke earned his B.S. in Physics at Western Illinois University followed by his M.S. and Ph.D. in physics and technology education at the University of Illinois. His military career has spanned 4 decades to include combat duty during the Vietnam War and Gulf War 1. Dr. Doug Rokke is a Depleted Uranium expert. Doug served as a member of the 3rd U.S. Army Medical Command's Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical (NBC) teaching, medical response, and special operations team, the 3rd U.S. Army captured equipment project team, and with the 3rd U.S. Army Depleted Uranium Assessment team during Gulf War 1(Operation Desert Storm).

Most DU weapons manufactured in the United States show a distinct difference between conventional weapons and those that contain DU and other toxic elements such as Tungsten etc. The warhead clearly shows the Rod with a Sabot sitting just below the point. It must be clearly understood that despite any re classification that may have taken place by the US Government these truly are nuclear related weapons. You can clearly see that the Israel's IMI is manufacturing weapons that are almost identical to the US weapons that are displayed in the left hand picture above.

Perhaps the most distinctive building near N Reactor, the "golf ball," should be rubble by the end of today. The building, which looks like a large, white golf ball half buried in the sand, was used as a waste treatment facility for the piping system at N Reactor. It stands about 20 feet high and has a diameter of 35 feet. Washington Closure Hanford also is making progress at the cooling water building on the banks of the Columbia River. It filtered water from N Reactor's fuel storage basins, which stored highly radioactive fuel rods. Two sand filter tanks, each weighing about 60,000 pounds, have been removed from the building.

Waste Control Specialists LLC said Tuesday that it will begin storing low-level radioactive waste from Studsvik Inc., an Erwin, Tenn.-based waste processor. Interim storage at WCS' facility in Andrews County of this thermally processed Class B and Class C low-level radioactive waste will greatly reduce the risk and administrative burden of generators when compared to the use of multiple storage facilities across the United States, a news release said. "Studsvik provides a valuable national service because its process transforms the low-level radioactive waste into a safer form for storage and ultimate disposal. At the same time, Studsvik's processing reduces the volume of low-level radioactive waste by more than 80 percent, which allows for the efficient use of valuable landfill space," WCS President Rod Baltzer said. "WCS is proud to participate in this innovative program to increase the safety and to reduce the volume of low-level radioactive waste."

The CEO of Energy Fuels, George Glasier, holds up a tiny pellet, smaller than a ping-pong ball, to illustrate his point. This pellet of nuclear fuel, he says, is the equivalent of five gallons of oil, one railroad car, or 100 tons of coal. Behind this small finished pellet, however, is a long and expensive chain of production, from mining the uranium ore, to milling it into concentrated yellowcake that will travel across the country to be refined again into pellets that are placed into a fuel rod and used in a nuclear reactor. Right now, the price of uranium is too low to support that chain of production, according to Denison Mines President Ron Hochstein. Hochstein said that Denison's White Mesa Mill, the nation's only operating uranium mill, has ceased its regular milling operations for the remainder of 2009. "We will stop processing conventional ore through 2009, but will be processing alternate feedstock on a reduced scale, and we'll be laying off some personnel," said Hochstein. "Our costs are higher than the current spot price." Hochstein was upbeat about the future of the uranium market, and his company already has processing contracts in place for 2011, when he expects that the spot price of uranium will again make it profitable to process the radioactive material.

Taxpayers forked over a great deal of money to build the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, which the federal government now has no plans to use. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., says taxpayers should get some of that money back. In fact, Washington's decisions regarding high-level nuclear waste disposal have been so slow and so political that a bill such as Graham's is needed to force politicians to take responsibility for this safety issue for the generations. The United States needs a place to store or dispose of its spent commercial reactor fuel. Nuclear power plants use up fuel. Those spent fuel rods are highly radioactive. Right now, they are simply piling up at the nuclear power plants that used them.