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The government has released a list of 11 sites in England and Wales where new nuclear power stations could be built. The locations were nominated by companies interested in building the stations, and the government has given its initial approval to the sites. Nine of the locations have previously had nuclear reactors, and the other two are close to Sellafield in Cumbria. A month-long public consultation period now commences. The government wants the first reactors operational by 2018.

The U.S. Department of Energy has agreed to resume toxic waste cleanup at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday. The settlement, reached on Tuesday, follows the EPA's demand in January that the Energy Department immediately restart cleanup at the site or face escalating fines. The EPA said the DOE also agreed to pay a $165,000 fine, despite an agency spokesman's earlier assertions that it would appeal the fines as "unjustified." "I'm very, very pleased that we reached this settlement," said Kathy Setian, an EPA remedial project manager assigned to the lab. "But I'm very disappointed that we had to take it to the point that we had to take it."

"Plans to bury America's nuclear waste inside Nevada's Yucca Mountain, a project that has long been the subject environmental and political opposition, appear all but dead. Funding for the nuclear repository was eliminated in President Obama's budget proposal released Monday. What's more, according to the Las Vegas Sun, the Department of Energy has moved to suspend licensing for the desert storage site. "

The safety record of Britain's nuclear industry will be tarnished tomorrow when managers at the Sellafield complex in Cumbria are fined for exposing staff to radioactive contamination. A substantial penalty is expected to be imposed by Carlisle crown court following a successful criminal prosecution brought by the Health and Safety Executive. Concerns about conditions at the plant come just a week after an eminent group of scientists and military experts described as "ludicrous" the manner in which 100 tonnes of plutonium was stored at Sellafield - and at a time when the wider nuclear industry is trying to build public support for a new generation of reactors.

The safety record of Britain's nuclear industry will be tarnished tomorrow when managers at the Sellafield complex in Cumbria are fined for exposing staff to radioactive contamination. A substantial penalty is expected to be imposed by Carlisle crown court following a successful criminal prosecution brought by the Health and Safety Executive. Concerns about conditions at the plant come just a week after an eminent group of scientists and military experts described as "ludicrous" the manner in which 100 tonnes of plutonium was stored at Sellafield - and at a time when the wider nuclear industry is trying to build public support for a new generation of reactors.

"The Obama administration moved vigorously on two fronts Friday to promote nuclear power, proposing to triple federal loan guarantees for new projects and appointing a high-level panel to study what to do with nuclear waste. Administration officials confirmed that their federal budget request next week for 2011 would raise potential loan guarantees to more than $54 billion from $18.5 billion. The newly formed panel will examine a vastly expanded list of options for nuclear waste, including a new kind of nuclear reactor that would put some of it to use. The current $18.5 billion in loan guarantees were provided in the 2005 Energy Act, but have not been disbursed because of long bureaucratic delays. The Energy Department has said it is set to start issuing those soon. Because the loan guarantees are supposed to cover 80 percent of the construction cost, the current sum now available would cover only about three projects. "

"A new experiment that reproduces the magnetic fields of the Earth and other planets has yielded its first significant results. The findings confirm that its unique approach has some potential to be developed as a new way of creating a power-producing plant based on nuclear fusion - the process that generates the sun's prodigious output of energy. Fusion has been a cherished goal of physicists and energy researchers for more than 50 years. That's because it offers the possibility of nearly endless supplies of energy with no carbon emissions and far less radioactive waste than that produced by today's nuclear plants, which are based on fission, the splitting of atoms (the opposite of fusion, which involves fusing two atoms together). But developing a fusion reactor that produces a net output of energy has proved to be more challenging than initially thought."

"America's nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclear terrorism are interconnected. How the US handles its arsenal must change. The United States is on the cusp of making a needed shift on policy related to nuclear weapons. The last time the US had a congressionally mandated review of its nuclear status was in 2002. In that Nuclear Posture Review, declassified portions contained no mention of "preventing nuclear terrorism." The latest review, slated to be finished in March, appears to indicate that America's nuclear arsenal and the threat of nuclear terrorism are interconnected issues. That means that how the US handles its nuclear weapons will have to change."

"The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) today leveled criticism at an expected Obama administration announcement that it will significantly boost federal loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants. The Wall Street Journal reported today that the Obama administration plans to triple federal loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors, from $18.5 billion to $54 billion. Ellen Vancko, nuclear energy and climate change project manager at UCS, said "increasing loan guarantees for nuclear power beyond what Congress already has authorized would shift unacceptable risks from the nuclear industry to U.S. taxpayers. This is a prime example of pork barrel politics on behalf of special interests." "

"This week Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev will sign a new strategic arms reduction treaty. Since the US and Russia own 95% of the world's nuclear weapons, the signing of this treaty is the most significant step towards nuclear arms reduction since the original document was signed in 1991. Despite this advance, the nuclear non-proliferation treaty is under increasing pressure. Nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation are firmly back at the top of the political agenda and their importance at this time cannot be overestimated. Every country has a responsibility to contribute towards disarmament efforts, strengthening the non-proliferation regime and ensuring our nuclear security. At the same time, we also face the spread of nuclear technology as growing numbers of states harness the use of civil nuclear power for their increasing energy demands. States that can enrich uranium and reprocess spent fuel can more readily acquire the capability to create a nuclear weapon, so a truly international and non-discriminatory regulatory system is urgently needed to govern these technologies."

"President Obama's new Blue Rib­bon Commission on America's Nuclear Future has a mission that nobody else has been able to do: Find a long-term storage solution for America's growing mountain of radioactive nuclear waste. Earlier this month, Steven Chu, secretary of the US Department of Energy (DOE), filed papers to finally end the agency's nearly 30-year quest to make Nevada's Yucca Mountain the main US repository for spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive waste. That leaves the United States without a permanent storage site."

"Nothing stirs in the empty heart of Tomioka, a community of 16,000 now reduced to the eerie status of a ghost town after the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. The shops of the main street are deserted, motorbikes and cars are abandoned, weeds push through gaps in the concrete. Vending machines selling drinks and snacks - always popular in Japan - stand unlit and silent. Tomioka lies just inside the 20km exclusion zone that was hurriedly enforced last March when a radioactive cloud escaped from the stricken power plant. In the rush to flee, doors were left wide open. Windows and roofs shattered by the earthquake and tsunami are still not repaired. A bicycle leans against a lamp-post."

""The estimated source terms for iodine-131 are very constant, namely 1.3 x 10^17 becquerels per day for the first two days (US station) and 1.2 x 10^17 becquerels per day for the third day (Japan)," the institute said in a German-language statement posted on Wednesday on its website. "For cesium-137 measurements, (the US station) measured 5 x 10^15 becquerels, close, while Japan had much more cesium in its air. On this day, we estimate a source term of about 4 x 10^16." A "becquerel" is the unit that measures how many radioactive nuclei decay per second, and the "source term" refers to the quantity and type of radioactive material released into an environment. "The nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl had a source term of iodine-131 at 1.76 x 10^18 becquerels of cesium-137 at 8.5 x 10^16 bequerels," the statement added. "The estimated for Fukushima source terms are thus at 20 percent of Chernobyl for iodine, and 20-60 percent of Chernobyl for cesium.""