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An "unusual event" was declared at the Hope Creek nuclear reactor early Thursday morning after sump pumps failed to start and drain water accumulating in a service building. The incident occurred in a non-nuclear area of the plant where water is drawn into the plant from the Delaware River to be used for cooling the plant. A leak let about 2 inches of river water to accumulate on the floor of the building before an alarm sounded, according to Joe Delmar, a spokesman for the plant's operator, PSEG Nuclear.

Will the November 4, 2008, election doom the future of Nevada? That sounds ominous, I know, but this election could be a make-or-break moment in history for the Yucca Mountain Project. This is the ill-conceived plan to bury nuclear waste in Nevada's Yucca Mountain. Everyone in this state knows the problems inherent in this project and should be on alert. But also this should serve as a "heads-up" to everyone in the country.

Centrica, Britain's biggest gas and electricity supplier, is to sound out institutional shareholders about reviving plans for a £22.5bn all-share merger with British Energy, The Sunday Telegraph has learned. Centrica, which owns British Gas, will gauge the appetite of City investors for a paper deal following the last-minute hitch in British Energy's takeover by EDF, the French government-controlled energy group, last week.

At some point, you or someone you know will benefit from a little-known radioactive isotope with a name that sounds like something out of a Spider-Man comic book -- technetium-99m. Doctors rely on it to diagnose conditions such as heart disease and bone cancer.

Attention U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission: You've got mail. And lots of it. Mailboxes at the federal agency have been stuffed with thousands of cards, letters and e-mails of late, as John and Jane Utahns sound off on a proposal by EnergySolutions Inc. to import low-level radioactive waste from Italy.

Anne Lauvergeon, chief executive of French nuclear giant Areva, has been sounding smug recently. The message from the Queen of Nukes in an interview this week was that Areva will be crowned as the exclusive reactor designer for Britain's new generation of nuclear power stations. But perhaps she should be more concerned about her existing customers.

On Wednesday, July 23, 2008, U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Dennis R. Spurgeon will deliver keynote remarks at the 2nd Annual Nuclear Fuel Cycle Monitor Global Nuclear Renaissance Summit hosted by Exchange Monitor Publications and Forums. Assistant Secretary Spurgeon is expected to discuss the Department's role in spurring nuclear expansion domestically with a nuclear energy policy that is technologically robust, economically sound, and publically acceptable.

Janine Anderson spent seven years as a secretary at the Oak Ridge nuclear reservation, one of the nation's premier nuclear weapons development and production complexes. But that safe-sounding office position didn't protect her from the toxic exposure that has ravaged her body. Her lungs are scarred with deadly beryllium, a key ingredient in atomic bombs. Her immune system is attacking her body, which harbors an array of heavy metals in toxic quantities. Her liver is so enlarged that it is threatening to burst through her abdominal wall.

Nuclear power, we're told, is a vibrant industry that's dramatically reviving because it's proven, necessary, competitive, reliable, safe, secure, widely used, increasingly popular, and carbon-free-a perfect replacement for carbon-spewing coal power. New nuclear plants thus sound vital for climate protection, energy security, and powering a growing economy.

Votes to Ignore Sound Science, Its Own Prior Analysis, and Radiological Safety Decision an Apparent Bow to Burgeoning Nuclear Fuel Enrichment Industry TAKOMA PARK, Md. - March 18 - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) voted today to declare that depleted uranium (DU) from enrichment plants is a Class A low-level radioactive waste -- the least dangerous kind that supposedly consists mainly of short-lived radionuclides. In 2005, the NRC had concluded that large amounts of DU were not covered by its existing low-level waste rule and directed its staff to develop recommendations regarding DU classification. The Commission's action also opens the door to classification of other dangerous radioactive wastes in the least hazardous category -- Class A. Commissioner Jaczko dissented and voted in favor of a rulemaking process to determine the classification of DU within the existing low-level waste framework.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu told a group of state officials this morning he favors moving forward toward licensing a nuclear waste repository in Nevada, although whether it would ever be built is another thing altogether, according to officials familiar with the meeting. Nuclear waste was one of the topics on the agenda when Chu met with 12 to 15 state public service leaders attending an annual conference of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. Regarding the Yucca Mountain Project, "it sounds like what he said was positive in that (DOE) wants the process to continue. It made our guys happy," said Rob Thormeyer, the association's communications director. But according to several people who were in the 20-minute session, Chu stressed that President Obama doesn't want the Yucca repository, "and I work for the president."

A two-way race to succeed U.N. nuclear watchdog director-general Mohamed ElBaradei could snag in an inconclusive vote next month, throwing open the field to compromise candidates, diplomats say. The transition comes at a time of a potentially great diplomatic opening that could aid the IAEA's non-proliferation mission. New U.S. President Barack Obama has signaled a readiness for direct talks with Iran on nuclear and other long frozen disputes after decades of unproductive mutual hostility. Japan's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency is believed to have a solid lead over his rival, South Africa's chief delegate, but appears to have stalled short of the 2/3 majority required for election, according to informal soundings taken by diplomats on the IAEA's 35-nation Board of Governors.

Yucca Mountain was supposed to be where the highly toxic material was sent. But Obama's energy budget leaves it out. ** sound: Reporter Gail Chaddock discusses the proposal to store nuclear waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain and why it's not in President Obama's budget. ** Washington - President Obama's proposed budget for fiscal year 2010 all but sinks prospects to store America's nuclear waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain. But it leaves wide open the role of nuclear power in building "a new economy powered by clean and secure energy" - and the question of what to do with existing, highly toxic nuclear waste. "The nation has already accumulated 60,000 metric tons of spent nuclear waste, and the material is going to have to be isolated from the environment for hundreds and thousands of years," says Edwin Lyman, senior scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington.

The U.S. government spent billions and billions of dollars (OK, I know that doesn't sound like much these days) enriching uranium for the nation's arsenal of nuclear weapons, and so where does the money go as the Dept. of Energy carries out plans to downblend the surplus stocks of bomb-grade stuff and otherwise divest itself of uranium supplies? Well, that kind of depends. In the DOE report, "Excess Uranium Inventory Management Plan," which was released in December, there's an appendix that deals with legal aspects of uranium sales and the money trail.

August 6 and 9 mark the anniversaries of the atomic bombs launched on the two Japanese cities. It marked the beginning of the era of nuclear terror. The testimonies of Jesuit Fr Arrupe, in Hiroshima at the time, and a Catholic doctor from Nagasaki. In 1945 political designs prevailed over the scientists and humanists who refused the use of atomic power. And now? Tokyo (AsiaNews) - Every year in the early morning hours of 6 August in Hiroshima in Peace Memorial Park (Peace Memorial Park) thousands of Japanese citizens and a few hundreds of tourists sit in meditation in front of the cenotaph to remember the victims of the first atomic explosion. At 8:15 the rhythmic sound of a gong calls the assembly to silent prayer.

Re: Wind farm foes should look to Wolfe Island Several years ago, while en route to Nova Scotia, my wife and I toured a wind farm near Matane, Que. Having read horror stories about the noise and bird deaths caused by these giant windmills we were both greatly surprised by what we found. Not only were the windmills not noisy, they were nearly silent. The only sound to be heard was a gentle 'swoosh' as the blades went around. The structures were actually quite elegant and I had a notion that these were among mankind's better ideas. As for bird deaths, I believe the numbers have been greatly exaggerated. The blades are allowed to rotate to a maximum of 22 revolutions per minute.

Thousands of people from some of South Carolina's most depressed counties are flocking to information sessions for new jobs cleaning up an old nuclear weapons complex. Some of the 2,000 people at a job fair in Barnwell this week say they don't mind that the job is cleaning up nuclear waste at the Savannah River Site. They say the economy is so bad that just about any job sounds good.

The FBI was scrambling. Agents had intercepted information about a possible terrorist attack in Manhattan, including a diagram showing a mysterious device. The raw intelligence was relayed to experts in Washington, who offered a daunting diagnosis: "You have a problem." As chilling as that sounded, the situation wasn't real. But authorities say it could be, and what followed over the next two days was an ambitious stress test of the city's line of defense against a radiological or nuclear terrorist attack. The exercise earlier this week involved hundreds of New York Police Department officers and FBI agents trained at detecting threats, along with an elite unit of federal weapons experts expected - with the approval of the U.S. attorney general - to swoop in by plane and defuse them.

The Clean Energy bills navigating their way through the Senate and House sound good at first glance. Consider the sales pitch: * Create clean energy jobs. * Achieve energy independence. * Reduce global warming. Who can argue with such lofty goals? Not you, not me - not unless we look at the fine print on Jeff Bingaman's 21st Century Energy Technology Deployment Act (S. 949), and the Markey/Waxman American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (H.R. 2454). Here's the dirty little secret.

If you haven't thought of the possibility that epidemic influenzas such as 'swine flu,' or 'H1N1 virus,' may come about as a result of low-level radiation in the form of fallout that covers the Earth, neither did I. That was until last week when someone proposed the idea to me. It all sounds like something out of a science fiction novel: 'a catastrophic nuclear war in 2030 covers the Earth with toxic radioactive fallout that gives rise to mutant viruses which infect and destroy surviving clusters of humans...' But, back in the 1950s, the so-called 'father of the [Soviet] hydrogen bomb' predicted that the radioactive fallout from the 'Cold War' could accelerate the rise of mutant pathogens, including influenzas.