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Minute amounts of radioactive strontium have been detected in soil and plants in Fukushima Prefecture beyond the 30-kilometer zone around the crippled Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, the science ministry said Tuesday. It is the first time that radioactive strontium has been detected since the Fukushima plant began leaking radioactive substances after it was severely damaged by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. There is no safety limit set by the government for exposure to strontium, but the amount found so far is extremely low and does not pose a threat to human health, the Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology said. Experts, however, expressed concern that the accumulation of strontium could have adverse health effects. When strontium enters the human body, it tends to accumulate in bones and is believed to cause bone cancer and leukemia. Samples of soil and plants were taken March 16 to 19 from a number of locations in Fukushima Prefecture.

In the course of summer, Russia removed another 46 strontium-fuelled lighthouses from the coast of the White Sea and the Barents and Kara Seas. With Norwegian project support, Russia has now removed 180 radioactive lighthouses between Murmansk and the Novaya Zemlya and replaced them with solar cell installations. Strontium-fuelled lighthouse (Fylkesmannen.no)The 46 lighthouses were all sent to the VNIITFA institute in Moscow, Rosbaltnord.ru reports with reference to RIA Novosti. Another 11 lighthouses will be brought from the island of Vaigach to Moscow next summer.

"A Connecticut River fish caught four miles upstream from the Vermont Yankee nuclear reactor this winter tested positive for low levels of strontium-90, a highly dangerous radioactive isotope recently confirmed in soil outside the plant. But the Department of Health said Monday that the fish's strontium-90 was not related to this winter's radioactive leak at Vermont Yankee, and state officials attributed the strontium to atmospheric testing in the 1960s and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 20 years ago, which spread radioactive fallout even as far away as Vermont."

"The Department of Energy is proposing extending a chemical barrier along the Columbia River at Hanford after a pilot project successfully trapped radioactive strontium before it entered the river. At the same time, a system to pump contaminated water out of the ground and treat it, which had disappointing results, would be torn out. DOE has been testing the chemical barrier technology since 2005, with the most recent results showing a 90 percent reduction in strontium contamination in ground water, according to DOE. The test area extends 300 feet along the Columbia near Hanford's N Reactor, but DOE is proposing extending the chemical barrier to 2,500 feet to span the width of the area where strontium exceeds drinking water standards in ground water near the river."

A Sept. 29 letter published in your paper ("Dumping strontium into river dangerous") needs correcting. When Entergy purchased the Indian Point nuclear power plants several years ago, it made a commitment to remove all the used fuel from the old Unit 1 reactor (which was shut down in 1974 by then-owner Consolidated Edison). Strontium-90, a radioactive nuclide, has been identified in groundwater samples near the plant, and this was unacceptable to Entergy. The removal of this fuel now means that the source of the contaminant is removed.

The Norwegian-Russian project on replacing radioactive strontium batteries with solar panels in lighthouses along the White Sea and Barents Sea coast and islands is now completed. In 2009 the project might be adopted in the Baltic Sea. All of the Northern Fleet hydrographical service's 153 lighthouses along the White Sea and Barents Sea coast and islands, have now been modernized to use solar energy as power source, Russian TV company TV21 reports. The radioactive strontium batteries that used to supply these lighthouses with energy have been shipped to the Mayak reprocessing plant in Chelyabinsk, Siberia.

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."

Radioactive strontium 90 has been found in trace amounts in a monitoring well next to Indian Point for the second time in little more than a year. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission spoke with county officials and others in an afternoon conference call today with Entergy, so the company could detail the preliminary test results it found during routine well sampling on the property, according to NRC documents obtained by The Journal News.

Forgotten about for 50 years, an odd stash yields clues about above-ground nuclear tests and cancer They were locked away in an ammunition bunker near St. Louis, Mo., in dozens of cardboard boxes. Each was in its own manila envelope, with an index card identifying the donor. These 85,000 baby teeth were collected in the late 1950s and early 1960s to study the effects of radioactive fallout in the environment. The fallout came from hundreds of above-ground nuclear tests in America and other parts of the world. The radioactive isotope Strontium-90, one of the by-products of the bombs, spread into the atmosphere, fell onto the land, was ingested by dairy cows and passed into the milk supply. Strontium-90, like calcium, was concentrated in children's teeth in detectable amounts. In 1958 scientists in St. Louis began a campaign to collect baby teeth to study the link between above-ground testing and human exposure. The undisputed link between the tests and a radioactive element in baby teeth provided much of the impetus for the 1963 Test Ban Treaty, which outlawed above-ground nuclear weapons-testing.

"Tests on soil samples taken at Vermont Yankee Nuclear Plant in Vernon now confirm the presence of a new - and more serious - form of radioactivity in the ground outside the reactor building. Yankee spokesman Larry Smith released a statement late Friday afternoon confirming the presence of strontium 90 -- a "hard to detect" isotope found 15 feet below ground in soils excavated during the search for a broken pipe leaking tritium last March."

The Department of Energy is proposing that tons of very low-level radioactive soil from a closed plutonium extraction plant in New York be trucked to Tennessee. The Chestnut Ridge Landfill in Anderson County was the only landfill mentioned as the likely dirt depository during a conference call Thursday organized by DOE. Some 6,000 cubic yards of soil that contains cesium-137 and detectable levels of strontium-90 and plutonium-239/240 are to be excavated from the New York site starting in mid-October, according to a DOE briefing. That's the equivalent of some 200 dump truck loads of waste.

The Department of Energy is proposing that tons of very low-level radioactive soil from a closed plutonium extraction plant in New York be trucked to Tennessee. The Chestnut Ridge Landfill in Anderson County was the only landfill mentioned as the likely dirt depository during a conference call Thursday organized by DOE. Some 6,000 cubic yards of soil that contains cesium-137 and detectable levels of strontium-90 and plutonium-239/240 are to be excavated from the New York site starting in mid-October, according to a DOE briefing. That's the equivalent of some 200 dump truck loads of waste.

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.

The last five strontium-fuelled lighthouses along the Barents Sea coast are now being replaced with solar technology. All together, 153 of the radioactive lighthouses have been removed as part of a Russian-Norwegian project. Since year 2000, Murmansk regional authorities have together with the Norwegian Finnmark county governor removed all the radioactive lighthouses (RITEGs) from the Russian Barents Sea coast. As many as 85 of the lighthouses were located in Murmansk Oblast, while 68 of them were in Arkhangelsk Oblast.

Workers at Indian Point nuclear power plant have loaded the fifth and final canister of spent fuel from the Unit 1 Spent Fuel Pool onto the outdoor storage pad. The canister contains the last of the spent fuel from the Unit 1 pool. Officials said removal of the fuel from the pool eliminates the source of Strontium-90 and other radioactive contaminants in the pool water and ultimately the groundwater.

1999: After five decades of denial, the U.S. government owns up to poisoning thousands of defense, aerospace and atomic energy workers by exposing them to beryllium. President Bill Clinton asks Congress to enact legislation to compensate the sickened workers and their survivors. The element beryllium (Be, atomic number 4) is a Group 2 alkaline earth metal, the lightest of the family that includes magnesium, calcium, strontium, barium and radium. Because of its low weight, high melting point, resistance to corrosion, great strength and good electrical conductivity, it's widely used in electronics, aerospace, atomic energy and defense. Other applications are in precision machining and die casting, molding plastics, and making dental plates and X-ray tubes.

Twenty-three years have passed since The Day of April 26 divided human fates into "before" and "after" the disaster at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Until this day it is the world's worst anthropogenic catastrophe unmatched for its environmental impact. For Ukraine Chornobyl is an everyday reality and a host of global-scale problems. Unfortunately, the problems caused by the catastrophe are as acute today as they were 23 years ago. Can one get used to devastated villages and abandoned fertile land? Today nothing prevents us from learning in detail what was happening on the banks of the Prypiat in late April-November 1986. In May 1986 foreigners were the first to learn the truth: on April 30 a Geiger counter on a Swedish nuclear power plant detected an unacceptably high level of radiation. After the Swedish government ascertained that the discharge did not take place in Sweden, it made an official inquiry. Mikhail Gorbachev addressed the people only 18 days after the disaster, on May 14. And three years passed before the information on the radioactivity conditions was declassified and publicized. After the explosion at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant, the scientists at the Institute for Nuclear Research (National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) identified two groups of radionuclides emitted from the damaged reactor. One of them included volatile radioactive substances carried up high in aerosols with the streams of warm air (iodine-131, iodine-135, cesium-134, cesium-137, and strontium-90). Nearly 30 percent of cesium accumulated in the reactor core was emitted.

"Even after billions of dollars are spent cleaning up the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, radioactive waste could threaten the Columbia River for thousands of years to come. A government analysis shows that hot spots of uranium, strontium 90 and other potential carcinogens could linger in Hanford's groundwater for nearly 10,000 years. The analysis is part of a 6,000-page document outlining the U.S. Department of Energy's options for dealing with leaky underground storage tanks. But that's a worst-case scenario, Department of Energy officials said Tuesday night. The goal is to ensure that groundwater leaving Hanford after the cleanup meets drinking water standards, they said. Officials faced a skeptical crowd at a public meeting in Spokane. "The impacts to the groundwater and the people who will use it are shockingly high," said Gerry Pollet, executive director of Heart of America Northwest, a Seattle-based Hanford watchdog group that advocates stricter cleanup standards. "Our grandchildren will be exposed to this. People will drink that groundwater. It's a valuable resource and it's only going to get more valuable.""

"Even after billions of dollars are spent cleaning up the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, radioactive waste could threaten the Columbia River for thousands of years to come. A government analysis shows that hot spots of uranium, strontium 90 and other potential carcinogens could linger in Hanford's groundwater for nearly 10,000 years. The analysis is part of a 6,000-page document outlining the U.S. Department of Energy's options for dealing with leaky underground storage tanks. But that's a worst-case scenario, Department of Energy officials said Tuesday night. The goal is to ensure that groundwater leaving Hanford after the cleanup meets drinking water … "

"In a letter dated May 20, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Petition Review Board denied a request by Rep. Paul Hodes, D-N.H., that it order Entergy to keep its Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant off-line until a number of actions have been completed regarding a recent leak of contaminants into the groundwater under the site. Hodes had asked the NRC to prevent Yankee from restarting after its current refueling outage until the removal of tritiated water from the ground is completed. He also asked that Entergy finish removing soil that was contaminated with radioactive cesium, manganese, cobalt, zinc and strontium before the plant is restarted. In addition, Hodes requested that the root cause analysis, the final report on why tritium leaked from the plant, and the NRC's review of documents submitted to it are both completed prior to restart. "