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"Canada's nuclear watchdog is fast-tracking a request for a hearing to consider reopening the country's aging medical isotope-producing reactor. Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. made a request Friday for a formal hearing in hopes of restarting medical isotope production at the Ontario plant by mid-summer. The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has not yet scheduled a hearing, which is expected to take one day, but it said the date would be announced quickly and normal hearing rules will be tossed aside to deal with what it calls a priority case. "

Energy secretary blames predecessors for avoiding tough decisions in 'classic example of short-termism' Britain is facing a £4bn black hole in unavoidable nuclear decommissioning and waste costs, Chris Huhne, the energy and climate change secretary disclosed tonight. The decommissioning costs over the next four years revealed by officials to Huhne are so serious that he has already flagged the crisis up to the cabinet. The revelation places an unexpected burden on his department's £3bn annual budget ahead of difficult spending negotiations this summer."

Work has halted to empty the only Hanford tank on which work has been under way to retrieve radioactive waste, but the Department of Energy and its contractor have ambitious plans for the remainder of the year. "Washington River Protection Solutions is going to be working very hard this summer to pull this off," said Steve Pfaff, DOE project director for tank waste retrieval. Work started in January to remove 260,000 gallons of solids from Tank C-104, one of 142 leak-prone single-shell tanks at Hanford that still hold radioactive waste from the production of plutonium during World War II and the Cold War. But this spring the pump lowered into the tank to help remove waste hit an obstruction hidden in the sludge. It was a broken piece of an old pump that Washington River Protection Solutions had removed from the tank to make way for the pump used for waste retrieval."

"Official says he headed review of project A member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has disqualified himself from an upcoming key vote on the Yucca Mountain repository, saying he may have a conflict. George Apostolakis, a former nuclear science and engineering professor, disclosed he headed a panel that conducted a review on the nuclear waste project from March 2007 to March 2008 for Sandia National Laboratories, the lead science agency at Yucca Mountain. For that reason, he said in a statement Thursday, "I have concluded that I should recuse myself." The commission is expected to rule this summer whether the Department of Energy should be allowed to terminate licensing for a project it no longer wants to build. A panel of law judges within the NRC has decided that DOE cannot end the Nevada project unilaterally. The commission, which is the nuclear safety agency's ruling body, will determine whether that decision should be upheld or reversed. Apostolakis was one of three commissioners who had been urged to step aside on the Yucca Mountain vote, but for another reason."

"Bill Wilcox is not eating his sandwich. Bow-tied and bespectacled, he's the most dapper man in the room. Waiters come and go, the tinkle of iced teas being refilled adding a musicality to the lunchtime noise at the Flatwater Grill perched at the edge of Melton Lake. Wilcox, 87, squints down at the chicken salad on white toast, but what swims before his eyes is a city of mud, a city erected almost overnight. A secret city. In the summer of 1939, Albert Einstein penned a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was crucial, he said, to be the first to make use of a new discovery: If you bombard uranium with particles, the nucleus splits and creates a huge amount of energy. Einstein and his fellow physicists were persuasive. Things got going fast."

In the 1980s, climate scientists in Russia and the U.S. theorized that all-out nuclear war between the superpowers would result in a "nuclear winter," as smoke from the atomic explosions blackened the sky and sent summer temperatures plummeting below freezing - killing crops and eventually starving all those who survived the initial explosions. Now that the risks of an all-out U.S.-Russian exchange have diminished, scientists are looking at the climactic effects of regional nuclear war - and the predictions are still sobering.

CORNWALL has turned down the chance to receive a jackpot worth billions of pounds by not bidding to have radioactive waste stored in the county. The Government is currently inviting local authorities to submit expressions of interest to host geological disposal facilities for "higher activity" radioactive waste. In a white paper published in the summer the Government said that the construction and operation of the facilities would be a "multi-billion pound project that will provide skilled employment for hundreds of people over many decades".

Box Elder residents should receive notices within the next week alerting them to the presence of radium, a naturally occurring type of radioactive metal, in one of the city's two water wells, Mayor Al Dial said. Box Elder's notice stems from a violation that occurred this summer, when high levels of radium 226 and radium 228 were detected during a routine test of a new well. The well has since passed another quarterly test, Dial said. After a water system fails a water test, the system is considered in violation of the standards. To bring a water system into compliance takes four quarterly tests with an annual average that is below the standard.

For about two weeks there have been arguments over the "suddenly revived" Soviet-made nuclear-powered satellite which had been placed into an 800 km-high orbit in 1987. The military space vehicle suddenly started losing parts, sparking fears of a possible threat. Rest assured, the Kosmos 1818 satellite is incapable of destroying the Earth. However, the question forces consideration of space security issues in general. The back story is as follows. In mid-summer last year, NORAD tracking systems spotted the first signs of the satellite's disintegration. On July 4, NASA published the information recorded. The process gained momentum, in the current state of the satellite covered in the NASA orbital debris bulletin of January 15.

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.

It is said that all that glitters is not gold. Keep that in mind when considering the bidding war heating up the nuclear power business. France's EDF has offered $6.5 billion for half of Constellation Energy Group's nuclear business and some other assets, trumping Warren Buffett's bid of $4.7 billion for all of Constellation. If plummeting demand for everything from new cars to tin foil could fell BHP's monster bid for Rio Tinto, why wouldn't it weigh on demand for energy? While nuclear power has regained some favor as a cheap, relatively clean alternative to nasty fossil fuels, is it really safe to expect consumers to ramp up electric heat this winter, and air conditioning next summer, when they are worried about losing their jobs?

Enough highly enriched U.S. uranium to make about 20 nuclear weapons was sneaked back to the United States from Japan over a 12-year period until last summer in a secret operation aimed at keeping it out of terrorists' hands, a senior U.S. official and Japanese specialists recently revealed. The uranium, which was provided to Japan by the United States to build five nuclear nuclear research reactors, totaled more than 500 kg.

The discovery of more degraded wooden support beams in Vermont Yankee's cooling towers - this time in the reactor's only safety dedicated cell - raised questions Thursday about how thorough a special Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspection was this summer. Workers at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant had to immediately replace five deteriorated major support columns in the one safety-related cell of the reactor's two cooling towers during the plant's recent refueling outage, according to the NRC. The degraded columns, which are about 40 feet tall, were discovered after Entergy Nuclear started its gradual overhaul of the two cooling towers, replacing the wood with fiberglass. The overhaul is expected to take a couple of years.

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France joined Russia in condemning the Pentagon's plans to install missile defence bases in central Europe yesterday and backed President Dmitri Medvedev's previously ignored calls for a new pan-European security pact. Both presidents concluded a Russia-EU summit, in Nice in the south of France, with an agreement to convene a major international conference next summer at which the Americans, Russians and the 27 countries of the EU should come up with a blueprint for new post-cold war "security architecture" in Europe.

Although still in the licensing phase, full approval for the Port Hope Low Level Radioactive Waste clean-up is expected by mid-2009. "The licensing phase will continue through some hearings in the spring and summer of 2009," said Mark Stevenson, project manager for the Port Hope project. That approval would allow the municipality, together with the Low Level Radioactive Waste Management Office (LLRWMO), to move forward with plans to remediate radioactive waste within the municipality and transfer it to a long-term waste management facility, which will be constructed as part of the project.

The Indian Point nuclear power plant in Buchanan is pledging millions to follow the operational advice of an independent safety evaluation panel. The 12-person panel of industry experts was hired in March to evaluate safety, security and emergency preparedness at the controversial plant. The more than $4-million study was conducted over the summer, and last week, plant officials unveiled their five-year, $100 million blueprint of changes. Adjustments include:

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.

There are lots of toxic hazards to guard against in the stuff that ends up at recycling centers and landfills. Until this past summer, a radioactive cheese grater wasn't one of them. According to the state Department of Environmental Quality, the common kitchen utensil with an uncommon past set off the alarms at Genesee Recycling in August, sending ripples all the way to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Environmental Protection Agency.

Luxembourg's Minister for Health, Mars Di Bartolomeo, has confirmed that no nuclear waste is, nor has been, transported through the Grand Duchy. The information was provided in response to a parliamentary question which was raised following an incident this summer when a train carrying nuclear waste was stopped (outside Luxembourg) on its way to the Moselle. However, European regulations do not require one country to inform another that train cargo passing close to a country's border may contain nuclear waste.

South Carolina Electric & Gas Company, Acting for Itself and as Agent for the South Carolina Public Service Authority (Also Referred to as Santee Cooper) Application for the Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Station Units 2 and 3; Notice of Order, Hearing, and Opportunity To Petition for Leave To Intervene