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A Boulder, Colo., laboratory says new tests show that more people were exposed to plutonium than originally thought after a June spill there. No one who was exposed is expected to have significant health effects. The National Institute of Standards and Technology said Thursday that about half the 29 people who have been tested showed signs of exposure. The specific number wasn't released.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has said the results of Iran's missile tests prove that US plans for a defence shield in Europe are unnecessary. Mr Lavrov said the tests confirmed Tehran had missiles with a limited range of up to 2,000km (1,240 miles).

VIENNA, May 22 (UPI) -- The International Atomic Energy Agency announced plans to hold a simulated nuclear emergency in Mexico to test international and national response capabilities. The two-day mock radiation emergency exercise will take place at the Laguna Verde nuclear power plant in Alta Lucero, Mexico, on July 9 and 10. The exercise is an effort to test the ability of emergency authorities from 60 participating countries and 10 international organizations to handle a radiological emergency, the IAEA reported.

June 3 (Bloomberg) -- On May 1, 1962, Lucien Parfait watched the In-Eker Mountain in the southern desert of Algeria tremble and fissure under a black cloud full of dust. Parfait, 68, witnessed one of France's 210 atomic tests from a distance of 800 meters (2,625 feet) with only a white cotton overall for protection. The former French army draftee, who'd dug tunnels in the mountain to place the bomb, is among thousands of people who say they were exposed to radiation from atomic tests between 1960 and 1996 in France's former Algerian colony and in the Polynesian atolls of Mururoa and Fangataufa.

Nuclear bomb veteran John Waters is demanding justice 52 years after he says he was treated like "a guinea pig" during atomic bomb tests. Mr Waters is aged 72 now, and was one of about 300 servicemen on board the "ship of death", HMS Diana, which sailed into the blast zone of nuclear testing off the coast of northern Australia in 1956.

Predawn atomic fireballs and billowing mushroom clouds - plus the radioactive and political fallout accompanying them - are all part of Nevada's long-time association with nuclear weapons testing.

Revision 2 of Regulatory Guide 6.2, ``Integrity and Test Specifications for Selected Brachytherapy Sources,'' was issued with a temporary identification as Draft Regulatory Guide DG-6004. This guide directs the reader to the type of information acceptable to the NRC staff to evaluate the integrity and test specifications for selected brachytherapy sources.

A Royal Navy veteran from Dundee is suing the Ministry of Defence (MoD) over the radiation he was exposed to during atomic bomb testing. John Gilchrist, 72, was involved in two tests at the Montebello Islands off north western Australia in 1956.

A garbage truck that tested over the limit for radioactivity Monday found its way to the Valparaiso Public Works yard for testing Tuesday afternoon by the Okaloosa County Special Operations Unit. The garbage truck was measured at 175 milliRoentgen on Monday and 165 on Tuesday, according to Ken Wolfe, Emergency Management Coordinator for Okaloosa County. But there was some confusion about the numbers. Wolfe said that those amounts would be dangerous, but it is likely that the first measurements actually were microRoentgen - much smaller units - because the measurement taken Tuesday by the Special Operations Unit measured zero.

Pius Henry fears his adopted government will kill him, that the United States won't live up to a health care obligation to people from Pacific islands where it tested nuclear bombs. Henry, a diabetic from the Marshall Islands, has received free dialysis treatments three times a week for years, but the cash-strapped state of Hawaii has threatened to cut off him and others to save money. Like thousands of legal migrants to Hawaii from independent Pacific nations, Henry believes the United States has a responsibility to provide health care to compensate for the radioactive fallout of 67 nuclear weapons tests from 1946 to 1958. "I don't have any option. I'm asking the government to help us," Henry said. "They say we're like U.S. citizens, but then they don't treat us the same. It's really unfair."

At the start of the Cold War, Stalin chose one of the furthest outposts of his empire to test the Soviet Union's first nuclear bombs. Sixty years on, their cancerous legacy is still being felt. Jerome Taylor reports from Kurchatov Nemytov Oleg, a radiologist at the National Nuclear Centre checks is Geiger meter at the epicentre of the first nuclear test conducted by the Soviets on 29 August 1949. Walking through the flat and endless Kazakh steppe, Nemytov Oleg suddenly stops, fumbles in his desert camouflage trousers and pulls out a Geiger counter. The device bleeps into life. He peers pensively at the reading. When we got out of the car it read 3. Now, within a couple of hundred yards, it has jumped to 10. He unwraps breathing masks and two pairs of disposable shoe coverings. "If we want to go any further we will have to wear these," he says. Further along the dusty road he checks his device once more. "You see, the meter is now reading 21," he says. "If we were in a city far away from here it would read about 0.1. The radiation increases very quickly."

As many as two-thirds of adults underwent a medical test in the last few years that exposed them to radiation and in some cases, a potentially higher risk of cancer, a study in five areas of the U.S. suggests. It is the latest big attempt to measure how much radiation Americans are getting from sometimes unnecessary medical imaging. Though the annual average radiation exposure from X-rays, CT scans and other tests was low, researchers found about 20 percent were exposed to moderate radiation doses and 2 percent were exposed to high levels. "Super X-rays" to check for heart problems accounted for nearly a quarter of the radiation people received. "Given the growing use of medical imaging procedures, our findings have important implications for the health of the general population," the researchers reported in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.

More than 20,000 people gathered in a small Kazakh town on Thursday to mark 20 years since the closure of a site where the Soviet Union conducted lethal nuclear tests for much of the Cold War. Moscow used the vast open steppes of now-independent Kazakhstan to test some 500 nuclear bombs between 1949 and 1989, poisoning swathes of land and entire generations of people, and feelings among the population still run high. President Nursultan Nazarbayev, despite being a close ally of Russia, used some of his strongest words yet to describe the grave legacy of the Soviet nuclear past. "Millions of Kazakh citizens fell victim to this nuclear madness," he told the crowd gathered at the town's memorial site. "The scar inflicted on our environment is so serious that it will not disappear for at least 300 years."

On the Fourth of July weekend of 1957, Darrell Robertson was on a train from Fort Lewis, Wash., to southern Nevada. He was one of hundreds of young men with orders in hand to take part in a training exercise that they were told was crucial to the fight against communism. Advertisement The native of Lamar was headed deep into the burnt landscape of the Mojave Desert, to a place called Camp Desert Rock. There, between 1945 and 1958, the U.S. military conducted 106 atmospheric nuclear tests. At the time, Robertson said, military brass believed a nuclear confrontation with the Soviets was likely. They were intent on developing a group of troops hardened by repeated exposure to radiation. They thought exposure to radiation was like sunning on the beach: First you burn, then you tan.

Suddenly, a flash of blinding light burst on the horizon, a deafening roar ripped across the steppe and a huge nuclear mushroom cloud slowly unfurled in the sky. This image still haunts Zheyembek Abishev who was a child when the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear bomb near his village in northern Kazakhstan where generations of his ancestors grazed horses in the quiet wilderness of the steppes. "I was born in 1947 and the explosions started in 1949. I remember it all very clearly," said Abishev, whose village is perched on the fringes of the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site.

French Polynesians who have had their claims for compensation for the effects of nuclear testing rejected say they won't give up their bids for redress. France carried out many nuclear tests in French Polynesia from 1960 until 1996, and its government has said it will compensate the victims. But campaigner, John Doom, says eight people who took their cases to French Polynesia's industrial relations tribunal were unsuccessful. He says the three surviving workers have leukaemia, and they and the five widows will consult with lawyers over how to continue with their bids.

Ex-servicemen who took part in nuclear tests in the 1950s have won the right to sue the government for compensation. More than 1,000 men say they and their families have suffered ill-health following the nuclear tests conducted in the South Pacific. The ruling by the High Court means the government could face its largest class action yet, for millions of pounds. The servicemen's solicitor, Neil Sampson, urged the government to settle the case out of court.

Nuclear test survivor Bert Tomlin has died without learning whether he and his fellow veterans' compensation claims can go ahead. Mr Tomlin, of Sherwood Close, Faversham, was 70 and one of about 1,000 servicemen who spent time in the Pacific in the 1950s while atomic and hydrogen bombs were tested just a few miles away. In 1976 he was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, a chronic lung disease that over the past six to eight months had left him housebound and using oxygen around the clock. Mr Tomlin was convinced that his ill health was caused by radiation exposure after the explosions and he and the other veterans were trying to claim damages from the Ministry of Defence.

The chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry, said on Friday he had begun laying the groundwork for Senate ratification of a global pact banning nuclear tests. The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was rejected by the Senate a decade ago. President Barack Obama said during his campaign that he would seek to get it ratified. But ratification is up to the Senate, where two-thirds approval is required. "We are very close ... We don't have that many votes to win over to win," Kerry told a conference on U.S. policy toward Russia. "But they are serious folks and we are going to have to persuade them."

The head of a group representing the victims of nuclear testing in French Polynesia says a law to provide them compensation is a public relations exercise. France's Minister of Defence recently outlined the main points of a proposed Bill to compensate, for the first time, victims of nuclear testing it conducted both in Algeria and later in French Polynesia, between 1966 and 1996. The compensation announcement precedes a court hearing in which the French government will answer to charges it failed to protect its French Polynesian workers from nuclear fallout during that time.