Group items tagged

Details of a class action lawsuit for Canadian veterans of Cold War atomic testing were filed Monday in a Saskatchewan court as former soldiers who were subjected to nuclear blasts prepare to do battle with the federal government for compensation. Veterans who witnessed atomic tests in the U.S. and at other locations allege that various ailments they suffer from are the result of exposure to radiation from those experiments.

The U.S. military is set to run a "realistic" test Friday of a system built to knock out long-range missiles that could be fired by North Korea or Iran, the Pentagon said. The drill, over the Pacific, will be the first since September 2007 involving an attempted intercept by the sole U.S. shield against long-range ballistic missiles.

NUCLEAR waste from UK tests at Maralinga in the 1950s may have been dumped at sea despite the Federal Government ordering a proper clean-up. Just how much radioactive waste resulted from the British series of tests at Maralinga, in South Australia, and how the then British government disposed of it has always been a mystery. However, declassified British Government documents to be released publicly today under the 30-year rule reveal for the first time the plutonium's final resting place was probably the ocean floor.

Britain learned that apartheid South Africa was preparing to test an atomic bomb only after being alerted by the Russians. Previously secret papers released at the National Archives show how James Callaghan, the Labour prime minister, was informed in August 1977 of a secret test site in the Kalahari Desert in a personal letter from Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet president. A Soviet spy satellite had discovered the site at Vastrap, in a remote area south of South Africa's border with Botswana, a week earlier. Two 750-foot shafts had been drilled in preparation for underground explosions. The Americans appear to have possessed similar satellite imagery but failed to inform their closest ally until after the Brezhnev letter.

Compounds used in medicine are making their way into the Broome County landfill and into the Susquehanna River. Some -- such as the nuclear medicine used for diagnostic imaging and fighting cancer -- are radioactive, and have set off radiation detectors at the landfill. Wastewater treatment plants aren't specifically designed to treat effluent for such substances. While fish downstream of the Binghamton-Johnson City Joint Sewage Treatment Plant haven't been tested, Bingham-ton University researchers found traces of hormones and drugs -- including antibiotics, estrogen and aspirin products -- in the plant's effluent prior to a new secondary treatment system that went online last year. The area hasn't been tested for drugs since.

US Defense Secretary Robert Gates believes the United States needs to resume its nuclear tests. The US needs to take steps to transform an ageing and very expensive complex of nuclear weapons from the Cold War era to a smaller and less costly enterprise that could meet the nation's security needs for the future. He said the current nuclear stockpile has been re-engineered to extend its life span, but such extensions cannot continue indefinitely. Without a modernization program, Gates said, the long-term outlook for the arsenal is "bleak."

Calls have been made for relations of Britain's nuclear test veterans to be checked for potential genetic damage. North Durham MP Kevan Jones will consider researching the possible damage caused to children and grandchildren of those exposed to radiation 50 years ago. His pledge comes after a House of Commons debate that revealed similar research in New Zealand found that effects had been passed down generations.

Tuffy Ruth is one of Mesquite's originals. His dad's family has been here since the beginning. He has ancestors that fought in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. His mother was an original settler in St. George. She too was a downwinder who died of leukemia. Tuffy worked at the Nevada Test Site from 1961 to 1993 as a miner. The men that prepared the tunnels for the underground tests and worked on Yucca Mountain tunnels are all miners.

Agency gives OK to some Area 51 workers seeking compensation In 1998, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy were keeping mum about the secret work that went on at Area 51, a widely known Air Force installation near the northeast corner of the Nevada Test Site. That year, the U.S. Supreme Court turned away an appeal by former Area 51 workers who claimed that they were made sick and that co-workers had died from exposure to toxic fumes from stealth coatings burned in open trenches near the Groom Lake base, 90 miles north of Las Vegas. The site was used to test high-tech aircraft.

A WAR veteran used as a guinea pig in secret nuclear tests has been granted his day in court. Ken McGinley, 70, blames the Ministry of Defence for leaving him seriously ill and unable to have children after being exposed to huge doses of radiation. If he and nine other ex-soldiers win their test cases at the High Court in London in January, they will sue for damages.

British defence chiefs have admitted servicemen were exposed to dangerous radiation during nuclear tests in Australia and the South Pacific in the 1950s. The admission, made after years of denials, is in papers filed with the High Court in London by Ministry of Defence lawyers.

Officials have interrupted the multiyear test of converted plutonium fuel at a South Carolina nuclear reactor after the discovery of "excessive growth" in the fuel assemblies, two nuclear watchdog groups said Monday. Advertisement Officials with the two groups said the discovery has implications for other reactors, including Oconee Nuclear Station, where similar types of fuel assemblies using different fuel have produced "the same flaw."

A mineral Queensland Health is testing for radioactivity on North Stradbroke Island has also been found at the planned site of new Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) Brisbane studios. On July 18, Queensland Health agreed to test radioactivity levels on the Moreton Bay island after residents voiced concerns about monazite, a naturally occurring phosphate mineral that contains radioactive thorium.

The state's health agency will be testing water from wells near three nuclear reactor sites around South Carolina. The Department of Health and Environmental Control says its staffers will visit residents Thursday and take samples from wells near Duke Energy Inc.'s nuclear power plants in York and Oconee counties and near the V.C. Summer plant in Fairfield County, which is co-owned by South Carolina Electric and Gas and state-owned utility Santee Cooper.

AN EX-SERVICEMAN from Leeds who was fighting for compensation over Cold War atomic bomb testing, has died.

The widow of an Ottawa veteran of Cold War atomic tests says the federal government has turned a blind eye to the suffering the former soldiers are enduring. Peter Mitchell, who died on Monday after a 15-year battle with various cancers, is the second area veteran of the atomic bomb tests who has died within the past seven months.

Vermont Yankee's advertisements would have us believe that nuclear power is clean, safe and reliable. This is psychological abuse on the part of Entergy towards the good people of Vermont. This week, throughout the state, I had the opportunity to listen to two speakers who have dedicated themselves to exposing the truth that we don't hear in our dialogues, debates and discussions about the future of Vermont Yankee. Lorraine Rekmans, a member of the Serpent River First Nation in Ontario and candidate for parliament, and Ian Zabarte, the secretary of state for the Western Shoshone Nation near Yucca Mountain, spoke about the missing pieces in Entergy's clean energy campaign. These missing pieces are uranium mining, waste storage and current nuclear weapons testing at the Nevada test site.

ST. LOUIS (AP) - Baby teeth collected in St. Louis in the 1950s and '60s to measure children's exposure to atomic bomb fallout will be used in a new study to try and gauge if Cold War bomb testing increased cancer risk. The new study became possible after an estimated 85,000 baby teeth were discovered in storage in 2001. They were leftover contributions to the St. Louis Baby Tooth Survey, and about 300 of them will be tested as part of the new research.

Nearly 35 years after France thumbed its nose at world opinion and held a series of nuclear tests on Mururoa Atoll in the South Pacific, David Barber's view has not changed. It was a fundamentally wrong thing for France to do and nothing since had altered that opinion, Barber said.

MOSCOW, May 13 (UPI) -- Russia has pegged the number of nuclear tests conducted worldwide in the past 50 years at as many as 730, not including blasts set off by the Kremlin.