Regarding the Friday letter, "Nuclear energy can answer our needs":
In the 1950s, nuclear power looked like our best option for future energy. Today nuclear power seems obsolete and expensive. Nuclear power's costs are rising because it requires tremendous amounts of costly fossil fuels to mine, process and transport uranium and build nuclear power plants. Plus, there are serious environmental concerns our federal government cannot seem to address.
SELLAFIELD HAS the world's biggest stockpile of plutonium and uranium and storage tanks contain highly volatile radioactive waste "more dangerous" than the Chernobyl reactor, according to a study published today.
The study, Voodoo Economics and the Doomed Nuclear Renaissance, also says the British government is now unlikely to meet its 1998 commitment under the Ospar Convention to reduce "close to zero" Sellafield's radioactive discharges into the Irish Sea by 2020.
The last containers of 6,700 tons of Kuwaiti sand at the Port of Longview contaminated with low levels of depleted uranium have been loaded onto trains bound for Idaho, said Chad Hyslop, spokesman for the disposal company American Ecology.
(Paducah Sun, The (KY) (KRT) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Jun. 1--Tearing down the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant would generate enough waste to fill the Paducah Expo Center roughly 100 times, according to the Department of Energy.
Dealing with a mountain of radiologically contaminated soil, debris and scrap is essential in planning for the ultimate use of the plant once it closes starting in 2013.
Much of the material would come from four huge uranium-enrichment buildings; each of the two largest spans 26 acres and is 80 feet high.
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (AP) - Building the world's first full-scale uranium enrichment factory - a 45-acre monster that was the biggest industrial structure in the world at the time - took 18 months amid the race for the first atomic bomb.
Six decades later, federal authorities think they finally have a handle on just how long it will take to clean up and tear down the long-shuttered relic of the Manhattan Project: About 15 years.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has called a meeting regarding the GE Plant in Castle Hayne. The commission is concerned about an alert the global nuclear fuels facility issued in January when moisture may have leaked into a container of uranium dioxide powder.
The executive director of the environmental watchdog group NC Warn said it was most likely a human error. However Jim Warren voiced his concern, saying, "That's the NRC's clever way of saying there was no risk."
Over the past two weeks, for the first time, news was shared in Kuwait that sand that has been contaminated since the 1991 U.S. Coalition War in Kuwait has now been shipped to U.S. soil and is currently heading to Idaho.
The sand's contamination resulted from U.S. military vehicles and munitions combining in a combustive accident at the end of that war.
BRATTLEBORO - The recent spate of advertisements promoting the electric power generated at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant as "clean and green" doesn't tell the true story, said two Native Americans whose native lands are severely affected by the nuclear power industry.
Lorraine Rekmans, of the Northern Ojibwa people from Elliot Lake, Ontario, and Ian Zabarte, from Mercury, Nev., secretary of state of the Western Shoshone National Council, spoke in Brattleboro Monday night, their last stop in a weeklong visit to Vermont organized by the Vermont Yankee Decommissioning Alliance and Citizens Awareness Network.
The New South Wales Government is facing scrutiny over plans to sell-off contaminated land at Hunters Hill, on Sydney's north shore.
An Upper House inquiry will be established into the land, which was once used for uranium processing.
The Greens won support for the inquiry from the Opposition and crossbenches.
The government has issued a $123,750 fine against B&W Technical Services, the contractor at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant, for safety violations related to a uranium chip fire in 2007.
More than 100 workers received radiation doses due to inhalation of airborne radioactive material created by the fire, according to the report released today.
WHEN Kevin Rudd unveiled his push for a world free of nuclear weapons, he was saying nothing unusual as leader of a party averse to almost all things nuclear.
However, eyebrows were certainly raised when a few days earlier his energy minister Martin Ferguson declared the Government would break an election promise by building a nuclear waste dump in the Northern Territory.
WINDHOEK, June 20 (Reuters) - French nuclear reactor maker Areva (CEPFi.PA: Quote, Profile, Research) plans to build a $750 million mine in Namibia after it gets a mining licence, and construction could start as early as next month, a senior official said on Friday.
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. -
The U.S. Department of Energy is accepting public comments on a draft environmental assessment to evaluate alternatives to safely dispose of approximately 15,300 tons of radiologically-contaminated nickel scrap recovered from uranium enrichment process equipment at the department's Oak Ridge and Paducah, Ky., facilities.
During the summer of 1991, the United States military had collected artillery, tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, conventional and unconventional munitions, trucks, etc. at Camp Doha in Kuwait. As result of carelessness this weapons depot caught fire with consequent catastrophic explosion resulting in death, injury, illness and extensive environmental contamination from depleted uranium and conventional explosives. Recently the emirate of Kuwait required the United States Department of Defense to remove the contamination.
On June 16, 1958, eight workers were hospitalized after they were exposed to high radiation fields in a production facility at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant. A batch of highly enriched uranium went critical when it was inadvertently mixed in an unsafe container, zapping everyone in the vicinity with neutrons.
After a recent opinion piece, facts need to once again be clarified. To this date only a minor fraction of separated uranium has actually been recovered by reprocessing from spent nuclear fuel. And apparently, there are no expectations that this may change in the near future.
A WATERFRONT home on the site of an old uranium smelter at Hunters Hill is so radioactive that it is "unfit for human habitation", independent tests have found.
Peter and Michelle Vassiliou, who bought their property at 11 Nelson Parade from the NSW Health Department seven years ago, are too scared to go home after radioactive soil next to their bedroom was measured at 350 times safe levels.
Nuclear energy is not the magic bullet to solve global warming and the costs of building reactors far outweigh the benefits, warns a retired University of Regina professor.
Jim Harding visited Saskatoon and Prince Albert Wednesday and Thursday to speak against uranium mining and nuclear energy, a hot topic in Saskatchewan since last week's announcement by Bruce Power LP that it is studying the feasibility of a reactor for the province. In his presentation, Harding said now is the time for public debate on whether the province should pursue nuclear power -- and his long-held argument is that we shouldn't.
This has been energy crisis week at Tomdispatch (with a brief pit stop at America's mega-bases in Iraq, built with control of the oil heartlands of the planet in mind). First, Michael Klare asked why the Pentagon's garrisoning of the global gas station had anything to do with American security. Then John Feffer wondered whether, when it came to that lethal combo of soaring energy prices, soaring food prices, and extreme weather, we were all now North Koreans. Today, Chip Ward takes up the energy crisis in America's increasingly arid western backyard.
The government is in favour of recycling the hundreds of tons of highly-radioactive spent uranium fuel that has passed through the country's three nuclear reactors, members of parliament's minerals and energy portfolio committee heard on Wednesday.
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