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Sen. Webb wants to explore whether the U.S. should recycle nuclear fuel rods. The experts are divided, and an investigation is worthwhile. After a visit to a nuclear fuel processing plant in Lynchburg, Sen. James Webb said he wants to consider whether it's time for the United States to get serious about recycling nuclear waste

Government plans to send the highly-radioactive spent fuel rods stored at the Koeberg nuclear power station overseas for reprocessing, Parliament's minerals and energy portfolio committee heard on Wednesday. This was a short-term solution to disposing of it, in terms of policy approved by Cabinet "but not announced yet", minerals and energy department nuclear safety director Schalk de Waal told MPs.

For the sixth year in a row, Areva's nuclear fuel processing and equipment work in Lynchburg has won the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's approval. "No specific areas needing improvement were identified," said Charles Payne, the NRC's chief of an Atlanta inspection branch that oversees Areva and two other nuclear-fuel plants.

Exelon representatives brought the Ogle County Board up to speed July 15 on their plan for storage of spent fuel at the Byron Nuclear Generating Station. Communications director Robert Kartheiser said construction has already begun on a dry cask storage system which he said is necessary to the operation of the nuclear plant.

U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson, along with the Utah and Nevada Congressional delegations, has introduced a bill -HR 4062-that amends the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, according to a press release from Matheson's office today. Advertisement Matheson's bill requires commercial nuclear utilities to transfer nuclear waste from spent nuclear fuel pools into dry storage casks; requires the Department of Energy (DOE) to take title of all spent nuclear fuel stored in dry casks on-site and requires such storage to comply the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's safety regulations, the release said.

A small amount of uranium powder escaped from a machine at a Japanese nuclear fuel plant near Tokyo, slightly exposing a worker to radiation, the plant operator said Thursday. There was no health threat to the worker and the spill from Wednesday's incident was contained inside the plant in Yokosuka, about 30 miles southwest of Tokyo, according to Global Nuclear fuel-Japan Co.

One largely unnoticed example is gaining big national attention thanks to a hefty $27.5M USD settlement awarded to the 250 plaintiffs who suffered disease and death due to poor regulation and flaws in the technology. The story begins in Apollo and Parks Township in Armstrong county Pennsylvania, back in the late 1950s. The Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp., eager to profit at the booming trend to exploit nuclear energy, jumped at the chance of opening new facilities to process nuclear fuel. In 1959 they opened two new plants in the respective townships, which processed both uranium and plutonium fuels.

NEW DELHI, May 27 (Xinhua) -- India has received the first consignment of uranium fuel from Russia for unit-1 of 1000 MW Kudankulam nuclear power project, according to the NDTV Tuesday. The Kudankulam nuclear power project, comprising of two units of 1000 MW each, are at an advanced stage of completion in technical collaboration with the Russian Federation and the Low Enriched Uranium fuel for its first unit arrived at Kudankulam, in Tamil Nadu state of India Sunday.

AIKEN - The U.S. Energy Department has finalized a $2.7 billion contract with a French company to build a South Carolina plant where weapons-grade plutonium will be converted into commercial reactor fuel, the company announced today. The modified contract allows Shaw Areva MOX Services to complete construction of the facility at the Savannah River nuclear complex near Aiken, said Shaw spokesman Sean Clancy. The facility for converting weapons-grade plutonium into a mixed-oxide fuel to be burned in commercial nuclear power reactors would be the first of its kind in the U.S

The last of the fuel has been removed from Hanford's shutdown Fast Flux Test Facility and shipped to Idaho almost a year ahead of a legal deadline. The research reactor is being deactivated to allow it to be put into a long-term surveillance and maintenance mode at minimum cost by August 2009. The Department of Energy was required under the Tri-Party Agreement to have the last of the fuel removed from the reactor in March 2009.

FUKUI--Nuclear fuel was brought Friday into the Monju fast-breeder reactor in Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture, which had been shut down since a sodium leak accident in December 1995. The last time nuclear fuel was brought into the reactor was in November 1995, shortly before the accident.

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.

Community activists concerned about storage of spent fuel at the Nuclear Power Station in Zion want more information from owner Exelon on its plan to have the plant dismantled by a contractor. A former commissioner with the Waukegan Park District was among about 60 people who attended a presentation by Exelon Nuclear officials last weekend that drew pointed questions.

Although a dozen years have elapsed since any new nuclear power reactor has come online in the U.S., there are now stirrings of a nuclear renaissance. The incentives are certainly in place: the costs of natural gas and oil have skyrocketed; the public increasingly objects to the greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels; and the federal government has offered up to $8 billion in subsidies and insurance against delays in licensing (with new laws to streamline the process) and $18.5 billion in loan guarantees. What more could the moribund nuclear power industry possibly want?

ST. PETERSBURG - Fifteen years ago, in March of 1994, a report was published which, in essence, saved the Arctic region from a nuclear catastrophe. The report by the then little-known Bellona Foundation uncovered the secrets that were for decades hidden by Soviet authorities, and later, the Russian military. Bellona, 18/03-2009 - Translated by Charles Digges The subject of the secret was some 150 decommissioned nuclear submarines languishing at dockside at the ports of the Russian Northern Fleet with their spent nuclear fuel still on board. These cast-off submarines were rusting and their terrifying cargo of spent nuclear fuel could well have ended up in the waters of the Barents and White Seas at any moment. The successor of the USSR - the Democratic Russia - had no money to devote to their dismantlement.

When decommissioned in 1987, Hanford held two-thirds of the nation's high-level radioactive waste stored in 177 underground tanks. These have been leaking into the groundwater and the river despite a massively funded, 19-year cleanup effort. The Nov. 17 hearing presented a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement on the energy department's earlier proposal to develop a "Global Nuclear Energy Partnership" presented in May, 2007 at the same locations. The DOE snuck in its mandated hearings far from our population centers, with short and little notice. For good reason. Under the GNEP plan, nuclear fuel would be produced in the U.S. and other advanced nuclear nations through a reprocessing technology that is yet to be developed. The cost is undisclosed but substantial. Nuclear fuel would be provided to developing countries for their nuclear energy development. In return, we would receive their waste for further reprocessing - an international recycling system that would keep the big boys in control of weapons-grade nuclear material production. The DOE claims the reprocessing site isn't yet selected, but the inside word is that it's Hanford.

President Barack Obama's proposed budget all but kills the Yucca Mountain project, the controversial site where all of the U.S. nuclear industry's spent fuel rods once were supposed to end up in permanent storage deep below the Nevada desert. Since there are no other plans being developed, the waste will remain in 104 reactors across the country. Illinois holds the most nuclear waste.

I read with great interest Nuclear Energy Institute Chief Executive Officer Marvin Fertel's article on spent fuel policy ( The Energy Daily, February 7). You will appreciate that Nevada is deeply concerned about how the country will deal with spent nuclear fuel. We don't have nuclear power plants but the Energy Department selected Nevada's Yucca Mountain for the country's repository for commercial nuclear waste, despite the site's obvious safety deficiencies. We support an independent re-examination of the waste issue because we are confident DOE's gargantuan and misdirected project cannot withstand independent scrutiny.

The Spanish government has yet to decide when it will revive plans to find a site for storing spent nuclear fuel, Environment Minister Elena Espinosa said on Tuesday. Spain has for several years planned to build a facility to house high-level waste for 60 years. The country's nuclear power stations no longer have room to store much more than the 6,700 tonnes of spent fuel rods they have accumulated. "We have not discussed a date for this matter," Espinosa told journalists in response to questions on the planned Centralized Temporary Site, known as ATC in Spanish.

Russia will become the first supplier of nuclear fuel to India since a club of uranium producers lifted a three-decade ban on sales to the south Asian country. A unit of Rosatom Corp., Russia's holding company for all nuclear assets, will sign a contract with Indian atomic energy monopoly Nuclear Power Corp. on Feb. 11 in Mumbai to deliver 2,000 metric tons of uranium pellets, both companies said. India will pay $780 million for the fuel, Rosatom spokesman Sergei Novikov said by phone from Moscow today. "We're very glad that a Russian company will be the first to supply India with low-enriched uranium after the Nuclear Suppliers Group canceled its restrictions," Novikov said.