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When some people refer to Utah as a "national treasure," it's not for the state's picturesque deserts or breathtaking mountains but because of a mile-square disposal site in Tooele County for much of the nation's radioactive waste. Without it, rail cars of low-level radioactive waste would have nowhere to go. That kind of notoriety is making the Utah public and policymakers uneasy, a state regulator said Wednesday.

They bickered about economics, energy and the environment, but Friday's debate between Republican Congressman Rob Bishop and Democratic challenger Morgan Bowen got most heated when the two talked about money. Not the billions spent bailing out failing financial institutions during the current market meltdown or the thousands more Utahns shelled out this year to gas up their cars or heat their homes.

Flame-licked doors of a hydrogen furnace clatter open at a Cold War bomb factory in the Altai Mountains of Kazakhstan, spilling a tray of baked metal capsules into the pale winter light. Each enriched-uranium pellet the size of a Brazil nut packs almost as much energy as a ton of coal. Former cognac and car salesman Mukhtar Dzhakishev says he plans to triple production at the Ulba Metallurgical Plant in Oskemen, a formerly secret city south of Siberia known in Russian as Ust Kamenogorsk.

PORTSMOUTH - The energy future belongs not to a "nuclear renaissance" but to a technological revolution involving wind and solar power, energy-efficient houses and affordable electric cars, Seacoast Anti-Pollution League activists marking the group's 40th birthday were told.

BOISE, Idaho (AP) - Nearly 80 rail cars loaded with contaminated sand from Kuwait are headed to a desert dump site in southwestern Idaho. Idaho Department of Environmental Quality Director Brian Monson says the American Ecology Co. is moving about 6,700 tons of sand to a hazardous waste disposal site in the Owyhee desert 70 miles southeast of Boise. The sand is from Camp Doha, a U.S. Army Base in Kuwait. The sand absorbed depleted uranium after ammunition caught fire.

I AM concerned to read that both Allerdale and Copeland councils have expressed an interest in hosting an underground repository for the storage of radioactive material in West Cumbria, which is clearly just based on our Government's cash-for-community projects bribe.THE selfish attitude of Val Wiggin is breathtaking (letters, January 30). Many people cannot afford to buy a car, let alone run one.I NEVER fail to be surprised at the efforts ex-television stars employ trying to get the people involved with purchase of death and funeral benefits. OVER 12 months ago I created a petition on the No.10 e-petitions website for the A66 to be upgraded to dual carriageway from Chapel Brow to the M6 at Penrith.

FEARS that radioactive material taken from France's old uranium mines has been used in construction have been raised by a TV documentary. According to investigators for the programme Pièces à Conviction (Incriminating evidence), there are many sites where radioactive material is a potential health risk including schools, playgrounds, buildings and car parks. Very little uranium is now mined in Europe, but France carried out mining from 1945 - 2001 at 210 sites which have now been revealed by IRSN, the Institute of Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety on its website - click here.

The first rail cars hauling uranium tailings away from a huge pile near Moab could move sometime in April. Work is about a month ahead of schedule to begin rail shipments, said Don Metzler, the project's director for the federal Department of Energy. Managers are hoping to ship the first load April 20, but Metzler says that date is only a target at this point and not firm. "It's getting more intense, and we're getting more excited," Metzler said Friday. The 16 million tons of radioactive sludge are being taken to Crescent Junction as part of a $1 billion project to deal with the waste. The tailings are leftovers from a former uranium mill about three miles northwest of Moab. The 130-acre site along U.S. 191 leaches contaminants into the river, which provides water for some 25 million people downstream.

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."

Small nuclear reactors - like a mini-car versus a Hummer - are on the drawing board of the nuclear industry, which has been hard-pressed to get financing for the standard-size models. The Tennessee Valley Authority has agreed to help one nuclear power company, Babcock & Wilcox of Lynchburg, Va., gain certification for such a scaled-down version. The reactors would be a tenth of the normal size and suitable for a community of 100,000 residents. The atom-splitting operations and radioactive waste would be stored underground, which advocates say offers more protection from airplane sabotage by terrorists.

Australia could see a five to tenfold increase of radioactive rail cargo if proposed uranium mines in South and Western Australia go ahead. Green Senator Scott Ludlum says rail cars carrying radioactive material are a concern for rail workers and communities on the line to Darwin. He's calling on communities across Australia to stand up against the expansion of uranium mining.

People are conserving energy and GRU revenues are declining, except during periods of extreme weather conditions. However, electric battery-charged cars are on the horizon. They will likely take up any slack in energy use, and then some. Progress Energy is looking ahead to increasing energy use. Their plans are to build two new nuclear power plants. However, electric customers beware, excessive cost overruns (and defects and deficiencies) at a Finnish power plant have been reported in the New York Times. If Progress Energy experiences similar problems, utility customers should brace for a double-cost whammy in their electric bills.

Residents fled a central Chinese county at the weekend over rumors of a radiation leak at a factory but most had returned by Monday after government assurances it was safe. The exodus was sparked Friday, when bystanders saw government workers at a factory using robots to examine a cobalt-60 irradiator that had malfunctioned. The irradiator is used mainly for sterilizing pepper powder, flavoring used in instant noodles and garlic. "There was chaos on the streets from about 2:30 p.m. until dark," Zhu Zhihai, manager of a different factory that processes garlic, told The Associated Press by telephone Monday. "All kinds of vehicles were going out of the county - farm vehicles, motorcycles and cars." He estimated that a third of the population of about 1 million in Qi county, Henan province, fled, many because they had heard rumors of explosions. Officials have not estimated the number who fled.

When the budget fight got underway earlier this year, Democrats hammered Republicans for criticizing President Obama's blueprint without a plan of their own. Now, as House Democrats work on cap-and-trade legislation to reform greenhouse gas emissions--one of Obama's main domestic priorities, along with health care and education--House Republicans have crafted an energy plan of their own before the debate has hit full swing. House Republicans unveiled their energy plan yesterday. It includes offshore drilling leases, 100 new nuclear reactors in the next 20 years (and an extended look at the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository), more Arctic drilling, and a $500 million prize for the first U.S. automaker to sell 50,000 cars that get 100 miles per gallon. Other prizes are included as well, administered by an energy trust fund.

Recent dust storms from strong winds have had the communities of Norwood, Telluride and Mountain Village concerned about future contamination with radionuclides should uranium development in the Paradox valley ramp up. Winds measuring consistently above 40 mph have mobilized large quantities of dust from the west end of San Miguel County, bringing sands all the way from Utah. Paradox valley, the proposed site for a new uranium mill, is due west of the resort communities of Telluride and Mountain Village, and the ranching town of Norwood. The dust storms, which occurred over two days at the end of March and early May, brought thick quantities of red dust up into the mountains, obscuring the sky and reducing visibility. "It was like being in a red fog," said one Norwood resident. "I couldn't even see Lone Cone [mountain]." The dust filled the sky, covered cars and homes, and settled visibly on the slopes around Telluride. It was an eerie portent, a bloody sunset and doom-like sky. Each spring strong winds race up Wright's mesa, heading in from the desert. A strong differential is formed by the heat in the low-lying desert areas around Moab and the four corners, and the cool mountain air at elevation. Each year, winds roll in from the west. But this amount of dust was unusual.

The CEO of Energy Fuels, George Glasier, holds up a tiny pellet, smaller than a ping-pong ball, to illustrate his point. This pellet of nuclear fuel, he says, is the equivalent of five gallons of oil, one railroad car, or 100 tons of coal. Behind this small finished pellet, however, is a long and expensive chain of production, from mining the uranium ore, to milling it into concentrated yellowcake that will travel across the country to be refined again into pellets that are placed into a fuel rod and used in a nuclear reactor. Right now, the price of uranium is too low to support that chain of production, according to Denison Mines President Ron Hochstein. Hochstein said that Denison's White Mesa Mill, the nation's only operating uranium mill, has ceased its regular milling operations for the remainder of 2009. "We will stop processing conventional ore through 2009, but will be processing alternate feedstock on a reduced scale, and we'll be laying off some personnel," said Hochstein. "Our costs are higher than the current spot price." Hochstein was upbeat about the future of the uranium market, and his company already has processing contracts in place for 2011, when he expects that the spot price of uranium will again make it profitable to process the radioactive material.

Motorists whipping past along I-70 see only the turnoff for Moab at the sign that says Crescent Junction. But a little to the north, a train sits on the railroad tracks, and oversize trucks unload rail cars. From there containers of the radioactive waste that are the legacy of a bankrupt uranium mine are unloaded one after the other, filling up a disposal cell that will trap the tailings for years to come. Much was celebrated Monday to the south on the outskirts of Moab at the former Atlas mine site, where full-time operations to remove the waste have been under way since mid-April.

More than half a century ago, an unemployed geologist stumbled across the country's largest deposit of high-grade uranium in southeastern Utah. The result of that discovery fueled a thriving industry for Moab at the time, but left a legacy of 16 million tons of uranium tailings that currently threaten the Colorado River. Today is a celebratory landmark in the cleanup process at the former Atlas mill site, where 22 rail cars hauling 88 containers of the waste will head 30 miles north to Crescent Junction to a disposal site. The site is 1700 feet longs, 1800 feet wide, and 30 feet deep. Trucks carrying the material dump it into the disposal site, where a front end loader make several passes to pack the bright red dirt, which is full of tailings.

A French anti-nuclear activist nicknamed the "unbending squirrel" managed to stop a train carrying uranium from a German processing plant in spectacular fashion, police said on Tuesday. Cecile Lecomte, 27, rappelled down a motorway bridge near the western city of Münster late on Monday night to hang suspended over a rail line, forcing the 25-car train carrying the enriched nuclear fuel to stop. Police climbing specialists then had to dangle off the bridge to remove her. It was the third time that Lecomte had succeeded in blocking trains from the Gronau processing plant in western Germany.