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Since when is nuclear an "alternative energy source"? Nuclear power has been around for decades. It's second only to coal for electricity production in the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. And yet in its recent public survey, Three Mile Island repeatedly refers to nuclear power as an "alternative energy source."

South Carolina Electric and Gas Company as Itself and Acting as Agent for the South Carolina Public Service Company (Also Referred to as Santee Cooper) Acceptance for Docketing of an Application for Combined License for Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Station Units 2 and 3

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.

NRC's review of Oyster Creek's license renewal request has been extended by an August 21 commission order referring one technical issue back to an Atomic Safety and Licensing Board panel. In its order, the commission directed the panel to resolve "as expeditiously as is practicable" issues related to operator AmerGen's plans to create a 3-D computer model of corrosion in Oyster Creek's steel drywell containment shell. Nuclear Information and Resource Service and five other groups, who contend that the corrosion could jeopardize future safe operation of the plant, appealed those issues to the commission after the ASLB panel rejected their challenges earlier this year.

A three-year struggle to release childhood leukaemia figures in Dumfries and Galloway has been referred back to Scotland's information commissioner. The House of Lords has ruled he must decide whether the information can be "anonymised" sufficiently for it not to constitute personal data.

The rocks in the Marcellus Shale not only hold an abundance of natural gas, they also contain quite a bit of radioactivity. It comes in the form of Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials, which the drilling industry refers to by the acronym NORM. Is NORM harmful to human health?

Shipping thousands of tons of highly radioactive spent fuel from U.S. nuclear power reactors across the ocean to an international repository in Siberia, if one is built, would be "impractical," a nuclear industry official said Thursday. The comments of Steve Kraft, a senior director at the Nuclear Energy Institute, were made in reference to Arizona senator and Republican presidential candidate John McCain's statement this week that an out-of-country, international repository for nuclear waste could eliminate the need for a U.S. repository at Yucca Mountain.

Determination of Holyrood government to refuse planning permission for reactors is sidestepped Prime Minister Gordon Brown last night reignited the row over nuclear power north of the border with a statement hinting that the Scottish Government's refusal to consider new reactors may not be the end of the issue. Asked how many should be built in Scotland, he said: "These are matters for decision." He made no reference to the Scottish Government's decision to refuse planning consent for such developments in Scotland.

South Carolina Electric and Gas Company Acting for Itself and as Agent for the South Carolina Public Service Company (Also Refered to as Santee Cooper) Virgil C. Summer Nuclear Station Units 2 and 3 Combined License Application; Notice of an Extension to the Environmental Scoping Period

A group of retired soldiers, who say they were ordered to help decontaminate a 1958 nuclear accident without the right protective gear, is suing the Defence Department. The class-action suit on behalf of three soldiers and the estates of two others accuses the government of negligence and deceit. The suit says they didn't get proper protective clothing, weren't correctly decontaminated after their shifts and that the government covered things up by purging their records of references to the incident at Chalk River, Ont.

An "excessive exuberance" for expansion in the U.S. nuclear power industry has calmed because of the global credit and economic crisis, the head of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said on Tuesday. Separately, a GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy official warned that the lack of credit will slow the pace of U.S. nuclear power development. U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Dale Klein said in the past two years he worried whether there would be enough NRC staff to review an avalanche of licenses for new nuclear power plants, none of which have been ordered since the 1970s. "Today, of course, the picture looks a little different ... it seems like the global economy has resolved the issue of what I referred to as an 'excessive exuberance' to be in line for the first new reactor builds," Klein said in a speech to NRC staff in Washington.

EVERYTHING seems easy to some proponents to make the Bataan nuclear plant generate energy for the first time in the unseen future: 1) only $1 billion R48,500,000,000) is needed and 2) just one of our 7,000 islands for waste disposal will suffice. The tall boast One Filipino geologist claims to be knowledgeable: "Give me one island out of our 7,000 and I can find ways to safely store nuclear waste in the Philippines." He referred to levels of barrier protection system and cited Carlsbad, New Mexico as a model for disposal of nuclear waste. He said we have this attitude of "not in my backyard."

Despite progress against nuke dump proposal, Nevada should remain vigilant Now that the Obama administration has followed through with a promise to strip federal funding from a proposed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, many of the project's ardent supporters have begun throwing in the towel. The Washington Post, which has supported burying nuclear waste in Nevada, wrote in an editorial last Sunday that "the Yucca Mountain project is dead." At a Senate Budget Committee hearing Wednesday, ranking Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire said: "I don't want to save Yucca. I accept the fact that may not be viable." The most stunning comment, though, came from Alex Flint, senior vice president for governmental affairs of the Nuclear Energy Institute. Referring to the nuclear waste now stored at reactors, Flint was quoted on National Public Radio Wednesday as saying: "In many ways, we've reduced the urgency of a need to find some other solution for this material. We can definitely deal with this material for decades or hundreds of years. It would be ideal to come up with some eventual disposition proposal in this regard, but we have a lot of time to figure that out."

By Michele Boyd and Arjun Makhijani A Fact Sheet Produced by Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research Thorium "fuel" has been proposed as an alternative to uranium fuel in nuclear reactors. There are not "thorium reactors," but rather proposals to use thorium as a "fuel" in different types of reactors, including existing light-water reactors and various fast breeder reactor designs. Thorium, which refers to thorium-232, is a radioactive metal that is about three times more abundant than uranium in the natural environment. Some of the largest reserves are found in Idaho in the U.S. Large known deposits are in Australia, India, and Norway. The primary U.S. company dvocating for thorium fuel is Thorium Power (www.thoriumpower.com). Unlike the claims made or implied by thorium proponents, however, thorium doesn't solve the proliferation, waste, safety, or cost problems of nuclear power, and it still faces major technical hurdles for commercialization.

In the context of disposal of radioactive waste, a performance assessment is a quantitative evaluation of potential releases of radioactivity from a disposal facility into the environment, and assessment of the resultant radiological doses. The term performance assessment can refer to the process, model, or collection of models used to estimate future doses to human receptors. Typically, a performance assessment is conducted to demonstrate whether a disposal facility has met its performance objectives. In general, a performance assessment considers the following factors: * Selected scenario (specific features and processes at the disposal facility and in the surrounding area, such as the location of the potential release, location and general characteristics of the receptors, and applicable transport pathways through which radionuclides might reach the environment and pose a threat to the selected receptor groups) * Performance of the cask or other engineered barrier system used to store low-level waste, limit the influx of water, and reduce the release of radionuclides * Release and migration of radionuclides through the engineered barrier system and geosphere (those deep-underground portions of the disposal facility where human contact is generally not assumed to occur) * Radiological dose(s) to the selected receptor group(s)

Bumbling nuclear waste disposal technicians opened spent reactor fuel rods and spilt radioactive material on the ground in front of the Delta Bessborough Hotel Thursday afternoon. And people laughed, because this political vaudeville act was a protest against the closed-door Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) hearings. The two-day meetings at the hotel were held as part of the search for a long-term nuclear waste storage facility. The NWMO, a not-for-profit established by Canada's nuclear industry, has identified Saskatchewan, Ontario and Quebec as possible sites for deep geological storage. Coalition for a Clean Green Saskatchewan held a protest with about 20 people outside the hotel. Some supporters jumped into a media scrum with reporters and posed their own questions to a NWMO spokesperson. "What gives you the hubris, the arrogance to make us think we can solve this problem," said Jim Penna, in reference to the U.S. government's failed $90 billion Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage project.

The Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (COMARE) is a quango that is supposed to be a watchdog on the health issues arising from the activities of nuclear installations in the UK. COMARE's terms of reference are "to assess and advise Government . on the health effects of natural and man-made radiation and to assess the adequacy of the available data and the need for further research". But how seriously does this body take its responsibilities? Not very, it seems. A recent authoritative health study commissioned by the German government entitled KiKK (Kinderkrebs in der Umgebung von KernKraftwerken, or Childhood Cancer in the Vicinity of Nuclear Power Plants) found increased leukemias near all German nuclear facilities. The Environmental Health Sub-Committee of the West Cumbria Site Stakeholder Group, a group that discusses nuclear issues mainly concerning Sellafield, raised the findings of this study with COMARE and asked for its views. A one-page COMARE briefing was sent by Professor Alex Elliott, the COMARE chairman, and was read out to the May 2009 meeting of the Environmental Health Sub Committee as COMARE's official view. It is likely that other stakeholder groups near other UK nuclear sites were informed along similar lines. However the COMARE briefing was never published on its website.

This time around, U.S. Senate skeptics who killed the nuclear test-ban treaty a decade ago must take into account a new, $1-billion verification network underpinning the pact, the treaty chief said Wednesday. In 1999, "the system was a blueprint," Tibor Toth said of the high-tech web of stations on alert for nuclear bomb tests. Now "I could call it a `verification Manhattan Project," he said, referring to the all-out U.S. program that built the first bombs in the 1940s. Toth, who heads the U.N.-affiliated Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, spoke with The Associated Press on the eve of a conference of some 150 nations convened every other year to urge those that have not ratified the treaty, including the United States, to do so. The two-day session will be held in parallel Thursday with a summit of the 15 U.N. Security Council members on the subject of nuclear nonproliferation, presided over by U.S. President Barack Obama.

A Russian nuclear submarine in which 20 people died after a toxic gas accident will be leased to India later this year, a Russian defence official was quoted as saying on Wednesday. "On June 20 the vessel should finish all its tests. We are planning to hand the nuclear submarine over to India by the end of this year," Deputy Defence Minister Vladimir Popovkin said, quoted by Interfax news agency. Popovkin was referring to the the Nerpa, an Akula-class attack submarine that was the site of the one of the Russian navy's worst tragedies in recent years, Interfax reported.

Japan's parliament has unanimously adopted a call for a nuclear weapons-free world in a resolution passed by both chambers that cleared the upper house Wednesday. The resolution, which refers to U.S. President Barack Obama's call in April for a world without atomic weapons, and to North Korea's May 25 underground nuclear test, was submitted by a bipartisan group of legislators. "Japan, as the only nation to have been attacked with atomic bombs, has a responsibility to spearhead efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons around the world," the resolution says. "The government needs to make efforts toward eliminating nuclear weapons, by trying to extend the regional efforts over the issue of North Korea's nuclear program to the global level."