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A group of 15 cancer victims, survivors, relatives and friends who worked or who are still working at the West Valley Demonstration Project (WVDP) were expecting to see Senator Chuck Schumer at their meeting held last Friday. But Susanne Klein, whose husband died of cancer at age 54 after working for 18 years in the warehouse, explained that an earlier phone call said neither he nor a representative would be attending, but that they could send him the minutes.

Japan plans to increase mandatory contributions to a fund for compensating victims of accidents at nuclear power plants, Kyodo News said. The government aims to boost payments by electric power producers to as much as 120 billion yen ($1.1 billion) next year from 60 billion yen, Kyodo reported, citing government officials it didn't identify. It would be the first change in the fund since 1999, Kyodo said.

In the wake of the strongest and deadliest earthquake to ravage China in decades, the task of searching through wreckage for victims and property proved an onerous one. The 7.9-magnitude earthquake of 12 May devastated China´s mountainous Sichuan Province, killing an estimated 69,000 people and causing extensive property damage.

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.

WASHINGTON, April 28 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The AFL-CIO Metal Trades Department (MTD) is calling for congressional oversight hearings to investigate the failure of the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program (EEOICP) to provide adequate benefits to nuclear weapons workers and survivors victimized by radiation or exposure to toxic agents in their work environment.

Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, and two Idaho congressmen are calling for hearings into whether a program to compensate downwind cancer victims of atomic bomb tests in the 1950s and '60s should be expanded to include more areas - including several counties in Utah and Idaho. "Eligibility for compensation is limited to certain counties in just a few states. These geographical boundaries are, quite frankly, arbitrary boundaries that do not account for the fact that radioactive fallout does not abide by lines on a map," Matheson and Reps. Walt Minnick, D-Idaho, and Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, wrote to House Judiciary Committee leaders. The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act currently applies to residents who lived in 21 counties, including 10 in Utah - mostly in southern Utah nearest to the Nevada Test Site. However, the Deseret News obtained fallout maps in past years showing its path went through Salt Lake County and parts of eastern Utah for some tests.

The Commissioner of the Maine Department of Public Safety said Wednesday, Feb. 11, in a press release that the health and safety of the public were never at risk from items seized in December from the High Street home of homicide victim James Cummings. Commissioner Anne Jordan was reacting to published reports that potentially hazardous materials were recovered from the home of Cummings, who was shot and killed Dec. 9, 2008, by his wife, Amber Cummings.

The Moruroa e Tatou nuclear test veterans association in French Polynesia has expressed surprise that a fresh compensation ruling is being appealed by the French state. This follows an undertaking by the French defence minister, Herve Morin, that in such matters the state would no longer go ahead with a challenge but accept court rulings. According to Tahitipresse, the head of Moruroa e Tatou says he wonders if the minister had lied or just used deceptive language. As the French compensation bill is to go to the French senate, the association has questioned the significantly lower compensation being considered for victims in French Polynesia over that offered in France.

U.S. Sen. Jim Risch would back doubling federal loan guarantees for U.S. uranium enrichment projects to $4 billion and awarding half to a proposed new Ohio plant, if that's what it takes to help a competing proposal in Idaho that the first-term Republican fears could fall victim to politics. Risch told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday the political clout of lawmakers in Ohio, an important battleground state in presidential politics, could wind up hurting efforts by French-owned Areva Inc. to secure the $2 billion the Department of Energy currently has set aside for loan guarantees to uranium enrichment projects. USEC Inc. was told by the DOE in late July it wouldn't get the guarantees because its partially built plant near Cincinnati wasn't ready to go forward. Just a week later, however, the agency offered the Bethesda, Md.-based-company another six months before doing a final review of the loan application.

August 6 and 9 mark the anniversaries of the atomic bombs launched on the two Japanese cities. It marked the beginning of the era of nuclear terror. The testimonies of Jesuit Fr Arrupe, in Hiroshima at the time, and a Catholic doctor from Nagasaki. In 1945 political designs prevailed over the scientists and humanists who refused the use of atomic power. And now? Tokyo (AsiaNews) - Every year in the early morning hours of 6 August in Hiroshima in Peace Memorial Park (Peace Memorial Park) thousands of Japanese citizens and a few hundreds of tourists sit in meditation in front of the cenotaph to remember the victims of the first atomic explosion. At 8:15 the rhythmic sound of a gong calls the assembly to silent prayer.

Some residents in the Black Falls/Box Springs area have been drinking uranium- and arsenic-contaminated water for nearly 40 years. Another month or two, while they wait on the Navajo Nation to declare a state of emergency, probably won't kill them. Then again, maybe it will. During a July 11 meeting at the Box Springs home of Rolanda and Larry Tohannie, more than 80 people - many of them cancer victims - traveled miles of washboard roads in the summer heat to meet with representatives of the Navajo Nation and voice concerns about their illnesses, their need for safe drinking water, and what they view as a lack of assistance by Window Rock.

More than 20,000 people gathered in a small Kazakh town on Thursday to mark 20 years since the closure of a site where the Soviet Union conducted lethal nuclear tests for much of the Cold War. Moscow used the vast open steppes of now-independent Kazakhstan to test some 500 nuclear bombs between 1949 and 1989, poisoning swathes of land and entire generations of people, and feelings among the population still run high. President Nursultan Nazarbayev, despite being a close ally of Russia, used some of his strongest words yet to describe the grave legacy of the Soviet nuclear past. "Millions of Kazakh citizens fell victim to this nuclear madness," he told the crowd gathered at the town's memorial site. "The scar inflicted on our environment is so serious that it will not disappear for at least 300 years."

Idaho's nuclear downwinders have earned their right to cynicism. The federal government has ignored them. Their elected officials - namely Larry Craig and Dirk Kempthorne - had the chance to press the downwinders' case while serving in the U.S. Senate, but didn't do nearly enough. The downwinders believe their elevated cancer rates are linked to nuclear weapons tests conducted on the Nevada desert during the 1950s and 1960s. The Cold War has ended but the bureaucratic battle continues. Senators are taking a third run at expanding a federal program that provides payments to downwind cancer victims. Previous efforts have failed.

Algeria has minimized the value of French bill related to the compensation of victims of nuclear tests in the Algerian Sahara, and Polynesia. In fact, APS has quoted Foreign Minister, Mourad Medelci, saying the abovementioned financial compensations "are not the lone required demand capable of settling such issue, but rather removing the nuclear pollution caused by such tests." At the margin of Africa Day celebrations, attended by accredited diplomatic corps, Medelci indicated that Algeria is following with great interest the French bill on nuclear damages compensation. He further mentioned that "such a bill would only settle a part of the issue."

It's not just AIG and Wall Street jeopardizing your financial future. Taxpayers and ratepayers have long been victimized by the nuclear industry, their lobbyists, and some elected officials who take their contributions. Nuclear power couldn't exist without massive taxpayer giveaways. The nuclear industry is reaping enormous profits at your expense. Nuclear power's costs to taxpayers are astronomical. Wall Street rejects the nuclear gamble, so costs for new nuclear power plants and their deadly wastes will continue to come from the wallets of ordinary Americans. Nuclear industry lobbyists and oblivious supporters are perpetrating an unconscionable scam on taxpayers.

All four Senators representing Idaho and Montana are sponsoring new legislation that would make residents of the two states eligible for a federal government program that compensates people who lived in affected areas downwind of the Nevada Test Site during periods of atmospheric nuclear testing during the 1950s and 60s. Under the legislation, those victims would be compensated if they contracted cancer or other specified compensable diseases following the testing. The bipartisan legislation introduced today, S. 1342, would amend the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) to include all of Idaho and Montana.

French Polynesians who have had their claims for compensation for the effects of nuclear testing rejected say they won't give up their bids for redress. France carried out many nuclear tests in French Polynesia from 1960 until 1996, and its government has said it will compensate the victims. But campaigner, John Doom, says eight people who took their cases to French Polynesia's industrial relations tribunal were unsuccessful. He says the three surviving workers have leukaemia, and they and the five widows will consult with lawyers over how to continue with their bids.

President Barack Obama should instruct his administration to fulfill his campaign pledge to clean up the Navy's toxic mess in Vieques, Puerto Rico, and to help the victims of Vieques who suffer from a suite of health problems caused by the military's 50-plus year bombardment of the island. Back in February 2008, candidate Obama wrote a letter to then Governor Anibal Acevedo Vilá and the people of Puerto Rico in which he promised to "actively work" to clean up Vieques and to help those suffering from the health effects of toxic heavy metals, chemicals and radioactivity associated with the Navy's use of Vieques for target practice and live-fire training since World War II.

The French National Assembly has approved a bill to compensate the victims of the nuclear tests it carried out in French Polynesia and Algeria for more than three decades. It's the first time the French government has acknowledged it has a legal obligation to compensate the 150,000 military personnel and local staff who may have suffered serious health problems due to exposure to radiation. But the workers aren't happy, saying the new bill falls short of what they need.