Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Wednesday that the new president will essentially zero-out funding for Yucca Mountain when he releases the fiscal 2010 budget to Congress after taking office. President-elect Barack Obama's transition office declined this week to discuss budget plans beyond Obama's previously-stated opposition to the nuclear waste dump. But Obama told Reid during last week's sit-down meeting in the Capitol that the budget would be zero, or close to it, the senator's office said.

Senators celebrated Steven Chu today as a scientist, administrator and Nobel Prize winner. But in the hearing on his nomination as President-elect Barack Obama's Energy secretary, Chu was cast in a new role: politician. Under gentle questioning from the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, the physicist and director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory signaled his support for a variety of energy alternatives -- including coal -- to America's dependence on imported oil.

OPERATIONS and work practices at Sellafield will be put under the microscope by the site's new owners. af nuke lab Nuclear Management Partners (NMP), which took control in November, said it is now ready to "engage and energise" the workforce. That means high-powered teams of experts from NMP's consortium companies in America, France and the UK will be called in to scrutinise and assess methods being used across six core areas of the site over the next three months, starting in February.

The call came in just after 11 p.m. from a passing motorist on Interstate 94, who reported a grass fire. When Texas Township firefighters arrived, they instead found a large pole barn on fire at 10135 West O Ave. The property owner, Donald Haugen, a garden hose in hand, told firefighters he had it under control and that they could leave. Firefighters were skeptical. "The walls were beginning to collapse inside, as well as portions of the roof," Texas Township Fire Chief Jim Williams said in a report on the Aug. 19 blaze. "Looking inside of the structure, I could see many unidentified barrels, as well as barrels that were on fire. I had also heard several small explosions from within the barn."

Senate President Peter Shumlin says he wants lawmakers to consider moving high level radioactive waste from southern Vermont to somewhere else in the state. Governor Jim Douglas says he doesn't see any need to move the waste because state and federal regulators have determined that the current site is a safe location. VPR's Bob Kinzel reports. (Kinzel) Shumlin says it's critical for the Legislature to look at this issue because the owners of Vermont Yankee want to extend its license for another 20 years. Shumlin argues that when Vermont Yankee went on line in 1972, it was assumed that the federal government would build a national waste repository. But the debate over a national site has dragged on for years and the development of a location in Nevada is now the subject of numerous lawsuits.

More than a dozen members of citizen and environmental groups protested Constellation Energy's nuclear energy partnership with a French utility at the company's Baltimore headquarters this morning and said they were concerned about additional investment in nuclear energy and the way those plants will be financed. Last week, Paris-based Electricite de France agreed to invest $4.5 billion in Constellation's nuclear facilities in exchange for a 49.99 percent ownership stake. This follows a joint venture started last year between EDF and Constellation to develop four new nuclear reactors, including a third at Calvert Cliffs.

The federal government has failed to act on information that could help sick and dying Rocky Flats workers - or their survivors, the Rocky Mountain News has learned. A year ago, the Rocky reported that Colorado officials have data showing thousands of Flats workers were exposed to the type of radiation that was supposed to automatically qualify them for medical care and compensation if they developed certain cancers. At the time, federal officials dismissed the data as nothing new.

A Bush administration project aimed at reprocessing nuclear waste in a global sharing arrangement is bringing opposition that's not always from anti-nuclear advocates as public hearings come to Oak Ridge and Paducah next week. Both of those locations are potential receiving sites for what could be domestic and foreign waste. In the case of Oak Ridge, at least part of the highly radioactive materials could travel through Nashville. Advertisement The Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation's largest public power producer, has been working with the U.S. Department of Energy on the feasibility of the long-controversial practice of re-tooling nuclear waste.

The electric industry's effort to fast-track a new design for nuclear reactors has triggered complaints about transparency and questions about the suitability of a TVA site in Alabama. Just over a year ago, the Tennessee Valley Authority, backed by a consortium of other electric utilities, applied for a license to build along the Tennessee River the first of a new generation of nuclear reactors. Advertisement But the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has raised questions about TVA's environmental assessment of the Bellefonte site about 100 miles southeast of Nashville, saying the power producer's flooding studies couldn't be verified. And environmental and anti-nuclear advocates have launched a challenge with the NRC to the licensing process, saying that the commission should halt review because the never-built reactor proposed for this and other sites is still undergoing design changes.

After years of false starts and legal fights, state environmental officials are moving forward with plans designed to stem pollution from the Millstone Nuclear Power Complex. The plan is supposed to cut the amount of heated water that the plant pumps into Long Island Sound each day - a plan that has the backing of a cross section of environmentalists. But not all. One longtime foe of Millstone is charging that the state Department of Environmental Protection has failed to stop the facility from polluting and is asking the state's courts to remove the agency from the case.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission released a report that concludes that there are no significant conditions that would affect safety and the operation of Oyster Creek Generating Station's drywell liner until its next examination in four years. The drywell shell is an important mechanism of the nuclear power plant's cooling system. The steel container surrounds the reactor and is supposed to contain radioactivity in the event of a nuclear accident. NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said Monday that a preliminary notification report issued on the agency's inspection has shown that the crucial drywell liner is operational.

What many children in a densely populated eastern Moscow suburb used to think of as a good little hill to play and toboggan on has turned out to be a radioactive waste dump - one that local residents and ecologists say could spill over and contaminate a larger area. The radiation-emitting dump on Bulvar Marshala Rokossovskogo, which was unearthed during incomplete cleanup works, poses a danger to Muscovites, said Vladimir Chuprov, head of Greenpeace Russia's Energy Unit. He said the works, suspended half a year ago, were not done properly, leaving the site in a potentially dangerous state. "The bad news is that the water has flowed in," Chuprov said. "This water might contain radioactive materials. Liquid is much more difficult to recover and keep from spreading."

The new operators of Sellafield are to be exempt from Freedom of Information (FOI) laws, it has been revealed. Energy and climate change secretary Ed Miliband has ruled that Nuclear Management Partners (NMP), a US-led consortium that will take control of the site on Monday, will not be subject to the legislation. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) said the decision was taken because NMP is a private company.

Linda Waite-Simpson, a newly elected legislator from Essex Junction, has not been sworn in, doesn't have an assigned seat in the House chamber and doesn't know what committee she'll be serving on. Waite-Simpson, a Democrat, nonetheless had her first legislative briefing Wednesday. For four hours, she and other lawmakers learned about the region's electric grid, the history of the state's only nuclear power plant and their upcoming role in deciding its future.

The League of Women Voters of Ocean County has voted to oppose the relicensing of the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant in Lacey. Blanche R. Krubner, the organization's president, appeared before the Ocean County Board of Freeholders on Wednesday to express safety concerns over the oldest operating commercial nuclear reactor in the country. She called on the freeholders to also be more vocal about its future. At immediate issue for the League is whether a corroded steel radiation barrier is safe enough for the plant to resume operation and continue operating until its next scheduled inspection in 2012. Officials for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission contend it is.

Cumbria County Council looks set to volunteer Copeland as a potential site for an underground nuclear waste repository. And it is backing proposals to build two new nuclear power stations immediately north west of Sellafield. A recent government White Paper invited local authorities to volunteer to have nuclear waste buried in return for investment in roads, schools and other public services.

Compounds used in medicine are making their way into the Broome County landfill and into the Susquehanna River. Some -- such as the nuclear medicine used for diagnostic imaging and fighting cancer -- are radioactive, and have set off radiation detectors at the landfill. Wastewater treatment plants aren't specifically designed to treat effluent for such substances. While fish downstream of the Binghamton-Johnson City Joint Sewage Treatment Plant haven't been tested, Bingham-ton University researchers found traces of hormones and drugs -- including antibiotics, estrogen and aspirin products -- in the plant's effluent prior to a new secondary treatment system that went online last year. The area hasn't been tested for drugs since.

Most of us want Oyster Creek nuclear power plant in Lacey to shut down. But most of us are not sure how to make that happen. Oyster Creek will close if we do three things: 1) Support the legal effort to close the plant. 2) Let Gov. Corzine know how we feel. 3) Join together to march in protest of the plant.

Hundreds of German students protest the dumping of reprocessed nuclear waste at a storage center in the town of Gorleben. Germany annually sends the spent fuel of its nuclear power plants to France and Britain for reprocessing and later the waste is returned to Germany for dumping at nuclear storage centers. A train carrying the toxic remains was to leave France on Friday, and arrive at a storage facility in the town of Gorleben on Monday. The Friday protest took place in the nearby town of Luechow.

The owner of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant says it will have to wait almost 60 years before it has enough money to decommission the plant. Faced with that lengthy timeline, lawmakers are likely to try again to force Yankee to set aside funds for decommissioning. VPR's John Dillon reports: (Dillon) As the stock market has plummeted in recent months, so has the value of the Vermont Yankee decommissioning fund. It's worth around $397 million these days. But the expected cost of decommissioning is around $875 million.