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To stop the nuke, we organized throughout our region on economic, ecological and political grounds. In February, 1974, a member of our commune named Sam Lovejoy toppled a weather tower at the site of the nuke. it was a great protest, memorialized in the award-winning "Lovejoy's Nuclear War" from Green Mountain Post Films (gmpfilms.org). When the cost of the nuke started to skyrocket, there were riots in Connecticut against rate hikes meant to pay for the plant. Facing increasingly stiff local and financial opposition, Northeast Utilities canceled the plant. Skyrocketing costs and fierce resistance led to the cancellation of scores of reactors across the US in the 1970s and '80s. Our demonstrations and interventions made a huge difference. Had there been no resistance, no one would have heard a word about Three Mile Island, which put a serious nail in the industry's plans. However, with the attempted "renaissance" of this murderous, suicidal technology, we will have to restart our movement.

To stop the nuke, we organized throughout our region on economic, ecological and political grounds. In February, 1974, a member of our commune named Sam Lovejoy toppled a weather tower at the site of the nuke. it was a great protest, memorialized in the award-winning "Lovejoy's Nuclear War" from Green Mountain Post Films (gmpfilms.org). When the cost of the nuke started to skyrocket, there were riots in Connecticut against rate hikes meant to pay for the plant. Facing increasingly stiff local and financial opposition, Northeast Utilities canceled the plant. Skyrocketing costs and fierce resistance led to the cancellation of scores of reactors across the US in the 1970s and '80s. Our demonstrations and interventions made a huge difference. Had there been no resistance, no one would have heard a word about Three Mile Island, which put a serious nail in the industry's plans. However, with the attempted "renaissance" of this murderous, suicidal technology, we will have to restart our movement.

"President Obama says he wants a "world without nuclear weapons." But his Department of Energy may not be so persuaded. It's prepping for a future where the U.S. keeps double the amount of nuclear weapons a new treaty permits - and at higher cost-per-nuke than it currently spends to maintain its arsenal. We're talking $175 billion over two decades. According to an Energy Department plan submitted to Congress in May that the Federation of American Scientists and the Union of Concerned Scientists obtained and published, the department's National Nuclear Security Administration proposes to slash the 5,000-warhead nuclear arsenal down to "approximately 3,000 to 3,500″ warheads. So far, so clear. nukes going down. President Obama's plan for a nuke-free world going up."

"It generates radioactive waste; it requires uranium that's dangerous to mine; it's hugely expensive. Here we go again. With the Obama administration's promise of federal loan guarantees to build two new nuclear power plants at a cost of $8.3 billion, the radioactive monster is rising from a long dormancy, pumped to life by the lobbyists for nuke designers, nuke contractors, nuke operators and nuke consultants and their generous spending. Over the last decade, the nuclear industry has spent more than $600 million lobbying the federal government and another $63 million in federal campaign contributions, according to an analysis of public records by the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University. Today, the industry is using our desperate need for jobs and worries about global warming to further its cause."

There have been many accidents and thefts of uranium in India's atomic research centres and other facilities giving rise to doubts about the security of Indian nukes. Risks related to India nuclear proliferation are many while their security arrangements are far from satisfactory. The world must take note of it before it is too late. On 29th December 2009, two research students died in the fire in laboratory of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) caused by an explosion, what was described as a 'loud bang'. It is not yet clear if the bang was caused by an explosion or triggered by a chemical reaction, however this has exploded the myth of the security of India's nukes. The centre's director and Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Sreekumar Banerjee said that the fire broke out at 12.05 hours in the lab on the third floor of the modular lab of BARC. However, two scientists associated with the centre have claimed that no research involving radioactive material is conducted in the modular lab. Nevertheless, security has been beefed up at BARC following intelligence inputs that the country's prestigious nuclear facility faced terror threat.

There have been many accidents and thefts of uranium in India's atomic research centres and other facilities giving rise to doubts about the security of Indian nukes. Risks related to India nuclear proliferation are many while their security arrangements are far from satisfactory. The world must take note of it before it is too late. On 29th December 2009, two research students died in the fire in laboratory of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) caused by an explosion, what was described as a 'loud bang'. It is not yet clear if the bang was caused by an explosion or triggered by a chemical reaction, however this has exploded the myth of the security of India's nukes. The centre's director and Atomic Energy Commission Chairman Sreekumar Banerjee said that the fire broke out at 12.05 hours in the lab on the third floor of the modular lab of BARC. However, two scientists associated with the centre have claimed that no research involving radioactive material is conducted in the modular lab. Nevertheless, security has been beefed up at BARC following intelligence inputs that the country's prestigious nuclear facility faced terror threat.

Report: Energy Department on verge of abandoning nuke dump application We have cheered the Obama administration's decision to eventually shutter the ill-conceived Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project by starving it of federal funding. Nonetheless, our optimism has been tempered because the Energy Department still has a pending license application before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a permanent dump for the nation's high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. What we eagerly await is the day when the Energy Department abandons the application so that the idea of forcing a potentially deadly nuke waste dump, on a state that does not want it, is buried for good.

Report: Energy Department on verge of abandoning nuke dump application We have cheered the Obama administration's decision to eventually shutter the ill-conceived Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project by starving it of federal funding. Nonetheless, our optimism has been tempered because the Energy Department still has a pending license application before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a permanent dump for the nation's high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. What we eagerly await is the day when the Energy Department abandons the application so that the idea of forcing a potentially deadly nuke waste dump, on a state that does not want it, is buried for good.

Report: Energy Department on verge of abandoning nuke dump application We have cheered the Obama administration's decision to eventually shutter the ill-conceived Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project by starving it of federal funding. Nonetheless, our optimism has been tempered because the Energy Department still has a pending license application before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a permanent dump for the nation's high-level nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. What we eagerly await is the day when the Energy Department abandons the application so that the idea of forcing a potentially deadly nuke waste dump, on a state that does not want it, is buried for good.

'Tis the season to get rid of nukes? In an effort to achieve world peace and lessen the growing threat of nuclear power, a nascent group including the likes of former President Jimmy Carter, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Bishop Desmond Tutu and Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa this week launched a campaign calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons. The new organization, Global Zero, is planning a grassroots effort to spur world powers to rid the planet of nukes over the next 25 years. Meeting yesterday and Monday in Paris, 100 past and current world leaders signed a declaration imploring the U.S. and Russia to slash their nuclear arsenals and for a system to be created to verify that countries are complying with non-proliferation treaties, according to the Associated Press.

Quoth Barack Obama, then a candidate for the Presidency, way back in August of 2007: "I think it would be a profound mistake for us to use nuclear weapons in any circumstance involving civilians." Now that Obama is President-Elect, we all hope and pray that he more than thinks that nuking civilians would be a profound mistake. Yea, all of us - except the neocrazies, the Likudniks, their fellow travelers and their media sycophants - hope and pray that Obama sincerely believes that nuking civilians - even threatening to nuke civilians - is actually... immoral!

Is the Climate Bill morphing into an excuse to promote fossil fuels and new nuclear power plants? Sen. John Kerry's (D-MA) recent promotion of a pro-nuke/pro-drilling/pro-coal agenda in the name of Climate Protection has been highlighted in a New York Times op ed co-authored with Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC). The piece brands nuke power "our single largest contributor of emissions-free power." It advocates abolishing "cumbersome regulations" so utilities can "secure financing for more plants." And it wants "serious investment" to "find solutions to our nuclear waste problem."

Is the Climate Bill morphing into an excuse to promote fossil fuels and new nuclear power plants? Sen. John Kerry's (D-MA) recent promotion of a pro-nuke/pro-drilling/pro-coal agenda in the name of Climate Protection has been highlighted in a New York Times op ed co-authored with Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC). The piece brands nuke power "our single largest contributor of emissions-free power." It advocates abolishing "cumbersome regulations" so utilities can "secure financing for more plants." And it wants "serious investment" to "find solutions to our nuclear waste problem."

UniStar Nuclear Energy, a joint venture between Electricite de France (EDF) and Constellation Energy Group Inc. (NYSE:CEG), and PPL Corporation (NYSE:PPL), a UniStar partner, have passed the first regulatory review on the road to building four new nuclear power plants. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission just added the fourth, a plant near Berwick, Pennsylvania, to its docket of combined license applications for new nukes. The NRC now has docketed 26 new nuclear units at 17 different sites for review and approval. It can take up to four years for a project to receive NRC approval, and that's without any public clamor against nukes. The timeline can go way out if lawsuits start getting filed.

It is more than conceivable that the principal reason Harry Truman - who had unexpectedly ascended unto the Presidency barely four months, previously - dropped the only two "atomic" bombs then in our arsenal on absolutely defenseless Japanese civilians, was to scare-off Stalin and the all-victorious Red Army, to prevent their invading and occupying any more territory in Europe and in Asia, especially the rest of the Korean peninsula. And who knows, maybe the scare tactics worked. After all, Stalin didn't invade and occupy any more territory, and, as far as we know, Stalin didn't know we didn't have any more nukes in our arsenal. But that was way back then, when no other country had any nukes in their arsenals, either.

The nuke power industry is back at the public trough for the fourth time in two years demanding $50 billion in loan guarantees to build new reactors. Its rust-bucket poster child is now the ancient clunker at Oyster Creek, whose visible New Jersey rust and advanced radioactive decay are A-OK with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which just gave it a twenty-year license extension. The industry's savior may be France, whose taxpayer-funded EdF and Areva Corporations may be poised to build their own reactors on US soil using French and American taxpayer money. And President Obama's first big test on nuke power may be how he fills a vacancy---and the chair---at the NRC.

A new nuclear facility in the Northwest? Residents of southwest Idaho appear sharply divided over a proposed new nuclear power plant near the Oregon-Idaho border. Thursday night, around 250 people filled a high school auditorium for an initial public hearing on the project. KPLU's Tom Banse reports from Payette, Idaho. Full story A small Idaho company called Alternate Energy Holdings is proposing a large commercial nuclear power plant on private ranchland in rural Payette County. Payette resident Kent Porter was one of dozens of locals who testified they'd welcome a nuke plant. Kent Porter: "Someday if we don't get cheap power to keep our farmers going, we're all going to pay dearly when our food prices go up."

A new nuclear facility in the Northwest? Residents of southwest Idaho appear sharply divided over a proposed new nuclear power plant near the Oregon-Idaho border. Thursday night, around 250 people filled a high school auditorium for an initial public hearing on the project. KPLU's Tom Banse reports from Payette, Idaho. Full story A small Idaho company called Alternate Energy Holdings is proposing a large commercial nuclear power plant on private ranchland in rural Payette County. Payette resident Kent Porter was one of dozens of locals who testified they'd welcome a nuke plant. Kent Porter: "Someday if we don't get cheap power to keep our farmers going, we're all going to pay dearly when our food prices go up."

To nuke or not to nuke: whether it's kinder to the environment to suffer nuclear plant start-up delays and potential cleanup headaches or to take arms against (rising) seas of trouble through other, likely costlier, alternatives (think solar)? That is the question that's been haunting environmental circles for the past few years. Environment California Research & Policy Center, an environmental advocacy group, weighed in yesterday with a new report arguing that nuclear power would actually set back efforts to fight climate change. Nuclear power plants are too costly and slow to bring on-line, the group says, to effectively contribute toward cutting greenhouse gas emissions. (View the entire report below)

To nuke or not to nuke: whether it's kinder to the environment to suffer nuclear plant start-up delays and potential cleanup headaches or to take arms against (rising) seas of trouble through other, likely costlier, alternatives (think solar)? That is the question that's been haunting environmental circles for the past few years. Environment California Research & Policy Center, an environmental advocacy group, weighed in yesterday with a new report arguing that nuclear power would actually set back efforts to fight climate change. Nuclear power plants are too costly and slow to bring on-line, the group says, to effectively contribute toward cutting greenhouse gas emissions. (View the entire report below)

A nuke power bailout must NOT be part of the hundreds of billions of federal dollars about to pour out of Washington to revive our Bush-whacked economy. If the huge Obama stimulus package we all know is coming includes money to build new reactors, the whole venture could turn to radioactive dust. This is the last gasp both for American prosperity and atomic energy. nuke promoters are lobbying frantically to get some of that cash for a dying business in which Wall Street would not invest even before the last crash.

Part 1 presented a new study that puts the generation costs for power from new nuclear plants at from 25 to 30 cents per kilowatt-hour - triple current U.S. electricity rates! Nuclear plants with such incredibly expensive electricity and "out of control" capital costs, as Time put it, obviously create large risks for utilities, their investors, and, ultimately taxpayers. Congress extended huge loan guarantees to new nukes in 2005, and the American people will be stuck with another huge bill if those plants join the growing rank of troubled assets (see "Nuclear energy revival may cost $315 billion, with taxpayers' risking over $100B"). The risk to utilities who start down the new nuke path is also great. A June 2008 report by Moody's Investor Services Global Credit Research, "New Nuclear Generating Capacity: Potential Credit Implications for U.S. Investor Owned Utilities" (PR here), warned that "nuclear plant construction poses risks to credit metrics, ratings," concluding:

"Boulder resident Bo Fellinger is disgusted. She recently discovered that the Department of Labor yet again denied her husband Michael's claim to compensation for chronic lung disease. Fellinger doesn't have a good word to say about the department or its Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program (EEOICPA). Her husband, a grad student at the Ames Laboratory in Iowa, died of lung failure in 2008 at age 62, his claim shuttled back and forth among bureaucrats for nearly four years. A nuke worker monitors waste in South Korea. "The program strikes me as some stupid headless animal," says Fellinger of the red tape she has endured. "Everyone involved seems to be standing in a circle, handing things around to the next person without taking any responsibility for it. The buck never stops anywhere.""

The secretive JASON group of academic physicists have given a thumbs up to the current program of refurbishing nuclear warheads in the U.S. stockpile instead of building new, more reliable ones. The report should bolster efforts by the Obama Administration to keep dead the Reliable Replacement Warhead program, a Bush-era program to build new nukes. Bush's Energy Department and Pentagon officials had argued that flaws in the refurbishment program were a key rationale for new bombs, but Obama disagreed. (Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a holdover, tried to revive the program this past summer, but failed.) The strong endorsement of the status quo by JASON, says Arms Control Wonk: should drive a stake through the heart of the RRW and warhead "replacement" in general. They turned back arguments that refurbishment efforts-known as Life Extension Programs- introduced enough changes to the bombs so as to raise questions about their effectiveness: JASON finds no evidence that accumulation of changes incurred from aging and LEPs have increased risk to certification of today's deployed nuclear warheads.

The secretive JASON group of academic physicists have given a thumbs up to the current program of refurbishing nuclear warheads in the U.S. stockpile instead of building new, more reliable ones. The report should bolster efforts by the Obama Administration to keep dead the Reliable Replacement Warhead program, a Bush-era program to build new nukes. Bush's Energy Department and Pentagon officials had argued that flaws in the refurbishment program were a key rationale for new bombs, but Obama disagreed. (Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a holdover, tried to revive the program this past summer, but failed.) The strong endorsement of the status quo by JASON, says Arms Control Wonk: should drive a stake through the heart of the RRW and warhead "replacement" in general. They turned back arguments that refurbishment efforts-known as Life Extension Programs- introduced enough changes to the bombs so as to raise questions about their effectiveness: JASON finds no evidence that accumulation of changes incurred from aging and LEPs have increased risk to certification of today's deployed nuclear warheads.

"It's everyone's nightmare scenario: After a 65-year hiatus, nuclear bombs are again used as weapons. But despite the evident dangers posed by their existence, nine nations cling to nukes, and a few others, such as Iran, seem to want them. The existing nuclear powers resist disarmament because they believe, or claim to believe, in a number of myths about how easy bombs are for rogue regimes to get -- and how useful they are once in hand. 1. We can't eliminate nukes because countries would cheat and build them in secret. 2. Nuclear weapons are a guarantee of security. 3. As long as there is nuclear energy, there will be nuclear weapons. 4. If all nations dismantled their nuclear arsenals, a cheater with just a few weapons could rule the world. 5. Nuclear weapons are the only way to become a global power."

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.