nuke.news

* Admission servicemen exposed to nuclear danger * Defence belives bomb tests led to deaths * Australian victims preparing to sue government BRITISH Defence chiefs have admitted servicemen were exposed to dangerous radiation levels during nuclear tests in Australia and the South Pacific in the 1950s. The dramatic admission, made after years of denials, features in papers filed with the High Court in London by Ministry of Defence lawyers.

There has been a plutonium leak at a site run by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Austria. UN nuclear monitors said pressure had built up and plutonium had contaminated a storage-room at the Seibersdorf laboratory, south of Vienna.

TULLYTOWN, Pa. - Borough leaders want "Trash Mountain" to grow green, not glow green. Thats why they're fighting a plan to bring radioactive sludge to the Tullytown Landfill.

Plans to dispose of radioactive waste at the site of a former opencast pit in Cumbria have met with opposition. Recycling and waste management firm Sita UK wants to buy land at Keekle Head, near Whitehaven, for the disposal of low level radioactive waste.

Bärbel Höhn, 56, deputy leader of the German Green Party's parliamentary group, discusses her party's opposition to nuclear energy, the market power of the major energy companies, and why she rejects warnings of a shortfall in energy supplies.

Progress Energy has submitted an application to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for a combined construction and operating licence (COL) for a potential new nuclear power plant in Levy County, Florida.

Yesterday, the Department of Energy (DOE) reaffirmed its prior decision to relocate the uranium mill tailings predominantly by rail from Moab, Utah. The tailings will be trained from the banks of the Colorado River 30 miles north to Crescent Junction, Utah. DOE may still consider using truck transport under certain circumstances, but it won't be the primary mode of transportation for the contaminated pile.

Waste Control Specialists (WCS), a subsidiary of Valhi, has awarded a contract to URS to lead the design and construction of a new low-level radioactive waste (LLW) facility in Andrews County, Texas.

WHEN the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima 63 years ago today, it paved the way for a cancer time bomb inside Toowoomba man John Collins. Mr Collins served in the Australian Army as part of the clean-up crew at Hiroshima 23 months after the infamous bomb wiped out the city.

I once shared an office for a time with a Japanese scientist from Hiroshima. It was a strange setting for such an association: we were working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where the atomic bomb that obliterated my colleague's city -- 63 years ago today -- was fashioned.

I'm guessing it was excessive exposure to either radiation or George Bush, but Senator John McCain's comments from inside a nuclear power plant in Michigan are so cracked-brained that I fear some loose gamma rays are doing to McCain's gray matter what they did to Homer Simpson's.

It may not be pristine wilderness, but most of the trademark characteristics that define a nuclear power plant are long gone from Haddam Neck - no dome-shaped nuclear reactor and no electricity coursing into the power grid. Now that the Connecticut Yankee nuclear power plant is no more, now that the only artifacts of the sixth nuclear power plant built in the U.S. are a nuclear waste storage area and a warehouse, what comes next? Can there be a second act for land that once housed a nuke plant?

Hiroko Ikeda's fate was sealed before she was even born. Exposed to radiation while still in her mother's womb after the bombing of Nagasaki, she suffered with frequent convulsions for many years until her death earlier this year, as her brother Teruo Deguchi, 72, explained to a local junior high school on Saturday.

The wild mushrooms tested in various parts of Finland still exhibit elevated levels of the radioactive caesium-137 that originates from the Chernobyl accident in 1986, while the caesium content of berries and animals has already become almost zero. In addition to mushrooms, some hares and the predatory fish in small lakes still contain radioactive caesium.

As the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority launched a fresh consultation last week on how best to communicate with the public on a new radioactive waste disposal site, it was been told it does not have to publish a draft report on possible locations. The NDA was asked for an earlier, draft version of the 2006 report "Potential Areas of Future Geosphere Research" , which identified geological factors requiring research regarding the possibility of locating an underground disposal facility for nuclear waste.

Agency gives OK to some Area 51 workers seeking compensation In 1998, the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy were keeping mum about the secret work that went on at Area 51, a widely known Air Force installation near the northeast corner of the Nevada Test Site. That year, the U.S. Supreme Court turned away an appeal by former Area 51 workers who claimed that they were made sick and that co-workers had died from exposure to toxic fumes from stealth coatings burned in open trenches near the Groom Lake base, 90 miles north of Las Vegas. The site was used to test high-tech aircraft.

UniStar Nuclear Energy and state officials are in a dispute about new conditions the state wants to impose for building a third reactor at the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant.

The DoD, the nation's biggest polluter, is now cleaning up 29,500 currently or formerly contaminated sites in every state and territory. California alone has 3,912 contaminated sites on 441 current and former DoD installations. Many of DoD's facilities have already contaminated groundwater sources of drinking water.... The cost to clean up toxic munitions contamination and unexploded ordnance at active and former military installations around the country may reach $200 billion." - The National Resources Defense Council, April 21, 2004.

The government has decided to build 11 more nuclear power plants by 2030, boosting the percentage of power generated by nuclear energy from the current 26 percent to 41 percent. It has also decided to boost the percentage generated by renewable energy sources from 2.24 percent to 11 percent.

The environmental organisation Greenpeace is accusing Boyygues, the company which is building the reactor building of the new nuclear facility in Olkiluoto, of serious security breaches in welding work. The reactor that is being built in the west coast community of Olkiluoto is the third to be built on the site, and the fifth in all of Finland.