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NUCLEAR waste from around the world should be brought to South Australia for disposal, a global energy expert believes. There is a great opportunity for SA to make lots of money as the use of nuclear energy increases, said Paul Stevens, senior research fellow at Chatham House, the London-based Royal Institute for International Affairs. Climate change was driving the quest to find alternative ways to power motor vehicles which created less carbon emissions. "If we do start going down the route of electric vehicles, then nuclear is a great source of baseload electricity,'' Professor Stevens said.

Australia could see a five to tenfold increase of radioactive rail cargo if proposed uranium mines in South and Western Australia go ahead. Green Senator Scott Ludlum says rail cars carrying radioactive material are a concern for rail workers and communities on the line to Darwin. He's calling on communities across Australia to stand up against the expansion of uranium mining.

A three-part exhibit titled "Against Nuclear Arms" opened Monday at the United Nations as testament to the victims of the atomic bombings in Japan and 40 years of nuclear tests carried out in Kazakhstan. The exhibit is being presented by the Japan and Kazakhstan missions as part of ongoing efforts for nuclear disarmament and nonproliferation. It will be on display until Sept. 30.

A strong earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 6.5 shook Shizuoka Prefecture and its vicinity, including the Tokyo metropolitan area, at 5:07 a.m. Tuesday, injuring 112 people and causing two nuclear reactors to automatically shut down. The Meteorological Agency said that while the temblor will not lead to the massive quake feared in the Tokai region - the so-called Tokai quake - it will further study the data on this quake.

The new Bulgarian government is reassessing the prospects for financing of the controversial 4 billion-euro project for the construction of NPP Belene and RWE AG's plan to expand in Bulgaria's nuclear market is on the brink of collapse. RWE say they are still probing the possibilities for realization of the project together with Bulgaria's national electric company NEK, but there still are some unsolved issues, among them being financing. And it is exactly because of the high construction costs that the Borissov-led Cabinet has put the project under question. Sources from RWE say that the German company is going to accept any decision of the Bulgarian government concerning the Belene project. Experts say that if the Bulgarian government withdraws its support, the project is certain to collapse, as the Bulgarian state holds 51% in the project venture and RWE?s stake is 49%. Financial Times Deutschland reported last week that Bulgaria's government will probably announce the end of the plan to build two nuclear reactors at the Belene site.

Data shows proposed nuclear waste facility would fail, says state agency Nevada officials say they have found evidence that the Energy Department withheld data in a licensing request that would prove a proposed nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain would fail. The Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects discovered two documents in a computerized database not included in a licensing application sent to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that show how unsafe buried nuclear waste would be at Yucca Mountain, said Bruce Breslow, executive director of the state agency.

Despite Gov. Jim Gibbons' objections, the Board of Examiners voted Tuesday to give a Washington law firm another $10 million to continue the legal fight against a high-level nuclear waste repository in Yucca Mountain. The governor pointed out that Egan Fitzpatrick & Malsch already had received $27 million to fight Yucca Mountain, which, according to news accounts, is dead. "Why should we give them $10 million for a dead project?" Gibbons asked. But the other board members, Attorney General Catherine Cortez Masto and Secretary of State Ross Miller, disagreed. They argued that the legal fight must continue until the U.S. Department of Energy drops its effort to secure Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing for Yucca Mountain.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announces official Yucca Mountain closure. What does it mean for the nuclear industry? The writing has been on the wall for the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository ever since Steven Chu took control of the Department of Energy earlier this year. In March, YMNWR was cut out of the energy stimulus package, and now after a long-term campaign to rid his state of the project many call "the failed $100 billion dinosaur in the desert," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced that all application funding has been cut for the project, meaning that it will likely never be resuscitated.

Dirt and rock taken from an old uranium mining site, and used for fill dirt, has been removed from private properties south of Tusayan and at Grand Canyon Village. The Bureau of Reclamation says its contractor excavated materials from two private residences south of Valle, from a Grand Canyon sanitary plant, from a business near the airport at Valle and from a South Rim trailer park. The Arizona Radiation Regulatory Agency said it wasn't consulted about the clean up. Agency director Aubrey Godwin said his agency would have advised nearby residents to stay indoors last week, during the removal, because of blowing winds. Bureau of Reclamation spokesman Peter Soeth called the fill materials' radiation level normal for the region. He said all but one of the six sites, to which it was hauled, had average readings for radioactivity upon first inspection.

Washington state and federal officials announced a court-enforceable schedule Tuesday for cleaning up the nation's most contaminated nuclear site, ending more than two years of negotiations that followed dozens of missed deadlines. The sprawling Hanford Nuclear Reservation, created near the Tri-Cities as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb during World War II, has been a focus of extensive cleanup efforts for two decades. In that time, the pact that governs cleanup has been changed more than 400 times. Washington state sued the Energy Department last November over missed cleanup deadlines, though the two sides settled part of the lawsuit in February. That agreement accelerated cleanup of contaminated groundwater along the neighboring Columbia River, among other things, and both sides said it would shrink the 586-square-mile site to just 75 square miles by 2015.

Uranium One Inc. is buying several uranium facilities in Wyoming's Powder River Basin, including in Campbell and Johnson counties. The company said this week that it has agreed to pay $35 million for the Irigaray in-situ recovery central processing plant in Johnson County, the Christensen Ranch processing facility in Campbell County and several uranium resources in the Powder River Basin. The company also plans to open a separate processing facility at the Moore Ranch in southern Campbell County. Uranium One is one of the world's largest uranium producers and has assets located in Kazakhstan, Australia and South Africa, as well as the United States. It says its buying the facilities from subsidiaries of AREVA and EDF.

Sitting in on Mayor Julián Castro's town hall meeting Monday evening felt like watching some old movie in which you know all the lines by heart. It probably served some purpose on the front end - forcing CPS Energy officials to realize that their proposal for a $5.2 billion investment in two nuclear plants falls well short of a sure thing - but it didn't seem to shift opinions around much. Still, with all the talk about how the Big Decision will affect our grandchildren, it was easy to wonder which question will appear most prescient decades from now. Perhaps it will be the handwritten, photocopied 'No Nuclear Energy!' sheet passed out at the front door, on which a man named Ray Davidson Hillman guaranteed that if all North American nuclear plants are not shut down soon, the planet won't support life in one or two hundred years. If he's right, of course, no one will be around to realize how smart he was.

A second radioactive leak at the Palisades nuclear plant has been fixed. "I'm happy to say we have found the source of the leak," said Mark Savage, the public-affairs and communications director for Palisades, "and have repaired that." The new leak was at a turn in a pipe and was because of the failure of a weld, Savage said. The pipes and welds are stainless steel. "We think it was during original construction," Savage said. In June, Savage told the Van Buren County Board of Commissioners that tritium levels were rising in monitoring wells.

A coalition of business, labor and environmental leaders is backing a nonprofit that wants to increase nuclear power generation in Minnesota. Sensible Energy Solutions for Minnesota, or SESM, wants repeal of the state's moratorium on constructing nuclear energy facilities. "As we look ahead, we must put nuclear power - the most sensible and carbon-free base-load electricity source in existence - back on the table as an energy option," said Minnesota Chamber of Commerce President David Olson, an SESM board member.

It and the Veterans Affairs Department papered over cancer treatment errors. When news broke of the bungled radiation treatments given to prostate cancer patients at the Philadelphia VA hospital, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was quick to deflect responsibility. The agency said it learned of the problems only in May 2008 and then moved "aggressively and decisively" to correct them. The Department of Veterans Affairs took a similar line. Testifying before a Senate committee in June, acting VA Undersecretary for Health Gerald Cross expressed regret that "this problem went undetected for nearly six years." But the NRC's own records tell a different story. Documents readily accessible on its Web site show it knew of Dr. Gary Kao's pattern of errors in 2003, saw it recur in 2005, and did nothing about it until 2008. Far from "undetected," this problem was papered over by the two agencies. The veterans with the greatest grievance are therefore those treated after 2005. They had no way of knowing what the NRC had learned not once, but twice: that Kao, despite his good intentions, had no business implanting radioactive seeds in anyone.

Indian Point nuclear plant has passed a major test. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued its final safety report today. It found owner Entergy can safely manage Indian Point 2 and 3 as they age over the 20-year period that new licenses would cover. But environmental advocates disagree. Deborah Brancato is with Riverkeeper. BRANCATO: We're not surprised at all by the NRC staff's findings. They have consistently sided with Entergy throughout the proceedings, which is why interveners like Riverkeeper and the state of New York will continue to raise relevant concerns and make sure the agency does a thorough review. A separate NRC examination of environmental issues is still underway for Indian Point. And several objections to the relicensing -- including some from New York State -- remain to be heard.

A senior US official acknowledged on Wednesday that the growing demand for atomic energy in response to climate change was adding to the challenges of preventing the spread of nuclear weapons. "Some people are calling this a nuclear renaissance, it's very much in vogue," said Susan Burk, the US president's special representative for nuclear non-proliferation in what she termed her first public presentation. The peaceful use of atomic energy is one of the three pillars of the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT), allowing countries that have signed up the right to the peaceful use of nuclear power in return for disarmament or giving up weapons ambitions.

Childhood cancer survivors treated with total body or abdominal radiation may have an increased risk of diabetes, according to a report in the August 10/24 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals. This correlation does not appear to be related to patients' body mass index or physical inactivity.

U.S. Labor Department reaches $5 billion in benefits paid and 8th anniversary of Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act WASHINGTON - The U.S. Department of Labor today announced that it has paid more than $5 billion in compensation and medical benefits to more than 52,600 claimants nationwide under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA). This milestone coincides with the eighth anniversary of the Labor Department's administration of the EEOICPA, which provides compensation and medical benefits to employees who became ill as a result of working in the nuclear weapons industry. "I am proud to announce that the Labor Department has delivered more than $5 billion in compensation and medical benefits to deserving workers and their families during the eight years it has administered the EEOICPA," said Shelby Hallmark, acting assistant secretary of labor for employment standards. "The department is dedicated to carrying out the vital mission of this program: getting compensation and medical benefits to eligible workers and their survivors as quickly and consistently as possible. We will continue to strengthen the adjudication process, our outreach efforts and claimant services in order to carry out the EEOICPA in a manner that is consistent with the law as enacted by Congress."

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has issued its final safety evaluation report (SER) for the proposed renewal of the operating licenses for Indian Point Nuclear Generating Unit numbers 2 and 3, and concluded that there are no open items that would preclude license renewal for an additional 20 years of operation. The report documents the results of the NRC staff's review of the license renewal application and site audits of the plant's aging management programs to address the safety of plant operations during the period of extended operation. It represents the culmination of NRC's comprehensive review of the application and inspection of the plant to verify license renewal implementation is consistent with the application. Overall, the results show that the applicant has identified actions that have been or will be taken to manage the effects of aging in the appropriate systems, structures and components of the plant and that their functions will be maintained during the period of extended operation.