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Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson, who represents the district where the plant will be built, said Areva has a strong safety record

Since the Liberal Democratic Party selected him as prime minister in September 2006, the hawkish Abe repeatedly called for Japan to move beyond the postwar formula of a strictly defensive posture and non-nuclear principles. Advocacy of a nuclear-armed Japan arose from his family tradition. His grandfather Nobusuke Kishi nurtured the wartime atomic bomb project and, as postwar prime minister, enacted the civilian nuclear program. His father Shintaro Abe, a former foreign minister, had played the Russian card in the 1980s, sponsoring the Russo-Japan College, run by the Aum Shinrikyo sect (a front for foreign intelligence), to recruit weapons scientists from a collapsing Soviet Union.   The chief obstacle to American acceptance of a nuclear-armed Japan was the Pentagon, where Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima remain as iconic symbols justifying American military supremacy.The only feasible channel for bilateral transfers then was through the civilian-run Department of Energy (DoE), which supervises the production of nuclear weapons.

Camp David Go-Ahead   The deal was sealed on Abe's subsequent visit to Washington. Wary of the eavesdropping that led to Richard Nixon's fall from grace, Bush preferred the privacy afforded at Camp David. There, in a rustic lodge on April 27, Bush and Abe huddled for 45 minutes. What transpired has never been revealed, not even in vague outline.   As his Russian card suggested, Abe was shopping for enriched uranium. At 99.9 percent purity, American-made uranium and plutonium is the world's finest nuclear material. The lack of mineral contaminants means that it cannot be traced back to its origin. In contrast, material from Chinese and Russian labs can be identified by impurities introduced during the enrichment process.

The flow of coolant water into the storage pools ceased, quickening evaporation. Fission of the overheated cores led to blasts and mushroom-clouds. Residents in mountaintop Iitate village overlooking the seaside plant saw plumes of smoke and could "taste the metal" in their throats.   Guilty as Charged   The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami were powerful enough to damage Fukushima No.1. The natural disaster, however, was vastly amplified by two external factors: release of the Stuxnet virus, which shut down control systems in the critical 20 minutes prior to the tsunami; and presence of weapons-grade nuclear materials that devastated the nuclear facility and contaminated the entire region.   Of the three parties involved, which bears the greatest guilt? All three are guilty of mass murder, injury and destruction of property on a regional scale, and as such are liable for criminal prosecution and damages under international law and in each respective jurisdiction.

An unannounced reason for Cheney's visit was to promote a quadrilateral alliance in the Asia-Pacific region. The four cornerstones - the US, Japan, Australia and India - were being called on to contain and confront China and its allies North Korea and Russia.. From a Japanese perspective, this grand alliance was flawed by asymmetry: The three adversaries were nuclear powers, while the U.S. was the only one in the Quad group.   To further his own nuclear ambitions, Abe was playing the Russian card. As mentioned in a U.S. Embassy cable (dated 9/22), the Yomiuri Shimbun gave top play to this challenge to the White House : "It was learned yesterday that the government and domestic utility companies have entered final talks with Russia in order to relegate uranium enrichment for use at nuclear power facilities to Atomprom, the state-owned nuclear monopoly." If Washington refused to accept a nuclear-armed Japan, Tokyo would turn to Moscow.

Throughout the Pantex caper, from the data theft to smuggling operation, Bush and Cheney's point man for nuclear issues was DoE Deputy Director Clay Sell, a lawyer born in Amarillo and former aide to Panhandle district Congressman Mac Thornberry. Sell served on the Bush-Cheney transition team and became the top adviser to the President on nuclear issues. At DoE, Sell was directly in charge of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, which includes 17 national laboratories and the Pantex plant. (Another alarm bell: Sell was also staff director for the Senate Energy subcommittee under the late Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, who died in a 2010 plane crash.)   An Israeli Double-Cross   The nuclear shipments to Japan required a third-party cutout for plausible deniability by the White House. Israel acted less like an agent and more like a broker in demanding additional payment from Tokyo, according to intelligence sources. Adding injury to insult, the Israelis skimmed off the newer warhead cores for their own arsenal and delivered older ones. Since deteriorated cores require enrichment, the Japanese were furious and demanded a refund, which the Israelis refused. Tokyo had no recourse since by late 2008 principals Abe had resigned the previous autumn and Bush was a lame duck.

The Japanese nuclear developers, under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, had no choice but to enrich the uranium cores at Fukushima No.1, a location remote enough to evade detection by nonproliferation inspectors. Hitachi and GE had developed a laser extraction process for plutonium, which requires vast amounts of electrical power. This meant one reactor had to make unscheduled runs, as was the case when the March earthquake struck.   Tokyo dealt a slap on the wrist to Tel Aviv by backing Palestinian rights at the UN. Not to be bullied, the Israeli secret service launched the Stuxnet virus against Japan's nuclear facilities.   Firewalls kept Stuxnet at bay until the Tohoku earthquake. The seismic activity felled an electricity tower behind Reactor 6. The power cut disrupted the control system, momentarily taking down the firewall. As the computer came online again, Stuxnet infiltrated to shut down the back-up generators. During the 20-minute interval between quake and tsunami, the pumps and valves at Fukushima No.1 were immobilized, exposing the turbine rooms to flood damage.

The Texas Job   BWXT Pantex, America's nuclear warhead facility, sprawls over 16,000 acres of the Texas Panhandle outside Amarillo. Run by the DoE and Babcock & Wilson, the site also serves as a storage facility for warheads past their expiration date. The 1989 shutdown of Rocky Flats, under community pressure in Colorado, forced the removal of those nuclear stockpiles to Pantex. Security clearances are required to enter since it is an obvious target for would-be nuclear thieves.   In June 2004, a server at the Albuquerque office of the National Nuclear Security System was hacked. Personal information and security-clearance data for 11 federal employees and 177 contractors at Pantex were lifted. NNSA did not inform Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman or his deputy Clay Sell until three months after the security breach, indicating investigators suspected an inside job.

The White House, specifically Bush, Cheney and their co-conspirators in the DoE, hold responsibility for ordering the illegal removal and shipment of warheads without safeguards.   The state of Israel is implicated in theft from U.S. strategic stockpiles, fraud and extortion against the Japanese government, and a computer attack against critical infrastructure with deadly consequences, tantamount to an act of war.   Prime Minister Abe and his Economy Ministry sourced weapons-grade nuclear material in violation of constitutional law and in reckless disregard of the risks of unregulated storage, enrichment and extraction. Had Abe not requested enriched uranium and plutonium in the first place, the other parties would not now be implicated. Japan, thus, bears the onus of the crime.

The International Criminal Court has sufficient grounds for taking up a case that involves the health of millions of people in Japan, Canada, the United States, Russia, the Koreas, Mongolia, China and possibly the entire Northern Hemisphere. The Fukushima disaster is more than an human-rights charge against a petty dictator, it is a crime against humanity on par with the indictments at the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals. Failure to prosecute is complicity.   If there is a silver lining to every dark cloud, it's that the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami saved the world from even greater folly by halting the drive to World War III.

Firstly, 'spent fuel' is defined as fuel whose elements have been removed from the reactor because the fissionable material they contain has been depleted to a level near where it can no longer sustain a chain reaction. The high concentration of radioactive fission products in spent power-reactor fuel creates a gamma-radiation field, which at a distance of a metre would be lethal. South Africa, or more accurately Necsa, no longer has any use for this material.

Secondly, the US and South Africa have been working constructively for a number of years on various peaceful use applications of nuclear material and in particular on the need to minimise the use of HEU. Examples of such co-operation are the conversion of South Africa's SAFARI-1 reactor to low enriched uranium (LEU) fuel as well as training in medical responses to nuclear and radiological emergencies. Indeed, today South Africa is leading the transition to produce the medical isotope molybdenum-99 (Mo-99) with LEU rather than HEU.

Zuma was one of only five African Heads of State or government invited to develop concrete measures towards ensuring that nuclear materials under their control are not stolen or diverted (the others being Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Nigeria). They pledged to improve security as changing conditions may require, and to exchange best practices and practical solutions for doing so. The Summit's final communiqué also highlighted the fact that 'highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium require special precautions'.

Thirdly, the return is not unique. The repatriation of used and unused HEU fuel to its country of origin - either the US or Russia - has been an international goal since the early 1980s. Some 1,249kg of US-origin highly enriched uranium from sites around the world have already been returned, including from Chile in April 2010 just after the earthquake the previous February.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the spent fuel storage facility at Necsa is not, and has never been, 'vulnerable' - in the sense of being in danger of being accessed by organisations or persons with criminal intent or worse, with terrorist ideologies.

Now six months after the disaster, the smoking gun has finally surfaced, not on a Japanese paddy field but inside a pile of steer manure from a pasture near Sacramento, California

The sample of cattle dung and underlying soil was sent to the nuclear engineering lab of the University of California, Berkeley, which reported on September 6:

We tested a topsoil sample and a dried manure sample from the Sacramento area. The manure was produced by a cow long before Fukushima and left outside to dry; it was rained on back in March and April. Both samples showed detectable levels of Cs-134 and Cs-137, with the manure showing higher levels than the soil probably because of its different chemical properties and/or lower density. One interesting feature of t the Sacramento and Sonoma soil samples is that the ratio of Cesium-137 to Cesium-134 is very large - approximately 17.6 and 5.5, respectively. All of our other soil samples until now had shown ratios of between 1 and 2. We know from our air and rainwater measurements that material from Fukushima has a cesium ratio in the range of approximately 1.0 to 1.5, meaning that there is extra Cs-137 in these two soil samples. The best explanation is that in addition to Fukushima fallout, we have also detected atmospheric nuclear weapons testing fallout in these soils. Weapons fallout contains only Cs-137 (no Cs-134) and is known to be present in older soils ..Both of these samples come from older soils, while our samples until this point had come from newer soils.

The last atmospheric nuclear blast at the Nevada Test Site occurred in 1962, whereas the manure was presumably dropped less than 49 years ago. Over the past year, the approximate life-span of a cow patty, the rain that fell on the plain came not from a former province of Spain. Within that short time-frame, the only possible origin of radioactive fallout was Fukushima.To think otherwise would be lame.

Sun-dried manure is more absorbent than the rocky ground of Northern California, which explains the higher level in Sacramento dung than in the Sonoma soil. As a rule of thumb, the accuracy of radiation readings tends to improve with higher concentration of the test material.The manure acted like a sponge for the collection of radioactive rainfall. Its ratio of Cs-137 (resulting from enriched uranium) to Cs-134 (from a civilian fuel rod) is more than 17-to-1. Larger by 1,700 percent, this figure indicates fission of large amounts of weapons-grade material at Fukushima.

The recent higher readings were probably based on either late releases from a fire-destroyed extraction facility or the venting of reactor No.3, a Toshiba-designed unit that used plutonium and uranium mixed oxide or MOX fuel. Unannounced nighttime airborne releases in early May caused radiation burns in many people, as happened to my forearms. Those plumes then drifted toward North America.

Enrichment of uranium for nuclear warheads is prohibited under constitutional law in Japan and by terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Since no suspects have been charged by prosecutors, this cannot be a plot by a few individuals but stands as the crime of a national entity.

Yellow-Cake Factory 608   Fukushima Province has a history of involvement in atomic weapons development, according to a New York Times article by Martin Fackler titled "Fukushima's Long Link to a Dark Nuclear Past" (Sept. 6). Following the lead of Japanese news reports, the correspondent visited the town of Ishikawa, less than an hour's drive south of the Fukushima No.1 nuclear plant. There he interviewed Kiwamu Ariga who as a student during the war was forced to mine uranium ore from a local foothill to supply the military-run Factory 608, which refined the ore into yellow-cake.

Several research groups worked on building a super-weapon for militarist Japan. The Naval Technology Research Institute was best-positioned due to its secret cooperation with the German Navy. Submarine U-234 was captured in the Atlantic after Germany's surrender with a cargo of uranium along with two dead passengers - Japanese military officers .Soon after departing Norway, U-864 was bombed and sunk, carrying a load of two tons of processed uranium..

In the article for the Atlanta Constitution, dated, Oct. 2, 1946, David Snell reported that the Japanese military had successfully tested a nuclear weapon off Konan on Aug. 12, 1945. There are detractors who dispute the account by a decommissioned Japanese intelligence officer to the American journalist, stationed in occupied Korea with the 24th Criminal Investigation Detachment of the U.S. Army. A cursory check on his background shows Snell to have been a credible reporter for Life magazine, who also contributed to the Smithsonian and The New Yorker magazines. A new book is being written by American and Russian co-authors on the Soviet shoot-down of the Hog Wild, a B-29 that flew over Konan island soon after the war's end..

Due to its endemic paranoia about all things nuclear, the U.S. government had a strong interest in suppressing the story of Japan's atomic bomb program during the war, just as Washington now maintains the tightest secrecy over the actual situation at Fukushima.

The emerging picture shows that nuclear-weapons development, initiated in 1954 by Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi and supervised by Yasuhiro Nakasone, was centered inside civilian nuclear plants, since the Self-Defense Forces were bound by strict Constitutional rules against war-making and the Defense Agency is practically under the direct supervision of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Funding came from the near-limitless budget of the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which today claims financial insolvency without explanation of how its vast cash holdings disappeared. A clandestine nuclear program must be expensive, since it would include the cost of buying the silence of parliament, the bureaucracy and foreign dignitaries.

Following the March 11 disaster, TEPCO sent a team of 250 emergency personnel into the plant, yet only 50 men were assigned to cooling the reactors. The other 200 personnel stayed out of sight, possibly to dismantle an underground plutonium-extraction facility. No foreign nuclear engineers or Japanese journalists were ever permitted entry into the reactor structures.   Radiation leakage from Fukushima No.1 prevented local police from rescuing hundreds of tsunami survivors in South Soma, many of whom consequently went unaided and died of wounds or exposure. Tens of thousands of farmers have lost their ancestral lands, while much of Japan's agriculture and natural areas are contaminated for several generations and possibly longer, for the remaining duration of the human species wherever uranium and plutonium particles have seeped into the aquifers.

TEPCO executives, state bureaucrats and physicists in charge of the secret nuclear program are evading justice in contempt of the Constitution. As in World War II, the Japanese conservatives in their maniacal campaign to eliminate their imagined enemies succeeded only in perpetrating crimes against humanity and annihilating their own nation. If history does repeat itself, Tokyo once again needs a tribunal to send another generation of Class-A criminals to the gallows.

f Iran eventually succeeds in introducing them in industrial quantities for enrichment, it could significantly shorten the time needed to stockpile material that can have civilian as well as military purposes, if refined much further.   "The installation of ... IR-2s and IR-4s represents progress, for sure," nuclear proliferation expert Mark Fitzpatrick said, referring to the names of the new models.

But analysts said it was not evident that Tehran has the technical prowess and components to make them in bigger numbers.

The imposition of requirements that seem unnecessary and unfair can affect commercial decision-making by the affected country.  Such conditions put U.S. commercial contracts and jobs at risk. Moreover, if the country does not use U.S.-based technology, fuels or services, the value of conditions in the 123 agreement (i.e., consent rights) would be lost. Some U.S. leaders are proposing a prohibition on uranium enrichment and reprocessing as part of all bilateral nuclear energy agreements for cooperation.  Ensuring enrichment technology and reprocessing technology are used only for peaceful purposes is a paramount goal for government and industry. But U.S. 123 agreements are neither the best, nor in most cases, the appropriate mechanism to achieve that goal. 

Multilateral agreements are more appropriate mechanisms for policy regarding the global challenge of nuclear proliferation.  Promising mechanisms include the decision by the International Atomic Energy Agency to establish a uranium fuel bank, potential nuclear fuel lease/takeback contracts, and other multilateral, institutional nonproliferation arrangements.  In addition, the Nuclear Suppliers Group (an international body of 46 nuclear technology supplier nations that sets standards for commercial nuclear trade) recently adopted new clear and strict criteria for the transfer of nuclear energy technology.  These institutional controls do not require the receiving country to cede sovereign rights, which the U.S. government and other countries with civilian nuclear energy programs would never give up. 

Fast-growing electricity needs in developing countries and concern about air quality and climate change are stimulating significant global demand for nuclear energy.  Sixty-six plants are being built worldwide and another 154 are in the licensing and advanced planning stage. U.S. suppliers are vying for business around the world – including China, Poland and India.  Continued U.S. leadership in global nuclear safety and nonproliferation matters go hand-in-hand with a strong presence in the global marketplace.  Both are critical to our national and global security.  We must continue to participate in worldwide trade and nonproliferation policy discussions, or cede leadership in these areas to other governments and industrial competitors.  Unless we choose engagement, America will lose tens of thousands of jobs and other benefits such trade has for our economy while forfeiting the nonproliferation benefits that 123 agreements are intended to achieve.

BIO- Everett Redmond is director of nonproliferation and fuel cycle policy at the Nuclear Energy Institute in Washington, D.C.

Epangelo out of Etango  A deal that would have seen Namibian state mining company Epangelo take a 5% interest in Bannerman Resources's Etango project has come to an end with the parties unable to agree terms. The two parties signed an agreement earlier this year setting out the terms and conditions for Epangelo to buy into Bannerman's Namibian subsidiary, Bannerman Mining Resources Namibia (BMRN), for a total of approximately A$3.9 million ($4.1 million) with an option to acquire a further interest at a later date.

Thorium reactors offer absolutely zero possibility of a meltdown because it cannot sustain a nuclear chain reaction without priming; fission would stop by default.- Thorium reactions do not create weapons-grade by-products.- Waste from a thorium reactive stays radioactive for only a few hundred years rather than tens of thousands of years.- Pure thorium from the ground does not require enrichment, as opposed to uranium.

there are projects underway in the United States, China, India, and elsewhere. Germany and India already have existing commercial power stations powered by thorium. India has a goal of meeting 30 percent of its energy needs from thorium by the year 2050. In the US, a reactor project is ongoing in Odessa Texas and should be operational by 2015.

For more information: http://www.the-weinberg-foundation.org/index.php

Many ICS have lifespans of 30 years and mitigation and compensation measures to help them mesh with the newer technologies are creating additional weak links and vulnerabilities.

Another worrisome change involves tens of millions of wireless "smart meters" being installed in homes and businesses for faster, more efficient two-way communications with local utilities via the Internet. Utilities, in turn, are networked with the big transmission operators and bulk power generators. More than 300,000 smart meters are installed in Ottawa homes and small businesses.The concern is that they potentially expose the system to hackers and other cyber attacks.

Though the nuclear program in our country started in 1967, when the United State handed the nuclear reactor of 5 MW capacity to Shah Muhammad Reza Pehlevi, in 1979, the clericals who came to power rejected to implement the program of nuclear plant construction. In the first years after war not only foreign but also a great many of specialists participating in the nuclear program left the country. In a few years, when the situation in the country slightly stabilized, the powers decided to restart implementation of the nuclear program.

A scientific research center with the research reactor on heavy water was created under China’s support in Isfahan, and production of uranium ore continued. All the same, the powers were negotiating the technologies of uranium enrichment and production of heavy water with the companies from Switzerland and Germany. Iranian physicists visited  the National Institute of Nuclear Physics and High Energy Physics in Amsterdam, nuclear Petten center in Netherlands. However, in 2002 the United States included our country into the so-called evil axe and on the basis of footage from the space, they declared that religious fanatics are working secretly on creation of nuclear weapon. For many years the United States have been seeking international isolation of our country under pretense of inadmissibility of creating a nuclear bomb by this country

Our religious leader Ayatollah Hamenei said that creation of the nuclear bomb is illegal and goes contrary to Islam.

Undoubtedly, nuclear program is a two-edged sword. First, we are an independent state and no one has the right to dictate their provisions to us. The country’s powers have repeatedly stated that the nuclear program is implemented under international standards and control. Additionally, our neighbors Kuwait, Bahrain, Arab Emirates have already stated the intention to build nuclear stations and develop nuclear industry. But the world community is not concerned with it. This means that the ‘concern’ over Iranian nuclear programs is politically motivated. How long will we have to prove that we pursue only peaceful aims?

why do we need this nuclear program? Why do we need those high costs, if 70% of population is starving? There are no economic preconditions for development of the nuclear program. Our country has 10% of world’s proven oil reserves and is second for its natural gas resources.

The energy complex of the country fully meets the internal needs, for example, Iran is 20th in the world for its power generation. So why do we need the nuclear energy sector? It is much more important in the countries that have no sufficient natural energy sources. Additionally, nuclear energy remains the subject of fierce debates. Opponents and supporters of nuclear energy give different assessment to its security, reliability and economic effectiveness. The threat is connected with problems of waste utilization, car crashes that are causes of environmental disasters.

It seems that the maniacal wish to develop nuclear program by all means  is caused by the excessive ambitions of the regime, which decided to demonstrate its independence and determination by all means. Getting involved in the ambitions race with its main rival-United States, the Iranian authorities do not understand that the nuclear program has already turned into a speculation that is used by each of the parties for their own interests.

no one cares that this mad race has no place for the problems of people,  suffering from international sanctions against the country. Though, we are used to it since in 32 years the regime recalled the people only when there appeared the direct threat of overthrow.

Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi will go to Moscow amid Russian efforts to revive talks between Tehran and world powers on Iran's nuclear programme. Western powers suspect Tehran is seeking an atomic weapons capability under the guise of its civilian space and nuclear programmes, a charge Iran vehemently denies.

Thorium can be used as fuel in a nuclear reactor, and it is a fertile material, which allows it to be used to produce nuclear fuel in a breeder reactor.  These are some of the benefits of Thorium reactors compared to Uranium. Weapons-grade fissionable material is harder to retrieve safely and clandestinely from a thorium reactor; Thorium produces 10 to 10,000 times less long-lived radioactive waste; Thorium comes out of the ground as a 100% pure, usable isotope, which does not require enrichment, whereas natural uranium contains only 0.7% fissionable U-235; Thorium cannot sustain a nuclear chain reaction without priming,[22] so fission stops by default. The following conference by Kirk Sorensen explains a Liquid-Fuoride Thorium Reactor a next generation nuclear reactor.

References Thorium – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://bit.ly/qYwoAv Thorium fuel cycle – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://bit.ly/piNoKb Molten salt reactor – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://bit.ly/qlyAxe Thorium Costs http://bit.ly/oQRgXK Thorium – The Better Nuclear Fuel? http://bit.ly/r8xc92