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A top regulator said on Sunday that a nuclear power plant threatened by flooding from the swollen Missouri River was operating safely and according to standards. "I got to see a lot of efforts they're taking to deal with flooding and the challenges that presents," Gregory Jaczko, the chairman of the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said after touring the Cooper Nuclear Station near the village of Brownville and meeting with plant officials and executives.

Right now, we think they're taking an appropriate approach. This is a plant that is operating safely and meeting our standards," he added.The plant is located about 80 miles south of Omaha, where snow melt and heavy rains have forced the waters of the Missouri River over its banks, although they have not flooded the plant and receded slightly on Sunday.Jaczko said he was not doing an official plant inspection. He was briefed by NRC resident inspectors -- the agency staff who work on-site every day -- plant officials and executives, said Mark Becker, a spokesman at the Nebraska Public Power District, the agency that runs the plant.The power plant sat about 4 feet above the river's level on Sunday. The river had surged over its banks near the plant and filled in low-lying land near the Cooper plant.Water levels there are down after upstream levees failed, Becker said, relieving worries that water will rise around the Brownville plant as it has at another nuclear plant north of Omaha in Fort Calhoun.Art Zaremba, director of nuclear safety at Cooper, backed the assessment."The plant is very safe right now, and we've taken a lot of steps to make sure it stays that way," Zaremba said.

A nuclear reactor in Maryland has been shut down because of wind damage, while others were either taken offline or operating at reduced capacity as precautionary measures before the arrival of hurricane Irene on Sunday.A reactor at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Lusby, Maryland, remained off-line on Sunday, after going into automatic shutdown when a piece of aluminum siding ripped from a nearby building damaged a transformer.Constellation Energy, which operates the Lusby plant, said the facility was safe and that a second reactor was operating at full capacity. No power outages were expected because of the shutdown.

Maryland state emergency agency said the plant would reopen after inspection. "Number one will stay offline until they have folks that will crawl over every inch of it," its spokesman, Quentin Banks said.It was the second complete shutdown caused by Irene, after authorities took a plant offline in New Jersey as a precaution before the storm.Exelon Corporation decided on Saturday afternoon to take its Oyster Creek generator offline as Irene blew in. "It's really as a precaution, a conservative action, because we do expect hurricane force winds," Marshall Murphy, an Exelon spokesman, told reporters.

Fourteen nuclear plants from North Carolina to New Hampshire were in Irene's path

The New York Times published an article on Sunday, June 26, 2011 titled Insiders Sound an Alarm Amid a Natural Gas Rush. The article quotes a number of emails from natural gas industry insiders, financial analysts that cover the gas industry and skeptical geologists to produce a number of questions about the long term viability of an increasing dependence on cheap natural gas from hydraulic fracturing. The message is that the gas industry has been engaging in hyperbole regarding its capacity to expand production at current prices to meet market demands.

the people quoted in the NY Times article do not agree that the technique magically produces low cost gas in unprecedented abundance.

“Our engineers here project these wells out to 20-30 years of production and in my mind that has yet to be proven as viable,” wrote a geologist at Chesapeake in a March 17 e-mail to a federal energy analyst. “In fact I’m quite skeptical of it myself when you see the % decline in the first year of production.”

Japan on Sunday said cesium that is generating significant radioactivity at a location in China prefecture had likely been released from the damaged Fukushima atomic facility, the Japan Times reported (see GSN, Oct. 21). The six-reactor power plant was damaged by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that left more than 20,000 people missing or dead in Japan. Radiation releases on a level not seen since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster forced the evacuation of about 80,000 residents from a 12-mile ring exclusion zone surrounding the site in Fukushima prefecture. A Sunday inspection by Japanese Science Ministry and Kashiwa city authorities located an area to which rainwater had likely been carrying contaminants from the plant. The city had previously played down the likelihood that the radioactive material had originated from the nuclear facility (Japan Times, Oct. 24). Fukushima prefecture on Thursday said two boys between 4 and 7 years old had received the highest levels of internal radiation contamination out of roughly 4,500 locals tested, Kyodo News reported. The contamination would amount to roughly three millisieverts of radiation over their lives and would not produce dangerous effects, officials said (Kyodo News/Mainichi Daily News, Oct. 21). The Japanese Forestry Agency indicated that as soon as November it would begin to test pollen from cedar flowers located in the evacuation zone for cesium contamination, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported on Monday (Yomiuri Shimbun, Oct. 24). The government's Science Ministry and Fisheries Agency are set to ramp up and broaden testing for radioactive materials in ocean water and marine produce, the Asahi Shimbun reported on Saturday (Asahi Shimbun, Oct. 22).

According to Kyodo, the “Kashiwa hot spot [is] linked to Fukushima” and Japan’s Science Ministry “reverses government claims after [an] on-site survey finds high amounts of cesium.” When the local government received a report about the 57.7 microsieverts per hour measurement at the site, it said the radiation was unlikely to be related to the Fukushima disaster. However, “On Sunday, the science ministry and the city government [...] said it is highly likely that rain tainted with fallout from the Fukushima plant was running into nearby soil,” reports Kyodo. “The ministry has confirmed that rain water is leaching out of the ditch and into the soil at the spot, ministry officials said at a new conference Sunday,” the article notes. Read More: Kashiwa hot spot linked to Fukushima Background information on the 57.7 microsieverts in Kashiwa, 18 miles northeast of Tokyo

The operator of Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant aims to restore the cooling systems of the reactors at the troubled facility within three months and achieve “cold shutdown” of the plant in six to nine months.

The water, which has been pumped into the reactors to cool them down, started leaking into the basements of the facility’s buildings through the cracks that appeared as a result of the earthquake. The level of water reached 85cm below ground level on Sunday in reactor 2 and threatens to overflow into the ocean. It happened despite the efforts to decant some of the water to a condenser tank at the premises of the reactor.

''We will do our utmost to curb the release of radioactive materials by achieving a stable cooling state at the reactors and spent fuel pools,'' said TEPCO’s Chairman Tsunehisa Katsumata at a news conference on Sunday, as cited by Kyodo news agency.

German police say they have cleared a sit-in of thousands of protesters attempting to block a shipment of nuclear waste and have detained 1,300 people. Police said hundreds of officers started evicting protesters from the rail lines near Dannenberg in the north of the country early Sunday. Those who refused to leave were detained and are being brought before judges later. Police put the number of protesters at 3,500 while protest organizers said 5,000 people had occupied the tracks that will be used to transport a nuclear waste shipment that has been reprocessed in France to a storage site near the town of Gorleben. Police say two groups of about 250 activists each are currently hurling stones and fireworks at officers. They say several officers were injured and at least 10 people detained.

Tepco Press Release, Dec. 5: “At 11:33 am on December 4, workers found that there was puddle water inside the barrier around the evaporative condensation apparatus (estimated volume of water was approx. 45 m3 [1 cubic meter of water = 1 metric ton]).” NHK: “The water is believed to have contained 130,000 becquerels per cubic centimeter of radioactive strontium.” New York Times: “Tepco said a check on Saturday had found no sign of the leak, suggesting that it began Saturday night or early Sunday morning. The company said it was exploring ways to stop any more water from escaping.” 45 metric tons = 45,000 kg = 45,000,000 cubic centimeters * 130,000 becquerels per cubic centimeter of strontium = 5,850,000,000,000 Bq strontium

A senior Iranian lawmaker stressed that Tehran will block its oil supplies to the European Union for the next 5 to 15 years as part of its strategy to punish the EU for its oil ban against Tehran.

"We will change the threat into an opportunity for Iran and cut Iran's oil supplies to the Europeans for five to 15 years," member of the parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Mohammad Karim Abedi told FNA on Sunday.

He pointed to a bill drafted in the parliament to cut oil exports to the EU, and noted, "We will not leave enemies' sanctions unanswered and we will impose other sanctions on them in addition to closing Iran's oil supplies to Europe." Abedi also said that Iran will use the banned oil in its refineries and petrochemical complexes to turn it into more valuable products.

An Iranian lawmaker says his parliament has postponed vote on a bill requiring the government to immediately halt crude oil sales to Europe. The ban would be a response to the EU's decision to stop importing Iranian oil and freeze assets of its central bank.

Lawmaker Ali Adiani Rad is quoted by the semiofficial ISNA news agency as saying lawmakers need experts' views before they vote on the ban. Many Iranian officials have called for an immediate ban on oil exports to the European bloc before the EU's ban goes into full effect in July.

Temperatures can fall by up to 4C downwind of farms

Tory MPs write to PM demanding dramatic subsidy cuts

The team from the University of Illinois found that daytime temperatures around wind farms can fall by as much as 4C, while at night temperatures can increase

The North Anna nuclear plant is expected to begin generating electricity today for the first time since a magnitude-5.8 earthquake shut down both reactors almost three months ago. Dominion Virginia Power started the nuclear-fission process in Unit 1 on Monday at 3 a.m., 2½ days after federal regulators gave permission to return the reactors to service at the power station in Louisa County.

The company expects to begin restarting Unit 2 soon after the first reactor begins producing electricity and return both units to full power by Sunday, about 10 days after receiving the green light from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The NRC is monitoring the restart. Its staff reported no concerns Monday. Dominion Virginia Power spokesman Rick Zuercher said the process of restarting the first reactor has taken a little longer than the company had expected but had not encountered significant problems.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission said Dominion Virginia Power performed a quarterly inspection of the Lake Anna dam last week. "Everything checked out OK," said commission spokeswoman Celeste Miller, who said the company also had inspected the dam immediately after the earthquake.

The Monticello nuclear power plant was automatically shut down over the weekend as a result of safety concerns, Xcel Energy officials said Sunday. The plant, owned and operated by Xcel, shut down at 11:12 p.m. Saturday when relays that are part of the reactor protection system activated, the company said, adding that all plant safety systems functioned as designed, and the situation posed no danger to the public or to plant workers. Plant operators are investigating what caused the relays to activate. The shutdown was not expected to be lengthy. The plant is about 40 miles northwest of Minneapolis. It generates enough electricity to power nearly 500,000 homes. Xcel will purchase energy from other sources until the plant comes back online.

The original Japanese video was compiled by "sievert311":http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ppon_vEJLCQ&feature=channel_video_title "sievert311" also has a Dr. Shunichi "100 millisievert is safe" Yamashita's video in three languages (English, Spanish, French). Check it out.

Tokyo Brown Tabby's latest captioning is over the collection of video clips of three Japanese nuclear researchers, claiming safety for plutonium on the national TV. The first two appeared on TV after the March 11 accident to assure the public that there was nothing to worry about on plutonium, because it was so safe.

Three Plutonium Brothers are: (1)Tadashi Narabayashi Professor in Engineering at Hokkaido University (in TV Asahi "Sunday Scramble" on Apr. 3, 2011)

Seventy percent of the Japanese public supports centre-left Prime Minister Naoto Kan's policy to make the country nuclear free in future but most people still want him to quit, a poll said Sunday

Kan said earlier this month that the country must gradually reduce its reliance on atomic power with the eventual goal of becoming nuclear-free, despite fears that power shortages could slow an already limping economy.

Kan's scepticism about boosting nuclear power in the quake-prone island nation has also set him on a collision course with pro-nuclear lawmakers, both in the conservative opposition and within his own party.