Financial problems facing EDF could force the French energy giant to pull out of the £14bn project to build the first of a new generation of nuclear power plants in Britain, a French expert has warned.

en years after the start of the U.S. invasion in Iraq, doctors in some of the Middle Eastern nation's cities are witnessing an abnormally high number of cases of cancer and birth defects. Scientists suspect the rise is tied to the use of depleted uranium and white phosphorus in military assaults.

Jamail says that the current rate of birth defects for the city of Fallujah has surpassed those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the nuclear attacks at the end of World War II.

More than a year and a half since the nuclear crisis, much of Japan’s post-Fukushima cleanup remains primitive, slapdash and bereft of the cleanup methods lauded by government scientists as effective in removing harmful radioactive cesium from the environment.

Recent reports in the local media of cleanup crews dumping contaminated soil and leaves into rivers has focused attention on the sloppiness of the cleanup.

Also worrying, industry experts say, are cleanup methods used by the construction companies that create loose contamination that can become airborne or enter the water.

Workers can't work in Buildings 1, 2 and 3 because the radiation is too intense. Steel is corroding from saltwater, threatening pipes and pumps which cool the remains of three destroyed reactors. Radiation is crumbling concrete onto dust. Zirconium cladding is so corroded from seawater that it is doubtful that SFP 1, 2, 3 and 4 can ever be emptied. Corium under Building 4 has cracked the foundation and the building is sinking unevenly. Ground water contacting corium in the mudrock below Buildings1, 2 and 3 becomes highly contaminated, and flows directly into the Pacific Ocean, killing the Pacific Seafood Industry. Hawaii milk is so comtaminated that farmers are feeding boron to their cows. Two US cities on RadiationNetwork.com right now measure over 60cpm of radiation in the air. TEPCO seems to have lost track of the corium from 3 nuclear plants. And then there are the two earthquakes of 6.2 and 7.3 which hit just offshore since midnight...

[Fukushima] prefecture had conducted thyroid checks on 38,000 children by the end of March.No-one was diagnosed with cancer, but lumps were found in 36 percent of the children.

Cabinet Office says data will be collected in areas that are not affected by radioactive materials released from the crippled nuclear reactors. It says the move is designed not only to alleviate concerns, but also to detect possible effects of the nuclear accident on children’s health, if any, as early as possible.

: Dr. Helen Caldicott

All areas of Japan should be tested to assess how radioactive the soil and water are because the winds can blow the radioactive pollution hundreds of miles from the point source at Fukushima. Under no circumstances should radioactive rubbish and debris be incinerated as this simply spreads the isotopes far and wide to re-concentrate in food and fish. All batches of food must be adequately tested for specific radioactive elements using spectrometers. No radioactive food must be sold or consumed, nor must radioactive food be diluted for sale with non-radioactive food as radioactive elements re-concentrate in various bodily organs. All water used for human consumption should be tested weekly. All fish caught off the east coast must be tested for years to come. All people, particularly children, pregnant women and women of childbearing age still living in high radiation zones should be immediately evacuated to non-radioactive areas of Japan. All people who have been exposed to radiation from Fukushima – particularly babies, children, immunosuppressed, old people and others — must be medically thoroughly and routinely examined for malignancy, bone marrow suppression, diabetes, thyroid abnormalities, heart disease, premature aging, and cataracts for the rest of their lives and appropriate treatment instituted. Leukemia will start to manifest within the next couple of years, peak at five years and solid cancers will start appearing 10 to 15 years post-accident and will continue to increase in frequency in this generation over the next 70 to 90 years. All physicians and medical care providers in Japan must read and examine Chernobyl–Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment by the New York Academy of Sciences to understand the true medical gravity of the situation they face. I also suggest with humility that doctors in particular but also politicians and the general public refer to my web page, nuclearfreeplanet.org for more information, that they listen to the interviews related to Fukushima and Chernobyl on my radio program at ifyoulovethisplanet.org and they read my book NUCLEAR POWER IS NOT THE ANSWER. The international medical community and in particular the WHO must be mobilized immediately to assist the Japanese medical profession and politicians to implement this massive task outlined above. The Japanese government must be willing to accept international advice and help. As a matter of extreme urgency Japan must request and receive international advice and help from the IAEA and the NRC in the U.S., and nuclear specialists from Canada, Europe, etc., to prevent the collapse of Fukushima Dai-ichi Unit 4 and the spent fuel pool if there was an earthquake greater than 7 on the Richter scale.As the fuel pool crashed to earth it would heat and burn causing a massive radioactive release 10 times larger than the release from Chernobyl. There is no time to spare and at the moment the world community sits passively by waiting for catastrophe to happen. The international and Japanese media must immediately start reporting the facts from Japan as outlined above. Not to do so is courting global disaster.

Extracting uranium from seawater is closer to becoming an economic reality which could guarantee the future of nuclear power, scientists said today.

Improvements to the extraction technology have almost halved production costs from around 560 dollars (£355) per pound of uranium to 300 dollars (£190).

"This uncertainty around whether there's enough terrestrial uranium is impacting the decision-making in the industry, because it's hard to make long-term research and development or deployment decisions in the face of big uncertainties about the resource," said Dr Schneider. "So if we can tap into uranium from seawater, we can remove that uncertainty."

The plan envisages the construction of twin nuclear "fast reactors" at Sellafield that can dispose of the plutonium directly as fuel to generate electricity while ridding the country of a nuclear-waste headache that has dogged governments for half a century.

Britain's Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), which is in overall charge of Sellafield, requested the study last year in a remarkable U-turn in its stated policy of dealing with the 112 tonnes of civil plutonium that has accumulated as a result of the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel.

The American company behind the proposal, GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, still has a long way to go to convince experts that it can deliver reactors that can work as promised, as well as being delivered on time and to budget.

A fortnight after writing $2.84bn (£1.84bn) off the value of its Fayetteville shale gas business in Arkansas, BHP is poised to reveal on Wednesday that the charge helped push down its profits by a massive 40 per cent – to $14.2bn – in the year to June 30.

The FTSE 100 mining giant was forced into the writedown after a decade-long stampede into the brave new world of US shale gas produced so much of the stuff that its price tumbled to 10-year lows, taking the value of its producers with them.

"The problem is exacerbated because the minerals leasing system in the US obliges lessees to drill fairly quickly or relinquish their drilling rights," he added.

On Monday, as officials warned an explosion is possible from gas in Louisiana’s sinkhole area where radioactive waste has been pumped into a cavern and the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) authorized drilling a new well in the danger sinkhole zone, a seismologist told the Examiner that seismic activity exists in that zone and that fossil fuel industries’ environmental modifications (ENMODs) causing the gas bubbles, giant sinkhole and thousands of quakes resulting in the State of Emergency, is a “real possibility.”

Seismic activity is being detected from Louisiana’s giant sinkhole area, according to Horton, whose work at University of Memphis involves monitoring the New Madrid fault line for the United States Geological Survey (USGS) as well as the Louisiana disaster.

Fukushima’s cesium and other airborne emissions have already dwarfed Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and all nuclear explosions including Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

16 months later, the worst may be yet to come.

our lives are still threatened every day by a Unit 4 fuel pool left hanging 100 feet in the air. At any moment, an earthquake we all know is coming could send that pool crashing to the ground.

A day laborer wiping down windows at an abandoned school nearby shrugged at the work crew’s haphazard approach. “We are all amateurs,” he said. “Nobody really knows how to clean up radiation.

Nobody may really know how. But that has not deterred the Japanese government from starting to hand out an initial $13 billion in contracts meant to rehabilitate the more than 8,000-square-mile region most exposed to radioactive fallout

Even more disturbing to critics of the decontamination program is the fact that the government awarded the first contracts to three giant construction companies — corporations that have no more expertise in radiation cleanup than anyone else does, but that profited hugely from Japan’s previous embrace of nuclear power.

The temperature in a reactor at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant may have risen to 82 degrees on Feb. 12, a situation that could force the government to revoke the declaration of “an equivalent of cold shutdown.”

TEPCO said that it does not know why the temperature is rising.

High radiation levels in the No. 2 reactor are preventing workers from entering and examining the state of melted nuclear fuel.

Japan has succeeded in bringing its tsunami-stricken atomic power station to a safe “cold shutdown”, the government said on Friday, concluding the most dangerous phase of its nuclear crisis after a nine-month struggle.

Cold shutdown is a technical term meaning temperatures inside the reactors’ cores are stably below the 100-degree centigrade boiling point. It indicates that a nuclear chain reaction is highly unlikely to recur, though Fukushima Daiichi’s damaged units remain highly radioactive at close range and will remain so for years.

A side effect of their early efforts was that tens of thousands of tonnes of contaminated water built up at the site, some of which leaked into the sea.