Press Pieces

Radiation-related consulting and services from Integrated Environmental Management, Inc.

The following are a few recent news items that involve radiation or radioactivity in some form or another.  They are unedited articles or excerpts.  Because very few (if any) have been through any form of scientific review, their technical validity and accuracy should not be taken for granted.  Please give Integrated Environmental Management, Inc. (IEM) a call if you would like some additional insights. (You may wish to press your "reload" button to be sure you are seeing the most current collection.)

March 11, 2010 - Heritage Foundation - NRC Commissioner Takes a Stand on Obama’s Yucca Decision - Dale Klein, Commissioner and former chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) challenged the premise on which President Obama based his move to withdraw the application to permit the geologic repository at Yucca Mountain. At a conference in Bethesda, Maryland yesterday Commissioner Klein emphasized that it was politics, not science, which led to this decision. Klein said, Frankly, I would have preferred the White House to plainly say that it was implementing a policy change. The president has the right and responsibility to set policy, and clearly, an issue of national importance and complexity such as this needs to be periodically revisited. However, in my opinion, the administration’s stated rationale for changing course does not seem to rest on factual findings and thus does not bolster the credibility of our government to handle this matter competently.” Those who would distort the science of Yucca Mountain for political purposes should be reminded that it was a year ago today that the president issued his memorandum on scientific integrity, in which he stated that ‘The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions.’ I honestly cannot say if Yucca Mountain could ever meet the stringent tests that would allow it to be licensed. But I do know that, under the law, that licensing determination — and the technical evaluation of the science — is the NRC’s responsibility.”

March 11, 2010 - Associated Press - Uranium mining focus of Va. forum - Activists and scientists opposed to tapping a huge deposit of uranium in Southside Virginia are taking their case to Richmond. Speakers on Thursday will discuss the health impacts of uranium mining and the specifics of the Pittsylvania County uranium mine. The National Academy of Sciences' National Research Council is undertaking a study to examine various aspects of uranium mining in Virginia. Virginia Uranium Inc. seeks to mine and mill a 119-million-pound uranium ore deposit in Pittsylvania County. The company will pay for the first phase of the study through Virginia Tech. Before uranium could be mined in Virginia, the General Assembly would have to lift a ban that has been in place since 1982. The study is a first step to lifting that ban.

March 11, 2010 - NCR - Civil Nuclear Liability Bill to be introduced in Parliament - India is likely to introduce the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill in the current session of the Parliament providing to safeguard the interest of people in the unlikely event of a 'nuclear incident'. Replying to the questions, Minister of State for Science and Technology and Earth Sciences Prithviraj Chavan said the Bill was needed for the growth of the industry in the country. The private sector could participate in the setting up of nuclear power plants as a junior equity partner, the Minister clarified. The private sector, he said was in a position to participate and set up nuclear power plants through supply of components, equipment and works contracts. On the role of the Indian corporates in the nuclear sector Mr Chavan said, for the present, the project would continue as per the existing provisions of the Atomic Energy Act 1962. He said the Act allowed the Central Government to produce, use develop and dispose of the atomic energy by themselves or through an authority or corporation established by it. There were two PSUs - Nuclear Power Corporation of India and Bharatiya Nabhikiya Vidyut Nigam Limited in the scenario. To a question seeking details on nuclear accidents, the minister said, India had to its credit 315 reactor years of safe operation.

March 11, 2010 - Business Green - Funding deal bolsters US nuclear industry confidence; Department of Energy provides $40m for next generation nuclear reactor research projects - The US nuclear industry received a welcome confidence boost from the US government this week in the form of a $40m grant, even as policymakers continued to puzzle over how to store its waste. The Department of Energy awarded $40m to two companies working to develop next generation nuclear reactors. Westinghouse Electric and General Atomics will each receive around $20m to accelerate plans for new nuclear reactors which are expected to be safer to operate, and will recycle the heat produced by atomic reactions to help turn turbines and produce greater levels of energy from the same amount of nuclear fuel. The funding is the latest in a series of measures designed to provide a boost to the US nuclear industry and comes just weeks after President Obama announced the award of $8.3bn in loan guarantees to support the construction of two new nuclear reactors. The president has made the development of a new generation of nuclear reactors a central component of his climate change strategy and the industry is expecting a further boost later this month with the release of a new draft of the proposed cliomate change bill that is expected to include significantly more support for nuclear energy. However the latest moves come as Nuclear Regulatory Commission chair Gregory B. Jaczko this week voiced concerns over current storage policies for nuclear waste. The highly radioactive nuclear material produced from spent fuel rods has been a source of growing concern for all players in the nuclear supply chain in the past few years. Nuclear experts have also warned of the potential terrorism risk from plutonium rods stored in cooling ponds inside reactors.

March 11, 2010 - TopNews - No health risk posed by uranium testing site - According to the Western Australian Government, people of Kalgoorlie need not worry as the results of a radiation survey states that the decommissioned uranium-testing site near Kalgoorlie poses no health risk. Ian Bishop, the Labor candidate for the seat of O'Connor, earlier this month, had stated that the site, which is about six kilometres north of Kalgoorlie, posed a health risk. In the 1980s, this site was used by BHP Billiton for testing ore from the Yeelirrie uranium deposit, near Wiluna. Mines Minister Norman Moore informed that at the site the radiation levels were comparable with background radiation levels that were present at any other place. Moore said, "Sixty-nine radiation measurements were taken across the site and readings showed radiation levels averaged 0.11 micrograys per hour, which compares to typical background radiation levels of 0.08 micrograys per hour at the Kalgoorlie DMP office.” In 1986, this facility was stopped and the area was decontaminated before rehabilitating the area with vegetation.

March 11, 2010 - Express Healthcare - The New Age Two-in-One Imaging: PET / CT - Hailed as the investigation of this century, Positron Emission Tomography - Computed Tomography (better known by its acronym PET-CT) is a medical imaging device which combines in a single gantry system both a Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and an X-Ray Computed Tomography, so that images acquired from both devices can be taken sequentially, in the same session from the patient and combined into a single superposed (co-registered) image. Thus, functional imaging obtained by PET, which depicts the spatial distribution of metabolic or biochemical activity in the body can be more precisely aligned or correlated with anatomic imaging obtained by CT scanning. Two- and three-dimensional image reconstruction may be rendered as a function of a common software and control system. PET-CT has revolutionised many fields of medical diagnosis, by adding precision of anatomic localisation to functional imaging, which was previously lacking from pure PET imaging. For example, in oncology, surgical planning, radiation therapy and cancer staging have been changing rapidly under the influence of PET-CT availability, to the extent that many diagnostic imaging procedures and centers have been gradually abandoning conventional PET devices and substituting them by PET-CTs. Although the combined device is considerably more expensive, it has the advantage of providing both functions as stand-alone examinations, being, in fact, two devices in one.

March 11, 2010 - Iowa Independent - Iowa nuke workers: Government not living up to promises - Iowans who got sick working for our nation’s nuclear weapons industry during the Cold War were promised that a federal program would provide them medical benefits and lump sum payments for illnesses associated with their work. But since its inception only a third of Iowans who have made claims have seen any payment. The program, the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Program Act (EEOICPA), launched in 2001. It was created to provide “timely, uniform, and adequate” compensation to all the nation’s nuclear workers, many of whom were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation and toxic substances while working at Department of Energy sites and contract facilities. The reality has been anything but, according to frustrated claimants and medical examiners, who say red tape and unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles stand between those who are sick and the benefits they were promised for their years of service. And while legislation to fix the process languishes in the U.S. Senate, workers continue to suffer and often die without receiving compensation. “It is antithetical to the concept of public health to wait until you have human bodies to do something,” said Dr. Laurence Fuortes, a University of Iowa professor of occupational and environmental health and director of the Former Worker Medical Screening Programs.

March 11, 2010 - Press Information Bureau - Use of Thorium for nuclear power production - Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) has set up a research reactor KAMINI at Kalpakkam using Uranium-233 fuel obtained from irradiated Thorium which is operating since 1996. DAE has developed the design for a 300 MWe Advanced Heavy Water Reactor (AHWR) to generate most of its power from Thorium based fuel, as a demonstrator for Thorium related technologies. During XIth Five Year Plan, a range of activities pertaining to systems and technologies relevant for Thorium utilization has been taken up. The design and development of main nuclear systems of AHWR have been completed. Large scale engineering experiments for the simulation of important thermal hydraulic parameters of its natural circulation driven cooling system have led to a better understanding of various associated phenomena. This was stated by Shri Prithviraj Chavan, the Union Minister of Science &Technology and Earth Sciences in the Rajya Sabha today.

March 11, 2010 - Global Post - Nuclear Japan: A pox on MOX? - Japan is going "pluthermal" and anti-nuclear activists are up in arms. The term, coined by Japan, refers to using mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel containing plutonium in nuclear reactors, instead of normal uranium fuel. Ignoring months of protests and sit-ins, Japan's first nuclear reactor went "pluthermal" last December. This month, a second plant is going pluthermal too: the Ikata Nuclear Power Plant, which sits on a narrow, mountainous peninsula jutting out into Japan's Inland Sea. Several more plants are due for the upgrade in the coming years. The government says pluthermal reactors are more efficient and produce less waste than normal plants. Activists say they're more dangerous. But their pleas look unlikely to stop Tokyo's ambitious plans to boost nuclear power and ultimately become a self-sufficient nuclear nation. The government touts MOX fuel as a way to recycle the spent fuel from Japan's 54 nuclear reactors. Currently, Japan ships its spent fuel to Europe. There, a French reprocessing firm extracts plutonium from the spent fuel, mixes that plutonium with fresh uranium and — voila — a potent batch of MOX fuel.

March 11, 2010 - Reno News & Review - GOP candidates: Bring waste to Nevada - The Yucca Mountain project is being treated as all but dead, but some Nevada political figures could breathe new life into it. Pacific Northwest activist Gerry Pollet could not believe his eyes. Pollet, who monitors the cleanup at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation on the Columbia River in Washington and has sometimes made common cause with Nevada anti-Yucca Mountain dump activists, found a Las Vegas Review-Journal story on the web about Nevada candidates calling for bringing waste to Yucca Mountain just as the state seemed on the verge of winning its long running battle against the dump there. “Several Republican candidates—including leading U.S. Senate candidates Danny Tarkanian, Sue Lowden and Sharron Angle—have expressed support for studying or experimenting with reprocessing, a method of extracting useful fuel from radioactive waste,” the newspaper reported. “Two Republican gubernatorial candidates are also open to the idea, despite steadfast opposition from the Nevada political establishment that stymied the plan to store waste at Yucca Mountain.” For a quarter of a century, Nevada has been fighting to keep the mountain in Nye County from becoming a dump for high level wastes, mainly from power plants. “I wouldn’t have predicted that statewide candidates in Nevada would be calling for sending the same high-level waste to Yucca Mountain that the state just defeated,” Pollet said. “That’s the danger of candidates or incumbents listening to industry or political ideologues from outside Nevada.” Is it the same waste? Pollet says the end goal—reprocessing instead of storage—may be different, but the waste that would be brought to Nevada is exactly the same stuff Nevada has been trying to keep out. “It really is the very same high-level nuclear waste!” he said in an email message. “The reprocessing proposal is to reprocess the fuel rods from reactors, melting them down to extract Pu [plutonium] and U [uranium], rather than simply burying the fuel rods in a deep geologic repository.”

March 11, 2010 - Post-Standard - Too Much Risk: PSC should kill plan to spin off FitzPatrick, other nukes - The uncertain fate of Entergy’s nuclear plant in Vermont is reason enough to scuttle the company’s plans to spin off six of its nuclear reactors, including the FitzPatrick plant in Oswego County. Last month, the Vermont state Senate voted to close Entergy’s reactor in that state when its license expires in 2012. Senators cited radioactive contamination at the site as the reason for the vote. The Vermont House of Representatives has yet to vote on the matter, and Entergy promises a vigorous fight. The plant would be included in the proposed spin-off. In New York, the state Public Service Commission has been examining Entergy’s proposal since 2008. In addition to FitzPatrick, Entergy runs the two Indian Point plants Downstate. All three reactors are part of the proposal. But the Vermont reactor’s inclusion in the spin-off plan raises questions about the financial stability of the new company that would indirectly own the six reactors under Entergy’s proposal. If it is part of the deal and the full Vermont legislature votes for closure, would the new company — Enexus Energy Corp. — have enough revenue after 2012 to decommission the reactor and clean up the contamination at the Vermont plant and other sites? The six nuclear plants sell the power they generate in competitive electricity markets. Radioactive pollution at Indian Point, in particular, is quite extensive. And the investigation of the Vermont reactor’s tritium contamination is far from over.

March 11, 2010 - Las Vegas Review-Journal - Agency needs new plan after Yucca decision - With the Yucca Mountain repository apparently off the table, safety regulators will need to retool to determine whether nuclear waste can remain stored at reactor sites for periods of a hundred years or longer, officials said Wednesday. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is preparing to pivot from its focus on evaluating the proposed Nevada waste storage site in light of the Obama administration declaring it no longer was interested in the repository plan. The agency will need to determine what environmental and safety issues might come into play if thousands of tons of radioactive spent fuel needs to be kept in steel and concrete containers at reactor sites across the country for extended periods, NRC official Jack Davis said at an agency conference. Speaking with reporters earlier this week, NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko said nuclear fuel can be stored safely for long periods, and the NRC will "work to see what that time frame is really like -- 100 years, 200 years, 400," according to the New York Times. NRC staff has indicated that waste-containing canisters can remain robust for another 50-60 years. On Wednesday, Davis, who heads a high-level waste technical review team, said the prospect of keeping highly radioactive material contained for longer periods raises a new set of issues the agency will need to tackle. NRC safety regulations "are not really optimized for long-term storage," he said. Also, "if you are starting to store for a very long time at individual sites, you are going to have to reconsider the environmental impacts and the assessments that went into that."

March 11, 2010 - Associated Press - Robot explorer stuck in pipe at Vt. nuke plant - A small robot looking for the source of a radioactive leak at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant is stuck in the mud. Officials say the robot exploring a tunnel believed to be the source of a leak of radioactive tritium into the groundwater beneath the plant is mired in the sludge that plugged a drain in the tunnel. Vermont Yankee spokesman Larry Smith tells the Rutland Herald The robot is about the size of a remote-controlled toy car. Plant officials say that since the drain was unplugged the level of radioactive tritium found in groundwater has dropped. Smith says the plan is to replace the leaking pipes during Vermont Yankee's next refueling outage, scheduled to begin next month.

March 11, 2010 - Huntington News - Nuclear Waste Mess in South Carolina Heads for Litigation Concerning Yucca Mountain - Nuclear waste sets at power plants and former defense (DOE sites) awaiting a journey for burial at a proposed depository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. President Obama had proposed abandoning the site for a permanent nuclear waste storage facility. However, states are starting to line up at federal court houses seeking to force federal entities to adhere to their promises. Georgia officials were the first to sue. The State of Washington followed. Aiden County, S.C. has also sued. Under various strategic clean up plans, states with waste had been assured that it would be moved to a secure federal facility permanently. If the Yucca Mountain plan folds, state officials worry that they will be stuck with the used nuclear materials permanently. Yet, to do so would open the very scenario feared --- a potential terrorist infiltrating one of the many DOE facilities in various stages of clean up, decommissioning and decontamination where radioactive materials might be utilized to produce a WMD. Electric companies using nuclear reactors have paid billions of dollars (and therefore their customers) into a trust fund for research and development of the Yucca disposal site. Georgia’s Public Service Commission has asked for a $30 billion refund. Utilities have been paying into the nuclear waste trust fund since 1982. Spent nuclear fuel remains on 130 individuals properties. Despite the federal nuclear disposal promises, a scientist and investigative reporter has recently learned that the property is NOT owned by Uncle Sam or any of his entities and agencies. A 2005 freedom of information request asked for “a copy of the document… by which the Governor of Nevada notified DOE that his state had been notified for participation in the development of Yucca Mountain and that he was willing to receive funds,” however, “no responsive documents were found.” According to the inquiry the Department of Energy Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management Office of Repository Development did locate “several documents between DOE and the state of Nevada regarding DOE’s offer to enter into a benefits agreement and the state of Nevada’s response.

March 11, 2010 - Knoxville News-Sentinel - Plans for 'Radioactive Report Card' - The Alliance for Nuclear Accountability has scheduled a press briefing March 15 and release of the first-year "Radioactive Report Card" for President Obama. According to a media advisory, the report card is timed with the alliance's annual "D.C. Days" March 15-17, when activists hold a number of meetings in Washington with Congressional leaders, staff and members of the Obama administration. Ralph Hutchison, coordinator of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance, is among the scheduled participants. Others include Michele Boyd of Physicians for Social Responsibility's Safe Energy Program and Nick Roth of the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability. On March 16, the ANA is planning an awards reception "honoring leaders in the movement for more responsible U.S. nuclear policies."

March 11, 2010 - Las Vegas Review-Journal - YUCCA MOUNTAIN FOES: 'Sweet' victory savored; More than 100 attend mock wake for project - "How sweet it is. How sweet it is. And it really is." That's how former Nevada Sen. Richard Bryan, a long-time foe of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste project, opened his "keynote eulogy" Tuesday night at the project's mock wake at the Palms. Bryan pumped his fists in victory as more than 100 anti-Yucca activists cheered and the "Rocky" movie theme blared inside the ghostbar at the top of the resort. "Let's hear it for Nevadans because today is a day to celebrate a victory," Bryan said. The cause for celebration was the Department of Energy's recent withdrawal of its application to build what he and Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., often referred to over the past few decades as "the dump." Bryan credited Reid with "driving the silver stake into the heart" of the project to entomb the nation's most deadly nuclear waste inside the mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. While the crowd roared and drinks flowed, Bryan reminded the audience that the specter of more litigation looms. But with DOE throwing in the towel, it's certainly a time to celebrate, he said. He also reflected on some memorable moments in the fight against the dump. There was, for example, the infamous "Screw Nevada Bill," in which Congress saddled the state with hosting a place to bury the nation's spent nuclear fuel from commercial power reactors and highly radioactive defense waste.

March 10, 2010 - Pottstown Mercury - One Exelon unit down for routine maintenance - Unit Two of Exelon Nuclear's Limerick Generating Station was taken off-line early Tuesday morning for regularly schedule maintenance. According to a release from Exelon, while Unit Two is off-line, personnel will make repairs to the water cooling system on the non-nuclear side of the plant, which provides cooling water to several components within the turbine generator.

March 10, 2010 - The Citizen - Obama, politics and nuclear waste question - The project involved more than 2,500 scientists. It cost $ 10.5 billion between 1983 and 2009 and it included one of the most bizarre scientific tasks of all time: evaluate whether nuclear waste stored deep inside a Nevada desert mountain would be safe a million years into the future. That was the safety standard set in September, 2008, by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a condition for allowing nuclear waste to be stored deep in the belly of the Yucca Mountain, 95 miles (155 km) from Las Vegas, long the subject of political debate and a fine example of nimbyism (not in my backyard). The vastly complex computer models and simulations experts launched to figure out whether Yucca Mountain would be a safe environment in the year 1,000,000 and beyond ended before there was a scientific conclusion. President Barack Obama has pulled the plug on the entire Yucca Mountain enterprise, million-year safety study and all, by writing it out of his financial year 2011 budget, which begins in October. Yucca Mountain's death by budgetary axe defies logic. It coincides with Obama's stated support for expanding nuclear power. More reactors mean more waste, now piling up above-ground at sites scattered around the country. In February, Obama announced $8.3 billion in government loan guarantees for two nuclear reactors in Georgia. They would be the first new plants since the 1979 nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, an accident that caused no casualties but became a rallying symbol for the anti-nuclear movement.

March 10, 2010 - All Cars Electric - Is Radiation From Hybrid Vehicles Cause for Concern? - Could hybrid cars actually be dangerous to the environment? It seems like an unfounded question. How could hybrids actually hurt the environment? A study conducted by a research committee funded by the Environmental Protection group of Israel suggests that hybrid could actually be harmful to the environment and humans, as well. The study found "surplus" radiation in some hybrid models. The study took 9 months to conduct and the research group focuses on hybrid models sold in Israel, as well as worldwide. The "surplus" radiation is generated by the electromagnetic field made by AC current flowing from the batteries to the engine and back again. This type of radiation, known as non ionizing radiation, is similar to that found in a typical cellphone. How dangerous is this type of radiation? The answer remains to be discovered. Numbers for acceptable levels of this type of radiation vary. According to the Truth About Cars report, "The Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) recommends a limit of 1,000 mG (milligauss) for a 24 hour exposure period. While other guidelines pose similar limits, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) deemed extended exposure to electromagnetic fields stronger than 2 mG to be a "possible cause" for cancer. Israel's Ministry of Health recommends a maximum of 4 mG."

March 10, 2010 - Associated Press - State Public Service Board to review request to close nuclear plant - Two weeks after lawmakers voted to close Vermont Yankee in 2012, Vermont regulators are being pressed to act sooner — shutting it down immediately — because of leaking tritium that environmental groups say is polluting the environment. The state Public Service Board begins today an investigation sought by the Conservation Law Foundation and the New England Coalition, which say the nuclear power plant in southeastern Vermont should stop operating until the source of the leak — first reported two months ago — is found and fixed. The organizations petitioned the Board for a review late last month. Tuesday, the Safe & Green Campaign — a citizens group that sponsored a recent Brattleboro-to-Montpelier march calling for the shutdown — joined the call, filing a letter with the Board. “The plant continues to leak radioactive waste,” said Sandra Levine, senior attorney for the Conservation Law Foundation. “If there was an oil dealer down the street that was leaking into the Winooski River, don’t you think we’d close that dealership down and stop the continued operation? The same is true, only more so, for Vermont Yankee.” Tritium is a radioactive isotope that can cause cancer in humans when ingested in large amounts.

March 10, 2010 - Mining Weekly - Minister quashes Kalgoorlie radiation claims - Western Australian Mines and Petroleum Minister Norman Moore has quashed rumours of a possible health risk from radiation at a decommissioned BHP Billiton uranium testing site near Kalgoorlie, following the completion of testing at the site. Moore rejected the claims based on the results of radiation testing he directed the Department of Mines and Petroleum (DMP) to carry out last week. The Minister requested the DMP survey in response to reported claims by the Labor Party that the rehabilitated Kalgoorlie Research Plant (KRP), 6 km north of the city, posed a health risk. He added that the remarks made by the opposition party heightened community concerns about the possible risk of radiation to children following vandalisation of the site’s gates. “I was advised BHP Billiton, which owns the site, had repaired the gates and increased security.” Radiation levels across the site were found to be comparable with normal natural background radiation levels found elsewhere in Western Australia. Moore noted that 69 radiation measurements were taken across the site and readings showed radiation levels averaged 0,11 micrograys an hour, which compares with typical background radiation levels of 0,08 micrograys an hour at the Kalgoorlie DMP office.

March 10, 2010 - Ireland Online - Tánaiste: Cancer X-ray scandal shows 'shabbiness' - The Tánaiste Mary Coughlan has described as "shabbiness" the fact that almost 58,000 X-rays were never looked at by a radiologist in Tallaght hospital in Dublin for nearly five years. One person's died and another's seriously ill undergoing treatment for cancer after their diagnoses were delayed as a result of the failures. A helpline for patients has opened while an investigation into the issue is underway and the HSE is holding crisis talks at the hospital. The Tánaiste admitted she wasn't fully informed, but that "there had been a failure of the system". The Taoiseach Brian Cowen has denied that the Government or the HSE tried to cover-up the cancer scandal. He made the remarks after Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny said it was the "best example of national failure on the part of the Government". And Mr Kenny accused the Minister for Health Mary Harney of trying to suppress the scandal.

March 10, 2010 - The Press and Journal - Tiny Moray school in shutdown after high levels of radon show up - A small Moray school has been closed after a high level of radon gas was discovered on the premises. Cabrach Primary has just four pupils. Its staff and pupils will be transferred to Mortlach Primary School, about eight miles away at Dufftown, until remedial work can be carried out. Radon is a radioactive gas which exists naturally in rocks and soil, but higher-than-average levels can occur depending on geological conditions. High levels of radon can increase the risk of developing lung cancer. Tests were undertaken by the Health Protection Agency (HPA) after the school was identified as having the potential for higher-than-normal radon levels. Other schools in the Speyside area were also tested, but their results revealed normal levels of the gas, according to the council. Cabrach primary had previously faced the threat of closure. Despite the gas levels being given as the reason for temporary closure, one parent believes it may not reopen. Moray Council said that was definitely not the case as it was about to spend £30,000 rectifying the problem. The parent, who did not wish to be named, and is convinced the school was in a low-risk zone, said: “I think this whole thing is a complete stitch-up. We’ll lose our school – it’s very sad. They have just been chipping away at us. “Why, in the middle of a severe financial crisis, are tests for radon being carried out? A lot of other questions need to be asked. “Monitors can give unreliably high readings in extreme cold and wet weather, which we have had a lot of.”

March 10, 2010 - Associated Press - Oligarch wins suit against Russian broadcaster - Self-exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky on Wednesday won a libel case against a Russian broadcaster that accused him of masterminding the murder of a former KGB agent in London. The 64-year-old tycoon sued All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting, known as RTR, over a show that alleged he was behind the 2006 poisoning death of renegade Russian agent Alexander Litvinenko. In the ruling Justice David Eady said "there is no evidence before me that Mr. Berezovsky had any part in the murder of Mr. Litvinenko. Nor, for that matter, do I see any basis for reasonable grounds to suspect him of it." Eady awarded Berezovsky 150,000 pounds (about $225,000) in damages. Berezovsky, who was in court for the verdict, said in a statement he was pleased the court "has unequivocally demolished RTR's claims." RTR did not take part in the hearings, and called the judgment illegal. Speaking from Moscow, the broadcaster's lawyer Zoya Matviyevskaya said the company "does not recognize the decision of the court" and was ready to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

March 10, 2010 - Deutsche Welle - Sun begins new solar cycle, flinging radiation at the Earth - There is still much to be learned about the sunAs a new solar cycle of activity begins this year, the Earth will once again be bombarded with increased radiation from the sun. This effect may damage satellites and interfere with GPS, television and communications. In ancient history, men would sometimes look up into the extreme northern or southern skies and see flickering green or blue lights shimmering across heavens. These auroras were often attributed to the gods, for what else could explain such displays? Today we have a more scientific explanation for the polar lights, known as aurora borealis in the Northern Hemisphere and aurora australis in the Southern: the effect is caused by charged particles from the sun colliding with the Earth's magnetic field. This phenomenon is just one side effect of what is called space weather. The fact is that the Earth is constantly pelted with radiation from the sun, which can play havoc with a society that is increasingly dependent on its high-tech toys. But for hikers, drivers, pilots and ship's captains, perhaps the biggest concern is that interference from the solar radiation could mislead or disable their global positioning system (GPS) signal.

March 10, 2010 - Rutland Herald - State agency finds GE liable - A former employee for General Electric has been awarded compensation by state labor officials who agreed that her longstanding lung ailment was a reaction to inhaling and absorbing beryllium at the company's two Rutland-area plants. In a Feb. 19 decision and order issued by the state Department of Labor, Commissioner Patricia Moulton Powden awarded Patricia Alexander permanent partial disability benefits, medical benefits and attorneys' fees for a medical condition that Alexander's attorney said has forced the 68-year-old Rutland woman to rely on bottled oxygen to breath and a motorized scooter to get around. "It's been very hard for her," said Burlington attorney Michael Green, who represented Alexander in a disputed workers compensation claim brought to the state. "This decision is good news for her and should serve to put other workers on notice. If someone worked (at GE in Rutland) and was diagnosed with sarcoidosis, I would get myself back to my doctor." Sarcoidosis, an inflammatory lung disease characterized by small nodules called granulomas, was the initial diagnosis for Alexander, who experienced worsening shortness of breath after her retirement from GE in 1996, according to the Labor decision.

March 10, 2010 - Associated Press - Volunteers needed for radioactive waste panel - The U.S. Department of Energy is seeking volunteers to help advise it on radioactive waste cleanup at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The agency says it needs people to serve on the Northern New Mexico Citizens' Advisory Board, which makes recommendations to the DOE over such things as waste management, stabilizing waste dump sites and future land use. Its members serve 2-year terms. The board's vice chairman, Robert Gallegos, estimates working on the board takes up 10 to 20 hours a month. The board is largely made up of people directly affected by lab cleanup activities.

March 10, 2010 - Denver Post - Justice Dept. sends interns to Four Corners to spread word about radiation exposure payments - The U.S. Justice Department announced today that it has launched an "intensive outreach effort" in the Four Corners area to Native Americans and their families whose work in the uranium industry during the Cold War benefitted the United States but exposed them to radiation. Tony West, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, said in a news release that workers and their families may be entitled to compensation under the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA). Under the act, people in the following categories may receive payments: uranium miners, millers and ore transporters; people who were present at nuclear weapons test sites; and people who lived in certain areas "downwind" of the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. In the latest outreach in the Four Corners area - Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona - the Justice Department has developed an internship program using part-time college and graduate students recruited from tribal communities. West said the students will attempt to contact Native Americans in the Four Corners area who contracted certain cancers or other serious diseases after being exposed to radiation through nuclear weapons tests or work in the uranium mining industry between 1942 and 1971. The internships will include a two-week training program in Washington, D.C.

March 10, 2010 - 9News.com - Bill would warn Rocky Flats visitors of dangers - State Rep. Wes McKinley wants visitors to Rocky Flats to know the area's history. Mckinley (D-Walsh) is sponsoring a bill that would require visitors to be notified of the dangers at the wildlife refuge. The Department of Public Health and Environment would educate visitors through audio recordings and written pamphlets. According to a summary of the proposed bill, it would require signs and brochures to contain information about "...the presence of, and risks posed by, plutonium and other toxic substances that were used in the production of nuclear weapons at the site." Rocky Flats is 16 miles northwest of Denver and was the home of a nuclear weapons plant during the Cold War. Some chemicals the plant used to make weapons include plutonium, uranium and beryllium. Weapons-grade plutonium can stay in the environment for thousands of years. The plant stopped production in 1989 and began a contamination cleanup in 1992. In 2001, The Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge Act, sponsored by now former Sen. Wayne Allard and then Rep. Mark Udall, would make the area a wildlife refuge after an intensive cleanup. Allard is now retired and Udall is now a senator.

March 10, 2010 - North County Times - SAN ONOFRE: Nuke plant gets continued criticism from NRC on worker issue - In a new report card issued to the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, federal regulators once again criticize the seaside power plant for failing to make sure that workers meticulously follow procedures designed to head off safety problems. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission released on Friday its latest annual assessment of the plant. Overall, the assessment says that San Onofre is operated in a way that preserves public health and safety, but it also notes that ongoing flaws in worker performance remain. The commission will brief the public on the assessment during a meeting March 24 at the Dana Point Doubletree Hotel. In its letter, the commission says that this is the fifth report over the past two years in which regulators have pointed out performance troubles at San Onofre. Those problems first surfaced in 2008 with a report that a worker trained to watch for fires at the plant had falsified logs and skipped some hourly rounds on several occasions, dating back to 2001. Other incidents included a failure to properly connect batteries used to start backup diesel generators; a nuclear fuel assembly inserted in the wrong slot inside one of San Onofre's spent fuel pools; and, more recently, a report of work performed on the wrong cooling pump at the plant. The commission found that none of the incidents was found to affect safety at the plant, because multiple backup systems were in place to catch errors.

March 10, 2010 - Salt Lake Tribune - Legislature seeks to create radioactive waste cleanup fund - The state could keep up to $4 million in fees from companies burying radioactive waste in Utah in case the state has to take over the sites, under a bill that passed the Senate on Tuesday and now goes to the governor for his signature. HB331 would allow the state to put the first $400,000 in waste fees toward the state's general budget each year, then allows environmental regulators to build a remediation fund of up to $4 million. "It really does help us make sure we have the funds available in the even of an emergency or a cleanup," said Sen. John Valentine, R-Orem. The bill passed the Senate unanimously.

March 10, 2010 - Las Vegas Review-Journal - Yucca Mountain foe: Work paid off; DOE move surprises former state official - The man who led Nevada's charge against the Yucca Mountain Project for more than 20 years says he's surprised that the Department of Energy took action on its own to withdraw its license request to build a nuclear waste repository in the ridge, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. "I have to admit that side of it is kind of a surprise," Bob Loux, former executive director of Nevada's Agency for Nuclear Projects, said after DOE filed a motion last week to withdraw its construction application from a nuclear licensing board. "I could see DOE getting defeated in the licensing proceedings given the number of contentions that Nevada submitted and were accepted. I never thought they'd come from a licensing proceeding with a license." After working for the state for 32 years, including 23 at the helm of the Nuclear Projects Agency, Loux resigned in September 2008 amid controversy over giving himself and his staff unauthorized pay raises. He later offered to pay the state more than $29,000 in salary overpayments in exchange for the withdrawal of an ethics complaint against him, but the Ethics Commission rejected the proposal. Then in March 2009, the Ethics Commission decided in a 3-2 vote to drop the charges, ruling that he didn't break state ethics laws because the governor, not the Legislature, determines his salary and those of his staff. Since then, Loux said, he has been working on a book and playing golf.

March 9, 2010 - Orangeburg Times & Democrat - S.C. State gets cash for nuclear institute - A South Carolina State University program designed to get students interested in nuclear science was slated to end in 2009. However, a new donation to the Nuclear Science Institute will allow it to continue this year. Shaw/AREVA MOX Services, LLC presented a $100,000 check to the university’s Nuclear Engineering Program on Monday to continue the program that exposes high school students and guidance counselors to nuclear science and various fields of engineering. Sixth District Congressman James E. Clyburn, who was there for the presentation, said it is vital to get young people involved in nuclear science and producing nuclear energy. “I’m convinced that the future in this country is going to be determined by who gets out in front of the energy issue,” he said. “The fact of the matter is, we’re not going to do what is necessary to do for this country economically ... without nuclear (energy).” Clyburn said that producing nuclear energy is the only way to end dependence on foreign oil. It’s also going to be critical to producing new jobs that help secure the country’s economy, he said. “We want to have more students in nuclear. We want to have more students in energy issues, because we know that’s what the future’s going to be,” Clyburn said. David Stinson, president of Shaw/AREVA MOX Services, said his company is looking for a future workforce that is presently in middle and high school.

March 9, 2010 - sTV - Primary school shut over cancer gas discovery - A remote Moray primary school is to be temporarily closed after soil tests showed higher than average levels of a gas which can cause cancer. Cabrach Primary School's four pupils will be transferred to Mortlach Primary in Dufftown after radon was detected by the Health Protection Agency (HPA). Work to vent the gas, which occurs naturally in rocks and soil, will begin after the Easter holidays. A Moray Council spokesman said radon levels had varied from one part of the school to another and the lowest readings were recorded in the classroom areas. He said: "We are working closely with the Health Protection Agency and the Health and Safety Executive with a view to carrying out remediation work and we will be taking their advice on how that is best achieved. "The council is not prepared to leave the health and safety of its staff and pupils to chance and the position was discussed with parents and staff as soon as the data from the radon tests was analysed." Other schools in the Speyside area were tested by the HPA but levels were found to be normal.

March 9, 2010 - Associated Press - Maine Panel Mulls Cell Phone Warnings - Whether to require health warnings on cellular phones in Maine is on the agenda of a legislative committee. The Health and Human Services Committee takes up Rep. Andrea Boland's bill Tuesday afternoon. Last week, the committee took testimony during a more formal hearing on Sanford Democrat's bill. Researchers told the committee that studies in Europe show electromagnetic radiation from cell phones poses risks of brain cancer, especially in children. They want consumer warnings on cell phones and their packaging. An industry group, TechAmerica, says scientific evidence so far does not indicate a public health risk and that warning labels would be misleading and confusing. Maine health officials also oppose the bill.

March 9, 2010 - Energy Digital - No “two-track” nuclear industry, warns Areva - The conference took place at the headquarters of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Speaking to the conference, Areva Chief Executive, Anne Lauvergeon, said: "We cannot see a two-track nuclear industry develop, with a low-cost one for some and high standards for others." In December, Areva was part of a consortium that lost a crucial project to build as many as four third-generation EPR nuclear reactors in Abu Dhabi. Sources said that although the local authorities preferred Areva's 1,650 megawatt EPR, which among other things was also plane crash-proof, the project instead went to a less powerful and less advanced reactor costing nearly half the amount of the French proposal. "We can of course propose ready-to-wear products in terms of reactor size, in terms of adaptation to local constraints, in terms of technology choices, but as far as safety is concerned there is no choice," Lauvergeon said. Lauvergeon also called for greater transparency in safety standards, arguing this would make nuclear energy more acceptable to the public. United States Deputy Secretary of Energy, Daniel Poneman, who also attended the OECD conference, said there could be no compromise on safety at nuclear plants. "We still must focus on security. A nuclear accident anywhere is a nuclear accident everywhere," he said.

March 9, 2010 - Sonoran Weekly Examiner - Radiological Terrorism: GAO report on recovery from attacks - A terrorist’s use of a radiological dispersal device or improvised nuclear device – a/k/a ‘dirty bombs’ – to release radioactive materials into the environment could have devastating consequences. The timely cleanup of contaminated areas, however, could speed the restoration of normal operations, thus reducing the adverse consequences from an incident. At the request of the U.S. Congress, the Government Accountability Office examined the extent to which federal agencies are planning to fulfill their responsibilities to assist cities and their states in cleaning up areas contaminated with radioactive materials from RDD and IND incidents. GAO analysts also examined what is known about the federal government’s capability to effectively cleanup areas contaminated with radioactive materials from RDD and IND incidents, and the analysts looked at suggestions from government emergency management officials on ways to improve federal preparedness to provide assistance to recover from RDD and IND incidents. Analysts also discussed recovery activities in the United Kingdom with that nation’s experts. The Department of Homeland Security, through the Federal Emergency Management Administration, is responsible for developing a comprehensive emergency management system to respond to – and recover from – natural disasters and terrorists attacks, including RDD and IND attacks. The term used by these officials is ‘all-hazards response.” The response phase would involve evacuations and providing medical treatment to those who were injured; the recovery phase would include cleaning up the radioactive contamination from an attack in order to permit people to return to their homes and businesses.

March 9, 2010 - FEN - Endress + Hauser Gammapilot M FMG60 reduces radioactive source activity - ENDRESS + Hauser has released the Gammapilot M FMG60 for radiometric measurement to help reduce radioactive source activity for compliance with ARPANSA.ENDRESS + Hauser has released the Gammapilot M FMG60 for radiometric measurement to help reduce radioactive source activity for compliance with ARPANSA. Radiometric measurement is commonly used for determining density, continuous level and level limits. Endress + Hauser claims its Gammapilot M FMG60 scintillation detector has high sensitivity, allowing clients to reduce the required radioactive source activity. Even with low radiation levels, the Gammapilot M FMG60 scintillation detector is said to have a high pulse rate for signal evaluation. Due to the security risk involved in the use of radiation sources, operators need to comply with the ARPANSA Code of Practice RPS11 for the Security of Radioactive Sources. If the radiation source used as high enough activity to be considered high risk, the Code of Practice stipulates additional security measures must be implemented for the storage, possession, use and transport of the radiological material.

March 9, 2010 - eng24 - 92 toxic and radioactive objects in Kyrgyzstan - There are 92 toxic and radioactive land-buried waste objects of mining production in Kyrgyzstan, the estimated volume of wastes makes up more than 254 million cubic meters (457 ton). The statement was voiced by the press-service of the Ministry of Emergency Situations referring to the State cadastre of mining production’s wastes. Reportedly, abandoned tailing dumps and waste banks after the Soviet Union period remains under control of the Ministry of Emergency Situations. The total volume makes up 15 million cubic meters. Including 31 tailing dumps with radioactive wastes – 7.2 million cubic meters, 5 tailing dumps with toxic wastes – 5.2 million cubic meters and 25 mining waste banks of dradge – 3.3 million cubic meters.

March 9, 2010 - The Day - NRC says 2009 was a safe year at Millstone - Millstone Power Station operated safely in 2009, according to a Nuclear Regulatory Commission performance review, and will require only routine inspections this year as a result. Some willful violations by individual workers will get extra scrutiny, however. Details about the followup inspections for misconduct were not available, but NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan said the agency will examine whether there are "common" elements to the three incidents. The NRC issued a letter Wednesday to Millstone owner Dominion of Virginia saying the two reactors' daily operations "preserved public health and safety" for the past year, meeting all operations objectives. Millstone operates two reactors, Unit 2 and Unit 3, and maintains a spent fuel pool at a third reactor, Unit 1, which is shut down and in the process of being decommissioned. Combined, Units 2 and 3 provide 2,097 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 500,000 homes. As a result of the review, which covers last year in its entirety, the NRC will conduct baseline inspections throughout the coming year, said Donald E. Jackson, chief of Projects Branch 5 for the NRC's division of reactor projects. Security inspections are handled separately and are not released publicly, he said.

March 9, 2010 -CrossCut - Obama wants more nuclear power, but what about the waste? - Let's get this straight: Barack Obama wants to build more nuclear power plants. More nuclear power plants will generate more radioactive waste. The nation doesn't have a place to store that waste long-term. The nation does, however, have a plan to build a nuclear repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain where highly radioactive waste from the nation's nuclear plants, from its plutonium-production facilities at Savannah River in South Carolina, and from Hanford can be stored until hell freezes over. The Yucca Mountain plan has been in the works for the past 30 years. Nevada doesn't want the repository, but then, neither does anyone else. High-level nuclear waste creates the ultimate NIMBY issue. Now, following up on a campaign promise made in Nevada, the Obama administration has filed a motion to withdraw its application for a license to build the Yucca Mountain repository. "This is great news,"said Senate majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada, adding that the decidion "prevents Nevada from becoming the nation's nuclear dumping ground."

March 9, 2010 - USNRC Press Release (03/08/10) - NRC announces changes in senior management - The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has selected Martin J. Virgilio to replace Dr. Bruce S. Mallett, who will retire in June after 30 years of public service, as Deputy Executive Director for Reactor and Preparedness Programs and Michael F. Weber who will replace Virgilio as the Deputy Executive Director for Materials, Waste, Research, State, Tribal, and Compliance Programs. “I want to thank Dr. Mallett for his many years of dedicated service to supporting the mission of the NRC,” said Chairman Gregory B. Jaczko. “We will miss Bruce’s leadership, his expertise and insight. In light of his decision to retire, we are very fortunate to have strong, talented individuals like Martin Virgilio and Michael Weber to move into these senior management positions at our agency.” Virgilio joined the NRC in 1977 and held progressively more responsible positions in the Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation (NRR), including project director; chief, Inspection and Licensing Policy Branch; assistant director in the Division of Reactor Projects; and deputy director, Division of Systems Safety and Analysis. From 1997 to 1998, he served as executive assistant and director, Office of the Chairman under former Chairman Shirley Ann Jackson. From 1998 to 2001, he served as deputy director, Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards (NMSS), and in 2001 was appointed director. In 2004 Virgilio was appointed to his current position of deputy Executive Director for Materials, Waste, Research, State, Tribal, and Compliance Programs, OEDO. He received a bachelor’s degree from the United States Merchant Marine Academy and has completed post-graduate work in nuclear engineering at Catholic University. Weber joined the NRC in 1982 and held progressively more responsible positions in the Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards (NMSS), including, chief of the Low-Level Waste and Decommissioning Projects Branch; chief of the Licensing Branch; deputy director, Division of Waste Management; deputy director, Division of Fuel Cycle Safety and Safeguards; and director of the Division of Fuel Cycle Safety and Safeguards. In 2002, he was appointed deputy director, Office of Nuclear Security and Incident Response, and in 2006, was appointed deputy director, Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation. In 2007, Weber was appointed to his current position as director of NMSS. He has also served as a technical assistant to former Chairman Kenneth Carr and as executive assistant to former Chairman Jackson. Weber received a bachelor’s degree in geosciences from the Pennsylvania State University and is a graduate of the Senior Executive Service Candidate Development Program.

March 9, 2010 - Grist - Don’t buy Obama’s greenwashing of nuclear power - On Feb. 16, while President Obama was in Maryland announcing an $8.3 billion taxpayer-backed loan guarantee for Southern Company to build two new nuclear reactors in Georgia, inspectors at the Vermont Yankee reactor were finding dangerously high levels of tritium, a radioactive cancer-causing chemical, in the groundwater near the plant. The next week, the Vermont state Senate voted overwhelmingly to shut down Vermont Yankee when its current license expires in 2012. Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas (R) called the timing of the nuclear loan guarantee announcement and the Vermont Senate's decision "ironic." More than just some coincidence, though, the Vermont Yankee situation demonstrates that from the mining of uranium ore to the storage of radioactive waste, nuclear reactors remain as dirty, risky, and as costly as they ever were. If President Obama's recent enthusiasm for nuclear reactors has led you to believe otherwise, you've bought in to the administration's greenwashing of nuclear. President Obama has justified his proposed $55 billion in taxpayer-backed loan guarantees for new nuclear reactors by misrepresenting nuclear reactors as the largest "carbon-free" energy source in the United States. That's like saying McDonald's should be put in charge of a nationwide obesity campaign because it's the largest restaurant in the U.S. that sells salads.

March 9, 2010 - Arlington Advocate - Markey requests GAO investigation into nuclear plant safety - Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., chairman of the Energy and Environment Subcommittee, today announced his request that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) commence a thorough review of the adequacy of nuclear reactor safety regulations and oversight, as well as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC’s) process of granting licenses for both new and existing nuclear power plants. “For nuclear power to play a major role in our nation’s clean energy future, the public must have confidence that new reactors can be built safely and that existing reactors can continue to operate reliably,” said Markey. “We need to make sure that nuclear plants are adequately protected from both safety and fiscal problems that could place the public at risk.”

March 9, 2010 - Knoxville News-Sentinel - DOE sets $40M for Next Generation Nuke Plant; teams headed by Westinghouse, General Atomics - The Dept. of Energy announced today that a total of about $40 million will be awarded to teams headed by Westinghouse and General Atomics for conceptual design work and planning for the Next Generation Nuclear Plant. "The results of this work will help the Administration determine whether to proceed with detailed efforts toward construction and demonstration of the the NGNP," DOE said in the announcement. If successful, the demonstration project would prove that the high-temperature gas-cooled technology is capable of producting electricity as well as processing heat for industrial applications, etc. While the teams were announced, DOE said the final cost-shared awards are still subject to negotiations "of acceptable terms and conditions." The Westinghouse team includes Pebble Bed Modular Reactor Limited; Shaw Environmental & Infrastructure Inc., Toshiba, Doosan, Technology Insights, and M-Tech Industrial Ltd. The General Atomics team includes General Dynamics Electric Boat Division, URS Washington Division, Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, and Fuji Elecric Systems.

March 9, 2010 - Denver Westword - Rocky Flats: Like plutonium, the controversy over this former nuclear weapons plant lasts forever - Plutonium has a half-life of 20,000 years, and the controversy over the former Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant should continue at least that long. With good reason: If we forget that the plant sixteen miles upwind from Denver processed plutonium and other deadly materials, some day the land could turn into an attractive housing development: Contamination Acres. As it is, thousands of acres have been turned into a U.S. Fish & Wildlife-run wildlife area, much of which will soon be open to the public. You can hear all about it this morning, when Jon Lipsky, the then-FBI agent who led the raid on the plant back in June 1989, and state representative Wes McKinley, who was the foreman of the grand jury that looked at all the evidence that was seized during that raid, will be on KHOW radio with Peter Boyles. You may hear from McKinley (or may not, since all of the grand jurors are still under a gag order) how the grand jury wanted to indict eight individuals for environmental crimes in connection with what they termed an "ongoing criminal enterprise" at Rocky Flats -- one with a criminal disregard for the health and welfare of the people who worked at the plant, and lived around it. You'll certainly hear how McKinley wants the Colorado Legislature to make sure appropriate signage is put around the former plutonium plant/future wildlife playground.

March 9, 2010 - Deseret Morning News - U.S. Department of Justice seeks interns to help radiation victims - The U.S. Justice Department is seeking Native American interns to help cancer victims in their tribes to file for compensation if they lived downwind from atomic tests or worked in the uranium industry. Such compensation was allowed for downwinders and uranium industry workers by the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, pushed by Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and former Rep. Wayne Owens, D-Utah. However, the Justice Department said it has found that culture, tradition and customs sometimes present special concerns for Native American claimants that may make it tougher for them to file successful claims. The internship program is intended to conduct intensive outreach to educate tribal members about possible compensation. "In addition to helping us reach those Cold War patriots who are suffering and are entitled to compensation, this internship program will provide much needed summer jobs to bright students looking for an opportunity to serve," said Tony West, assistant attorney general for Justice's Civil Division.

March 8, 2010 - BBC News - Radiation overdose 'did not kill' teenager Lisa Norris - A fatal accident inquiry into the death of a teenager who was given accidental overdoses of radiation during treatment for a brain tumour has been abandoned. Lisa Norris, who was 15 and from Girvan in Ayrshire, died a few months after the treatment at Beatson Oncology Centre in Glasgow in 2006. The inquiry was abandoned after all parties agreed her illness caused her death rather than the overdose. The proceedings were formally wound up at Glasgow Sheriff Court on Monday. Miss Norris was given 58% too much radiation during her treatment at the Beatson and died at her family home on 18 October 2006. An internal inquiry following her death found that she had died from her tumour and not from the overdose. It is clear that there no longer exists any controversy surrounding the cause of Lisa's death and the cause of Lisa's tragic death is clear. However, that was disputed by an independent report from one of the country's top cancer experts. At Glasgow Sheriff Court on Monday, Procurator Fiscal Lesley Thomson said any disagreement among experts had now been resolved. "The medical experts who are all in full possession of the facts and the initial differing opinions have ultimately concluded that there is no causal link between the radiation overdose and Lisa's death," she said. Ms Thomson said that the Norris family also accepted this conclusion and were of the opinion that a fatal accident inquiry (FAI) should not go ahead.

March 8, 2010 - Irish Independent - Health bits: No risk from airport scanners - The medical risk of airport body scanners is negligible, but concerns about privacy still remain.  Irish passengers travelling abroad can expect to meet scanners in airports across the world. Concerns about the use of full-body scanners include the effects of radiation exposure and infringement of personal privacy. Experts say a person would have to undergo 1,000-2,000 backscatter scans before receiving a dose equivalent to a medical chest x-ray.

March 8, 2010 - MACWorld - Apple rejects iPhone app that measures radiation levels - Apple has reportedly rejected an iPhone application that promises to minimise your exposure to mobile phone radiation. Israeli company Tawkon invested a year and a half developing the application it hoped to sell on the iTunes App Store for between $5-$10. On Friday, The Washington Post quoted Tawkon co-founder Gil Friedlander after TechCrunch first reported on the story. "Our message is moderate, we don’t claim to try to stop users from using their phones. We just say to do so responsibly." In rejecting the application, Friedlander was told by Apple the information about radiation levels provided by the application may be confusing for users despite an excellent interface. "They are very clear about the fact that they make content decisions about what they want to post or not." The Washington Post reports an Apple spokesman declined to comment about the issue. According to the company, Tawkon's RRI patent pending technology alerts the user when radiation levels cross a predefined threshold and provides simple, non-intrusive suggestions to reduce exposure to radiation. The application leverages various smart-phones capabilities including the built-in Bluetooth, motion and proximity sensors, GPS and compass to determine the results. The technology collects and analyzes your phone's dynamic SAR (Specific Absorption Rate) levels, network coverage, location, environmental conditions and phone usage at any given moment to help determine those results.

March 8, 2010 - AHN - Radiation For Early-Stage Breast Cancer May Not Be Needed - Radiation treatment for many cases of early-stage breast cancer may be unnecessary, according to University of Texas researchers. The doctors said patients who have forms of the disease that have only spread to one lymph node may not benefit from radiation after having a mastectomy because there is a low risk that the disease will reoccur with modern surgery and therapy. The researchers said their findings could change the conventional treatment for thousands of women diagnosed with breast cancer. They said of the 47,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer every year involving one to three lymph nodes, 30,000 have forms of the disease involving only one node. The researchers presented their study at the Society of Surgical Oncology Annual Cancer Symposium in St. Louis, Mo.

March 8, 2010 - Agence France Presse - France urges world to turn to nuclear power - France urged international financial bodies to finance a new era of global nuclear power on Monday and pitched its own reactor technology as the model to follow. Welcoming delegates from 60 energy-hungry nations to a conference in Paris, President Nicolas Sarkozy said civil nuclear power had been unfairly passed over for World Bank development loans. He called on world and regional financial bodies to finance new nuclear projects in developing countries, and announced that France would set up an international institute to promote atomic technology. "I can't understand why nuclear power is ostracised by international finance, it's the stuff of scandal," he said, urging the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and others to do more. While Paris insists the two-day conference is not a trade show for French reactors, Sarkozy made it clear he expects France to play a leading role in the spread of nuclear technology. In a speech hosted by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, Sarkozy announced a new body to group "France's best teachers and researchers" in nuclear technology. "I have decided to change up a gear by creating an International Institute of Nuclear Energy that will include an international nuclear school," he said.

March 8, 2010 - Press Association - Nuclear bunker sold on eBay - A Cold War nuclear bunker has been sold on eBay for more than £20,000, it emerged today. The underground bunker in Derbyshire's Peak District went on sale on the online auction site with a starting price of £500, but was sold for £20,600 after more than 40 bids. The bunker was built in 1959 and operated by the Royal Observer Corps as a post from which nuclear fallout could be monitored. According to the seller, it was fully operational until 1991 and is "set in a stunning location with glorious views". The vendor added: "A rare opportunity to acquire a piece of Cold War history. "Your own nuclear bunker within a plot of land and much original equipment. "The bunker is in an elevated position with panoramic views over the Derbyshire Dales." The seller said the bunker was designated as a "master post". It is 15ft underground and is reached via a metal hatch and shaft. It has two rooms, a chemical toilet and monitoring room, and two ventilation shafts. It has a phone line and the vendor also threw in a desk, chair, siren box, enamel bucket, copper earthing straps along the top two walls and jerry cans. The item was sold when the auction ended yesterday.

March 8, 2010 - Occupational Health Safety - NRC Commissioner Wants 'More Balanced' Security Approach - Citing as his example of an unforeseen consequence the bullet-resistant enclosures (BREs) that nuclear power plants were required to install as security measures after 9/11, Nuclear Regulatory Commission member Dale Klein told attendees Friday in Raleigh, N.C., at the Grand Challenge Summit 2010 that NRC needs to take a "more balanced" approach to the plants' security requirements. Klein is a former NRC chairman who also worked for five years at the Pentagon as assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense Programs. He said the NRC "has made great strides in bringing a risk-informed approach to our safety regulations." The Reactor Oversight Process now in use is a good example, Klein said, according to the text of his prepared remarks that was posted on the NRC Web site. "Considering the great progress we have made in risk-informing our safety regulations, I believe we have the experience and many tools to further risk-inform the security-related arena," Klein said. "I also believe that in most instances, the U.S. nuclear industry has reached a level of security such that additional requirements would not substantially improve overall security. Let me be clear: I strongly believe we need to remain vigilant but must also do a better job of risk-informing our security-related decisions. Simply put, I think we need to be better regulators in the security arena to ensure that our requirements are balanced.

March 8, 2010 - San Luis Obispo Tribune - Diablo license renewal may be delayed on request by Board of Supervisors - Less than a week after concerns about earthquakes dominated public hearings on renewing Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant’s operating licenses, the county Board of Supervisors on Tuesday will consider asking federal regulators to delay the process until more high-tech seismic studies can be completed. Plant owner Pacific Gas and Electric Co. has proposed doing three-dimensional mapping of the ocean floor off the nuclear power plant. Such mapping and other state-of-the-art analysis would tell geophysicists more about the earthquake potential of the area around Diablo Canyon. Supervisors will vote whether to send a letter to the California Public Utilities Commission urging the agency to approve PG&E’s request to have its customers pay for the $16.73 million studies, which are expected to take three years to complete. The board will also consider sending a letter to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission asking that Diablo Canyon’s license renewal be postponed until the seismic studies are complete. Failing that, the letter would ask that the agency not complete the renewal process until the earthquake mapping is complete and its findings are integrated into the final decision.

March 8, 2010 - Amsterdam News.net - Nuclear rules could be universal under EU suggestion - The European Union has begun to push the idea of international nuclear standards. The head of the European Commission has started the idea of the whole world adopting European safety standards for nuclear power plants. Jose Manuel Barroso has told the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris that the European Union already has in place the main international norms to make nuclear security internationally binding. He said member governments of the Union should agree to present a proposal for international standards at a summit meeting scheduled for Washington in mid-April to be hosted by President Barack Obama. At the meeting world leaders will discuss the rapid growth in the civilian nuclear power sector and the nuclear safety standards that are required, including safe construction and operation of reactors, handling of radioactive materials and independent safety regulators.

March 8, 2010 - Wisconsin Public Radio - Northwestern Wisconsin anti-nuclear group rebounds from funding slump - The anti-nuclear group Nukewatch has rebounded from budget shortfalls that threatened to end the publication of its quarterly newspaper, by using different ways to raise money. The group’s co-director, John LaForge, says there's the good old-fashioned appeal to give money for the cause which worked last year. He says despite a down time last summer, they’ve bounced back after a few special appeals. But he says they're also recruiting musicians like Rachael Kilgour to hold fundraisers. Kilgour was scheduled to perform Saturday night (3/6) at the Red Mug Coffeehouse in Superior. She says writing songs about social justice needs passion, maybe even anger.

March 8, 2010 - Tri-City Herald - Yucca Mountain testimony lacks scientific reasoning - Was it just us, or did everyone think Energy Secretary Steven Chu looked uncomfortable talking about Yucca Mountain last week? During a congressional hearing Thursday, Sen. Patty Murray repeatedly pressed Chu to discuss the scientific basis for terminating the Nevada site as the nation's nuclear waste repository. The Washington Democrat said she had read Chu's statements regarding the decision to withdraw Yucca Mountain's license application. "What seems to be missing is the 'why,' " Murray said. It's a trick question, of course. Everyone knows why the Obama administration wants to remove Yucca Mountain from consideration. It fulfills a political promise Obama made to Nevada voters during his presidential campaign, and it helps Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's chances for re-election. Republicans have a real shot at ousting Reid this year. No wonder Chu seemed uneasy under Murray's repeated requests for the scientific reasons for abandoning Yucca Mountain. Responding to Murray's questions without admitting the obvious required some rhetorical tap dancing. "Other things, other knowledge and other conditions as they evolved made it (Yucca Mountain) increasingly not look like an ideal choice," Chu replied. Ideal is an odd word to associate with nuclear waste disposal. It's not the word we'd use to describe a political decision that threatens to strand about 70,000 tons of high-level nuclear wastes at Hanford and other sites across the country. Recycling as much spent fuel possible for additional energy production, thereby drastically reducing the amount of wastes destined for a repository, would be a vast improvement over current nuclear waste policy. But ideal? That's not going to happen.

March 8, 2010 - San Diego Union-Tribune - San Onofre reactor restart hits more snags - Problems continue to crop up at the San Onofre nuclear power plant’s Unit 2 reactor, which operators wanted to restart in January after it was shut down for three months while two massive steam generators were replaced and the nuclear fuel restored. The reactor remains idle nearly six months after that job began in late September. Officials with Southern California Edison, which operates San Onofre’s two reactors in northern San Diego County, say the delay has been caused by several unexpected issues connected with the steam-generator replacement, including the discovery of a bubble in the weld that joined one of the generators and the reactor. That weld was redone. Other less-serious maintenance chores that were scheduled during the outage have taken longer than expected, causing delays. “We have an obligation not only to the company but to the public that lives near the plant to make sure that when Unit 2 is brought back, it’s in the best condition that we can make and we have a very safe operation,” said Ross Ridenoure, the plant’s chief nuclear officer. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission also issued its annual report card on the plant last week. The NRC assigned an extra resident inspector at the plant last year, saying it needed to improve its safety culture. It also issued a separate report last week saying that some workers fear retaliation if they report nuclear safety violations to their superiors or the NRC. “SONGS (San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station) Units 2 and 3 operated in a manner that preserved public health and safety and fully met all cornerstone objectives,” the NRC annual report card said. However, inspectors said they’re not satisfied that Edison has corrected institutional problems that caused a failure to detect a faulty battery connection at Unit 2 for four years.

March 6-7, 2010 - Webmuenster took the weekend off.

March 5, 2010 - Tri-City Herald - Sen. Murray grills energy chief on Yucca Mountain - Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., repeatedly asked Energy Secretary Steven Chu if he could show any scientific basis for terminating Yucca Mountain, Nev., as the nation's nuclear repository during a congressional hearing Thursday. Other knowledge and other conditions e-volved that made Yucca Mountain in-creasingly not look "like an ideal choice," Chu answered initially at an Energy Appropriations Subcommittee hearing. He was looking down, the ease with which he had answered previous questions in the hearing gone. But was there scientific evidence, Murray pressed. "It was an unfolding of issues that continued," Chu said, adding that President Obama made very clear that it's not an option. But was there scientific evidence behind that decision, Murray asked again. She came to the hearing "very dismayed" that a day earlier the Department of Energy had filed to permanently withdraw the licensing application for Yucca Mountain, which was planned to hold high-level radioactive waste and irradiated fuel from the Hanford nuclear reservation. "Over the last 30 years, Congress, independent studies and previous administrations have all pointed to, voted for and funded Yucca Mountain as the nation's best option for a nuclear repository," Murray said. "And in concert with those decisions, billions of dollars and countless work hours have been spent at Hanford and nuclear waste sites across the country in an effort to treat and package nuclear waste that will be sent there," she said. "Without a repository, those sites and the communities that support them have been left in limbo."

March 5, 2010 - Longview Daily News - Abandoning Yucca Mountain project a costly and irresponsible blunder - Once the long 2008 presidential campaign was over, we held out hope that the newly elected President Obama would eventually come to his senses and abandon a politically motivated campaign pledge to halt work on the nuclear waste repository near Nevada's Yucca Mountain. But it seems Obama has new political motivation for blocking the national repository — the re-election of Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate Majority Leader from Nevada. The Obama administration last week signaled to Nevada voters that it's serious about blocking the Yucca Mountain project. Administration officials asked that the government's permit application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission be withdrawn "with prejudice," meaning the application needed to complete the nuclear repository is off the table for good. Washington state officials were among the first to push back. On Monday, Washington Attorney General Rob McKenna said the state will intervene in the courts to prevent the federal government from simply walking away from this project and its decades-old promise to take possession of the nation's nuclear waste. Only Aiden County, S.C., reacted quicker, filing a lawsuit late last week. South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford indicated that the state also may take legal action. We expect similar action will be taken by a number of other states where large quantities of radioactive waste awaits shipment to Yucca Mountain. The administration's attempt to permanently abandon this project is irresponsible to the extreme. The careful research that identified the Nevada site as most suitable for the storage of the nation's nuclear waste stretches back almost 30 years. Billions have been spent to date on planning and construction work. Most irresponsible, though, is the administration's seeming indifference to the fact that there is no Plan B for the safe disposal of the estimated 70,000 tons of nuclear waste scattered around the country at 131 sites.

March 5, 2010 - Associated Press - Franks introduces radioactive fallout comp bill - U.S. Rep. Trent Franks has introduced legislation that would compensate Mohave County residents exposed to radioactive fallout from nuclear testing during the 1950s and 1960s. The Arizona Republican introduced House Bill 4712 to amend the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. The federal government in 1990 recognized the damage aboveground tests had done to residents in Utah, Nevada and Arizona. The act is designed to compensate victims that lived downwind of the Nevada Test Site, worked in uranium mines or worked at the test site and developed cancer. Utah, Nevada and Arizona residents can receive $50,000, but they must have lived in the right spot, during the right time and have the right disease.

March 5, 2010 - Nuclear Engineering International - Resolve Optics reveals new radiation resistant lens - A British firm has recently launched a new 6x zoom, radiation resistant lens that is suitable for use in nuclear fuel handling operation, reactor active zones and radioactive waste storage plants. Known as Model 290 motorised non-browning zoom lens, the product was developed as a direct replacement to the Fujinon 12-72mm (6x) non browning zoom lens, which is no longer manufactured. Model 290 uses special glass that can withstand long term exposure to high levels of radiation (up to a total dose of 100,000,000 rads) and temperature (55 °C) without discoloration. All functions of the Model 290 are motorised and include slip clutches and electronic noise suppression. Operating at f/1.8 the Model 290 provides high image resolution and minimum geometric distortion from 400-750nm. The high-performance Model 290 CCTV zoom lens has been designed for use with single chip 1/2" and 2/3" CCTV cameras as well as Newvicon and Chalnicon tubes.

March 5, 2010 - World Net Daily - Oops! Agency fined $10,000 for spilling plutonium; Worker broke container, handled material, washed it down public drain - A federal agency in Boulder, Colo., has agreed to pay a $10,000 fine and take "corrective" actions for an incident in which an apparently unqualified worker broke a glass container holding plutonium, handled it, spread it around a lab area then washing his hands, sending the radioactive material into a public sewer system. According to a statement from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the National Institute of Standards and Technology will pay the fine for the 2008 incident. A former radiation safety officer at the institute also will be prohibited from engaging in any NRC-licensed activities for a year "for deliberate misconduct involving failure to provide complete and accurate information to the NRC." The NRC finding said the "willfulness" of lab officials who didn't provide the necessary information to the NRC contributed to the problem. "This misinformation and misconduct led to the plutonium spill that later followed," the regulatory agency said.

March 5, 2010 - Rutland Herald - N.H.: River tritium levels undetectable - New Hampshire authorities say water samples taken from the Connecticut River near the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant show no detectable levels of tritium, the radioactive isotope leaking from Vermont Yankee nuclear plant. In a news release, the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services said nine samples analyzed by its public health lab showed tritium levels below 500 picocuries per liter, which it said is the lower limit of detection. But they say none has been found at all. Vermont Yankee spokesman Larry Smith says tritium occurs naturally in the environment and that there's no indication that the plant's leak has reached the river.

March 5, 2010 - Washington Wire - Power Company CEOs Vent - The CEOS of two big utilities vented their frustrations with Congress and the Obama administration at The Wall Street Journal Eco:Nomics conference in Santa Barbara, Calif. “Our government is very ineffective at getting anything done on a timeline…that the business community can live with,” said American Electric Power Corp. Chief Executive Michael Morris. He cited “the idiocy of Yucca Mountain,” the proposed federal repository for nuclear waste in Nevada that the Obama administration has abandoned at the behest of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat. Lewis Hay, chairman and chief executive officer of FPL Group, the big Florida utility, was a big winner last fall when the Obama administration announced stimulus grants for the development of computer-controlled electric grid systems, commonly known as smart grid. "We were announced a winner in October, and as far as I know not a dime has gone to any company yet,” Hay said. Both CEOs expressed hope that Congress would eventually act on climate legislation – they both like the utility friendly House bill that’s now stuck in the Senate. Morris, whose company is a big coal burner, said he supports a proposal by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D., W.Va.) to delay by two years the EPA’s effort to regulate greenhouse gases using the Clean Air Act, in the absence of congressional action. Hay, whose company is planning to spend $16 billion to $18 billion on new nuclear power plants, said Washington’s failure to resolve the climate issue and give utilities a price for carbon on which to base investment decisions “creates a lot of uncertainty and puts a lot of investment dollars on the sideline.”

March 5, 2010 - Chicago Tribune - Joliet bid to boost radium dumping denied - The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency has denied a request from Joliet to more than double the concentration of cancer-causing radium it's allowed to dump onto farmland in the south suburbs. Joliet, which like a lot of northern Illinois towns has an abundance of naturally occurring radium in its deep-water wells, sought permission from the state EPA to increase the radium concentration to avoid paying a higher cost to dispose of the waste material in landfills. Joliet was seeking a 150 percent increase over what it's currently allowed to dump, roughly 10 times higher than what was considered safe five years ago. Joliet's director of public utilities, James Eggen, could not be reached for comment Thursday. About two dozen communities in northern Illinois have permits to dispose of concentrated radium on farmland, a practice that is not believed to harm people, crops or wildlife. However, as radium breaks down, it forms radon, a potentially deadly odorless gas that is a source of great concern in many radium-rich areas outside Chicago. Joliet began filtering radium from its drinking water in the 1980s, combining it with municipal sludge containing human waste and other nutrients from Joliet's wastewater treatment plants. This liquid sludge, containing about 5 percent solids, is shipped to suburban farms, where it is injected into the soil, officials said.

March 5, 2010 - Press-Banner - Your Health: Be aware, not fearful of medical x-rays - There has been a lot of attention recently about the amount of radiation to which patients are exposed by medical x-rays. As with most medical procedures, x-rays are safe when used with care — especially because, in most cases, as little radiation as possible is used to obtain the needed results. Why worry about radiation exposure? Radiation in sufficient doses can ultimately cause cancer. It is difficult to arrive at any accurate figure of the number of cancer cases due to x-ray exposure, but it is probably fairly low. The recent discussion of radiation exposure deals with the newer generation of x-ray exams, especially CT (or CAT) scans. About 60 million scans are done yearly in the U.S. This computerized type of x-ray exam has revolutionized the ability of a physician to diagnose critical diseases and injuries, such as appendicitis, stroke, blood clots in the lungs, kidney stones, internal injuries from accidents, heart attacks and many more serious medical problems. However, the scans expose a patient to much higher doses of radiation than plain x-rays. Technological advances can help in reducing radiation exposure. Newer scanners may use less radiation, and newer guidelines may allow doctors to use CT scans less often. Attitudes about scanning might need to change, as well. Doctors and patients need a heightened level of awareness about the amount of radiation to which one is exposed.

March 5, 2010 - St. Louis Post-Dispatch - Toughen federal and state radiation oversight - It's the kind of thing that never should happen but did. Seventy-six patients at a Springfield, Mo., health center received radiation overdoses while being treated for head and neck tumors. On average, they got 50 percent more radiation than had been prescribed. The problems at CoxHealth began in 2004 and continued unnoticed until September. Sophisticated equipment used for the treatment was improperly calibrated when it was installed. There was no independent check of the calibration, and no state or federal regulation requires it. And there are no rules requiring physicists who calibrate the equipment or the technicians who administer the treatment to be certified. That certification is an option instead of a requirement "is really silly," said Dr. Eric Klein, a professor of radiation oncology at Washington University. For most of the thousands of cancer patients who are treated each year with radiation therapy, the benefits far outweigh the risks. Serious mistakes are rare. But medical professionals fear that an inconsistent patchwork of federal and state rules allow the same errors to occur again and again. The faulty calibration that led to radiation overdoses in Springfield was reminiscent of problems at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Fla. In 2005, 77 Florida patients received excessive radiation. Moffitt's problems were uncovered after one year because, unlike CoxHealth, its doctors applied to participate in federally funded research. That requires an inspection by independent medical physicists, and they spotted the improper calibration.

March 5, 2010 - OnMedica - Vaginal radiotherapy better option for cancer - The standard treatment for endometrial cancer should be vaginal brachytherapy, where radiotherapy is given internally, say authors of research published today in The Lancet. Brachytherapy is as effective as external beam radiotherapy in preventing local recurrence, with similar likelihood of survival, but is associated with significantly less toxicity and with better quality of life. Women who have had hysterectomy and oophorectomy for endometrial cancer and are at intermediate-to-high risk of recurrence are then given vaginal brachytherapy (VBT) or external beam radiotherapy (EBRT) to lessen that risk from about 20% to 5%. The Post Operative Radiation Therapy in Endometrial Carcinoma (PORTEC-2) trial began in 2002 to determine whether VBT is as effective as EBRT at preventing vaginal recurrence (the most frequent site of recurrence in patients with high-intermediate risk endometrial cancer). It also looked for differences between the two therapies in terms of possible side effects and resulting quality of life reported by treated women. Preliminary analysis of the 427 women in the study has shown that in the first 2 years following treatment, women who had had EBRT were significantly more likely to have gastrointestinal side-effects, especially diarrhoea, and for this to have adversely affected their quality of life, than those who had had VBT. At median follow-up of 45 months, very few vaginal recurrences occurred in either radiotherapy group (three for VBT and four for EBRT), showing that VBT is highly effective in ensuring local disease control.

March 5, 2010 - The Medical News - UC researchers find CT scan screening of non-smoking women is cost-effective - Researchers at the University of Cincinnati (UC) have found that it is cost-effective to do CT scan screening of non-smoking women, ages 25-54, who come to the emergency room for the first time with a collapsed lung in order to diagnose and treat those with lymphangioleiomyomatosis, or LAM. This data is being featured in the online edition of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. LAM is a rare but serious lung disease that occurs when an unusual type of cell begins to grow out of control and spread to restricted areas in the body, including the lungs, kidneys, lymph nodes and vessels. "Women with LAM who first experience spontaneous lung collapse will, on average, experience two more," says Brent Kinder, MD, an investigator in the study. "LAM diagnosis doesn't usually occur until the second or third collapse occurs, delaying treatment. We thought that targeting screening to non-smoking women in the age range of typical LAM development may help us identify the condition earlier and improve quality of life for these patients."

March 5, 2010 - DVIDS - IKE Sailor Named Radiation Health Tech of the Year - A Sailor from USS Dwight D. Eisenhower's (CVN 69) (IKE) was recognized as the Navy's 2009 Radiation Health Technician of the Year. Petty Officer 1st class Natalie M. Jianuzzi, a hospital corpsman and IKE's senior RHT, is scheduled to be formally recognized March 22 during the Navy and Marine Corps Public Health Center Conference in Hampton, Va. "I am truly surprised and honored to have been selected for this award," said Jianuzzi, who was informed of her achievement during Vice Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert's visit to IKE in February. "He took time out of his busy schedule and came down to personally congratulate me." Jianuzzi said the recognition is a great boost for her career. However, recognition is not what motivates her; it is job satisfaction and the fact that her department recognized her as deserving of the achievement.

March 5, 2010 - Business Wire - Senators Hatch and Reid Introduce New Energy Legislation Important to U.S. Rare Earths, Inc.  - Senators Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and Harry Reid (D-Nevada) this week introduced the Thorium Energy Security Act of 2010 to accelerate the use of thorium-based nuclear fuel in existing and future reactors. Their legislation establishes a regulatory framework and a development program to facilitate the introduction of thorium-based nuclear fuel in nuclear power plants across the nation. The U.S. relies on foreign sources for approximately 90 percent of its uranium fuel needs. However, the most recent U.S. Geological Survey’s (U.S.G.S.) Thorium Mineral Commodity capital summary confirms that the United States has the largest thorium deposits in the world. The well-documented Idaho-Montana Lemhi Pass thorium holdings of U.S. Rare Earths, Inc. (www.usrareearths.com) have officially been recognized by the U.S.G.S. in their Jan. 2010 Mineral Commodity Summary, pushing the U.S. to number one in the world (for the first time ever) with 440,000 metric tons of reserves. “We have abundant domestic supplies of thorium, and when used in a nuclear reactor, thorium is non-proliferative, it produces much less volume of high-level waste, and it can be used to dispose of existing plutonium stockpiles. We certainly want to make sure it is a viable option in our nation’s energy mix,” Hatch said.

March 5, 2010 - Heritage Foundation Press Release - The Science IS Settled…On Yucca Mountain - Lost in President Obama’s rhetoric that the science is settled on climate change, the president is willing to shut down Yucca Mountain without scientific justification. Today, the Department of Energy (DOE) filed to withdraw the application for the geologic repository Yucca Mountain that was supposed to begin collecting used fuel in 1998. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 set January 31, 1998, as the deadline for the federal government to begin disposing of used fuel. More than a decade after the deadline, the government has still not settled on a policy for how to do it. The DOE established a blue ribbon commission to explore alternatives to long-term waste storage. The government’s ineptitude to begin proper nuclear waste management should be a reason to remove government responsibilities, not remove Yucca from consideration. On numerous occasions (not Yucca specific) President Obama emphasized the importance of objective, transparent science, stressing that politics should not trump sound science. President Obama in an Executive Memorandum on March 9, 2009: Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration on a wide range of issues, including improvement of public health, protection of the environment, increased efficiency in the use of energy and other resources, mitigation of the threat of climate change, and protection of national security. The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions. Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions. “ President Obama in a ceremony the same night: “Promoting science isn’t just about providing resources — it is also about protecting free and open inquiry.”

March 5, 2010 - World Nuclear News - End of the line for Yucca Mountain - The withdrawal of its licence application yesterday marked the official end of the Yucca Mountain repository project. The landmark means that efforts to make real the pledges of the 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act resulted only in $10 billion of spending on a project now described as "not an option." The project came to an official halt yesterday when the Department of Energy (DoE) filed a motion with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to withdraw the application to build and operate Yucca Mountain. About one year ago President Barack Obama cut all funding for the DoE's work towards realising Yucca Mountain apart from answering questions from the NRC related to the license application. However, "President Obama is fully committed to ensuring that the nation meets our long-term storage obligations for nuclear waste," said Scott Blake Harris of the DoE. The route for this is to be the 15-member Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, nominated last month. It is to evaluate fuel-cycle and disposal options, including the reprocessing of used nuclear fuel, but will not touch on any siting concerns. Work for the group begins with its first meeting on 25-26 March and will continue until 2012. Seeing as the USA's used nuclear fuel and other highly radioactive materials left over from weapons programs are temporarily stored at dozens of different secure sites, it is likely that a small number of larger longer-term facilities would be recommended. Most likely the permanent disposal route would be another geologic repository after a new site selection process based on voluntary participation of communities.

March 4, 2010 - NCRP Press Release - NCRP Releases Report No. 161, Management of Persons Contaminated with Radionuclides - NCRP Report No. 161, Management of Persons Contaminated with Radionuclides, provides guidance to those who may be called to respond to radionuclide contamination incidents. Such incidents may range from situations in which one or a few persons have received minor contamination while working in research, medical facilities, or industry to those in which large numbers of people are contaminated as a result of accidental or deliberate releases of large quantities of radionuclides. The focus of this Report is on the medical management of individuals exposed to and potentially contaminated with radionuclides in such incidents. Thus, it is directed to persons who would provide medical care and those who would perform radiation-safety functions. This Report is intended as an update and expansion of NCRP Report No. 65, Management of Persons Accidentally Contaminated with Radionuclides. This Report comprises two volumes, a Handbook and the Scientific and Technical Bases. The Handbook contains information for immediate "in-the-field" application to radiation contamination incidents. It is organized into four parts. Part A provides Quick Reference Information for incident responders based on supporting information given elsewhere in the Report. Part B contains essential information on medical and radiation-safety activities to be conducted at the site of a radionuclide contamination incident and prior to arrival at a hospital. Part C describes medical and radiation safety activities at the hospital. Part D provides guidance on medical follow-up of exposed persons and on handling contaminated decedents. This volume is produced on a synthetic material for durability and coil bound and color coded for ease of use.

March 4, 2010 - Gainesville Sun - Town Finds Good Neighbor in Nuclear Plant - A storm knocked out Kathleen Halvey’s power for eight hours last Wednesday, an event she found both disruptive and prescient. “I said to my husband, ‘This is what it will be like without Vermont Yankee,’ ” Ms. Halvey, 65, a retired nurse, recalled saying on the day the State Senate voted to close the plant here by withholding its operating certificate. Vermont would lose the source of one-third of its electricity, but residents say the move would forever change Vernon, the small town on the Connecticut River that has been the reactor’s home for 38 years. “It will ruin this town,” said Robert Miller, 49, who works in an auto body shop and serves on the Vernon Selectboard. The reactor is the area’s largest source of high-paying jobs — the average worker makes $100,000 with benefits, according to the Entergy Corporation, the Louisiana-based owner — and the influx of employees has allowed the town to expand its elementary school and to build a library. It has also provided residents with a hefty tax break. Many worry that last week’s vote will torpedo their property values — some residents said that the vote probably took $100,000 off the value of their homes. “It’s always kept our taxes down,” Donna Serviss, 48, said. “That’s the biggest thing people are worrying about, that they’ll tax us like crazy.” Given the reactor’s tangible benefits, Vernon residents find themselves defending it against deteriorating support statewide.

March 4, 2010 - Explore Everything - Hybrid Fusion – The Third Nuclear Option - The long-anticipated nuclear renaissance has arrived. In his State of the Union address last month, President Barack Obama announced plans for the US to build a new generation of nuclear power plants, and his budget for 2011 proposes large funding increases for the industry. Several European countries are also likely to restart their nuclear power programmes soon. The UK plans to increase to 20 per cent the proportion of its electricity generated from nuclear. A return to nuclear power is attractive right now for many reasons. It promises to help cut carbon emissions and reduce imports of fossil fuel. What’s more, unlike renewables, it can ensure a stable baseload electricity supply whatever the weather. However, nuclear energy also creates problems of its own, not least the risk of Chernobyl-style accidents and the production of radioactive waste that takes tens of thousands of years to decay. One thing Obama did not spell out is how the US will deal with a new generation of waste now that it has abandoned plans for a storage facility at Yucca mountain. There is a way of returning to nuclear while overcoming all these concerns: hybrid nuclear fusion. The concept has been around for decades, and has been discussed in the technical literature and at the International Atomic Energy Agency. But it has not yet been explained to governments, industry, researchers and the public. Hybrid nuclear fusion combines the two forms of nuclear power, fission and fusion, in a single reactor. This has several advantages over fission alone: it minimises the environmental impact, reduces risks, enlarges reserves of nuclear fuel and is more flexible to operate.

March 4, 2010 - TechEye.net - Fermi shows how clueless we are; There are dragons on the edge of space - NASA's Fermi Gamma ray Space Telescope is creating more questions than it is actually answering. A new study of the ever-present fog of gamma rays from sources outside our galaxy shows that less than a third of the emission arises from what astronomers once considered the most likely suspects - black-hole-powered jets from active galaxies. Top stargazer marco Ajello, an astrophysicist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC)said that this leaves a lot of room for new scientifict theories. Or put another way “we have not got a clue what we are looking at so we need to make something better up” According to the conventional explanation, the background glow of gamma rays represents the accumulated emission of a vast number of active galaxies that are simply too faint and too distant to be seen. According to the Astrophysical Journal, which we get for the spot the Pulsar competition, Fermi has shown that this is not the case.

March 4, 2010 - Environment News Service - U.S. Congress Presses Marshall Islanders to Resettle Radioactive Home - Fifty-six years after the first American hydrogen bomb blast in the Pacific exposed hundreds of people to radioactive fallout, U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman is pressing Marshall Islanders to return to their contaminated home island by next year. The U.S. official position is that radiation is no longer a threat on the Marshalls atoll. But many islanders doubt that their radiation-exposed island of Rongelap is safe enough to live on. Rongelap islanders say they fear for their health if they return home to the coral island that was exposed to the Bravo hydrogen bomb test that rained ashy fallout on their island 56 years ago. Bravo, the equivalent of 1,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs, was the first U.S. test of a dry fuel thermonuclear hydrogen bomb device, detonated on March 1, 1954, at Bikini Atoll, Marshall Islands. The inhabitants of Bikini and Enewetak were evacuated from their island homes before nuclear tests to avoid exposure to radioactive fallout. But the inhabitants of Rongelap, less than 100 miles away, were not.

March 4, 2010 - Las Vegas Sun - Yucca foes hail historic step to kill nuclear waste depository - The moment that Nevadans had awaited for decades arrived in a flash. There, popping up on computer screens in offices in Washington and Carson City, was the news that a slim, 15-page legal document had been filed, taking the biggest step yet — one in a series of giant leaps this year — in dashing long-running government plans for a nuclear waste dump in the desert 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. “The United States Department of Energy hereby moves ... to withdraw its pending license application for a permanent geologic repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev.,” reads the opening line. And then this: “with prejudice.” Those key words would make it extremely difficult for Yucca Mountain to ever be considered again for a nuclear waste repository. “Aside from my wife, this is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” Bruce Breslow, executive director of the Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects, which is fighting the dump, said in an e-mail flash moments after the filing was made public. President Barack Obama is making good on the promise he made two years ago to Nevadans to end the Yucca repository plan. The nuclear waste dump project has been starved of funding ever since Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid rose to power. But Obama, at Reid’s urging, could direct the Energy Department to halt the process and look at ways to deal with spent but still lethally radioactive fuel rods. The Obama administration also announced Wednesday the first meeting of the commission to investigate alternatives to a Yucca repository. The commission, headed by Washington veterans Lee Hamilton and Brent Scrowcroft, will begin its 18-month task this month. The move is a sizable win for Reid, who has led the Nevada delegation in fighting the dump, as he heads into a difficult re-election campaign this fall.

March 4, 2010 - Korean Times - KEPCO in Talks With Turkey for Nuke Plant Exports - Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEPCO) and the Turkish government are likely to sign a memorandum of understanding (MOU) late this month on a joint study to build a nuclear power plant in Turkey. Under the MOU, KEPCO and Turkey will form a task force to tackle such issues as site selection, period of construction and financing, the Ministry of Knowledge Economy said Thursday. Turkey is still not fully prepared for nuclear projects despite its willingness. Accordingly, the MOU will give KEPCO a supporting role for Turkey on the project, it said.  The country is currently eager to build nuclear power plants to meet its growing energy demand. The Korean government, however, was cautious not to get carried away with high expectations for the deal. "KEPCO has signed similar agreements with other countries before. This MOU doesn't necessarily mean a green light for another pending overseas deal, even though it could be helpful for the goal," a ministry official said on condition of anonymity.

March 4, 2010 - Associated Press - Nuke fuel company vows to stress safety - Top officials at an east Tennessee nuclear fuel plant that shut down operations after an October incident have vowed to make worker safety a top priority. The Johnson City Press reported that newly named president of Nuclear Fuel Services would stress a safety-conscious work environment. "We must and we will do better," David Amerine said. The remarks came at a public meeting Tuesday night at the Unicoi County High School auditorium. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission called the meeting with area residents and the roughly 800 employees at the plant to discuss its review of the incident. NFS, which is owned by Lynchburg, Va.-based Babcock & Wilcox Co., manufactures nuclear fuel for submarines and aircraft carriers. It also converts government stockpiles of highly enriched uranium into material that goes into nuclear reactor fuel. Federal inspectors were dispatched to the site after high levels of heated nitrous oxide fumes damaged pipes processing radioactive scrap metal for the Department of Energy. Nitrous oxide is a chemical compound used as a major horsepower booster in gasoline engines.

March 4, 2010 - APA - GTRI delegation in Mauritius to identify radioactive sources - A delegation of the Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI) is presently in Mauritius in order to identify vulnerable radioactive sources which could be used for terrorist acts, APA learns in the Mauritian capital Port Louis on Thursday. Sources here indicate that the GTRI which is made up of officials of the US Energy Department and the Lawrance Livermore National Laboratory is holding a series of work sessions with the staff of the Mauritius Radiation Protection Authority (RPA) and the Ministry of Renewable Energy and Public services on the elaboration of new tools for the detection of any activity that would violate and threaten world security. The sources point out that the delegation has already identified two sites, namely the Radiotherapy Centre of the Victoria hospital in Quatre Bornes, 20 km from Port Louis and the Enthomology Department of the Ministry of Agro-Industry (MAI) in Port Louis as two sites which need additional devices for an increased surveillance. GTRI intends setting up survellance cameras at the Radiotherapy Centre of the hospital and reinforce the physical structure of the building at the MAI, said the sources. According to the sources, GTRI will grant Mauritius US$ 300 000 to build a central stockage area for radioactive materials and buy apparatus for the detection of radio active sources. Founded in 2004 by the US Energy Department, the GTRI works in collaboration with the International Atomic Energy Agency and with regional partners in some 90 countries.

March 4, 2010 - Your Industry News - United States and Argentina Partner to Prevent Nuclear Smuggling - The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) today announced that U.S. Ambassador to Argentina, Vilma Martinez, and the Minister for Foreign Relations, International Trade and Worship, Jorge Enrique Taiana, signed an agreement in Buenos Aires to begin a cooperative effort to detect, deter, and interdict illicit smuggling of nuclear and other radioactive material. The agreement paves the way for NNSA to work with Argentine Customs to install radiation detection equipment and associated infrastructure at the Port of Buenos Aires. “The Megaports Agreement signed today solidifies the United States’ and Argentina’s joint commitment to the safety and security of our nations,” said NNSA Administrator Thomas D’Agostino. “This initiative will help NNSA meet its goal of equipping 100 ports with radiation detection equipment and play a critical role in NNSA’s efforts to implement President Obama’s nuclear security agenda.”

March 4, 2010 - Materials Handling World - Plans for NORM treatment and recycling facility to have public consultation - Public consultation on proposals for a new treatment and recycling facility in Aberdeenshire in north east Scotland gets underway this week. The proposed facility will deal with equipment from the oil and gas industry contaminated with Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material (NORM). Recycling and resource management company SITA UK has teamed up with one of the UK's leading radiation protection and radioactive waste experts, Nuvia, to develop a proposal to change the use of an existing waste processing building on the Stoneyhill landfill site, four miles south west of Peterhead.

March 4, 2010 - CNNMoney - US Ecology, Inc. Announces Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2009 Results - US Ecology, Inc. (formerly known as American Ecology Corporation) (NASDAQ: ECOL) ("the Company") today reported results for the fourth quarter and year ended December 31, 2009. Net income was $2.6 million, or $0.15 per diluted share, for the fourth quarter of 2009, down from net income of $5.2 million, or $0.29 per diluted share, in the fourth quarter last year. Operating income for the fourth quarter of 2009 was $4.6 million compared to $8.3 million for the fourth quarter of 2008. All four of the Company's disposal facilities remained profitable. Revenue for the fourth quarter of 2009 was $23.6 million, down from $44.0 million in the same quarter last year. This reflects declines in both transportation revenue and treatment and disposal revenue primarily due to the completion of the four year Honeywell International ("Honeywell Jersey City") project in early October of 2009 and the Molycorp/Chevron Pennsylvania ("Molycorp") project which shipped waste in the fourth quarter of 2008 and was completed in early 2009. "Base" business revenue (revenue from recurring waste streams) declined 10% in the fourth quarter of 2009 compared to the same quarter last year on decreased shipments from other industry, waste broker and refinery customers. "Event" remediation revenue (revenue from discrete projects) declined 43% in the fourth quarter of 2009 over the same quarter last year primarily due to the completion of the Honeywell Jersey City and Molycorp projects earlier in 2009. Our Texas thermal desorption recycling service contributed $1.7 million in revenue from a combination of Base and Event business in the fourth quarter of 2009, down 15% from the $2.0 million of revenue generated in the fourth quarter of 2008. Total volumes disposed at our Idaho, Nevada and Texas waste facilities were 132,000 tons in the fourth quarter of 2009, down 49% from the fourth quarter of 2008.

March 4, 2010 - USDOE Press Release (03/03/10) - Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future to Hold First Meeting - On Thursday, March 25th and Friday, March 26th, the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, co-chaired by former Congressman Lee Hamilton and former National Security Advisor General Brent Scowcroft, will hold its first meeting in Washington, D.C. At the direction of President Obama, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu established the Blue Ribbon Commission to conduct a comprehensive review of policies for managing the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle and to provide recommendations for developing a safe, long-term solution to managing the Nation’s used nuclear fuel and nuclear waste. The Commission is made up of 15 members who have a range of expertise and experience in nuclear issues, including scientists, industry representatives, and respected former elected officials. The Commission will produce an interim report within 18 months and a final report within 24 months.

March 4, 2010 - Newswise - Unmanned Helicopter Would Investigate Nuclear Disasters - Students at Virginia Tech’s Unmanned Systems Laboratory are perfecting an autonomous helicopter they hope will never be used for its intended purpose. Roughly six feet long and weighing 200 pounds, the re-engineered aircraft is designed to fly into American cities blasted by a nuclear weapon or dirty bomb. The helicopter’s main mission would be to assist military investigators in the unthinkable: Enter an American city after a nuclear attack in order to detect radiation levels, map and photograph damage. “It’s for a worst-case scenario,” said project leader Kevin Kochersberger, a research associate professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Virginia Tech Unmanned Systems Laboratory (http://www.me.vt.edu/unmanned/index.html). His team consists of several graduate and undergraduate students from the mechanical engineering (http://www.me.vt.edu/) and electrical and computer engineering (http://www.ece.vt.edu/) departments.

March 4, 2010 - Knoxville News-Sentinel - EnergySolutions smelter still shut down; accident investigation reports due in two weeks - A spokesman for EnergySolutions said today that most operations at the company's Bear Creek waste-processing plant in Oak Ridge have returned to normal following a Feb. 4 accident in which a worker was seriously injured. But the metal melt facility, where the accident occurred, remains out of operation and won't resume activities until the safety reports have been completed, Mark Walker of EnergySolutions said today. Walker said the two reports, one by an independent team and another in-house review, are due in two weeks. EnergySolutions has had little to say about the accident over the past month, citing the ongoing investigations. The injured employee was hurt when a crane moving a 10-ton metal block reportedly failed, with the block falling and hitting the worker's leg. Walker said the employee was recuperating at home, remains in good spirits, and plans to return to work "at the appropiate time."

March 4, 2010 - LEO Weekly - Kentucky wants your nuclear waste? Hardly - Lawmakers often lament that in the cacophony of the 24-hour news cycle, their words, deeds and policies are drowned out in a din of conflicting messages, celebrity gossip and public indifference. So when one of the nation’s most respected news magazines of record — Newsweek — turns its far-reaching and influential attention toward your small corner of the world, it would seem to be something of a minor triumph for those legislators struggling to get their voices heard. If your policies are sound and grounded in an honest belief that you are working for the common good, any substantive publicity should be, as they say, good publicity. Right? Wrong. At least not over the past couple of weeks and not for those Frankfort policy wonks responsible for mapping out a plan for meeting Kentucky’s future energy needs. In a prominently featured story from Newsweek’s Feb. 22 print edition, boldly headlined “Kentucky Wants Your Nuclear Waste,” the magazine suggested that because President Obama has nixed plans to store the nation’s nuclear waste at Nevada’s Yucca Mountain site, states eager to heed his State of the Union call for a new generation of nuclear power plants will now be forced to find alternatives for storing their collective radioactive runoff.  Kentucky, they write, is positioning itself to become that alternative. Senate Bill 26, recently passed by the Kentucky State Senate, would lift the long-standing state ban on the construction of nuclear power plants for the production of electricity. A later amendment to the bill references the storage of nuclear waste, a hot-button issue and more than likely the initial impetus for the story (an e-mail to Tony Dokoupil, the Newsweek reporter responsible for the article, received a polite “no comment”). Critics of the president’s nuclear power expansion campaign — Obama has proposed tripling public financing for nuclear power — point out it does not include plans for where to store all of that additional radioactive waste.

March 4, 2010 - Idaho Mountain Express - Nuclear power can be deadly for people, planet - It's easy to get into a conversation about nuclear power in Idaho. After all, the Idaho National Laboratory is the nation's lead nuclear energy and research facility, touted by our senators and congressmen who assert that nuclear power is the solution to climate change. Chances are good that the power structure of the state, the nation and even some turncoat environmentalists will bole you over with glossy facts. A wise person will want to have his or her own stockpile of retorts to enliven the conversation. Consider these points: · Nuclear power plants, like coal-fired plants and natural gas, are about maintaining the infrastructure of centralized power and the habits of excessive consumption, which rely on big power while decimating the Earth. Localized, regionalized energy production from renewable sources—wind, solar, geothermal, biomass—involves the community in responsible energy consumption. · Nuclear power advocates like to talk about clean energy as if the years not building nuclear facilities in this country were a mistake that leave the U.S. behind in power generation. In fact, the nuclear business is so risky that Wall Street won't invest in it, leaving the heavy costs to the taxpayers. Besides costs, there is the horrific impact on the communities, mostly indigenous, that mine the uranium on their lands—lung cancer, birth defects and ovarian and testicular cancer. Most mined uranium—about 99.28 percent—is uranium 238, which has to be "enriched" in an energy-intensive process to make nuclear fuel. By example, four dirty, coal-fired plants in Kentucky were operated just to operate two uranium enrichment plants. If the U.S. is building fewer coal plants these days, then what will be the source of energy to enrich uranium? An aside—what's left over from the enrichment process is depleted uranium, which is used in armaments and projectiles for war. Nasty.

March 4, 2010 - Fox 5 News - DOE Withdraws Application For Yucca Nuke Dump; Application Cannot Be Refiled, Governor's Office Says - The Department of Energy has withdrawn its license application to build a national nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. DOE asked the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s board to dismiss its application with prejudice -- meaning it cannot refile the application in the future -- and with no other terms of withdrawal. “We welcome the motion by the Department of Energy to withdraw its license application to build the nation’s nuclear dump at Yucca Mountain. Most important, is that the DOE included the language ‘with prejudice’ in its motion,” read a statement sent from Gov. Jim Gibbons’ office on Wednesday. The e-mailed statement was sent to media along with a message from Nevada Agency for Nuclear Projects Executive Director, Bruce Breslow, who commented, “Aside from my wife, this is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” The DOE said a geologic repository at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, was “not a workable option for long-term disposition of these materials.” The materials were the nation’s spent nuclear fuel and high-level nuclear waste. The DOE said it would search for an alternative site.

March 4, 2010 - Deseret Morning News - Anti-nuclear activists say Department of Energy unclear on waste; They accuse officials of sidestepping rules on depleted uranium at Clive - Anti-nuclear activists concerned over Utah's storage of depleted uranium are accusing the Department of Energy of sidestepping its own rules by allowing a trainload of radioactive waste to roll into Tooele County. HEAL Utah is calling on the department to immediately remove the 3,000 tons of waste sitting in storage at EnergySolutions' Clive facility and have also asked for a meeting with top Energy Department officials to gain assurances that no more of the material is headed to the state. The group held a media advisory Wednesday to outline the premises of a report, healutah.org/DuReport, it commissioned on depleted uranium. The report has been given to Gov. Gary Herbert and made available to Energy Department officials. Vanessa Pierce, HEAL Utah's executive director, said the organization is concerned whether the department is acting in "good faith" because of conflicting information that has been released about two remaining shipments that had been destined for Utah. Herbert, while in Washington, D.C., met with the department's assistant secretary, Inez Triay, and brokered an agreement that the final two trainloads would be diverted elsewhere.

March 3, 2010 - BBC News - Oscar hopeful made film in radioactive zone; The opening sequence was shot inside the "ghost city" near Chernobyl - One of the films up for an Oscar this year was shot in one of the most radioactive places on Earth. Dublin director Juanita Wilson took a small team into Pripyat, a deserted city in Ukraine next to Chernobyl, to make the story of one family's experience of the 1986 nuclear disaster. Everything had to be shot within three hours, so I was saying 'Action! Okay! Next shot...' and then we'd run to the next location. Her film, The Door, has been nominated for best short film (live action) at Sunday's Academy Awards ceremony. Pripyat, which housed the Chernobyl workers and their families, has been a ghost city since it was abandoned in 1986. In the centre is a playground dominated by an enormous ferris wheel which is clearly visible on satellite maps of the exclusion zone. "It was very complicated to get permission to film there," recalls Wilson, who began filming in January 2008. "Everything had to be shot within three hours, so I was saying 'Action! Okay! Next shot...' and then we'd run to the next location," she says. "You wear special clothing and discard it all afterwards. You can't touch anything. We took a motorbike in but we had to leave it there. They test you afterwards with a Geiger counter."

March 3, 2010 - Enterprise News - Authorities say Middleboro ‘radioactive’ canisters a hoax; FBI joins probe of discovery at Oliver Mill Park - The FBI has joined the investigation into who left five canisters marked “radioactive” and “nuclear waste” at Oliver Mill Park. Park Department employees found the canisters sitting on a cement wall at the park Tuesday afternoon, prompting a hazmat response, said Fire Chief Lance Benjamino. Authorities swept the area for radioactivity with Geiger counters and other devices. After a couple of hours the threat was determined to be a hoax, said Benjamino, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation took over the case. The canisters were label in magic marker bearing the descriptions Radio Active #1, Isotope #2, Nuclear Waste #13, Radio Active Isotope #9 and Thermo nuclear waste #13. Benjamino is seeking the public’s help to find the perpetrator of the hoax. He said it is a serious crime and carries felony charges. The investigation will be a joint effort between the FBI and Bureau of Criminal Investigation.

March 3, 2010 - PR-USA - Is the Person Exposing You to Radiation Qualified? - Every day in the United States, tens of thousands of patients are exposed to ionizing radiation through radiation therapy, CT scans, x rays, mammograms, and other medical imaging and therapeutic procedures. Patients need to have confidence that the technologists caring for them have the credentials and qualifications to safely administer radiation, and that the equipment they are using is properly calibrated and maintained to deliver radiation safely and within the proper dose parameters. These imaging procedures are key to making correct diagnoses of injuries and disease processes. Radiation therapy procedures are an important weapon in treating cancer. But, along with its life-saving capacity, ionizing radiation can cause harm to patients when used improperly. Too much radiation and the patient may suffer debilitating injury or death, as today's testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives' Energy and Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Health has documented. Responsibility for assuring balance between the amount of radiation used and the costs and benefits of its use lies with the physicians, the radiation oncologists, the equipment manufacturers, the radiation physicists, and the technologists who interact directly with the patients and who operate the equipment that delivers the radiation. Being fully qualified to perform their role in this team of professionals requires that the individuals have been appropriately educated in the fundamental concepts of radiation -- including its biological effects -- and how to achieve positive benefits and avoid or mitigate negative effects. "For technologists, that means a formal educational program that covers both the underlying concepts of radiation physics and its application for medical uses," according to Michael DelVecchio, B.S., R.T.(R)(ARRT), president of the American Registry of Radiologic Technologists. "This includes both classroom work and hands-on education in clinical settings."

March 3, 2010 - Bloomberg News - Italy Arrests 9 People on Weapons Trafficking to Iran - Italy’s Finance Police said it arrested five Italians and four suspected Iranian agents on suspicion of weapons trafficking to Iran. The authorities blocked the export of explosive materials to Iran and intercepted a supply of 1,000 German-produced optical-precision equipment and 120 scuba-diving jackets and oxygen tanks, according to an e-mailed statement. Two of the four Iranians were Italian residents while the five Italians lived in northern Italy and in Switzerland, police said today. Armando Spataro, the same prosecutor who requested the extradition of CIA agents for the 2003 kidnapping of a Muslim cleric, is leading the investigation, which began in June 2009 and was dubbed “Operation Sniper.” The police believe the suspects are part of a criminal gang that sells weapons and explosives to Iran through eastern Europe, the statement said. The arrests come as the U.S. pushes for tougher United Nations sanctions on Tehran’s government over its nuclear program. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency said in a Feb. 19 report that Iran enriched uranium to 19.8 percent, 0.2 percentage point below the threshold needed to start the chain reaction seen in an atomic bomb.

March 3, 2010 - OnMedica - Start radiotherapy as soon as possible after breast cancer surgery - Starting radiotherapy as soon as possible after breast cancer surgery reduces the risk of recurrence, suggests a study published on bmj.com today. The study found that the longer women waited for radiotherapy after breast cancer surgery, the more chance there was of local recurrence. Four to six weeks is generally accepted as a reasonable interval between cancer surgery and the start of radiotherapy. Researchers from the US, Canada and Japan analysed the records for more than 18,000 US women aged at least 65 diagnosed with early stage breast cancer between 1991 and 2002. All women received breast conserving surgery and radiotherapy, but not chemotherapy. The women were followed up for an average of five years. They found that starting radiotherapy more than six weeks after surgery was associated with a modest but significant increase in local recurrence. Thirty per cent of women in the study started radiotherapy after this time and 4 per cent had experienced a local recurrence at five years. Further analysis showed a continuous relationship between time to radiotherapy and local recurrence, suggesting that initiating radiation therapy as soon as possible could minimise risk of local recurrence.

March 3, 2010 - Associated Press - TVA contractor to lay off hundreds - Bechtel Power Corp. announced Monday that it is laying off more than 600 engineers and support staff as design work ends ahead of construction of a second reactor at the Tennessee Valley Authority's Watts Bar nuclear power plant. Francis Caravan, a spokesman for Bechtel, told the Knoxville News Sentinel that workers are receiving layoff notices now. "The engineering and design work for the final construction of Unit 2 at Watts Bar is nearing completion, and employees will be released gradually as the work decreases over the coming months," Caravan said. Bechtel is laying off 343 of its employees who work at TVA's East Tower in Knoxville and an additional 272 workers for subcontractors at the project site in Spring City. The layoffs will take place through Sept. 30. Bechtel and its contractors put the project on track to start construction by 2013 as planned, TVA spokesman Jim Allen told the Knoxville paper. Some of the workers will be able to find more work on other TVA projects, he said. "Some of the engineers and staff released from the Watts Bar project will be reassigned to other engineering work for their employers," he said.

March 3, 2010 - Northumberland Today - Cameco to double uranium production - The nuclear energy industry is entering a renaissance and Jerry Grandey, president and CEO of uranium giant Cameco, says he is looking forward to reaping the benefits of the increased demand for reactor fuel. He said their goal is to double uranium production, but according to Doug Prendergast, senior communications specialist for Cameco Port Hope, the push to double the uranium production is on the mining side of the business. "It would mean that the fuel services would be able to offer a range of products and services to customers," said Prendergast on Tuesday. Even though the uranium and conversion industries are linked, the demand and prices do not always follow the uranium market, he said. "The bottom line is that the impact on the Port Hope conversion facility will depend on the conversion market," said Prendergast. "We will continue to monitor the market. "It's a long-term plan," added Prendergast.

March 3, 2010 - Rutland Herald - More towns vote to ditch nuclear plant - Even some people in Vernon have questions about Vermont Yankee. While more than a dozen Vermont towns voted Tuesday that it was time to pull the plug on the future operation of Vermont Yankee, it was clear the residents of Vernon still support the controversial plant. But even the loyal residents of hometown of the plant had questions for two Entergy Nuclear officials Tuesday evening about the tritium leak at the reactor, which has made headlines all over New England. The future of Vermont Yankee was not on the ballot in Vernon. Two Entergy Nuclear officials, both of whom live in Vernon, gave an update of the tritium leak at the reactor, saying that while a "pathway" to groundwater contamination had been identified, the search for the source of the tritium leak continued. Finding the leak and stopping it and protecting the public is the company's priority, said Michael McKinney of Entergy. Residents interrupted the second night of Vernon's marathon town meeting to allow the presentation by Entergy Nuclear officials, and residents responded with questions. But their concerns were nothing like other Vermont towns, which overwhelmingly voted Tuesday in favor of shutting the Vernon reactor down in 2012.

March 3, 2010 - Environmental Expert - Looking inside the Dounreay prototype fast reactor - DSRL’s specialist in-house design team have designed some ingenious inventions over the years. Inspections of the Prototype Fast Reactor’s hazardous reactor core have been performed by remotely controlled devices resembling a giant anaconda, a one-eyed Cyclops and a child’s slinky toy to name but a few; all with combined drilling and camera capability built to withstand and measure high radiation levels. Mike Brown, reactor decommissioning unit manager said: “The reactor dismantling project is critical to the decommissioning of PFR. “To safely take apart the plant we need to inspect all the nooks and crannies within the reactor before we can begin the final phase of work which is to remove the reactor vessel. The design of purpose built equipment is invaluable to us.”

March 3, 2010 - Your Nuclear News - NRC Issues Confirmatory Order To National Institute Of Standards After Agreement Is Reached Under The Alternate Dispute Resolution - The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has agreed to pay a $10,000 fine and implement a series of corrective actions related to radiation safety under an agreement reached with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In addition, a former radiation safety officer (RSO) at the NIST’s facility in Boulder, Colo. will be prohibited from engaging in any NRC-licensed activities for one year for deliberate misconduct involving failure to provide complete and accurate information to the NRC. The settlement with the NIST was achieved under the NRC’s Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) process, which was initiated at the request of the NIST. The objective was to reach a preliminary settlement agreement and address ten apparent violations that were identified in an inspection report following a June 9, 2008 plutonium contamination spill. On Nov. 2, 2009, the NRC shared results of its special inspection and investigation with the NIST. In addition, the NRC found that willfulness may have been involved in that it appeared that a former RSO at the NIST-Boulder facility deliberately failed to provide complete and accurate information to the NRC in a 2007 license amendment application. This misinformation and misconduct led to the plutonium spill that later followed. In response to the report, the NIST informed the agency on Nov. 4, 2009, that they were interested in the use of the ADR session to resolve the matter. ADR is a process in which a neutral mediator with no decision-making authority assists the parties in reaching an agreement or resolving any differences regarding a dispute. An ADR mediation session took place on Jan. 5, 2010, and led to an agreement which is detailed in the Confirmatory Order newly issued by the NRC.

March 3, 2010 - Minneapolis Star-Tribune - Supporters of nuclear power push to lift ban - Energized by a surprise assist from the Obama administration, nuclear power supporters are taking their case to the Minnesota State Capitol. A state Senate panel heard more than three hours of testimony Tuesday on a bill that would lift a moratorium barring new nuclear plants in Minnesota. Once a dead issue here, talk about more nuclear power is reviving in Minnesota and elsewhere because of global warming. To be sure, Xcel Energy has no immediate plans to build a new nuclear plant in the state. Its Monticello plant received a 20-year license renewal and is awaiting final approval to increase the electricity it can generate. Its Prairie Island plant in Red Wing is renewing its license with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and also plans to increase power. Even so, Jim Alders of Xcel said that the state's moratorium has a "chilling effect" on nuclear power as an option in Minnesota's future energy mix.

March 3, 2010 - Morris Daily Herald - NRC: Tritium response is to emotion, not risk - The tritium issue that first saw light at Braidwood Generating Station five years ago is fueling headlines today at Yankee Nuclear Power Station in Vermont. “The focus of tritium leaks in the nuclear power industry started at Braidwood,” noted Viktoria Mitlyng, spokesman for Nuclear Regulatory Commission Region 3 at Lisle. “The attention right now is on the East Coast, where there are dozens and dozens of articles written on it, all negative, and thousands of entries on the Internet.” In early January, Vermont Yankee reported to the Vermont Department of Health tritiated water samples taken from some of its piping. This prompted NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko to note, on Feb. 17, that leaking pipes and tritium is an issue “that has drawn a good bit of attention lately.” Tritium is a naturally occurring isotope of hydrogen that emits a very low level of radiation. It is found in more-concentrated levels in water used in nuclear generating stations.

March 3, 2010 - USNRC Press Release (03/02/10) - NRC announces opportunity to request hearing on proposal to produce Co-60 at Hope Creek nuclear power plant - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff is seeking public comment and offering the opportunity to request a hearing regarding a request from PSEG Nuclear for a pilot program to explore the production of Cobalt-60 at the Hope Creek Generating Station, located about 18 miles south of Wilmington, Del. If approved, the requested license amendment would give PSEG permission to generate and transfer Cobalt-60 under the NRC’s regulations for “byproduct” material. The Cobalt-60, as a radioactive material licensed by the NRC and Agreement States, is used in applications such as cancer treatment and for irradiation sterilization of foods and medical devices. PSEG seeks permission to alter the reactor’s core by inserting up to 12 modified fuel assemblies with rods containing Cobalt-59 pellets, which would absorb neutrons during reactor operation and become Cobalt-60. PSEG’s pilot program would gather data to verify that the modified fuel assemblies perform satisfactorily in service prior to use on a production basis. PSEG has informed the NRC that if the amendment is granted, the company plans to insert the modified assemblies during Hope Creek’s planned fall 2010 refueling outage. The NRC staff review of the amendment request will include evaluating the potential effects of the modified fuel assemblies on plant operation and accident scenarios. The amendment will only be approved if the staff concludes the modified core will continue to meet the agency’s safety requirements.

March 3, 2010 - USDOE Press Release (03/02/10) - Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future Charter - The Secretary of Energy, acting at the direction of the President, is establishing the Commission to conduct a comprehensive review of policies for managing the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle, including all alternatives for the storage, processing, and disposal of civilian and defense used nuclear fuel, high-level waste, and materials derived from nuclear activities. Specifically, the Commission will provide advice, evaluate alternatives, and make recommendations for a new plan to address these issues, including: Evaluation of existing fuel cycle technologies and R&D programs. Criteria for evaluation should include cost, safety, resource utilization and sustainability, and the promotion of nuclear nonproliferation and counter-terrorism goals. Options for safe storage of used nuclear fuel while final disposition pathways are selected and deployed; Options for permanent disposal of used fuel and/or high-level nuclear waste, including deep geological disposal; Options to make legal and commercial arrangements for the management of used nuclear fuel and nuclear waste in a manner that takes the current and potential full fuel cycles into account; Options for decision-making processes for management and disposal that are flexible, adaptive, and responsive; Options to ensure that decisions on management of used nuclear fuel and nuclear waste are open and transparent, with broad participation; The possible need for additional legislation or amendments to existing laws, including the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, as amended; and Any such additional matters as the Secretary determines to be appropriate for consideration.

March 3, 2010 - Huffington Post - President Obama: Nuclear Power Is Neither "Safe" nor "Clean - During President Obama's recent State of the Union speech, Congress applauded as the President announced his intention to expand "safe and clean" nuclear power. The following week the president proposed an additional $54 billion in loan guarantees to the already heavily subsidized nuclear industry. It seems that the Obama Administration and Congress have miraculously discovered the cure for radiation-induced cancer, the solution for long term safe storage of nuclear waste and the secure containment of nuclear materials from theft or terrorist attack at nuclear power plants. It's more likely that the president and Congress are poised to dangerously repeat the same costly mistakes of the past at the expense of public health and safety and national security. Nuclear fission is a by-product of the Manhattan Project which developed enriched uranium and plutonium for nuclear weapons. After the dubious distinction of becoming the only country in the world to use atomic weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan, whether through guilt, blind faith or both, President Eisenhower proposed commercial nuclear power and the "Peaceful Atom" program. Because nuclear energy is anything but "clean and safe," utilities refused to accept the risks without legal indemnification and almost total government underwriting.

March 3, 2010 - University of Rochester Press Release - U.S. Agency Selects Rochester for Radiation Research Contract - The University of Rochester Medical Center has received a $3.9 million one-year contract, with options to increase to a total of $42 million over the next four years, to develop a simple, quick blood test to measure radiation exposure after an act of terrorism or nuclear accident. The project is funded by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), within the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.  The URMC was one of nine institutions to win BARDA awards, totaling $35 million for the first year and up to $400 million over five years. Principal investigator Bruce Fenton, Ph.D., URMC professor of Radiation Oncology, explained that scientists currently have the ability to detect radiation exposure in people, but the process is cumbersome. It requires drawing blood, takes at least two days for the culture to properly show chromosomal damage, and demands special expertise to analyze and score the sample. “In a mass-casualty situation where potentially hundreds or thousands of people are exposed to radiation,” Fenton said, “we would need a system that is more rugged and field-ready. Ideally it would require no special calibration or user skills, and could provide a measurement within 24 hours with just a drop of blood from a finger prick obtained within 24 to 48 hours after exposure.”

March 3, 2010 - Business Week - Feds seek to ID ailing ex-workers at NY lab - Officials are trying to identify workers who may have been exposed to radiation decades ago at Long Island's Brookhaven National Laboratory. At the time, the lab in Upton, N.Y. worked with the nuclear weapons industry. Officials say 89 people have already filed illness claims. They want to see if there are more. Aid is available to workers diagnosed with any of 22 specified cancers. Even if a worker has died, survivors could be eligible for compensation. The program is open to BNL employees, contractors and subcontractors who worked there for at least 250 days between Jan. 1, 1947, and Dec. 31, 1979. The U.S. Department of Labor is holding a town meeting Wednesday in Ronkonkoma. It will be held at the Courtyard by Marriott at MacArthur Airport.

March 3, 2010 - WBIR TV - ORNL engineers streamline nuclear reactor siting process - For at least one group of Oak Ridge National Laboratory engineers, going to work every day has rarely been more thrilling. "It's probably one of the most exciting, most interesting things I've ever worked on in the laboratory," said Advanced Reactor Systems and Safety Group Leader Gary Mays. Recent studies project a growth in energy consumption, which nuclear power supporters say calls for 300 more gigawatts of nuclear power by 2050. "That translates to roughly 250 to 300 new nuclear plants," Mays said. A couple of weeks ago, President Obama announced more funding for nuclear power in the form of more than $50 billion in loan guarantees. The administration hopes the additional financial security will spark interest in buidling new nuclear reactors. However, then a question arises. "Can we suitably site that much capacity in this country? Are there enough sites available?" Mays said. To answer it, Mays is heading a group at ORNL that's developing computer technology which consolidates geographical data across the continental USA. "What I like to say is you get smarter, quicker," Mays explained. The geographic images show areas that are better, or worse, for nuclear reactors. "You get a pretty quick feel without ever having to make a lot of trips, compile a lot of data," Mays said.

March 3, 2010 - The Oregonian - Don't seal off Yucca Mountain - It makes little sense, except as a matter of politics, to rule out now and forever the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository where the federal government already has spent more than 20 years and $10 billion preparing the nation's first permanent storage site for high-level waste. It was only a few weeks ago that President Barack Obama laid out his hopes for encouraging the nation's nuclear power industry and announced a new blue-ribbon commission that would look at alternatives for nuclear waste storage. Now, even before the commission has had its first meeting, Obama is sweeping off the table the best, most advanced alternative -- the repository at Yucca Mountain. At Obama's direction, Energy Secretary Stephen Chu has filed a request to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to withdraw the application for a license for the Yucca Mountain repository. Chu is seeking to withdraw the license "with prejudice," which means it could not be refiled and it would, for all intents and purposes, be the end of the Nevada project. That's cause for celebration in Nevada, and especially in the offices of embattled Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who can now run for re-election trumpeting his ability to keep nuclear waste out of his home state. But it's bad news for the rest of the country, especially the Northwest, where thousands of tons of nuclear waste remain stranded at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

March 3, 2010 - Salt Lake Tribune - Salt Lake County says N-O to D-U - If there's one thing the state's Republican governor and the Democratic-led Salt Lake County Council can agree on, it's this: Depleted uranium doesn't belong in Utah. Last month, Gov. Gary Herbert stopped trainloads of depleted uranium from reaching the Beehive State. Now, Utah's most-populous county is making it clear it doesn't want that radioactive waste being shipped through its territory either. The council passed a resolution 8-0 on Tuesday that, although nonbinding, prohibits the transport of depleted uranium through the county. If EnergySolutions has accepted waste that later is found to be unsuitable for its landfill, the resolution states, the company would have to remove it at its own expense. "It is imperative that we send a statement," Councilwoman Jenny Wilson said. "This is a big deal to all of us." The measure -- sponsored by Councilwoman Jani Iwamoto -- comes as public sentiment simmers against the burial of radioactive waste in Tooele County. A recent Salt Lake Tribune poll found 76 percent of Utah voters want to close the state's door to depleted-uranium shipments. It also has become a prominent issue in the governor's race. Salt Lake County Mayor Peter Corroon, a Democrat who is running against Herbert, has criticized the Republican governor for not being able to keep thousands of drums of the waste from reaching Utah. That said, Herbert did reach an agreement with the U.S. Department of Energy last month to keep additional trainloads from arriving by rail. Those shipments are being sent to Texas instead.

March 2, 2010 - Business Wire - Positron Recieves Radioactive Materials License from Nuclear Regulatory Commission  - Positron Corporation /quotes/comstock/11k!posc (POSC 0.05, 0.00, -1.96%) a molecular imaging solutions company focused on Nuclear Cardiology, announced today that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has licensed the Positron facility in Fishers, Indiana to handle radioactive material. Positron Corporation and staff demonstrated the necessary expertise and protocol to receive this license. A radioactive material handling license allows Positron to test equipment and develop new technologies, including pharmaceuticals. "A radioactive material license directly benefits our current product line and increases our ability to deliver new technologies," stated John A. Zehner, Positron Corporation, COO and Radiation Safety Officer. "The ability to handle radioactive material will enhance our sales efforts, allow new revenue streams, as well as, offer new opportunities to partner with pharmaceutical companies, Government agencies, inventors and universities." About Positron: Positron founded in 1983, is a molecular imaging company focused on Nuclear Cardiology. Positron utilizes its proprietary product line to provide unique solutions to the Nuclear Medicine community ranging from imaging systems to radiopharmaceutical distribution. Positron products include: the Attrius(TM), a PET imaging device; the Pulse(R), a SPECT imaging device; the Nuclear Pharm-Assist(R), an automated radiopharmaceutical distribution device; and the Tech-Assist(TM), a radiopharmaceutical injection shield. Positron is headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. More information about Positron is available at www.positron.com.

March 2, 2010 - Times Argus - Yankee: Source of leak remains uncertain; NRC seeks documents on testimony - Entergy Nuclear said Monday it is continuing to search for a radioactive tritium leak and didn’t have “conclusive evidence” that two cracked underground pipes associated with the advanced offgas system were the source of problems at the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant. The Vermont Department of Health has confirmed that two broken underground pipes in the advanced off-gas system at Vermont Yankee were tested successfully over the weekend to reveal a pathway to groundwater, according to release from the department. But Entergy voiced caution whether the source of the radioactive leak is resolved. “It is important to again note that no active process leakage has been observed,” said Entergy spokesman Larry Smith. “We still don’t have conclusive evidence,” Smith said, while acknowledging the Department of Health’s stand, but noting the company was being “very, very prudent and cautious.” William Irwin, the radiological health chief for the Department of Health, said that one source of the tritium leak had been identified. The Health Department noted that since a steam leak had been found and capped Feb. 14, the levels of tritium in the contaminated groundwater wells near the off-gas system have steadily declined, although they still are very high. Meanwhile, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has sent a formal “demand for information” to Entergy about the “veracity of statements made by Entergy officials and staff to the state.” The NRC asked Entergy for five years’ worth of statements that the employees made to the NRC, including the company’s relicensing case. ‘The NRC relies on licensees to provide complete and accurate information in order to make certain licensing and oversight decisions,” the NRC’s director of the Office of Enforcement, Roy Zimmerman, wrote to Entergy on Monday.

March 2, 2010 - CAGW - Pulling The Plug on Yucca Mountain – A New Mountain of Waste - The 27-year saga of the nation’s permanent underground nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nevada continues. After taking office in January, 2009, President Obama made good on his rash campaign promise to shutter the site, located 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. That decision, which is widely and correctly understood to be a political gift to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), has negative ramifications far beyond the near- term political expediency of appeasing Leader Reid and the anti-nuclear power crowd. In fact, it is patently illogical when viewed in tandem with the President’s stated support of nuclear power in general. The nation currently has 58,000 metric tons of commercial nuclear waste sitting at storage facilities at power plants across the country. President Obama’s crusade to close Yucca Mountain and permanently yank the facility’s license application will imperil the nation’s entire energy policy and cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. There are a myriad of problems associated with the politicized and short-sighted decision to abandon Yucca Mountain. First, and perhaps most importantly, it contravenes the law. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA), first enacted in 1982, authorized the federal government to enter into contracts with nuclear power companies to remove their spent nuclear fuel to a permanent repository; the nuclear utilities would have the authority to charge their ratepayers fees to pay for that facility. The law, as amended, clearly designates Yucca Mountain as the only permanent nuclear waste storage facility and any alteration of that location will require a legislative change to the NWPA. Other than to starve the project of money and announce a new “Blue Ribbon Commission” to reinvent the wheel by studying alternatives to Yucca Mountain, neither Congress nor the Obama administration has moved to amend the Act. Nor has the administration released any official documents or memoranda to explain the scientific or public policy rationale for its decision.

March 2, 2010 - Las Vegas Review-Journal - Washington state seeks entry to Yucca fray - The attorney general of Washington state, where millions of gallons of radioactive waste are resting in underground tanks at the Hanford nuclear reservation, is preparing to get into the fight over whether to terminate the Yucca Mountain program. Attorney General Rob McKenna intends to file a motion with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by Wednesday seeking permission to intervene as the agency considers a Department of Energy request to withdraw its application to build a nuclear waste repository at the Nevada site, his office confirmed. The state's interest follows on the heels of a federal lawsuit filed by three Hanford-area businessmen last week challenging the Obama administration's decision to end the repository, which had been designated to receive Hanford waste after it is converted into glass logs. In a weekend editorial the TriCity Herald, which covers the communities surrounding the Hanford reservation, said a broader fight was needed and challenged McKenna "to intervene and right away." In an interview with the Hanford News last week, Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire said she was concerned about the pending removal of Yucca as a potential disposal site. Gregoire said she was concerned that, without Yucca Mountain in the government's long-range plan, someone might move to turn the Hanford site into a reservation for spent nuclear fuel from other states in addition to the government-generated weapons waste that is there now.

March 2, 2010 - Materials Views - High-Sensitivity X-Ray Fluorescence Microscope - Product: High sensitivity X-ray fluorescence microscopes - "XGT-5000" and "XGT-7000" - with high resolution. Combines the unique combination of variable excitation spot diameter, with sizes between 10 microns and 1.2 mm, with the highly sensitive "Xerophy" Elemental silicon detector, allowing multiple applications with a single instrument. Features: These microscopy units make observations down to 10 µm routine. They provide simple sample handling, because the samples can either be measured under normal pressure or full vacuum without further preparation. The low working distance between the probe and the sample allows high sensitivity measurements, whether the measurements be for vacuum samples, for example in materials science, or sensitive samples from the life sciences. The instruments can be operated in point or multipoint mode, or as a raster area or mapping scanner. Areas between 200 × 200 mm and 10 micrometers can be measured down to an unprecedented resolution of 10 micrometers per pixel. With the patented coaxial arrangement of visual and X-ray optical light path reproducible positioning of the individual elements can be reached. The fluorescence spectrum is accurately drawn from the adjusted sample point. The integrated transmission detector is also suitable for mapping a transmission image, which is particularly useful in opaque samples, such as electronic components. Applications: The key features of this new microscope design expand the possible applications of X-ray analysis out of the traditional area of materials research and forensics into the field of environmental studies, life sciences, earth sciences, and industrial QC applications.

March 2, 2010 - Northumberland Today - $20-M radioactive waste facility design awarded - The detailed design of a $20-million, longterm management facility to contain historic low-level radioactive waste in Port Hope has been awarded to the joint venture of MMM Group Limited/ Conestoga-Rovers and Associates Limited of Thornhill, ON. "Our goal is the cleanup and safe long-term management of historic low-level radioactive waste in the Port Hope area. This is an important step forward in our commitment to the people in the Port Hope community," Northumberland-Quinte West MP Rick Norlock announced on behalf of the federal government at the Port Hope Area Initiative (PHAI) in Port Hope Monday. "By working collaboratively, we are moving ahead with the procurement phase in a fair and transparent manner."  In addition to the detailed design of the long-term waste management facility, the joint venture of MMM Group Limited/ Conestoga-Rovers and Associates Limited will also design the associated supporting infrastructure and plan the remediation of numerous sites throughout the municipality. "The announcement of this contract is good news for Port Hope," Mayor Linda Thompson said. "The awarding of this contract brings us one step closer to the environmental cleanup we have anticipated for so long."

March 2, 2010 - Associated Press - Maine panel weighs cell phone cancer warning - A bill that would make Maine the first state to require cell phones to carry warnings that they can cause brain cancer goes before a legislative committee for a hearing. The Health and Human Services Committee takes up Rep. Andrea Boland's bill Tuesday afternoon. The Sanford Democrat says numerous studies point to the cancer risk. But there's no consensus among scientists that that's true and industry leaders dispute the claim. Boland's bill would require manufacturers to put labels on phones and packaging warning of the potential for brain cancer associated with electromagnetic radiation. The warnings would recommend that users, especially children and pregnant women, keep the devices away from their head and body.

March 1, 2010 - Southside Pride - Obama’s nuclear blunder - President Obama has made yet another bad decision, one that will likely harm your children and grandchildren, and generations of your family, for centuries. On Feb. 16, Obama announced another bailout—this time for the nuclear power industry, those goodfellas who have given us dangerous nuclear reactors, a few more terrorist targets, and a whole lot of toxic waste that nobody wants in their back yard. Obama is giving one of the big nuke players, Southern Company, $8.3 billion in loan guarantees to build a couple of reactors in Georgia. And as a gift to the rest of the nuclear industry, Obama is tripling government loan guarantees—to $54 billion—in his 2011 budget. The industry depends on government loans because nuclear reactors are a risk even Wall Street won’t gamble on. Having failed to move Congress toward a green energy policy, and having wasted any momentum he might have had at the Copenhagen climate conference, pushing nuclear power is apparently Obama’s “clean” alternative to fossil fuels. Someone should tell this president that there’s nothing “clean” about toxic nuclear waste; that he should solve the storage problem before handing out tax dollars to create more garbage; and that reprocessing nuclear fuel, which misinformed pro-nuclear politicians are so crazy about, will only make the storage problem worse.

March 2, 2010 - Deseret Morning News - EnergySolutions CEO at center of nuclear storm; New leader is quiet, calm voice of reason for EnergySolutions - He is a man of understated demeanor in an industry marked by shrill rhetoric, by emotional cries of environmental damage, by ardent slogans that screech of Utah being the nuclear dumping ground of the world. Still, his voice remains one of quiet conviction, of black-and-white facts, of reiterating his points in the face of a loud chorus of disapproval. Val Christensen, the newly named chief executive officer of EnergySolutions, has stepped onto the center stage of the nuclear arena. His appointment as head of the company comes as developments in the industry and companion controversy power up at a furious pace, locally, nationally and globally. In Utah, critics of the company that operates the world's largest waste disposal facility in Clive, Tooele County, are waging the radioactive battle on multiple fronts. Foreign waste. Depleted uranium. Waste blending. Last year, after the company's 10-member board tapped him as president, Christensen ventured into the potentially stressing fray of being the "face" of a company that many love to hate but few understand.

March 2, 2010 - Yakima Herald-Republic - Politics trumps common sense in nuclear waste site reversal - Mixing politics with radioactive waste is never a good idea. But that's what President Barack Obama did when he decided to end construction of the nation's nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev. In an effort to block that move, three Tri-City business leaders last week sued Obama in federal court, claiming he violated the law when declaring Yucca Mountain would no longer be under consideration. The lawsuit claims that when Congress named Yucca Mountain in 2002 as the nation's repository, certain steps were required to be followed under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. But that didn't happen when Obama abruptly pulled the plug, the Tri-City business leaders argue. Obama made it no secret during his presidential campaign that he was opposed to the site. It's also no secret that the senior senator from Nevada, Democrat Harry Reid, is in a battle for his political life, so taking Yucca Mountain off the "to-do" list fits well into his re-election plans. No scientific evidence supported Obama's decision to drop Yucca Mountain. Then early last month, the Department of Energy announced it would withdraw the license for Yucca Mountain "with prejudice," meaning no future administration would be able to reconsider the site. That's why the Tri-City business leaders acted so quickly. And they are not alone. Officials in Aiken County, S.C., also filed a federal lawsuit to stop the DOE's decision. More than 4,000 metric tons of waste from the Savannah River site near Aiken are now stuck there. The radioactive waste had been destined for Yucca Mountain.

March 2, 2010 - Tri-City Herald - Court awards Energy Northwest $57 million from DOE - Energy Northwest has been awarded nearly $57 million by a federal court because of Department of Energy delays in opening the Yucca Mountain, Nev., nuclear repository. The money is intended to reimburse Energy Northwest for its costs to build and operate temporary storage near Richland for used nuclear power fuel from 1998 to about 2006. "It's a good thing for the ratepayer, a good thing for public power," said Energy Northwest spokesman Michael Paoli. Yucca Mountain was to open in January 1998 to accept used fuel from commercial nuclear power plants, such as Energy Northwest's plant north of Richland, and defense waste, including that at Hanford. In addition to the delay, the Obama administration has moved to terminate Yucca Mountain as a national repository. After Yucca Mountain did not open in 1998, Energy Northwest in 2001 began construction of an above-ground storage pad for the fuel. The $57 million includes the costs of licensing, design, construction, security, storage casks and cranes and other heavy equipment needed to move the 122-ton steel and concrete casks.

March 2, 2010 - Bennington Banner - Dozens attend floor Bennington meeting - Bennington's floor meeting Monday night was more widely attended than in recent years, but is still lacking the gusto of a time gone by, according to some who attended. More than 70 people gathered at the firehouse for the annual floor meeting, where discussion of issues seemed to be a bit more prevalent. Meeting participants voted to keep the annual salaries of Select Board members even. "It's been a number of years since it has increased, but this is not the year to consider it," said Old Bennington resident Charles Kozlosky. Several residents then rose to make comments, offer suggestions and otherwise engage in matters impacting residents -- the purpose of the annual meeting. Longtime resident Bob Matteson, a former Bennington town manager and moderator, and an ardent proponent of the annual meeting, said he was pleased to see a larger turnout. But turnout was still too low for the population, he said. "If there's any place in the United States where there should be widespread participation in the democratic process, it's Vermont," he said. Matteson, 93, urged the Select Board and the moderator, James Colvin, to raise topics and issues that spur debate. "I would like to see something to enliven town meeting," Matteson said.

March 2, 2010 - Australian Broadcasting Corporation - 'No clues' in disappearance of Australian nuclear scientist - Police in Canada say they do not have any leads in the case of an Australian nuclear scientist who has been missing since mid-January. The sudden disappearance of Lachlan Cranswick, 41, has mystified his colleagues. Mr Cranswick was last seen on January 18 when he left work at a high security nuclear facility in Chalk River, in northern Ontario. The facility produces about a third of the world's medical isotopes. Police say Mr Cranswick's home was reportedly left unlocked and his car was in the garage. His wallet, keys and passport have all been accounted for. Colleagues did not notice anything strange about his recent behaviour. One described him affectionately as a "safety-conscious nerd" who never went anywhere without his mobile phone and GPS. Local police have said he was an avid hiker and photographer but a search of the nearby ski trails and forests has not turned up any clues.

March 2, 2010 - Mother Nature Network - New material traps radioactive waste like a Venus flytrap - Venus flytraps are notoriously picky eaters. Drop a pebble into their open jaws and they won't bite, but when a fly enters they instinctively know to snap shut immediately. Now scientists have invented a chemical material which acts in a similar fashion, though unlike the carnivorous plant, its favorite food is radioactive waste. PhysOrg.com reports that the newly discovered mechanism has the potential to speed up the cleaning of power plants and contaminated sites, possibly making nuclear energy a safer option for the environment. Before the invention of this material, sorting out deadly isotopes from harmless ions in waste proved to be an arduous and inefficient process. "The name of the game in cleaning up nuclear waste is to concentrate the dangerous isotopes as efficiently as possible," said Mercouri Kanatzidis, one of the scientists who crafted the new technology. "That's where this new material does its job."

March 2, 2010 - Knoxvile News-Sentinel - NRC schedules public meeting on NFS incident - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has scheduled a public meeting for Tuesday, beginning at 6 p.m. at the Erwin Town Hall. The meeting will focus on results of an NRC review of an Oct. 13 incident at the plant. Some operations have been suspended since the incident, which involved a chemical reaction on a uranium processing line.

March 2, 2010 - Tri-City Herald - Compensation changes for ill workers to be explained - Three meetings have been scheduled in Kennewick to explain changes in a compensation program for ill Hanford nuclear reservation workers or their survivors. A recent change to the program should make more Hanford workers, retirees or their survivors eligible for $150,000 compensation and coverage of some medical expenses related to cancer or certain lung diseases. The meetings also will give an overview of the entire program, which provides compensation for illnesses caused by radiation or hazardous chemicals. Staff from the Hanford Resource Center will be available to help people file claims.  The Department of Labor meetings are planned at 7 p.m. March 16 and at 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. March 17 at the Red Lion Hotel, N. 2201 Columbia Center Blvd., Kennewick.  For more information about the compensation programs, call the Hanford Resource Center at 888-654-0014.

March 1, 2010 - Cosmetic Dentistry Guide - Tooth enamel indicator for radiation exposure - Boffins are trying to develop tools which use tooth enamel to test a person’s exposure to radiation. Scientists from Howard University’s (HU) College of Dentistry, Washington, want to develop the enamel testing technology so radiation levels can be tested after major emergencies, like bomb explosions have occurred. Exposure to radiation can create free radicals in the body. These atoms have a harmful unprepared electron which can damage DNA. However, these atoms can indicate how much radiation a person has been exposed to and now scientists are trying to measure free radicals by analysing teeth. They are trying to perfect the Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) process to gauge how much harm has been caused by radiation. A tiny piece of tooth is used in the process which scientists then apply microwave energy to. Free radicals absorb this energy which means scientists can work out how many harmful atoms are present by measuring the amount of energy which is left after flowing through the tooth.

March 1, 2010 - Toledo Blade - Davis-Besse shuts down to replace fuel assemblies - Refueling of the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Station began yesterday to replace 76 of 177 fuel assemblies, FirstEnergy Corp. said. The company declined to say when the plant would resume generating electricity "for competitive reasons," spokesman Todd Schneider said. The industry average for refueling shutdowns is four to six weeks. Three large pump motors will be replaced and welds on plant equipment will be reinforced, the company said. Other major work will include maintenance on the cooling tower. FirstEnergy Nuclear Operating Co., which operates the 32-year-old plant, hired about 1,200 contractors and brought in 100 employees from its other nuclear plants to supplement the Davis-Besse work force for the outage. The last refueling for the 908-megawatt plant in Ottawa County was in February, 2008. In addition to Davis-Besse, FirstEnergy's nuclear plants are Beaver Valley Power Station in Shippingport, Pa., and Perry Nuclear Power Plant in Perry, Ohio.

March 1, 2010 - CRIEnglish.com - China Looks Abroad to Fuel Growing Nuclear Energy Needs - The rapid expansion of China's nuclear energy sector is one of the most ambitious in the world. The country currently has 11 nuclear power reactors in commercial use generating 8.5 gigawatts of electricity. A further 57 plants are planned or already under construction, which should add another 63 gigawatts by 2020, at which point China's nuclear programme is expected to be one of the largest in the world. However, one challenge for the government is guaranteeing the supply of uranium, a key fuel for generating nuclear energy, as China's domestic supply is fast running dry. Elaine Wu is a Chinese nuclear analyst at Nomura investment bank. "Uranium is going to be the key focus for China because China is not endowed with a lot of uranium resources. Currently even at 8 gigawatt capacity, China has to import about half of its uranium needs." Another incentive for Beijing to import uranium is that of economics. Zha Daojiong from Peking University and a member of the state energy expert commission explains more. "So far as I know China has indigenous uranium deposits, it's just that the quality of those deposits in a technical sense is fairly low and it is more costly than in most other situations to process such uranium."

March 1, 2010 - Kyodo News Service - Japan's 2nd 'pluthermal' nuclear generation operation begins - A nuclear reactor in western Japan was activated Monday for the country's second ''pluthermal'' power generation operation using plutonium-uranium mixed oxide fuel. Shikoku Electric Power Co. made the move on the No. 3 reactor at the Ikata power plant in Ehime Prefecture, in which the self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction is expected to occur Tuesday to set the stage for the start of power generation with the MOX fuel scheduled for Thursday. The facility will enter the commercial operation phase March 30 following the completion of regular checkups if it passes final government-mandated inspections after boosting its power output. The pluthermal plan at the Ikata plant has been delayed for about a week because of a minor radioactive leakage and a subsequent investigation into the incident. Shikoku Electric applied to conduct pluthermal power generation in 2004 and obtained government approval in 2006. The central and local governments approved the reactor's quake-resistance capabilities by January, paving the way for it to be used for pluthermal generation.

March 1, 2010 - Eco-Business.com - Nuclear energy: The options for Singapore - If Singapore is to go nuclear, how could it prepare for such a big change in meeting national energy needs, particularly for electricity? And what kind of reactors might be best for the small island-state? When a country decides to use nuclear power to generate electricity, drive desalination plants or produce heat for industry, it is ‘a 100-year-long-commitment’, says Mr Yury Sokolov, a senior official of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the United Nations body responsible for helping nations harness nuclear power and ensuring they do so only for peaceful purposes. It takes at least 15 years from the time a government approves a nuclear programme to the start of power generation. The operating life of many commercial reactors in the United States, Japan and Europe has been extended from around 40 years to as much as 70 or 80 years. Safely managing the high-level radioactive waste from nuclear plants extends this commitment for many more years. Just to build a national nuclear power infrastructure is complex, requiring more than 10 years of planning according to the IAEA. ‘When we talk about infrastructure… we mean a system that provides legal, regulatory, technological, human and industrial support to ensure the effectiveness of the nuclear power programme and ensure that obligations for safety, security and safeguards are met,’ Mr Sokolov says.

March 1, 2010 - Defense Professionals - GAO Recommends Actions for Better Prevention of Radiological or Nuclear Attacks - A terrorist’s use of a radiological dispersal device (RDD) or improvised nuclear device (IND) to release radioactive materials into the environment could have devastating consequences. GAO was asked to examine (1) the extent to which the federal government is planning to fulfill its responsibilities to help cities and their states clean up contaminated areas from RDD and IND incidents, (2) what is known about the federal government’s capability to effectively clean up these contaminated areas, and (3) suggestions for improving federal preparedness to help cities and states recover from these incidents. The report also discusses recovery activities in the United Kingdom. GAO reviewed federal laws and guidance; interviewed officials from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), Department of Energy (DOE), and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); and surveyed emergency management officials from 13 cities at high risk of attack, their 10 states, and FEMA and EPA regional offices. GAO recommends that, among other things, FEMA prepare a national recovery strategy that clarifies federal roles for cleaning up areas contaminated by attacks using RDDs or INDs, and schedule additional exercises to assess recovery preparedness. DHS and DOE agreed with our recommendations, and EPA did.

March 1, 2010 - Auburn Citizen - Meaning of radon test results mean - Last week I wrote about the radioactive gas, radon, how it gets into your home and how you can detect it. This week I am looking at the way radon levels are measured and what they mean when you read your radon test results. Radon levels are measured in picocuries (“pee-co-cure-ees”) per liter of air, often seen as pCi/l. This measurement describes how much radioactivity from radon is in 1 liter of the air found in your home. The average indoor radon level is estimated to be about 1.3 pCi/L, and about 0.4 pCi/L of radon is normally found in the outside air. However, when your radon test shows that you have a level of 4 pCi/L or more, the EPA strongly recommends that you fix your home. According to the EPA, radon gas decays into radioactive particles that can get trapped in your lungs when you breathe. As they break down further, these particles release small bursts of energy. This can damage lung tissue and lead to lung cancer over the course of your lifetime. Not everyone exposed to elevated levels of radon will develop lung cancer. And the amount of time between exposure and the onset of the disease may be many years. Smoking combined with radon is an especially serious health risk. If 1,000 people who never smoked were exposed to a radon level of 4 pCi/L over a lifetime, about seven people could get lung cancer. If these 1,000 people smoked and were exposed to the same level of radon, about 62 people could get lung cancer. That's five times the risk of dying in a car crash. If 1,000 people who never smoked were exposed to a radon level of 10 pCi/L over a lifetime, about 18 people could get lung cancer. That's 20 times the risk of dying in a home fire.

March 1, 2010 - Appleton Post Crescent - Pursue nuclear energy - with caution - Nuclear power has been heralded as a clean energy source for years —and it's been disparaged for its risks and cost. But any serious debate has occurred under the radar in recent years, while wind and solar have taken center stage in green energy discussions. The truth is we get 20 percent of our energy from nuclear power plants, compared with 1 percent from wind and even less from solar sources. Sign up for news, weather and sports text alerts. At a time when the nation should be actively pursuing all forms of alternative energy, we have to be open to expanding nuclear energy. President Barack Obama has followed through on his commitment to pursue clean forms of energy by tripling loan guarantees for nuclear plants. He recently authorized $8.3 billion in loan guarantees for two new nuclear reactors in Georgia. This is huge. If they come to fruition, these reactors would be the first built in the United States since the 1970s. The nation has 104 operating power reactors, but all reactors ordered after 1973 were canceled. Obama, who is clearly reaching out to Republicans in hopes of getting their buy-in on more comprehensive energy legislation, has touted nuclear energy as a producer of high-skills jobs. Wisconsin, a net importer of energy resources, has the opportunity to be part of this expansion and create jobs here by lifting its moratorium on nuclear plant construction. There is a caveat — how to handle the nuclear waste, as environmentalists and some Democratic lawmakers have warned.

March 1, 2010 - The Reporter - New Berlin settles drinking water lawsuit - A Milwaukee suburb has agreed to pay a $45,000 settlement for failing to meet a deadline to provide radium-free drinking water for its citizens. Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen announced Wednesday that the City of New Berlin had settled a state lawsuit over drinking water violations. New Berlin buys Lake Michigan water from the City of Milwaukee. The city provided radium-free water to certain customers by the December 2006 deadline, but those in central New Berlin did not get radium-free water pumped to them until July 2009. Local residents may recall that the City of Fond du Lac missed the December 2006 deadline and paid a $35,000 fine last year to settle a similar suit. Fond du Lac had been moving forward with a plan to mix its well water with surface water from Lake Winnebago when the City Council — following renewed citizen input on the issue — reversed its position and supported a different process to remove radium. The change in plans caused the city to miss the deadline. Radium is a radioactive chemical element that occurs naturally in water drawn from deep wells where the water interacts with sandstone.

March 1, 2010 - Richmond Times-Dispatch - Nuclear plant hearing tonight in Louisa - The Louisa County Board of Supervisors will hold a public hearing tonight at 7 in the Public Meeting Room on the main floor of the county office building. The annual public meeting will address the operation of the Dominion Virginia Power nuclear plant and will include, but not be limited to, the storage of highand low-level radioactive wastes; general operations; employment; economics of operation; NRC relations and events; federal, state relations and events; safety and evacuation plans; and environmental and health issues. Additional information is available for review Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. in the Administration Department on the second floor of the county office building.

March 1, 2010 - The State - Don't play politics with Yucca; work to save it  - The federal government adopted a plan to build a national repository to house the highly radioactive remnants of the still-warm Cold War and the spent fuel rods that were piling up at the nation's nuclear power plants. It would take 20 years before the Congress managed to officially designate a giant hole in the Nevada dessert, which the nation already had spent billions of dollars testing, as the site for the facility. Progress has been no smoother in the eight years since. In 2006, when the Democrats took control of the U.S. Senate and Nevada's Harry Reid went from minority to majority leader, the Yucca Mountain site was all but given up for dead. Just so no one was unclear on that, the 2008 Democratic presidential candidates - including Barack Obama - vowed to "move on." Meantime, the waste has continued to pile up at the Savannah River Site and other weapons complexes and at nuclear plants at Jenkensville and across the state and nation. And the need to build a new generation of nuclear power plants becomes more obvious by the day. President Obama was wrong in 2008, and he is wrong today to try to abandon the only plan our nation has come up with in more than a quarter century of trying to deal with the deadly byproducts of the nuclear age. Claims that his decision has nothing to do with Harry Reid's political power - or Mr. Reid's political vulnerability in this year's elections - are absurd.

March 1, 2010 - Las Vegas Sun - Yucca Mountain low; Assemblyman sees a future for the dump — one that would be dangerous - Since President Barack Obama said he was withdrawing the Energy Department’s application to build a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain, 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, many Republicans have tried to keep the program alive. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a former GOP presidential candidate, has been livid and called Obama’s move “an insult to the intelligence.” That was a shot at not just Obama but also at Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who has fought the dump for years and worked with Obama to end the project. Realizing that the momentum is against them, McCain and others have tried to keep a Yucca repository alive any way they can. The most recent idea is to champion the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, and they say Yucca Mountain would be a great place to do that. Typically, such disingenuous approaches have failed in Nevada. Over the years there has been strong bipartisan support in the state against the dump. There are exceptions of course, particularly a small segment in Northern Nevada that doesn’t think it would be affected by having a nuclear waste dump near Las Vegas. Take, for example, Assemblyman Ty Cobb, a Republican from Washoe County, who raised the issue of Yucca Mountain on Thursday with the online Nevada News Bureau. “Right now, it would be best to change the project from the old version, which was just a waste dump, to a reprocessing center,” he said. “It would be interim storage, and we could reprocess the waste and reuse it.” He said it would be good for the economy because it would create jobs.

February 27-28, 2010 - Webmuenster took the weekend off.

February 26, 2010 - Updated News - New View of Comet Formation Forged in Study of Tiny Particle - Comets have a reputation of being outer solar system natives that were long thought to be made up of pristine remnants of the building blocks of our sun’s planets and moons. But new analysis of a tiny piece of one comet shows that some of its material actually formed in the inner solar system — just like that of meteorites — before it was kicked outward and incorporated into the comet. The study provides the first information on when comet material formed, in this case almost 2 million years after the first material in the solar system was forged, about 4.6 billion years ago along with the birth of the sun. The particle under study, dubbed “Coki,” was picked up from Comet Wild 2 (pronounced “Vilt 2?) by NASA’s Stardust mission. To figure out just when and where the material in Coki formed, Jennifer Matzel, a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and her colleagues looked to see if the particle contained any of a particular radioactive isotope of aluminum, which would have been long gone after the first few million years of the solar system’s history. This isotope is signature of the oldest solids thought to have formed in the early solar system, called Calcium-Aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs). But Coki seemed to contain little, if any, of the magnesium isotope that the radioactive aluminum decays into. The lack of these isotopes suggests that the material in Coki didn’t form until at least 1.7 million years after the first material in the solar system formed.

February 26, 2010 - Northumberland Today - Alberta visitors want both sides of the nuclear story - Two visitors arrived tired from the red-eye flight from Alberta Tuesday, but that didn't stop them from spending a full day touring various nuclear facilities, meeting different community groups and finishing up the day with a stop at Port Hope council. Reeve Teresa Tupper and Deputy Reeve Darlene Frith of the County of Northern Lights in Alberta, came to Ontario on a fact-finding mission after a former Port Hope resident and nuclear activist got involved in the proposed Bruce Power site in their jurisdiction. The proposed site is in the preliminary stages and has not entered the environmental assessment stage yet. "We have been everywhere and seen so much," said Tupper. "It's been very exciting to see the whole concept of nuclear communities from beginning to end." The duo arrived Tuesday morning and visited the Darlington nuclear station and met with members from Green Peace before arriving in Port Hope to tour both the Cameco fuel manufacturing and conversion facilities. "We provide tours of our facilities to any group that is interested," said senior communications specialist Doug Prendergast. Tupper and Frith didn't just go to the nuclear industries in Port Hope either. They met with Sanford and Helen-Anne Haskill who represented Families Against Radiation Exposure (FARE) -and the other side of the story. "They asked us what we thought about what the nuclear industry has done to our town," said Sanford. "And we told them."

February 26, 2010 - PR-USA.net - Cleveland BioLabs Submits Response to Department of Defense Request for Proposal for Radiation Count - Cleveland BioLabs, Inc. (NASDAQ: CBLI) today announced that it has submitted a response to the Request for Proposal (RFP) issued by The Department of Defense (DoD) for the advanced development, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval/licensure and delivery of Medical Radiation Countermeasure (MRC). In a statement to the press, Michael Fonstein, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer and President of Cleveland BioLabs, commented that the DoD's RFP described a countermeasure as one that would be administered following exposure to ionizing radiation that will decrease incapacity and prolong survival by treating the gastrointestinal sub-syndrome of ARS. "We believe our radiation protection drug candidate, CBLB502, fits these and other listed criteria," noted Fonstein. Dr. Fonstein reviewed CBLB502's development and highlighted the more than $32 million in development funding received over the past two years from several federal agencies, including the DoD, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health. "The tremendous programmatic and funding support from these US government agencies is instrumental in the successful development of CBLB502 working towards FDA licensure," said Fonstein. "CBLI views this support as a partnership to ensure that both the DoD and, potentially the HHS, have a capability to protect individuals against the terrorist threat of a radiation event."

February 26, 2010 - SA Instrument & Control - Beta gauge particulate monitor - Verewa’s Model F-904 Extractive Beta Gauge Particulate Monitor is designed to provide accurate particulate measurements in a wide variety of process and emission monitoring applications. The unit incorporates a three-step procedure to ensure accurate and reproducible particulate measurements. At the start of each measurement cycle, the F-904 measures the amount of radiation absorbed by an unloaded filter tape. This is in essence an automatic zero correction. Once this ‘zero’ reading is taken, a sample is drawn through the filter tape at a controlled flow rate and any particulates in the gas stream deposited on the filter tape. After a pre-selected sample collection period, the F-904 again measures the amount of radiation absorbed by the loaded filter tape. The difference between the original zero reading and the final reading is directly proportional to the additional mass (ie, dust particulates) collected on the tape. The instrument consists of five main modules: sample probe, sample collection/measurement assembly, sample gas cooler, pump/flow controller and on-board computer. All functions are controlled by the powerful PLC, which also calculates the particulate concentration value from the gas volume and zero/final radiation absorption differential. Components are housed in a sturdy cabinet and are easily accessible for periodic inspection and maintenance.

February 26, 2010 - Sudbury Star - Exposure to X-rays need to be tracked - While I enjoyed the article, I felt it did not go far enough. Indeed, there has been a flurry of literature regarding the 84 million CT scans being done annually in the United States. Comments from the American and Canadian Radiologist's associations indicating that a substantial percentage of these CT scans and other diagnostic imaging procedures are inappropriate or contribute no information to patient care are disturbing. Most patients and many doctors do not realize the amount of radiation exposure there is in a CT scan, a nuclear scan, an angiogram or a complex series of X-rays. It is not unusual for a CT scan, a nuclear scan, or an angiogram to have an equivalent radiation exposure of 200 to 600 chest X-rays. Even of more concern is the fact that many of these tests are done in combination or repeated periodically over time. In my specialty, cardiology, it is not infrequent for a patient to have a nuclear angiogram, coronary angiogram followed by a coronary angioplasty and several months later followed by a repeat nuclear scan and perhaps a repeat angiogram. This whole procedure can be repeated in time if a similar problem occurs. Someone should be keeping track of the total amount of lifetime radiation exposure that patients receive. With the new electronic medical records that we are seeing developed, it should be relatively easy for institutions to prominently display the total number of radiation procedures a patient has had. Large clinics could do the same. I encourage patients to keep track of their health care and this is another item that should be monitored.

February 26, 2010 - Barre Montpelier Times Argus - New radioisotope found at Yankee - Entergy Nuclear has found traces of cesium-137, a radioisotope, about 15 feet underground in the excavation trench where it is searching for the leak that has contaminated groundwater at the Vermont Yankee reactor for the past two months. Entergy Nuclear said the cesium was found in trace amounts, and at background levels, a result of radiation from nuclear bomb tests and the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986, and was not the result of the tritium leak. Entergy wouldn't disclose the cesium measurements. But William Irwin, radiological health chief for the Vermont Department of Health, said it was too soon to say what the source of the cesium was, but that testing in the next few days, along with the continuing excavation, could reveal the source. "There are two reasons: First, all soils and sediments have trace amounts of cesium-137 from above-ground weapons tests and Chernobyl. Second, they are digging where they expect to find a leak of radioactive water," Irwin wrote in an e-mail. "When other radionuclides are found, too, we will be sure," he said. Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear expert working for the Vermont Legislature, said cesium-137 is a fission product when uranium splits. He said cesium would date back to fuel failures from the 1970s through the 1990s at Vermont Yankee. "Nuclear fuel failures would have left cesium and strontium in the pipes in the off-gas system. When the pipes break, the fission products and activation products like cobalt-60 will come out into the soil," Gundersen said.

February 26, 2010 - Pembroke Daily Observer - Two workers exposed - Chalk River's NRU reactor could be operational by the end of April, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited announced Thursday. The company also reported two employees at Chalk River Laboratories have been accidently exposed to radioactive contamination in the past week. Patrick Quinn, manager of site and community affairs, said the levels detected on the two workers were not dangerous and the contamination was safely removed. The first occurrence involved a worker conducting maintenance, but routine monitoring after the task found he had contamination on his hands. The second incident involved an employee operating a vacuum to clean equipment. It malfunctioned and spread a small amount of radioactive contamination into the immediate area. "These individuals followed the procedures to the tee," said Mr. Quinn, noting there was no obligation to report these incidents to the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, however, he added, "We take all these events seriously and safe operations are our number one priority." He said there was no worker, public or environmental safety compromised as a result of these incidents. Meanwhile, AECL said that repairs to the National Research Universal (NRU) reactor were 43 per cent complete and that preparations for the final repair sequence are underway. The company said the earliest estimated return to service for the reactor is the end of April. The NRU has been out of service since a small leak of heavy water was detected during routine maintenance last May. An initial investigation found that the leak had occurred at the base of the reactor vessel.

February 26, 2010 - Seattle Times - Obama administration should not close Yucca Mountain unilaterally - Good for President Obama for inking a loan guarantee for two new nuclear reactors in Georgia. He's among many people, including Gov. Chris Gregoire and some environmentalists, who are concluding modern nuclear plants might have a role as the nation changes its carbon-emitting ways and moves away from dependence on dirtier coal and gas-fired plants. But, hold on, Mr. President. The nation has a serious problem with nuclear power's waste stream — the spent nuclear fuel from existing nuclear plants. Even as the Obama administration gooses new nuclear-plant construction, Energy Secretary Steven Chu is keeping Obama's campaign promise to shut down the intended repository for the waste at Nevada's Yucca Mountain — no doubt to the relief of Yucca opponent and embattled Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. Not so fast. Congress voted 60-39 in 2002 to designate Yucca Mountain as the nation's nuclear-waste repository. A spokesman for U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., who voted for the 2002 resolution, described the administration's latest action as "irresponsible." By the latest estimate, Yucca was to be opened by 2020 to take decades worth of spent commercial nuclear fuel — about 63,000 metric tons from 41 states and about 7,000 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste from the nation's nuclear-defense production sites, including Hanford in Southeast Washington. Chu has filed a request with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to suspend Yucca Mountain's license application and announced plans to withdraw the license completely "with prejudice." Those two words are the most troublesome because that means Yucca would be off the table permanently just as a new blue-ribbon commission to look at alternatives begins work — the billions of dollars already spent on Yucca would be utterly wasted. U.S. electricity customers, including those in the Northwest, have paid more than $30 billion into a fund for a permanent repository and many plant operators, including Energy Northwest in Richland, have run out of room, forced to store waste in outdoor casks on concrete pads.

February 26, 2010 - The Hill - McCain: Obama rhetoric on nuclear 'contradicted' by actions - My colleagues Bob Cusack and J.T. Rushing interviewed Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) yesterday. Once a hero to advocates of a carbon cap, McCain has been critical of the administration’s efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions since the election. Bob and J.T. asked McCain about whether his stance on climate change had changed, and this is what he said: "During the campaign, I said, 'Look, the only way we're going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and eliminate, over time, our dependency on foreign oil is nuclear power. I said it over and over and over again. So what did this administration just do? They say, 'We're for nuclear power, but we're shutting down Yucca Mountain,' in which we invested $16 billion. They keep saying, 'Yes, we're for nuclear power,' but the rhetoric is contradicted by their actions. So I cannot engage in serious contemplation, serious discussion, until nuclear power is a viable option. It is not viable when you announce the only place you can store is closing, and they're not recycling. So it's a non-starter." The administration is shutting down Yucca Mountain, as Obama pledged to do during the campaign. But in other ways, the administration has supported the industry. Its budget request, for example, seeks to triple the amount of loan guarantees to build new reactors.

February 26, 2010 - Nevada Appeal - Feds will recommend killing Yucca next week, nuke director says - Nuclear Projects Office Director Bruce Breslow told lawmakers Wednesday the federal Department of Energy will file an application next week to withdraw the application to license Yucca Mountain as the nation's nuclear waste dump. He said the application, supported by his office and Nevada, will seek to end the application “with prejudice,” which would prevent it from being re-filed. The nuclear power industry is expected to oppose the withdrawal. Breslow said this action should end the Yucca Mountain battle after 23 years of fighting. Assembly members praised the efforts to kill the project but shifted their concerns to the status of the Nevada Test Site, which for decades was the scene of nuclear tests above and below ground. Breslow said Nevada wants the test site designated as a Superfund site. “There are upwards of billions of dollars that could come to the state of Nevada if that site was declared a Superfund site,” said Breslow. He said he would like the authority to go after the federal Department of Energy to get that declaration, saying the DOE is responsible for remediation of contaminated sites caused by the federal government.

February 26, 2010 - Palmetto Scoop - McMaster to sue over Yucca Mountain - An argument between South Carolina and the federal government over where to store thousands of metric tons of nuclear waste may be headed to court. South Carolina Atty. Gen. Henry McMaster said on Wednesday that he would take legal action to stop President Barack Obama from abandoning a 23-year-old plan to store much of the nation’s high level radioactive waste at a proposed facility in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. “South Carolina has a vested interest in insuring that the Yucca Mountain licensing proceedings continue, so that the spent fuel and other nuclear material now being temporarily stored in our state will be safely placed in the Yucca Mountain repository, as mandated by the United States Congress,” McMaster said in a statement. Under pressure from environmental groups, Obama announced in December that he was terminating the plan passed into law by Congress in 1987 to store the hazardous material at Yucca Mountain. The president instead offered a short term plan to keep the waste in concrete casks at their current locations — including 4,000 metric tons at the Savannah River Site near Aiken. McMaster’s office has been researching the case since Obama’s announcement and has held “collaborative discussions” with attorneys general in similarly situated states, utility executives, nuclear industry legal experts, former DOE officials, and state and local officials from the Savannah River Plant community. “Following a review of South Carolina’s legal options, this office will file a Petition to Intervene with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission this week, and will take additional legal action in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals,” said McMaster. Those legal options, McMaster said, include filing either a temporary restraining order, a writ of mandamus, or both, to either the District of Columbia Court of Appeals or the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., on Friday. Gov. Mark Sanford applauded McMaster’s efforts, noting that Obama’s decision “represents a decades-long, $10 billion broken promise to the American people.”

February 26, 2010 - American Reporter - Nuclear follies - When President Barack Obama said, during his State of the Union speech, "But to create more of these clean energy jobs... that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country," I literally howled. How could an ostensibly intelligent man be so wrong, wrong, wrong? There's always been one glaring problem with nuclear power: the waste. It's hard to call nuclear power "clean" when the radioactive waste piles up day after day, week after week, year after year, remaining dangerously radioactive for milennia without anyone having a clue of how to get rid of it. That was the problem in the 1970s, and it's the problem now. For a long time, private industry built the plants while the federal government took responsibility for the waste. But the Yucca Mountain project in Nevada is a dead disposable waste site walking. There are no other plans. There are no safe ways to get the stuff to a site if there was one. And there is now way too much waste. So really, there is no argument in favor of nuclear power. Just as you can't legally or responsibly build a house without a sewer line or a septic system, how can you build a nuclear power plant without a waste depository? Dry casks sitting around above ground for the next few thousand years? Does that really sound like a good idea? Will our great-great-grandchildren really thank us for that?

February 26, 2010 - Knoxville News-Sentinel - TVA agrees to evaluate MOX fuel for two reactors - The National Nuclear Security Administration announced today that it had signed an interagency agreement with TVA to evaluate the psosible use of MOX (mixed-oxide) fuel, made with surplus plutonium from nuclear weapons, in the Sequoyah and Browns Ferry nuclear reactors. According to the NNSA release, converting the plutonium to spent fuel "is an essential step in U.S. efforts to dispose of 34 metric tons of surplus weapon-grade plutonium withdrawn from the nuclear weapons program." The U.S. effort parallels what's taking place in Russia, the federal agency said. In a statement, NNSA's Ken Baker said: "The MOX program is an important example of this Administration's commitment to irreversibly disposing of surplus nuclear weapons material in a way that realizes the energy value of the material and advances our nuclear nonproliferation agenda. This agreement is an important step in evaluating the use of MOX fuel in domestic nuclear reactors, and we look forward to working with the TVA as we move forward."

February 26, 2010 - Associated Press - Energy Solutions says Depleted Uranium Shipments Will Come to Utah - Depleted uranium from a government cleanup in South Carolina may be detoured, but Val Christensen of EnergySolutions Inc. said Thursday he still expects two more rail loads of the radioactive waste to roll into Utah. Christensen said the U.S. Energy Department will store the diverted trainloads in Texas only temporarily. The statement to investors Thursday contrasts sharply with Utah Governor Gary Herbert's announcement that he had blocked two more trainloads of depleted uranium en route to the EnergySolutions disposal site in Tooele County. "I'm still hopeful we'll get those shipments in 2010," company President and CEO Val Christensen told investors Thursday in a conference call to discuss fourth-quarter and 2009 financial results, his first since the stock-rattling departure of founder Steve Creamer last week. A trainload filled with about 5,000 drums arrived in Utah in December over Herbert's objections. The Utah Division of Radiation Control is sampling the contents this week and will have the waste tested to confirm that it currently meets the state's Class A limits for low-level radioactive waste. While the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission reaffirmed its position about a year ago that DU is Class A low-level radioactive waste, the agency said more study is needed to set up guidelines for burying large quantities of DU in shallow disposal sites like the one at EnergySolutions. Both state and federal regulators now are developing those guidelines.

February 25, 2010 - Top News - Radiation Errors in Missouri, 76 Patients Receive Overdose - A hospital in Missouri on Wednesday revealed that its 76 patients received too much radiation, the large majority with brain cancer, over a five-year period because powerful new radiation equipment had been established in a incorrect manner. The hospital, CoxHealth in Springfield, posted that 50% of all patients undergoing a particular type of treatment, i. e., stereotactic radiation therapy, were overdosed by nearly 50 percent than it was prescribed. In addition, CoxHealth administrators reported that the physicist who calibrated the machine in 2004 messed up, and 76 of the 152 patients who have received the treatment since then received an overdose. Stereotactic therapy delivers radiation in such high doses that usually only one treatment is needed. It is commonly used to treat small tumors in the head, which must be firmly stabilized, allowing radiation to be delivered to a precise location. “We have also learned that the incident here at CoxHealth is, unfortunately, not an isolated occurrence. Rather, similar instances of medical overradiation have occurred at other hospitals throughout the country”, Robert H. Bezanson, the hospital’s President and Chief Executive quoted.

February 25, 2010 - Mobile Enterprise Magazine - EWG Looks at Cell Phone Radiation - The Environmental Working Group has released its 2010 Cell Phone Radiation Report, which looks at the amount of radiation emitted by each mobile phone and smartphone currently on the market. RIM's smartphones run the gamut of levels, with the BlackBerry Bold 9700 "pushing the edge of radiofrequency radiation safety limits set by the Federal Communications Commission," according to the organization, and the Storm 9530 among the lowest emitters available. In the middle of the range are the Storm2 9550 and Curve 8900.

February 25, 2010 - PRNewswire - Next Generation Ultrasound: An Evolution in Diagnosis and Therapy - Exposure to radiation from imaging equipment is constantly subjected to scrutiny from regulatory authorities. Ultrasound poses no radiation threat and is constantly further developed to accentuate primary and secondary diagnosis. The next wave in ultrasound technology will witness advancements in Elastography and Contrast Enhanced Ultrasound (CEUS) for diagnosis. High intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) is also emerging to treat pathologies that usually require surgical intervention. In its upcoming web conference taking place on Thursday, 4th March 2010, at 3 p.m. GMT Frost & Sullivan will focus on the Next Generation Ultrasound Market in Europe. Research Analyst, Shriram Shanmugham, will present an analysis of advancements such as High Intensity Focused Ultrasound for therapy and contrast enhanced ultrasound for diagnosis.

February 25, 2010 - Bloomberg News - Exxon ‘Recklessly’ Hid Radiation Risk, Workers Claim - Exxon Mobil Corp., the largest U.S. energy company, showed “reckless and reprehensible” behavior by failing to protect workers from dangerous radioactive material in used oil-drilling pipes, a lawyer for 16 men told a Louisiana jury. “Exxon recklessly put profits above workers’ safety,” Frank Buck told jurors in Gretna, Louisiana, today in his closing argument at the end of a five-week trial. Buck told jurors they should award more than $17 million to a group of 16 pipe cleaners who sued Exxon, claiming they were exposed to high levels of radium in the residue, or “scale,” that built up inside the pipes and now fear they may develop cancer. Jurors began deliberating this afternoon after getting instructions from Judge John Peytavin. The workers, all former employees of Intracoastal Tubular Services, or ITCO, at a site in Harvey, Louisiana, near New Orleans, claimed that internal Exxon memos showed the Irving, Texas-based company had information about the risk beginning in the 1930s. ITCO, which went out of business in 1992, is also a defendant in the trial. The claims in the Gretna trial are among thousands pending against Exxon and other oil companies over allegations that they put employees and residents near pipe-cleaning operations at risk from radiation-related diseases, particularly cancer.

February 25, 2010 - Your Industry News - Protecting Nuclear Power Plants Against Nature´s Fury - There has been a misconception since the early days of nuclear power that human error or mechanical failure, in other words risk factors within the plant itself, is the most significant variables regarding possible radiological release to the environment. In fact, the greatest threat to a plant´s operation may lie outside its walls. Nuclear power plants all over the world are exposed to natural hazards, such as hurricanes, floods, fires, tsunamis, volcanoes and earthquakes. With safety always a key concern, engineers, safety specialists and architects also have to take extreme natural forces into consideration. The importance of external events in the selection of the site, the design, construction and operation of nuclear power plants became apparent when an earthquake with its epicenter in Romania caused superficial damage to the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant in nearby Bulgaria in 1977. A distinct new emphasis on external hazards in nuclear safety consideration followed the earthquake that hit the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant in July 2007, the largest to ever affect a nuclear facility.

February 25, 2010 - PR-USA.net - American Ecology Announces Name Change to US Ecology, Inc. - American Ecology Corporation (the "Company") (NASDAQ: ECOL) today announced that it has changed its corporate name to US Ecology, Inc. to align with its recognized brand name in the hazardous and radioactive waste disposal industry. The Company will continue to trade on the NASDAQ Global Select market under the ticker "ECOL." American Ecology Corporation was formed as a holding company in 1984 when Teledyne divested its waste disposal assets. Since that time, the Company has operated its facilities under the US Ecology name and built significant brand recognition as one of the top providers of hazardous and radioactive waste transportation, treatment, recycling and disposal services. James Baumgardner, President and Chief Executive Officer, commented, "Changing our corporate name to US Ecology better reflects the strong brand we have created with our unique network of facilities. It will also simplify contracting, government reporting and show our customers and investment community that we are truly one team dedicated to the long term growth of this business." The change in corporate name will not affect the validity or transferability of any existing stock certificates that bear the American Ecology Corporation name. Stockholders with American Ecology certificates should continue to hold them. No action is required.

February 25, 2010 - Albany Times Union - Examine scale of tritium leaks - I am concerned about the health and welfare of my family and neighbors, and applaud those who educate the public. However, I'm amused at your attempt to excite the world over tritium leaks from nuclear power stations ("No place for oops," editorial, Feb. 5.) You are right that tritium is radioactive, a form of hydrogen, and that radioactive materials are carcinogens. What is missing in your editorial is an understanding of scale. Take fireworks as an example to examine scale. Tritium would be analogous to the little "snaps" that one can throw against a hard surface for a pop and flash. These are safe enough that many parents allow their kids to play with them. The other end of the scale would be radon, which is analogous to the most spectacular aerial fireworks. Such fireworks release a lot of energy, and the show crews are often licensed. In the world of radioactive material, tritium is a pathetic wimp. To detect it, the instrumentation is specially designed to be super sensitive. Our atmosphere creates tritium from sunlight. The air one breathes contains this radioactive material. There is no place you can go to be isolated from radiation. At higher altitudes, you are exposed to more cosmic radiation. Underground, you encounter radon. Our world, air, water and food are radioactive. Somehow, most of us will not get cancer. I am confident that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and power station operators will find the problems and minimize the impact on the environment, even if the impact is from tritium. That is just how good they are. There is no energy source that is acceptable to everyone and none without environmental impact.

February 25, 2010 - Ashland Daily Times - Nuclear waste on Native American reservations - Dear EarthTalk: Some time ago there were issues with Native American tribes storing nuclear waste on their land, something that was both unhealthy to the communities and caused considerable controversy among tribal leaders. Where is this issue today? — M. Spenser, via e-mail. Native tribes across the American West have been and continue to be subjected to significant amounts of radioactive and otherwise hazardous waste as a result of living near nuclear test sites, uranium mines, power plants and toxic waste dumps. And in some cases tribes are actually hosting hazardous waste on their sovereign reservations — which are not subject to the same environmental and health standards as U.S. land — in order to generate revenues. Native American advocates argue that siting such waste on or near reservations is an "environmental justice" problem, given that twice as many Native families live below the poverty line than other sectors of U.S. society and often have few if any options for generating income. "In the quest to dispose of nuclear waste, the government and private companies have disregarded and broken treaties, blurred the definition of Native American sovereignty, and directly engaged in a form of economic racism akin to bribery," says Bayley Lopez of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. He cites example after example of the government and private companies taking advantage of the "overwhelming poverty on native reservations by offering them millions of dollars to host nuclear waste storage sites." The issue came to a head — and Native advocates hope a turning point — in 2007 when public pressure forced the Skull Valley band of Utah's Goshute tribe to forego plans to offer their land, which is already tucked between a military test site, a chemical weapons depot and a toxic magnesium production facility, for storing spent nuclear fuel above ground. The facility would have been a key link in the chain of getting nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain, the U.S. government's proposed permanent storage facility.

February 25, 2010 - BBC News - Gulls contaminated with radiation culled at Sellafield - A cull is being considered of gulls which may have become contaminated with radiation from the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in Cumbria. Bosses say some birds may have got into open spent fuel storage ponds and become contaminated by low-level waste. Sellafield Limited has stressed any contamination is so low that it would not pose a threat to public health. However, the company is to consider a major culling operation in an effort to control bird numbers around the site. A company spokeswoman said: "We are aware of the potential for gulls to become contaminated with low levels of radioactivity as a result of the operations at Sellafield. "Contamination is particularly evident within the historic facilities such as open fuel storage ponds, which gulls can access, although there are a number of measures in place to prevent them from doing so easily. "Monitoring and analysis has shown that the contamination is at such a low level that it poses no threat to health."

February 25, 2010 - ANI - Heaviest chemical element 112 named "Copernicium" - Reports indicate that the heaviest recognized chemical element with the atomic number 112 has officially been named "Copernicium" and carries the chemical symbol "Cn". Buzz up!The element was discovered at the GSI Helmholtzzentrum fur Schwerionenforschung in Germany on February 9, 1996, by an international team of scientists headed by Sigurd Hofmann. Using the 100-meter long GSI accelerator, they fired zinc ions onto a lead foil. The fusion of the atomic nuclei of the two elements produced an atom of the new element 112. This atom was only stable for the fraction of a second. The scientists were able to identify the new element by measuring the alpha particles emitted during the radioactive decay of the atom with the help of highly sensitive analytical procedures. Further independent experiments confirmed the discovery of the element. Last year, IUPAC officially recognized the existence of element 112, acknowledged the GSI team's discovery and invited them to propose a name.

February 25, 2010 - Nuclear Street - Steven Chu: Why We Need More Nuclear Power; U.S. Secretary of Energy posts his thoughts about nuclear power on his Facebook page - There has been a vigorous discussion here on Facebook since my last post about President Obama's announcement of a loan guarantee for what will become the first nuclear power plant to break ground in nearly three decades. I'd like to make a few points to continue the discussion. Some of you expressed a preference for solar and wind power over nuclear energy. I share your enthusiasm for these renewable sources of energy, and, because of the success of the Recovery Act, we are on pace to double our renewable energy capacity by 2012. But no single technology will provide all of the answers. Wind and solar now provide about 3 percent of our electricity, compared to 20 percent for nuclear. While we are working at hard as we can to promote energy efficiency in every part sector of America, it is likely that our energy demand will continue to rise. In fact, the Energy Information Administration projects an almost 20 percent increase in overall energy demand and over 30 percent increase in electricity demand over the next 25 years under current laws. If we want to make a serious dent in carbon dioxide emissions -- not to mention having cleaner air and cleaner water -- then nuclear power has to be on the table. Also remember that wind and solar are intermittent energy sources. The sun isn't always shining, and the wind isn't always blowing. Without technological breakthroughs in efficient, large scale energy storage, it will be difficult to rely on intermittent renewables for much more than 20-30 percent of our electricity. To overcome this problem, we are pursuing breakthrough approaches to grid-scale energy storage as well as stimulating the wide-spread adoption of known technologies such as pumped hydro energy storage. But nuclear power can provide large amounts of carbon-free power that is always available.

February 25, 2010 - POGO - Oak Ridge Slow to Secure Stock of Uranium-233 - On Monday, the Department of Energy (DOE) Inspector General (IG) released a report on why it has been taking so long for DOE to secure the stock of Uranium-233 (U-233) at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The stock of U-233, an isotope with highly radioactive and has dangerous properties, still sits in a "deteriorating" ORNL facility even though DOE began planning to dispose of the material back in 2001. As some of you may recall, POGO actually has some pretty direct experience with this material. During a 2005 site visit, POGO investigators were able to park in front of the ORNL building that held the 1,000 cans of uranium-233 and walk around for about 15 minutes before guards finally approached them and escorted them from the area. We determined that ORNL was the most vulnerable site in the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Fast forward five years: the IG now finds that despite an “expenditure of about $36 million, project planning and design had yet to be completed” to safely and securely dispose of the material. While the report highlights inadequate contractor oversight and ongoing performance and monitoring problems, the most troubling aspect is that it reflects a disturbing set of priorities at DOE. As the President’s FY 2011 budget for DOE construction project shoots through the roof, like a large-bore powder gun at Los Alamos, the funds decrease for nuclear safeguards and security, defense nuclear security, and downblending of the dangerous highly enriched uranium into low enriched uranium.

February 25, 2010 - The Tennessean - Thorium could produce power more efficiently - "The concept of nuclear power without waste or proliferation fears has obvious political appeal in the U.S.," says Wired magazine (January 2010). Understatement of the year! Research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory under Alvin Weinberg covering two decades proved that thorium has been a viable substitute for uranium since 1970. In fact, a thorium-powered plant produced electricity at Oak Ridge for more than five years. Why the 40-year lapse in interest in this superior fuel? Precisely because it did not produce bomb-making material. The Cold War arms race targeted many victims, and thorium electric generation was among the unfortunate. Thorium proves 50 percent more efficient than uranium in at least two configurations. Existing plants can use it without extensive modification or, even more efficiently, in a "liquefied fluoride thorium reactor.'' Nature provides far more thorium than uranium — a 1,000-year supply, with a mere $10,000 of the element fueling an installation indefinitely. Does our government recognize this breakthrough? After the 2008 election, renowned climatologist James Hansen cited thorium as a potential fuel source in an open letter to President Barack Obama. Further, three bills in Congress would exploit this potential bonanza. U.S. Sens. Orrin Hatch and Harry Reid authored the Thorium Energy and Security Act to provide funding for implementation of this fuel. Sen. Hatch said, "I don't know of anything more beneficial to the country as environmentally sound as . . . thorium."

February 25, 2010 - Tri-City Herald - Energy group wants Yucca Mountain reconsidered - The Department of Energy needs to analyze the safety and other consequences of terminating development of a national repository for high-level radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain, Nev., according to the Energy Communities Alliance. The alliance sent a letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu on Tuesday saying it is "frustrated by the lack of communication that has come from DOE on this issue." Richland council member Bob Thompson is chairman of the group, which includes coalitions of local governments near DOE nuclear cleanup sites, including a Hanford-area coalition. The Hanford Communities is made up of the three Tri-Cities, Benton and Franklin counties and the Port of Benton. The Energy Communities Alliance also is asking DOE to provide local governments with grants to hire technical assistance to analyze the impacts on communities. The alliance is concerned that DOE filed a request Feb. 2 to suspend Yucca Mountain's license application and announced plans to withdraw the license completely within a month. Hanford's high-level radioactive tank waste is planned to be treated at the vitrification plant and then sent as glass logs to a national repository, which was planned to be Yucca Mountain. It also has highly radioactive fuel planned to be sent to Yucca Mountain.

February 25, 2010 - Washington Times - How to waste $10 billion - So often in politics, what makes the headlines is only half the story. For the other half, you've got to do a little digging. Last week, President Obama announced that the federal government would guarantee $8 billion in loans for the construction of two nuclear power reactors. On the face of it, this represented good news: The nation faces serious energy challenges, and no new nuclear plants have been built in 30 years. What the president didn't explain was what his administration planned on doing with the nuclear waste - either the waste produced by these new reactors or the waste we already have in temporary storage facilities in 39 states. He didn't explain it because, earlier this month, he ditched the only responsible and feasible option this country had for the clean disposal of nuclear waste: the Yucca Mountain Storage Facility in Nevada. Right now, our office is actively conferring with other governors' offices, as well as with our state attorney general, to explore all options - including legal options - to prevent the U.S. Department of Energy from closing down the Yucca Mountain project. In fact, our state's attorney general yesterday began pursuing the legal option. Let me explain why. Since the Yucca Mountain site was selected in 1987, the federal government has spent billions of dollars and countless man-hours preparing for the storage project. During the intervening 23 years, presidents and their administrations of both parties have supported the project, and despite the glacial pace of the nuclear storage permitting process and foot-dragging on the part of the Department of Energy, the Yucca Mountain project was on the verge of functioning as a safe and centralized storage facility. Taxpayers, meanwhile, had invested billions into the project.

February 25, 2010 - Science Insider - Holdren Takes Lumps From House Panel on Scientific Integrity - Presidential science adviser John Holdren found himself in some hotter-than-usual water today during a congressional hearing on the Administration's proposed 2011 research budget. Legislators from both sides of the aisle pressed Holdren to explain several recent Administration decisions that they felt had failed to take into account sound science. And their ire was fueled by Holdren's confession that a report on how to improve scientific integrity among federal agencies is almost 8 months overdue. In March of last year President Barack Obama directed Holden to develop guidelines "designed to guarantee scientific integrity throughout the executive branch." The exercise was a reaction to several celebrated incidents during the Bush Administration in which scientists had been muzzled, documents altered, and information withheld from the public. Due in July, the proposed guidelines are still being vetted by senior officials at several agencies. Holden admitted today that the assignment has been much tougher than he expected. He told the committee about "the difficulties of constructing a set of guidelines that would be applicable to all agencies and accepted by all concerned." And he personally apologized to Representative Paul Broun (R-GA), who had written him three letters since July asking about the status of the review, for "the appalling delay." Broun accepted the apology, but the former physician was hardly mollified. Broun believes that the "magnitude of climate change is exaggerated" and that there is "no scientific consensus" on the effects of rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Still, Holdren's slight of his letters—in which he cited alleged manipulation and mishandling of decisions ranging from the health effects of greenhouse gases to fuel standards for cars—gave him a platform from which to criticize what he called the Administration's "arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence" toward science. "As a scientist," he added, "I want to know the answers. The American public deserves the answers, and we're not getting them."

February 25, 2010 - Las Vegas Review-Journal - South Carolina attorney general to intervene in Yucca dispute - South Carolina's attorney general said Wednesday that he plans to press federal regulators to stick to long-standing plans to open a Nevada repository for thousands of tons of nuclear waste, much of which would come from a former weapons plant near the Georgia line. Henry McMaster, the state's top lawyer, says he will file a petition this week asking the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for permission to intervene in a dispute over the Yucca Mountain site. "South Carolina has a vested interest in insuring that the Yucca Mountain licensing proceedings continue, so that the spent fuel and other nuclear material now being temporarily stored in our state will be safely placed in the Yucca Mountain repository, as mandated by the United States Congress," McMaster said in a statement released Wednesday. For two decades, the proposed site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas has been targeted to house the nation's high-level nuclear waste, including more than 4,000 metric tons of waste from the federal Savannah River Site in South Carolina. For now, high-level waste is stored at 80 sites around the nation, typically at nuclear power plants or places like the Savannah River site.  The Savannah River Site, a former nuclear weapons complex near Aiken, opened in the early 1950s and once produced plutonium and tritium for atomic bombs. The site's reactors have been shut down for more than 15 years.

February 24, 2010 - San Francisco Chronicle -Top-rated cell phones also rank high in radiation emissions - An environmental activist group has issued its latest list of popular cell phones that emit comparatively high levels of RF radiation, though all are within federal limits. The press release and full report on new 2010 cell phones by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), based in Washington, D.C., are intended in part to highlight the fact that technology writers and product reviewers rarely evaluate radiation emissions when rating cell phones. The press release singles out four recent, well-reviewed cell phones: Motorola Droid, Blackberry Bold 9700, LG Chocolate Touch and HTC Nexus One by Google. "EWG has found that all four phones' emissions are pushing the edge of radiofrequency radiation safety limits set by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)," according to the group's press release. A separate document, "Cell Phone Radiation Science Review," charges, among other things, that "Current FCC standards fail to provide an adequate margin of safety for cell phone radiation exposure and lack a meaningful biological basis."

February 24, 2010 - The Sun Times - Mildly radioactive parts to move through city port - Sixteen 100-tonne, school-bus size steam generators, considered nuclear waste, are to go through Owen Sound en route to Sweden for recycling. A $34-million contract Bruce Power has signed with Studsvik will see the Swedish company truck the steam generators, considered intermediate-level nuclear waste, to an ocean-bound transport at Owen Sound for the trip across the Atlantic. Bruce Power spokesman John Peevers said the first phase will deal with 16 generators removed from Unit 1 and Unit 2. An additional 16 generators from Unit 3 and Unit 4 face the same fate in a few years when they are removed when those units are refurbished. Peevers said a date has yet to be determined, but they are looking for it to happen in the fall. "They are going to go by truck, one at a time from the site here to Owen Sound," said Peevers. "We are still looking at the route, which will have to undergo an engineering evaluation and approval from the province." Peevers said the generators don't pose a risk to the public. "They will be welded shut and they will be secure," said Peevers. "Once they are in Owen Sound they will be in a secured staging area until they get shipped off out of Owen Sound, through the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Seaway, across the Atlantic and to Sweden."

February 24, 2010 - Associated Press - Future of Vermont's only nuclear plant in balance as state Senate votes on relicensing - It's decision day for Vermont's only nuclear plant, as the state Senate prepares for a vote that could determine Vermont Yankee's future. Senators are expected to vote on — and defeat — a bill Wednesday morning that would allow the consideration of a 20-year extension on a license for the plant currently set to expire in March of 2012. Supporters of the move to close Vermont Yankee say it's getting old and less reliable and that its owner, New Orleans-based Entergy Corp., has not proven itself trustworthy. Backers of keeping it open say Vermont needs the energy from the plant and its good-paying jobs. Even if it loses this vote, Vermont Yankee could ask lawmakers to reconsider next year.

February 24, 2010 - World Nuclear News - Clean bill of health for Ukraine's nuclear plants - A year-long assessment exercise carried out by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the European Commission (EC) has found that safety at Ukraine's nuclear power plants is in line with international standards. Ukraine's Energoatom announced the completion of the project to verify the safety of the country's nuclear plants, which was launched as part of a memorandum of understanding (MoU) on energy cooperation between the European Union (EU) and Ukraine. Over the course of the project, safety assessments were carried out at all 15 reactors by safety experts from Ukraine, the IAEA and the EC. The assessment looked at safety in four areas: power plant design; power plant operation; radioactive waste; and regulatory issues. The international experts found that safety in all areas was generally in line with international standards.

February 24, 2010 - San Diego Union-Tribune - San Onofre nuclear plant sets up new Web site - The San Onofre nuclear power plant has established a new Web site aimed at communicating directly with its neighbors. The oceanfront plant, which has been operating in north San Diego County since 1968, recently aroused concerns when safety sirens accidentally sounded twice in San Clemente during a three-week span. And last week an internal company memo was leaked that revealed a Nuclear Regulatory Commission survey found some plant workers fear retaliation by managers if they report safety concerns. That came on the heels of a federal whistle-blower complaint filed by two plant workers in November, in which they said they were punished for reporting a safety lapse to the NRC, and revelations by operators that they had to redo a weld that joined a steam generator to a reactor, because the first one was faulty. The events prompted residents to show up at San Clemente City Council meetings to ask the city to look into the plant’s safety. Some also wanted plant operator Southern California Edison not to restart the Unit 2 reactor, which is undergoing extensive maintenance, until they were sure it was safe.  San Clemente, in southern Orange County, is the city nearest the plant. Plant workers have rewelded the faulty joint, and Edison and NRC officials say the plant is safe.

February 24, 2010 - San Diego Union-Tribune - Company has plan for small reactors; General Atomics sees nuclear waste as fuel - A San Diego defense contractor has come up with an early design for a compact commercial nuclear reactor that aims to generate power using the nation’s stockpile of spent nuclear fuel and other nuclear waste. General Atomics’ Energy Multiplier Module, or EM2, is among a handful of relatively miniature reactors that are being developed by companies seeking to capitalize on a renewed interest in nuclear power. EM2, though, has zeroed in on a key problem with nuclear power: what to do with the waste. By developing ways to tap into energy remaining in spent fuel from large reactors or depleted uranium, the so-called fast reactor could help ease the thorny problem of finding a home for radioactive waste. EM2 has a long road ahead and easily could be derailed by anything from shifting political winds to a lack of development funding. “We’re trying to get the U.S. Department of Energy, for example, to move forward with supporting this,” said John Parmentola, senior vice president for energy at the privately held General Atomics. “And we’re also looking toward the private sector economics to see what the opportunities are, to see if there is a new path for the U.S. to carve out in nuclear energy.” The design calls for a reactor about 60 feet long and 16 feet in diameter — small enough to be transported on a flatbed truck — that can be used as an on-site power source by manufacturers, for example.

February 24, 2010 - Tri-City Herald - Energy Communities Alliance wants Yucca Mountain reconsidered - The Department of Energy needs to analyze the safety and other consequences of terminating development of a national repository for high-level radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain, Nev., according to the Energy Communities Alliance. The alliance sent a letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu on Tuesday saying it is "frustrated by the lack of communication that has come from DOE on this issue." Richland council member Bob Thompson is chairman of the group, which includes coalitions of local governments near DOE nuclear cleanup sites, including a Hanford-area coalition. The Hanford Communities is made up of the three Tri-Cities, Benton and Franklin counties and the Port of Benton. The Energy Communities Alliance also is asking DOE to provide local governments with grants to hire technical assistance to analyze the impacts on communities. The alliance is concerned that DOE filed a request Feb. 2 to suspend Yucca Mountain's license application and announced plans to withdraw the license completely within a month.

February 24, 2010 - The Tennessean - Nuclear reversal smacks of politics; Loans will put us on hook for trouble-prone industry - President Barack Obama's efforts to reach broad consensus on a range of tough issues — the war in Afghanistan, health care, jobs — in his first year in the White House have been admirable. But when it comes to nuclear power, the president's suddenly aggressive support should be a cause of concern for all Americans. Despite the fear that other alternatives to fossil fuel energy cannot meet U.S. power needs in the years to come, despite assurances from the nuclear power industry that they are ready to expand responsibly, there are serious questions about safety, environmental impact and about cost-effectiveness that should be answered before the country plunges into new nuclear-plant production. The president mentioned job creation frequently in his Feb. 16 announcement of an $8.3 billion loan guarantee to help Southern Co. build a nuclear power plant in Georgia. It would be the first new plant licensed in the U.S. since the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island plant in 1979. Other companies are on a Department of Energy short list for help, and Obama has proposed more than $50 billion in loan guarantees for nuclear plant construction.

February 24, 2010 - Heritage Foundation Press Release - President's Yucca Policy Inconsistent with Nuclear Rhetoric - President Barack Obama's proposals on nuclear energy do little to back up his pro-nuclear rhetoric. Most worrisome is his effort to terminate the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository project. His budget provides no funding for Yucca construction activities, and the Department of Energy (DOE) has filed a motion to permanently withdraw its application to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to construct the repository. Such action not only flouts existing statute but threatens to end America's nuclear renaissance before it even begins. According to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) of 1982, as amended,[1] the federal government was obliged to begin collecting nuclear waste by 1998. According to the Yucca Mountain Development Act of 2002,[2] Yucca Mountain was to be the waste repository. Despite having collected over $30 billion in waste disposal fees from electricity ratepayers and spending $10 billion on Yucca development, no waste has been collected. This has put the federal government in partial breach of contract even before the President decided to ignore existing statute and terminate the Yucca program. With over 60 suits already filed, the federal government has paid out $214 million in settlements. Without Yucca Mountain or any backup plan, this taxpayer liability will amount to over $12.3 billion through 2020 and $500 million annually thereafter. Terminating the program without regard to existing statute exacerbates these problems, and communities are already beginning to investigate the feasibility of pursuing additional legal actions.

February 24, 2010 - New York Times - A Reactor That Burns Depleted Fuel Emerges as a Potential 'Game Changer'  - After years in a status closer to science fiction than reality, the traveling wave nuclear reactor is emerging as a potential "game changer," according to a U.S. Department of Energy official. It helps that the reactor is the product of a team of top scientists backed by the deep pockets of Microsoft founder Bill Gates. This reactor (pdf) works something like a cigarette. A chain reaction is launched in one end of a closed cylinder of spent uranium fuel, creating a slow-moving "deflagration," a wave of nuclear fission reactions that keeps breeding neutrons as it makes way through the container, keeping the self-sustaining reaction going. And it goes and goes, perhaps for 100 years, said former Bechtel Corp. physicist John Gilleland. He heads TerraPower LLC, a private research team based outside Seattle that is pursuing the traveling wave reactor design. "We believe we've developed a new type of nuclear reactor that can represent a nearly infinite supply of low-cost energy, carbon-free energy for the world," Gilleland said in a presentation. If it can be built, a commercial version of the reactor is 15 years away or more, Gilleland acknowledged. But that could keep its development in step with the long-range policy and business investment decisions that lie ahead for the future of nuclear power fuel cycles and reactor designs.

February 24, 2010 - Asbury Park Press - Cooling towers at Oyster Creek are the topic of DEP's hearing Wednesday - The first round of public hearings on the proposed requirement for cooling towers at the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station will be held Wednesday from 1 to 4 p.m. and from 7 to 9 p.m. at the municipal building on Lacey Road. Last month, the Department of Environmental Protection issued a long-awaited draft New Jersey Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit that would require construction of the towers to recycle cooling water. DEP officials say towers would reduce the daily draft requirements of water from Barnegat Bay that is used to cool the plant's heat exchangers. Cutting back that daily flow would save fish eggs, larvae and tiny organisms that can not be screened out of the system and are killed when they are sucked through the plant, say environmental activists who have pressed the DEP to make towers mandatory. But officials with plant operator Exelon insist that forcing towers on Oyster Creek would make the 41-year-old plant uneconomical to operate.

February 24, 2010 - Atlanta Progressive News - Activists Criticize Obama's Nuclear Power Loan Guarantees - President Barack Obama's announcement last week that he has promised funding in the Fiscal Year 2011 budget for new nuclear power reactors in the US, with some 54.5 billion dollars in federal loan guarantees, has ignited a firestorm of local and national resistance. Obama also announced that Atlanta-based Southern Company has been conditionally approved for 8.3 billion dollars in loan guarantees for two new nuclear reactors to be built at Plant Vogtle in Burke County, Georgia. The Obama Administration is considering at least a half-dozen additional loan applications for nuclear projects. The Vogtle expansion would be the first new nuclear plants in the US in 30 years. "What you may not know about the Vogtle deal is that we taxpayers are not just providing loan guarantees, we're providing the actual loans, through the Federal Financing Bank," the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) said in a press release. "And you also may not know the Southern Company has not yet accepted the conditions of the loan--and for various reasons, it may not. In other words, it's not a done deal." "I am very disappointed the Obama Administration plans to squander billions of our tax dollars and years of delay to pursue risky and radioactive nuclear reactors. This is a direct theft from the future promise of renewable [energy]," Glenn Carroll, Coordinator of Nuclear Watch South, told Atlanta Progressive News.

February 24, 2010 - Yakima Herald-Republic - Nuclear industry necessary and a risk worth taking - We give high marks to President Barack Obama for his decision last week to extend $8.3 billion in loan guarantees to help build two nuclear reactors in Georgia. The net effect of this move will be to reinvigorate the nation's moribund nuclear power industry. Though nuclear power produces far fewer greenhouse gas omissions than ordinary fossil fuels, it has played a minimal role in terms of our overall energy generation. Though the U.S. has 104 operating nuclear power generators, none of the reactors ordered after 1973 -- when the Three Mile Island incident occurred -- was finished. The announcement even elicited applause, though faint, from U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Pasco. "I take President Obama at his word that he wants to make new nuclear reactors a reality -- and that's good news for (the Tri-Cities) and our nation," Hastings said in a news release. The 4th District congressman, though, warned that Obama's support of nuclear power should not be used as a foil for seeking a bipartisan endorsement of the administration's cap-and-trade legislation, which Hastings does not favor. There's no question Obama is seeking Republicans to back a broad initiative regarding energy policies. At this point, regardless of Obama's intentions, it's refreshing to see the White House embrace nuclear power as an important ingredient in the nation's mix of energy sources along with wind and solar power.

February 23, 2010 - Sideways News - Bill Gates calls for energy miracles - Microsoft founder Bill Gates is calling for "energy miracles" to help achieve zero carbon emissions by 2050. Speaking at the annual TED Summit in the US last week, he said that developed nations will need to completely decarbonise the energy they use within 40 years to avert the worst effects of climate change. He added that reducing carbon emissions by between 50% and 80% by 2050 will be insufficient and more investment in researching green technologies is needed to help meet more ambitious targets. However, he said that current levels of spending on zero carbon technologies are "ridiculously" low. Mr Gates is himself investing in a nuclear technology project, an area he claims is often ignored by green tech investors. The TerraPower project is a new Traveling Wave Reactor that promises to generate power from waste radioactive material. It burns uranium waste slowly, meaning a 60-year supply could be added to a reactor at once and not touched for decades. According to Mr Gates, spent uranium supplies in the US alone could power the nation for 100 years.

February 23, 2010 - Tri-City Herald - Tri-City leaders ready to file suit over Yucca Mountain - Three Tri-City leaders say they are prepared to file a federal lawsuit Mondayto stop the Obama administration from terminating plans to make Yucca Mountain, Nev., a national repository for Hanford and other waste. They believe it is just one of many that will be filed and then combined by the courts into a single case, said Bob Ferguson, Bill Lampson and Gary Petersen at a news conference Monday in Richland. Last week they had a letter delivered to the White House asking for a chance to discuss issues before a lawsuit is filed. They have not received a response nor are they optimistic they will, Ferguson said. A day after their letter was delivered, Aiken County, S.C., filed a federal lawsuit to prevent the federal government from abandoning plans to open Yucca Mountain as the nation's repository for used fuel from commercial nuclear power plants and high-level radioactive waste from nuclear weapons production. About two-thirds of the weapons waste planned to go to a national repository is at Hanford, Ferguson said. But 13 states, including South Carolina, have weapons waste that by law must go to a national repository, Petersen said. In addition, consumers of electricity produced at nuclear power plants have paid $33 billion into a fund for a waste repository program, and some utilities may file lawsuits, Ferguson said.

February 23, 2010 - Federal News Radio - Energy and FBI join forces to fight dirty bombs - To keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of potential terrorists, the FBI and the National Nuclear Security Administration are now working with officials in Slovokia. The new program will help Slovokian security agencies detect and stop the trafficking of nuclear and radioactive materials across their border. Joining us to discuss the program is Elly Melamed, a Deputy Director in the Energy Department's NNSA.

February 23, 2010 - San Angelo Standard - PET/CT is useful in certain cases - When your doctor needs a clearer image of what’s happening inside your body than an individual PET or CT scan can provide, a combination PET/CT scan could be the right choice. This technology combines the imaging power of positron emission tomography (PET) and computed tomography (CT). The dual-purpose machine provides more complete information than can be obtained when PET and CT scans are done separately, according to the Radiological Society of North America. Individually, the machines produce different kinds of information. A PET scan measures body functions, such as blood flow, oxygen use and how the body uses glucose (sugar). A CT scan produces detailed cross-sectional pictures of organs, bones and other tissues. Images from both scans can be called up on a computer, where they can be merged and manipulated. However, details are easier to see when the scans are taken at the same time using a PET/CT machine. The combined test may also reduce the need for additional imaging tests and other procedures. A combined scan is not necessary in every case, but it can be especially helpful in some circumstances.

February 23, 2010 - AllAfrica.com - FG to Install X-Ray Machines to Stem Human Trafficking - Mr. Ademola Seriki, the Minister of State for Interior, says Nigeria will install X-Ray machines at border posts in its effort to check human trafficking. Seriki spoke in Abuja when he received a delegation, led by Mr. Van der Arie Wiel, the Ambassador of the Netherlands in Nigeria, according to a statement, signed by Mr Stephen Nelson, Chief Press Secretary of the Ministry, The "Nigerian Government has reiterated its determination to eradicate all forms of illegal human trafficking in the country," the statement said. Seriki expressed gratitude to the government of the Netherlands for donating sophisticated X-Ray machines for the detection of persons being smuggled across the Nigerian border. He noted that Nigeria, like any other country, would continue to fight the battle with dedication in spite of limited at its disposal.

February 23, 2010 - Reuters - Newer heart CTs deliver far less radiation-US study - Newer CT technology that can capture an image of a beating heart in a single beat may offer one way of reducing a patient's exposure to excess radiation, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday. They said patients who got a type of heart scan called coronary angiography using the newer CT scanner technology received 91 percent less radiation than those who were scanned the traditional way using a computed tomography or CT scanner. "The amount of radiation that a patient would receive is about a 10th of that as compared to using the most traditional protocol," Dr. Andrew Einstein of Columbia University Medical Center in New York, whose study appears in the journal Radiology, said in a telephone interview. Radiation exposure from medical scans became a major concern of patients and lawmakers last fall after more than 200 patients were exposed to excess radiation during brain scans at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Although heart CTs only accounted for 2.3 million out of 65 to 70 million CT scans performed in 2006, they are worrisome because they deliver high radiation doses, Einstein said. "Since these are relatively high-dose tests, the ability to reduce the dose is a good thing," he said. Heart CTs offer a noninvasive way to look for blockages in heart arteries. Traditionally, most of these patients get an angiogram, in which a thin tube is inserted into heart arteries but not all patients are good candidates for this.

February 23, 2010 - Niagara Falls Review- Bruce nuclear exposure minimized - Though almost 200 people might have been exposed to high levels of alpha radiation at the Bruce Power nuclear plant in November, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission says the company took the right steps to minimize the threat. "CNSC staff has conducted an inspection and concludes that Bruce Power has taken appropriate action to contain the contamination and protect the heath and safety of workers," the oversight agency said in an update note. "There is no risk to the public or the environment." The commission heard from officials at the plant last week that elevated alpha radiation levels were discovered in late 2009 during refurbishment of the Bruce A Unit 1 reactor vault. The company immediately "tented off" the area it thought was contaminated, but some airborne contaminant likely leaked into the main vault. Bruce Power identified 192 workers whom it thinks might have been exposed to alpha radiation, but so far it has received test results on only 14 of them. The tests on those 14 con-c luded their exposure to the radiation was under the legal industrial maximum. It will be another four months until test results are done for all of the workers. Norman Sawyer, chief nuclear officer at the Bruce A Station on Lake Huron, told the CNSC there will be "a level of uncertainty" until those results are in. Alpha radiation, sometimes present in decaying fuel bundles, is dangerous if inhaled, but doesn't penetrate through skin.

February 23, 2010 - Reuters - South Africa eyes multiple nuclear power plants - South Africa plans to build multiple nuclear plants to plug the country's power deficit and reduce its carbon footprint, a senior official said on Tuesday. Director General at the ministry of energy Nelisiwe Magubane said one plant only would not make sense economically. "Nuclear is definitely on the table. We cannot build just one plant, it has to be a fleet," she told Reuters on the sidelines of an African utility conference in Durban. Magubane said the nuclear plants will be used to replace ageing coal-fired power plants, adding that between 2020 and 2030 some 7,000 MW would need to be built. "Because of liabilities like waste management we wouldn't want to leave it totally to private investors," she said. The last attempt to build the country's next nuclear plant, led by state-owned utility Eskom [ESCJ.UL], has been scratched due to a lack of funding. She said private investment would also help keep prices reasonable, adding that in comparison to prices offered elsewhere, the proposals put forward by the bidders in the last tender were "highly overpriced". "We might have been overcharged for Nuclear 1 -- that's the consensus. The price was so crazy compared to what others are offering," she said.  Bidders in the nuclear plant included France's Areva (CEPFi.PA) and U.S. company Westinghaus.

February 23, 2010 - Daily Reckoning - Like Steve Creamer, It’s Time to Hit the Exit - EnergySolutions, the Salt Lake City-based provider of specialized nuclear services, recently announced a change in its executive team, with Val John Christensen taking over the CEO mantle from Steve Creamer. What exactly does this mean for the company?Agora Financial expert editor Jim Nelson, reporting from Baltimore, Maryland, has a close read of the situation: “Friday evening, we wrote to you about some big news in the nuclear energy world, as well as an unfortunate second piece of news that accompanied our nuclear play, EnergySolutions Inc (NYSE:ES). “The company announced the resignation of its CEO, Steve Creamer, which led to a quick analyst downgrade. “It became evident during the ensuing analyst call that EnergySolutions mishandled this transition. While we still have high hopes for the company in the long term, we can’t ignore this major slip up. The mistake cost us nearly 19% in one day and may be a sign of mismanagement down the road… “Nuclear energy is finally coming around again, and we still believe there’s money to be made. We’ll keep looking and let you know when we find a better way to take advantage of it.”

February 23, 2010 - Rutland Herald - NRC confirms Yankee's earlier leak - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission confirmed Monday that a whistleblower told the truth last week when he told a member of the Vermont Legislative Oversight Panel there was an earlier radioactive leak of tritium at the Vermont Yankee plant in the same area that is the focus of the current leak. The confirmation by Donald Jackson, branch chief of reactor projects for NRC's Region One, again raised the question of why Entergy Nuclear executives repeatedly told Vermont regulators last year there were no underground pipes at the Vernon reactor carrying radionuclides. Jackson said the leak was in 2005, not two years ago, as the whistleblower had originally told Arnie Gundersen, a member of the oversight panel and a consultant to the Vermont Legislature. Entergy Nuclear spokesman Larry Smith said late Monday he could not discuss the 2005 tritium leak, saying he was still waiting for a letter from Entergy attorneys before talking about the issue. Entergy Nuclear is excavating the area near the advanced off-gas building, in particular an underground pipe tunnel connected to the building, which is the same area the whistleblower pointed to. The whistleblower said the area in question was in a "high-radiation" area and involved a "radioactive steam leak" which drained into a drain pit. Jackson said that the exact location of the current leak is still not known, although the advanced off-gas pipe tunnel is of strong interest, so it was impossible to say the two tritium leaks came from the same spot.

February 23, 2010 - Barents Observer - New law could turn Murmansk into nuclear dump - The Murmansk regional parliament last week approved the federal law on radioactive wastes. That could turn the region into a nuclear dump, environmentalists say. The law opens up for the underground storage of radioactive waste materials in the regions and leaves the regional and municipal administrations with a major responsibility for financing the storage facilities. The regional parliament – the Duma – approved the law amid massive protests from environmental organizations in the region. The new legislation is believed to have potentially serious consequences for people in the far northern region. Murmansk Oblast has a number of nuclear installations, both nuclear submarines, icebreakers and the Kola NPP, all of which leaves behind lethal waste materials. Leader of the local Nature and Youth organization, Vitalii Servetnik, maintains that the local politicians have prepared the ground for turning Murmansk Oblast a “nuclear dump”. Numerous requests from the locals have been ignored and neither the law, nor the proposed amendments have been discussed the way they should have, he adds in a press release posted at the organization’s website.

February 23, 2010 - Stewart Houston Times - Nuclear engineer visits HCHS - When Dax Jolly’s supervisors at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge wanted volunteers to visit high schools during “Engineering Week,” he knew exactly where he wanted to go. “I told them if I could come do it at my mom’s school, I’d volunteer,” said Jolly, a nuclear engineer who specializes in weapons. His bosses not only agreed to let Jolly visit Houston County High School, where his mother, Linda Jolly, is principal, they also donated 11 books to high school library. The reason for the visit, Jolly said, was to encourage students to think about careers in engineering related fields. “We want to let students that might not have been considering engineering to know that this is a viable option,” he said, noting engineering is promising for both men and women.  Y-12 visits schools – most of them in eastern Tennessee – every year during “Engineering Week.” “It’s good to see a company that does that because these students are our future,” Jolly said. Throughout the day, Jolly presented a slide show detailing engineering and conducted activities that required students to use processes they might not have realized were actually process of engineering.

February 23, 2010 - St. Catherine Standard - Nuclear waste recycling job goes to Swedish company - A Swedish company has been contracted to recycle some of Ontario's nuclear waste. In a $34-million contract, Bruce Power will ship 16 steam generators -- pulled from the Bruce A Unit 1 nuclear reactors -- and ship them to Sweden where the Swedish firm Studsvik will take over. The reactors are currently considered intermediate level nuclear waste. But once they are recycled, up to 90% of the metal in the generators can be reclaimed and reused. According to Bruce Power's Steve Cannon, the steam generators were removed during the 2007-2008 renewal project and have been stored in a warehouse at Ontario Power Generation's (OPG) Western Waste Management Facility ever since. Each reactor is approximately the size of a school bus and weighs up to 100 tonnes. "We're told Studsvik will segment the steam generators and roughly 90% of the metal will be melted down so it can be used again in other construction projects around the world," Cannon said. "Following the recycling work in Sweden, any radioactive waste material that cannot be released into the metal market will be shipped back to Canada as low-level waste and safely stored at the OPG facility." Studsvik has similar nuclear recycling contracts with Finnish, German and Swedish energy firms. In an e-mail, Studsvik spokesperson Bjorn Amcoff said the process has been common practice in Europe for the past 20 years. "The metal that can be free-released (typically 90% of the weight of a steam generator) will be recycled into the public domain for unrestricted reuse after remelting, based on an extensive sampling and quality assurance from Studsvik," Amcoff said. "The separated radioactivity will be returned as secondary waste to Canada for final disposal."

February 23, 2010 - Paris Post-Intelligencer - Swedes found way to store N-waste - The biggest obstacle to advancing nuclear power as a major part of this nation’s energy system is a lack, so far, of a workable plan for disposal of atomic wastes. Currently, spent fuel rods are in temporary storage at nuclear plants across the country, waiting for agreement on what to do with them. Sweden has the world’s best system, experts acknowledge. Comparing how Sweden does it to how the U.S. doesn’t do it offers some valuable lessons, a Los Angeles Times report shows. The Scandinavian nation gets half its electricity from nuclear plants and, as in this country, for decades it faced public opposition over plans for waste disposal. At several proposed waste storage sites, protests halted feasibility studies. The problem was compounded by the fact that Swedish law allows a municipality to veto a waste storage site within its boundaries. A major key to breaking the deadlock was for the national government, after enacting a law to allow establishing a single waste deposit site, to take a hands-off attitude. The problem was left for the nuclear power industry to solve. The industry’s approach was to undertake a methodical scientific survey of the geological suitability of 12 proposed sites. That narrowed the field to eight sites, and the industry spent seven more years conducting feasibility studies. Two sites emerged as the favorites.

February 23, 2010 - Dallas Morning News - Obama's nuclear option - It's impossible to overestimate the importance of President Barack Obama's plan to finance the construction of two nuclear reactors, the nation's first in three decades. Regardless of the political risks of alienating the anti-nuke wing of his party, the move is the best effort in years to jump-start the nation's long-stalled nuclear power industry. Obama called for a "new generation of clean, nuclear plants" in his State of the Union address last month and is backing it up with $8.3 billion in conditional loan guarantees to a power company consortium in Georgia and more dollars in his proposed 2011 budget for nuclear energy. Nuclear power in the United States has languished as the result of exaggerated fears of meltdowns, waste disposal controversies and financial concerns. As a supporter of nuclear energy, this newspaper hopes the industry will now have the confidence to make the $6 billion to $8 billion investment required to construct a nuclear reactor without worrying that the federal government will pull the financial rug from beneath it, as happened after Three Mile Island in 1979. The president's decision wisely acknowledges that nuclear power is the most practical way for this country to reduce reliance on dirty fossil fuels and to confront the issues posed by climate change. Solar and wind power will be part of the solution, but those alternatives can't match nuclear energy when it comes to steady and massive electricity production.

February 23, 2010 - KNDO - Rep. Hastings supports lawsuit over Yucca Mountain - This morning a group of three Tri-Citians announced they still plan to sue the President and the Secretary of Energy. Led by former Nuvotec CEO, Bob Ferguson, along with Bill Lampson and Gary Peterson, they contend the executive branch broke the law when Yucca Mountain was abandoned as a nuclear waste storage area. The heart of the lawsuit says Yucca Mountain is the only place where nuclear waste can legally be permanently stored. Today, Representative Doc Hastings said he's behind the legal action. "I totally support what they're doing," says Rep. Hastings, (D-WA). "What you are doing by cutting off Yucca Mountain… How are you going to handle the legal ramifications?"

February 23, 2010 - High Country News - Utah's first nuclear plant won't float without water rights - The former uranium boomtown of Green River sits along I-70 in eastern Utah, 100 miles from the closest city. Now it may become the Western outpost of America's nascent nuclear renaissance. Blue Castle Holdings, a 3-year-old, politically connected startup, wants to build a nuclear power plant here -- Utah's first, and the first in the West since 1987. Nuclear power has recently gained cachet -- and the backing of the Obama administration -- for its potential to help avert climate change. Nuclear generation emits a fraction of the greenhouse gases of coal or natural gas generation, and provides a steadier energy supply, at a larger scale, than solar or wind arrays. In January, President Obama made nuclear power the center of his "clean energy" agenda in his State of the Union speech. Two days later, he announced a commission to study nuclear waste solutions, and proposed tripling federal loan guarantees for new plants to $54 billion. The Green River proposal has sparked intense skepticism. Critics ask where the funding will come from, where the electricity will go, and, of course, what will happen to the waste. But the first hurdle is more immediate. In the Utah desert, this possible climate change solution is colliding with one of its projected consequences: water scarcity.

February 23, 2010 - Deseret Morning News - Herbert derails Utah-bound shipments of depleted uranium - Planned shipments of depleted uranium from the U.S. Department of Energy's South Carolina's storage site will not be shipped to Utah under an agreement negotiated Monday by Gov. Gary Herbert. "This is a monumental win for the state of Utah," Herbert said. "At one point, we were told these trains were all but on the tracks, making their way to Utah. The Department of Energy has now agreed, after we registered our concerns, that those trains will head elsewhere." In addition to derailing the two remaining shipments of 7,000 tons of the material, Herbert said federal regulators agreed to take back the depleted uranium that came in December if planned state changes to the disposal process fall through. HEAL Utah's executive director was delighted with the news of the averted shipments. "Today we celebrate the huge victory won by Gov. Herbert for the people of Utah," said Vanessa Pierce. "We salute him, as well as the scientists, concerned citizens, and radiation control board members who have played an active role in safeguarding the health of all Utahns from this dangerous material."

February 23, 2010 - Las Vegas Sun - Reid needed for continued fight over nuke waste - President Barack Obama’s recent announcement about funding additional nuclear reactors should give pause to those trying to get rid of Sen. Harry Reid. More nuclear reactors will surely bring up the debate of where to store nuclear waste. Without the strong voice of Reid, the Senate majority leader, you can bet the Yucca Mountain dump plan will come up again. If we elect a new Republican senator with no power to replace Reid’s, I hope you enjoy having nuclear waste in your backyard.

February 19-22, 2010 - Webmuenster on off-site assignment.

February 18, 2010 - Globe & Mail - Scary Nuclear Stuff - Your article Possible Mass Radiation Exposure Investigated (Feb. 17) reminds us that nuclear energy is a hazard to workers - but no one in authority will admit it. Bruce Power says its radiation limits are stricter than the federal government's, meaning it allows employees the equivalent of "only" 400 chest X-rays annually. But this is okay because Ottawa allows as many as 500. The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission says Bruce staff were exposed to alpha contamination - a potential carcinogen - but that's all right because Bruce suggests the exposures were below the regulatory limit. The fact is, no amount of radiation is safe. Atomic power is a cancer-risk for all of us, with workers on the front lines. Executive director, Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment.

February 18, 2010 - Times of Malta - French nuke tests cloud victims' health 50 years on - From the blasted wastes of the Sahara to the cancer wards of Normandy, the bitter fallout of France's atomic weapons programme still lingers 50 years after nuclear testing began. In the irradiated Algerian desert children are still born with deformities that campaigners blame on the experimental blasts, while back in France elderly army veterans complain of multiple unexplained cancers. "Right after the explosion, they told us 'Go and see what happened'," wheezes 74-year-old throat cancer sufferer Auguste Ribet, unfurling a sheaf of paperwork documenting his long struggle for justice. "We had pretty white cloth suits that were completely useless, and gas masks," he added, recalling the period in 1960 when France began atmospheric nuclear testing. Mr Ribet has been diagnosed with several simultaneous cancers over the past ten years. He wants the French state to recognise that he and several of his deceased comrades are victims of the tests carried out in Algeria. "They even told me to go and plant the French flag in the crater left by the explosion," said 71-year-old Gerard Dellac, speaking by telephone from the Tarn region in southwest France, where he too has been struck down by cancer. Since 1991 he has had 14 separate operations to remove malignant skin growths. Both men feel angry and betrayed by a state they say exposed them to danger and then abandoned them to their suffering.

February 18, 2010 - Santa Rosa Press Democrat - Getting back to nuclear power - In his State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama promised “a new generation of safe, clean nuclear plants” and this week he committed $8.3 billion in taxpayer funds to that promise, the amount of federal loan guarantees for Southern Co. to build two nuclear reactors in Georgia. Absent nuclear power, any clean-energy policy is largely decorative since the more-talked-about elements — wind, solar — can only supply power at the margins. Nuclear plants generate 20 percent of U.S. power now and 70 percent of the power considered to come from clean sources. But the public backlash that followed the Three Mile Island mishap in 1979 saw to it that no new plants have been licensed since. The Georgia plants are among 13 applications pending and unlikely to be decided before 2011 or 2012. And, even at that, the plants aren't expected to come online before 2016 and 2017. The economics could change, but on paper the plants make sense, providing power for 1.4 million people in an area of growing demand and creating 850 permanent jobs. Clearly, the Obama administration thinks these reactors will only be the first. The president's new budget triples to $54.5 billion the funds available to guarantee loans for clean-energy projects. That money is not exclusively for nuclear, but nuclear-power plants are the biggest-ticket items on the horizon. While the proposed plants would go some ways toward Obama's goals of clean power and self-sufficiency, they are unlikely to achieve another objective — reviving the dimming prospects for his cap-and-trade energy bill. In unveiling the loan guarantees, the president said, “We're not going to achieve a big boost in nuclear capacity unless we also create a system of incentives to make clean energy profitable. As long as producing carbon pollution carries no cost, traditional plants that use fossil fuels will be more cost-effective than plants that use nuclear fuel.”

February 18, 2010 - The Sun Times - Radiation case a concern for McGuinty - Premier Dalton McGuinty said he's concerned about the possible exposure of more than 200 employees at Ontario's Bruce nuclear plant to alpha radiation. "Oversight for nuclear safety falls within the purview of the federal government and I will take the opportunity later to speak to our (energy) minister to see if there's anything that we might or should do to ensure the continuing safety of all of our workers," he said. "It remains to be seen how many folks have in fact been affected, but there's a real concern here. Of course, we all hope that those workers are safe and healthy." Crews working to restart the Bruce A Unit 1 reactor in November discovered the problem through air monitoring. McGuinty said the province has a good safety record with nuclear reactors. "I'm not exactly sure what happened in this particular case but we do know that there are rules in place and we owe a very high duty to people who work in our plants for us," he said.

February 18, 2010 - Cleveland Plain Dealer - Require testing of oil- and gas-well sites for radioactivity - There's a potential problem when drilling for gas, other than the possibility of well-water contamination by methane, brine or "fracking" chemicals (Plain Dealer, Sunday). In 1995, a national organization called the State Review of Oil and Natural Gas Environmental Regulations (STRONGER) reviewed state regulations on gas and oil wells. One recommendation it made was that the state should test for naturally occurring radioactive material at oil and gas exploration and production sites. In the 2000 and 2005 reviews, the same recommendation was made. Now, 15 years later, legislation requiring the testing has not even been proposed. Is there a reason to be concerned? Yes. An Environmental Protection Agency map of the radioactive gas radon shows statewide distribution. The gas slowly percolates through soil as a decay product of radium, so the potential for bringing both radon and radium to the surface during drilling exists. Additionally, gas-well borehole "cuttings" are normally buried on-site at completion of the drilling. Do those "cuttings" contain radioactive material, which would continue to expose local residents to radiation after completion of the drilling? When is legislation addressing this potential problem going to be proposed and adopted? George Skipper, Bentleyville.

February 18, 2010 - Northumberland Today - High Cameco emissions reading reported - Criteria on ambient air quality by the Ontario Ministry of the Environment (MoE) is set at 40 micrograms of fluoride per 100 square centimetres over a period of 30 days, but Cameco's Port Hope conversion facility exceeded that by 18 points in the third quarter, Rebecca Peters, superintendent of compliance and licensing, told Port Hope council Tuesday. The third-quarter average was 19, but there was a 58 maximum reading, Peters said. When asked specifically by Mayor Linda Thompson, Peters said Cameco investigated the cause once they realized the reading was not incompliance with the parameter set by the MoE, and discovered there were several "small releases" that came out through the HVAC system. "It's a criteria, not a limit," Peters said. "But we're striving to ensure it doesn't happen again." She said they are required to be in compliance with set limits. Other highlights at the facil- ity included achieving a one-year lost-time accident-free status on Aug. 25, 2009 and a well contractor licence on Aug. 28. They also received a MoE permit to take water on Sep. 9. "We no longer have to hire outside contractors," said Peters. Within the next couple of weeks, new duct work will be installed on the uranium hexafluoride plant -coming out of the west end of the plant and up and over the plant's roof to the tower and into a stack, Peters said. "Just in case people see work going on, this is what is happening," Peters said.

February 18, 2010 - Post Standard - Plan to spin off Oswego County nuke plant needs serious reworking - Entergy’s plan to spin off six nuclear plants into a standalone company is fraught with too much financial and environmental risk. The state Public Service Commission needs to reject the plan in its current form or work with the company on a course of action that is truly in the public’s interest. Indeed, the commission’s staff, commenting that Entergy was not being forthright in its proposal, recommended significant changes. Entergy, which owns 12 nuclear reactors, wants to move six of them into a new independent, publicly traded company called Enexus Energy Corp. In return, Entergy shareholders would receive 80.1 percent of Enexus’s stock, with the rest transferred into a trust held for the benefit of Entergy. Entergy also would receive cash and reductions in debt worth billions. The Entergy-owned FitzPatrick nuclear reactor in Scriba and the two troubled Indian Point plants downstate would be taken over by Enexus. The state Attorney General’s Office, however, pointed out that the new company, whose only assets would be the aging plants themselves, would be awash in debt. In coming years, these reactors will face substantial capital costs to continue operations and to eliminate radiological contamination underground, the attorney general noted.

February 18, 2010 - Polskie Radio - Radioactive waste to be dumped in Poland? - Are highly radioactive materials from western EU countries going to be deposited in Poland? Nuclear power plants from EU countries want to dump their radioactive waste in Centeral East European countries, including Poland. A project of such an initiative is underway at the European Repository Development Organization and is reportedly supported by the European Commission. Negotiation as to the exact dumping place are to begin in May and should take an estimated 2 years. Reportedly, building one dumping site for nuclear materials is economical. A community which accepts nuclear waste on their territory can count on subsidies from the European Union, not to mention the work places that will be created in the area, claim enthusiasts of the project in the newspaper.

February 18, 2010 - BVI Beacon - Cell towers’ safety tested - A daunting shadow is cast on the basketball court outside of St. George’s Secondary School in Palestina. From the sidelines, the morning sunlight is dissected by a steel giant, standing about 100 feet tall. Youngsters about 20 times shorter than the LIME cellular phone tower frequent the court during lunch breaks and after school hours, seeming almost oblivious to its presence. But to many residents, the relevance of the large cellular phone towers and antennas sprouting up around the territory is frighteningly clear. Some see them while driving to work, others, out their office windows and in their backyards. And from those fearful of the towers, the question radiates: Are they a health and safety hazard? Standing a basketball court length away from the cellular tower overshadowing St. George’s, Dr. Paolo Vecchia didn’t hesitate to refute the possibility of radioactive harm. “Frankly speaking, there’s none — zero [possibility],” said Dr. Vecchia, who is the chairperson of the International Commission of Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection.

February 18, 2010 - The Cap Times - Obama's nuclear power dream is a nightmare - President Barack Obama is going nuclear. He announced the initial $8 billion in loan guarantees for construction of the first new nuclear power plants in the United States in close to three decades. Obama is making good on a campaign pledge, like his promises to escalate the war in Afghanistan and to unilaterally attack in Pakistan. And like his “Af-Pak” war strategy, Obama’s publicly financed resuscitation of the nuclear power industry in the U.S. is bound to fail, another taxpayer bailout waiting to happen. Opponents of the plan, which includes a tripling of the existing nuclear plant construction-loan guarantees to $54.5 billion, span the ideological spectrum. On its most basic level, the economics of nuclear power generation simply don’t make sense. The cost to construct these behemoths is so huge, and the risks are so great, that no sensible investor, no banks, no hedge funds will invest in their construction. No one will loan a power company the money to build a power plant, and the power companies refuse to spend their own money. Obama himself professes a passion for the free market, telling Bloomberg BusinessWeek, “We are fierce advocates for a thriving, dynamic free market.” Well, the free market long ago abandoned nuclear power. The right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation remarked, “Expansive loan guarantee programs ... are wrought with problems. At a minimum, they create taxpayer liabilities, give recipients preferential treatment, and distort capital markets.”

February 18,2010 - Al Arabya News - Algerians used by France for nuclear tests: report - The French army used soldiers and civilians as guinea pigs to test the effects of nuclear bombs a confidential report revealed, said French newspaper Le Parisien. As France marked 50 years since its first nuclear explosion on Tuesday, the full report was released by Le Parisien. The confidential military report stated that soldiers were knowingly exposed to radiation. The aim was "to study physiological and psychological effects produced on man by nuclear weapons, so as to obtain necessary information to physically and mentally prepare modern warriors." Between 1960 and 1966, 17 bombs were tested and hundreds of soldiers and approximately 30,000 Algerian civilians exposed to harmful radiation. " There is nothing new in this report, the ministry disclosed all of this in 2007. That was another time and we would of course not do things the same today. All of this happened 50 years ago and we cannot analyze this with our 2010 vision. The life of these soldiers was not put at risk " French Defense Minister Hervé Morin. According to an excerpt of the report titled “Gerboise verte,” (green jerboa) the name of the last open air nuclear test on April 25, 1961, French soldiers were sent to within 900 feet of where a bomb was detonated to "study the possibility of launching an attack in contaminated zones." One conclusion from the study was that soldiers should in such situations not wear gas masks but only surgical masks, so as to ensure easier communication. French Defense Minister Hervé Morin told France Info radio "There is nothing new in this report, the ministry disclosed all of this in 2007. That was another time and we would of course not do things the same today. All of this happened 50 years ago and we cannot analyze this with our 2010 vision. The life of these soldiers was not put at risk." The minister told Le Parisien that, although not aware of the report, he believes the radiation levels that the test subjects had been exposed to were low.

February 18, 2010 - Associated Press - Lawmaker Seeks to Replace Vermont Yankee - A lawmaker who represents the town where troubled Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant is located wants the state to consider a new plant. In a joint resolution filed Tuesday, state Rep. Patricia O'Donnell is calling for construction of a new plant next to Vermont Yankee and the re-licensing of the existing plant through 2015. Opened in 1972, Vermont Yankee is scheduled to close in 2012. Last month, plant officials reported that the plant is leaking radioactive tritium. O'Donnell, a Republican from Vernon, said building a new plant now would allow Vermont Yankee workers to stay employed once the plant closes.

February 18, 2010 - Spartanburg Herald Journal - Ultimate waste; Refusal to use $10 billion Yucca Mountain waste facility should trigger suit - Earlier this month, President Barack Obama officially left 39 states holding a bag the federal government has been agreeing to take possession of for the past two decades. The Obama administration made official its abandonment of a facility in Yucca Mountain, Nev., designed to accommodate the radioactive material currently stored at 121 sites in those 39 states, including the Savannah River Site. Yucca Mountain would also have stored waste from the 104 nuclear reactors currently generating electricity in this country. Tuesday, Gov. Mark Sanford, two U.S. congressmen and numerous state legislators protested Obama's decision, demanded a change and threatened legal action. "This issue is too big to be driven by partisan politics in Washington," Sanford said in Columbia, adding that Obama's move would "undo a 25-year solution that's been in place during Republican and Democratic presidential administrations." Sanford's close. It was actually the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1987 that set Yucca Mountain's role as our nation's storehouse of nuclear waste, so it's only been agreed upon for 23 years, fewer than four presidents. It was agreed upon for so long and by so many because it is the best, safest solution to our nuclear waste storage woes. It is also the only viable option the nation has developed, and the facility we have spent $10 billion to create. That money has come largely from the utility bills of people whose electricity is generated by nuclear power, with South Carolinians contributing $1.2 billion of the money. The partisan politics Sanford referred to are very specific: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has called in his markers with Obama and put the kibosh on storing nuclear waste in his home state. Sanford and other S.C. politicians pledged Tuesday to file a lawsuit to force Yucca Mountain to open. That and all other possible avenues should be employed in making this facility serve its purpose.

February 18, 2010 - Salem News - Nuclear Waste Problem: Study to Show if Fast Reactor Is Solution to Long-Term Waste Storage Headaches - Do concerns about inadequate options for long-term nuclear reactor waste disposal now mean that it is time to make a new commitment to the development of fast reactors? What of the related concerns about the cost, reliability, safety and proliferation issues associated with fast reactors? These questions are addressed in a major new report from the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM) to be released during a live phone-based news conference set for 1:30 p.m. EST/1830 GMT on February 17, 2010. In assessing the potential for fast reactors, the IPFM report looks at the historical experience and current status of fast breeder reactor programs in France, India, Japan, the Soviet Union/Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. The possibility of a plutonium-fueled nuclear reactor that could produce more fuel than it consumed (hence the term “breeder reactor”) was first raised during World War II in the United States by scientists in the atomic bomb program. Programs in the United States and elsewhere around the globe were driven by the hope of solving the long-term energy supply problem using the large-scale deployment of nuclear energy for electric power. Plutonium-fueled breeder reactors originally appeared to offer a way to avoid a potential shortage of the uranium required to support such an ambitious vision using other kinds of reactors. Today, with increased attention being paid both to “Generation IV” reactors and a new Obama Administration panel focusing on reprocessing and other waste issues, interest has shifted back to fast reactors as a possible means by which to bypass concerns about the long-term storage of nuclear waste.

February 18, 2010 - CNN - Obama's nuclear power push faces obstacle: Waste - President Obama's announcement Tuesday of loan guarantees for nuclear power plants may encourage new construction, but a problem still remains that has plagued atomic energy for decades: what to do with nuclear waste? On the left, opponents of nuclear power say the president should not be using taxpayer money to help build more power plants that will produce even more radioactive material, so long as the government has not figured out where to put it all. "We haven't found a solution for the 100 nuclear power plants operating," said Stephen Smith of the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. "And waste is building up on-site, with no solution." On the right, critics fault the president for leaving the country without a plan for disposing of the waste, when he decided to pull the plug on the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in Nevada. The government spent billions of dollars studying the location. South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, a Republican, said the president's decision was "spectacularly misguided, and breaks a promise" made "decades ago" by the federal government to handle the waste. Sanford accused Obama of making a "Chicago-style" political play to help Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nevada, who faces a tough re-election bid in a state where the Yucca Mountain plan was unpopular. But the White House points out that the president opposed the site since he was campaigning as a candidate, on the grounds of scientific and security questions.

February 18, 2010 - Land Line Magazine - Indiana bill sets regulations for transporting radioactive materials - A bill advancing through the Indiana statehouse would increase the state’s regulations on the shipment of radioactive materials within the state. Truck loads and rail shipments would be affected. The House Roads and Transportation Committee voted 9-1 to move the bill to the Ways and Means Committee for further consideration. The Senate has already approved it by unanimous consent. The Indiana Department of Homeland Security would be responsible for issuing permits for the transportation of radioactive materials on the state’s roadways. Shippers of affected loads would be required to notify the state how much of the material is being transported, the route and means of transportation, as well as the schedule. Permit fees would be $2,500 per truck or, for rail shipments, $4,500 for the first cask and $3,000 for each additional cask. Failure to obtain the proper permit could result in a maximum $1,000 fine. Sen. Jim Arnold, D-LaPorte, said the regulation for radioactive materials is needed to keep Indiana roads safe from dangerous materials that require delicate handling. “That is why legislation to increase the monitoring, tracking, and regulation of the transportation of this material is so important,” Arnold said in a statement.

February 18, 2010 - Popular Science Magazine - Can We Dispose of Radioactive Waste in Volcanoes?  - Dumping all our nuclear waste in a volcano does seem like a neat solution for destroying the roughly 29,000 tons of spent uranium fuel rods stockpiled around the world. But there’s a critical standard that a volcano would have to meet to properly dispose of the stuff, explains Charlotte Rowe, a volcano geophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. And that standard is heat. The lava would have to not only melt the fuel rods but also strip the uranium of its radioactivity. “Unfortunately,” Rowe says, “volcanoes just aren’t very hot.” Lava in the hottest volcanoes tops out at around 2,400°F. (These tend to be shield volcanoes, so named for their relatively flat, broad profile. The Hawaiian Islands continue to be formed by this type of volcano.) It takes temperatures that are tens of thousands of degrees hotter than that to split uranium’s atomic nuclei and alter its radioactivity to make it inert, Rowe says. What you need is a thermonuclear reaction, like an atomic bomb—not a great way to dispose of nuclear waste. Volcanoes aren’t hot enough to melt the zirconium (melting point 3,371°) that encases the fuel, let alone the fuel itself: The melting point of uranium oxide, the fuel used at most nuclear power plants, is 5,189°. The liquid lava in a shield volcano pushes upward, so the rods probably wouldn’t even sink very deep, Rowe says. They wouldn’t sink at all in a stratovolcano, the most explosive type, exemplified by Washington’s Mount St. Helens. Instead, the waste would just sit on top of the volcano’s hard lava dome—at least until the pressure from upsurging magma became so great that the dome cracked and the volcano erupted. And that’s the real problem.

February 18, 2010 - Las Vegas Sun - SC leaders may sue if Nev. nuke waste dump ditched - South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford accused the president of playing politics with nuclear waste Tuesday, urging the Obama administration to follow through on plans to send thousands of tons of radioactive material to Nevada and urging legal action if it does not. Sanford, surrounded by state, local and federal officials, accused the Obama administration of allowing "old-style Chicago politics" to dictate the fate of a long-planned nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. The governor said the president was trying to protect Nevada Democratic Sen. Harry Reid's seat while ripping off companies in South Carolina that have paid $1.2 billion to create the dump. A Reid spokesman denied the charge, but the Republican governor called Obama's plan "a detour from basically a 25-year compact based on simple old-style Chicago politics that are the antithesis of the change that he himself had promised" during his campaign. "This issue is too big to be driven by partisan politics in Washington, D.C.," Sanford said. The proposed site 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas has been targeted for 20 years to house the nation's high level nuclear waste. As a candidate, Obama promised to close the facility, and his latest budget calls for eliminating funding for the site. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has said Yucca Mountain is not an option and his department will withdraw its license application by the end of this month, essentially nixing the project as a commission studies where the waste should go. "As we move to expand nuclear power, the President is fully committed to ensuring that the nation meets our long term storage obligations for nuclear waste," Moira Mack, a White House spokeswoman, said in an e-mailed statement.

February 18, 2010 - Houston Chronicle - San Antonio utility reaches nuke plant settlement  - A consortium working to double the generating capacity of the South Texas nuclear power plant has agreed to buy up much of the San Antonio city-owned utility's stake in the project, both sides announced Wednesday. According to statements issued Wednesday by CPS Energy of San Antonio and a consortium of NRG Energy and Toshiba, the consortium will assume all but less than 8 percent of the 40 percent CPS stake in the plant's proposed third and fourth nuclear generation units. The consortium, Nuclear Innovation North America, also will pay $80 million to CPS, donate $10 million to San Antonio's Residential Energy Assistance Partnership and assume management control of the project. In return, CPS will stop paying into the project as of Jan. 31, two weeks ago. The San Antonio Express-News reports CPS had spent $370 million on the project, situated 65 miles southwest of Houston near Bay City. The settlement will be considered by the CPS board on Monday. If approved, it would mean the end of a $32 billion claim CPS made against NINA. "The agreement extracts the maximum value for our community at this stage of the project's development. It accounts for our investment to date and the value of the site with land and water rights," said Jelynne LeBlanc Burley, CPS acting general manager. CPS had wanted to reduce its payments toward the $13 billion project. A CPS statement says it will still get 200 megawatts more of electricity from the finished project, or about a third of its future needs by 2020.

February 17, 2010 - RFI - US to invest billions in nuclear power - US President Barack Obama unveiled a multi-billion loan scheme to back construction on the first new nuclear power plant to be built in the US in 30 years. Obama said nuclear power must play a key role in US environmental policy, despite concerns from environmental groups. "To meet our growing energy needs and prevent the worst consequences of climate change, we'll need to increase our supply of nuclear power. It's that simple,” Obama told journalists on Tuesday. He announced about eight billion dollars (5.8 billion euros) in loan guarantees to build the first in what he called “a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in America". The money will go towards building two new 1,100 megawatt reactors in an existing nuclear plant in Burke, Georgia, the White House said. Obama said nuclear power will create clean energy jobs, and that the US had to catch up to competitors, like France and Japan, which have long-term investments in the nuclear sector. "On an issue which affects our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, we cannot continue to be mired in the same old debates between left and right, between environmentalists and entrepreneurs," said Obama. Opposition to the plan comes from taxpayer watchdog groups who oppose the scale of the spending, and from environmentalists concerned about the safety of nuclear power. There are also concerns about what will happen to the radioactive nuclear waste. The Obama administration cancelled plans to develop the only waste dump site in the US, in the western state of Nevada, after opposition from lawmakers in Congress, including US Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, who is one of the state’s two senators.

February 17, 2010 - Space Fellowship - NASA's Fermi Closes on Source of Cosmic Rays - New images from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope show where supernova remnants emit radiation a billion times more energetic than visible light. The images bring astronomers a step closer to understanding the source of some of the universe’s most energetic particles — cosmic rays. Cosmic rays consist mainly of protons that move through space at nearly the speed of light. In their journey across the galaxy, the particles are deflected by magnetic fields. This scrambles their paths and masks their origins. Fermi's Large Area Telescope resolved GeV gamma rays from supernova remnants of different ages and in different environments. W51C, W44 and IC 443 are middle-aged remnants between 4,000 and 30,000 years old. Cassiopeia A, which is only 330 years old, appears as a point source. Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration. “Understanding the sources of cosmic rays is one of Fermi’s key goals,” said Stefan Funk, an astrophysicist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), jointly located at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University, Calif. When cosmic rays collide with interstellar gas, they produce gamma rays. “Fermi now allows us to compare emission from remnants of different ages and in different environments,” Funk added. He presented the findings Monday at the American Physical Society meeting in Washington, D.C. Fermi’s Large Area Telescope (LAT) mapped billion-electron-volt (GeV) gamma-rays from three middle-aged supernova remnants — known as W51C, W44 and IC 443 — that were never before resolved at these energies. (The energy of visible light is between 2 and 3 electron volts.) Each remnant is the expanding debris of a massive star that blew up between 4,000 and 30,000 years ago. In addition, Fermi’s LAT also spied GeV gamma rays from Cassiopeia A (Cas A), a supernova remnant only 330 years old. Ground-based observatories, which detect gamma rays thousands of times more energetic than the LAT was designed to see, have previously detected Cas A.

February 17, 2010 - Statesman Journal - Radon warnings required under bill - Legislation that will help reduce the risk of radon exposure for home buyers passed the Oregon Senate on Tuesday. Senate Bill 1025 moved to the House on a 24-6 vote. It requires both radon-resistant construction standards for new homes and public buildings in areas with higher radon levels and notification for all home buyers about the health risks associated with radon.

February 17, 2010 - Tuscaloosa News - New nuclear reactors are wise choice - The United States may, at last, be expanding its ability to generate power from a source that is safe and reliable, creates jobs at home, and won't put money in the pockets of our enemies abroad — nuclear power. We are glad to see it. President Barack Obama said Tuesday that the federal Department of Energy has approved a loan guarantee to underwrite the construction of two nuclear reactors in Georgia. Similar deals are in the works in three other Southern states. This is stimulus that makes sense. Developing nuclear power is not without risks. It is expensive to build nuclear power plants, and taxpayers will be assuming this risk. Also, we do not have a system in place for long-term storage of spent nuclear fuel. And, despite advances in technology, there is always the chance for an accidental release of radiation — or one created by terrorists. The last new nuclear reactor built in the United States began generating power in 1996. There has not been an order for a new reactor since 1973. Several nuclear projects were halted with construction half complete. The next generation of nuclear projects are likely to be different from those currently operating.

February 17, 2010 - Gainesville Sun - New Source of an Isotope in Medicine Is Found - Just as the worldwide shortage of a radioactive isotope used in millions of medical procedures is about to get worse, officials say a new source for the substance has emerged: a nuclear reactor in Poland. The isotope, technetium 99, is used to measure blood flow in the heart and to help diagnose bone and breast cancers. Almost two-thirds of the world’s supply comes from two reactors; one, in Ontario, has been shut for repairs for nine months and is not expected to reopen before April, and the other, in the Netherlands, will close for six months starting Friday. Radiologists say that as a result of the shortage, their treatment of some patients has had to revert to inferior materials and techniques they stopped using 20 years ago. But on Wednesday, Covidien, a company in St. Louis that purifies the material created in the reactor and packages it in a form usable by radiologists, will announce that it has signed a contract with the operators of the Maria reactor, near Warsaw, one of the world’s most powerful research reactors. The Maria, a 36-year-old reactor, will fill only a small fraction of the gap left by the shutdowns at Chalk River, Ontario, and Petten, the Netherlands. Still, Dr. Michael M. Graham, a professor of radiology at the University of Iowa and a member of the board of the Society of Nuclear Medicine, said the new arrangement “could make the difference between being able to limp along and shutting down.”

February 17, 2010 - PRNewswire - Mount Vernon Cancer Centre Becomes First NHS Facility to Acquire a CyberKnife System - Accuray Incorporated (Nasdaq: ARAY), a global leader in the field of radiosurgery, announced today that Mount Vernon Cancer Centre in the United Kingdom has become the first National Health Service (NHS) hospital to acquire a CyberKnife(R) Robotic Radiosurgery System. The NHS has grown to become the world's largest publicly funded health service. The system was born just over 60 years ago out of a long-held ideal that quality healthcare should be available to all, regardless of wealth - and that principle remains at its core. The NHS remains free at the point of use for anyone who is a resident in the United Kingdom - more than 60 million people - with only a few minor exceptions, and is funded centrally from national taxation. "Patients have been very eager to see CyberKnife radiosurgery available through the National Health Service, so we are excited to soon be able to offer them this state-of-the-art form of cancer care," said Dr. Peter Ostler, Consultant Clinical Oncologist and the Trust's Clinical Chair for Cancer Services. "The CyberKnife System will enable us to expand our radiation offerings to patients who may not have been able to tolerate other treatments or have medically or surgically inoperable tumors."

February 17, 2010 - Toronto Star - Nuclear staff exposed to radiation at Bruce - The federal nuclear safety watchdog says more than 200 workers may have been exposed to a dangerous form of radioactivity while they were refurbishing a reactor at the Bruce power station late last year. The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission filed a regulatory document in Ottawa on Tuesday saying up to 217 workers at the plant on the shores of Lake Huron may have inhaled potentially hazardous "alpha contamination." A routine survey picked up contamination in the air in Bruce A station's Unit 1 on Nov. 26, 2009, the document says. The radioactive particles are linked to cancer if ingested, inhaled or absorbed through cuts in the skin. But Bruce Power says monitoring of potentially affected workers indicates the levels of exposure were within limits set under federal rules. "All our analysis from our preliminary readings is that regulatory levels have not even been approached and half the ones we've received were too low even to register," said spokesman John Peevers.

February 17, 2010 - Natural News - FINALLY: NIH takes a step to track radiation exposure from medical tests - Many Americans are exposed to atomic bomb levels of radiation over their lifetimes, thanks to the medical industry's determination to push radiation imaging techniques like mammography and CT scans on the healthy as well as the ill. In fact, over the past three decades, Americans' exposure to radiation through common medical tests has soared six-fold. But although it is a well-known scientific fact that radiation exposure, which is cumulative, increases the risk of cancer, government scientists have failed to warn the public about the dangers of repeated tests involving radiation, claiming the specific risk level is unknown. Now, finally, researchers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center have decided radiation dose exposure reports should be included in patients' electronic medical records. According to an article in the February issue of the Journal of the American College of Radiology (JACR), the NIH researchers hope this effort will result in an eventual accurate assessment of cancer associated with low-dose radiation exposure from medical imaging tests. "The cancer risk from low-dose medical radiation tests is largely unknown. Yet it is clear that the U.S. population is increasingly being exposed to more diagnostic-test-derived ionizing radiation than in the past," David A. Bluemke, MD, lead author of the article and director of Radiology and Imaging Sciences at the NIH Clinical Center, said in a statement to the press. "One widely publicized appraisal of medical radiation exposure suggested that about 1.5 to 2 percent of all cancers in the USA might be caused by the clinical use of CT alone."

February 17, 2010 - Manilla Bulletin - Where to dump nuclear waste? - There are well-meaning suggestions from various quarters that one lasting solution to the energy problem, especially power outages in thge long dry months - December to June - is to develop nuclear power stations in lieu of hydro-electric plants and petroleum-fed turbines. Cheap and efficient but... There is no question that nuclear energy, in the long run, will prove inexpensive and totally efficient. Nuclear power plants in the US, Japan, France, and most progressive countries in Europe contribute substantially to both commercial and industrial energy requirements. There’s a move to rehabilitate the Bataan Nuclear Plant, now viewed as a colossal waste. Its closure was recommended by a commission years ago for reasons of safety. The cost of making it useful to the economy may run to tens of million dollars.

February 17, 2010 - Pharmaceutical Online - Eriez® Introduces Extra Wide Combination Dual-Beam Multi-Zone X-Ray And Metal Detector System - Eriez®, world authority in magnetic, vibratory and inspection applications, has introduced an extra wide combination E-Z Tec®-Beam Multi-Zone X-Ray and Metal Detector System. This state-of-the-art device offers optimal detection and precise rejection of virtually any foreign object for packaged or bulk flow applications. Working together, the X-Ray will provide Eriez customers with unsurpassed foreign objects detection for ferrous, nonferrous, stainless steel and non-metallics such as stone, glass, bone and some plastics. Additionally, the metal detector will provide for the best possible detection for aluminum--- which is the most difficult metal for the X-Ray machine to detect, explains Ray Spurgeon, Eriez Product Manager—Inspection Systems. "Now, processors can use both technologies to improve their food safety," he says.  An additional benefit of the dual beam X-Ray System is it offers zone detection as packaged or raw product moves through the unit, according to Spurgeon. Rather than rejecting an entire row of product, the X-Ray unit will pinpoint a single product with a foreign object for precise rejection, thus allowing non-contaminated product to proceed. "This will save our customers thousands of dollars in re-work and labor," says Spurgeon.

February 17, 2010 - Press TV - Obama wants a nuclear plant despite concerns - The US government has agreed to pledge more than $8 billions in loans to build the country's first new nuclear power plant in 30 years. “This is only the beginning'' of the administration's efforts to increase the use of nuclear power, said President Barack Obama. The US halted the construction of new nuclear power plants since 1979 when an accident occurred by the partial core meltdown of one of the reactors at the Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. “My budget proposes tripling the loan guarantees we provide to help finance safe, clean nuclear facilities and we'll continue to provide financing for clean-energy projects here in Maryland and across America,'' he said. Critics have expressed fears about the disposal of nuclear waste products and the likely release of radioactive gases into the atmosphere due to unexpected accidents. But Obama has emphasized that “we cannot allow those differences to prevent us from making progress.''

February 17, 2010 - Telegraph Journal - 'Citizens panel' is no alternative - In this rather tense political atmosphere, it is difficult to discern among those who oppose the Liberal agenda the differences in perspective on the problem to be solved and what our energy future should be. Two alternatives to the Liberal proposal have been released publicly. One is by the New Brunswick Green Party (I declare my bias as president of the party). The other is the so-called Neill report, named after Robert Neill, who is the spokesman for 23 signatories to it. The first has gotten no attention at all (find it at www.greenpartynb.ca). The second has attracted a great deal of attention, and yet little scrutiny. The buzz is that a group of people who hold or have held important positions in the energy, business and government sectors oppose the Liberal deal with Quebec. Their position automatically carries weight with the media and public; consequently, it has not received any scrutiny and is accepted at face value.

February 17, 2010 - Toledo Blade - Recycle nuclear fuels too - The Blade missed a critical option in looking at the future of nuclear energy without the Yucca Mountain waste repository: recycling (“Out of nuclear options,” editorial, Feb. 10). With nuclear fuel reprocessing we can recover the remaining usable fuel, of which there is a high percentage, separate the long-lived radioactive waste materials, and package the remainder in safe and efficient forms. This is done in France, which serves several other countries' nuclear programs, and in Japan. An advantage of recycling, researched by the U.S. Department of Energy, is that long-lived radioactive materials also can be consumed in nuclear reactors, requiring any waste storage facility to hold the shorter-lived materials. That makes disposal much simpler. We recycle everything now. The biggest payoff may be in recycling nuclear fuel. We cannot let our political uncertainty slow the building of new nuclear power plants. We need the energy they can generate and to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. Gene Novak, Oak Harbor, Ohio.

February 17, 2010 - Victorville Daily Press - Dangerous radioactive device stolen from construction site - Authorities are searching for a radioactive device stolen from a Hesperia construction site Tuesday morning and warn the tool is highly dangerous. “The probe does contain radioactive material inside and it will cause severe burns and people can be subject to radio activity which is never good,” Sgt. Ernie Kopasz of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Hesperia station said. Construction workers arrived at the work site in the 17100 block of Smoke Tree Road around 7 a.m. and discovered a nuclear density probe was missing. The probe is used to measure the moisture content in the soil, Roxanne Walker, spokeswoman for the Hesperia station said. The device is in a red case with radioactive stickers on it. The probe manufactured by CPN is inside the case along with a hammer, metal plate and plastic box. It’s model number is MC3 and the last four serial numbers are 6989, authorities said. Kopasz warns anyone who may run across the device not to touch it but instead call 911.

February 17, 2010 - Las Vegas Review-Journal - Utility panel wants reasons for planned Yucca shutdown - A board of state utility commissioners came out Tuesday against the planned Yucca Mountain Project shutdown, while calling for the Obama administration to explain in more detail why it wants to abandon the Nevada nuclear waste site. The resolution adopted by a panel of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners would put the group on record against the administration's nuclear waste policy if it gets final approval by a board of directors later this week. Commissioners conceded that the resolution probably would not change minds at the White House or Department of Energy, where administration officials are moving to shelve the Nevada waste storage site and have established a blue ribbon panel to start looking for alternatives. The utility group's resolution expresses "disappointment" that the government "took 25 years and expended more than $10 billion on Yucca Mountain" only to want it closed before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission could determine whether it would be safe. "If Yucca Mountain is not an option, they certainly need to explain why that is," said Dusty Johnson, chairman of the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission.

February 17, 2010 - KXNT - Federal Panel Halts Yucca License Hearings - A three-judge panel for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved a suspension in the hearings on a license application for the Yucca Mountain nuclear repository. The decision Tuesday comes as part of the Obama Administration's plans to withdraw the application to store nuclear waste at the Nevada facility. Nevada Senator Harry Reid called the NRC ruling "further evidence...that Yucca Mountain is no longer an option for the storage of nuclear waste in this country." President Obama has called for "zeroing out" all funding for Yucca Mountain in his budget proposal, but Congress will have the final say over the project's fate. Earlier this week, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford threatened legal action if the government does not restore funding for Yucca Mountain.

February 17, 2010 - Harry Reid Press Release - Reid Statement On Decision To Halt Yucca Mountain License Application Proceeding - Nevada Senator Harry Reid today made the following statement regarding the order from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s (NRC) Atomic Safety and Licensing Board to grant the Department of Energy’s stay on the Yucca Mountain license application proceedings. This is an important step towards withdrawing the license application from NRC’s review. “Today’s news that the license application proceedings have been stopped is further evidence of the Administration’s position that Yucca Mountain is no longer an option for the storage of nuclear waste in this country. I applaud the Atomic Safety and Licensing Board on their decision and for placing the safety and security of Nevadans above all else.”

February 17, 2010 - St. Louis Post-Dispatch - Is nuclear energy renewable? If Missouri House passes HB1851, it is - A Missouri lawmaker met heavy resistance this morning to his bill that would change the definition of renewable energy to include nuclear power. The proposal, filed by Rep. Jerry Nolte, R-Gladstone, is an attempt to change the meaning of Proposition C, a voter initiative that passed in 2008 requiring utilities to obtain 15 percent of their power from renewable energy sources by 2021. Nolte wants utilities to have the option of including nuclear power alongside wind, solar and biomass, but Democrats were quick to point out that nuclear energy, by definition, isn’t renewable. “I’ve been searching the Internet for the past two days and I can’t find a definition anywhere that ties nuclear energy and renewable energy together,” said Rep. Gina Walsh, D-Bellefontaine Neighbors. “It’s a huge stretch.” P.J. Wilson of Renew Missouri, who helped write Proposition C, testified that including nuclear power in portfolio of renewable energy would completely go against the spirit of the ballot initiative, which passed by about a two-t0-one margin. Nolte’s bill is backed by rural electrical cooperatives in Missouri. Last session, the rural coops backed a bill pushed by Ameren UE that would have made it easier for the investor-owned utility to finance a proposed new nuclear plant adjacent to the nuclear facility the company already owns in Callaway County. Ameren has since dropped plans to build the second unit.

February 17, 2010 - Mother Jones - Energy Sec Unaware That Nuclear Loans Have 50 Percent Risk of Default  - The Obama administration on Tuesday announced a loan guarantee for the first new nuclear reactor to be built in the US in decades—part of a planned $54.5 billion program to kickstart a nuclear revival using government-backed loans. Yet Chu said he was not aware of a Congressional Budget Office study showing that the chances of default on these loans are "very high—well above 50 percent." "I don't know of the CBO report," Chu told reporters during a conference call on Tuesday. "We don't believe the chance of default is 50 percent. We believe it's far less than that." The first loan guarantee, worth $8.33 billion, was awarded to two proposed reactors to be built by Southern Company at Plant Vogtle in Burke, Georgia. As Mother Jones has reported, the proposal to encourage nuclear construction via massive federally backed loans represents a major risk for the US taxpayer. While the nuclear industry as recently as 2005 claimed the price tag for a reactor was $2 billion, independent estimates now put the cost as high as $12 billion. In fact, the economics of the nuclear industry look so dicey that Wall Street banks—no strangers to high-risk investments—have for several years balked at financing new plants unless the government underwrites the deal. "There will be no nuclear renaissance beyond what the government is willing to underwrite," Peter Bradford, a former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission who is now a professor at Vermont Law School, told Mariah Blake in a recent piece for Mother Jones. And the nuclear industry has not been shy about announcing its reliance on the taxpayer. "Without loan guarantees we will not build nuclear power plants," Michael J. Wallace, co-chief executive of UniStar Nuclear and vice president of Constellation Energy, told the New York Times in 2007. That means the government would assume almost all the risk.

February 17, 2010 - Forbes - GE's Nuclear Waste Plan - Eric Loewen won't even utter the words "spent nuclear fuel." That's the industry term of art for the nuclear fuel bundles that are pulled out of today's reactors after they're done making electricity. Loewen, a nuclear engineer at General Electric ( GE - news - people ), doesn't see them as "spent" at all. He sees them as raw material for a new type of nuclear reactor. "It's used, but it's an energy asset," he says. GE's joint venture with Hitachi ( HIT - news - people ), called GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, would like to build both the reactor and facility that creates the new fuel at a single site, which GE calls an advanced recycling center, or an ARC. Loewen and GE suddenly have a captive audience. The Obama administration plans to offer $54 billion in loan guarantees to help the country start building new nuclear reactors again. (See "New Boost for Nukes") But the country's old plan of storing it deep underneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which taxpayers spent $9 billion thinking about, is dead. (Harry Reid, remember, is from Nevada.)

February 17, 2010 - Bellona - Obama announces $8.3 bln loan guarantee to US nuclear power plant in an upset to many environmentalists - US President Barack Obama, in a move that cleared any ambiguity that surrounded his attitude toward nuclear power, today announced $8.3 billion in loan guarantees to build the first nuclear power plant in American in more than 30 years, pinning his decision on shuttling stalled climate legislation through Congress. The federal loan will guarantee will go to help Southern Co. which plans to build two nuclear reactors near Southern's Vogtle site near Augusta, in the State of Georgia. Southern estimates the two new reactors will cost $14.5 billion. Under the loan guarantee programme, the government may guarantee up to 80 percent of a nuclear project's cost, but the recipient must pay a percentage as a "credit subsidy" fee set by US Department of Energy (DOE) and the Office of Management and Budget. The size of the credit subsidy fee has been the focus of squabbles among the government, industry and advocacy groups. Details of the loan guarantee were still being finalized today, an industry source told Bellona Web.

February 16, 2010 - vtdigger.org - New monitoring well at Vermont Yankee shows tritium levels of 192,400 picocuries per liter - Vermont Yankee engineers and technicians working diligently to identify the source of tritium in the plant’s groundwater continue to make progress. A new monitoring well installed in the containment access building to the east of the advanced offgas building is now in service and its concentration is currently 192,400 picocuries per liter. This result is consistent with preliminary hydrology study updates currently in progress and will be used for further refinement of the study. The data shows dilution occurs with the eastward movement. The work at the advanced offgas building excavation involves shoring and bracing and constructing an enclosure to provide for worker protection and radiological safety. As I noted previously, the integrity of structures and components in the excavation area is supported by a comprehensive engineering analysis that will ensure safety at its final depth of 15 feet. While this investigation continues, it is important to note that there has been no tritium levels found in any samples taken from drinking water wells or the river. For more details on the tritium investigation, the Vermont Department of Health has a thorough status report on the investigation at this web link: http://healthvermont.gov/enviro/rad/yankee/tritium.aspx.

February 16, 2010 - Las Vegas Review-Journal - South Carolina governor protests Yucca termination; S.C. governor seeks legal options to force go-ahead of project - South Carolina's governor is protesting the Obama administration's planned termination of the Yucca Mountain Project, including asking the state's attorney general to "pursue every legal action possible" to stop the shutdown. Gov. Mark Sanford is scheduled to hold a news conference today in Columbia, S.C., alongside two members of the state's congressional delegation, where they are expected to broadcast their unhappiness with steps the White House is taking to end development of a Nevada nuclear waste repository. "The governor will not be announcing any specific legal action tomorrow, at least as of right now," said Sanford's spokesman, Ben Fox. Sanford, a Republican, will call for President Barack Obama "to recommit to Yucca Mountain, to put it bluntly," Fox said. It was unclear what options South Carolina could pursue. But Sanford's reaction reflects what is being described as a mixture of bafflement, anger and resignation to the planned Yucca termination in several of the 38 states where radioactive spent fuel figures to remain stored at reactor sites for decades longer while the government considers alternatives to underground storage in Nevada. "They are frustrated obviously," said David Wright, a South Carolina public service commissioner.

February 16, 2010 - Israel News - Jordanian group to sue Israel over Dimona reactor - A Jordanian legal center plans to file a lawsuit against Israel for damage caused to the environment and residents of south Jordan by radiation emitted from the nuclear facility in Dimona, a Saudi news agency reported on Tuesday. According to the report, the al-Jisr al-Arabi human rights center located in Amman, has begun the necessary groundwork ahead of filing a legal claim in the coming month. According to the center, Israel is causing cases of death, cancer, and other afflictions among the Jordanians that live in the area adjacent to the reactor, due to the toxic gases and radiation it emits. The center also claims that the facility causes environmental damage in Jordan. Legal preparations began after representatives of the center met with a number of the reactor's "victims" in Jordan, and "collected evidence and proof that attest to a rise in the number of cancer cases, especially among residents of the southern region, which is adjacent to the reactor."

February 16, 2010 - Tri-City Herald - Study finds imported waste would increase contamination in Hanford ground water - A new draft study shows importing radioactive waste for disposal at Hanford would significantly increase pollution in ground water beneath the nuclear reservation, according to the Washington State Department of Ecology. The state long has opposed the Department of Energy sending radioactive waste to Hanford for disposal. But the draft Hanford Tank Closure and Waste Management Environmental Impact Statement that's open for public comment puts some numbers to that assertion. "We're cleaning up Hanford of some of the constituents we care most about and then recontaminating it with off-site waste to above the acceptable level from a cancer risk standpoint or a safe drinking water standpoint," said Suzanne Dahl, tank waste treatment section manager for the Department of Ecology. Under some scenarios that appear likely, the amount of certain long-lived radioactive isotopes that would be imported and buried at Hanford would account for as much as 90 percent of the releases of that isotope to the environment, according to the state. Some of the worst contamination could occur 1,000 or more years from now.

February 16, 2010 - Times Argus - NRC sees little threat from tritium - A review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of the various tritium leaks at nuclear reactors around the country concluded that there was no need for additional oversight or regulations regarding the problem. The review by the NRC's technical staff, conducted late in 2009 at the request of NRC Chairman Gregory Jaczko, was completed before Entergy Nuclear announced that Vermont Yankee was leaking tritium into several groundwater monitoring wells, presumably from a leak in an underground pipe that company officials told regulators last year did not exist. Entergy Nuclear said Monday it has "several thousand" feet of buried pipes carrying radionuclides. While the tritium has not showed up in any drinking water samples, state Health Department officials have said since January that the pollution is undoubtedly reaching the Connecticut River. So far tests have showed no discernable level of tritium in the river. Jaczko had asked NRC staff to review the issue of leaking underground and buried pipes in September, and in particular asked whether there needed to be any changes in NRC oversight or practices regarding the undergound piping. According to the NRC, about 27 of the 100 commercial nuclear reactors in the country are leaking tritium, at varying levels and due to various causes. The Vermont Yankee leak, which was first reported by Entergy Nuclear on Jan. 7, has risen sharply since the company started its effort to find the leak. "These pipe leaks have been of low significance with respect to public health and safety and the environment," the 2009 report stated.

February 16, 2010 - Reuters - France used troops as nuclear "guinea pigs" - France deliberately exposed its soldiers to nuclear explosions in Algeria in the 1960s to study the effect of radiation on humans, a newspaper reported on Tuesday, citing confidential documents. The French government promised last year to compensate victims of nuclear tests in Algeria, carried out between 1960 and 1966, recognizing a link between the explosions and veterans' illnesses such as cancer. While the government has said the tests were conducted as safely as possible, newspaper Le Parisien quoted an official defense report from the period as saying that the army deliberately sent its soldiers on risky maneuvers on April 25, 1961. One of the aims was "to study the physical and psychological effect of atomic weapons on humans, in order to obtain necessary elements for the physical preparation and training of morale of the modern combatant", Le Parisien quoted the report as saying. Defense Minister Herve Morin told the paper he had no knowledge of the report. "The (radioactive) dosages received during the tests were very low," he said. Some veterans who worked on the experiments in Algeria, and subsequent tests on French Polynesian atolls, have said they were ordered to lie down and cover their eyes during the explosions, wearing nothing but shorts and T-shirts. Le Parisien said that about 300 soldiers participated in the 1961 test, and that patrols were ordered to enter the affected area right after the explosion and head for the point where the device was set off. "A patrol of cross-country vehicles was ordered to carry out a raid on point zero to study the possibility of attack in a contaminated zone," the newspaper quoted the document as saying. France ran nuclear tests in French Polynesia between 1966 and 1996. Several veterans have said they were told to sail into affected areas immediately after the blast to examine the impact.

February 16, 2010 - Knoxville News-Sentinel - State holding DOE to Oak Ridge cleanup deal - The state is pushing the U.S. Department of Energy to live up to its word on environmental cleanup in Oak Ridge and, based on correspondence in recent weeks, the parties are in a serious dispute over several issues. The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation has denied multiple DOE requests to extend or modify scheduled milestones associated with the Federal Facilities Agreement. The FFA is the binding cleanup pact negotiated years ago by the state, DOE and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Basically, the state is unhappy with DOE's cleanup funding for Oak Ridge, which is $436 million this year, saying it isn't meeting the federal agency's commitment to accomplish long-term goals. While DOE's national budget for environmental management went up in Fiscal Year 2010, the amount coming to Oak Ridge actually declined, Roger Petrie, a TDEC official, said in a Jan. 26 letter to DOE.

February 16, 2010 - Pharma Times - Pharma Services deal seals MDS exit from contract research - Canadian life sciences company MDS has found buyers for the rest of its MDS Pharma Services unit, rounding off its exit strategy for the contract research sector. MDS will divest the remaining Early Stage components of its US-based contract research organisation (CRO) to Ricerca Biosciences and private investors for US$45 million as well as a minority interest in a new corporation being set up for the transaction. The deal, which is expected to close within two months, does not include MDS Pharma Services’ Early Stage Development facility in Montreal, Canada, which will be closed down with the loss of some 225 jobs. Also excluded are the MDS Pharma Services headquarters in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. While the majority of the company’s employees are expected to move to Ricerca or the new corporation, MDS “anticipates that around 50 people will not be part of the deal”. Specifically, MDS will divest its Discovery and Pre-Clinical operations in Bothell, Washington (US), Lyon, France and Taipei, Taiwan to Ricerca Biosciences, a leading provider of early-stage contract research services based in Concord, Ohio.

February 16, 2010 - KMOX - City leaders ask Feds to clean up nuclear waste site - A landfill in St. Louis County containing Cold-War, era nuclear waste has city leaders worried. The St. Louis Board of Aldermen took a field trip out to the site in Bridgeton Monday morning. Where they learned of the health issues that could potentially affect St. Louis City. Chairman of the Health committee Greg Carter, said Bridgeton seems far away, but we're all connected. "Even though its further out in the county our drinking water supply is not far from that, maybe fifteen miles." Besides the general proximity to the city, Professor Bob Criss with the Washington University Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences said, St. Louis County's geographic structure is all wrong to store hazardous materials, "We over estimate the integrity of our flood protection structures." Criss warned the group of a major flood swamp the nuke site and spreading the nuclear waste for miles, "the thing about radioactivity is we can't see it, taste it or feel it. There are cases when people have been exposed to intense burst of radiation and they're the walking dead." Carter helped pass a resolution urging the EPA to reconsider its 2008 decision to leave the nuclear waste where it is, "we're asking the federal government to come and just clean it out," said Carter.

February 16, 2010 - The Energy Collective - Why Is The US DOE Planning To Pay Nearly Half a Billion Dollars to Dispose of a Ton of Material Worth $4600 Per Pound? - The US Department of Energy has a stockpile of approximately one ton of Uranium 233 that was produced as part of several experimental programs including the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment and the Light Water Breeder Reactor. According to a March 3, 1997 decision by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, the stockpile is held in a number of different physical and chemical forms and is located in secure storage facilities at several DOE sites with the majority of the inventory held at either the Oak Ridge National Laboratory or the Idaho National Laboratory. The current plan for this material is to blend it with about 15-20 tons of depleted uranium. The design effort for the facility to be used for this blending process has been running into some cost and schedule issues; the most recent cost estimate is $477 million with an expected start date of the blending at the end of 2012 with the project completing near the end of 2015. This plan seems like a waste of both money and a potentially valuable feedstock. The reason that the U-233 exists is that a number of forward looking scientists and engineers recognized that thorium, a heavy metal that is 3-4 times as abundant as uranium in the Earth's crust, is a potentially valuable nuclear fuel. It is not fissile in its natural form, but it can be converted into U-233, which is fissile. A thermal spectrum reactor using U-233 as the fissile material and Th-232 as the fertile material can breed; that has been proven with much greater than laboratory scale experiments. The existence of an inventory of U-233 gives the concept of a Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) a head start. Destroying that material now would raise the barrier to getting that concept off the ground.

February 15, 2010 - Vineland Daily Journal - Readers ask about radiation and mammography - Mammograms once were considered as routine as an annual checkup. But the recent government decision to recommend the procedure for women 50 and older -- up from age 40 -- has residents questioning the safety of this potentially life-saving screening. Two readers submitted questions to this month's Healthline on mammography, both concerned with the potential side effects of the yearly mammogram. "People worry, but the risk is extremely low," said Dr. Jacqueline Gomberg, director of women's imaging at South Jersey Healthcare. One reader asked if there were studies that suggested radiation from mammograms cause cancer. "Scientists have calculated the theoretical risk of mammography inducing breast cancers and have shown the risk to be far lower than the likelihood of mammography detecting breast cancer in women 40 years of age and older," Gomberg said. She added the radiation a person is exposed to during a mammogram is much less even than the amount you receive every day just from exposure to the sun, about on par with a dental X-ray.

February 15, 2010 - Irish Independent - Killer in the house - Safe as houses is a phrase you often hear, but it can't be applied to 86,450 Irish homes. That is the number of dwellings that, unknown to their occupants, could contain lethally high levels of radon gas. Radon is a radioactive gas naturally produced in the ground from the uranium in all rocks. When it surfaces in open air it is harmless, but when it enters enclosed spaces it can be deadly. Inhaled over a sustained period of time, it can lead to lung cancer. Dr Seamus O'Reilly, consultant medical oncologist at the South Infirmary Victoria University Hospital in Cork, says that between 150 and 200 preventable cancer deaths occur in Ireland every year because of unsafe levels of radon gas in buildings. "There is no effective screening test for lung cancer, so if you discover high radon levels in your home and show no signs of ill health, there is no point in seeking medical attention. "But if you have symptoms such as coughing, shortness of breath, weight loss or if you are coughing up blood then you should see your GP immediately.

February 15, 2010 - West Yorkshire Police - Man Charged After Laser Shone At Force Helicopter - A man is due to appear in court charged with endangering an aircraft after a laser was shone at West Yorkshire Police's helicopter as it flew over Leeds. At about 5.40am yesterday (14/2), the crew of the Force helicopter, callsign X-ray 99, reported a laser pointer being shone at them from a house in Outgang Lane, Bramley. Response team officers, based at Horsforth police station, attended the address and a 21-year-old man was arrested. He was subsequently charged with shining a light at an aircraft in flight so as to dazzle or distract the pilot under The Air Navigation Order 2009. He was released on bail to appear at Leeds Magistrates Court on Tuesday, February 23.

February 15, 2010 - SRInternational - Mobile Phone Radiation Not Dangerous - Radiation from mobile phones, transmitter masts and wireless networks is not bad for your health, according to a new report. The Swedish Radiation Safety Authority (SSM) commissioned its international expert group to examine more a hundred studies on the health impacts of mobile phones, phone masts, and wireless transmissions over the last two years. The group, which includes scientists from Sweden, Finland, France and the US, concluded that the radiation poses no particular risk to human health and does not increase the risk of cancer, sleep disorders or concentration problems. “I can’t say that anything found in this research would increase misgivings about risks with this type of technology,” Professor Anders Ahlboms, chairman of the expert group, told Swedish Radio News. However SSM also points out that there is a lack of research into the effects of long term use or the effects on children and the authority recommends using hands free devices to reduce exposure. “As the widespread use of mobile phones is not more than 10 to 15 years old, we can’t be sure yet that long term use is totally risk free,” said SSM spokesperson Lars Mjönes.

February 15, 2010 - Oil & Gas Online - New GE X-Ray Detector Brings Portability To Digital Radiography - Weighing just 13 lbs (6 kg), the DXR250V is the latest lightweight and portable digital radiography tool from GE Sensing & Inspection Technologies. In the past, the use of digital radiography (DR) has been limited due to size, weight and connectivity of the equipment. With DXR250V, DR users have the benefit of shorter shot times and minimal radiation exposure, in applications that were previously limited to computed radiography or film. The DXR250V can easily connect to a laptop computer and produce images for instant review with GE's Rhythm® software, providing significant gains in productivity. Key applications include field inspections in the oil and gas, aerospace and power generation sectors. "The benefits of digital radiography, such as eliminating the chemicals and reducing radiation exposure through shorter exposure times can now be used in a much wider range of applications with the DXR250V," said Shana Telesz, product manager at GE Sensing & Inspection Technologies. "The ability to use digital radiography in areas where it was previously impossible is an important step in the conversion from film to digital radiography."

February 15, 2010 - Pittsburgh Tribune Review - Veterans Administration requests retraction of 80 'medical events' - Veterans Affairs officials are asking the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to retract the VA's reporting of 80 "medical events" stemming from six years of treating veterans with improper radiation doses. If approved by the NRC, the unprecedented request would eliminate the negative "medical event" categorization for 80 of 97 previously reported cases in which prostate cancer patients were given improper doses of radiation at the VA's Philadelphia facility. NRC officials say they do not recall ever getting a similar request. Records released by the VA indicate that at least one of the 80 patients was from the Pittsburgh area. According to the NRC Web site, a "medical event" indicates potential problems in a medical facility's use of radioactive materials. It does not necessarily result in harm to the patient. In a 17-page submission made public Saturday, Gary E. Williams, head of the VA's radiation programs, said existing standards for determining a "medical event" are "both imprecise and too objective for regulatory review" by the NRC or regulated entities. He wrote that if the Philadelphia cases were reviewed under the standards recommended by a recently convened "blue ribbon panel" of experts, only 17 of the 97 incidents would be classified as "medical events." The proposed standards would focus on the accuracy of the placement of radioactive seeds rather than on the accuracy of achieving the planned dosage.

February 15, 2010 - Associated Press - Hundreds protest outside UK nuclear weapons site - Hundreds of peace protesters are demonstrating outside a factory in southern England where Trident nuclear submarines are made. Police say the demonstrators blocked gates outside the site in Aldermaston, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) west of London early Monday. Ten people have been arrested. Anti-nuclear groups said two Nobel Peace Prize winners _ Jody Williams, who led a campaign to ban land mines, and Mairead Maguire, who led a campaign to end violence in Northern Ireland _ were among those taking part.

February 15, 2010 - The Day - Utilities' proposed strategy includes look at nuclear power - Connecticut should focus on studying the pros and cons of nuclear power, developing a policy for renewable resources and targeting certain energy efficiency programs for funding, according to a report funded by the state's two major utilities. The Connecticut Light & Power Co. and United Illuminating outline these recommendations as vital to the state's future energy strategy in a 341-page Integrated Resource Plan first released in January. The report was prepared by the Brattle Group, an economic consultant based in Cambridge, Mass. This past Thursday, the Connecticut Energy Advisory Board held a public hearing on the plan in New Britain. That session will be followed by public input in a docket to come before the state Department of Public Utility Control over the next few months, said Jeffrey Gaudiosi, the advisory board's vice chairman. The DPUC regulates the two utilities.  Both utilities support the renewable policy and energy efficiency recommendations, but United Illuminating recommends completing a detailed study of the possible costs and benefits of nuclear power, based on the Brattle Group's analysis of the potential advantages of a "nuclear strategy." "I very strongly suggest that the (advisory board) carry out that recommendation," said Stephen Goldschmidt of Guilford. "We need to provide facts that can address what are often irrational fears and biases about nuclear generation and be sure that Connecticut policymakers are not ignoring the overwhelming benefits of nuclear energy. It has to be studied now."

February 15, 2010 - Burlington Free Press - Blowing the whistle on Vermont Yankee - Arnie and Maggie Gundersen came to the Statehouse last week hauling a poster-sized map that detailed the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant and the monitoring wells that dot the grounds. Sitting before a legislative committee, Arnie Gundersen recounted the tritium levels found in each well and their proximity to the Connecticut River and to the plant’s functions. A committee of legislators listened intently, thirsting for information as the search for a tritium leak at the Vernon plant headed into its second month. Later in the day, the Gundersens would pore over this information with another committee down the hall.

February 15, 2010 - Chemie.de - Setting out to discover new, long-lived elements - Besides the 92 elements that occur naturally, scientists were able to create 20 additional chemical elements, six of which were discovered at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt. These new elements were produced artificially with particle accelerators and are all very short-lived: they decay in a matter of a split second. However, scientists predict the existence of even heavier elements with an extreme longevity, leaving them to only decay after years. These elements form an island of stability. Scientists at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt have developed and applied a measuring apparatus that might allow them to discover such long-lived elements. An international team of scientists headed by Michael Block was able to trap atoms of the element 102, nobelium, in an ion trap. This is the first time in history that a so-called super heavy element had been trapped. Trapping the element allowed the research team to measure the atomic mass of Nobelium with unprecedented accuracy. The atomic mass is one of the most essential characteristics of an atom. It is used to calculate the atom's binding energy, which is what keeps the atom together. The atom's binding energy determines the stability of an atom. With the help of the new measuring apparatus, scientists will be able to identify long-lived elements on the so called islands of stability that can no longer be assigned by their radioactive decay . The island of stability is predicted to be located in the vicinity of the elements 114 to 120. "Precisely measuring the mass of nobelium with our Shiptrap device was a successful first step. Now, our goal is to improve the measuring apparatus so that we can extend our method to heavier and heavier elements and, one day, may reach the island of stability", says Michael Block, head of the research team at the GSI Helmholtz Centre.

February 15, 2010 - Worcester Telegram & Gazette - Nuclear confusion; Washington must forge clear policies - One year into his presidency, Barack Obama’s stance on nuclear energy is fast becoming a study in contradictions. The fiscal 2011 budget he recently unveiled calls for an additional $36 billion in loan guarantees designed to support what he referred to in his State of the Union address as “a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants.” But that same budget would eliminate funding for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, a project that the nation has already spent some $38 billion to develop, and which remains the only viable, long-term storage option in sight. Whatever one thinks of global warming, it is clear that nuclear energy offers Americans an emissions-free means of easing our dependence on foreign oil. With 104 operational nuclear plants, the U.S. obtains nearly 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear power. That number could be much higher, but only if government commits itself to a clear and consistent political and regulatory framework that includes sensible options for waste storage. While seeking to end the Yucca Mountain project, the administration promises to convene a blue-ribbon panel to find a long-term waste storage solution. But the Yucca Mountain project was that solution, and would have begun accepting waste more than a decade ago had Washington been willing to place science ahead of politics. Launching another study group is no solution, but simply continues a cycle of governmental inaction and delay that could eventually prove fatal to the nation’s nuclear program. Already, Americans are grappling with the effects of aging nuclear plants, such as the Vermont Yankee plant, which was recently found to be leaking tritium. While experts disagree over the severity and environmental impact of such leaks, there is no question that aging facilities have problems that require prompt attention, and decommissioning of reactors, when necessary, can be done most effectively with a long-term waste solution in view. At the same time, new reactor designs and projects must be encouraged.

IEM - Consulting and Services for Today's Business Climate