nuclear-news

Australia wants Israel to provide details on death of ‘Prisoner X’

“I need to know what the contact was between Australian agencies and those of Israel, and I need to see what the Israelis want to tell Australia,” Carr stated. “The key is to get all the information.”

“…The Haaretz newspaper reported on Friday that Israel has agreed to pay millions in compensation to Zygier’s family.

A source told the newspaper that Israel agreed to pay millions of shekels several weeks ago, after an investigation concluded that Zygier’s death had been a suicide and before the affair was exposed by the Australian media….”

Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr said on Sunday that the ministry was seeking answers in a “formal report” from the Tel Aviv regime over the circumstances surrounding the suspicious death of 34-year-old Ben Zygier known as ‘Prisoner X.’

On February 12, reporter Trevor Bormann revealed on Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that the prisoner who had worked for Mossad for ten years was “found hanged in a cell with state-of-the-art surveillance systems” near Tel Aviv in December 2010. Carr told reporters in Sydney that the Australian government had “asked” the Israeli regime “for a contribution to that report.”

The Australian foreign minister said Canberra wanted Tel Aviv to “submit… an explanation of how this tragic death came about.”

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February 17, 2013 Posted by arclight2011 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments

With no way to process it, US will bury 70,000 tons of nuclear waste

“It also ups the ante for reactor accident danger, as in the case of Fukushima, because MOX fuel has plutonium in it.”

“…So-called MOX fuel, short for mixed-oxide, is used in nuclear warheads and usually consists of a mix of plutonium and uranium.

The stock of used nuclear fuel currently held at 79 temporary locations in 34 US states “is massive, diverse, dispersed, and increasing,” according to the Oak Ridge report…”

Published: 01 February, 2013, 08:05
Edited: 02 February, 2013, 06:31

RT

With two decades to go before it can reprocess spent nuclear fuel, the US will have to bury nearly 70,000 tons of it, a research lab reports. It comes after Congress and the Obama administration defunded a planned nuclear waste repository in 2011.

­The Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a facility that does research for the Department of Energy (DOE), said that “about 68,450 [metric tons] or about 98 percent of the total current inventory by mass, can proceed to permanent disposal without the need to ensure retrievability for reuse or research purposes” in its report, published near the end of 2012. The rest of the waste, the report said, could be kept available for research on fuel reprocessing and storage.

The report was fairly obscure until being cited in a DOE document that showed plans to find a new permanent waste dump after Congress and the Obama administration cut funding for the Yucca Mountain repository in 2011.

Reprocessing has little support in Washington due to concerns that spent fuel could fall into the wrong hands. Nevertheless the DOE started looking into reprocessing methods in 2005.

But following the March 2011 disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, US officials became wary of recycling radioactive waste. The Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, co-chaired by Energy Secretary Steven Chu, said that “no currently available or reasonably foreseeable reactor and fuel cycle technology developments — including advances in reprocessing and recycling technologies — have the potential to fundamentally alter the waste management challenges the nation confronts over at least the next several decades, if not longer” in a report.

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February 17, 2013 Posted by arclight2011 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment