New Mexico nuclear waste facility has a second radiation leak
Second radiation leak detected at New Mexico nuclear waste site About one month after radiation leaks were reported at the United States’ first nuclear waste repository, a second release has been detected in the air by Department of Energy officials. Rt.com 19 Mar 14, According to the Associated Press, air-monitoring stations near the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico, have picked up elevated radiation readings, suggesting another small batch of radiation has been released into the air.The WIPP – one of the world’s three deep nuclear repositories – has been shut down since February, when a sharp rise in radiation levels was linked to a leak in one of the underground tunnels storing radioactive waste about 600 meters underground. This radiation eventually made it into the plant’s surrounding area and was detected in the air by nearby monitoring stations…….One watchdog group, Southwest Research and Information Center, said plans to expand the plant’s operations could have led to lax security measures, and has labeled the WIPP a failure in terms of safety……http://rt.com/usa/second-radiation-leak-new-mexico-913/
The Coke Can Plutonium Experiment
On arrival at lecture halls, he would push his stand-in for plutonium into an empty Coke can he had sawn in half. During his talks, he would hold the can up so his audience could see it, and say the contents could incinerate a city. “A six-pack of these is a nuclear arsenal,” he would say.
A World Awash in a Nuclear Explosive? TruthOut, 19 March 2014 12:24 By Douglas Birch and R. Jeffrey Smith, Center for Public Integrity | Report Washington #……..The Coke Can Experiment In the abstract, there’s plenty of alarm in official circles. “Just one nuclear weapon exploded in a city — be it New York or Moscow; Tokyo or Beijing; London or Paris — could kill hundreds of thousands of people,” President Barack Obama told the United Nations Security Council in September 2009. “And it would badly destabilize our security, our economies, and our very way of life.”
But Cochran has long criticized the effectiveness of one of Washington’s most costly and elaborate strategies to prevent such a catastrophe — a global effort to detect and capture illicit fissile materials at border crossings and major world ports.
Since 2003 the United States has spent more than $850 million on equipment and training for customs officials at 45 foreign ports so they can scan shipping containers to detect nuclear materials. It’s a daunting assignment. About 432 million shipping containers crisscrossed the oceans in 2009 alone. U.S. ports accept 15 million containers every year. Continue reading
UN nuclear chief – ‘we can only try to prevent’ a nuclear accident
UN nuclear watchdog chief says atomic plants never ‘100%’ safe, 7 News, March 17, 2014 Tokyo (AFP) – The head of the UN nuclear watchdog said Monday his agency would keep working to improve safety after 
the Fukushima crisis, but no atomic plant could be “100 percent” safe from natural disasters.
Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), made the comments before he meets Prime Minister Shinzo Abe later Monday, as Japan moves closer to restarting two reactors despite objections from a nuclear-wary public……..Amano added that “what we can do is to prevent an accident (as much) as humanly possible, and to get prepared for the mitigation of the consequences” of one………http://au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/22027660/un-nuclear-watchdog-chief-says-atomic-plants-never-100-safe/
Inconsistency in Nuclear Plant Safety Enforcement
Report: Inconsistent Nuclear Plant Safety Enforcement WLTX 19, Eric Connor, Greenville News, 10 Mar 14, Inconsistent enforcement by federal regulators stands in the way of protecting the public from the dangers of nuclear energy, across the country and at the Upstate’s Oconee Nuclear Station where concerns over fire and flood have hovered for decades, a nuclear watchdog group says in a new report………..The report — “The NRC and Nuclear Power Plant Safety in 2013: More Jekyll, Less Hyde” — lists 10 instances of what the group considers “near miss” events that required special inspections and posed higher-than-acceptable risks……..
The report’s author — Dave Lochbaum, a nuclear safety expert who once trained NRC inspectors — wrote that the NRC has been complicit in allowing utilities like Duke to ignore deadlines for years.
“What’s protecting the people around Oconee from fire risk? Luck,” Lochbaum wrote. “What’s protecting Oconee’s owner from the cost and bother of legally managing the fire risk? The NRC.”…….
Last year, The Greenville News reported on an NRC whistleblower’s analysis detailing dam concerns that spanned decades.
The NRC had held the analysis from public view on grounds that it contained security-related information, but the document has since been released in largely unedited form.
The News also reported on hundreds of internal emails that show NRC staffers expressing frustration over superiors they said were cowing to the industry instead of holding it accountable for the threat of a dam failure.
ust one month after the Fukushima meltdown, Lochbaum wrote, the NRC met with the public but didn’t mention the long-held concerns.
“The exact same flooding hazard that exists today at the Oconee nuclear plant was not mentioned by the NRC — so the public was actually misled into believing no such problems existed,” Lochbaum wrote………http://www.wltx.com/story/news/2014/03/10/safety-enforcement-at-nuclear-plants-inconsistent/6251227/
Japan could restart nuclear reactors with no proper emergency plan
Japanese nuclear power regulation does not require evacuation plan approval as a prerequisite for restarting nuclear power plants
No plan best plan in Kansai nuclear disaster Area leaders paralyzed by lack of answers, state guidance Japan Times, BY ERIC JOHNSTON 26 Jan 14 Ten months after regional governments were required to submit nuclear disaster 
evacuation plans, a lack of central government guidance and local-level cooperation is generating concern that Kansai will be ill-prepared to respond if any of Fukui Prefecture’s 13 commercial reactors suffers a meltdown.
Questions remain about how fleeing Fukui residents who pass through neighboring Kyoto would be stopped and screened for radiation, and how residents in the rural northern areas closest to the reactors would be gathered and evacuated in a timely manner. Evacuating the elderly, young mothers and the pregnant is also a serious concern.
There is also the question of what to do if Shiga’s Lake Biwa, which supplies drinking water to about 14.5 million people, gets contaminated with radiation.
Citizens’ groups have posed these and other detailed questions to prefectural officials in Kyoto and the Union of Kansai Governments, a loose federation of seven prefectures and four major cities in the region. But Kansai officials reply that, on many issues, there is little they can do because the central government hasn’t drafted specific guidelines…..
Kansai leaders recognize that more monitoring stations, particularly in northern Kyoto and Hyogo, are needed, but without guidance from the central government, as well as funding, there is little they can do.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government has made restarting the nation’s nuclear reactors a primary goal. The discussions have focused mostly on the technical issues related to the plants and whether the fault lines surrounding them, or in some cases under them, are active.
Given the widespread concerns, Smith says such thinking puts the cart before the horse. “It’s a very serious problem that Japanese nuclear power regulation does not require evacuation plan approval as a prerequisite for restarting nuclear power plants,” she said. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/01/26/national/no-plan-best-plan-in-kansai-nuclear-disaster/
USA Defense Dept calls to ramp up spying
“The report’s big technical conclusion centers on the importance of overhauling the monitoring framework used to find groups that represent a nuclear threat before they act ”
I wonder if they are thinking of people like Sr Megan Rice
Defense Dept. Calls For Expanded Nuclear Monitoring, Information Week, 22 Jan 14 US must ramp up surveillance and big data analytics tools to meet challenge of global nuclear proliferation monitoring, warns DOD Defense Science Board report. The world’s nuclear future looks a lot different than its past. As access to nuclear knowledge widens, so does the need to monitor nuclear proliferation globally. But that’s not something that the US government is fully equipped to address, according to a report released by the Defense Department’s Defense Science Board this month.
The report, “Assessment of Nuclear Monitoring and Verification Technologies,” argues that the lines between intelligence and traditional monitoring are blurring, therefore technologies for battling terrorism should also be used to address the threat of proliferation.
The report lists two types of proliferation of equal concern: “vertical,” the increase in capabilities of existing nuclear states; and “horizontal,” the increase in the number of states and non-state players owning or attempting to own nuclear weapons.
Future “monitoring will need to be continuous, adaptive, and continuously tested for its effectiveness against an array of differing, creative, and adaptive proliferators,” Dr. Paul Kaminski, chairman of the Defense Science Board, said in a memo included in the report.
The report argues that the standard for monitoring nuclear activity should happen as early in the planning and acquisition process as possible.
“New intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) technologies, demonstrated in recent conflicts, offer significant promise for monitoring undesirable nuclear activity throughout the world,” the report said. However, the “advances in persistent surveillance, automated tracking, rapid analyses of large and multi-source data sets, and open source analyses to support conventional warfighting and counterterrorism have not yet been exploited by the nuclear monitoring community.”…..
The report’s big technical conclusion centers on the importance of overhauling the monitoring framework used to find groups that represent a nuclear threat before they act……http://www.informationweek.com/defense-dept-calls-for-expanded-nuclear-monitoring/d/d-id/1113521
“Acceptable nuclear risk”- Is there such a thing?
Whatever we decide, the outcome may not be as relatively benign next time
What is ‘acceptable risk’ when planning a nuclear power plant, The Conversation, Peter Bernard Ladkin Professor of Computer Networks and Distributed Systems at University of Bielefeld 23 Jan 14, Modern safety engineering follows the aphorism, “there is no such thing as zero risk, only acceptable risk”. However, calculating chances and risk is a finicky process, especially when played out against factors of cost, time and complexity. Major accidents such as at Fukushima Dai-ichi – still unfolding as it approaches its third anniversary – demonstrate how essential it is to correctly assess risks and safeguards.
Risk is expectation of loss, and is dependent on the chance of a loss-event occurring combined with its magnitude. The chance can be tiny, but the loss huge, and the risk therefore considerable. Analyses of the possibility that the universe would collapse when operating the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) were undertaken, despite the infinitesimal chance.
Calculating risk is now de rigeur in big engineering projects, but it wasn’t always so. Built in the late 1940s, the Windscale piles, Britain’s first two nuclear reactors, used air blown over the core and up a chimney as their cooling. Exhaust filters were added to the chimneys only as an afterthought, insisted on by designer Sir John Cockcroft at some expense – the so called “Cockcroft’s Follies”. Continue reading
Seven nuclear disasters. Who’s next?
Is Nuclear Experimentation Fascism? OpEdNews Op Eds 1/22/2014By Ethan Indigo Smith (about the author) opednews.com
“……..HANFORD, USA, 1943 — 1987
As an early “flagship’ nuclear experiment, many of the safety procedures and waste disposal practices employed at the Hanford site were completely inadequate. Although most of the reactors were shut down between 1964 and 1971, government documents have since confirmed that operations at the Hanford site released significant amounts of radioactive materials into the air and the Columbia River, which still threatens the health of residents and ecosystems today. Hanford is currently the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States, representing two-thirds of the nation’s high-level radioactive waste by volume. .
BIKINI ATOLL, NORTHERN PACIFIC OCEAN, 1946
The United States military undertook nuclear weapons tests at Bikini Atoll in mid-1946. At the request of the US military, Bikini’s 146 native residents agreed to temporarily evacuate the island so the United States government could begin testing atomic bombs for “the good of mankind and to end all world wars.” After “confused and sorrowful deliberation”, the Bikinians agreed to the relocation request, announcing “we will go believing that everything is in the hands of God.”
Most residents were moved by the military to Rongerik Atoll, 125 miles away. Only one-sixth the size of Bikini Atoll, no one lived on Rongerik because it had an inadequate water and food supply, however the United States Navy left the natives there with only a few weeks of food and water. Predictably, this soon proved to be insufficient and the Bikinians were left starving on Rongerik. (Read more: http://www.bikiniatoll.com/history.html)
As a series of large thermonuclear tests continued at Bikini Atoll into the 1950″s, the island was eventually rendered unfit for subsistence farming and fishing, and because of radioactive contamination still remains uninhabitable today. So much for the “temporary” evacuation of the Bikinians from their native island to help the United States “end all world wars.”
WINDSCALE FIRE, UK, 1957
The worst nuclear accident in Great Britain’s history, the core of the nuclear reactor at Windscale, Cumberland (now Sellafield, Cumbria) caught fire, releasing substantial amounts of radioactive contamination into the surrounding area. Caused by operators pushing the first-generation design of the Windscale facility beyond its intended limits, the fire burned for three days releasing radioactive material into the atmosphere that spread across the UK and Europe.
SANTA SUSANA, USA, 1959
A reactor at the Atomics International field laboratory in the Santa Susana Mountains, California, experienced a power surge and subsequently spewed radioactive gases into the atmosphere. According to a 2009 report from the Los Angeles Times, residents blame the facility for their health issues and say the site remains contaminated.
THREE MILE ISLAND, USA, 1979
The worst accident in U.S. commercial history, the Three Mile Island Unit 2 (TMI-2) reactor near Middletown (PA) partially melted down on March 28, 1979. A combination of equipment malfunctions, design-related problems and worker errors led to TMI-2″s partial meltdown and off-site releases of radioactivity. 14 years later, the clean up effort officially ended in December
CHERNOBYL, UKRAINE, 1986
Widely considered to have been the worst nuclear power plant accident in history, Chernobyl’s reactor four suffered a catastrophic power increase leading to explosions in its core. The explosion and resulting fire released large quantities of radioactive particles into the atmosphere, which spread over much of the western USSR (the then-Soviet Republic) and Europe.
ROCKY FLATS PLANT, USA 1987
Following insider reports of unsafe conditions, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) found numerous violations of federal anti-pollution laws, including the contamination of water and soil. A grand jury report released following this incident criticized the Department of Energy and Rocky Flats contractors for “engaging in a continuing campaign of distraction, deception and dishonesty”, and noted that Rocky Flats had discharged pollutants, hazardous materials and radioactive matter into nearby creeks and water supplies for many years. But even the DOE itself acknowledged that Rocky Flats’ ground water was (at the time) the single greatest environmental hazard at any of its nuclear facilities.
The contamination levels at Rocky Flats itself, as measured by the United States government remain sealed records and have not been reported to the public. Clean-up was not declared complete until October 13, 2005 — 18 years later.
FUKUSHIMA DAIICHI, JAPAN 2011
The troubled Fukishima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan has experienced a number of “incidents’ since its construction in 1971, culminating in total reactor failure when the plant was hit by a tsunami triggered by the Tōhoku earthquake. At the time of the disaster, the plant began releasing substantial amounts of radioactive materials making it the largest nuclear incident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster and the second in history (with Chernobyl) to measure at Level 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale. More than two years after the incident it was revealed that the plant is still leaking radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean, and despite the technical assistance of GE (the corporation that designed the failing reactor) the situation appears to keep deteriorating as time goes on.
WHO IS NEXT?
Lucky they fixed nuclear reactor’s coolant leak
Workers discovered the leak Monday in a valve on a water line that carries reactor water back to the reactor after it has run through the plant’s steam turbine and then been condensed back into water.
The leaky valve was in a pipe contained in a hallway-sized steam tunnel running from the turbine and generator building through a second, auxiliary equipment building and then back into the reactor containment building, said Young.
Cameras monitoring the tunnel 24 hours a day first spotted the small spray of water and steam coming from the pipe, she said. ……http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2014/01/perry_nuclear_power_plant_trit.html
On the assassinations of Iran’s nuclear scientists
How the IAEA Basically Helped Assassinate Iranian Nuclear Scientists By Global Research News December 29, 2013 “……In the fifth attack of its kind, terrorists killed a 32-year-old Iranian scientist, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, and his driver on January 11, 2012.
The blast took place on the second anniversary of the martyrdom of Iranian university professor and nuclear scientist, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, who was also assassinated in a terrorist bomb attack in Tehran in January 2010.
The assassination method used in the bombing was similar to the 2010 terrorist bomb attacks against the then university professor, Fereidoun Abbassi Davani – the former head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization – and his colleague Majid Shahriari. While Abbasi Davani survived the attack, Shahriari was martyred……..
Over the course of the investigations, all other elements behind the assassination of Iranian scientists Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, Majid Shahriari and Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan as well as Reza Qashqaei (Roshan’s driver) have been apprehended, the statement read.
Some of the perpetrators of the assassination of Dr. Fereydoun Abbasi are among those arrested, the ministry added.
The statement said Iran’s Intelligence Ministry has detected some of Mossad’s bases within the territories of one of Iran’s Western neighbors, which provided training and logistic support to the terrorist networks…….http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-iaea-basically-helped-assassinate-iranian-nuclear-scientists/5362939
UK’s Hinkley nuclear reactor design failed the Generic Design Assessment
Hinkley C: the Generic Design Assessment has failed Ecologist, Peter Lux 26th December 2013 The safety assessment for the Hinkley C reactor design has failed, reports Peter Lux. Faced with 724 unresolved concerns about the EPR design, the UK regulator went ahead and issued the licence anyway.The Generic Design Assessment (GDA) is a process which was set up in order to examine the designs for new power stations and iron out any flaws in them before the power stations are constructed. Continue reading
Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s study on nuclear waste storage is inadequate
Watchdogs criticize nuclear storage study; A.G. says NRC didn’t focus on Indian Point lohud.com, 26 Dec 13, State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and his counterparts in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont have given a thumbs-down to the federal government’s draft study on the long-term storage
of used nuclear fuel.
A 143-page document filed late last week detailed their concerns, along with those of a Minnesota Native American tribe.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s review, they maintain, was incorrectly focused at the industry level and not individual plants.A federal court in 2012 found the NRC didn’t fully consider the hazards of on-site storage of old fuel at the nation’s nuclear plants, including Indian Point in Buchanan. The court ordered the commission to evaluate the environmental effects of such storage.
Old fuel at Indian Point is kept in spent-fuel pools and dry casks. Both are reinforced against attacks or other calamities but critics have called for moving more old fuel at a faster pace into the casks.The draft study “fails(s) to address these core issues as required by (federal law) and the Court,” the attorneys general and the general counsel for the Prairie Island Indian Community wrote. The study also fails to provide the states, the tribe and the public with plant-by-plant reviews and wrongly relies on a generic approach, they wrote.
The tribe’s reservation is next to the Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Plant, which was the subject of litigation in the 1970s that lead to how the NRC regulates the storage of old nuclear fuel……..http://www.lohud.com/article/20131225/NEWS/312250023/Watchdogs-criticize-nuclear-storage-study-A-G-says-NRC-didn-t-focus-on-India
Scrutiny on US Navy’s secret and possibly unsafe plan for explosive- handling wharf
Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, a Poulsbo, Wash.-based anti-nuclear group. Ground Zero has accused the Navy of withholding facts that would have fully informed the public of the second wharf’s potential dangers, as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.
Anti-Nuclear Groups Wary of Navy’s Planned Wharf Seattle Times | Dec 26, 2013 | by Kyung M. Song WASHINGTON — In September 2012, the Navy began in-water work at Naval Base Kitsap Bangor to build an explosives-handling wharf, a $650 million project anti-nuclear activists criticized as an unneeded vestige of the Cold War. Continue reading
Paris derailment of nuclear waste freight train
Freight wagon with nuclear waste derails at depot near Paris, no leak http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/12/23/us-france-nuclear-idUSBRE9BM0QH20131223 PARIS Mon Dec 23, 2013 (Reuters) – A rail freight wagon carrying nuclear waste derailed at a depot in Drancy, 3 km (2 miles) northeast of Paris on Monday, the mayor of the town said.
There was no leakage of nuclear waste, Jean-Christophe Lagarde said by telephone.
“Today at 1605 (1505 GMT), a freight car transporting radioactive material derailed in Drancy station,” said the mayor, who is also a member of parliament for the French centrist UDI party. About 4,000 freight wagons carrying radioactive or chemical waste pass through the station each year, Lagarde said, calling the incident “intolerable”.
France’s “Europe Ecologie Les Verts” (EELV) Green party called for an end to the transportation of radioactive waste through urban areas and busy stations following the incident.
“The slightest accident can have catastrophic effects,” the EELV party said in a statement. “All (nuclear waste) transport is risky and exposes populations to unnecessary danger.”
US Nuclear Air Force Troubles
Recap of AP Reporting on Troubles in Nuclear Force, abc news, December 23, 2013 A recap of Associated Press reporting this year on troubles in the country’s nuclear force:
—In April, 19 missile crew members in the 91st Missile Wing at Minot, N.D., were deemed temporarily unfit for duty and given weeks of remedial training. The wing’s deputy commander of operations complained of “rot” in the force. Later, the officer in charge of the 91st’s missile crew training and proficiency was relieved of duty.
—In August, the 341st Missile Wing at Malmstrom, Mont., failed a safety and security inspection. Nine days later the officer in charge of security forces there was relieved of duty. In October the unit passed a do-over test.
—On Oct. 11,…….—Also in November, the AP reported that key members of the Air Force’s nuclear missile force are feeling “burnout” from what they see as exhausting, unrewarding and stressful work. The finding, in an unpublished RAND Corp. study provided to the AP in draft form, also cited heightened levels of misconduct such as spousal abuse and said court-martial rates in the nuclear missile force in 2011 and 2012 were more than twice as high as in the overall Air Force. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/recap-ap-reporting-troubles-nuclear-force-21306790
-
Archives
- May 2026 (72)
- April 2026 (356)
- March 2026 (251)
- February 2026 (268)
- January 2026 (308)
- December 2025 (358)
- November 2025 (359)
- October 2025 (376)
- September 2025 (257)
- August 2025 (319)
- July 2025 (230)
- June 2025 (348)
-
Categories
- 1
- 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
- business and costs
- climate change
- culture and arts
- ENERGY
- environment
- health
- history
- indigenous issues
- Legal
- marketing of nuclear
- media
- opposition to nuclear
- PERSONAL STORIES
- politics
- politics international
- Religion and ethics
- safety
- secrets,lies and civil liberties
- spinbuster
- technology
- Uranium
- wastes
- weapons and war
- Women
- 2 WORLD
- ACTION
- AFRICA
- Atrocities
- AUSTRALIA
- Christina's notes
- Christina's themes
- culture and arts
- Events
- Fuk 2022
- Fuk 2023
- Fukushima 2017
- Fukushima 2018
- fukushima 2019
- Fukushima 2020
- Fukushima 2021
- general
- global warming
- Humour (God we need it)
- Nuclear
- RARE EARTHS
- Reference
- resources – print
- Resources -audiovicual
- Weekly Newsletter
- World
- World Nuclear
- YouTube
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
nuclear-news 