• Abandoning nuclear power would cost Germany billions

    Nuclear power is highly unpopular in Germany, and in the wake of the nuclear disaster in Japan, Germany chancellor Angela Merkel announced that Germany would abandon nuclear power generation (she called it “Atomausstieg,” or “nuclear exit”) and would gradually close its seventeen nuclear power plants; there is a debate in Germany about whether abandoning nuclear power would cost Germany 3 billion Euros a year – or only 2 billion Euros, as the government says it would

  • Experts: new U.S. nuclear reactors unlikely soon

    Experts on a panel at Stanford University say radiation leaks at Japan’s Fukushima plant could impact the future of nuclear energy in the United States and abroad; they said that nuclear safety improved after the historic disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. Richter, and that it was improved further after the 9/11 attacks; they expect similar safety reviews by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission following the Fukushima accident

  • NRC inspects Nebraska reactor radiation exposure

    On 3 April, workers at the Cooper Nuclear Station, located near Brownville, Nebraska removed a long tube contaminated with highly radioactive material through the bottom of the reactor vessel, rather than through the top as is usually done, triggering radiation alarms; the NRC is investigating

  • Five U.S. nuclear plants in earthquake zones

    Five active U.S. nuclear reactors — the Diablo Canyon Power Plant and San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station in California; the South Texas Project near the Gulf Coast; the Waterford Steam Electric Station in Louisiana; and the Brunswick Steam Electric Plant in North Carolina — are situated in seismic activity-prone zones

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  • Concerns about Illinois nuclear safety trigger inspections

    The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is currently performing Special Inspections at the Byron and Braidwood Nuclear plants in Illinois after issues were identified in February and March of 2011; at issue is the ability of pumps to cool the reactor in case of a reactor trip or any reason the system for heat removal became unavailable at both Byron and Braidwood stations which are similar in design

  • Easing contamination fears in Japan's food industry

    With much of Japan’s manufacturing sector, land, and critical infrastructure badly damaged from the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, dairy and rice manufacturers have struggled to produce enough to feed the nation; Japan produces all of its own milk, rice, and yogurt products, but domestic plants are operating far below full capacity; shortages may persist into the summer; as production ramps up, fears of contamination from radiation leaked from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant may dampen consumption; one analyst suggests that Japan institute a food tracking program that will allow consumers to track the production of food every step of the way to help ease fears

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  • Release of radioactive water into ocean stopped

    Radioactive water stopped flowing from Japan’s damaged nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean Wednesday after a special material was used, the utility said; the release, which began Monday, was described as an unavoidable process to avert a much bigger problem resulting from the leakage of the highly contaminated water; in terms of volume, about three million gallons of low-level radioactive water will have been dumped into the seas; the flooded basement of the buildings and their underground trenches at Nos. 1, 2, and 3 reactors are believed to hold about 60,000 tons of the more highly radioactive water; this water, which is also preventing workers from doing other emergency work, eventually will be stored in tanks at the reactors’ nuclear waste disposal sites, the government nuclear safety agency said. Those tanks will be shipped by the end of this month, the agency said

  • Modeling shows limited spread of Fukushima's radioactive release in ocean

    Daily computer simulations are suggesting that, so far, the hazardous radioactive materials being released into the sea by the Fukushima nuclear plants are still largely restricted to areas near the coast; the powerful Kuroshiro current — the Pacific’s version of the Gulf Stream — tends to block contaminated seawater from flowing southward toward Tokyo Bay while picking up little contamination itself

  • IAEA: after Japan, no more nuclear "business as usual"

    The world cannot take a “business as usual” approach to nuclear power in the wake of the disaster in Japan, UN atomic watchdog chief Yukiya Amano said; “Thinking retrospectively, the measures taken by the operators as a safety measure (were) not sufficient to prevent this accident,” Amano said; he added that the crisis in Japan caused by the 11 March earthquake and tsunami “has enormous implications for nuclear power and confronts all of us with a major challenge”

  • Scientific explanation overturned -- good news for nuclear fusion

    A team of Duke University researchers has discovered, much to its surprise, that a long-accepted explanation of how nuclei collide to produce charged particles for electricity — a process receiving intense interest lately from scientists, entrepreneurs, and policy makers in the wake of Japan’s nuclear crisis — is flat out wrong; the discovery of the error makes nuclear reactors based on fusion more realistic

  • Subterranean salt beds to keep U.S. nuclear waste

    Beds of salt up to one kilometer thick lie within one or two kilometers of the surface across much of the United States; they were deposited hundreds of millions of years ago by evaporating seas; a new study suggests that since President Obama killed the only national nuclear waste burial program — the Yucca mountain site — the United States should look again at the pre-Yucca plan to bury nuclear waste in subterranean salt beds

  • Algae might help reduce nuclear waste

    The humble algae — Closterium moniliferum — might one day soon be used to help separate strontium from calcium in nuclear waste; if successful, the process could lead to a reduction in the amount of nuclear waste that is left over from nuclear power facilities, and might even help in cleanup when accidents occur such as the one in Chernobyl, Ukraine, that spewed great quantities of strontium into the surrounding environment

  • U.S. reactors have weaker back-up batteries than Fukushima Daiichi had

    Almost all American nuclear power plants have backup batteries that would last only half as long as those at Japan’s troubled Fukushima Daiichi plant did after a tsunami knocked out power there; just eleven of the U.S. 104 plants had eight-hour batteries, and 93 had four-hour batteries; the batteries are not powerful enough to run pumps that direct cooling water, but they can operate valves and can power instruments that give readings of water levels, flow and temperatures

  • Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant lost

    The radioactive core in the Unit 2 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant appears to have melted through the bottom of its containment vessel and is now resting on a concrete floor; officials are now struggling with two crucial but contradictory efforts: pumping in water to keep the fuel rods cool and pumping out contaminated water; an investigation found that Tokyo Electric Power Co. officials had dismissed scientific evidence and geological history that indicated that a massive earthquake — and subsequent tsunami — was far more likely than they believed; more than 11,000 bodies have been recovered, but officials say the final death toll is expected to exceed 18,000. Hundreds of thousands of people remain homeless, their homes and livelihoods destroyed. Damage could amount to $310 billion — the most expensive natural disaster on record

  • Nuclear power here to stay

    There are currently 441 large nuclear power reactors in 35 countries, 120 of which date from the 1970s and early 1980s; collectively the 400-odd reactors supply about 15 percent of the world’s electricity (the average in OECD countries being more than 22 percent); the United States has the greatest number operating, with 104 units providing 20 percent of its electricity supply; this is followed by France with 57 (producing nearly 80 percent of its supply), and Japan, with 54 (providing about 30 percent); so far, the world’s 441 reactors have racked up more than 14,000 reactor-years of operation; to generate electricity for a city of a million people, coal-fired power stations have to burn about three million tons of coals a year, releasing about ten million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in the process; to generate the same power, nuclear reactors consume only one ton of the fissile uranium isotope, U-235 — and release no carbon dioxide