Nuclear Power & Radiation

"Environmental groups, on Thursday, again asked the U.S. nuclear regulator to delay approval of Westinghouse Electric's AP1000 reactor design."

"More than a dozen Virginia legislators are flying to France this month on all-expenses paid trips as part of an aggressive lobbying effort by a company pushing lawmakers to lift a ban on uranium mining in the state."

"Nuclear safety rules in the United States do not adequately weigh the risk that a single event would knock out electricity from both the grid and from emergency generators, as an earthquake and tsunami recently did at a nuclear plant in Japan, officials of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Wednesday."

"Nearly three-quarters of Japanese voters want to see a gradual phase-out of nuclear power, a newspaper poll showed on Tuesday, the latest sign of concerns about atomic safety as the country struggles with the world's worst nuclear crisis in 25 years."

"Italians voted to abandon nuclear power for the foreseeable future, turning out in droves to cast ballots in a packet of referenda whose outcome is a sign of growing popular discontent toward Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's conservative government."

"Radioactive strontium up to 240 times the legal concentration limit has been detected in seawater samples collected near an intake at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Sunday."

"A report says the chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was “not forthcoming” with other commissioners in his decision to have the agency’s staff wind down the review of an application for a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada."

"A panel of three federal administrative law judges has announced it is delaying Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant’s license renewal until at least December 2015." The renewal will await further seismic studies.

"Imagine a country where corruption is rampant, infrastructure is very poor, or the quality of security is in question. Now what if that country built a nuclear power plant?"

"A fire in an electrical switch room on Tuesday briefly knocked out cooling for a pool holding spent nuclear fuel at the Fort Calhoun nuclear plant outside Omaha, Neb., plant officials said."