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| | | published Sunday, August 14, 2011 | 1095 Views :: 0 Comments |
August 13, 2011
By Annette Cary
From the Tri-City Herald
The Department of Energy has taken a look at all the environmental cleanup yet to be completed at the Hanford nuclear reservation and come up with a big price tag: $115 billion.
That's what it projects will be required to finish environmental cleanup in about 2060 and then prevent any intrusion into areas, such as landfills holding radioactive waste, until 2090.
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| | | published Sunday, August 14, 2011 | 1072 Views :: 0 Comments |
ANA has been closely monitoring the situation reported on in the following article, which quotes ANA member Tom Carpenter and refers to 2011 ANA Whistleblower Award winner Walt Tamosaitis. We've strongly been urging Congress to require complete testing of Hanford's mixers and support the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board in their Hanford oversight.
Engineers and scientists say equipment being installed by Bechtel Corp. at the Hanford site in Washington state poses risks, but the Energy Department is letting work continue.
August 14, 2011
By Ralph Vartabedian
From the Los Angeles Times
The Energy Department has asserted that Bechtel Corp. underplayed safety risks from equipment it is installing at the nation's largest nuclear waste cleanup project, according to government records.
A federal engineering review team found in late July that Bechtel's safety evaluation of key equipment at the plant at the Hanford site in Washington state was incomplete and that "the risks are more serious" than Bechtel acknowledged when it sought approval to continue with construction, the documents say.
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| | | published Tuesday, August 09, 2011 | 383 Views :: 0 Comments |
August 8, 2011
By Norimitsu Onishi and Martin Fackler From the New York Times
FUKUSHIMA, Japan — The day after a giant tsunami set off the continuing disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, thousands of residents at the nearby town of Namie gathered to evacuate.
Given no guidance from Tokyo, town officials led the residents north, believing that winter winds would be blowing south and carrying away any radioactive emissions. For three nights, while hydrogen explosions at four of the reactors spewed radiation into the air, they stayed in a district called Tsushima where the children played outside and some parents used water from a mountain stream to prepare rice.
The winds, in fact, had been blowing directly toward Tsushima — and town officials would learn two months later that a government computer system designed to predict the spread of radioactive releases had been showing just that.
But the forecasts were left unpublicized by bureaucrats in Tokyo, operating in a culture that sought to avoid responsibility and, above all, criticism. Japan’s political leaders at first did not know about the system and later played down the data, apparently fearful of having to significantly enlarge the evacuation zone — and acknowledge the accident’s severity.
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| | | published Friday, August 05, 2011 | 881 Views :: 0 Comments |
August 4, 2011
By Peter Geoghegan
Guardian.co.uk
Sellafield Mox nuclear fuel plant to close. It's a headline that generations of Irish environmental activists,
and government ministers in Leinster House, never thought they would
see. After just 10 years of operation – and at the cost of a vertiginous
£1.4bn to the British taxpayer – the mixed-oxide fuel plant nestled on
the edge of bucolic west Cumbria is to be decommissioned.
Sellafield
has long been an emotive issue in Ireland. At just 128 miles from
Dublin, the plant is within spitting distance of Ireland's densely
populated eastern seaboard. The Irish Sea is now the most radioactively contaminated in the world, while in the wake of 9/11 concerns about a terrorist attack on the plant briefly gripped the Irish popular imagination.
Unsurprisingly then, yesterday's announcement that the Mox plant is to cease operation has been welcomed by Irish activists,
many of whom have been involved in decades-long campaigns opposing the
facility. However, the closure is anything but the end of Sellafield's
nuclear story.
Last October, the environment secretary, Chris
Huhne – in a volte-face from previous Lib Dem energy policy – announced
that eight new nuclear power plants are to be constructed across
Britain. Only last month it was confirmed that Sellafield is to be the
site of one such new reactor, to be built by 2025. It is widely expected
that additional employment at the new facility will at the very least
replace the 600 job losses announced yesterday.
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| | | published Monday, August 01, 2011 | 951 Views :: 0 Comments |
The following Jul. 30, 2011 article from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram highlights the work of ANA member group Peace Farm and quotes former ANA board member Mavis Belisle.
AMARILLO -- Deep in the Texas Panhandle, farmland sprawls as far as the eye can see, dotted by the occasional wind farm and herd of cattle. It feels like the heart of the middle of nowhere. Tucked away in the vastness is one of the nation's most heavily secured facilities, an 18,000-acre complex that houses thousands of the most dangerous weapons ever made.
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| | | published Monday, July 11, 2011 | 880 Views :: 0 Comments |
July 11, 2011
BY Tony Rutherford
From the Huntington News
HUNTINGTON, WV (HNN) – Depending upon your degree of ‘trust’ in government agencies, the revelations about dangers at the former Huntington uranium processing plant and the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant either border on disrespect or symbolize how the truth slowly ebbs out exposing even the best planned cover up.
Actually, Piketon, Ohio, atomic plant workers such as Owen Thompson and Vina Colley joined the ranks of whistleblowers long ago which eventually led to the unraveling of decades of denial.
Thompson had a special security clearance. He worked in the “E Area” of the huge diffusion facility. Between 1978-1979, he just followed order by driving a hay wagon to some already dug trenches. When the contents were dumped, he saw a green goo. Thompson also observed that the wagons , trucks and other tools were entombed.
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| | | published Thursday, June 30, 2011 | 413 Views :: 0 Comments |
June 30, 2011 By Matt Ferner From the Huffington Post CotterCorp. has received approval from Colorado Department of Public Healthand Environment to dump 90,000 gallons of radioactive sludge andwaste products from its defunct Canon City uranium mill, into animpoundment pond that officials know is leaking, TheDenver Post reports.
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| | | published Tuesday, June 07, 2011 | 434 Views :: 0 Comments |
Jun. 07, 2011
By Annette Cary From the Tri-City Herald
Deep geological disposal is the best alternative for the nation's waste classified as greater than class C low-level radioactive waste and similar nondefense waste, according to the Hanford Advisory Board.
The HAB board has joined several other agencies or groups in recommending Hanford be taken off a list of locations the Department of Energy is considering for disposal of the waste. The states of Washington and Oregon already have asked that Hanford be taken off DOE's list.
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| | | published Friday, May 27, 2011 | 836 Views :: 0 Comments |
May 27, 2011
By Phil Parker From the Albuquerque Journal
Warnings of death and devastation echoed Thursday night as dozens of speakers took turns decrying Los Alamos National Laboratory’s plan to construct a new plutonium lab.
“I feel like I’m standing on a train track, and the train is coming full speed ahead,” said Santa Fean Adele Caruthers.
Officially, the meeting held at Santa Fe Community College for public comment was a federally mandated part of the supplemental environmental impact study being conducted by the National Nuclear Security Administration as it prepares to build a Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement-Nuclear Facility at LANL.
The building is projected to cost $5.8 billion and scheduled to be completed sometime after 2020.
The meeting was the last of four such meetings held around the state this week, and almost every one of the dozens of speakers Thursday was against the lab.
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| | | published Friday, May 20, 2011 | 1020 Views :: 0 Comments |
May 18, 2011
By the Oregonian Editorial Board
Plutonium was made in a reactor near the Columbia River, and it powered the nuclear bomb that destroyed Nagasaki in 1945. In weapons work that lasted through the 1980s and would involve several reactors, radioactive materials were spilled onto the ground and into trenches and, over time, into tanks rotting underground. The 586-square-mile southeast Washington site is already tens of billions of taxpayer dollars into a near-impossible cleanup -- the largest in the world -- and has little chance of being completed anytime before 2050. Now the Northwest has a new Hanford challenge.
The U.S. Department of Energy, which oversees the cleanup, names Hanford as a candidate site for becoming the nation's radioactive dumping ground -- a permanent storage site not for spent nuclear fuel but for radioactive parts of decommissioned nuclear plants, mainly from Midwestern and Eastern states, as well as radioactive castoffs from medical and research processes nationwide.
This is a bad idea. It runs counter to everything that Oregon and Washington, Northwest tribes and health advocates have sought to achieve in taming a Hanford nuclear beast that menaces underground water, the Columbia River, and human and wildlife populations nearby. And the mission of our cleanup remains singular: Find the money and invent the technologies it will take to process and contain substances so radioactive they take thousands of years to lose potency.
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