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| | | published Thursday, June 30, 2011 | 514 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 | 537 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 | 984 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 | 1153 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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| | | published Thursday, May 05, 2011 | 861 Views :: 0 Comments |
April 30, 2011
By John Severance
From the Los Alamos Monitor
POJOAQUE - It was evident about halfway through the public comment
session Thursday night that not too many people were in favor of the
Department of Energy wanting to build a nuclear disposal facility in Los
Alamos or anywhere in New Mexico.
In fact, one New Mexico resident had another alternative.
"Build an above grade vault on the Mall at Washington, D.C. and mandate
that all waste be sent there," said Stuart Barger, who said he lives
downwind from Los Alamos. "Make sure to use trucks and ship it there
during a Congressional session."
The remarks drew laughs and applause from the majority of the crowd at
the Cities of Gold conference room, but this was still serious business
for all those in attendance.
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| | | published Thursday, April 28, 2011 | 1045 Views :: 0 Comments |
April 28, 2011
By Mark Oswald
From Albuquerque Journal
Environmental and community groups and Los Alamos National Laboratory announced Wednesday that they had reached a settlement agreement resolving a three-year legal dispute over stormwater runoff from the lab.
In a 2008 federal court complaint, the plaintiffs alleged the lab had violated the Clean Water Act by allowing contaminants to wash into the Rio Grande and threaten drinking water supplies. LANL denied that its runoff violated standards.
The groups that had sued the lab on Wednesday called the settlement “historic” and the lab described it as a “win-win.”
The Western Environmental Law Center, based in Taos, agreed to drop the lawsuit in exchange for access to inspect certain sites at the lab, $200,000 in funding for technical consulting and a portion of legal fees.
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| | | published Tuesday, April 12, 2011 | 2487 Views :: 1 Comments |
For immediate release: April 7, 2011
Contact: Arjun Makhijani 301-270-5500
Takoma
Park, Maryland - Total releases of radioactive iodine-131 and
cesium-137 from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi reactors in Japan now
appear to rival Chernobyl. As a result, there is now fallout through the
northern hemisphere, with hot spots appearing due to rain. For
instance, rainwater in Boise, Idaho, on March 22, 2011, was reported by
the Environmental Protection Agency at 242 picocuries per liter, about
80 times the U.S. drinking water standard if the level persisted for a
prolonged time. The drinking water standard is a common reference number
for water purity, even if the water is not used for drinking.
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| | | published Tuesday, February 15, 2011 | 1977 Views :: 0 Comments |
Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2011
By Annette Cary
From the Tri-City Herald
The Democratic administration's proposed fiscal 2012 budget released Monday would increase funding for the Hanford nuclear reservation.
However, while the budget for work at the tank farms and the vitrification plant under the Department of Energy Office of River Protection would increase, money for the Richland Operations Office would decrease. It is responsible for the rest of Hanford work.
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| | | published Thursday, February 10, 2011 | 3880 Views :: 1 Comments |
For immediate release, February 9, 2011
For further information:
Susan Gordon (505) 577-8438
The Obama Administration’s FY 2012 budget request is slated
to be released on Monday, February 14, 2011. Despite pledging to reduce
the U.S. nuclear stockpile in the recently ratified New START treaty,
the Department of Energy (DOE) will likely ask Congress for
significantly more funds for nuclear weapons activities, including
expanding U.S. warhead production capacity, while nonproliferation
programs are allowed to stagnate. The DOE request will not reflect
recent scientific conclusions that existing nuclear weapons can be
reliably maintained for decades under current programs or the
President’s stated goal of global nuclear weapons reductions.
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| | | published Monday, January 24, 2011 | 1475 Views :: 0 Comments |
January 22, 2011
From the Seattle Times
By Craig Welch
At the Hanford nuclear
reservation, the Department of Energy is building a plant to clean up 53
million gallons of radioactive waste. But after a quarter-century of
preparation — and cost estimates that have nearly tripled to $12.2
billion — builders still haven't resolved this project's most vexing
technical and safety issues.
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