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| | | published Tuesday, January 31, 2012 | 65 Views :: 0 Comments |
For immediate release: January 27, 2012
For further information, contact: Dr. Arjun Makhijani (301) 270-5500, cell (301) 509-6843
Commission Recognizes French Style Reprocessing Will Increase Proliferation Risks Without Solving Waste Problem
Progress on Consent-Based Approach to Geologic Repository Siting
Takoma Park, Maryland -- Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D., President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, today commented on some of the recommendations of the final report of the Presidential Blue Ribbon Commission (BRC) on America’s Nuclear Future, released yesterday. The commission was created to address U.S. nuclear waste issues after the Obama administration cancelled the Yucca Mountain program.
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| | | published Tuesday, January 31, 2012 | 59 Views :: 0 Comments |
January 29, 2012 By LeRoy Moore and Robert Del Tredici
Whether to build the Jefferson Parkway or to turn Rocky Flats into a playground, the determining factor should not be commercial or residential development. The determining factor should be hot particles of plutonium.
A hot particle of plutonium is one that can lodge in air sacs of a lung or be moved via blood elsewhere in the organism. Wherever it resides in the body it irradiates surrounding tissue. A single particle of plutonium can damage more than 10,000 cells within its range.
Nobel chemist Glenn Seaborg, who discovered plutonium in 1941, called it "fiendishly toxic, even in small amounts." Physicist Jeremy Bernstein recently declared plutonium "the world's most dangerous element."
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| | | published Tuesday, January 31, 2012 | 89 Views :: 0 Comments |
Press Conference Advisory: Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 9:15 am Rotunda, Roundhouse at the corner of Old Santa Fe Trail and Paseo de Peralta Topic: Map Documenting Community Water Concerns to be Released as Part of Legislative Day for People of Faith Concerned about Clean Air, Water and Earth Contact: Joan Brown, Partnership for Earth Spirituality 505-266-6966 (Albuquerque), joankansas@swcp.com Joni Arends, Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety 505-986-1973 (Santa Fe), jarends@nuclearactive.org A map documenting community and people of faith concerns for water will be released Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 9:15 in the Rotunda of the State Capitol. The document release is part of a Legislative Day for People of Faith Concerned for Water, Land, Air and People. The project was initiated by people of faith and communities concerned about water and funded by the Catholic Sisters of Mercy – Northeast Community.
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| | | published Monday, January 23, 2012 | 78 Views :: 0 Comments |
January 19, 2012
By The Associated Press
IDAHO FALLS, Idaho — An accident at the Idaho National Laboratory that exposed 16 employees to plutonium radiation could have been prevented, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Energy.
Inadequate safety measures and ineffective training contributed to the November contamination and lab officials missed several opportunities to make changes, states a report released Wednesday by the Energy Department’s Office of Health, Safety and Security.
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| | | published Monday, January 23, 2012 | 182 Views :: 0 Comments |
The following feature explores problems at the Washington State nuclear Waste Treatment Plant and quotes ANA member Tom Carpenter. ANA has been tracking progress at the Waste Treatment Plant or decades and recognized whistleblower Walt Tamosaitis at our 2011 DC Days awards reception.
January 17, 2012
By H. Darr Beiser
From the USA TODAY
HANFORD SITE, Wash. – Seven decades after scientists came here during World War II to create plutonium for the first atomic bomb, a new generation is struggling with an even more daunting task: cleaning up the radioactive mess.
The U.S. government is building a treatment plant to stabilize and contain 56 million gallons of waste left from a half-century of nuclear weapons production. The radioactive sludge is so dangerous that a few hours of exposure could be fatal. A major leak could contaminate water supplies serving millions across the Northwest. The cleanup is the most complex and costly environmental restoration ever attempted.
And the project is not going well.
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| | | published Thursday, November 03, 2011 | 913 Views :: 0 Comments |
ANA thanks the Santa Fe Reporter for their excellent feature article on toxic waste coming from Los Alamos National Laboratory. The following article quotes several ANA members and asks "Why are we expanding weapons production and cutting corners on environmental protection?"
Nov. 2, 2011
By Wren Abbott
From the Santa Fe Reporter  In the summer of 2010, an excavator lifted a 1940s-era radiation protection suit from a pit in Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Technical Area 21. With it came two pickup trucks of the same vintage—one of which may have been involved in the famous Trinity nuclear test near White Sands—and a 30-foot-tall chemical mixing tank.
The successful excavation of Material Disposal Area B, the lab’s oldest waste site, disproved a commonly held belief: that comprehensive cleanup of radioactive waste at the lab was cost-prohibitive, if not impossible. The project cleared a 200,000 square foot area and removed 750,000 cubic feet of toxic waste that had lain dormant since World War II. It cost $110 million—a modest sum for a facility with an approximately $2 billion budget.
Unfortunately, Area B is one of 24 waste sites at LANL, which in 1944 started burying everything from uranium chips to contaminated dump trucks in unlined pits. More than half of the lab’s estimated 17 million cubic feet of remaining waste lies in Area G—the only disposal site where LANL continues to dump, and one it seeks to expand. Though Area G’s fate has been bandied about for decades, it has now reached a critical turning point.
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| | | published Friday, October 07, 2011 | 944 Views :: 0 Comments |
The following article covers part of ANA member group Georgia Women's Action for New Directions' campaign to restore environmental monitoring of nuclear sites in Georgia. Learn more about Georgia WAND's campaign for environmental justice from this 5 minute CNN clip.
Oct. 4, 2011
By Walter C. Jones Morris News Service / Augusta Chronicle
ATLANTA — A group of anti-nuclear activists held a rally on the Capitol steps Tuesday to call for the U.S. Department of Energy to resume funding Georgia’s monitoring of air and water quality for dangerous emissions from Savannah River Site.
The group, Women’s Action for New Directions, said the funding was needed as an early warning against accidental releases of nuclear hazards that could contaminate the air, crops, wildlife and private wells and raise the risk of cancer in people living in Richmond, Burke, Screven, Effingham and Chatham counties.
Dr. Helen Caldicott, a pediatrician who co-founded the group and Physicians for Social Responsibility, contended federal officials feared an objective environmental assessment because it would show that the residents of those counties would have to be relocated.
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| | | published Thursday, September 29, 2011 | 1843 Views :: 0 Comments |
For Immediate Release Thursday, September 29, 2011 Contact:
Courtney Hanson What: Georgia WAND will host a press conference exposing the Department of Energy’s (DOE) failure to stand behind their agreement to implement environmental testing and monitoring in Georgia, specifically in rural, poor counties near Savannah River Site (SRS). A US nuclear weapons site, known by local residents as ‘the bomb plant’, SRS is currently tasked with Cold War legacy waste management, waste clean-up after reprocessing, plutonium disposition, and tritium production for nuclear weapons.
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| | | published Tuesday, September 13, 2011 | 436 Views :: 0 Comments | |
| | | published Tuesday, September 06, 2011 | 629 Views :: 0 Comments |
Y-12 mercury project plagued by problems
September 5, 2011
By Frank Munger From the Knoxville News' Atomic City Underground blog
OAK RIDGE — Most of the Recovery Act-funded cleanup projects at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant have been completed successfully, with some coming in well ahead of schedule and under budget. Over the past couple of years, workers have taken down dirty and dilapidated buildings, removed hazardous materials and, in one memorable case, made a decades-old scrap yard disappear.
The jury is still out, however, on a project that's supposed to reduce the amount of mercury pollution — a legacy of the plant's Cold War work on thermonuclear weapons — that's entering East Fork Poplar Creek.
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