Nuclear Power & Radiation

In the debate over how to meet the nation's 'clean energy' goals, the nuclear industry seems to be winning.

"The Tennessee Valley Authority has lost nearly $50 million in power generation from its biggest nuclear plant because the Tennessee River in Alabama is too hot."
 

"A Federal judge recently struck down a ruling that is keeping high level nuclear waste from being stored on an Indian reservation in Tooele County.  It's a judicial move that could make it easier to bring the highly toxic waste into the state of Utah where it will be stored."

"Just beneath the wind-stippled surface of the Hudson River here, huge pipes suck enough water into the Indian Point  nuclear plant every second to fill three Olympic swimming pools. And each second they take in dozens of organisms -- fish and crabs, but mostly larvae -- that are at the center of a $1.1 billion debate: should the plant have to put in cooling towers that would vastly reduce the intake of water?"

"Union workers at the nation’s only uranium conversion plant, in Metropolis, Ill., have erected 42 crosses nearby in memory of workers who died of cancer. Twenty-seven smaller crosses symbolize workers who have survived the disease."

Workers in the Joliet, Illinois, area who are ill because they handled radioactive materials in the production of nuclear bombs are still waiting for compensation promised in 2000.

A Senate committee defeated proposal to revive the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal site.

This week a blue-ribbon commission on nuclear waste will hold two days of hearings on alternatives to the now-stalled Yucca Mountain disposal site.

"The amount of plutonium buried at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State is nearly three times what the federal government previously reported, a new analysis indicates, suggesting that a cleanup to protect future generations will be far more challenging than planners had assumed."

"Women who worked in the Grand Junction offices of the former Atomic Energy Commission have been diagnosed with diseases that would be compensable under the radiation exposure compensation law and related legislation, except for the fact they were employed by the federal government."