The F(N)ukushima Thread .... and Related Nooklear Concerns

[newworldafro]

I believe this is connected to post #28 ....posted part of article

Government to Dispose of Radioactive Waste By Putting It In Our SILVERWARE - Washington's Blog

Government to Dispose of Radioactive Waste By Putting It In Our SILVERWARE

Posted on January 28, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog

Department of Energy Wants to Let Radioactive Scrap Metal Back into Consumer Products

The overwhelming scientific consensus is that any amount of radiation – no matter how small – can cause cancer and other serious health effects.

(Current safety standards are based on the ridiculous assumption that everyone exposed is a healthy man in his 20s – and that radioactive particles ingested into the body cause no more damage than radiation hitting the outside of the body. In the real world, however, even low doses of radiation can cause cancer. Moreover, small particles of radiation – called “internal emitters” – which get inside the body are much more dangerous than general exposures to radiation. See this and this. And radiation affects small children much more than full-grown adults.)

But the Department of Energy – the agency which is responsible for the design, testing and production of all U.S. nuclear weapons, promotes nuclear energy as one of its core functions, which has been covering up nuclear accidents for decades, and has used mutant lines of human cells to promote voodoo, anti-scientific arguments – proposes letting radiation into our silverware.

Counterpunch notes:

Even the deregulation-happy Wall St. Journal sounded shocked: “The Department of Energy is proposing to allow the sale of tons of scrap metal from government nuclear sites — an attempt to reduce waste that critics say could lead to radiation-tainted belt buckles, surgical implants and other consumer products.”

Having failed in the ‘80s and ‘90s to free the nuclear bomb factories and national laboratories of millions of tons of their radioactively contaminated scrap and nickel, the DOE is trying again. Its latest proposal is moving ahead without even an Environmental Impact Statement. Those messy EISs involve public hearings, so you can imagine the DOE’s reluctance to face the public over adding yet more radiation to the doses we’re already accumulating.

Congressman Markey writes:

A Department of Energy proposal to allow up to 14,000 metric tons of its radioactive scrap metal to be recycled into consumer products was called into question today by Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) due to concerns over public health. In a letter sent to DOE head Steven Chu, Rep. Markey expressed “grave concerns” over the potential of these metals becoming jewelry, cutlery, or other consumer products that could exceed healthy doses of radiation without any knowledge by the consumer. DOE made the proposal to rescind its earlier moratorium on radioactive scrap metal recycling in December, 2012.

The proposal follows an incident from 2012 involving Bed, Bath & Beyond stores in America recalling tissue holders made in India that were contaminated with the radio-isotope cobalt-60. Those products were shipped to 200 stores in 20 states. In response to that incident, a Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesperson advised members of the public to return the products even though the amount of contamination was not considered to be a health risk.

 

[newworldafro]

Posted first page of article............. you know its a problem if pro-natural gas fracking communities seem to be against it..........

Energy's Latest Battleground: Fracking For Uranium - Forbes

1/23/2013 @ 11:47PM |18,325 views

Energy's Latest Battleground: Fracking For Uranium
This story appears in the February 11, 2013 issue of Forbes.

No tour of Uranium Energy Corp.’s processing plant in Hobson, Tex. is complete until CEO Amir Adnani pries the top off a big black steel drum and invites you to peer inside. There, filled nearly to the brim, is an orange-yellow powder that UEC mined out of the South Texas countryside.

It’s uranium oxide, U3O8, otherwise known as yellowcake. This is the stuff that atomic bombs and nuclear reactor fuel are made from. The 55-gallon drum weighs about 1,000 pounds and fetches about $50,000 at market. But when Adnani looks in, he says, he sees more than just money. He sees America’s future.

“The U.S. is more reliant upon foreign sources of uranium than on foreign sources of oil,” says Adnani, who himself was born in Iran and looks out of place in South Texas with his sneakers and Prada vest.

America’s 104 nuclear power plants generate a vital 20% of the nation’s electricity. Back in the early 1980s the U.S. was the biggest uranium miner in the world, producing 43 million pounds a year–enough for nuclear utilities to source all the fuel they needed domestically. But today domestic production is down to 4 million pounds per year.

Perhaps worrisome, our biggest supplier is cutting us off. For the past 20 years America bought 20 million pounds a year from Russia, courtesy of dismantled nuclear weapons. But in 2013 the $8 billion Megatons to Megawatts Program comes to an end. Growing production from Kazakhstan (39 million pounds per year), Canada (18 million) and Australia (12 million) will fill the gap. But China, with 15 nuclear reactors, 26 in the works and 100 more planned, will increasingly compete for these finite supplies.

Adnani insists that he can close the yellowcake gap through a technology that is similar to the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, that has created the South Texas energy boom. Fracking for uranium isn’t vastly different from fracking for natural gas. UEC bores under ranchland into layers of highly porous rock that not only contain uranium ore but also hold precious groundwater. Then it injects oxygenated water down into the sand to dissolve out the uranium. The resulting solution is slurped out with pumps, then processed and dried at the company’s Hobson plant.

Standing next to a half-dozen full drums of UEC’s yellowcake, we’re not wearing any protective gear, save a hard hat. We don’t need to. The uranium emits primarily alpha radiation, easily stopped by our skin. That doesn’t mean yellowcake is safe. Inhaling or swallowing it–in drinking water, for instance–can cause kidney and liver damage or cancer.

That’s why Adnani’s plan has prompted concern in a region otherwise nonchalant about environmental impacts on health and comfortable with the risk-reward ratio that comes with fracking. This part of Texas is in the core of the Eagle Ford s hale, currently the most profitable oil and gas field in the U.S. The people around here understand that the fracking of this shale, the injection of billions of gallons of sand-and-chemical-laden water, takes place 2 miles beneath the ground. They know that steel pipe cased in concrete, when engineered correctly, is not going to leak chemicals into their water.

UEC’s process doesn’t take place 2 miles down. Rather, it’s dissolving uranium from just 400 feet to 800 feet down–not only from the same depths as groundwater but from the very same layers of porous rock that hold it. “By design it’s much worse than fracking,” says Houston attorney Jim Blackburn, who is suing UEC on behalf of residents near the company’s new project in Goliad, Tex. “This is intentional contamination of a water aquifer liberating not only uranium but other elements that were bound up with the sand. We know this process will contaminate groundwater; that’s the whole point of it.”

UEC argues that it is doing the environment a favor. “We’re taking out a radioactive source from the aquifer that won’t be there for future generations,” says Harry Anthony, UEC’s chief operating officer. Adnani adds: “The water is already polluted. Uranium is so close to the water table such that by-products like radium and radon are already in the water. We’re pumping water out of the polluted aquifers and reinjecting less radioactive water.”

Such analyses haven’t mollified critics. But they’ve proven enough for this unknown company to move full steam ahead. “The Eagle Ford,” smiles Adnani, “will be the site of a uranium boom.”

Adnani’s putative uranium boom is 45 million years in the making. Back then volcanoes dotted West Texas and New Mexico, blanketing the countryside in a thick layer of ash that contained uranium and other elements. As uranium is easily dissolved by water, most of it washed out into the Gulf of Mexico over the millennia. But enough got stuck along the way–converted into solid ore when it came in contact with natural gas bubbling up from below–to produce one of the largest uranium deposits in the U.S.

Enter UEC, which already has one mine in operation, a second under construction and a handful more in the works, making it the most notable uranium producer in South Texas. As companies go, it’s still a pip-squeak. Founded in 2005 in Vancouver, its roots are more in marketing than mining. Before UEC Adnani, just 34, was founder of Blender Media, an investor relations firm catering to speculative Vancouver mining companies. Adnani’s cofounder was his father-in-law, Alan Lindsay, 61, who, in the words of Citron Research analyst Andrew Left, “has left behind nothing but companies that have promised high hopes and left investors with empty pockets.” That would include defunct or bulletin-board firms like Strategic American Oil, Phyto-medical, TapImmune and MIV Therapeutics. Adnani says that as nonexecutive chairman of UEC, Lindsay has no day-to-day role with the company. And besides, he says, when Left critiqued UEC a couple years ago “we hadn’t produced a pound of uranium. Since then we have executed on everything that Citron said we wouldn’t be able to do.”

UEC is listed on the American Stock Exchange and the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. BlackRock, Oppenheimer Funds and the closed-end Geiger Fund all hold large chunks, and the company boasts a market capitalization of $250 million, despite a net loss of $25 million in the past year on yellowcake sales of $13.7 million. Over five years it’s run through more than $100 million, though money from follow-on stock offerings have kept it debt free, with $17 million in reserve. Shares peaked at $6.70 in the months before Fukushima. They’re down to $2.45 now.

UEC inherits a checkered legacy. From the 1950s through the early 1980s big oil and chemical companies like Union Carbide, Exxon, Chevron, Conoco and even U.S. Steel mined uranium in South Texas. Not only did they find a lot of the stuff while hunting for oil and gas, but the federal government, amid the Cold War, even required that they also run tests in every oil and gas well to check for the presence of uranium. The oil companies sold their yellowcake to the government for the production of nuclear weapons and reactor fuel. “Back then every company was down here,” recalls Anthony, who was a young engineer for Union Carbide. “This was the stomping ground.”

But in the process, they made a mess, gouging out muddy pit mines and building tailings ponds to hold toxic sludge left over from processing ore with acid. A uranium mine in Karnes County was designated a Superfund site; it remains polluted, as does the nearby Falls City uranium mill site, where, the Department of Energy says, “contaminants of potential concern are cadmium, cobalt, fluoride, iron, nickel, sulfate and uranium.”

 

[newworldafro]

Third of US West Coast Children Hit With Thyroid Problems Following Fukushima | Zen-Haven - Love Hope Courage

Third of US West Coast Children Hit With Thyroid Problems Following Fukushima

Posted on April 3, 2013 by Soren Dreier
Author: Anthony Gucciardi

Still think that the Fukushima nuclear meltdown of 2011 never affected the United States public? Young children born in the United States West Coast, right in the line of fire for radioactive isotopes, have been found to be 28% more likely to develop congenital hypothyroidism than infants born the year before the incident.

The study followed children born in California, Alaska, Washingto, Hawaii, and Oregon between 1 and 16 weeks after the horrific meltdown at Fukushima back in March 2011. Published in the Open Journal of Pediatrics by researchers affiliated with the Radiation and Public Health Project, the information further lends credence to previous documentation regarding the way in which radioactive fallout ended up on US soil.

The researchers explained how radioactive fallout affected the entirety of the US in varying degrees:

Fukushima fallout appeared to affect all areas of the U.S., and was especially large in some, mostly in the western part of the nation,” they wrote.

Fukushima’s Effects on The US

The findings are likely no surprise to those who have been following the effects of Fukushima closely, as back in 2011 numerous reports surfaced regarding the ways in which Fukushima’s radioactive waste had made its way to the US geography in a big way.

Despite Japanese officials downplaying the incident and its real devastating health consequences, even so much as to ignore the fact that Fukushima radiation was detected in Tokyo far beyond the evacuation zone, US scientists were quick to reveal their own measurements to the scientific community.

Scientists from UC Berkley detailed even more concerning reports following the disaster, finding the highest cesium content in topsoil for each California location was consistent.

 

[the mechanic]

Damn I dont beleive theyre fracking for yellowcake....why do your threads make me feel hopeless b

 

[newworldafro]

Damn I dont beleive theyre [attempting] fracking for yellowcake....why do your threads make me feel hopeless b

don't blame me breh........I didn't create this Twilight Zone ... just sharing the info ....

 

[newworldafro]

All Nuclear Reactors Leak All of the Time | Veterans Today

All Nuclear Reactors Leak All of the Time

Saturday, April 6th, 2013 | Posted by Bob Nichols

(San Francisco) Reportedly Americans widely believe in God and lead the world in the percentage of citizens in prison and on parole. That is actual reality from an imaginary character in a TV show. The Gallup Poll also says it is true and has been for years.

Most Americans believe that nuke reactors are safe and quite sound, too. Wonder why they do that?

Most people at one time in their lives watched as steam escapes from a pressure cooker and accept it as real and true. A reactor is very much the same thing. The “cooks,” called “Operators,” even take the lid off from time to time too.

A nuclear reactor is just an expensive, overly complicated way to heat water to make steam. Of course all reactors leak!

All nuclear reactors also actually manufacture more than 1,946 dangerous and known radioactive metals, gases and aerosols. Many isotopes, such as radioactive hydrogen, simply cannot be contained. So, they barely even try. It is mostly just a show for the rubes.[1]

The four exploded reactors, still burning in Japan after two years, are like dropping four radioactive GBU-39 Bombs[2] down a Bunker vent guaranteeing an astonishing 100% Cancer & Heart Disease rate in surviving personnel. Except, in this case, the whole planet gets zapped.


The US reactors – embrittled, decrepit and crippled – are run about 20% harder than their nameplate capacity, thanks to an always obliging and ever-so-helpful Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC.) The “Commission” likes to act as if they monitor public health; but, the NRC never met a little nuke reactor UpRate Request they did not like.

That means the aging nukes are run hotter and harder at higher temps and pressures while the “Commission” aggressively monitors the resulting decline in public health.

Predictably, these devious snake oil salesmen are amping up to Approve the Restart of FukuUSA, the badly broken big San Onofre Nukes in San Diego, California. The San Onofre Nuke Reactors are built on land leased from Camp Pendleton.

Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton is the major West Coast base of the United States Marine Corps and serves as its prime amphibious training base for Assault Craft Unit 5.

About 21 million people are in the San Diego/Tijuana-Los Angeles areas. Do the Pro-Nukers care? Of course not. Attention Marines: See Sources and Notes Item No 13 below.

The radioactive San Onofre steam and smoke is guaranteed to add to the radioactive particles from Fukushima’s six trashed reactors and a thousand and one other nuclear “accidents.” Plus, there are daily leaks from all reactors. Have you ever heard of anything more idiotic or FUBAR?[3] Does anybody see a pattern here?

This persistent routine has been repeated again and again for 66 years. Veterans and other troops, these nuke Psychos are taking shots at your back! What the hell do you normally do when a confirmed, blood thirsty Psycho who’s also a very good sniper draws down on you and Fires? This is the exact same thing.

The Pro-Nuker snipers shoot tiny, invisible machine guns that crash through your skin and never stop firing. In fact, you will be dead long before that. A good ole U238 machine gun fires 850 rounds a minute for an eternity of majestic proportions – up to Ninety Billion Years. [4]


All your cells within range die and turn to dead puss filled spheres inside you. There is no medicine, no treatment, certainly no cure. Demand an autopsy after you pass to count your internal levels. Leave instructions to file Murder charges against GE, other manufacturers and your local reactor personnel. Strike back from the grave.

Isotope weapons never jam, either, unlike human invented machine guns that run out of rounds or jam. Even if our machine guns could fire continuously, the barrels would melt from the friction and heat buildup.

No way – that doesn’t happen with the very powerful nuke rounds. To make it even worse for us, the muzzle velocity on some rounds approaches 3,000,000 Meters per second.

Amazingly enough, in the US alone, there are currently close to 40,000 State and local prosecuting attorneys.[5] In addition, there are the 50 States’ Governors – all of whom have an Army that works for them with tanks and millions of other weapons and sidearms.

Governors and prosecuting attorneys, get off your butts and take down all the nuclear reactors. Do your Jobs!

The nuke reactors are just great big stationary nuclear weapons that all leak and are aimed squarely at American voters, your major donors included.

Then Perp Walk the criminals to Court, all fair and square legal like, and hang them till very dead in front of TV cameras.

Of special note: Master-Sergeant Woods, the Hangman for the 3rd Army in the European Theatre during WWII was extremely good at his job.

He was tasked to execute a slew of high-ranking Nazis after the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 at the end of WW II.

Master-Sergeant Woods enjoyed a large audience of top allied Generals; yet he was solely in charge. It took 26 minutes for one of those snakes to finally croak. That was a job well done. We must do no less.

 

[Mowgli]

Yup. The white man destroyed the planet. Gotta move outta cali.

 

[newworldafro]

"Mothers of Fukushima Trailer"

[ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L94h124zMvA[/ame]

 

[Orbital-Fetus]

are they still using sea water to cool the rods and letting that water go back into the ocean?

 

[newworldafro]

America’s “Secret Fukushima”: Uranium Mining is Poisoning the Bread Basket of the World | Global Research

America’s “Secret Fukushima”: Uranium Mining is Poisoning the Bread Basket of the World

By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese

Global Research, June 07, 2013

Truthout

Early in the morning of July 16, 1979, a 20-foot section of the earthen dam blocking the waste pool for the Church Rock Uranium Mill caved in and released 95 million gallons of highly acidic fluid containing 1,100 tons of radioactive material. The fluid and waste flowed into the nearby Puerco River, traveling 80 miles downstream, leaving toxic puddles and backing up local sewers along the way.

Although this release of radiation, thought to be the largest in US history, occurred less than four months after the Three Mile Island partial nuclear meltdown that sent radioactive gases and iodine into the air, the Church Rock spill received little media attention. In contrast, the Three Mile Island accident made the headlines. And when the residents of Church Rock asked their governor to declare their community a disaster area so they could get recovery assistance, he refused.

What was the difference between the Church Rock spill and the Three Mile Island partial meltdown? Church Rock is situated in the Navajo Nation, one of the areas in the US sacrificed to supply uranium for the Cold War and for nuclear power plants. That area and many others in the Navajo Nation are contaminated to this day. Another sacrifice area is the Great Sioux Nation where thousands of open uranium mine pits continue to release radiation and heavy metals into the air, land and water.

This poisoning of the people in the Navajo and Great Sioux Nations has been going on for decades and has had serious effects on their health. Even today, it is unknown what the full effects are and what the impact is on the rest of the nation because the contaminated air and water are not limited by borders. Most Americans are unaware of the story of uranium mining on tribal lands because it is a difficult story to accept. It is a story that includes the long history of human rights abuses by the US against native Indians and recognition of the full costs of nuclear energy – two stories the government and big energy have suppressed.

Many people think of nuclear power as a clean source of energy. It has been promoted as part of the transition from fossil fuels. But the reality is that nuclear power comes at a heavy price to the health of people and the planet. Like other forms of extractive energy such as coal, oil and gas, uranium needs to stay in the ground. Radiation and heavy metal poisonings are a hidden environmental catastrophe that is ongoing and must be addressed. But rather than studying the health effects and cleaning up the environment, private corporations are pushing once again to lift the ban on uranium mining.

Uranium Mine Pits Continue to Leak Radiation Today

Radiation and heavy metals from uranium mines continue to pollute the land, air and water today and very little action is being taken to stop it.

In the upper great plain states of Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas, there are 2,885 abandoned uranium mines that are all open pits within territory that is supposed to be for the absolute use of the Great Sioux Nation under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty with the US. These open mines continue to emit radiation and pollutants that are poisoning the local communities.

According to a report by Earthworks, “Mining not only exposes uranium to the atmosphere, where it becomes reactive, but releases other radioac*tive elements such as thorium and radium and toxic heavy metals including arsenic, selenium, mercury and cadmium. Exposure to these radioactive ele*ments can cause lung cancer, skin cancer, bone can*cer, leukemia, kidney damage and birth defects.”

There are currently 1200 abandoned uranium mines in the Navajo Nation and 500 of them require reclamation. The greatest amount of radioactive contamination on Navajo land comes from solid waste called ‘tailings’ which sit in large open piles, some as tall as 70 feet high, and were incorporated into materials used to build homes. Dust from these piles of waste blows throughout the land causing widespread contamination.

A 2008 study found that “mills and tailings disposal sites caused extensive groundwater contamination by radium, uranium, various trace metals and dissolved solids. One estimate is that 1.2 million acre-feet of groundwater (or enough to fill Elephant Butte Reservoir more than twice) have been contaminated in the Ambrosia Lake-Milan area from historic mine and mill discharges, and less than two tenths of 1 percent has been treated to reduce contaminant levels.” It is estimated that 30 percent of people living in the Navajo Nation lack access to uncontaminated water.

Charmaine White Face of Defenders of the Black Hills describes the situation in the Great Sioux Nation as “America’s Chernobyl.” She says, “A private abandoned, open-pit uranium mine about 200 meters from an elementary school in Ludlow, SD, emits 1170 microRems per hour, more than 4 times as much as being emitted from the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan. “ In addition, “Studies by the USFS show that one mine alone has 1,400 millirems per hour (mR/hr) of exposed radiation, a level of radiation that is 120,000 times higher than normal background of 100 millirems per year (mR/yr)!” Cancer rates in Pine Ridge, SD are the highest in the nation.

This contamination escapes into the air which blows to the East and South and seeps into the water, reaching the Cheyenne and Missouri Rivers. It poisons grain grown in these areas that is fed to cattle that provide milk and beef for the rest of the nation. As White Face explains, “In an area of the USA that has been called ‘the Bread Basket of the World,’ more than forty years of mining have released radioactive polluted dust and water runoff from the hundreds of abandoned open pit uranium mines, processing sites, underground nuclear power stations, and waste dumps. Our grain supplies and our livestock production in this area have used the water and have been exposed to the remainders of this mining. We may be seeing global affects, not just localized affects, to the years of uranium mining.”

Uranium also contaminates coal that is mined in Wyoming for power plants in the East. Defenders of the Black Hills report that “Radioactive dust and particles are released into the air at the coal fired power plants and often set off the warning systems at nuclear power plants.”

People in the Navajo and Great Sioux Nations have been fighting for decades for the US Government to perform studies on the extent of contamination and to clean up both current contamination and prevent future contamination. As wards of the federal government, the US is responsible for the health and safety of native Indians. The Forgotten Navajo People have put forth a resolution which states “that all people have the inalienable right to clean air, clean water, and the preservation of sacred lands and that immediate action must be taken to Fund the Ongoing need for Remediation of Radioactive Contamination in our Air, Water, and Homelands to ensure our survival and that the named parties will Support the People’s Uranium Radiation Activity Data Collection Network.” The resolution also asks that the US uphold the ban on further uranium mines. They have also sought equipment that would allow them to measure radiation on their reservations, as simple request that has not been acted on.

Defenders of the Black Hills have written legislation, the Uranium Exploration and Mining Accountability Act, calling for study and remediation, but according to White Face, no members of Congress are yet willing to sponsor the bill. She explains that state and federal legislators want to hide the fact that this ongoing contamination exists because it will hurt the states economically. Just 40 miles South of Mount Rushmore, there are 169 abandoned open mines. And there are mines in the areas of National Parks such as Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons. These mines likely contaminate water and air in those areas visited by thousands of tourists.

The Chain of Environmental Damage from Nuclear Energy Begins with Excavation

During the energy crisis of the 1970s, President Nixon called for the US to become more energy independent and to pursue renewable sources of energy through Project Independence 1980. This included increasing the use of nuclear power and resulted in the building of nuclear power plants throughout the nation. Some of those power plants, 23 currently in use, were built using the same flawed plan as Reactor One which failed at the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant in Japan. And many of them are reaching their 40 year lifespan and are applying for renewed permits to continue operation.

In addition, because of the reduced availability of fossil fuels and the climate crisis, nuclear power is back on the table as part of President Obama’s, who has been well-funded throughout his career by Excelon Energy, “All of the Above” energy strategy. Earthworks reports that “According to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, there are currently 26 pro*posals to start, expand or restart in situ projects in the states regulated by the commission (Wyoming, Nebraska, South Dakota, New Mexico). Of these, nine will be new operations.”

In situ uranium mining is being promoted as a safer method of extracting uranium. In this type of mining process, deep holes are drilled into the Earth’s surface and fluids are injected into them to dissolve the uranium so that it can be collected. This method of mining is certainly less destructive to the surface of the Earth than open pit mining, but the report also states that “Any in situ operation risks spreading ura*nium and its hazardous byproducts outside the mine, potentially contaminating nearby aquifers and drink*ing water sources. This has been a major problem with almost all in situ projects in the U.S.”

Current uranium mines have a history of noncompliance with regulations. There continue to be spills. Mining corporations do not clean up areas that they are required to clean up. They do not pay fines. And they influence local governments to loosen requirements once they receive a mining permit.

In addition to contamination of land, air and water, uranium mining, particularly in situ mining requires large amounts of water. In the current environment with extended droughts and reduced aquifers, in situ mining places greater strain on the water crisis.

Nuclear power is another form of extractive energy that is not only extremely unsafe but is also more expensive than safer forms of energy. Beyond the human and environmental costs, the cost of building new nuclear reactors has quadrupled since 2000 to an average of $13 to 15 billion each. Physicians for Social Responsibility report that “New reactors are estimated to cost homeowners and businesses between 12 cents and 20 cents per kilowatt hour on electric bills—more than cleaner, safer alternatives.”

And the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War passed a resolution in 2010 calling for a ban on all uranium mining worldwide, which states that “As well as the direct health effects from contamination of the water, the immense water consumption in mining regions is environmentally and economically damaging – and in turn detrimental for human health. The extraction of water leads to a reduction of the groundwater table and thereby to desertification; plants and animals die, the traditional subsistence of the inhabitants is eliminated, the existence of whole cultures are threatened.

 

[newworldafro]

listening to a radio show, they said a nooklear dragon had been slained with this ......... had some issues a year or so back, area is near 8 million+ people and on an earthquake fault zone, 1,500 tons of highly radioactive fuel (more than Fukushima, according to radio show)....they thought about restarting it, but the public outcry was huge... this is the 2nd or 3rd plant to close in the U.S. in the last year...

Calif. utility to retire troubled San Onofre nuclear power plant - CBS News

Calif. utility to retire troubled San Onofre nuclear power plant

LOS ANGELES The troubled San Onofre nuclear power plant on the California coast is closing after an epic 16-month battle over whether the twin reactors could be safely restarted with millions of people living nearby, officials announced Friday.


Operator Southern California Edison said in a statement it will retire the twin reactors because of uncertainty about the future of the plant, which faced a tangle of regulatory hurdles, investigations and mounting political opposition. With the reactors idle, the company has spent more than $500 million on repairs and replacement power.


San Onofre could power 1.4 million homes. California officials have said they would be able to make it through the summer without the plant but warned that wildfires or another disruption in distribution could cause power shortages.


It wasn't clear how electrical production from the plant would be replaced permanently. The California Public Utilities Commission said it will work with governments to ensure Southern California has enough electricity, which will require increased energy efficiency and conservation during peak usage, as well as upgrades to transmission and generation resources.

The plant between San Diego and Los Angeles hasn't produced electricity since January 2012, after a small radiation leak led to the discovery of unusual damage to hundreds of tubes that carry radioactive water.

The plant "has served this region for over 40 years," Ted Craver, chairman of SCE parent Edison International said in a statement. "But we have concluded that the continuing uncertainty about when or if (the plant) might return to service was not good for our customers, our investors or the need to plan for our region's long-term electricity needs."


SCE had been seeking permission from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to restart the Unit 2 reactor and run it at reduced power, in hopes of stopping vibration that had damaged the tubing.


"The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is aware of Southern California Edison's plans to permanently shut down San Onofre, but we are waiting for formal notification of their decision," Victor Dricks, spokesman for NRC, told KNX1070.


Edison's stock price was up slightly in midday trading.


Friends of the Earth, an advocacy group critical of the nuclear power industry, praised the decision to close it.


"We have long said that these reactors are too dangerous to operate and now Edison has agreed. The people of California now have the opportunity to move away from the failed promise of dirty and dangerous nuclear power and replace it with the safe and clean energy provided by the sun and the wind," the group's president, Erich Pica, said in a statement.


Democratic U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said she's also relieved.


"This nuclear plant had a defective redesign and could no longer operate as intended. Modifications to the San Onofre nuclear plant were unsafe and posed a danger to the eight million people living within 50 miles of the plant," she said in a statement.


"Now that the San Onofre nuclear plant will be permanently shut down, it is essential that this nuclear plant be safely decommissioned and does not become a continuing liability for the community."


The problems center on steam generators that were installed during a $670 million overhaul in 2009 and 2010. After the plant was shut down, tests found some generator tubes were so badly eroded that they could fail and possibly release radiation, a stunning finding inside the nearly new equipment.


The four generators at San Onofre — two per reactor, each with 9,727 alloy tubes — function something like a car radiator, which controls heat in the vehicle's engine. The generator tubes circulate hot, radioactive water from the reactors, which then heats a bath of non-radioactive water surrounding them. That makes steam, which is used to turn turbines to make electricity.


Edison has argued for months that the Unit 2 plant could be safely restarted, but Craver recently raised the possibility of closing the plant because of lingering uncertainty about the future. The company had said little about the future of the heavily damaged Unit 3 reactor.


Questions arose over changes to the replacement generators — they were different than the originals, 23.6 tons heavier and hundreds of additional tubes were added as part of design changes.

San Onofre is owned by SCE, San Diego Gas & Electric and the city of Riverside. The Unit 1 reactor operated from 1968 to 1992, when it was shut down and dismantled.

 

[usopp]

j i used to live in pine ridge

 

[Orbital-Fetus]

damn.

 

[newworldafro]

Nuclear waste clean-up delayed and billions over budget - CBS News (Video inside link)

 

[Mowgli]

When do we turn into xmen.