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Slate Magazine: Communicating the dangers of nuclear waste to unfathomably remote descendants may seem like a topic best left to third-drink philosophers in dorm rooms.

It's actually been left to the US Department of Energy.

According to government guidelines, DoE must plan for the continuing safety of nuclear waste sites over the next 10 millenniums.

So in 1991, the department (through Sandia National Laboratories) hired 13 linguists, scientists, and anthropologists at a cost of about $1 million to devise a conceptual plan for a 10,000-year marker system.

The summary report, dryly titled "Expert Judgment on Markers To Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion Into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant," was published in 1993.

The report takes seriously the quixotic goal of warning far-off civilizations and ultimately proposes a system as elaborate as it is futile says Slate's Juliet Lapidos.

guardian.co.uk: The UK government is poised to allow nuclear power generators to use ordinary landfill sites for dumping "hundreds of thousands of tons" of waste in an attempt to reduce the £73 billion ($140 bn) cost of decommissioning old reactors.

The move has triggered a swath of applications around the country from big corporations trying to cash in on this potential new business, but infuriated local governments and environmental campaign groups.

NYTimes.com: With a federal plan to handle nuclear waste in deadlocked disarray, the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board—an advisory panel that has spent 20 years studying a proposed repository at Yucca Mountain—turned Wednesday to discussing ways of reusing the fuel instead.

But as the panel made evident during the meeting, such reuse was uncertain, along with the future of Yucca Mountain.

NPR: NASA is running out of the special kind of plutonium needed to power deep space probes, worrying planetary scientists who say the US urgently needs to restart production of plutonium-238.

But it's unclear whether Congress will provide the $30 million that the administration requested earlier this year for the Department of Energy to get a new program going.

csmonitor.com: Some 60,000 metric tons of radioactive waste is stored at nuclear power plants across the US, awaiting federal action that’s already a decade late.

BBC NEWS: America's first nuclear weapons production facility has become the center of a growing tourism industry.

More than 60 years after plutonium was first produced at Hanford, Washington State, the US government is running limited visits to the site.

Many locals are proud of their heritage, but Hanford has left another legacy: massive radioactive contamination.

And now billions of dollars of President Obama's stimulus money is being spent on cleaning up what is one of the most polluted places in the US.

Chattanooga Times Free Press: The Tennessee Valley Authority is on track to complete a $2.5 billion, five-year plan to finish a second reactor at the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant by 2012.

TVA began construction of Watts Bar II in 1973, but work was suspended in 1988 when TVA's growth in power sales declined. After mothballing the unit for 19 years, TVA's board decided in 2007 to finish the reactor because it is projected to provide cheaper, no carbon-emitting power compared with the existing coal plants or purchased power it may help replace. More than 1850 TVA and contract employees are working on the project.

Watts Bar II is the first commercial reactor in the country to seek a license since 1995 and could be the last reactor of its generation to be built.

The Observer: More than 1,767 safety incidents have occurred at nuclear power plants in the UK between 2001-08 according to a report written by the government's chief nuclear inspector, Mike Weightman of the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII), and released under the UK's Freedom of Information Act.

About half were subsequently judged by inspectors as serious enough "to have had the potential to challenge a nuclear safety system". They were "across all areas of existing nuclear plant", including Sellafield in Cumbria and Aldermaston and Burghfield in Berkshire, says Weightman.

NPR: Some environmentalists believe building more nuclear power plants today is the best way to combat climate change while solar and other renewable energy sources mature. Ira Flatow and experts discuss the economic and engineering hurdles to nuclear development in the US.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: After years of investment, South Africa has abandoned its plan to develop a fleet of electricity-generating pebble bed modular reactors (PBMR), once hyped as the future of nuclear power.

Problems with the PBMR aren't new; a 2008 German report chronicles Germany's own problems developing the reactor since 1967.

China, the only other country still developing PBMR-based power reactor designs, has taken a slower approach, and it is unclear if they have run into problems as well.

Nevertheless, some 10,000 staff and 2,000 contractors work here - considerably more than the 8,000 or so people who worked in nuclear research and development during the industry's heyday, in the early 1980s.

They carry out very little productive work - instead, their job is positively destructive: they are demolishing long-since closed nuclear power plants and atomic weapons research facilities, many of them contaminated by nuclear waste after more than half a century of energy and weapons production.

Steven Chu: Yucca Mountain as a repository is off the table. What we're going to be doing is saying, let's step back. We realize that we know a lot more today than we did 25 or 30 years ago. The NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] is saying that the dry cask storage at current sites would be safe for many decades, so that gives us time to figure out what we should do for a long-term strategy. We will be assembling a blue-ribbon panel to look at the issue.

[We're] looking at reactors that have a high-energy neutron spectrum that can actually allow you to burn down the long-lived actinide waste. [Editor's note: Actinides include plutonium, which can be dangerous for 100,000 years.] These are fast neutron reactors. There's others: a resurgence of hybrid solutions of fusion fission where the fusion would impart not only energy, but again creates high-energy neutrons that can burn down the long-lived actinides.

Wired: Thirty years ago, half the core of a reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear complex melted down, but government officials and the utility running the place didn't know that. And they wouldn't know for six more years.

The Washington Post: Iran sharply criticized the United States, Britain and France on Monday for "continuous nuclear cooperation" with Israel, saying support for the Jewish state was a source of concern for the entire Middle East.

ABC News: Japan says it will back US President Barack Obama's drive for a nuclear-free world by holding a global disarmament summit.

Bloomberg.com: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said his government is preparing to offer the US and European nations an updated version of a one-year-old proposal for talks about its nuclear program.

The Washington Post: Fuming at the UN Security Council for condemning its recent missile launch, North Korea said Tuesday it will restart its plutonium factory, junk all its disarmament agreements, and "never participate" again in six-country nuclear negotiations.

BBC: Iran has welcomed an offer of talks with six world powers over its nuclear program, state television says.

Associated Press: Watchdog groups want the U.S. to reduce its nuclear weapons complex to just three sites as a step toward the nuclear arms-free world that President Barack Obama envisioned in a speech days ago in Prague.

The New York Times: Arizona Republican John McCain said today that he will promote amendments to a Senate energy bill that would abandon the Yucca Mountain, Nev., nuclear waste dump and refund about $16 billion in waste fees to electricity ratepayers.

"Leadership in science remains vital to America's economic prosperity, energy security, and global competitiveness," said Chu at a lunchtime press conference. "These projects not only provide critically needed short-term economic relief but also represent a strategic investment in our nation's future. They will create thousands of jobs and breathe new life into many local economies, while helping to accelerate new technology development, renew our scientific and engineering workforce, and modernize our nation's scientific infrastructure."

The money will mainly be directed to the 10 national laboratories run by DOE. The package also provides substantial support for both university- and DOE-based researchers, working on problems in fields ranging from particle and plasma physics to biofuels, solar energy, superconductivity, solid-state lighting, electricity storage, and materials science, among others.

The news came days after the Obama administration announced that current BP chief scientist Steve Koonin will serve as undersecretary of science at DOE. He would replace Ray Orbach once the position receives Senate confirmation.

Included among the approved projects are the following:

• $150 million to accelerate ongoing construction on the National Synchrotron Light Source-II at Brookhaven National Laboratory, in Upton, New York.

• $123 million for major construction, modernization, and needed decommissioning of laboratory facilities at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL); Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL); and Brookhaven National Laboratory.

• $65 million to accelerate construction of the 12-Billion Electron Volt Upgrade of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF) in Newport News, Virginia.

• $277 million for Energy Frontier Research Centers, to be awarded on a competitive basis to universities and DOE National Laboratories across the country. These centers will accelerate the transformational basic science needed to develop plentiful and cost-effective alternative energy sources and will pursue advanced fundamental research in fields ranging from solar energy to nuclear energy systems, biofuels, geological sequestration of carbon dioxide, clean and efficient combustion, solid-state lighting, superconductivity, hydrogen research, electrical energy storage, catalysis for energy, and materials under extreme conditions.

• $90 million for other core research, providing support for graduate students, postdocs, and PhD scientists across the nation.

• $69 million to create a national scale, prototype 100-gigabit per second data network linking research centers across the nation.

• $330 million for operations and equipment at Office of Science major scientific user facilities, including ORNL's Spallation Neutron Source; the Nanoscale Science Research Centers, located at five national laboratories nationwide; the ARM Climate Research Facility; Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory; and Linac Coherent Light Source at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SNAL).

In addition, the Recovery Act funding provides $125 million for needed infrastructure improvements across nine DOE national laboratories: Ames Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, LBNL, ORNL, PNNL, SNAL, and TJNAF.

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The New York Times: President Obama has made clean and efficient energy a top priority, and Congress has obliged with more than $32 billion in stimulus money mostly for conservation and alternative energy technologies like wind, solar and biofuel. Sadly, the Energy Department is too weighed down by nuclear energy programs to devote itself to bringing about the revolution Mr. Obama envisions, writes Stephanie Cooke in the New York Times.

Los Angeles Times: Abdul Samad Minty and Yukiya Amano are the front-runners to take over the International Atomic Energy Agency when Mohamed ElBaradei's term ends. The two officials could not be more different.

The Wall Street Journal: "White House Buries Yucca," read the headlines last week after Secretary of Energy Steven Chu said the proposed storage of nuclear waste in a Nevada mountain is "no longer an option."

Instead, Mr. Chu told a Senate hearing, the Obama administration will cut all but the most rudimentary funding to Yucca and be content to allow spent fuel rods to sit in storage pools and dry casks at reactor sites "while the administration devises a new strategy toward nuclear waste disposal."

AFP: Iran could produce an atomic weapon in "one or two years," a Russian strategic arms control expert said Thursday, calling a nuclear-armed Tehran a "significant threat."

The Washington Post: The nation's nuclear weapons laboratories would be spun out of the Energy Department and become the center of an independent Agency for National Security Applications under a proposal to be released today by a bipartisan task force formed by the Stimson Center, a research organization devoted to security issues.

In keeping with a pledge President Obama made during the campaign, the budget released last week cuts off almost all funding for creating a permanent burial site for a large portion of the nation's radioactive nuclear waste at the site in the Nevada desert. Congress selected the location in 1987 and reaffirmed the choice in 2002. About $7.7 billion has been sunk into the project since its inception.

CNN: Iran tested its first nuclear power plant Wednesday, a stride that prompted one Iranian technician to declare it was "independence day" for the Islamic republic.

"Iran has enough nuclear fuel to build a bomb if it decides to take the drastic steps of violating its international treaty obligations, kicking out inspectors and further refining its supply."

However, as Chemist Cheryl Rofer points out, at 3.49% , the concentration of Iran's 1010 kg of enriched uranium-235 is still too low to make an atomic bomb and would have to be reprocessed for a number of months to reach the necessary enrichment level for military applications. The uranium enrichment facility would also have to be reconfigured to reach higher concentration levels of U-235.

An atomic bomb requires highly enriched uranium-235 at greater than 90% concentration. To produce enough low-enriched uranium fuel for the two nuclear reactors Iran is building it needs at minimum a cascade of 5000 centrifuges. Iran currently has 5600 known centrifuges according to the IAEA report.

The report also states that Iran has slowed down its enrichment program and that as long as the IAEA monitors their facilities, they cannot develop nuclear weapons. As IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei recently said in an interview in Süddeutsche Zeitung, "they still do not have the ingredients to make a bomb overnight."

Related coverage
Iran holds enough uranium for bomb Financial Times
Iran has enriched enough uranium to make bomb, IAEA says The Guardian
Iran Has More Enriched Uranium Than Thought The New York Times

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The gas centrifuge and nuclear weapons proliferation Physics Today

The Washington Post: The United States is more than two years ahead of the schedule set under the Moscow Treaty in reducing the number of its nuclear warheads operationally deployed on strategic missiles and bombers, according to congressional and administration sources.

The Associated Press: The Obama administration, reversing the Bush administration's limited interest in nuclear disarmament, is gearing up for early negotiations with Russia on a new treaty that would sharply reduce stockpiles of nuclear warheads.

BBC: The Swedish government plans to overturn a nearly 30-year-old decision to phase out nuclear power and lift a ban on building new reactors.

Xinhua: Diplomats representing the United Nations Security Council's five permanent members and Germany met Wednesday to discuss Iran's nuclear issue.

Guardian Unlimited: Tehran claims to be joining the space race but the west has its suspicions

ABC News: A delegation of South Korean officials which has just returned from North Korea says the communist state has almost 15,000 unused nuclear fuel rods.

CNN: The United States signed an agreement Thursday on civil nuclear cooperation with the United Arab Emirates -- the first such pact with a Middle Eastern country.

Reuters: The European Commission will listen to the arguments of Slovakia on the need to restart the country's Bohunice nuclear power plant and then assess the situation, the European Union executive said on Monday.

As a result, on 5 December it terminated the process of selecting a preferred bidder for the construction of the proposed plant.

Los Angeles Times: The agreement, the first of its kind between the U.S. and an Arab nation, entails providing an Arab country with U.S. nuclear technology. Critics cite the United Arab Emirates' ties with Iran.

Physics Today: President-elect Obama's transition team is expected to shortly announce that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu will be nominated as secretary of energy, while Lisa Jackson, a former environmental policy official in New Jersey, has been picked to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Carol Browner, who led the EPA under President Clinton, will fill a new White House "energy czar" role. The announcements came from Democratic officials on Wednesday night.

Chu, who will be the first Nobel Prize winner to be appointed to the US cabinet, is the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and has played a key role in moving the lab in the direction of specializing in renewable energy, particularly in the field of new fuels for transportation. LBNL is experimenting with making biofuels from different types of biomass, using algae in fermentation tanks to make fuel, and applying solar energy to convert water and carbon dioxide to fuels. "[President-elect Obama] certainly needs somebody who can focus on the science and energy policies and I can't think of a better guy than Steve," says Mike Lubell from the American Physical Society.

Originally his father wanted him to be an architect as "the competition in physics was too strong." Chu did both his graduate and postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley. He then spent nine years at Bell Labs before joining Stanford University's physics department where he remained between 1987-2004. He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Phillips for cooling and trapping atoms with lasers.

During the presidential campaign, Obama said he would invest $150 billion over 10 years in clean energy and proposed requiring that 10 percent of electricity in the United States comes from renewable sources by 2012. Chu, has been one of the most public faces of promoting renewable energy. At the National Clean Energy Summit held in August, Chu said "I think political will is absolutely necessary. But we need new technologies."

Chu is also one of the co-authors of the 2006 National Academy of Sciences' report Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future, in which he lobbied for the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) at the Department of Energy as a way of funding risky hich-tech technologies to solve the US energy crisis. ARPA-E, although legislation creating its existence has passed into law, has yet to be receive a budget as the proposal is not supported by the Bush administration. Chu's appointment increases the likelihood that the ARPA-E will finally be created.

The largest part of the Department of Energy's budget however, goes towards maintaining the nuclear weapons stockpile. It is too early to say what the implications are for Chu's appointment to the long term future of the three main nuclear weapons labs at Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia. According to the Wall Street Journal, Chu is likely to focus his attention on the Energy Department's core missions: basic science, nuclear weapons and cleaning up a nuclear-weapons manufacturing complex contaminated since the Cold War.

Related Physics Today articles
Chu Named Berkeley Lab Director (August 2004)
Politicians skeptical about need for ARPA-E (June 2006)
'Gathering Storm' Report Urges Strong Federal Action to Save US Science and Technology Leadership December 2005
Could 'green gasoline' displace ethanol as the biofuel of choice? December 2008
Blueprint for new energy institute February 2007

Related Physics Today science articles
Laser Beam Focus Forms Optical Trap for Neutral Atoms September 1986
New Mechanisms for Laser Cooling October 1990
Atom Interferometers Prove Their Worth in Atomic Measurements July 1995
Work on Atom Trapping and Cooling Gets a Warm Reception in Stockholm December 1997
Atom Interferometer Measures G with Same Accuracy as Optical Devices November 1999
How the Laser Happened: Adventures of a Scientist December 1999 (review by Steven Chu)

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Nobel Winner Chu To Land Top Energy Post (NPR)
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The Associated Press: The Bush administration said Tuesday there are no technology constraints to a major expansion of the proposed nuclear waste site in Nevada, calling for possibly tripling the amount of highly radioactive used reactor fuel that could be stored there in manmade underground caverns.

Science: What does nuclear deterrence mean? An active defense? Strategic defense? What constitutes a nuclear explosion? Precise definitions are critical for everything from negotiating treaties to interpreting
military postures of ally and adversary alike. On 20 November, the U.S. National Academies unveiled the first Chinese-English glossary of nearly 1000 nuclear-security terms.* The compendium seeks to reduce misunderstandings between China and the United States--nuclear powers that came into conflict in the Korean War and could conceivably be in confrontation again

AFP: US envoy Christopher Hill on a visit to Japan Tuesday said "tough" talks are expected during next week's six nation meeting focussing on North Korea's pledge to scrap its nuclear weapons programmes.

Nature: An exhaustive calculation of proton and neutron masses vindicates the Standard Model.

The Washington Post: Yearly study offers agenda for new administration.

AHN: Small, underground nuclear power plants, about the size of a hot tub, may soon provide electricity for communities. One mini reactor is capable of powering approximately 20,000 homes.

Xinhua : The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) council meeting to be held at the end of November will include Syrian nuclear issue in its agenda, an IAEA high ranking official confirmed to Xinhua in Vienna on Monday.

Guardian Unlimited: Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

The Economist: Much more than worries about safety, the biggest obstacle to the
revival of nuclear power in Britain is the billion dollar cost says the Economist. During the recent run up in the price of oil to above $100, nuclear power looked competitive, but once oil drops below $60, the numbers to do add up. But the other obstacles to a nuclear renaissance consist of a global shortage of manufacturing capacity for important components and a severe shortage of qualified scientists, engineers and technicians.

Cogent, an industry training body, reckons that between a fifth and a third of nuclear workers will retire in the next decade, just when their knowledge will be in greatest demand. The government forecasts that up to 1,500 workers need to be replaced every year merely to maintain the status quo. Decommissioning old reactors and building new ones will require 18,000 more over the next 20 years.

Atlanta Journal Constitution: The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is warning the nuclear industry to be careful in its construction oversight after finding problems earlier this year at the Savannah River Site.

The Christian Science Monitor: Could China's plan to help Pakistan build nuclear power plants be the first of many pacts in the region?

Viet Nam Net: According to the draft plan of the Ministry of Industry and Trade on nuclear power development, Vietnam will build two nuclear power plants in the southern province of Ninh Thuan with four reactors, each with the capacity of 1,000 MW. The reactors will be put into operation between 2020 and 2024.

Reuters: Florida regulators on Tuesday approved plans to allow the state's two largest utilities to collect more than $600 million next year in costs for new nuclear plants expected to be online in eight to 10 years.

The Associated Press: North Korea planned to resume dismantling its nuclear program Tuesday for the first time in two months, days after the US removed the communist regime from a terrorism blacklist as a reward under a disarmament pact.

Chicago Tribune: Regardless of whether the U.S. Senate grants its approval in the coming days, a controversial nuclear deal between the United States and India already has delivered what New Delhi considers the most important part.

The Associated Press: Indian nuclear energy officials say they would like to do business with GE and other US firms. But if they can't, there's always France and Russia.

Reuters: North Korea said on Friday it was working on restarting its nuclear plant and dismissed the prospect of being removed from a U.S. terrorism blacklist in return for a disarmament deal.

Nature: International Energy Agency calls for more funds for non-nuclear technologies in Europe.

The State: SCE&G’s plan to build two reactors goes before state regulators Wednesday.

The Wall Street Journal: The Bush administration, seeking to secure a landmark nuclear-cooperation deal with India before its term expires, will push Congress to pass the required legislation by the end of the month.

Wall Street Journal: The Bush administration's landmark nuclear-cooperation agreement with Russia is unlikely to gain passage before President George W. Bush leaves office, the latest sign of how Russia's offensive in Georgia has roiled the international scene.

The Washington Post: A Bush administration proposal to exempt India from restriction on nuclear trade has aroused skepticism from several members of the 45-nation Nuclear Suppliers Group, diplomats said yesterday, making it increasingly unlikely that a deal will be reached in two-day meetings that begin today in Vienna.

US News and World Report: "Nuclear Help Desperately Wanted" could be the sign in front of dozens of engineering colleges across the country. With worldwide interest in nuclear energy and technology skyrocketing, engineers with a nuclear background are feeling very popular these days. It's welcome news for a field that has been long stifled by negative public opinion. The challenge the discipline faces is how to meet this new demand after years of shrinking interest.

The Jerusalem Post: The Saudi Arabian cabinet has decided to approve the country's agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on the protocols and application of safeguards under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Saudi newspaper Arab News reported.

Wall Street Journal: In the latest development of a longstanding contract dispute, a federal appeals court reversed and remanded a trio of cases concerning damages owed to nuclear utilities as a result of the government's failure to build a nuclear-waste facility.

The Register: The British government plan to build a new generation of nuclear power stations is on hold, after French energy giant EDF's bid to buy the UK's existing nuclear industry was rejected at the last moment. Reports have it that the deal fell through after existing shareholders in British Energy - thought to be large UK pension funds - demanded more than EDF was willing to pay.

The £12 billion acquisition had been seen for some time as a done deal, with the full approval of the government. EDF, which is a major player in the mostly-nuclear French electricity market, was to take over British Energy not so much for its existing plants or expertise, but in order to acquire its nuclear sites. This would avoid much of the red tape, protests and legal disputes that would result from breaking of new ground, and EDF with its French experience would have little difficulty in doing the building.

Now, however, the deal - a vital precursor to the entire plan - appears to have foundered.

World Nuclear News: Small advanced reactors offer enormous potential to extend the reach of nuclear power - but safety regulators in some leading nuclear nations are too busy to approve the designs.

The Guardian: The French electricity group EDF is ready to unveil a £12bn deal for the takeover of the UK's nuclear power generator British Energy as early as next week.

An agreement - widely expected by those close to the talks - will raise questions about a French takeover of the sector after the French group Areva this month became preferred bidder with two others to takeover management of the Sellafield nuclear complex in Cumbria.

British Energy is attractive to EDF because the sites could be used to build a new generation of nuclear stations.

The Guardian: An internal audit undertaken by the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (DBERR) of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has found significant financial risk that were exacerbated by misunderstandings, unminuted meetings and lack of sufficiently trained staff which has led to embarrassing cost overruns that forced the department to find £400m worth of emergency funds from other budgets to balance the books.

The Independent: Prime Minister Gordon Brown is to fast-track the building of at least eight nuclear power stations to cut Britain's dependence on oil following the dramatic rise in its price.

Brown is quoted in a speech at the "Union for the Mediterranean" summit in Paris as saying there will be "no upper limit" on the number of nuclear plants that will be built by private companies. This would mean, despite the decommissioning of nearly all the UK's current reactors over the next 15 years, that nuclear power, which currently provides about 20 per cent of Britain's electricity, could meet a bigger share. The location for the first batch of new nuclear power plants will be announced in 2010.

The speech outlined the UK's vision of a "post-oil economy", calling for "a renaissance of nuclear power" and "massive expansion" of renewable energy in which the North Sea becomes "a vital energy resource through harnessing wind power.

Related Physics Today article
A Stronger Future for Nuclear Power (February 2006)
Nuclear power's costs and perils (January 2007)
Nuclear power challenges and alternatives (September 2007)
DOE urged to proceed more deliberately with global plan to expand nuclear power (July 2008, restricted to subscribers)

Daily Telegraph: Cuts of up to 40 per cent in grants to scientists have been announced, triggering a warning they could undermine the nation’s ability to build and decommission nuclear power plants.

Associated Press: The market at the heart of this little village is stuffed with locally grown produce. Fat, red radishes practically fly out of the display basket next to the cash register hours after leaving the field.

The Economist: The North Korean government prepares to blow up a cooling tower at its nuclear reactor

Science: In papers published over a quarter of a century ago Isaac J. Winograd and Eugene H. Roseboom Jr discussed the assets and liabilities of burying high level radioactive waste (HLW) in areas with deep water tables, specifically within the several-hundred-meter-thick unsaturated zones common to the arid and semiarid Southwest U.S.A.

This idea which was taken by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission eventually led to the proposal of using Yucca Mountain as a potential repository for HLWs. In the ensuing decades, a voluminous body of knowledge of the geology, hydrology, geochemistry, and paleoclimatology of YM and the surrounding southern Great Basin was acquired and documented in hundreds of studies by federal, state, university, and industry scientists.

As a result of these efforts, Yucca mountain remains controversial for storage of HLWs. Winograd and Roseboom examine several reasons for this outcome, two of which would apply to any site being considered for the geologic isolation of HLWs, and suggest a potential way to move beyond the controversy.

The Associated Press: A Bush administration official was seeking to convince skeptical lawmakers Thursday that a U.S.-Russian agreement on civilian nuclear power would not undermine efforts to rein in Iran's nuclear program.

BBC: Police in Japan have raided two companies after vacuum pumps they manufactured and sold were found in a North Korean nuclear facility.

Washington Post: A nuclear power plant in Georgia was recently forced into an emergency shutdown for 48 hours after a software update was installed on a single computer.

The incident occurred on March 7 at Unit 2 of the Hatch nuclear power plant near Baxley, Georgia. The trouble started after an engineer from Southern Company, which manages the technology operations for the plant, installed a software update on a computer operating on the plant's business network.

The computer in question was used to monitor chemical and diagnostic data from one of the facility's primary control systems, and the software update was designed to synchronize data on both systems. According to a report filed with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, when the updated computer rebooted, it reset the data on the control system, causing safety systems to errantly interpret the lack of data as a drop in water reservoirs that cool the plant's radioactive nuclear fuel rods. As a result, automated safety systems at the plant triggered a shutdown.

Bloomberg: India may be forced to slash its target for new nuclear power stations as the US-India nuclear technology accord falters, prolonging electricity shortages that are constraining economic growth.

``Time is slipping out of our hands,'' Shreyans Kumar Jain, chairman of the Nuclear Power Corp. of India Ltd., said in an interview in Mumbai yesterday. India's plan to add 25,000 megawatts before 2020 by importing reactors and fuel will be delayed by two decades if the nation has to rely on indigenous designs, he said.

[From Bloomberg.com: Asia]

The Associated Press: Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said Tuesday he's confident the government's license application to build a nuclear waste dump in Nevada will "stand up to any challenge anywhere."

Bodman spoke at a news conference hours after the Bush administration submitted the formal application with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to build the underground storage facility at Yucca Mountain more than 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

[From The Associated Press: Bush administration files nuclear dump application]