Residents of the town of Novi Han, 12km southeast of Sofia, voted in favour of shutting down the nuclear waste facility near the town, in a referendum on February 18 2008.
The turnout for the referendum was 66.2 per cent, passing the 51 per cent threshold for it to be considered valid, with 99 per cent of the 1221 town's residents who went to polling stations voting in favour of shutting down the facility, Focus news agency reported.
A CONTROVERSIAL £6 million nuclear decontamination plant planned for Workington can go ahead.
Studsvik UK was granted a nuclear site licence by the Health and Safety Executive on Wednesday.
The plant will decontaminate low-level radioactive metal from the nuclear industry and sell it on to be reused.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Monday began taking public comments and fielding requests for a public hearing on plans by Salt Lake City-based EnergySolutions to import 20,000 tons of waste from Italian nuclear plant cleanups.
Next week, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission will formally begin inviting the public and affected government agencies to weigh in on EnergySolutions' application to accept low-level radioactive waste from Italy.
But the agency is already welcoming public comments, said Brooke Smith, a member of the NRC team reviewing the import license.
By Galina Stolyarova, the St. Petersburg Times
As 2,000 tons of radioactive cargo arrived at St. Petersburg’s port from Germany on Thursday, environmental groups took to the streets to inform city residents about the growing imports of nuclear materials and the dangers the trade imposes.
The MV Schouwenbank cargo ship, carrying containers with a total of 2,000 tons of depleted uranium hexafluoride, came from the Gronau uranium enrichment facility that belongs to Urenco Deutschland. The radioactive load on board the ship is due to be sent by rail to the town of Novouralsk in Siberia for reprocessing and storage.
OSLO (Reuters) - Half a century after the first atomic power plant opened at Obninsk near Moscow, climate change is widening the environmental appeal of nuclear power despite a lack of final storage for the most toxic waste.
By GEORGE JAHN, The Associated Press
VIENNA, Austria -- Global warming and rocketing oil prices are making nuclear power fashionable, drawing a once demonized industry out of the shadows of the Chernobyl disaster as a potential shining knight of clean energy.
By Will Stewart in Moscow
Last Updated: 2:24am GMT 04/01/2008
Russia has admitted that customs officials thwarted more than 120 attempts to smuggle "highly radioactive" material out of the country last year.
The disclosure is likely to fuel concern about how many illegal exports were not halted. It will also lead to new fears that Moscow has failed to stop material becoming available on the black market that could be used by terrorists to make radioactive "dirty" bombs.
A new generation of nuclear power plants could burn 100 tonnes of surplus weapons-grade plutonium as a good way of keeping it away from terrorists, according to scientists working for the European Union.
20 December 2007
On 17 December the first transport to France of irradiated fuel still present in Italy was completed. The first two special containers, with 34 of the 1243 fuel rods that will be reprocessed at La Hague, left the shut down Caorso nuclear power plant.
