ROME, Dec 16 2007 A first shipment of uranium bars left a disused nuclear plant in northern Italy on Sunday bound for France, where they will be reprocessed in Le Hague, Normandy, the ANSA news agency reported.
The 34 uranium bars -- the first 7.5 tonnes of 235 tonnes of waste to be sent to France for disposal -- were first loaded in two casks onto a truck under heavy guard, then placed on a special train for the journey across the Alps.
BRATISLAVA, Slovakia (AP) — Two Hungarians and a Ukrainian arrested in an attempted sale of uranium were peddling material believed to be from the former Soviet Union, and it was enriched enough to be used in a radiological "dirty bomb," police said Thursday.
The three, who were arrested Wednesday in eastern Slovakia and Hungary, were trying to sell about a pound of uranium in powder form, said First Police Vice President Michal Kopcik.
CHARLESTON, South Carolina: Environmentalists and some federal lawmakers voiced concerns over the planned shipment to the United States of radioactive nuclear waste from Italy, questioning the volume of waste being brought in and whether it exceeds federal safety standards.
EnergySolutions wants to ship about 200,000 cubic feet (5,664 cubic meters) of the radioactive waste into the United States, process it in Tennessee before burying it at a site in Clive, Utah, where the company is based.
SWEEPING his hand across the surface of a warm cask heated by some of the most radioactive material on earth, Walter Heep says he is confident that the contents can be kept safely and securely aboveground for the next few decades.
Asked what might happen beyond that time frame — particularly if Swiss voters continue to reject proposals to bury nuclear waste permanently at a deep underground site — Mr. Heep is blunt about the problems that a lack of such a site will present for the future of the nuclear industry in Switzerland.
Mon Oct 29, 2007 1:27pm EDT
By Natalya Shurmina
YEKATERINBURG, Russia (Reuters) - Safety breaches have caused a radiation leak at a major nuclear reprocessing plant in the Ural mountains, Russia announced on Monday, but officials said there was no danger to humans.
Local Emergencies Ministry officials said a faulty tap allowed radiation to leak from a tank holding liquid radioactive waste onto 1.5 km (just under a mile) of a road at the Mayak plant. The incident happened four days ago.
By Galina Stolyarova
Staff Writer
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
An ecological demonstrator is carried away by a policeman as a protest on St. Isaac’s Square, in front of the Legislative Assembly building, was broken up on Thursday.
The police on Thursday disrupted an environmental picket outside the St. Petersburg Legislative Assembly, detaining more than 10 activists from local and international ecological groups campaigning against the import of spent nuclear fuel and depleted uranium hexafluoride. The picket was held in the wake of a hefty cargo of depleted uranium arriving in the city.
The official cost of cleaning up 20 of Britain's nuclear facilities will be more than £73bn, 16% higher than estimated last year, according to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority yesterday. The latest rise in clean-up costs came as the government completed consultation on whether to proceed with a new generation of atomic plants, with one potential operator arguing there was a "moral imperative" to allow more to be built.
10/10/2007 09:17
(Belga) De jongste maanden is de buitenlandse markt intensief afgespeurd in een zoektocht naar laag radioactief materiaal dat verbrand zou kunnen worden in de verbrandingsoven van Belgoprocess in Dessel.
03 October 2007
Operators of the Dounreay nuclear plant in northern Scotland have come up with a seven-year plan to retrieve spent fuel particles from a section of seabed around the plant’s old active effluent outlet.
The plan to remove offshore particles is to be accompanied by the ongoing legal requirement to detect and remove particles from local beaches – work that is expected to total about £18–25 million.
The 0.6km2 section lies above the site’s old effluent diffusion chamber and is believed to be the main source of particle pollution washing up on local beaches, although there are other less significant suspected sources.
Fred Attewill
Tuesday September 25, 2007
Guardian Unlimited
The most expensive public works project in the US was today in disarray after it emerged that a planned giant nuclear dump would be located on a faultline.
Rock samples from deep within Yucca Mountain, in Nevada, showed that the fault runs directly beneath the site where the US federal government planned to store 70,000 tonnes of highly radioactive waste.
