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Nuclear Power: Buoyed by data showing that outside the immediate area, radiation dangers remain small, Japan's pro-nuclear prime minister seeks to restart other shut-down reactors to restart a stagnant economy. It has been two years since the March 11, 2011, Honshu quake and tsunami that killed nearly 19,000 people, smashed Tokyo Electric Power Co.'s Fukushima plant, and put the brakes on the worldwide commercial use of nuclear power. Days after the quake — which registered at 9.0 on the Richter scale and was equal to about 336 million tons of TNT, a quake so powerful it shifted the position of...

The Chinese are running away with thorium energy, sharpening a global race for the prize of clean, cheap, and safe nuclear power. Good luck to them. They may do us all a favour. Princeling Jiang Mianheng, son of former leader Jiang Zemin, is spearheading a project for China's National Academy of Sciences with a start-up budget of $350m. He has already recruited 140 PhD scientists, working full-time on thorium power at the Shanghai Institute of Nuclear and Applied Physics. He will have 750 staff by 2015. The aim is to break free of the archaic pressurized-water reactors fueled by uranium...

Department of Energy Imagine the following scenario: The President of the United States delivers a speech on nuclear energy. With gasoline prices high and oil being imported from unfriendly countries, the president says that “a more abundant, affordable, and secure energy future� will be a crucial part of getting the nation out of its economic slump. “One of the best potential sources of new electrical energy supplies in the coming decades,� the president notes, “is nuclear power.� But there are obstacles: Nuclear power has become entangled in a morass of regulations that do not enhance safety but that do cause...

New York energy regulators told power companies in New York City to develop plans to keep the lights on in the Big Apple in case the giant Indian Point nuclear power plant, which supplies about a quarter of the city's electricity, is forced to shut down. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo wants the two reactors at Indian Point shut when their operating licenses expire in 2013 and 2015 in part because the nuclear plant is located in the New York metropolitan area, home to some 19 million people. The governor has said even the most unlikely possibility of an accident...

BRATTLEBORO — Six anti-nuclear protesters were convicted Tuesday of unlawful trespass at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant by a Windham County jury, after a judge rejected their attempts to turn the trial into a tribunal on nuclear power. After deliberating for more than an hour and a half, the four-man, eight-woman jury returned the unanimous guilty verdict.

A reactor at Three Mile Island, the site of the nation’s worst nuclear accident, shut down unexpectedly on Thursday afternoon when a coolant pump tripped and steam was released, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told NBC News. The system tripped when "the pump stopped operating and created a power/flow imbalance," said NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan. The plant responded as designed and is stable with no impact on public health or safety, added NRC spokeswoman Diane Screnci. If any radiation was in the released steam, Screnci said, it would be below detectable levels. Exelon, the plant operator, said in a statement that...

Denver has particularly high natural radioactivity. It comes primarily from radioactive radon gas, emitted from tiny concentrations of uranium found in local granite. If you live there, you get, on average, an extra dose of .3 rem of radiation per year (on top of the .62 rem that the average American absorbs annually from various sources). A rem is the unit of measure used to gauge radiation damage to human tissue. The International Commission on Radiological Protection recommends evacuation of a locality whenever the excess radiation dose exceeds .1 rem per year. But that's one-third of what I call the...