Free Republic

President Barack Obama is preparing to unveil his long-awaited national plan to combat climate change in a major speech, he announced on Saturday. … Environmental groups have been pleading with Obama to take that step, but the administration has said it’s focused first on controls on new power plants. The Environmental Protection Agency, using its authority under the Clean Air Act, has already proposed controls on new plants, but the rules have been delayed—to the chagrin of states and environmental groups threatening to sue over the delays. … “They shouldn’t wait for Congress to act, because they’ll be out of...

An economic analysis of what is in spent nuclear fuel. As a nuclear reactor fissions heavy metal U235 and Pu239, the atoms are split into two randomly sized pieces. Many of these fission products are unstable and rapidly decay into other products. After nuclear reactor fuel has cooled in a pool of water for a few years, and then sat in dry cask storage for another 10--30 years, what is it made of? Is it dangerous waste that needs to be isolated from humanity for 100,000 years or is it precious material waiting to be partitioned and sold? The answer...

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...

When Barack Obama was just a baby, nuclear energy was touted as the technology that would finally provide pollution-free, limitless electricity for all. In its famous 1962 Port Huron Statement, the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society gushed about how “our monster cities…might now be humanized” thanks to nuclear power. Like so many predictions about the future, that one rather dramatically missed the mark. Surprising as it may seem, the United States still generates around 20 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants. This despite the fact that no new facilities have been built since the notorious Three Mile...

Energy: A green administration blocks the safe storage of nuclear waste and refuses even to acknowledge nuclear power has a future. But after the GOP House votes to open a safe site, the nuclear debate has been reopened. Actually "waste" is an inaccurate term for the spent nuclear fuel rods still accumulating at above-ground fuel storage sites around the country, many near major cities. Spent nuclear fuel is a renewable resource that, in generating energy after being reprocessed, emits no greenhouse gasses. But wait, critics shout, what about Fukushima and Chernobyl? Certainly Russian incompetence and Japanese carelessness produced tragic results....

TOKYO (AP) -- A panel investigating Japan's nuclear disaster said Saturday that the ex-prime minister and his aides caused confusion at the height of last year's crisis by heavily interfering in the damaged and leaking plant's operation. Shuya Nomura, a member of the parliamentary panel, said that Naoto Kan's aides made numerous calls to the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, often asking basic questions and distracting workers, thus causing more confusion. They did not follow the official line of communication -- through the regulator, the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency -- under the country's nuclear disaster management law, he said.

Radioactive fallout from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster continues to show up at dangerously high levels in the city of Tokyo, which is located roughly 200 miles from the actual disaster site. According to an analysis of five random soil samples recently taken by nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen, the soil around Tokyo is so contaminated with Fukushima radiation that it would be considered nuclear waste here in the U.S. During a recent trip to Tokyo, Gundersen collected soil samples from a sidewalk, a children's playground, a rooftop, a patch of moss by the side of a road, and the lawn...

A $670 million overhaul at California’s San Onofre nuclear plant was expressly intended to avoid the types of ailments that have sidelined its twin reactors. San Onofre’s twin reactors have been idle for more than three months in the midst of a federal probe into what went wrong with hundreds of tubes that snake through the generators. Some were so eroded after a brief run in operation they can no longer function safely. Less than a month before a tube break in January prompted Southern California Edison to take the plant offline, engineers writing in a trade magazine touted a...

Any discussion of Japan and nuclear power is complicated by that country's history as the only nation ever to suffer a nuclear attack. That event continues to haunt the venerable Pacific nation. This is an immutable truth that one must accept regardless of which side one is on concerning the legitimacy of the US attack 67 years ago. That said, the Japanese nation nevertheless staked much of its economic destiny on nuclear power. Beginning more than four decades ago, Japan deployed over 50 nuclear power plants to feed the energy needs of its densely packed population. Very limited in domestic...

China will accelerate the use of new-energy sources such as nuclear energy and put an end to blind expansion in industries such as solar energy and wind power in 2012, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao says in a government report published on March 5.China will instead develop nuclear power in 2012, actively develop hydroelectric power, tackle key problems more quickly in the exploration and development of shale gas, and increase the share of new energy and renewable energy in total energy consumption.The guidance indicates a new trend for new-energy and renewable energy development in China from 2012. Analysts believe that the...

The troubled San Onofre nuclear plant in Southern California will remain shut down while investigators try to solve a mystery inside its massive generators _ the rapid decay of tubing that carries radioactive water, federal regulators said Tuesday. The announcement that formalized an agreement with operator Southern California Edison came on the same day that a report commissioned by an environmental group claimed the utility misled the Nuclear Regulatory Commission about design changes that are the likely culprit in excessive tube wear. A four-page letter to Edison from NRC Regional Administrator Elmo E. Collins laid out a series of steps...

The U.S. nuclear industry seemed to be staging a comeback several years ago, with 15 power companies proposing as many as 29 new reactors. Today, only two projects are moving off the drawing board. What killed the revival wasn't last year's nuclear accident in Japan, nor was it a soft economy that dented demand for electricity. Rather, a shale-gas boom flooded the U.S. market with cheap natural gas, offering utilities a cheaper, less risky alternative to nuclear technology. "It's killed off new coal and now it's killing off new nuclear," says David Crane, chief executive of NRG Energy Inc., NRG...

In the early 1980s, a Taiwan steel company accidentally mixed some highly radioactive cobalt-60 into a batch of steel rebar. The radioactive rods were then used in the construction of 1,700 apartments. As a result, people living in these buildings were subject to radiation up to 30 times the normal amount received from the natural background. When dismayed officials discovered this enormous error 15 years later, they surveyed past and present apartment dwellers expecting to find an epidemic of cancer. Normal incidence would have predicted 160 cancers among the 10,000 residents. To their astonishment, the researchers discovered only five cases...

Ever since the end of World War Two, the U.S. has come to regard Saudi Arabia as almost its exclusive oil producing enclave. In February 1945, after the Yalta Conference with Soviet General Secretary Iosif Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, on his way home U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and King Ibn Saud met aboard the New Orleans-class heavy cruiser U.S.S. Quincy in the Suez Canal’s Great Bitter Lake. During the meeting, instigated by Roosevelt, he and Ibn Saud concluded a secret agreement in which the U.S. would provide Saudi Arabia military security, including military assistance, training and...