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Sunday's Der Spiegel had a massive expose on the continuing efforts of Bashar al-Assad to build a nuclear weapons plant, which included evidence that Iran is constructing such a plant for Syria in Qusayr, less than two kilometers from Syria's border with Lebanon. The issue came up in the State Department's Monday daily briefing. Disturbingly, spokeswoman Marie Harf said that the United States did not plan to raise the issue in the Iranian nuclear talks, claiming that those talks only deal with Iran's nuclear capabilities and not with Syria's. According to findings of Western intelligence agencies, however, the situation...

Xun Wang, a former Managing Director of PPG Paints Trading, has been indicted on a charge of conspiring to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the Export Administration Regulations.She is accused of exporting and reexporting high-performance epoxy coatings to the Chashma 2 Nuclear Power Plant in Pakistan.She is a Chinese national and lawful permanent resident of the United States.In 2006, PPG sought an export license for the shipments of coatings to Chashma II. The Department of Commerce denied that license application. Following that denial, Wang and her co-conspirators agreed upon a scheme to export and reexport the high-performance...

The Obama administration is so desperate to reach a nuclear deal with Iran by the current deadline of November 24th if at all possible that it is willing to trust Russia to play a key implementation role. In the face of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s duplicity with regard to Ukraine and Putin’s increasingly aggressive stance towards the West that harkens back to the Cold War, the Obama administration is deluding itself into thinking that it can trust Putin to keep his word on ensuring that much of Iran’s uranium stockpile is converted into a relatively harmless end product. According to...

Fukushima operator starts hazardous year-long fuel removal TOKYO Mon Nov 18, 2013 5:50am EST Nov 18 (Reuters) - The operator of Japan's wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant took the first step on Monday in the long and hazardous process of decommissioning the facility, extracting a fuel rod from its container for later removal. Tokyo Electric Power Co said it transferred the rod to a steel cask within the same cooling pool in a badly damaged reactor building, beginning the delicate and unprecedented task of removing 400 tonnes of highly irradiated spent fuel from that reactor.

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran will load domestically made nuclear fuel rods into its Tehran Research Reactor on Wednesday for the first time to keep it running, a senior official told a national news agency. Tehran had announced in January that it had successfully manufactured and tested fuel rods for use in nuclear power plants, a move to show that international sanctions are failing to stop it making advances in nuclear know-how and to strengthen its hand in any renewed negotiations with six world powers. "The first home-made nuclear fuel roads will be loaded in the Tehran Nuclear Research Reactor in...

Japanese officials said Monday that nuclear fuel rods appear to be melting inside three reactors compromised by Friday’s earthquake, sparking discussion among officials in the U.S. over domestic nuclear policy. Nuclear experts differ on whether to call what's happening at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station in northeastern Japan a partial “meltdown.” Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Monday that "although we cannot directly check it, it's highly likely happening." Unit 3 of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station exploded earlier Monday, wounding 11 workers; it had been under emergency watch for an explosion after a hydrogen blast at Unit...

TEHRAN, Iran – In a major setback to Iran's nuclear program, technicians will have to unload fuel from the country's first atomic power plant because of an unspecified safety concern, a senior government official said. The vague explanation raised questions about whether the mysterious computer worm known as Stuxnet might have caused more damage at the Bushehr plant than previously acknowledged. Other explanations are possible for unloading the fuel rods from the reactor core of the newly completed plant, including routine technical difficulties.

Iran has begun loading its first nuclear power plant in the southern city of Bushehr with fuel in an effort to provide the country with nuclear-generated electricity. Nuclear fuel is being transferred to the Bushehr reactor under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency and senior officials from Iran and Russia. The Russian-completed plant is finally being launched after years of delay. 163 fuel rods are to be transferred to the core of the plant. The fueling comes after head of Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) Ali Akbar Salehi and Russian Federal Atomic Energy Agency Director Sergei Kiriyenko...

"I am proud that after over two decades of fighting the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, the project is finally being terminated." See Reid's Senate page. Obama's budget: "This proposal implements the Administration's decision to terminate the Yucca Mountain program while developing disposal alternative." What are those alternatives? Currently, the 77,000 tons of high level nuclear waste that were supposed to go to Yucca Mountain are held in temporary surface storage facilities located at 131 sites in 39 states. Now that's spreading the wealth, eh? The NRC also has a list of 55 "Locations of Independent Spent Fuel Storage...

BEIJING – North Korea is planning to unload fuel rods at its Yongbyon reactor within the next three months in what would be a significant boost to its nuclear weapons capability, an American scholar said Saturday. During a meeting this past week in Pyongyang, Selig Harrison said that North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan told him that the communist nation would unload the rods “beginning this fall, and no later than the end of the year.” Removing the fuel rods is “a significant new development because it underlines that North Korea is enhancing its weapons capability,” Harrison, director...

By NASSER KARIMI, Associated Press Writer 15 minutes ago TEHRAN, Iran - Iran is producing fuel rods for nuclear reactors, state radio reported Thursday in the government‘s latest attempt to boost a nuclear program that world powers are trying to curb. "After sanctions from the U.S., experts from Iran‘s atomic energy organization have produced better quality rods than the foreign samples," the radio reported. Enriched uranium can be used in the production of nuclear energy or weapons. Iran, a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, insists its nuclear program is aimed only at producing electricity. But the United States, France...

TOKYO, Aug. 21 (Yonhap) -- North Korea began operating its nuclear reactor just before the fourth round of six-party talks on ending the North's nuclear weapons ambitions started in late July, Japan's Asahi Shimbun reported Sunday. In a dispatch from Washington, Asahi said North Korea resumed operations at its 5,000-kilowatt nuclear plant in Yongbyon in July, merely months after it announced that activities at the plant had been suspended in order to remove spent fuel rods out of it for reprocessing. Asahi quoted U.S. officials as saying that intelligence satellites had detected water vapor being released from the plant's...

North Korea said Wednesday it had completed removing spent nuclear fuel rods from a reactor at its main nuclear complex. A North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said they had "successfully completed" removing 8,000 fuel rods from the reactor at Yongbyon, in a statement carried by the North's official Korean Central News Agency. Removing the rods would allow the North to reprocess them to extract weapons-grade plutonium. But the North didn't say Wednesday it would take such a step.

An Iraqi defector has given Pentagon officials a detailed inside look at Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein's biological and chemical weapons programs — and told of buying nuclear materials with a briefcase full of $100 bills. The defector, whose story is recounted in the new edition of Vanity Fair magazine, says he was involved in the most sensitive of Iraq's secret arms programs before fleeing a year and a half ago. Presented to U.S. officials by the Iraqi National Congress, a London-based exile group pushing for an American attack on Iraq, the defector says Saddam is close to finishing a...

Two pieces of a highly radioactive fuel rod are missing from a Vermont nuclear plant, and engineers planned to search onsite for the nuclear material, officials said Wednesday. The fuel rod was removed in 1979 from the Vermont Yankee reactor, which is currently shut down for refueling and maintenance. Remote-control cameras will be used to search a spent fuel pool on the property, officials said. "We do not think there is a threat to the public at this point. The great probability is this material is still somewhere in the pool," said Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Neil Sheehan. But Sheehan...

US wakes up to Osama's nuke dreams CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA TIMES NEWS NETWORK ASHINGTON: Alarm bells are clanging in the US and other western establishments over reports that Osama Bin Laden may have acquired or developed crude atom bombs with help from renegade Pakistani nuclear scientists. Accounts of Bin Laden's pursuit of nuclear weapons has been in the air for some time, but they acquired an added urgency this week following the arrest in Islamabad of two retired Pakistani nuclear scientists whose activities in Afghanistan were being scrutinised by western intelligence agencies. The scientists were reportedly taken into custody for questioning ...

AP News Alert SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- North Korea says it has processed all of its 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods and is using plutonium to make bombs. Copyright 2003 Associated Press. All rights reserved. MORE

July 15, 2003 North Korea Says It Has Made Fuel for Atom Bombs By DAVID E. SANGER WASHINGTON, July 14 ?North Korean officials told the Bush administration last week that they had finished producing enough plutonium to make a half-dozen nuclear bombs, and that they intended to move ahead quickly to turn the material into weapons, senior American officials said today. The new declaration set off a scramble in American intelligence agencies ? under fire for their assessment of Iraq's nuclear capability ?to determine if the North Korean government of Kim Jong Il was bluffing or had succeeded in producing...

N. Korea informed U.S. that it finished reprocessing spent fuel rods. N. Korea told U.S. on July 8, 2003, that it finished reprocessing 8,000 spent fuel rods at Yong-byun nuclear facilities in N. Korea, according to the former (S. Korean) legislator Chang Sung-min(MDP) who was told about this from a high-level source in Washington, D.C. on July 12, 2003. He was told that, on July 8, in New York, N. Korea had unofficial working-level meeting with America. At this meeting, N. Korea informed America that the reprocessing of 8,000 spent fuel rods was complete on June 30, 2003, and that...

Report: N. Korea takes nuclear step U.S. intelligence: Evidence suggests Pyongyang is reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods July 11 — Air samples collected near North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear facility contain the first physical evidence that North Korea has begun reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods. NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski reports. July 11 — North Korea has begun to reprocess spent nuclear fuel rods — a critical step to produce more nuclear weapons — an intelligence report delivered to the White House on Thursday suggests, NBC News has learned. U.S. GOVERNMENT officials tell NBC News that air samples collected from the vicinity of...