Two proposed reactors at South Texas put on hold

"NRG Energy, one of the City of San Antonio’s partners at the South Texas Project nuclear facility in Matagorda County, announced today it will idle payments into a planned two-reactor nuclear expansion on the Texas coast," writes Greg Harman this week in the San Antonio Current. The NRF-Toshiba project which would add two reactors to the South Texas nuclear site, is dependent on federal loan guarantees - a burden likely to fall to taxpayers. But the loan guarantees have so far failed to materialize causing this latest retreat from the nuclear energy frontier - more examples can be found on our Nuclear Retreat page.

Epidemic of radioactivity leaks from U.S. nuclear plants includes irradiated fuel pools

A new Beyond Nuclear fact sheet, prepared for use on Kevin Kamps' speaking tour of Japan, lays out multiple cases of radioactivity leakage from high-level radioactive waste storage pools at such places as Indian Point, New York, Salem 1, New Jersey, and Connecticut Yankee. The anti-nuclear movement in Japan is resisting MOX (mixed oxide uranium-plutonium), or "Pluthermal," fuel use in Japanese reactors, in part because there is no disposition pathway for irradiated MOX other than long-term pool storage, with its risks of leakage.

This little piggy is radioactive.....

While contaminated sheep in Scotland may have - controversially - been taken off the radioactive list the same is not true for the wild pigs of Germany. On the rise in population, and making ever more frequent appearances in German cities, a significant portion of the wild boar population is still too radioactive for human consumption even nearly 25 years after the Chernobyl reactor accident that contaminated them. Der Spiegel has the full story.