South Texas Project new reactor partners battle in court

CPS, the utility owned by the City of San Antonio, has requested the courts to award it $32 billion in damages from NRG Energy and Toshiba-Westinghouse, primary proponents of an "Advanced Boiling Water Reactor" (ABWR) near Bay City, Texas. It recently came to light that the price tag for the two proposed new reactors is $5 billion higher than CPS publicly admitted just last summer, now topping $18.2 billion. The San Antonio Express News has posted a chronology of numerous articles about the unfolding scandals at the South Texas Project.

Canadian nuclear plant spills tritium and hydrazine into Lake Ontario

The Toronto Star has reported that the Darlington nuclear power plant, site of 4 CANDU reactors, accidentally released over 50,000 gallons of water contaminated with radioactive tritium and toxic hydrazine into Lake Ontario. Predictably, the Ontario nuclear utility has downplayed any health risks. But documents on Beyond Nuclear's and NIRS' websites show that tritium, whether released into the environment "routinely" as part of daily operations, or accidentally via spills or leaks, cannot only cause cancer, but other maladies such as birth defects and genetic damage. For its part, hydrazine is so toxic that the U.S. military justified its shooting down of a listless satellite in order to prevent the toxin on board from reaching the Earth's surface, as reported by National Public Radio in early 2008.

New York Times reports DOE to issue first nuclear reactor loan guarantee "in the next few days"

While American taxpayers were distracted by the holidays, Congress and the Bush administration approved $18.5 billion in new reactor federal loan guarantees, and another $2.0 billion in uranium enrichment facility loan guarantees, on Christmas Eve, 2007. Now that the American people are again distracted by the holidays, the Obama administration's Dept. of Energy (DOE) appears poised to begin delivering the goods, at U.S. taxpayer risk and expense. A Christmas Eve New York Times article, "Loan Program May Stir Nuclear Industry," reports that DOE may begin dispersing the first new reactor federal loan guarantees in "the next few days." This, despite widespread design flaws endemic to proposed new reactors on DOE's loan guarantee short list. This includes the design for the Westinghouse-Toshiba Advanced Passive (AP) 1000, proposed to be built at Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia, widely rumored to be at the top of DOE's list for receiving a loan guarantee. In recent months, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission publicly announced that the AP1000 design is vulnerable to severe weather such as tornadoes and hurricanes, and other natural disasters such as earthquakes, damaging the reactor core due to a faulty "shield building."

Harvey Wasserman celebrates "A quiet but HUGE no nukes triumph"

Harvey Wasserman's latest essay lists recent setbacks plaguing the nuclear "renaissance," and urges continued grassroots vigilance against taxpayer-backed loan guarantees for new atomic reactors. See numerous additional Wasserman anti-nuke blogs down the righthand side of his freepress.org homepage, and visit the nukefree.org website Harvey edits.

Helen Caldicott in TruthOut and on video from Copenhagen

Helen Caldicott spoke to TruthOut.org reporter, Al Levine, about her Copenhagen experiences. The article includes a video clip of her speech at one of the protest rallies in the Danish capital. Dr. Caldicott, a longtime anti-nuclear campaigner and pediatrician, is the founding president of Nuclear Policy Research Institute, now operating as Beyond Nuclear.