Nuclear Reactors
The nuclear industry is more than 50 years old. Its history is replete with a colossal financial disaster and a multitude of near-misses and catastrophic accidents like Three Mile Island and Chornobyl. Beyond Nuclear works to expose the risks and dangers posed by an aging and deteriorating reactor industry and the unproven designs being proposed for new construction.
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Exelon Corp. announced Monday it has reached agreement on a $1 billion, 10-year project to dismantle the shuttered Zion nuclear power plant. Used nuclear fuel will remain on site indefinitely under the plan. NewsSunOnline.
Just beneath the wind-stippled surface of the Hudson River here, huge pipes suck enough water into the nuclear plant every second to fill three Olympic swimming pools. And each second they take in dozens of organisms making the annual death toll nearly a billion organisms. The New York Times.
TVA directors approved plans here Friday to move ahead with reviving work on its unfinished Bellefonte Nuclear Plant in Alabama, and replacing coal fired plants in the process. During Friday’s public hearing, anti-nuclear activists blasted TVA for putting $248 million in next year’s budget to move ahead with reviving the Bellefonte Nuclear Plant in Hollywood, Ala., where construction was halted in 1988. Chattanooga Times Free Press.
A deputy for the regional parliament in Bryansk, Lyudmila Komogortseva, found that radiation levels in the burning forests were six to 12 times higher than they were before the fires began. But just as Moscow kept many of Chernobyl's victims in the dark for days about the dangers they faced — volunteer cleanup crews worked in the wreckage with their bare hands, unaware that they were being exposed to lethal doses of radiation — Russia's leaders again tried to pretend nothing was wrong. Time.
Owners of the Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire have announced plans to request an operating license renewal 20 years before the expiration of the current license. At a press conference today, a newly-formed coalition of local, regional and national groups filed a formal petition to the NRC to change its rule to require that the license extension process begin no more than 10 years before the expiration date. The petition further calls on NRC to suspend its current review of Seabrook owners, NextEra’s (aka Florida Power & Light) license extension application for the historically controversial Seabrook nuclear power station. Seabrook was the site of huge protests and sit-ins in the mid-1970s during construction. The second planned reactor was dismantled and four companies went bankrupt before the current Seabrook reactor became operational. (Photo Eric A. Roth, May 1977 courtesy of Harold Marcuse Web site).
August 25, 2010