Disasters

"Federal regulators have been working closely with the nuclear power industry to keep the nation’s aging reactors operating within safety standards by repeatedly weakening those standards, or simply failing to enforce them, an investigation by The Associated Press has found."

"As record floodwaters along the Missouri River drench homes and businesses, concerns have grown about keeping a couple of notable structures dry: two riverside nuclear power plants in Nebraska."

"The U.N. nuclear chief proposed international safety checks on reactors worldwide to help prevent any repeat of Japan's atomic crisis, a plan which may face resistance from nations worried about outside involvement."

"A major offshore Arctic oil spill could severely challenge the Coast Guard, with no available infrastructure to base rescue and clean-up operations, the Coast Guard commandant said on Monday."

The Missouri River flooding confronting Iowans is "a historic double punch expected to continue at least into August and one that worries even the most battle-hardened veterans of previous flood fights."

"The first six months of 2011 have brought image after image of human misery and ecological upheaval. Droughts, wildfires, twisters, floods, heat waves, extreme blizzards — just about every natural disaster you can imagine has hit just about every place on the planet."

"A system to clean massive amounts of contaminated water at the site of Japan's nuclear disaster was shut down Saturday, just hours after it began full operations, because a component filled with radioactivity much more quickly than expected."

"The impact of skyrocketing food prices is echoing across the globe, in households and in the corridors of power ahead of a summit in Paris next week of G20 farm ministers."

"Japan plans to ask pregnant women and children to move away from radiation 'hotspots' that were found far away from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, the government said on Thursday, reflecting new anxieties about the spread of radioactivity."

"Nuclear safety rules in the United States do not adequately weigh the risk that a single event would knock out electricity from both the grid and from emergency generators, as an earthquake and tsunami recently did at a nuclear plant in Japan, officials of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Wednesday."