Disasters

"The debate over making post-Fukushima Daichi improvements to American reactors is getting down into the details, and one focus is pressure relief vents."

"Lakes across eastern Japan are being contaminated with radioactive cesium from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, and scientists are warning of a growing problem in Tokyo Bay.

Radioactive mud carried down rivers is slowly accumulating in the lakes, in some cases making fish and shellfish dangerous to eat.

"The June 29 derecho, which caused widespread damage in Washington, D.C. blossomed to full fury in a record hot environment. Could the heat added to the atmosphere from manmade greenhouse gases have provided extra fuel to this explosive storm?

The amount of energy available to this storm was extreme and, wundergound weather historian Chris Burt called the number of all-time heat records set around the time 'especially extraordinary.'

"More than 1 million homes and businesses in a swath from Indiana to Virginia remained without power on Wednesday, five days after deadly storms tore through the region."

"More than 2,000 temperature records have been matched or broken in the past week as a brutal heat wave baked much of the United States, and June saw more than 3,200 records topped, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said Monday."

"LOS ANGELES - The future of the troubled San Onofre nuclear power plant could balance on an inescapable question: Is it worth the money to fix it?"

"TOKYO — The nuclear accident at Fukushima was a man-made disaster rooted in government-industry collusion and the worst conformist conventions of Japanese culture, a high-level parliamentary inquiry concluded on Thursday, in a report that also warned that the plant may not have stood up to earthquake damage — a worrying concern as the quake-prone country starts to bring its reactor fleet back online."

"To date in 2012, more than 173,000 acres have already burned in Colorado, destroying more than 600 homes and taken six lives, 7News reports. Now with 4th of July approaching, the heat combined with relative low humidity and unseasonable dryness has firefighters saying that fireworks are "not worth the risk" this year during the worst wildfire season in a decade."

"The US Air Force, which grounded the remaining seven of its eight C-130 air tankers after a crash in South Dakota on Sunday, has cleared the fleet to fly again today."