Disasters

"Japan has raised its assessment of the accident at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to the worst rating on an international scale, putting the disaster on par with the 1986 Chernobyl explosion, the Japanese nuclear regulatory agency said on Tuesday."

"Japan's unfolding reactor crisis is fueling a battle over nuclear power across the Pacific, in earthquake-prone California."

"An internal review of the Coast Guard’s performance during the BP oil spill cleanup last year has concluded that the agency was caught badly unprepared and that the response operation was dogged from the beginning by significant planning failures."

Japan on Monday expanded the evacuation zone around its crippled nuclear plant because of high levels of accumulated radiation, as a strong aftershock rattled the area one month after a quake and tsunami sparked the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl."

"A lot of dead dolphins continue to wash ashore along the Gulf Coast and now a lot of sea turtles — most of them rare Kemp's ridleys — are washing up dead too, federal officials said Thursday."

"More than 900,000 households remained without electricity on Friday after the strongest aftershock to hit since the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan rocked a wide section of the country’s northeast."

"U.S. officials say the nation’s health system is ill-prepared to cope with a catastrophic release of radiation, despite years of focus on the possibility of a terrorist 'dirty bomb' or an improvised nuclear device attack."

"The 2011 Atlantic hurricane season will be above average in activity and there is a more than 70 percent chance of at least one major hurricane hitting the U.S. coastline, Colorado State University forecasters predicted on Wednesday."

The Japanese nuclear disaster is a reminder that the storage of spent fuel in temporary facilities across the United States may be a disaster waiting to happen.