Nuclear Power & Radiation

"A competition between nuclear waste dumps has pulled the Nuclear Regulatory Commission into an unusual reconsideration of its rules to allow moderately radioactive materials to be diluted into a milder category that is easier to bury."

"The owners of a closed uranium mine near Golden have been ordered by the state health department to stop discharging polluted water into a creek that flows into a Denver-area reservoir."

"A nuclear reactor where a hidden leak caused near-catastrophic corrosion in 2002 has experienced a second bout of the same problem."

"Three months after the U.S. cancelled a plan to build a vast nuclear-waste repository in Nevada, the country's ad hoc atomic-storage policy is becoming clear in places like Wiscasset, Maine."

"For 11 years, the federal government has been burying nuclear waste in New Mexican salt beds at a place called WIPP, or the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. It's waste from making atomic weapons. But now the government is looking for a place to put thousands of tons of spent fuel from reactors. These salt beds could be the place."

"A commission run jointly by Texas and Vermont, with a membership made up mostly of Gov. Rick Perry's appointees, could decide this summer to make Texas the potential resting place for radioactive waste from 36 states."

"Japan's Atomic Energy Agency says it has restarted a controversial nuclear reactor, more than 14 years after its operations were suspended."

The $2 billion in federal stimulus money was welcomed in southeastern Washington, where the government has been working for decades to clean up the Hanford nuclear complex. But newly hired workers on the project may be facing dangers because of inadequate training and precautions for the threat of deadly beryllium dust.

"Twenty concrete vaults sit side-by-side, like self-storage containers, next to the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant. These concrete tombs hold fuel cells, each containing 12-foot rods of enriched uranium. The rods are toxic and radioactive and were never intended to be stored here indefinitely, among Ocean County's 560,000 residents."