"WASHINGTON -- As costs and competition from cheap natural gas force more old nuclear plants to shut down, their owners have a new complaint: the electricity market is rigged against them."
"Six workers at Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant were exposed to a leak of highly radioactive water on Wednesday, the latest in a string of mishaps the country's nuclear watchdog has attributed to carelessness, saying they could have been avoided."
"FirstEnergy Corp said on Monday a small area of degradation found in the steel containment liner in one of the reactors at Pennsylvania's Beaver Valley nuclear power plant poses no harm to the public, workers or the environment."
"When senior scientist Walter Tamosaitis warned in 2011 about fundamental design flaws at the nation's largest facility to treat radioactive waste in Hanford, Wash., he was assigned to work in a basement room without office furniture or a telephone. On Wednesday, Tamosaitis, an employee of San Francisco-based URS Corp., was laid off from his job after 44 years with the company."
"A senior Democrat wants the Energy Department (DOE) to explain how it will address problems described in a new inspector general report that criticizes DOE’s oversight of a major nuclear waste treatment plant that’s under construction in Washington State."
"The operator of Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant said on Tuesday that four tonnes of rainwater contaminated with low levels of radiation leaked during an operation to transfer the water between tank holding areas."
"Fracking may be contaminating a Pennsylvania river with radioactive waste, a Duke University study to be published this week shows."
"In an episode that evokes B-grade sci-fi movie plots from the 1950s, but actually reflects a continuing global problem, nuclear engineers in southeastern Sweden have been wrestling with a giant swarm of jellyfish that forced the shutdown of the world’s largest boiling-water reactor."
"While the continuing environmental disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant has grabbed world headlines — with hundreds of tons of contaminated water flowing into the Pacific Ocean daily — a human crisis has been quietly unfolding. Two and a half years after the plant belched plumes of radioactive materials over northeast Japan, the almost 83,000 nuclear refugees evacuated from the worst-hit areas are still unable to go home."
"Federal judges [Wednesday] posed stiff questions to Department of Energy officials on why the agency continues to collect fees for disposing of nuclear waste even though it has no operating national repository."
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