Panic over oil disaster will do far more harm than the spill itself

If you're searching for yet another reason to hate BP and distrust Washington, here it is. No, I'm not talking about the dead birds, befouled beaches or zillions of dollars in damage inflicted on millions of Americans by the incompetents at BP (enabled by clueless federal regulators). Rather, I'm talking about the way our nation will overreact to the Deepwater Horizon disaster. That overreaction will cause us far greater damage than the disaster itself, because we'll import more oil than we otherwise would and produce less of our own...
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Roadmap shows the way for nuclear future

Nuclear power could become the world's single biggest source of electricity, said a roadmap revealed today by intergovernmental agencies. Industry says the projections are not ambitious enough...
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Georgia Power accepts Vogtle loan guarantee

Southern Company subsidiary Georgia Power has formally agreed to accept a conditional federal loan guarantee for the construction of two new nuclear units at its Vogtle site....
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Russian Lawmakers Rule Out Prompt START Ratification

The lower house of Russia's parliament is not expected to take up ratification of a new nuclear arms control treaty with the United States until later this year at the earliest, ITAR-Tass reported today...
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US wants China to clarify Pakistan atomic reactor deal

The United States said Tuesday it had sought clarification from China on the sale of two civilian nuclear reactors to Pakistan, saying the deal must be approved by the Nuclear Suppliers Group...
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U.S. Official Backs Mix-and-Match Approach for Updating Warheads

A senior U.S. defense official last week voiced confidence in a newly defined "reuse" approach to modernizing nuclear warheads that some scientists have called into doubt...
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Iran to Construct Additional Medical Reactors

Iran today announced plans to design and construct multiple next-generation nuclear reactors capable of generating isotopes for medical use, Agence France-Presse reported ...
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Unity Could be Elusive For Future U.N. Proliferation Sanctions

A fourth round of sanctions aimed at curtailing Iran’s nuclear development passed the U.N. Security Council last week, but U.S. lawmakers and experts said the fight to secure support for the vote illustrated the difficulty of cracking down on suspected proliferation...
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Build Safety Culture Before Plants!

Vietnam must start now to implement safety measures including public oversight for its first nuclear power plant, which is scheduled to begin operations in 10 years, experts said Thursday.The energy-hungry communist country is making preparations to start construction in 2014 of its first atomic power facility. Initial plans call for four reactors, with a total capacity of 4,000 megawatts, at least one of which should be operational from 2020...
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Nuclear Energy Industry Continued To Set Safety Standard

The nation’s nuclear power plants in 2009 had one of the safest industrial working environments and fell just shy of setting a record for reactor efficiency—two factors that further bolster the role of nuclear energy as the nation’s most reliable electricity source. These and other annual performance indicators are compiled by the World Association of Nuclear Operators (WANO), which measures several aspects of nuclear power plant operations...
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Gulf spill a reminder of the value of redundant safety systems

Airliners can lose one engine and keep flying. Nuclear power plants have two cooling systems, in case one fails. In an explosion, coal mines must allow miners two paths to escape...
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Washington objects to China-Pakistan nuclear deal

The Obama administration has decided to object to a lucrative deal in which a state-owned Chinese companies would supply Pakistan with two nuclear reactors, U.S. officials said...
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Exclusive: Bill Gates-backed nuclear startup raises $35 million

TerraPower, a nuclear energy startup backed by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, has raised $35 million in a new round of funding to aid the development of a reactor fueled by nuclear waste...
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Nuclear wasteland

AFTER MORE than 20 years, four administrations and billions of dollars spent, Yucca Mountain is the one place in America that a new Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future cannot look to put this country's nuclear waste. Created by the Obama administration after it jettisoned the Nevada project, the commission, which will meet for the third time in July, is to make its recommendations two years from now -- rendering any action unlikely until after the 2012 elections...
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U.S. Lab Reveals Nuclear Response Capabilities

A laboratory at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada last month hosted visitors China, Russia and more than 20 other nations as part of a U.S. effort to establish a shared international capability for dealing with a nuclear or radiological incident, the Associated Press reported...
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U.N. Security Council Adopts Additional Iran Penalties

The U.N. Security Council today adopted a fourth sanctions resolution against Iran, prompting the nation to announce its withdrawal from talks on its nuclear activities that could support weapons development, the Wall Street Journal reported...
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LANL helps create ‘virtual’ nuclear reactor

Los Alamos National Laboratory is participating in a five-year, $122 million project to create a virtual nuclear reactor that could lead to a new generation of safer, longer-lasting and less-expensive nuclear power plants...
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N.Y. Senator Sees Energy Bill as Promoting Nuclear Power

A Senate proposal setting up a cap-and-trade program to curtail greenhouse gas emissions likely will be offered on the floor later this summer as an amendment to a smaller, energy-only approach, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said today...
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Steps to bolster isotope production

While Petten in the Netherlands was recently announced as the site for a new research reactor for the production radioisotopes, the Canadian government has called for project proposals to produce medical isotopes without using reactor-based technology...
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NPT review concludes in New York

The month-long conference on the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has ended by confirming the treaty's importance to the use of nuclear energy and placing pressure on Israel and North Korea....
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Contract for Texan ABWR pressure vessel

Japanese engineering company IHI Corporation has been awarded a contract by Toshiba to produce the reactor pressure vessel for the first Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR) to be built in the USA....
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Cornyn to Kerry: Try hitting some singles instead of home-run energy legislation

A Republican senator on Sunday said he would work with Democrats on limited energy proposals but warned against a comprehensive energy and climate bill that congressional leaders want to push this summer...
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Americans are exposed to increased levels of radiation

The average American receives 620 millirems of background radiation every year, as opposed to the 360 millirems as is often stated in the press. The number has crept up in the last two decades, from 180 millirems to 300 millirems, then to 360 millirems and most recently, in 2006, to 620 millirems...
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Nuclear power group contributes to energy-assistance fund

Nuclear Innovation North America LLC has donated $2.5 million to the Residential Energy Assistance Partnership to help low-income, elderly or disabled residents pay their utility bills.Nuclear Innovation North America (NINA) is the nuclear development company jointly owned by NRG Energy Inc. (NYSE: NRG) and Toshiba Corp. The company is making the donation as part of its Feb. 17 $1 billion settlement with CPS Energy — which cleared the path for the development of two new reactors at the South Texas Project in Bay City, Texas...
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Atomic Waste Gets 'Temporary' Home

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. Wiscasset doesn't even have a nuclear-energy plant anymore. The Maine Yankee facility was shuttered back in 1996 after developing problems too costly to fix, and the reactor was dismantled early this decade. What's left is a bare field of 167 acres cleared and ready for development—except for one thing...
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Hitachi reviews nuclear power partnership with GE

Japan's largest electronics maker, said on Tuesday that it is reviewing the structure of its nuclear power partnership with General Electric Co (GE.N), as it seeks to win more deals globally. A Hitachi spokesman did not rule out the possibility of Hitachi and GE changing their investments in their joint ventures as part of an overhaul of Hitachi's global sales network, but said nothing concrete had been discussed or decided...
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Terrorists in Former Soviet States Pursuing Nuke Materials, Official Says

Extremists operating out of former Soviet states are seeking to acquire nuclear or other WMD materials to use in terrorist attacks, the head of Russia's security service said today...
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Iran Holds More Than 12 Pounds of Refined Uranium, IAEA Says

Iran's fissile material stockpile in early April included no less than 12.5 pounds of uranium enriched to the 20 percent level, the International Atomic Energy Agency said in a report issued this week on the Middle Eastern nation's nuclear program...
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Programmers Create Nuke Simulator Debugging Tool

Specialists at Purdue University in Indiana and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have developed a computer program for automatically tracking down bugs in supercomputer codes used to evaluate the reliability of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, the university announced yesterday...
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