A former engineer at one of Germany’s nuclear reactors has made an astonishing claim: that the plant intentionally pumped radioactive waste into the atmosphere in 1986.

Thousands of homeowners who lived downwind of the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant and the operators of the controversial facility have settled a lawsuit to the tune of $375 million, more than a quarter century after the legal action was first filed.

The settlement, which must be approved by a federal judge, brings to an end a 26-year legal saga that began when homeowners living east of Rocky Flats accused the plant's operators, Rockwell International Corp. and Dow Chemical Co., of devaluing their properties due to plutonium releases from the plant.

The lawsuit, which included as many as 15,000 homeowners in an area largely encompassing neighborhoods surrounding Standley Lake, was first filed in 1990.

In court papers filed Wednesday, the lawsuit was described as "quite possibly the largest docket of any District of Colorado case to date."

The U.S. government secretly allowed radiation from a damaged reactor to be released into air over the San Fernando and Simi valleys in the wake of a major nuclear meltdown in Southern California more than 50 years ago — fallout that nearby residents contend continues to cause serious health consequences and, in some cases, death.

An enormous "spike" in radiation which the EPA confirms leaked on May 5 from the Hanford Nuclear Waste Facility in Washington state has reached Chicago.

On May 5, the US Environmental Protection Agency confirmed an enormous "spike" in radiation was emitted from the Hanford Nuclear Waste Facility outside of Richland, WA. At least one underground tank holding lethal Plutonium waste has been found to be leaking and as crews undertake efforts to pump out the leaked material, open hatches release intense radiation into the air. The EPA released this chart from their national "RadNET" radiation monitoring system:

The US Environmental Protection Agency chalked elevated gamma radiation levels around America’s largest nuclear waste storage facility, the Hanford site, up to natural causes, but RT’s Alexey Yaroshevsky has found a few inconsistences in its claims.

State utility regulators on Monday reopened the agreement they approved in 2014 that assigned ratepayers the lion’s share of the multibillion-dollar cost for premature shutdown of the failed San Onofre nuclear power plant.

The action represents a significant turnaround for the California Public Utilities Commission, which stood behind the settlement agreement for 18 months amid growing criticism — even from parties to the $4.7 billion deal — that the process and the outcome were stacked against the public and for utility companies.

A group of former fishermen Monday filed an unprecedented lawsuit seeking compensation from the government for failing to disclose, for decades, records of their exposure to radiation from U.S. hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific Ocean in 1954.

Planned air transports of high-enriched uranium from Dounreay in Scotland to the US state of Tennessee would risk of accident or a terrorist seizure of weapon-usable nuclear material, writes Ernie Galsworthy. The motive for the transport appears to be purely commercial - and would thus put the public at needless risk for the sake of a cut-price nuclear waste / fuel deal between US and UK authorities.

France's ailing nuclear giant, Areva, faced a major scandal on Tuesday after the country’s nuclear watchdog confirmed there have been “irregularities” in 400 parts produced in its reactors since 1965, and that “around 50 are currently in service in France’s nuclear power plant fleet”.

A nuclear power plant in Germany has been found to be infected with computer viruses, but they appear not to have posed a threat to the facility's operations because it is isolated from the Internet, the station's operator said on Tuesday.

Cancer-struck workers at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in California have been denied state compensation in order to keep the danger posed by the nuclear site to nearby residential areas out of the public eye, a former employee told RT.

Tellurium-132’s is a major short-lived FISSION PRODUCT, with a half-life of only 3.2 days, making it a tell-tale sign of a leaking ACTIVE reactor.

Twenty workers at the The Hanford Site nuclear facility in Washington state were sent for medical evaluations after inhaling chemical vapors in the vicinity of a leaking nuclear waste tank which was being transferred, according to US Energy Department officials.

Hanford tank workers were performing routine tasks at the vast nuclear waste site when they all started complaining of headaches on Thursday before being sent for medical evaluations, according to local news station KING.

There is a dangerous radiological threat to the West Coast of the United States that puts the health of millions of Americans at risk. It includes dangers to public health, dangers to the food supply, and dangers to future generations from long-lived radionuclides, including some of the most toxic material in the world. It is not Fukushima, it is Hanford. While radiation from the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns is reaching the West Coast, carried across the ocean from Japan, the radiation from Hanford is already there, has been there for 70 years, and is in serious risk of catastrophe that could dwarf the effects of Fukushima even on Japan.

Officials for the Hanford Nuclear Reservation are trying to determine if a second giant underground tank containing radioactive waste from the production of plutonium for nuclear weapons is leaking, the U.S. Department of Energy revealed on Tuesday. Air monitors attached to an aging tank known as AY-101 recently found radiation at higher than normal background levels, the agency said. A video inspection of the underground tank found no evidence that radioactive waste had leaked from the primary tank into the space between the two walls, Hanford officials said. A Hanford watchdog group on Tuesday contended the higher radiation found by the air monitors was evidence of a leak in a second tank.

Remember when "someone" used the Stuxnet virus, or rather worm, in an Iranian nuclear plant several years ago to freeze Iranian nuclear production, leading to a major diplomatic scandal involving the spy agencies of both the US and Israel, as the world learned that in the present day industrial sabotage only needed a flash drive and a computer virus to render even the most sophisticated piece of industrial machinery obsolete? Well, moments ago, Bloomberg reported that a computer virus was discovered in a German nuclear power plant.

Of course, the question of choosing a supplier for power plants, even nuclear, can be attributed to normal commercial relations and competition between companies. However, not everything is so unambiguous. Experts immediately warned that the fuel produced at Westinghouse is not suitable for the reactors in Ukrainian nuclear power plants, which were designed with a focus on the use of rods produced in Russia.

China is pushing ahead with its construction of a first-ever floating nuclear power platform, which is expected to add to Beijing's ever-increasing clout in the South China Sea, according to the Chinese newspaper Global Times.

Japan was plunged into fresh panic today as a 6.1 magnitude tremor hit the northern coast - the third major earthquake within a week.

The tremors struck near the northern island on Honshu around 60 miles southeast on Sendai.

To the dismay of rattled survivors, the latest quake happened close to the site of the Fukushima nuclear disaster - which saw 15,000 killed in March 2011.

Buchanan, New York is a town in the United States where tens of thousands of people have been diagnosed with Thyroid Cancer, and it sits just 35 miles from New York City. Also nearby is the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant, which is situated on the Hudson River and serves the electricity needs of approximately 2 million people, with two working reactors which have operated since the mid 1970s.

For years, the public has been told that nuclear power is a safe and clean alternative to other fuels, but the people of Indian Point and surrounding areas know those claims are untrue, and it appears they are now paying the price of all the failed promises of nuclear energy.

Thyroid Cancer rates, in and around this area, have seen a huge spike in the last 15 years. Some say as many as 20,000 thyroid cancer cases.

Germany has asked Belgium to take two of its nuclear reactors offline, citing safety concerns. The environment minister said doing so would show that Brussels “takes the concerns of its German neighbors seriously.”

Barbara Hendricks urged Belgium on Wednesday to take its Tihange 2 and Doel 3 reactors offline “until open safety questions are cleared up.” German officials have expressed concerns over the safety of the reactor pressure vessels.

The ongoing radioactive leak problems at the Hanford Site, a nuclear storage tank in Washington State, are nothing new.

We first wrote about the ongoing radioative leakage at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, created as part of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, in 2013.

Georgia has arrested six people on charges of trying to sell $200 million worth of radioactive substance uranium-238, the country’s security service says.

“Officers of Georgia's State Security Service detained three citizens of Armenia and three citizens of Georgia… for planning to sell the nuclear material,” said security service investigator Savle Motiashvili in a news briefing on Monday.

The prefabricated transportation containers full of uranium were found in one of the detainee's apartment, he further said without disclosing the precise amount of the radioactive material.

A leak in a massive nuclear waste storage tank at the Hanford Site has expanded significantly, KING 5 learned this weekend.

After leak detector alarms sounded early Sunday morning, crews at Hanford lowered a camera into the two-foot-wide space between the tank's inner and outer walls. They discovered 8.4 inches of radioactive and chemically toxic waste has seeped into the annulus.

The U.S. Department of Energy released a statement Monday calling the leak an "anticipated" outcome of an ongoing effort to empty the tank in question. The Washington state Department of Ecology said, "There is no indication of waste leaking into the environment or risk to the public at this time."

But one former tank farm worker said the leak should be considered a major problem.

The Japanese government says there won’t be any catastrophic damage, this time, at its nuclear facilities following Thursday night’s devastating earthquake and subsequent aftershocks.

Nine people are confirmed dead and more than 1,000 others injured after a 6.5-magnitude quake hit east of the city of Kumamoto.

The disaster revived terrifying memories of the Fukushima disaster, when a 15-meter post-quake tsunami caused a nuclear meltdown that polluted a sizeable portion of the country for decades.

Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga confirmed that there were no abnormalities at any nuclear facilities in the area, the Japan Times reported.

An incident at the Fessenheim nuclear facility in France in 2014 was more serious than previously known. German media reports claim the authorities withheld information detailing the gravity of the situation.

To dump or not to dump a little-discussed substance is the question brewing in Japan as it grapples with the aftermath of the nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima five years ago. The substance is tritium.

The radioactive material is nearly impossible to remove from the huge quantities of water used to cool melted-down reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, which was wrecked by the massive tsunami in northeastern Japan in March 2011.

The water is still accumulating since 300 tons are needed every day to keep the reactors chilled. Some is leaking into the ocean.

A radioactive release and emergency shutdown of unit 6 occurred at the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant. Management of the State Emergency Service requested people not to panic, but to calmly take preventive measures:

"For preventive measures State Emergency Service experts recommend to refrain from a prolonged stay in an open area within three days, to use a medical mask, use a weak solution of iodine in cold water and red wine".

US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Apr 8, 2016: BROWNS FERRY [Alabama]… Event Date: 04/06/2016… Emergency Class: UNUSUAL EVENT… EMERGENCY DECLARED… OFFSITE NOTIFICATION… UNUSUAL EVENT DECLARED DUE TO MAIN STEAMLINE HIGH HIGH RADIATION CONDITION…

Crew members in their mid-20?s from the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan are coming down with all sorts of radiation-related illnesses after being deployed less than 3 years ago to assist with earthquake rescue operations off the coast of Japan in 2011. It looks as though the onboard desalinization systems that take salt out of seawater to make it drinkable, were taking-in radioactive water from the ocean for the crew to drink, cook with and bath-in, before anyone realized there was a massive radiation spill into the ocean.

The above video talks about the first two weeks after the Fukushima nuclear meltdown. It discusses and provides examples about how many of the rich upper class left Tokyo, and most if not all of the ambassadors from foreign nations moved out, right after the Fukushima meltdown.

Fukushima And Tokyo Residents Report Various Radiation Caused Illnesses, Japanese Government Covering Up Health Data, Doctors Forced Out Of Business If They Mention Radiation

It also quotes a nuclear expert saying that she would advise people to not only leave Tokyo, but to leave Japan entirely if they had the financial means to do so. She said that she would leave, if she could afford to do so.

Northern Japan is raising an alarm, as the area surrounding the Fukushima Nuclear disaster zone has been overwhelmed by radioactive wild boars, whose population has increased dramatically over the past 4 years, as they breed freely in the exclusion zone.

With the number of animals steadily growing, the boar population has been devastating the crops of farms in the area. Since the nuclear disaster of 2011, damage to agriculture caused by boars in the Fukushima prefecture has doubled, amounting to some $15 million, according to a report from The Times. Boars also pose a threat to public safety, as reports of rampaging wild beast injuring local residents while roaming the streets have become more frequent over the past few years.

Humanity has been experimenting with nuclear power for decades, so it’s no surprise that a few accidents have occurred along the way. Actually, there’ve been more than a few. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukushima are hardly the only times that people, power plants, or neighborhoods have been irradiated.

As the Fukushima tragedy struck, President Obama assured Americans that U.S. nuclear plants were closely monitored and built to withstand earthquakes. That statement covered one of the oldest plants in the country, the Indian Point Energy Center (IPEC) in Westchester, New York, first opened in 1962. One of 61 commercial nuclear plants in the country, it has two reactors that generate electricity for homes across New York City and Westchester County. It is located in the sixth most densely populated urban area in the world, the New York metropolitan region, just 30 miles north of Manhattan Island and the planet’s most economically powerful city.

Concentrations of radioactive cesium from the Fukushima nuclear disaster in wild game animals in nine eastern Japanese prefectures have been dropping, but remain higher than the government-mandated limit for shipment to market in many areas