A new, shocking report by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Engineering and Public Policy (EPP), Harvard University, and the University of California San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy discovered that the US nuclear power industry could be on the verge of a collapse — a reality that many have yet to realize.

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), “US nuclear power: The vanishing low-carbon wedge” examined 99 nuclear power reactors in 30 states, operated by 30 different power companies. As of 2017, there are two new reactors under construction, but 34 reactors have been permanently shut down as many plants reach the end of their lifespan.

People who live near the Tihange nuclear power plant in Belgium’s Wallonia region have serious concerns about the safety of the station which has experienced several shutdowns in recent years.

The station’s operator, Engie-Electrabe, found “instability” in the reinforced concrete ceiling of the reactor’s armored bunker during a planned check that started on March 30, the newspaper Soir reported on Thursday.

According to the newspaper, company specialists also determined that the “anomalies” in the reinforced concrete had been there since the time the bunker was built.

TEPCO is conducting an independent geological survey to confirm the absence of active faults in Aomori Prefecture, where it wants to resume the construction of a Fukushima-type nuclear plant, frozen following the 2011 disaster.
“It’s necessary to form a consortium for building a nuclear plant that is excellent in safety, technology and economy,” TEPCO President Tomoaki Kobayakawa said in Tokyo, announcing the decision to conduct a survey of the Aomori Prefecture nuclear site.

READ MORE: Fukushima operator turned down tsunami simulation plan 9yrs before disaster

The Higashidori Nuclear Power Plant hosts two adjoining sites administered by Tohoku Electric Power Company and Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO). While Tohoku Unit 1 began commercial operations in December 2005, TEPCO never got a chance to finish their unit, the construction of which began only in January 2011. All activity at the site has ceased since the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdown.

In the early stages of research, before Dimona existed, there were accidents that exposed scientists to lethal levels of radiation. Some of them died and their names are known (though not well). Less known is that Dimona had a series of accidents - the most serious in 1966 - that exposed hundreds of its workers to similarly lethal doses.

Avner Cohen, the world’s leading scholar of the Israeli nuclear programme, told me that in the first 20-25 years the processes used to protect workers were primitive and sloppy. Mistakes were common, often not intentionally, but because relatively little was known about the proper handling of radioactive materials. In some cases, documentation was fabricated.

Beneath the elegant curves of the roof on the Seirinji Buddhist temple in Japan's Fukushima region hangs an unlikely adornment: a Geiger counter collecting real-time radiation readings.

The machine is sending data to Safecast, an NGO born after the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster that says it has now built the world's largest radiation dataset, thanks to the efforts of citizen scientists like Seirinji's priest Sadamaru Okano.

Like many Japanese, Okano lost faith in the government after the nuclear meltdown seven years ago.

"The government didn't tell us the truth, they didn't tell us the true measures," he told AFP, seated inside the 150-year-old temple.

A major wildfire is sweeping through the Chernobyl nuclear disaster area. The authorities have deployed dozens of fire trucks as firefighting aircraft bombard the radioactive exclusion zone with massive amounts of water.

The fire inside the Chernobyl 'dead zone,' which is now part of Ukraine, started on Tuesday morning, when dry grass was ignited, local emergency services said in a statement. The wildfire subsequently reached a forest, where up to 10 hectares (24 acres) are now in flames.

Some 29 vehicles and 126 personnel have been dispatched at the scene, with several planes and helicopters dropping water from the sky on the area engulfed by wildfire.

The zone saw another large blaze last year, which scorched 25 hectares (60 acres) of land.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company is running out of container space to store water contaminated by tritium outside the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, and it's also running out of room for building more tanks, according to Yomiuri Shimbum, a Japanese newspaper, which is creating an intractable problem for the utility, which has been tasked with supervising the cleanup of Fukushima.

The Japanese government has been desperately trying to accelerate the cleanup ahead of the upcoming 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo - and it's a miracle it hasn't run into this issue sooner. TEPCO is still struggling with how to dispose of the tritium-tainted water. Options discussed have included dumping it into the ocean, but that proposal has angered local fishing communities.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company is running out of container space to store water contaminated by tritium outside the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, and it's also running out of room for building more tanks, according to Yomiuri Shimbum , a Japanese newspaper, which is creating an intractable problem for the utility, which has been tasked with supervising the cleanup of Fukushima.

The Japanese government has been desperately trying to accelerate the cleanup ahead of the upcoming 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo - and it's a miracle it hasn't run into this issue sooner. TEPCO is still struggling with how to dispose of the tritium-tainted water. Options discussed have included dumping it into the ocean, but that proposal has angered local fishing communities.

A reactor at EDF Energy’s (EDF.PA) Hunterston B nuclear power plant in Scotland will remain offline for additional safety checks after cracks were found in its core, Britain’s Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) said.

Ageing reactors generate just over 20 percent of Britain’s power but almost half of this capacity, including Hunterston, is due to go offline by 2025, prompting the government to plan new plants.

The Republic of Serbia appears to be making moves that would ultimately open the door to holding NATO responsible for the significant spike in cancer illnesses and deaths which followed NATO’s bombing of Serbia with depleted uranium shells.

President of the Serbian Parliament Maja Gojkovic drafted a resolution in parliament that would establish a commission charged with investigating the impact of the NATO bombing in 1999 on the health of citizens and the environment, with particular emphasis on the effects caused by the use of depleted uranium shells.

Previously, the Italian parliament, recognized that NATO’s use of these nuclear waste tainted weapons were the primary cause of illness and death for Italian NATO soldiers in the occupied southern Serbian region of Kosovo. Serbian officials are in an active conversation with the Italians, whose findings may better inform any Serbian investigation.

A small amount of radioactive, weapons-grade plutonium has gone missing from a university in Idaho.

Idaho State University was using the radioactive chemical element, which was about the size of a 10p piece, for research.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission said the university could not account for about a 30th of an ounce (one gram) of the material, which is used in nuclear reactors and to make nuclear bombs.

One of the nuclear reactors at the Hunterston B nuclear power plant in Scotland could remain offline until the end of the year, after fresh cracks expanding at a higher rate were discovered in the graphite blocks forming its core.

Reactor 3 at the aging Hunterston B nuclear power station on the West coast of Scotland was initially taken offline on March 9 for a routine inspection, during which the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) found new “keyway root cracks” in the reactor core. On Wednesday, operator EDF Energy announced that the reactor could remain offline for months until the problem is fixed.

“The inspections confirmed the expected presence of new keyway root cracks in the reactor core and also identified these happening at a slightly higher rate than modeled,” EDF Energy said. “While Hunterston B Reactor 3 could return to operation from the current outage, it will remain offline” until the company addresses safety concerns.

The radiation dispersed into the environment by the three reactor meltdowns at Fukushima-Daiichi in Japan has exceeded that of the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe, so we may stop calling it the “second worst” nuclear power disaster in history. Total atmospheric releases from Fukushima are estimated to be between 5.6 and 8.1 times that of Chernobyl, according to the 2013 World Nuclear Industry Status Report. Professor Komei Hosokawa, who wrote the report’s Fukushima section, told London’s Channel 4 News then, “Almost every day new things happen, and there is no sign that they will control the situation in the next few months or years.”

Tokyo Electric Power Co. has estimated that about 900 peta-becquerels have spewed from Fukushima, and the updated 2016 TORCH Report estimates that Chernobyl dispersed 110 peta-becquerels. [1] (A Becquerel is one atomic disintegration per second. The “peta-becquerel” is a quadrillion, or a thousand trillion Becquerels.)

The country’s Environment Ministry wants to use the radiation-tainted material to rebuild a number of roads in the region that was devastated by a tsunami in 2011.

But the proposal has sparked fury among residents over fears they could be poisoned by the soil.

A briefing about the plans on Thursday saw angry scenes erupt, with locals in the city of Nihonmatsu yelling about how the roads will be “contaminated”.

Authorities have been desperately trying to convince people that it will be safe, saying the soil will be buried under clean earth that will “block” any harmful radiation.

Due to an increased level of radiation in the given block, maintenance works in the reactor have been most recently handicapped, but the maintenance company says there is no need to worry.

The reactor cooling system at the Doel nuclear power station has suffered a leak, although no danger is posed to the personnel or to the environment, the operating company Engie-Electrabel reported Saturday.

"A minor water efflux has been spotted in a reserve pipe line of the cooling system. The efflux is rather small, we are still well below the mark which would cause an automatic switch-off of the reactor. It does not affect security," the company’s representative noted.

Two groups of Chinese researchers have reportedly confirmed a risk from radioactive exposure to their countrymen after a North Korean nuclear test site appeared to have partially collapsed.

North Korea's Mount Mantap has contained every known nuclear test in the country: the Punggye-ri nuclear test site sits under it in a network of tunnels. After a thermonuclear device was tested in early September 2017, seismic activity at the mountain was recorded in the form of a 6.3-magnitude earthquake, according to the US Geological Survey's findings, while the China Earthquake Networks Center detected a 3.4 magnitude follow-up quake.

Almost immediately, it was reported that the mountain had experienced a tunnel collapse, although with some uncertainty. Now, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reports that Chinese researchers have confirmed that the mountain collapsed on itself.

The United States is struggling to handle the excessive amounts of plutonium generated at the cores of its many retired nuclear reactors, according to a new report, raising fears that it might end up in the wrong hands.

Today, there are some 54 metric tons of surplus plutonium stored in nuclear facilities the US Department of Energy operates around the country, according to Reuters.

In Pantex, a plant located near Amarillo, Texas, the surplus plutonium has long exceeded the 20,000 cores, also known as “pits,” that regulations allow such facilities to store in their temporary storage facility.

That means a mishap in the process, which is mostly done manually by contract workers, can trigger massive nuclear explosions.

While in the past the US simply used the leftover plutonium to produce more nuclear munitions, it is now obliged under a 2010 treaty with Russia to keep its arsenal under 1,550 warheads.

Faced with the post-3.11 reality of government (and corporate) policy that protects economic and security interests over public health and well-being, the majority of the 2 million inhabitants of Fukushima Prefecture are either unconscious of or have been encouraged to accept living with radioactive contamination…

A leaked report has raised new fears that Mururoa Atoll, the site of French nuclear testing in the Pacific, is in danger of collapsing. The French government, since 2010, has kept secret that Mururoa Atoll, the site of French nuclear testing in the Pacific, is in danger of collapsing, according to Mururoa e Tatou (MET), the Nuclear Association in French Polynesia.

The Nuclear Association’s president, Roland Oldham, told Radio Australia’s Pacific Beat program that radioactive material could be released into the Pacific Ocean if the atoll were to collapse. (Listen to the report here.) French nuclear safety official, Marcel Jurien de la Graviere, suggested that people on nearby Tureia Atoll could be exposed to radiation 300 times the level in France. If the atoll collapses there could be international ramifications.

Seven decades after making key portions of the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, workers at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation are being exposed to radiation as they tear down buildings that helped create the nation's nuclear arsenal.

Dozens of workers demolishing a plutonium processing plant from the 1940s have inhaled or ingested radioactive particles in the past year, and even carried some of that radiation into their vehicles, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

The incidents have prompted the federal government, along with state regulators, to halt the demolition of the sprawling Plutonium Finishing Plant until a safety plan can be developed.

The contamination has also shaken confidence in a massive cleanup of Hanford, the nation's most polluted nuclear weapons production site.

The US mining industry has asked the supreme court to overturn an Obama-era rule prohibiting the mining of uranium on public lands adjacent to the Grand Canyon.

The National Mining Association (NMA) and the American Exploration and Mining Association (AEMA) filed petitions on Friday asking the court to reverse the 2012 ban on new uranium mining claims on more than 1 million acres of public land surrounding Grand Canyon national park.

In December, the ninth circuit court of appeals upheld the ban after a legal challenge by the industry, to the relief of environmental groups and Native American tribes in northern Arizona.

Nuclear power is often billed as clean base-load electrical energy. However, few if any nuclear power proponents mention the unintended consequences or the externalized costs associated with this technology to support the unsustainable U.S. lifestyle. A crucial part of this story is told by Native Americans.

I have included three shocking, detailed articles outlining these unintended consequences impacting the Native Americans in South Dakota and neighboring states -- in particular the Cheyenne River radiation poisoning from nearby uranium mining impacting the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.

This remarkable video shows Yoichi on a bicycle sneaking into the Fukushima radiation danger zone, risking his life to investigate the hidden nuclear weapons plant in the destroyed Fukushima NPP. He produced this video as solid proof that there was MUCH more underway at Fukushima than just generating electricity.

As we learned early on, much of the nuclear releases from Fukushima was being transported eastward by the North Pacific current and the northern jetstream, much of that abetted by years of official tolerance of unchecked venting and wastewater releases. The groundwater outflows were and still are being enabled by the media myth of an “ice wall”, an expensive boondoggle that provided cover for the release of reactor coolant from the Fukushima storage tank farm. The so-called isotope-filtration equipment from AREVA and Kurion of Hanford were ineffective. For all the numbers games played by the “experts”, tossing out round-ball estimates, there’s been no containment of nuclear contamination in Japan, which soon proved itself again to be an eager exporter, this time of radioactive steel, used cars, motorbikes and bicycles.

American sailors on the USS Ronald Reagan were exposed to radiation from Fukushima. Many are sick. Some have died. Why can’t they get justice?

Free distribution of iodine tablets has started in Belgium as a precautionary measure in the event of a nuclear catastrophe, the Belgian Pharmaceutical Association told Sputnik on Tuesday.

Starting from Tuesday, every Belgian citizen can come to a pharmacy and get free iodine pills, the association said. This move is part of the government's nuclear safety policy.

Before March 6, only those living within 20 kilometers (12 miles) from nuclear sites were entitled to receive the medication free of charge, while now the area of distribution has been increased to 100 kilometers (62 miles).

Radiation levels at houses and nearby areas in a Fukushima village remain around three times higher than the target set by the government despite cleanup work following the 2011 nuclear crisis, an environmental group said Thursday.

In some areas among tens of thousands points where Greenpeace Japan conducted surveys in the village of Iitate and town of Namie last September and October, the levels of radioactivity were higher than the previous survey in 2016, the group said.

WHERE IS THE RADIOACTIVE CESIUM COMING FROM THAT IS BEING FOUND IN US PATIENTS?

Nuclear Expert: Largest amount of Fukushima radiation fell on US West Coast and Pacific — “Why don’t we hear complaints from US?”… Officials are criminals and trying to cover it up — Public must be aware even more radiation is coming… “People need to realize impact of contamination on them”
http://enenews.com/nuclear-expert-largest-amount-fukushima-radiation-f...

Where is the radioactive cesium contamination coming from that is being found in US patients? Here is a clue!

In 1942, the U.S. government chose downtown St. Louis as a processing center of uranium for the first atomic bombs. Over the next 25 years, the radioactive waste from this processing center was moved to sites throughout the city’s northern and western suburbs and eventually dumped into the West Lake Landfill in North St. Louis County. But until recently, many residents living near the landfill were unaware the waste had become a ticking time bomb.

Directed by Rebecca Cammisa (the Oscar-nominated HBO documentaries God Is the Bigger Elvis and Which Way Home), the documentary Atomic Homefront exposes the lasting toxic effects nuclear waste can have on communities.

Lethal levels of radiation have been observed inside Japan’s damaged Fukushima nuclear power plant. And they are arguably way higher than you suspect.

An inspection of the Fukushima nuclear plant has detected extremely high amounts of radiation, says operator TEPCO. Just an hour of exposure would be lethal.

A remote-controlled inspection detected 42 Sieverts (Sv) per hour of radiation outside the foundations of the crippled Unit 2 of the plant, according to a newly-released report. And that’s a lot, as just one Sv is enough to cause acute radiation syndrome.

Sieverts are used to measure radiation in terms of its potential harm and the cancer risk begins already at the doses of radiation as low as in between 50-100 mSv, the World Health Organization says.

The operator of the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has released the results of its latest probe of the site.

A remote-controlled inspection of the Unit 2 reactor containment vessel last month detected a maximum of 8 sieverts per hour of radiation.

Experts say exposure to such radiation for about an hour would be fatal.

Officials from Tokyo Electric Power Company, or TEPCO, released the results on Thursday.

They said the radiation reading was taken near what appeared to be fuel debris, the term used to describe a mixture of molten fuel and broken interior parts.

The finding shows that nearly 7 years after the meltdowns, radiation levels remain so high that they present a major challenge to decommissioning work.

A sprawling middle-class neighborhood is rising on the site of a former nuclear testing facility in San Francisco. But its future is uncertain amid new allegations of a botched cleanup.

The US Navy has learned that Tetra Tech, a government contractor tasked with the cleanup of radioactive contamination at the retired San Francisco Naval Shipyard, faked more soil tests than previously thought, in order to expedite the city's largest redevelopment project. Workers swapped samples from areas known to be highly contaminated with dirt from clean areas.

According to investigations by Curbed SF and NBC Bay Area, almost half of the toxic waste-site cleanup was "suspect" or has "evidence of potential data manipulation or falsification."

These findings could cause the project to be delayed many years. The Navy is expected to release the results of its investigation into Tetra Tech in a public meeting on January 31.

It’s been six years since the triple 100% nuke meltdowns occurred at Fukushima Daiichi d/d March 11th, 2011, nowadays referred to as “311”. Over time, it’s easy for the world at large to lose track of the serious implications of the world’s largest-ever industrial disaster; out of sight out of mind works that way.

According to Japanese government and TEPCO (Tokyo Electric Power Company) estimates, decommissioning is a decade-by-decade work-in-progress, most likely four decades at a cost of up to ¥21 trillion ($189B). However, that’s the simple part to understanding the Fukushima nuclear disaster story. The difficult painful part is largely hidden from pubic view via a highly restrictive harsh national secrecy law (Act on the Protection of Specially Designated Secrets, Act No. 108/2013), political pressure galore, and fear of exposing the truth about the inherent dangers of nuclear reactor meltdowns. Powerful vested interests want it concealed.

A federal judge on Friday dismissed without prejudice the latest class action filed by hundreds of U.S. sailors exposed to radiation in the Fukushima, Japan, nuclear disaster, finding a San Diego courtroom isn’t the right place for the case.

U.S. District Judge Janis Sammartino issued a 15-page order dismissing the class action against Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TepCo) and General Electric, finding the service members who were stationed aboard the USS Ronald Reagan in San Diego have failed to establish how the Japanese utility’s acts were directed at California.

During the 1950s and 60s, the British carried out testing of 12 nuclear bombs which were comparable to the one dropped on Hiroshima at Maralinga and Emu Field in South Australia, and Monte Bello in Western Australia.

Some Australians say that there are still high levels of radiation around the area which are having an effect on locals.

Sue Coleman-Haseldine claims that in the area where she grew up in Kokatha, radiation poisoning is still giving people cancer and leading to serious birth defects.

Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom is ready to take defective fuel from the Fukushima-1 Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), said Rosatom department’s director Andrei Ivanov on Friday.

Scientists are trying to work out what caused the spike in radiation engulfing northern parts of the continent.

Russia's state-run nuclear company Rosatom has denied being responsible for any accidents or incidents that may have caused the radiation spike.

Moscow yesterday acknowledged the cloud for the first time after they were accused of being responsible for a radioactive leak.

Data from Russia’s weather service Roshydromet confirmed “extremely high pollution” recorded in late September and early October.

Nuclear companies in neighbouring Kazakhstan also denied being responsible for the radiation.

Scientists on the ground at the clean-up operation for the Fukushima nuclear reactor have warned that the radiation levels from the Daiichi power plant have now reached "unimaginable levels" despite the threat being downplayed by Japan's Prime Minister Shinz? Abe.Tokyo Electric

Power Company (TEPCO) has revealed that the radioactivity level is now 100 times greater than what would be normally considered a deadly emergency threat, according to Japan's National Institute of Radiological Sciences.

Faced with the post-3.11 reality of government (and corporate) policy that protects economic and security interests over public health and well-being, the majority of the 2 million inhabitants of Fukushima Prefecture are either unconscious of or have been encouraged to accept living with radioactive contamination…

As Fukushima city resident Shiina Chieko observed, the majority of people seem to have adopted denial as a way to excise the present danger from their consciousness. Her sister-in-law, for example, ignored her son’s ‘continuous nosebleeds’, while her mother had decided that the community must endure by pretending that things were no different from pre-3.11 conditions. [Source: Shiina Chieko, interview with the author]…

Fukushima-derived radiocesium fallout in Hawaiian soils… This study estimated the magnitude of cesium deposition in soil, collected in 2015-2016, resulting from atmospheric fallout… Detectable, Fukushima-derived 134Cs inventories ranged from 30 to 630 Bq m-2 and 137Cs inventories ranged from 20 to 2200 Bq m-2… This research confirmed and quantified the presence of Fukushima-derived fallout in the state of Hawai’i in amounts higher than predicted by models and observed in the United States mainland…
The Hawaiian Islands were expected to get minimal, below 10 Bq m-2 or lower, of Fukushima-derived fallout…
Fukushima-derived soil radiocesium concentrations, were greater than anticipated based on model-predicted Pacific atmospheric dispersion rates…

Based on the detection from monitoring stations and meteorological data, the mysterious cloud — which has since dissipated — has been traced to somewhere along the Russia-Kazakhstan border, according to Jean-Christophe Gariel, director for health at the IRSN.

"It's somewhere in South Russia," he says, likely between the Volga River and the Ural Mountains.

Here's an honest disclosure: I grew up with command-rank Naval officers, and a Semper Fi uncle. Duty, Honor, Country.

That said, many false flags later, the Forever-War enriches Mil-Indus greedsters and politicos at the lobbyist trough.

Our military grunts pay the ultimate price, of death, dismemberment, PTSD, divorce, and suicide...

Unreported, and oceanically difficult to hide:

The Fukushima cover-up has been a stupefying outrage, as Public Health violation and nuttin-to-see-here planetcide.

Representing cancer-ridden Navy service members who say they were exposed to radiation on a humanitarian mission in Fukushima, former Sen. John Edwards urged a federal judge Thursday to set a date for trial. Over a decade after serving as John Kerry’s running mate in the 2004 presidential election, Edwards now represents hundreds of Navy sailors who were aboard the USS Ronald Reagan… “We have all these sailors whose case is now five years old, who have died or are in the process of dying right now,” said Edwards… Edwards noted that some of his other clients have seen their children born with birth defects… He said they want to make sure “the truth comes out” and that the “word gets out about the dangers and risks that exist not just in Japan, but in other parts of the world.”

Thirteen commonly consumed types of fish caught in the North Pacific and locally available in Hawaii were analyzed using gamma spectroscopy to measure Fukushima-derived and historic 134 Cs and 137 Cs isotopes. All fish samples had detectable 137 Cs above 95% Confidence Intervals. Three out of the thirteen samples had 134 Cs, an isotope indicative of Fukushima releases, detected above 95% Confidence Intervals. The highest 134 Cs and 137 Cs concentration in the examined species was in ahi tuna carrying 0.10±0.04 Bq/kg and 0.62±0.05 Bq/kg, respectively. Other samples with 134 Cs activities found above their 2-sigma uncertainty were albacore tuna and swordfish…

[W]hile the plume has not necessarily reached the Hawaiian Islands, it did travel within established fishing grounds across major migratory paths northeast of the islands…