The western German city of Aachen has started issuing free iodine tablets to some 500,000 residents and people living nearby because an ageing Belgian nuclear plant is seen as a risk.

Hurricane Harvey is setting its sights on the area around Corpus Christi… Located not far from where Harvey is expected to make landfall is the South Texas Nuclear Project nuclear power plant. Spokesman Buddy Eiler says the facility was ‘designed to sustain a storm,’ and there are plans in place to shut down operations if necessary…

STP Nuclear Operating Co., Aug 24, 2017: A Hurricane Warning has been declared for several counties in Southeast Texas, including Matagorda County. Hurricane Harvey is expected to make landfall near Corpus Christi on Friday, possibly as a category 3… At STP, we are tracking this storm closely and are making on-site preparations…

Just ten days after the emergency at Washington's Hanford nuclear facility in early May, when a tunnel collapse prompted concerns about radioactive waste fallout as we described then in "'Serious Situation' After Tunnel Collapse At WA Nuclear Facility; Evacuation Ordered, No-Fly Zone In Place", we reported that the U.S. Department of Energy was scrambling to deal with a second emergency, when signs emerged that a massive underground double shell nuclear waste holding tank may also be leaking. As reported then, the tank in question - AZ 101 - was put into service in 1976, with a life expectancy of 20 years. Through 2017, it has been holding hot, boiling radioactive and chemically contaminated waste for 41 years.

Just ten days after the emergency at Washington's Hanford nuclear facility in early May, when a tunnel collapse prompted concerns about radioactive waste fallout as we described then in "'Serious Situation' After Tunnel Collapse At WA Nuclear Facility; Evacuation Ordered, No-Fly Zone In Place", we reported that the U.S. Department of Energy was scrambling to deal with a second emergency, when signs emerged that a massive underground double shell nuclear waste holding tank may also be leaking. As reported then, the tank in question - AZ 101 - was put into service in 1976, with a life expectancy of 20 years. Through 2017, it has been holding hot, boiling radioactive and chemically contaminated waste for 41 years.

Japan was finished, and was all ready to sue for peace; the only condition it made was that the position of the Emperor should be protected. The Japanese government under Kantaro Suzuki that took office in April 1945 did so with the one single objective of ending the war. All this was known to the Western Allies, since the Japanese codes had long since been broken.

By May 1945, the Japanese were suing for peace through Switzerland and Moscow – peace on any terms, just so long as the position of the Emperor was protected.

These are the terms the Japanese offered as early as 20 January 1945, and repeated through the USSR in July[1,3]:

* Complete surrender of all Japanese forces and arms, at home, on island possessions, and in occupied countries.
* Occupation of Japan and its possessions by Allied troops under American direction.
* Japanese relinquishment of all territory seized during the war, as well as Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan.

Two major US news organizations citing anonymous officials have reported that Russian hackers have broken into the computer networks of over a dozen US power facilities, including nuclear plants. Political observer Ilya Kharlamov says the timing of the suspected hack attack could not have been more convenient for Washington's anti-Russia hawks.

The area was declared an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund site in 1990, but the federal government is still deciding how to clean up the waste.

The “Little Sunfish,” the swimming robot that TEPCO is using to capture images of the containment vessel in the Unit 3 reactor of the ruined Fukushima power plant, has brought back the goods.

A trove of new images captured in the past few days show what is likely to be melted nuclear fuel from inside the reactor, what Bloomberg describes as a “potential milestone” in the cleanup of one of the worst atomic disasters in history.

In the latest sign that the area surrounding the destroyed Fukushima power plant is far from ready for the return of human inhabitants, locals and fishing groups are criticizing a plan to release water containing radioactive tritium from the ruined Fukushima power plant into the ocean, according to the Telegraph. Officials of Tokyo Electric Power Co., the operator of the plant, say tritium poses little risk to human health and is quickly diluted by the ocean. But for some, the plan undoubtedly dredges up uncomfortable memories from 2013, when it was revealed that 300 tonnes of radioactive material had been leaking into the Pacific Ocean from the devastated plant every day. It was also revealed that TEPCO had known about the leaks, but had tried to cover them up.

Stream sediments in Pennsylvania downstream from two fracking wastewater treatment facilities were found to contain radioactive material and carcinogens, according to study scientists from Penn State, Colorado State and Dartmouth universities.

The study’s findings, published Thursday, came after Penn State’s Bill Burgos and his fellow scientists sought to discover what had been the effect of the strategy of treating and releasing fracking wastewater, according to the Independent.

They sampled sediments and groundwater from the Conemaugh River water, downstream from two facilities that were created to make the water used in the fracking process fit for release into the environment.

Operation Tomadachi

The United States quickly dispatched an entire aircraft carrier group, centered on the USS Ronald Reagan, some 25 ships, for what came to be known as Operation Tomadachi (Friend). The U.S. provided search and rescue, and medical aid. Thousands of American military personnel assisted Japanese people in desperate need.

But it did not take long before the problems started.

The Aftermath

Military personnel soon began showing signs of radiation poisoning, including symptoms rare in young men and women: rectal bleeding, thyroid problems, tumors, and gynecological bleeding. Within three years of the disaster, young sailors began coming down with leukemia, and testicular and brain cancers. Hundreds of US military personnel who responded to Fukushima reported health problems related to radiation.

Tokyo Electric Power Company, Results of Radioactive Analysis around Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station:

Results of radioactive nuclide analysis for groundwater at the east side of Unit 1-4 Turbine Buildings and seawater at the port in order to monitor the source, the extent, and the effect of the radioactive materials in the groundwater toward the ocean.

“Far worse than economic and social problems, the major threats to the survival of the human species are the threat of nuclear war and environmental catastrophe”.

Let’s take as first example the nuclear disaster in the reactor of Chernobyl in Ukraine 30 years ago. So far the worst accident in a nuclear power plant, but by no means the only one.

Since the accident, only 50 % of the nuclide Cesium 137 has disintegrated.

We have therefore to live many more years with this poison.

The massive, 150-ton turbines have stopped spinning. The mile-long cooling pipes that extend into the Pacific will likely become undersea relics. High voltage that once energized the homes of more than a million Californians is down to zero.

But the San Onofre nuclear power plant will loom for a long time as a landmark, its 1,800 tons of lethal radioactive waste stored on the edge of the Pacific and within sight of the busy 5 Freeway.

Across the site, deep pools of water and massive concrete casks confine high-power gamma radiation and other forms of radioactivity emitted by 890,000 spent fuel rods that nobody wants there.

And like the other 79,000 tons of spent fuel spread across the nation, San Onofre’s nuclear waste has nowhere to go.

The nation’s inability to find a permanent home for the dangerous byproduct of its 50-year-adventure in nuclear energy represents one of the biggest and longest running policy failures in federal government history.

The US Department of Energy says there is a high risk that a tunnel filled with radioactive waste might collapse at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in the state of Washington. This after another tunnel partially caved in at the same facility last month.

The agency says it has until August 1 to develop plans to prevent the collapse of yet another tunnel at Hanford.

The facility was built in the 1950s and for decades produced plutonium for the US nuclear weapons arsenal. In 1988, production stopped and the site became a burying ground for radioactive waste.

The tunnels were used to get rid of nuclear material and equipment, such as rail cars that transported the fuel rods from nuclear reactors to the processing facility.

The radiation monitoring system at Ukraine's Chernobyl nuclear site has been taken offline after a massive cyberattack, forcing employees to use hand-held counters to measure levels, officials said Tuesday.

“The first demand is actually to stop Tihange 2, because there are many, many fissures in that power plant and it's not secure,” Rodrique Dumas, protester and Huy city council member for the Green Party, told RT’s Ruptly video agency.

How clean is “clean enough” when your park is an old radioactive Superfund site?

The shutdown of the US’ only laboratory for producing and testing plutonium cores for nuclear weapons at Los Alamos in New Mexico puts US nuclear arsenal renovation at risk – but the facility cannot be reopened due to numerous safety violations.

A member of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently informed the public that radioactive waste from the decommissioned Hanford nuclear power plant is ‘flowing freely’ into the Columbia river.

The mighty Columbia river is the largest river in the Pacific Northwest region of America, flowing down from Canada, winding through eastern Washington state and along the border between Oregon, ultimately moving through downtown Portland and into the Pacific. The Hanford site, located near Kennewick, WA is up river from a million or so people, not to mention the wildlife.

Constructed in the 1940’s as part of the Manhattan Project, the plant was decommissioned after the Cold War, leaving behind some 53 million gallons of high level radioactive waste. Proposed as a Superfund site in 1988, Hanford is an uncontrollable ecological and public health disaster.

The latest ultrasonic inspections have detected a substantial number of new micro cracks in nuclear reactors at the Tihange and Doel power plants in Belgium since the last study conducted three years ago, Belgian and German media report.

At least 70 additional cracks were uncovered at the Tihange 2 nuclear reactor during an ultrasonic inspection in April of this year, Belga news agency reports. Some 300 new flaws have also allegedly been discovered at the Doel 3 reactor tank during a check last November, according to tagesschau.de.

Japanese authorities are unsure about the medical prognosis for five staffers who inhaled toxic plutonium after mishandling it at the Oarai Research and Development Center outside Tokyo.

“As far as I can remember, no one has inhaled plutonium at this level,” said Ishikawa Keiji, a security official at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) which oversees the lab, cited by the Jiji Press news agency.

Sad but true, the dramatic opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota failed to achieve the result of stopping corporate and political powers from proceeding with the pipeline. Less than six months after the camp’s abandonment, the pipeline is functional and leaks are already being reported.

Another, less publicized, struggle has been taking place for years around the area of the Grand Canyon, where indigenous rights and environmental activists have been seeking a ban on uranium mining in this part of America’s breathtaking landscape. Beginning in the 1950’s when a rush to draw uranium for the first generation of nuclear weapons brought mining operations to this region, opponents recently lost a bid to prohibit the mining and processing of radioactive materials near the iconic Grand Canyon.

Tens of thousands of crustaceans wash ashore along miles of Mokuleia beaches — There’s an odd pink tint to the sand along Mokuleia thanks to tens of thousands tiny crustaceans that have washed ashore. But what the creatures are and where they came from is a bit of a mystery. “I don’t know what’s going on over there. But I’ve never seen anything like this,” said resident said Elisah Rivera. “And it’s millions, it’s not thousands, it’s millions. We actually walked all the way along the way, and it went all the way, about two miles down.”… It’s unclear what they are. Some say they’re crabs, others say shrimp, some suspect lobsters. The state Department of Land and Natural Resources says they appear to be baby shrimp… Environmentalist Carroll Cox he found about a dozen dead sea cucumbers washed up on shore as well. He believes the creatures are baby crabs. ‘There are other species. I just noticed sea cucumbers found in a small area along with the crab.

A new US study has found that government agencies have undermined the risks to the country’s nuclear safety, warning that a single nuclear fuel fire may lead to a disaster “much greater than [Japan’s] Fukushima.”

If spent fuel at one of America’s dozens of nuclear sites is set on fire, it “could dwarf the horrific consequences of the Fukushima accident,” researchers from Princeton University and the Union of Concerned Scientists cautioned in a study published in the Friday issue of Science Magazine, censuring the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for ignoring the potential danger.

Such a disaster, it said, would lead to “trillion-dollar consequences,” as the hypothetical fire would lead to the contamination of a region larger than the northeast state of New Jersey and compel mass relocations.

The Portuguese parliament has unanimously approved a motion put up by the Green party (PEV) for the Portuguese government to request the Spanish government at the next Iberian Summit to close the Almaraz Nuclear Plant.

The motion renounces the continued operation of the plant after 2020 and asks the government to take a “resolute position” for the facility, located 100 kilometres from the Portuguese border, to be closed.

The PEV noted that Portugal had given up on a complaint about the plant filed with the European Commission after it signed an agreement with Spain to reassess the cross-border impacts of the temporary nuclear waste storage facility planned to be built in Almaraz.

Nuclear waste-fires at any of the dozens of reactor sites across the US could spread radioactive material throughout an area twice the size of New Jersey, scientists warn.

And, they say the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s failure to adopt a critical protection measure has left Americans at risk of such a catastrophic event.

The U.S. Department of Energy is scrambling to deal with the second emergency at the nuclear site in 10 days’ time. Signs have emerged that a massive underground double shell nuclear waste holding tank may be leaking… Now it has been holding hot, boiling radioactive and chemically contaminated waste for 41 years. KING 5 has learned that a… radiation specialist on the crew detected higher than expected readings… Detection equipment was then used to check for contamination that might have become airborne… They found radioactive material on one worker in three spots… “Everybody was freaked, shocked, surprised,” said a veteran worker and KING 5 Hanford source who is in direct contact with crew members… Thursday night’s incident means this could be the second double shell tank to fail.

“Everybody’s Freaked” – Washington Nuclear Facility Admits Second Radiation Leak, Workers Contaminated

Hanford official: Tunnel could collapse again — Less than a week after a tunnel collapse at Hanford’s PUREX site, Senator Cantwell visited the nuclear site Saturday, concerned about the recent collapse and the possibility of more. “There is still a potential that we could have an additional collapse of that tunnel,” said Doug Shoop, manager at the Department of Energy Richland Operations Office… “What we will be doing, weather permitting, will be putting a very large cover over the top of that tunnel number one,” said Shoop. That cover meant to keep radioactive particles in the dirt from flying into the air in the event of another collapse.

Were you surprised when the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state suffered a tunnel collapse that nearly exposed hundreds of workers to radiation? Whistleblowers weren’t. Neither were government investigators or state officials, all of whom warned the facility operators in vain that the site was unsafe.

Update 5: The Spokane Spokesman-Review reports that Gov. Jay Inslee was notified about the tunnel breach by the Energy Department and the White House on Tuesday morning. Inslee called the event “a serious situation.”

“Federal, state and local officials are coordinating closely on the response,” Inslee said, with the state Ecology Department in close communication with the Energy Department. There were no plans for Inslee, who is making several previously planned stops in Skamania County on Tuesday, to go to Hanford, his staff said.

Energy Secretary Rick Perry had been briefed, federal officials said, adding that

“everyone has been accounted for and there is no initial indication of any worker exposure or an airborne radiological release.”

U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., released a statement as well:

Two years ago, the U.S. Department of Energy was warned that two tunnels containing radioactive waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation were vulnerable to collapse.

On Tuesday, part of one tunnel failed, triggering an emergency at the nuclear site that required Hanford employees to shelter in place while workers checked for radiation releases.

No one was hurt and no radiation leaks were detected. But problems related to the tunnel’s deteriorating wood timbers from exposure to radioactivity had been identified in a 2015 risk assessment commissioned by the Energy Department.

During a routine surveillance of the area this morning, a 20-foot-wide hole in the roof of one of the tunnels was observed, leading to the precautionary sheltering of employees and notifications to area counties and states. After no contamination was detected, the shelter in place order was lifted and employees were sent home from work early as a precaution. Workers continue to monitor the area for contamination as a crew prepares to fill the hole with clean soil.

The approximately 360-foot-long tunnel where the partial collapse occurred contains 8 rail cars loaded with contaminated equipment. That tunnel feeds into a longer tunnel that extends hundreds more feet and contains 28 rail cars loaded with contaminated equipment. The hole opened up in the shorter tunnel near where it joins the longer tunnel. The tunnels were sealed in the mid-1990s and are checked periodically.

And now one of them has collapsed...

Along the Columbia River in Southern Washington, lies the notorious Hanford Site. This sprawling nuclear facility was once a critical component of America’s nuclear arsenal. Hanford was first established in 1943 for the Manhattan Project, and continued to operate during the Cold War. The vast quantities of plutonium that were produced there were used to build the majority of our government’s nuclear weapons during the 20th century.

Now however, the rundown facility is a massive liability. The Hanford site has been leaking radioactive materials into the environment for decades, and in 2007 it was was called “the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site.” To give you an idea of just how contaminated Hanford is, in 2014 the government estimated that it would cost $113.6 billion to clean up the entire site.

A portion of a storage tunnel that contains rail cars full of radioactive waste collapsed Tuesday morning, forcing an emergency declaration at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southeastern Washington state.

Officials detected no release of radiation and no workers were injured, said Randy Bradbury, a spokesman for the Washington state Department of Ecology.

The accident occurred at a facility known as PUREX, located in the middle of the sprawling Hanford site, which is half the size of Rhode Island, Bradbury said.

An emergency has been declared at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in south-central Washington state after the partial collapse of a tunnel containing railcars full of nuclear waste.

"Near where two tunnels join together there is a [six-metre by six-metre] cave-in," said a Hanford joint information centre spokesperson. "There is no detected contamination or [radiation] release at this time."

The US Department of Energy has declared an emergency at the Hanford, Washington nuclear waste storage site, after a tunnel used to store contaminated materials caved in

A report says France covered up the extent of the nuclear fallout from its first atomic bomb test in North Africa.

The report published by the French daily Le Parisien was based on a recently declassified military map regarding the fallout from the detonation of the Gerbouise Bleue bomb in the Algerian desert in 1960.

The map revealed that radioactive particles reached the Italian island of Sicily and the southern Spanish coast on the 13th day after the blast.

Lawyer Fatima Benbraham, who represents dozens of cases in Algeria, said the map shows that Algeria and practically the whole Saharan region was contaminated following the atomic test.

A vast majority of Fukushima voluntary evacuees are not planning to move back to their homes out of fear of radiation despite the government declaring living conditions in the prefecture to be “good”, a new government survey has discovered.

Martin Stanford, host of ‘Insight’ (emphasis added): Radiation Alert — a nuclear scientist tells us the cleanup at Japan’s Fukushima plant could take 100 years… The decommissioning process has barely begun… A British nuclear scientist who’s just come back from Fukushima has told this program it could take up to 100 years.

Nearly two-thirds of the US Navy ships that assisted in the relief efforts that followed the March 2011 nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan are still contaminated with low-level radiation, according to a new report.

The Pentagon is now facing a hard choice: to scrap its radioactive fleet and dump the mess at Hanford nuclear site and inside veterans hospitals, or arrange a naval war to sink the lethal vessels and their human cargo in foreign waters.

Despite the devastating nuclear accident at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant in March 2011, scientists studying the waters off the west coast of the United States have concluded that there is no contamination risk to people or the local ecology.

Studying the waters of the Pacific coastline, scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts and from Ottawa's Fisheries and Oceans Canada found levels of Cesium-134, the radiation footprint of the Fukushima disaster, to be at levels below what a dental patient would be exposed to in a routine X-ray, according to the Associated Press.

A private think tank says the total cost of the Fukushima disaster could reach ¥70 trillion ($626 billion), or more than three times the government’s latest estimate.

In a study Saturday, the Japan Center for Economic Research said costs of dealing with the heavily damaged Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant run by Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. could rise to between ¥50 trillion and ¥70 trillion.

In December, the government estimated the costs would reach roughly ¥22 trillion.

“If costs rise, the public burden could greatly increase. The country’s nuclear policy needs to be reviewed,” JCER said.

The government’s initial expectations pegged the costs at ¥11 trillion.

But a study by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry said that the final figure could turn out to be double the sum estimated in 2013.

Following that, the government decided to raise electricity rates to secure the money needed to cover compensation payments to the evacuees.

VIDEO SHOWS SAUDI COALITION IS USING DEPLETED URANIUM
Where are so-called International Organizations? Where is UN? Where is Human Rights Organizations? Where are those so-called humanist Activists?

February 28th, 2016 marks the 25th anniversary of the end of Operation Desert Storm, the combat phase of the Gulf War, the first war with Iraq. This conflict was a turning point in US and world history, but the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq turned these war theaters into toxic waste lands. Desert Storm ushered in the widespread use of depleted uranium (DU) ammunition, a topic that few official spokespersons want to talk on the record. Now Syria is fast becoming the latest toxic battlefield where the “real weapons” of mass destruction are being deployed. Even though the Pentagon has professed a reversal of decision on the use of DU munitions, the clear cut evidence still does not support any real effort to reduce their indiscriminate use. It should be noted that US and UK forces during Desert Storm, openly acknowledged having fired some 286,000 kilograms of DU shells in between 1990 and 1991.

Doctors in Yemen have been warning about the rise in stillbirths and deformities as a result of the war for some time.

“Fetal malformations could occur due to several reasons, including mothers’ diseases and subsequent viral infection of the faction and/or poor nutrition,” Wafa al-Mamari, an obstetrician at al-Rahma Hospital in northern Sana’a, told Press TV in July.