This week a blue-ribbon commission on nuclear waste will hold two days of hearings on alternatives to the now-stalled Yucca Mountain disposal site.

"The amount of plutonium buried at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State is nearly three times what the federal government previously reported, a new analysis indicates, suggesting that a cleanup to protect future generations will be far more challenging than planners had assumed."

"Women who worked in the Grand Junction offices of the former Atomic Energy Commission have been diagnosed with diseases that would be compensable under the radiation exposure compensation law and related legislation, except for the fact they were employed by the federal government."

"In a setback for the Obama administration, a panel of judges at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission ruled on Tuesday that the Energy Department could not withdraw its application to open a nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada."

"Emerging details of accidental radiation exposure at an Ontario nuclear power plant  have triggered an order to investigate the possibility of similar incidents across the country, while raising doubts about safety at Canada’s only privately owned operator."

"The days of unregulated production and government secrecy are gone. But as the uranium industry revives in the West, health problems from the last boom still plague communities, and victims are still fighting for recognition."

"A competition between nuclear waste dumps has pulled the Nuclear Regulatory Commission into an unusual reconsideration of its rules to allow moderately radioactive materials to be diluted into a milder category that is easier to bury."

"The owners of a closed uranium mine near Golden have been ordered by the state health department to stop discharging polluted water into a creek that flows into a Denver-area reservoir."

"A nuclear reactor where a hidden leak caused near-catastrophic corrosion in 2002 has experienced a second bout of the same problem."

"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."

"For 11 years, the federal government has been burying nuclear waste in New Mexican salt beds at a place called WIPP, or the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. It's waste from making atomic weapons. But now the government is looking for a place to put thousands of tons of spent fuel from reactors. These salt beds could be the place."

"A commission run jointly by Texas and Vermont, with a membership made up mostly of Gov. Rick Perry's appointees, could decide this summer to make Texas the potential resting place for radioactive waste from 36 states."

"Japan's Atomic Energy Agency says it has restarted a controversial nuclear reactor, more than 14 years after its operations were suspended."

The $2 billion in federal stimulus money was welcomed in southeastern Washington, where the government has been working for decades to clean up the Hanford nuclear complex. But newly hired workers on the project may be facing dangers because of inadequate training and precautions for the threat of deadly beryllium dust.

"Twenty concrete vaults sit side-by-side, like self-storage containers, next to the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant. These concrete tombs hold fuel cells, each containing 12-foot rods of enriched uranium. The rods are toxic and radioactive and were never intended to be stored here indefinitely, among Ocean County's 560,000 residents."