Nuclear Power & Radiation

"A fire from spent fuel stored at a U.S. nuclear power plant could have catastrophic consequences, according to new simulations of such an event."

"More than five years after a tsunami struck Japan triggering one of the worst nuclear disasters in history, U.S. reactors and industry regulators haven’t done enough to prevent a similar catastrophe, a government-sponsored study found."

"Thousands of homeowners have reached a $375 million settlement over their claims that plutonium releases from a nuclear weapons plant in Colorado damaged their health and devalued their property, officials said Thursday."

"The head of a Nebraska utility recommended shutting down the nation's smallest nuclear power plant by the end of the year, saying Thursday that it doesn't make economic sense to keep it open."

"The Obama administration’s plan to pull the plug on an unfinished, $5-billion nuclear plant has brought together some unlikely allies – the South Carolina congressional delegation and Russian President Vladimir Putin."

"It will be 30 years ago Tuesday that Pripyat and the nearby Chernobyl nuclear plant became synonymous with nuclear disaster, that the word Chernobyl came to mean more than just a little village in rural Ukraine, and this place became more than just another spot in the shadowy Soviet Union."

"China's quest to fence off a big chunk of the South China Sea may have just gotten another, powerful boost: plans for a fleet of floating nuclear power plants that could provide huge amounts of electricity for the far-flung atolls and islets."

"The federal government is cleaning up a long legacy of uranium mining within the Navajo Nation — some 27,000 square miles spread across Utah, New Mexico and Arizona that is home to more than 250,000 people."

"Nuclear catastrophe is always an unmitigated disaster. The only beneficiaries, albeit in a perverse fashion, are animals,  which tend to flourish in areas humans evacuate. This has certainly been the case for wild boars around Fukushima, which have multiplied so rapidly, they’ve become a problem for neighboring towns."

"Renewable energy and new technologies that are making low-carbon power more reliable are growing rapidly in the U.S. Renewables are so cheap in some parts of the country that they're undercutting the price of older sources of electricity such as nuclear power."