"E=mc2" - Documental de Eliecer Jimenez sobre que pudo haber ocurrido en la central nuclear de Juraguá, Cuba

Maria Elvira Salazar

Emergency shutdown at Ukraine’s largest nuclear power plant

Follow The Money

http://rt.com/news/218199-ukraine-nuclear-reactor-shut/

One of the reactors at the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant was automatically shut down after a glitch. This was the second halt in operations in recent weeks at the plant in Ukraine’s southeast, which covers at least one fifth of the country’s power needs.

“Unit 6 at Zaporizhzhya NPP was disconnected from the network by the automatic system that prevents damage to the generator. The reactor is running at 40 percent of nominal power,” the plant’s official website says stressing that radiation at the facility is equal to the natural background, which is 8-12 microroentgen/hour.

This accident took place on Sunday morning at 05:59 am local time (03:59 GMT). Causes are still being investigated, while the Energy Ministry hopes to restart the unit in the coming days. The remaining five reactors continue to generate an estimated 4,530 MW.

Late on Sunday, the problem had been fixed and the power plant’s sixth power block had been plugged back into the network, the plant said on its website.

“Unit №6 was plugged back in after an error was corrected…At this moment all six power blocks are working,” the statement said.

The previous incident at Zaporizhia NPP happened on November 28, but the fact went public five days later, when Ukraine’s Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk revealed it during the first session of his new cabinet.

Chernobyl's new shell

The Economist

 

"Habla el General" Rafael del Pino [10]: Cuando Fidel pensó en atacar la central nuclear de Turkey Point

Maria Elvira Salazar

Cuba's Soviet Legacy: Inside the Caribbean island's unfinished nuclear power station that lays just 180 miles off the Florida coast

Daily Mail Online

Cuba is an nation full of 1950s automobiles but at one time the Caribbean island was almost a nuclear power, less than 100 miles from the United States coastline.

It was 1976 when Cuba’s revolutionary government, headed by Fidel Castro, was began looking for a solution to create a reliable and stable form of energy.

After talks between Cuba and the USSR, an agreement was reached to construct a twin-reactor nuclear plant near the southern town of Juragua.

Built with Russian money, it was suggested that just one of the reactors would provide enough energy to cater to 15% of Cuba. A new city was built in 1983 to house the site’s workers known as Ciudad Nuclear.

The United States were horrified at the idea of two 440-megawatt Soviet-built nuclear power reactors within 30 minutes flying time of the Florida coastline.

In the end, they need not have worried and it's unlikely that Cuba's nuclear power station will ever be completed. When the Soviet Union began to crumble in 1991, the completion date got pushed back to the mid-90s and the money began to dry up.

Now all that remains are the ruins of bigger political ambitions to provide true power to the people. 

Photographer Darmon Richter managed to sneak in and take some revealing photos. 

See the full collection here: http://www.thebohemianblog.com or www.facebook.com/TheBohemianBlog

+21

Cuba’s revolutionary government, headed by Fidel Castro, had long been looking for a solution in the form of nuclear energy

+21

The solution seemed to arrive in 1976, after talks between Cuba and the USSR resulted in an agreement to construct a twin-reactor nuclear plant

+21

The plant near the southern town of Juragua, was funded with Soviet money, with early projections suggesting that the completion of the first reactor alone would cater to over 15% of Cuba’s energy needs

+21

Construction began in 1983, as the foundations were lain for the two reactors along with a sizeable turbine hall at a site close to the Caribbean

+21

The United States, however, opposed Cuba’s nuclear program from the get-go. The Juragua site lays just 180 miles south of Florida

+21

The US was less than enthusiastic about having two 440-megawatt Soviet-built nuclear power reactors at their back door

+21

The fall of the Soviet Union had a crippling effect on the project. The money from Moscow dried up, and in September 1992, Fidel Castro announced the Juragua project temporarily suspended

+21

The first reactor was estimated somewhere around 90-97% complete, with 37% of equipment fully installed; the second reactor had not reached more than 30% completion

+21

There have been numerous talks about bringing the Cuban nuclear program back to life

+21

In 1995, the Russian Federation granted Cuba a $50 million loan for support work at the Juragua site. It still fell a long way short though, of the estimated $800 million required to complete the two reactors

+21

+21

In 1997, an official from the Ministry of the Russian Federation stated their intention to resume construction of the Cuban nuclear power station

+21

President Vladimir Putin visited Cuba in 2000, and supposedly offered Fidel Castro $800 million with which to finish the project… which Castro refused

+21

in October 2013 Cuba’s new president, the younger brother Raúl Castro, accepted Russia’s gesture of ‘brotherly love’: and Putin cancelled $32 billion of debt owed by Cuba to the Soviet Union

+21

The building twisted in on itself, a labyrinthine knot of winding passages and worn stairvases

+21

The building contains various chambers including some with half-furnished with half-built apparatus, others open and bare

+21

+21

A narrow alley runs between the security wall and the back of the turbine hall. Photographer Darmon Richter spotted a gap in the brickwork – a hole large enough to climb through, that had been hastily patched up with a few clinging strands of barbed wire

+21

The view from the top of the reactor on the sixteenth floor provides an overview of the doomed containment structure

+21

The bare chamber was riddled with deep holes and square pits that dropped away into darkness. According to some of the local stories the reactor went as far beneath the ground as above

+21

Other rooms contained pillars, festooned in switch boxes and wires… others with arms and frames presumably designed for holding something delicate

Suicide in Fukushima: The Unspoken Legacy of A Disaster

TIME

New Details on the 1961 Goldsboro Nuclear Accident

National Security Archive
Multi-Megaton Bomb Was Virtually "Armed" When It Crashed to Earth in North Carolina, Sandia Lab Report Concluded

Nuclear Stockpile Safety Review from the Mid-1970s Identified Four Weapons Systems that Needed "Time Urgent" Evaluation Because of "Nuclear Detonation Safety Concerns"

1986 Sandia Lab Study Found that, with Respect to "Fully Assembled" and "Combat-Ready" Nuclear Weapons, U.S. Could Not Claim "in an Absolute Sense, that We Take Every Action to Ensure their Safety"
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 475
Posted - June 9, 2014
For more information contact:
William Burr - 202/994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu

One of the two Mk39 thermonuclear weapons that landed when a B-52 bomber broke up over Goldsboro, North Carolina in February 1961. This was the weapon that came closest to detonation.

The T-249 switch used to arm nuclear bombs on Strategic Air Command bomber aircraft. Photo courtesy of Glenn's Computer Museum

U.S. Nuclear Weapons Safety Issues, 1957-1986

Washington, D.C., June 9, 2014 – A recently declassified report by Sandia National Laboratory, published today by the National Security Archive, provides new details on the 1961 Goldsboro, North Carolina, nuclear weapons accident. While both multi-megaton Mk 39 bombs involved in the mishap were in the "safe" position, the report concluded, by the time one of them hit the ground it was in the "armed" setting because of the impact of the crash. If the shock had not also damaged the switch contacts, the weapon could have detonated.
Since the advent of the nuclear age, the nightmarish possibility of an accidental detonation has made weapons safety a boiler-plate item in the U.S. nuclear weapons program — yet potentially serious errors continue to occur. A series of 2013 reports on the Goldsboro accident provided a fresh reminder of the role of luck in preventing nuclear disaster: the same switch involved in the 1961 event had failed in other incidents.[1]
Eric Schlosser's extraordinary book Command and Control Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety, raises important questions about the record of nuclear weapons safety in the United States during and after the Cold War. Two major studies by Sandia National Laboratory, cited by Schlosser in his book, have been recently released by the Department of Energy in response to National Security Archive Mandatory Declassification Review requests and are included in this publication. Both are demanding studies which require attentive readers. One is a 1959 study of nuclear weapons safety when experts at the national nuclear laboratories were beginning to review the problem more comprehensively. The other is an overview of safety history published in 1987 which reviews the impact of changing weapons design on safety policy, the impact of accidents on policy, and initiatives taken by experts at Sandia to improve safety.
Also included in today's posting are recently declassified Joint Chiefs of Staff documents from early 1958 which address a problem that increased apprehensions about safety: the introduction of sealed-pit nuclear weapons into the arsenal. Embedding plutonium pits or highly-enriched uranium in the bombs or warheads themselves, unlike previous nuclear weapons where fissile material capsules were kept separate until arming occurred, this development made the weapons ready for use but created new vulnerabilities, including greater contamination risk. While the Joint Chiefs of Staff dismissed the risk of an accidental detonation — special features on the weapons allegedly made the probability a "negligible factor" — sealed-pit weapons would figure in the major accidents of the following years, including Jonesboro (1961), Palomares, Spain (1966) and Thule, Greenland (1968), where they would do considerable environmental damage.
Some of the highlights of the documents:

• A memorandum of conversation involving President Dwight D. Eisenhower, JCS Chairman Nathan Twining, and British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in which the two Americans made optimistic statements about weapons safety. Atomic Energy Commission chairman Lewis Strauss soon asserted that those statements did not address the conditions that would emerge when sealed-pit weapons entered the stockpile. He presciently observed that "In case of [high explosives/HE] detonation on crash there would be plutonium scattered outside of the HE danger area, and this might necessitate evacuation of personnel and even clean-up operations."
• A statement in one of the JCS papers laid out the requirement that made future accidents possible by SAC bomber aircraft flying sealed-pit weapons: "A portion of SAC must be kept on continual alert status fully armed and ready for instant implementation of emergency war plans."
• A declassified State Department letter from early 1958 indicating a growing risk of accidents in the European Command area because of the eventual "saturation" of nuclear stockpiles.
• According to a Sandia Laboratory 1959 study, the Cold War goal of keeping nuclear weapons in a high state of readiness meant that safety was "fundamentally a matter of playing percentages." This meant that "absolute" nuclear safety was illusory and that giving ground "safety-wise" was necessary in order to have "useful" weapons.
• According to the same report, one of the dangers of an accidental nuclear detonation was that it could produce "public and diplomatic reactions leading to disastrous curtailment of military readiness and nuclear capability." Even worse, "an accident might be mistaken for the opening round of an unannounced nuclear war."
• A safety policy review performed in the late 1960s developed risk criteria for accidental nuclear detonations: in either "normal" or "abnormal" environments (where an accident had occurred) the annual risk of such an accident would be no greater than one in a million for an arsenal of ten thousand weapons or more.
• Studies at Sandia Laboratory of stockpile safety in the mid-1970s identified four nuclear weapons systems which needed review on a "time-urgent basis because of nuclear detonation safety concerns."
• The author of the 1986 safety policy history asserted that "the perceived need to keep weapons fully assembled and deployed on combat-ready systems … prevents us from claiming, in an absolute sense, that we take every action…. to ensure their safety."

This collection includes a declassified State Department history on two major U.S. overseas nuclear accidents, one near Palomares, Spain in January 1966, the other near Thule, Greenland, two years later, in January 1968. First published on the Archive's Web-log Unredacted, this history, prepared by James Miller, provides a detailed account of how the U.S. government tried to manage the diplomatic furor that both accidents triggered. As the AEC had forecast in 1958, accidents involving sealed-pit weapons posed risks of contamination of radioactive material and the Palomares and Thule incidents required major clean-ups which the United States had to undertake. The recovery operation at Palomares was particularly challenging because one of the hydrogen bombs was lost underwater for several months.
Keep reading at  National Security Archive >>

Pentagon to Remove 50 Nuclear Missiles From Silos Near Yellowstone Blast Zone

Mary Greeley

ALERT! Huge Explosion in Iranian Secret Nuclear Facility: Closes City of 1.1 Million

Mary Greeley

Increased sex ratio in Russia and Cuba after Chernobyl: a radiological hypothesis

ehjournal

Hagen Scherb (scherb@helmholtz-muenchen.de)

Ralf Kusmierz (ralf.kusmierz@bremen.de)

Kristina Voigt (kvoigt@helmholtz-muenchen.de

Synoptic analysis of Russian and Cuban secular sex ratio trends

We compare the sex ratio trends of Cuba (1958 – 2011) and Russia (1959 – 2010) and

quantify pertinent effect-parameters of those trends, especially the jumps in 1987. The

relevant annual births figures by gender are presented in Table 2 (for the original data sources

see: http://www.one.cu/anuariodemografico2011.htm, http://data.euro.who.int/hfadb/, and

http://www.mortality.org). Sex ratio in Russia follows an overall linear decline from 1959 to

1986 with a reduction per 10 years of 0.12% (0.04, 0.20), p value 0.0021 (Figure 2). We may

estimate a significant jump of the sex ratio from 1986 to 1987 of 0.51% (

0.28, 0.75), p value< 0.0001. From 1987 onward, there is a long-term sex ratio increase to

maximum values in 1999/2000 of nearly 1.065 and a subsequent decline after the year 2000. A parsimonious model for the partial Russian sex ratio trend after Chernobyl is a 2

nd degree polynomial, i.e. anparabola with p value < 0.0001. If the decline starting in 2000 will continue linearly and undisturbed, the Russian sex ratio is to resume normal pre Chernobyl

values near 1.05 beyond the year 2020. Sex ratio in Cuba from 1958 to 1986 follows an essentially constant trend with no strong overall upward or downward tendency before Chernobyl

(Figure 3). In Cuba, we may estimate a jump in 1987 of 2.99%; (2.39, 3.60), p value < 0.0001, which is six times the jump estimate of the Russian sex ratio in 1987. Moreover, there are still even stronger increases in Cuba in 1995 and 1996 exceeding a sex ratio of 1.15. A well-fitting,

however less parsimonious model for the partial Cuban sex ratio trend after Chernobyl

consists of a 3rd degree polynomial adjusted for the extreme values in 1995 and 1996. This

model approaches nearly normal pre-Chernobyl values of 1.06 around the year 2010. It is,

therefore, quite obvious that in Cuba and Russia the sex ratio trends that had existed before

the Chernobyl accident are markedly disturbed immediately afterChernobyl albeit the

temporal patterns of the sex ratio changes as well as the maximum values taken on differ considerably between the two countries.

Keep reading at  http://www.ehjournal.net/content/pdf/1476-069X-12-63.pdf

Wrecked Fukushima nuke plant leaking 330 tons of contaminated water a day

worldnews

By Arata Yamamoto, Producer, NBC News

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Wednesday ordered increased efforts to stop radiation-contaminated water from spilling into the Pacific Ocean from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant.

A government official told reporters Wednesday that an estimated 300 metric tons (330 tons) of contaminated water was leaking into the ocean every day from the Daiichi plant, which was devastated by the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami, Reuters reported.

The official also said the government believed the leaks had been happening for two years.

Few people are granted access to the radioactive Fukushima exclusion zone in Japan, which remains abandoned and frozen in time on March 11, 2011 — the day a massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami caused a triple nuclear meltdown in the city. Channel 4's Alex Thomson reports.

The plant’s operators Tokyo Electric Power Company has been building an underground wall by injecting “liquid glass” into the ground in an attempt to contain the contaminated water.

TEPCO has insisted that so far the level of contamination in the ocean does not pose a risk to health.

But some of the contaminated water has made its way through parts of the underground barrier and started to rise above ground.

In response, TEPCO announced that it would begin pumping out the contaminated underground water at a rate of 100 metric tons (110 tons) a day starting this week.

The main government spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, told the press that the government was considering providing financial assistance to help with the project.

The cleanup operation is expected to take more than 40 years and cost $11 billion, Reuters reported.

Feds: Nuclear waste may be leaking into soil from Hanford site

usnews

Mark Ralston / AFP - Getty Images file

Government officials said radioactive waste might be leaking into the soil from a nuclear site in Hanford, Washington state. Governor Jay Inslee said the situation should be treated with the "utmost seriousness."

By Shannon Dininny, The Associated Press

An underground tank holding some of the worst radioactive waste at the nation's most contaminated nuclear site might be leaking into the soil.
The U.S. Energy Department said workers at Washington state's Hanford Nuclear Reservation detected higher radioactivity levels under tank AY-102 during a routine inspection Thursday.
Spokeswoman Lori Gamache said the department has notified Washington officials and is investigating the leak further. An engineering analysis team will conduct additional sampling and video inspection to determine the source of the contamination, she said.
State and federal officials have long said leaking tanks at Hanford do not pose an immediate threat to the environment or public health.
The largest waterway in the Pacific Northwest — the Columbia River — is still at least 5 miles away and the closest communities are several miles downstream.
However, if this dangerous waste escapes the tank into the soil, it raises concerns about it traveling to the groundwater and someday potentially reaching the river.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said in a statement that the situation "must be treated with the utmost seriousness."
Inslee said additional testing is expected to take several days.
"Our state experts confirm that there is no immediate public health threat. Given the relatively early detection of this potential leak, the river is not at immediate risk of contamination should it be determined that a leak has occurred outside the tank," he said.
Tom Carpenter, executive director of the Seattle-based advocacy group Hanford Challenge, said, "this is really, really bad. They are going to pollute the ground and the groundwater with some of the nastiest stuff, and they don't have a solution for it."
AY-102 is one of Hanford's 28 tanks with two walls, which were installed years ago when single-shell tanks began leaking. Some of the worst liquid in those tanks was pumped into the sturdier double-shell tanks.
The tanks are now beyond their intended life span. The Energy Department announced last year that AY-102 was leaking between its two walls, but it said then that no waste had escaped.
Two radionuclides comprise much of the radioactivity in Hanford's tanks: cesium-137 and strontium-90. Both take hundreds of years to decay, and exposure to either would increase a person's risk of developing cancer.
At the height of World War II, the federal government created Hanford in the remote sagebrush of eastern Washington as part of a hush-hush project to build the atomic bomb. The site ultimately produced plutonium for the world's first atomic blast and for one of two atomic bombs dropped on Japan, and it continued production through the Cold War.
Today, it is the nation's most contaminated nuclear site, with cleanup expected to last decades. The effort — with a price tag of about $2 billion annually — has cost taxpayers $40 billion to date and is estimated will cost $115 billion more.
The most challenging task so far has been the removal of highly radioactive waste from the 177 aging, underground tanks and construction of a plant to treat that waste.
The Energy Department recently notified Washington and Oregon that it may miss two upcoming deadlines to empty some tanks and to complete a key part of the plant to handle some of the worst waste.
Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz visited the site Wednesday for the first time since being confirmed by the Senate in May. He said he intends to have a new plan by the end of the summer for resolving the technical problems with the waste treatment plant.

’A very fragile situation’: Leaks from Japan’s wrecked nuke plant raise fears

MLordandGod 

worldnews

By Arata Yamamoto and Ian Johnston, NBC News

TOKYO — Like the persistent tapping of a desperate SOS message, the updates keep coming. Day after day, the operators of the wrecked Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant have been detailing their struggles to contain leaks of radioactive water.

The leaks, power outages and other glitches have raised fears that the plant — devastated by a tsunami in March 2011 — could even start to break apart during a cleanup process expected to take years.

The situation has also attracted the attention of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which sent a team of experts to review the decommissioning effort last month. They warned Japan may need longer than the projected 40 years to clean up the site. A full report is expected to be released later this month.

Journalists have been given a rare glimpse inside Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, which was crippled in the 9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami that hit the country two years ago. NBC News' Arata Yamamoto reports.

The discovery of a greenling fish near a water intake for the power station in February that contained some 7,400 times the recommended safe limit of radioactive cesium only served to heighten concern.

There was also some reassuring news in February, when a report by the World Health Organization said Fukushima had caused “no discernible increase in health risks” outside Japan and “no observable increases in cancer above natural variation” in most of the country.

But for the most affected areas, the report said the lifetime risks of various cancers were expected to increase. For example, baby boys were predicted to have up to a 7 percent greater chance of getting leukemia in their lifetime and for baby girls the lifetime risk of breast cancer could be up to 6 percent higher than normal.

Independent nuclear expert John Large — who has given evidence on the Fukushima disaster to the U.K. parliament and written reports about it for Greenpeace — said there would be hundreds of tons of “intensely radioactive” material in the plant.

He said normally robots could be sent in to remove the fuel relatively easily, but this was difficult because of the damage caused by the tsunami.

Large said the plant was close to the water table, so it was difficult to stop water getting in and out.

“Until you can stop that transfer, you will not contain the radioactivity. That will go on for years and years until they contain it,” he said. "The structures of containment start breaking down. Engineered structures don’t last long when they are put in adverse conditions."

Larged added: "It may have some marked effect on the health of future generations in Japan. What it will create is a Fukushima generation — like in Nagasaki and Hiroshima - where girls particularly will have difficulty marrying because of the stigma of being brought up in a radiation area."

Leaks into the sea would not only affect the marine environment, Large said, as tiny radioactive particles would be washed up on the beach, dried in the sun and then blown over the surrounding countryside by the wind.

Japanese activists are also worried by the ongoing leaks from the plant.

The Associated Press reported that "runoff ... and a steady inflow of groundwater seeping into the basement of their damaged buildings produce about 400 tons of contaminated water daily at the plant." According to the plant's operator, 280,000 tons of contaminated water has been stored in tanks there.

Hisayo Takada, energy campaigner with Greenpeace Japan, complained no real progress had been made.

“It’s still a very fragile situation and measures implemented by the government and [power company] TEPCO are only temporary solutions,” she said. "The issue with the contaminated water is very serious and we're very concerned. And we're very angry because it’s been two years and they've been saying that everything's safe."

Greenpeace has been testing food sold in supermarkets, and to date has not found “radiation levels higher than government guidelines,” Takada said.

But she said the “land and sea will never return to the way it was before the accident.”

One man who knows this all too well is cattle farmer Masami Yoshizawa. He lives in the Namie area, which was once inside a 12-mile, mandatory evacuation zone but is now among the places where people have been allowed to return.

He tends his herd of 350 cows as “a living symbol of protest.”

Nearly a year after a tsunami and 9.0 magnitude earthquake hit Japan, NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel travels to the evacuation zone surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. The plant suffered a triple meltdown in the wake of the earthquake, turning the neighborhoods in the 12 mile radius of the plant into ghost towns. Engel journeyed near the mangled plant which remains very much a hotspot.  Radiation levels were so high, the NBC News team on the ground had to wear face masks and full body suits. Even as NBC News drove half a mile from the reactor, radiation monitors were screaming in alarm.

“As long as they're alive, I will keep them to show to the world -- these cows that have been exposed to radiation, cows that are no longer marketable, and that I’m being told to have slaughtered,” said Yoshizawa, 59.

“For us farmers, it’s impossible for us to return to work in Namie. Our community will disappear. It’s going to become like Chernobyl … Only the elderly who say they don't care about the radiation will return. Children will never return,” he said.

The nuclear industry in the U.S. argues its safety standards are higher than at Fukushima.

Steve Kerekes, a spokesman for the Nuclear Energy Institute, said it was “incredibly unlikely” that a similar accident could happen in the U.S.

Significant safety improvements were made in the U.S. after Fukushima, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the last major nuclear incident in America at Three Mile Island in 1979, he said.

“Our layers of defense extend beyond what the Japanese had in place,” he said. “We’re now well into our fifth or sixth layer of back-up defenses to ensure there would not be – regardless of the cause – a serious accident that would jeopardize public safety.”

A survey for the institute in February found that 68 percent of Americans supported nuclear energy. 

“[Support] did drop for about six to eight months after the Fukushima accident … it hasn’t quite reached the pre-Fukushima historic highs, but we have rebounded to a considerable extent,” Kerekes said.

Part of this support comes from those who see nuclear energy as key in the fight against climate change.

Kerekes pointed to a report by climatologist James Hansen — until recently head of NASA’s Goddard Institute — that said nuclear power had stopped the release of massive amounts of greenhouse gases and saved 1.8 million deaths related to air pollution.

“Every technology has pros and cons. We feel when you look at the benefits of nuclear energy, it’s very effective, round-the-clock electric supply,” Kerekes said.

“As we look to help try to drive our economy and provide jobs that people need, there’s a strong role for nuclear energy going forward. We believe that’s widely recognized on a bipartisan basis.”

It remains to be seen whether this support will be eroded by the drip, drip of leaks from Fukushima.

Leaking at Hanford nuclear site worse than thought

usnews

Mark Ralston / AFP - Getty Images file

By M. Alex Johnson, staff writer, NBC News

The leaking of radioactive liquids at the Hanford, Wash., Nuclear Reservation is more extensive than previously reported, with six storage tanks affected, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said Friday.

In a conference call with reporters Friday after a meeting with Energy Secretary Steven Chu, Inslee disclosed that six of the 177 tanks were leaking at the nuclear facility in Richland, in eastern Washington about 50 miles southeast of Yakima. 

Inslee said Chu told him that evaluation system of the tank levels wasn't used correctly, raising the prospect that there may be even more leaks. But he said he was told that there was no immediate threat, a point the Energy Department reiterated in a statement Friday evening.

Hanford — which houses millions of gallons of radioactive waste left over from plutonium production for nuclear weapons — is already considered one of the most contaminated sites on Earth, the U.S. government says.

Last week, the U.S. Energy Department said that only one tank was leaking at Hanford.

"We need to get to the bottom of this," Inslee said. He called the disclosure "very disturbing news" and contended that the Energy Department needed a new plan to remove liquid from tanks that can't be repaired.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and an outspoken critic of containment efforts at Hanford, toured the site this week — before Friday's announcement — and judged conditions there "an unacceptable threat to the Pacific Northwest for everybody," NBC station KING of Seattle reported.  The Associated Press quoted Tom Towslee, a Wyden spokesman, as saying the senator will be asking the Government Accountability Office to investigate Hanford's tank monitoring and maintenance program.

An estimated 1 million gallons of waste has seeped out of the underground tanks and reached groundwater that will eventually reach the Columbia River, scientists say. The U.S. plans to build a plant to turn the waste into low-level radioactive glass for safe storage, but that facility is years behind schedule for its projected opening in 2019.

In a statement Friday evening, Inslee warned that the federal budget impasse — which could lead to a "sequestration," or cuts, of $1.2 trillion in federal spending over 10 years — made the Hanford predicament even more alarming.

"Frankly, the state Department of Ecology is not convinced that current storage is adequate to meet legal and regulatory requirements," Inslee said.

"With potential sequestration and federal budget cuts looming, we need to be sure the federal government maintains its commitment and legal obligation to the cleanup of Hanford," he said. "To see Hanford workers furloughed at the exact moment we have additional leakers out there is completely unacceptable."

Graham Robertson of NBC News contributed to this report.

North Koreans among 40 dead at Iran nuke plant

WND/ Reza Kahlili

The explosions at Iran’s Fordow nuclear facility Jan. 21 killed at least 40 people, including two North Koreans, WND learned Sunday.

Meanwhile, the Islamic regime is labeling WND a “mouthpiece of the CIA” for its exclusive reporting of the blasts.

The bodies of 11 of the technicians and scientists are beyond recognition, a member of the security forces at the facility told WND. According to the source, 60 others are in critical condition and have been transferred to the central base of the 27th Division of Mohammad Rassool Allah. The base, between Tehran and Qom, is equipped with a modern medical facility.

At the time of the explosions, the source said, 203 Iranian scientists and technicians along with 16 North Koreans had been logged in at the site, though the initial report listed 240 people.

The day before the explosions, the North Koreans had brought in new equipment, described by the source as touch-screen monitors the size of TVs that were installed in the monitoring room and some new parts that were installed in the centrifuges before the start of the enrichment process.

Get the inside story in Reza Kahlili’s “A Time To Betray” and learn how the Islamic regime “bought the bomb” in “Atomic Iran.”

The explosions were reported exclusively by WND Jan. 24, with updates Jan. 27, Jan. 29, Jan. 30 and Jan. 31.  WND previously reported the trapped workers included 16 North Koreans: 14 technicians and two military attaches.

The source said many of the centrifuges have been destroyed and rescuers have still not accessed the reserves of the stock of 20-percent enriched uranium to assess the level of radiation.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has not visited the site since the explosions despite media rumors, the source said. Because the regime’s Ministry of Defense covers the project at Fordow, officials of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization were allowed to visit it Jan. 5.

In an unusual move, the IAEA issued a brief statement Jan. 29: “We understand that Iran has denied that there has been an incident at Fordow. This is consistent with our observations.”

IAEA spokeswoman Gill Tudor emailed that response to reporters. However, when pushed by WND, Tudor could neither confirm nor deny the incident had taken place and did not say whether inspectors had visited the site after the explosions, despite media reports.

Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi, representatives of the supreme leader and intelligence officers from both the Ministry of Intelligence and the Revolutionary Guards have visited parts of the site that have been cleared as secure. A counterintelligence committee has been formed to investigate the incident, which already has been called an act of sabotage, with Israel the prime suspect.

The regime is debating how to explain the incident at a later date depending on the level of destruction, the source said. But because of internal rifts among President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Majlis (parliament), Ahmadinejad or others connected to his team will soon reveal the incident.

Regime media have solely based their denial that the explosions occurred on a statement by White House spokesman Jay Carney, who told reporters Jan. 28: “We have no information to confirm the allegations in the (WND) report, and we do not believe the report is credible.”

However, the Islamic regime’s official news agency, IRNA, in a report Jan. 30, called WND a “mouthpiece of the CIA” and its reporting mere propaganda by the West before the start of renewed negotiations between Iran and the 5-plus-1 powers – the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China, plus Germany.

IRNA’s report said: “WND, which publishes under the direct control of the CIA, on Thursday, Jan. 24, reported that an explosion took place at Fordow that destroyed much of the facility and trapped 240 personnel. WND in its report interestingly touches on the previous sabotage at Fordow and in a coordinated effort, the White House denies having information and the Israelis state their happiness of such an event. The propaganda by the West continues with the BBC reporting that Iran has denied the report put out by Reza Kahlili, a former CIA spy in the Revolutionary Guards.”

IRNA, in its extensive report, covered all the recent WND revelations about Iran’s nuclear program and Russia’s involvement. It said, “Two days prior to the publication of the explosion report, WND reported that an Iranian spy in the Israeli intelligence service, Mossad, has informed the Islamic republic that Tel Aviv and certain Western countries have plans on covert ops for the destruction of Iranian nuclear sites. This news agency (WND) in another report states that the recent negotiations between the IAEA and the Iranian counterparts for the inspection of the Parchin military site was a failure and that Iran will resort to publication of documents from the Shah era to further pressure the U.S.”

IRNA concluded that “the West knows this is psychological warfare (and it) will not disrupt the goals of (Iran) in the negotiations, but it tries to fill that void with propaganda against clear and logical policies of the Islamic Republic, which is the result of their hatred against the government of Iran.”

The regime media have also attacked Hamidreza Zakeri, the former officer of Iran’s ministry of intelligence, now living in Europe, who has provided information on the Fordow explosion and other valuable insights into the regime’s illicit activities.

The Fordow nuclear site was central to the regime’s nuclear bomb program, built 300 feet under the belly of a mountain where over 2,700 centrifuges were enriching uranium to the 20 percent level. That level could within weeks be further enriched to nuclear-weapons grade.

In a letter to the IAEA two days after the reported explosions, Iran said it planned to install thousands of its upgraded centrifuges at the Natanz facility. The source stated the move was a direct result of the explosions at Fordow.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2013/02/north-koreans-among-40-dead-at-iran-nuke-plant/#pVZh2MwCyYfmQDQl.99

Radioactive Fish Near Fukushima Suggest Ongoing Contamination

Scientific American/ David Biello

RADIOACTIVE FISH: Some source of radioactive contamination is causing bottom-dwelling fish, like the greenling pictured here, to absorb high levels of radionuclides. Image: Flickr.com / Brian Gratwicke

The fish off Fukushima remain radioactive more than a year after the earthquake and subsequent tsunami triggered three meltdowns at the Daiichi nuclear power plant. In fact, bottom-dwelling greenling fish caught in August 2012 bore the highest levels of radioactive particles seen to date—25,000 Becquerels per kilogram. (A becquerel is a unit of the rate of radioactive decay—or radiation emitted by a substance.) That is 250 times higher than current Japanese safety standards, a key reason fishing off Fukushima remains prohibited.
The findings suggest that contaminated water is still leaking from the stricken power plant, the sea bottom itself is now laced with radionuclides, or both. Concentrations in the ocean water itself remain below any human health concern but they do pass into fish that swim through those waters.
"When fish 'drink' they take [cesium] and other salts up from the water they are swimming in, that accumulates in the muscle tissue," explains marine chemist Ken Buessler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who compiled the analysis of publicly released Japanese fisheries data and published it in Science on October 26. But the fish also shed that cesium if they swim in uncontaminated waters, as has been seen in tuna that migrated from near Japan to near San Diego, suggesting that levels in fish should decrease over time. For this reason, most of the fish caught off Japan's northeastern coast are not radioactive. But roughly 40 percent of bottom-dwelling fish, such as flatfish or halibut, caught off the coast adjacent to Fukushima bear radionuclides above the Japanese food safety standard of 100 becquerels per kilogram.*
According to a response to questions from Scientific American that was prepared by staff at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, ingesting fish at that level "would only produce a dose that is a small fraction of the dose that people receive from natural levels." For example, as Buessler notes, fish caught off Japan in June 2011 boasted levels of potassium-40—a naturally occurring radionuclide—10 times higher than those of radioactive cesium from Fukushima. More >>

Massive fire on nuclear powered submarine

Security Clearance/

Read >>

Are Mysterious Illnesses Linked to Fukushima?

By TheAlexJonesChannel Hundreds of Alaska Airlines flight attendants have filed a formal complaint about uniforms they suspect might be causing their skin to rash and develop lesions, and their hair to fall out. But based on the timing of the symptoms and their relation to similar symptoms in local marine life and polar bear populations, it appears as though radiation from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster may also be a potential culprit.

One year after disaster at Fukushima nuclear plant, town remains frozen in time

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Radiation from Fukushima detected 400 miles off Japanese coast

By BRIAN SKOLOFF, MALCOLM RITTER/

Radioactive contamination from the Fukushima power plant disaster has been detected as far as almost 400 miles off Japan in the Pacific Ocean, with water showing readings of up to 1,000 times more than prior levels, scientists reported Tuesday.

But those results for the substance cesium-137 are far below the levels that are generally considered harmful, either to marine animals or people who eat seafood, said Ken Buesseler of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

He spoke Tuesday in Salt Lake City at the annual Ocean Sciences Meeting, attended by more than 4,000 researchers this week.

The results are for water samples taken in June, about three months after the power plant disaster, Buesseler said. In addition to thousands of water samples, researchers also sampled fish and plankton and found cesium-137 levels well below the legal health limit.

"We're not over the hump" yet in terms of radioactive contamination of the ocean because of continued leakage from the plant, Buesseler said in an interview before Tuesday's talk. He was chief scientist for the cruise that collected the data.

The ship sampled water from about 20 miles to about 400 miles off the coast east of the Fukushima plant. Concentrations of cesium-137 throughout that range were 10 to 1,000 times normal, but they were about one-tenth the levels generally considered harmful, Buesseler said.

Cesium-137 wasn't the only radioactive substance released from the plant, but it's of particular concern because of its long persistence in the environment. Its half-life is 30 years. More >>