CategoryNuclear disaster

New disclosure lifts lid on government cover-up of radioactive pollution in Ohio

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A surprise admission by a top federal administrator is raising some shocking new questions about how much that kids going to a nearby middle school and neighbors of a southern Ohio uranium-processing plant have been exposed to radioactive pollution during recycling efforts there since the start of the new millennium. Paul Dabbar, undersecretary of science for the U.S, Department of Energy...

Trump’s DOE places a ticking nuclear time bomb at Hanford Site

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Calling the 177 containers at the Hanford Nuclear Site in south-central Washington state that contain high-level radioactive waste “tanks” is not a very good description. Each of these so-called “tanks” — buried in a kind of a farm of well-manicured dirt — is roughly the size of a four-story apartment building. Collectively, the 177 containers hold about 56 million gallons of some of...

Fukushima’s radiation would kill a person in 2 minutes

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Every month or two, I feel that it’s important to check in on the meltdown-ravaged nuclear reactors at Fukushima. It’s been nearly six years since a near “perfect storm” of bad events — a major earthquake, followed by a tsunami making a direct hit on the four-reactor power plant on the Japanese coast — caused the worst nuclear accident of the 21st Century...

The news on nuclear power isn’t all good

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Over the course of the last few months, there’s been a run of good news on nuclear power. The state of America’s nuclear industry — both from an environmental and an economic standpoint — is weakening; many of the nation’s reactors are at least four decades old with increasing repair problems, and a number are sited in the worst possible locations, near major...

A great win for the planet in California

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Even before the tragedy in Fukushima, it’s been clear that America’s aging nuclear power plants are an accident waiting to happen — and desperately need to be taken off line. That’s happened far too slowly, nor has safety been the only issue. When policy makers did decommission some of the nation’s most dangerous plants, such as California’s oceanfront San...

Shocker: The EPA’s plan to let you drink radioactive water

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The world not long ago marked the 5th anniversary of the Fukushima reactor meltdown in Japan — an ongoing nuclear crisis that may not be cleaned up for decades, and even that may be optimistic. Lingering high radiation levels mean that swaths of northern Japan remain uninhabitable — unsafe to eat local food, breathe the air, or drink the water. To many, the 2011 Fukushima tragedy...

Chernobyl: A monument to folly that may outlast human civilization

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In addition to the sixth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon spill, this month marked another grim environmental anniversary — 30 years since the April 24, 1986 nuclear accident at the Chernobyl plant in what was then the Soviet Union and is now the Ukraine. In a strange way, the fact that the accident occurred well behind the Iron Curtain of the 20th Century has left much of the Western...

Five years of Fukushima — a living monument to human folly

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Today marks the 5-year anniversary of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami that triggered a meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant. In today’s distracted world — where the worst cases of attention-deficit disorder belong to the mainstream news media — it feels as if these annual anniversaries are the only way to bring attention to any ongoing environmental crisis, from the our...

Alarming leak at U.S. nuke plant

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We’re coming up in a few short weeks on the 4th anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. It was certainly a series of unfortunate — if completely foreseeable — events that essentially caused a meltdown at the four-unit reactor…a massive earthquake, followed by a tsunami which knocked out an atomic plant that had been poorly sited along the Pacific coastline...

Four years later, Fukushima radiation still assaults the West Coast

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More than four-and-a-half years later, the devastated Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan continues to send out the warning signs of just how bad the 2011 meltdown at the site truly has been. After all this time — not to mention all this distance — scientists continue to find radiation from the Japanese plant, which was devastated first by a major earthquake and then the subsequent...

Stuart H. Smith is an attorney based in New Orleans fighting major oil companies and other polluters.
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