Tagnuclear power

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...

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...

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...

When a low-level radioactive waste dump explodes

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It was just the other day that I was upbraiding the mainstream media for taking its eye off one of the most important stories — to my mind, anyway — of this decade: The nuclear catastrophe at the Fukushima power plant in Japan, and the lack of focus on the potential for similar accidents at atomic sites both here in the United States and around the globe. Simply put, we have too many...

It’s long past time to close the Indian Point nuclear plant

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There are a few places that have really come to symbolize the folly that has been nuclear power in America in the decades since World War II. One of the more famous ones is the San Onofre plant in Southern California, built next to the Pacific Ocean and perilously close to a major fault line, in one of the nation’s more populated corners. What could go wrong? But then, poorly located plants...

Four years later, the world needs to own up to Fukushima

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Imagine if there were news bulletins one day last year that a global terrorist group such as ISIS had pulled off an attack in Asia that has claimed more than 1,200 lives, sickened thousands more, and displaced even more people from their homes. Can you imagine the breathless, non-stop coverage on cable news channels such as CNN or the Fox News Channel? All the interviews with devastated family...

America can’t afford to ease up on nuclear safety

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There was a brief scare earlier this week from the part of the world that gave us the Chernobyl nuclear disaster nearly 30 years ago, In the Ukraine, a strife-torn nation where good information is often in short supply, officials announced there had been an accident at one of the country’s nuclear power plants. It was only later that more information emerged that, at least according to the...

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