March 5, 1997 |
Anti-nuclear protesters hurled stones and firebombs at police and tried to seize control of a road to halt transport of atomic waste. Police reported 250 arrests. The main road to a nuclear waste storage facility at Gorleben remained nearly disabled by tractors and deep holes that protesters tunneled. In the biggest and costliest security operation in postwar Germany, 30,000 police are protecting the shipment of reprocessed nuclear waste from German power plants.
December 12, 1989 |
The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded a $550-million contract to UE&C Catalytic Inc. of Philadelphia to construct a facility that solidifies liquid nuclear waste. The waste vitrification plant will be built at the DOE's Hanford Reservation, a 560-square-mile nuclear facility near Richland, Wash. It is scheduled to begin operating by the year 2000.
March 28, 2001 |
A heavily guarded train laden with nuclear waste from a French plant that reprocesses fuel rods from German reactors was brought to a halt in northern Germany today by activists who chained themselves to the tracks despite a massive police presence. Police had to replace sections of track damaged as they cut free the protesters so that the train could continue to its final destination, a nuclear storage site at Gorleben on the Elbe River.
June 2, 2007 |
A nuclear waste dump in the Russian Arctic may be in danger of exploding because of salt water corrosion in its three enormous storage tanks, the Norwegian environmental group said. The group Bellona, citing a report from the Russian nuclear authority Rosatom, said the tanks near the Norwegian border long had been believed to be dry inside, but recent studies show salt water is inside.
CALIFORNIA | LOCAL
March 18, 2001 |
Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt has signed legislation banning high-level nuclear waste from the state, a reaction to a plan by the Goshute tribe to raise money by allowing utilities with nuclear power plants to store spent fuel on tribal lands. Although acknowledging the "extreme economic burdens" faced by the tribe, "Utah says no to high-level nuclear waste," Leavitt said. A companion bill directs state agencies to study tribal economic development needs.
November 13, 2001 |
More than 100 activists intent on halting a shipment of reprocessed nuclear waste have been taken into custody by German security forces who want to avoid a repetition of protests that disrupted a transport in March, police said. More than 15,000 police were deployed to protect six rail cars carrying nuclear waste being shipped from a reprocessing plant in La Hague, France, to a storage site in the northern German town of Gorleben.
January 19, 2002
We need to applaud Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham's decision to declare Yucca Mountain fit for the storage of nuclear waste as a much-needed push toward solving the waste problem ("Nevada Site Picked for Nuclear Waste," Jan. 11). In this environment there is little objective information, with even the driest technical reports causing controversy. Yet all this rhetoric belies two facts. Leaving spent nuclear fuel scattered across the country at nuclear plant sites is poor environmental management and lousy economics.
December 10, 2008 |
The Bush administration said there are no technology constraints to a major expansion of the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site near Las Vegas, calling for possibly tripling the amount of highly radioactive used reactor fuel that could be stored there. In a report to Congress, the Energy Department asked that the current capacity limit of 77,000 tons of waste be removed to accommodate all of the waste expected to be generated at commercial power plants, many of which are likely to operate for at least four decades.
January 14, 1998 |
Environmental groups called on the U.S. on Tuesday to bar Britain, France and Japan from using the Panama Canal to ship nuclear waste around the world. At issue is the route of a British-flagged freighter, the Pacific Swan. It is due to leave Cherbourg, France, for Japan on Jan. 23 carrying waste encased in 60 half-ton glass logs sealed in stainless steel canisters, according to Greenpeace International and the private Nuclear Control Institute.
February 19, 2006 |
Work on the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump, though performed by federal employees who apparently made up facts, was scientifically sound, an Energy Department report found. But the work will be redone anyway because it didn't comply with quality assurance rules. That will take months and could cost several million dollars. The Energy Department released the 144-page report nearly a year after disclosing the existence of e-mails written by U.S.