Nuclear Waste

LOS ALAMOS, N.M. — A wildfire burning near the desert birthplace of the atomic bomb advanced on the Los Alamos laboratory and thousands of outdoor drums of plutonium-contaminated waste as authorities stepped up efforts to protect the site and monitor the air for radiation. Officials at the nation’s premier nuclear weapons lab gave assurances yesterday that dangerous materials were safely stored and capable of withstanding flames from the 93-square-mile fire, which at midday was as close as 50 feet from the grounds.

SEOUL - Over the past year, Washington and Seoul have held low-key but highly sensitive talks on whether South Korea should be allowed to do what the Americans have long tried to stop North Korea from doing: enrich uranium and reprocess spent nuclear fuel. The talks, set to resume today in Seoul, are aimed at revising a bilateral nuclear cooperation treaty for the first time in four decades. And the two allies' expectations are as far apart as their perspectives on what it would mean for South Korea to adopt the technologies, which can be used to create fuel for reactors, but also to make...

WASHINGTON -- The government would store civilian nuclear waste for up to 25 years at federal sites across the country under a proposal in the Senate to deal with growing volumes of used reactor fuel at power plants. The waste sites could be built to accommodate plants in a region or individual state, said Senator Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, who included the provision in a $30.7 billion spending bill that advanced out of his Appropriations subcommittee yesterday. The interim storage approach is aimed at addressing increasing concern about thousands of tons of used reactor fuel...

BERLIN - German police cleared a sit-in of thousands of protesters attempting to block a shipment of nuclear waste and temporarily detained 1,300 people yesterday, officials said. Hundreds of officers started evicting protesters from the rail lines near Dannenberg in the north of the country in the morning, said a police spokesman, Stefan Kuehm-Stoltz. Those who refused to leave were detained on site for several hours, but all were eventually released by late afternoon. Only those who refused to divulge their identity to police were brought...

WASHINGTON -- The new head of the government's Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump has doubts about a Senate plan for temporary storage of highly radioactive nuclear waste pending completion of Yucca. "I'm not saying it can't be done but it's going to be a challenge," Edward F. "Ward" Sproat, director of the Energy Department's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management , said yesterday. Sproat, a former nuclear industry executive, also said that if Yucca Mountain opens in Nevada in 2017 -- a new completion date announced this week -- there may be no need for interim storage.

Greenpeace activists say they are blocking a train carrying nuclear waste from a Dutch power station to a reprocessing plant in France. Activist Ike Teuling says the environmental group has driven a truck across rail lines being used by a train transporting the waste from the Borselle nuclear power station in the southern Dutch province of Zeeland through Belgium to La Hague in northern France. Teuling said four Greenpeace activists chained themselves to the truck being used in Tuesday morning’s blockade.

YAKIMA, Wash. -- Supporters call an initiative on the Washington state ballot a no-brainer: Bar the federal government from shipping nuclear waste to the Hanford nuclear site until all the existing waste there is cleaned up. But opponents of Initiative 297 argue that interfering with the Energy Department's national plan for nuclear waste disposal could spell doom, especially if other states follow Washington's lead. The 586-square-mile facility in south central Washington, created decades ago as part of the Manhattan Project, remains the most contaminated site in the nation.

Reading John D’Agata’s new booklong essay “About a Mountain” is like finding your GPS on the fritz, getting lost, and then, suddenly, realizing you’re on the right road after all, and headed for an epiphany or two. D’Agata’s style has the off-kilter air of free association about it, as if he’s jumping randomly from first thought to first thought. When you open “About a Mountain,” you know that his subject is Yucca Mountain, outside Las Vegas, and the much-debated plan to turn it into a nuclear waste bin; but D’Agata’s prose skips among descriptions of 1,000 seemingly...

Police in northern Germany have used water cannons against demonstrators gearing up for the arrival of a shipment of nuclear waste from France. News agency dapd reported that police said they used water cannons Thursday after fireworks and paint were thrown at officers. Protesters had previously blocked a crossroads at Metzingen, near the shipment's destination. The trainload of waste set off from northwestern France on Wednesday. It wasn't immediately clear when it would cross into Germany.

YAKIMA, Wash. — Washington state filed suit yesterday to stop the federal government from permanently abandoning the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada, marking the latest clash in a dispute over where the nation’s nastiest radioactive waste should be stored. Waste and spent nuclear fuel from south-central Washington’s Tri-Cities, site of the highly contaminated Hanford nuclear reservation and the Northwest’s only commercial nuclear plant, had long been intended to go to Yucca Mountain.

Egypt CAIRO - At least two of three US students arrested during protests in Cairo arrived back in the United States yesterday, and the third was expected to arrive in St. Louis late last night. Luke Gates, 21, and Gregory Porter, 19, both arrived three days after an Egyptian court ordered their release. Derrik Sweeney, 19, left Cairo yesterday on a flight to Frankfurt, Germany, an airport official said. The three were arrested last Sunday and were accused of throwing firebombs at security forces fighting with protesters.

Police in northern Germany have used water cannons against demonstrators gearing up for the arrival of a shipment of nuclear waste from France. News agency dapd reported that police said they used water cannons Thursday after fireworks and paint were thrown at officers. Protesters had previously blocked a crossroads at Metzingen, near the shipment's destination. The trainload of waste set off from northwestern France on Wednesday. It wasn't immediately clear when it would cross into Germany.

BOISE, Idaho - All 16 workers exposed to radiation in an accident at the Idaho National Laboratory were allowed to go home following the incident, which officials said yesterday likely resulted from decades-old plutonium powder that escaped its damaged stainless-steel shell. US Department of Energy officials and private contractors are closely monitoring two workers at the eastern Idaho lab who tested positive for radioactive material in their lungs. Another employee also is being monitored, but doctors believe uranium detected in his lungs was a false positive.

PARIS - An explosion and fire yesterday at a French nuclear-waste processing site killed one person and injured four, heightening concern about safety risks from atomic energy after the disaster in Japan six months ago. There was no chemical or radioactive discharge from the Centraco plant in the town of Codolet in southern France, said Carole Trivi, a spokeswoman for the owner Electricite de France Europe's biggest power producer, which...

WASHINGTON - Efforts to replace a disputed nuclear dump in Nevada are doomed unless officials generate local support for alternative sites, a presidential commission said yesterday. In an interim report, the 15-member panel suggests building regional storage sites to warehouse spent nuclear fuel for up to 100 years while officials seek to build a permanent burial site. In a move likely to stir opposition in Congress, the panel also recommends that money being paid by nuclear operators for long-term storage be set aside for that purpose,...

WASHINGTON -- The House voted yesterday to begin temporary storage of commercial nuclear waste at one or more federal facilities, fearing further delays in a proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada. The directive was included in a $29.7 billion measure funding the Energy Department and came over the objections of lawmakers from Washington and South Carolina, two states where the waste from commercial power reactors might be located. An attempt by Representative Edward Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, to strip the bill of $10 million for the interim storage program...