All 50 reactors now closed for maintenance after 2011 tsunami but government faces major public opposition to reactivation Japan is shutting down its last working nuclear reactor as part of the safety drive imposed after the March 2011 tsunami triggered a meltdown at the Fukushima plant. The closure of the third reactor at the Tomari [...]

  Kyoto, Japan—On 30 April, seventy-two Japanese NGO organizations lead by Shut Tomari and Green Action send an urgent request to the UN and Japanese government urging immediate action to stabilize the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Unit 4 spent nuclear fuel. The letter was endorsed by experts from Japan and abroad. The letter warned [...]

It could be the latest Inside the Beltway TV drama: the safety guardians of America’s nuclear industry working in a political environment so toxic that the White House was compelled to appoint the bureaucratic equivalent of a marriage counsellor. Firstly, there have been testimonies to Congress of “outbursts of abusive rage” at the US Nuclear [...]

Warning Signs for the US In the aftermath of the world’s worst nuclear power disaster, the news media is just beginning to grasp that the dangers to Japan and the rest of the world posed by the Fukushima-Dai-Ichi site are far from over. After repeated warnings by former senior Japanese officials, nuclear experts, and now [...]

Officials at the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), which acts as the operator of the crippled nuclear facility, say there is reason to believe some of the 12 tons of radioactive water has flowed into the Pacific Ocean. ­A leak was found in a pipe attached to a temporary decontamination system. The water, once it [...]

Despite reports this week that the Fukushima nuclear situation may be even worse than previously thought, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has given approval today for two combined licenses for two nuclear reactors in South Carolina, only the second time in the last three decades that new nuclear plants have been approved in the nation. [...]

TOKYO (Kyodo) — Thousands of people formed human chains in Germany and France to protest against the use of nuclear power plants on Sunday, the first anniversary of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami disaster that crippled the Fukushima nuclear power plant, while protesters also gathered at antinuclear rallies in New York and California. At [...]

Sunday will be the first anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that struck hardest in Japan, and Mr. Kitajima is among those who have brought to New York’s commemorations their direct witness of the unexpected, the statistically improbable, the totally far-fetched. “I came to convey the reality,” Kazuhiko Amano, a relief worker in Fukushima, said [...]

The first reports issued by the Japanese government stated that emissions equaled 10% of 1986 Chernobyl emissions. A few weeks later, they doubled that estimate to 20%. By October 2011, an article in the journal Nature estimated Fukushima emissions to be more than double that of Chernobyl. How anyone, let alone scientists, could call Fukushima [...]

… One of the legacies of Fukushima is that while investment in today’s current reactor designs may have slowed, there is a renewed interest in Alvin’s alternative designs and in other fundamentally different approaches. In China, a major R&D programme into thorium molten salt reactors is underway, with the first test reactors to be completed [...]