Nuclear Policy

U.S. nuclear plants are storing increasing amounts of highly radioactive spent fuel in pools that are vulnerable to accident or attack. New safety policies are needed.

A drained spent fuel pool in the U.S. could lead to a catastrophic fire that would result in long-term land contamination substantially worse than what the Chernobyl accident unleashed.

Japan’s peacetime and wartime nuclear disasters are like night and day.

It’s likely that the dose rates coming off that reactor are life-threatening.

Will the Department of Energy stop trying to bring on a nuclear renaissance?

The photos from Fukushima illustrate a dire situation.

A hydrogen explosion yesterday at Unit 1 severely damaged the reactor building, blowing apart its roof.

The devastating Japanese quake and its outcome could generate a political tsunami here in the United States.

There’s no transforming our energy future without completely overhauling the Energy Department.

For a new energy future, the Department of Energy needs to be free of the shackles of nuclear weapons.

As Egypt and the Middle East rise, Wall Street and congressional Republicans continue to ignore the financial reforms the world is demanding.

Hanford remains one of the most contaminated zones in the western Hemisphere.

The National Nuclear Security Agency within the Energy Department estimates it will need about $168 billion over 20 years to maintain the nuclear arsenal and refurbish the U.S. weapons complex.

Republicans see shelving New START as a serious foreign policy blow that will further weaken Obama’s presidency.

Drinking nuclear waste-contaminated milk most likely contributed to hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens developing thyroid cancer.

An expected tritium shortage may soon hamper the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

So much for the expertise of Los Alamos where billions of dollars are spent each year to better understand nuclear explosives.

The threats to human health and the environment from Chernobyl fallout, scientists are now finding, will persist for a very long time.

This report estimates that from 1944 to 2009, about 12.7 metric tons of plutonium were discarded at U.S. nuclear weapon production facilities. This is more than three times than the U.S. Department of Energy’s last official estimate of waste losses made in 1996.

The people of the Marshall Islands had their homeland and health sacrificed for U.S. national security interests. The Obama administration and Congress should promptly correct this injustice.