Free Republic

In a SPIEGEL interview, Olli Heinonen, the former deputy director of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, offers his first assessment of his 27 years at the global nuclear watchdog. He addresses Iran's nuclear program, his concerns about the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and mistakes made in Fukushima. SPIEGEL: Mr. Heinonen, if you consider your time as the United Nations' atomic "watchdog," do you look back in anger? Or did you succeed in making the world safer from nuclear bombs? Heinonen: There are quite a few things I'm proud of. While I was at the International Atomic Energy...

When I wrote this expose on nuclear-powered laptops in 2005, it was nothing but a juvenile April Fool's joke. It was a prank that most people "got" right off the bat, but it also naturally suckered in a few of the gullible into thinking the dawn of portable nuclear power had arrived. Gag or no, I've remained obsessed with the idea of personal nuclear power ever since. The realist in me understands that it's probably the worst idea ever, what with the radioactivity, hazardous waste, and Iran to think about. But I remain deeply intrigued with the idea. Now comes...

January 26, 2009 Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2009/January/09-nsd-064.html Former Oak Ridge Complex Employee Pleads Guilty to Unlawful Disclosure of Restricted Atomic Energy Data WASHINGTON – Roy Lynn Oakley, 67, a resident of Harriman, Tenn., pleaded guilty today in U.S. District Court in Knoxville, to count one of an indictment charging him with unlawful disclosure of Restricted Data under the Atomic Energy Act, in violation of 42 U.S.C., Section 2274(b). The guilty plea was announced today by Matthew G. Olsen, Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security, and James R. Dedrick, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of...

House Democrats are bypassing renewal of the offshore oil drilling ban by including the entire Pelosi “drill nothing” energy bill in a draft of a Continuing Resolution. HUMAN EVENTS obtained a copy of the most recent House draft CR this morning. The Pelosi bill, HR 6899, fails to open more than a miniscule part of the available offshore drilling areas and -- even worse -- it establishes permanent bans on development of most other domestic energy sources (natural gas, oil shale, etc.) and does nothing to develop nuclear power. It passed the House earlier this month and is now languishing...

House Democrats are bypassing renewal of the offshore oil drilling ban by including the entire Pelosi “drill nothing” energy bill in a draft of a Continuing Resolution. HUMAN EVENTS obtained a copy of the most recent House draft CR this morning. The Pelosi bill, HR 6899, fails to open more than a miniscule part of the available offshore drilling areas and -- even worse -- it establishes permanent bans on development of most other domestic energy sources (natural gas, oil shale, etc.) and does nothing to develop nuclear power. It passed the House earlier this month and is now languishing...

America's premier trade body has projected that the Indo-US nuclear deal could revitalise the US nuclear industry and support 2.5 lakh high-tech jobs in the country, much higher than the estimate of the Bush Administration. Lobbying lawmakers to approve the 123 Agreement before the close of the 110th Congress, the world's largest business federation, the US Chamber of Commerce, says that if American companies are allowed to compete in India, even modestly, it could support 2.5 lakh high-tech jobs. "If US companies are allowed to compete, a modest share of that business could support 250,000 high-tech American jobs," R Bruce...

McCain hits Biden in Ohio today: I am going to put in place the priorities and policies that will create jobs in Ohio. One important way that we are going to create jobs here is with the development of additional nuclear plants and through investments in clean coal technology. Not only will investment in our energy infrastructure create millions of new jobs across the country, it will help lead our nation toward the important goal of energy independence. My opponent is against the expansion of nuclear power. His running mate here in Ohio recently said that they weren’t supporting clean...

ANKARA (AFP) - Police detained 40 protesters Tuesday in a demonstration against government plans to build Turkey's first nuclear power plant, a day before the tender process was to open, activists said. Several dozen members of environmental groups, among them Greenpeace, demonstrated outside the energy ministry in central Ankara, brandishing banners that read "No to nuclear." Some of the protesters, dressed in black overalls and their faces painted white, lay on the ground posing as corpses. Police officers detained about 40 people on the grounds that the demonstration was unauthorized, Greenpeace said. Overriding strong opposition from environmentalists, the energy ministry...

How long Uranium can supply nuclear power is effected by the kinds of nuclear reactors that are used and the sources of Uranium that are used and

 Washington, DC—Nevada Senator Harry Reid delivered the following statement today at a hearing before the Commerce Committee regarding the safety and security dangers associated with the proposal to ship 77,000 tons of nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain.  Both Reid and fellow Nevada Senator John Ensign spoke about the Department of Energy's unpreparedness to begin a massive nuclear waste shipping campaign.  Below are his remarks as prepared for delivery: "I want to thank Chairman Inouye, Senator Hutchison, and the members of the Committee for scheduling this important hearing.  It has been a long time since the Senate has looked closely at plans...

here may be a workable way to solve most of America's energy problems, end dependence on foreign oil and dramatically cut greenhouse gas emissions with little pain. Remarkably, while proposals for renewed offshore oil drilling, new atomic power plants, expanded carbon trading and other proposed tactics abound in this year's presidential campaign, no one mentions the single most promising technique.This may be because its name contains the word "reactor." Combined with the fact that it depends on a sophisticated form of nuclear technology, that appears to make the notion of power plants using the Integral Fast Reactor anathema to today's...

WASHINGTON: The House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to approve the Indo-US nuclear deal that would allow the US to provide nuclear materials to India. While there was bi-partisan support for the Bill, a considerable number of Democrats voted against the Bill moved by party colleague Howard Berman, an opponent of the measure who was persuaded to change his line. While 120 Democrats voted for the Bill, 107 Democrats voted against. Of the Republicans, 178 voted for and 10 voted against. The deal still faces major obstacles in the Senate. The accord reverses three decades of US policy by shipping atomic...

CARACAS, Venezuela — President Hugo Chavez said Sunday that Russia will help Venezuela develop nuclear energy — a move likely to raise U.S. concerns over increasingly close cooperation between Caracas and Moscow.

There is a joke of no known authorship that says, “No good deed shall go unpunished.” So, alas, it has been with nuclear power. The gift was given to the world by the storied Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, which wrote and promoted legislation that gave the public unique access to the licensing procedure for new nuclear plants. The idea was that this openness would encourage the public to take a greater interest in nuclear science and the civilian uses of nuclear. No other licensing procedure was so open or, as it turned out, so subject to distortion and abuse....

TMI-Alert Inc. sharply disagrees with the results of a recent poll paid for and released by Exelon on the relicensing of Three Mile Island. At issue are the questions that were not asked. The poll also failed to note that a majority of the folks who actually testified before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission were against extending the license of TMI-1. When the community held a nonbinding referendum on May 18, 1982, more than 67 percent of the voters in Cumberland, Dauphin and Lebanon County opposed the restart of Three Mile Island. TMI and the NRC ignored the results. How many...

The following legislation has been introduced in the US Senate today by Senator Orrin Hatch and Senator Harry Reid: 110TH CONGRESS 2D SESSION To amend the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 to provide for thorium fuel cycle nuclear power generation. > Thorium Energy owns property in Lemhi Pass, Idaho, where it is generally believed that the largest veins of thorium-rich minerals in the world are located. Analysis of the deposits shows them to be either the highest grade or in the top tier of the highest grade known anywhere on Earth.

The presidential candidates claim to see America’s energy future, but their competing visions have a certain vintage quality. They’ve revived that classic debate: the hard path versus the soft path. The soft path, as Amory Lovins defined it in the 1970s, is energy conservation and power from the sun, wind and plants — the technologies that Senator Barack Obama emphasizes in his plan to reduce greenhouse emissions. Senator John McCain is more enthusiastic about building nuclear power plants, the quintessential hard path. As a rule, it’s not a good idea to revive anything from the 1970s. But this debate is...

Rockwall man boasts of nuclear reactor, but no arrest made Thursday, January 10, 2008 By JASON TRAHAN / The Dallas Morning News A 22-year-old Rockwall man's Internet boasts that he had made a mini-nuclear reactor in his garage resulted in a visit recently by federal authorities. Representatives with the FBI and the Texas Department of State Health Services' Radiation Control Program took away the man's science equipment on Friday – but not because he was doing anything dangerous or illegal. Rather, the man's parents, with whom he is living, asked that the equipment be removed, officials said. The man, who...

VIENNA — Pierre Lagoda pulled a small container from his pocket and spilled the contents onto his desk. Four tiny dice rolled to a stop. “That’s what nature does,� Dr. Lagoda said. The random results of the dice, he explained, illustrate how spontaneous mutations create the genetic diversity that drives evolution and selective breeding. He rolled the dice again. This time, he was mimicking what he and his colleagues have been doing quietly around the globe for more than a half-century — using radiation to scramble the genetic material in crops, a process that has produced valuable mutants like red...

The United Nations' Cash for Kim Jong Il scandal is now six months old, so it's a good time to assess progress, if that's the right word. The evidence of misdeeds at the U.N. Development Program in North Korea continues to mount, but there's still no "urgent" and "external" inquiry, as ordered by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in January. Now the U.S. has uncovered evidence that in addition to transferring millions of dollars in cash that may have gone to help prop up Kim's grotesque regime, the UNDP also transferred dual-use technology. It did so without bothering to secure a U.S....

Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn’t plan to be isolated for long. He expects that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They’ll lose their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. They’ll stop worrying about “frankenfoods” and embrace genetic engineering. He predicts that all this will happen in the next decade, which sounds rather improbable — or at least it would if anyone else had made the prediction. But when it comes to anticipating the zeitgeist, never underestimate Stewart Brand. He divides environmentalists into romantics...

Not so many years ago, nuclear energy was a hobgoblin to environmentalists, who feared the potential for catastrophic accidents and long-term radiation contamination. But this is a new era, dominated by fears of tight energy supplies and global warming. Suddenly nuclear power is looking better. The nuclear industry recently trotted out two new leaders of its campaign to encourage the building of new reactors. They are Christie Whitman, the former administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace. This campaign is the latest sign that nuclear power is getting a more welcome reception from some...

WASHINGTON, April 25 — The United States attorney for Nevada has decided not to prosecute federal employees who admitted making up details about research involving the Energy Department's effort to open a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, the department's inspector general said Tuesday. But the inspector general, Gregory H. Friedman, said the Yucca project had "internal control deficiencies" that allowed lapses that contributed to a loss of public confidence. Mr. Friedman's findings were part of a report about e-mail messages sent by employees of the United States Geologic Survey who said they had made up details about their research...

Of all the claims that Iran made last week about its nuclear program, a one-sentence assertion by its president has provoked such surprise and concern among international nuclear inspectors they are planning to confront Tehran about it this week. The assertion involves Iran's claim that even while it begins to enrich small amounts of uranium, it is pursuing a far more sophisticated way of making atomic fuel that American officials and inspectors say could speed Iran's path to developing a nuclear weapon. Iran has consistently maintained that it abandoned work on this advanced technology, called the P-2 centrifuge, three years...

VIENNA -- The UN atomic agency's investigation of Iran will continue as Iran has failed to provide "sufficient" information on crucial questions about uranium-enriching centrifuges and nuclear smuggling, the agency's chief said on Tuesday. Mohamed ElBaradei also said that Iran had not given access requested by the IAEA to the Lavizan and Parchin military sites, where diplomats say that weaponization work is suspected. Diplomats said that the agency had also requested but had been denied access so far to interview key officials such as Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a brigadier general who has worked at Lavizan. Information is lacking over how close...

The great taboo against nuclear power seems to be over in Washington. This is a mixed blessing. The subject had been off limits to environmentally correct politicians since the spring of 1979, when the Three Mile Island accident inspired the Woodstock of the antinuke movement. More than 65,000 protesters marched on the Capitol to hear energy experts like Jackson Browne and Benjamin Spock - and, of course, Jane Fonda, an authority because of her role in the "The China Syndrome." Celebrities and politicians, warning of meltdowns and cancer epidemics, demanded the shutdown of all nuclear plants. Protesters dressed as mushrooms...

WASHINGTON, May 14 - Several of the nation's most prominent environmentalists have gone public with the message that nuclear power, long taboo among environmental advocates, should be reconsidered as a remedy for global warming. Their numbers are still small, but they represent growing cracks in what had been a virtually solid wall of opposition to nuclear power among most mainstream environmental groups. In the past few months, articles in publications like Technology Review, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Wired magazine have openly espoused nuclear power, angering other environmental advocates who maintain an unyielding stance against it. Stewart...

OP-ED COLUMNIST If there was one thing that used to be crystal clear to any environmentalist, it was that nuclear energy was the deadliest threat this planet faced. That's why Dick Gregory pledged at a huge anti-nuke demonstration in 1979 that he would eat no solid food until all nuclear plants in the U.S. were shut down. Mr. Gregory may be getting hungry. But it's time for the rest of us to drop that hostility to nuclear power. It's increasingly clear that the biggest environmental threat we face is actually global warming, and that leads to a corollary: nuclear energy...

OP-ED COLUMNIST How will future historians explain it? How will they possibly explain why President George W. Bush decided to ignore the energy crisis staring us in the face and chose instead to spend all his electoral capital on a futile effort to undo the New Deal, by partially privatizing Social Security? We are, quite simply, witnessing one of the greatest examples of misplaced priorities in the history of the U.S. presidency. "Ah, Friedman, but you overstate the case." No, I understate it. Look at the opportunities our country is missing - and the risks we are assuming - by...

NEWS ANALYSIS WASHINGTON, March 14 - Behind President Bush's recent shift in dealing with Iran's nuclear program lies a less visible goal: to rewrite, in effect, the main treaty governing the spread of nuclear technology, without actually renegotiating it. In their public statements and background briefings in recent days, Mr. Bush's aides have acknowledged that Iran appears to have the right - on paper, at least - to enrich uranium to produce electric power. But Mr. Bush has managed to convince his reluctant European allies that the only acceptable outcome of their negotiations with Iran is that it must give...

...Because Iran's endless gaming of the IAEA is fast becoming a story of short memories getting shorter, it's useful to recap the events of just the past two weeks. In mid-November, Tehran finalized an agreement with Britain, France and Germany to suspend its uranium-enrichment program -- crucially and explicitly including the use of uranium-enriching centrifuges. In exchange, Europe promised not to refer the Islamic Republic's known and suspected breaches of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to the U.N. Security Council, which could impose economic sanctions. No sooner was the ink dry on that agreement than Iran rushed to convert 22 tons...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 27 - Researchers at a government nuclear laboratory and a ceramics company in Salt Lake City say they have found a way to produce pure hydrogen with far less energy than other methods, raising the possibility of using nuclear power to indirectly wean the transportation system from its dependence on oil. The development would move the country closer to the Energy Department's goal of a "hydrogen economy," in which hydrogen would be created through a variety of means, and would be consumed by devices called fuel cells, to make electricity to run cars and for other purposes. Experts...

...[T]he governments of Britain, France and Germany cut a deal with Iran whereby the Islamic Republic agreed to a temporary suspension of its nuclear-weapons programs. Yet within hours, evidence began piling up that Tehran was already in breach. What does this mean for the Bush Administration? We'll get to that in a moment, but first let's be clear on what this says about Iran's purposes, and about Europe's. ...[T]his latest agreement rehashes a similar deal reached by the same parties in October 2003. In both cases, Iran promised not to seek nuclear weapons and pledged full cooperation with the International...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 19 - Despite having collected substantial information about Iran's nuclear and weapons programs over the last several ears, Western officials have limited intelligence about the crucial question of whether Tehran is trying to meld those two programs to produce a nuclear warhead that can be carried by a missile, administration officials said Friday. The inability to answer that question so far poses an obstacle to the Bush administration's efforts to press for a hard line against the Tehran government. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said this week that he had seen intelligence indicating that Iran was "working...

PARIS, Nov. 17 - An Iranian opposition group leveled startling but unconfirmed charges on Wednesday that Iran had bought blueprints for a nuclear bomb and obtained weapons-grade uranium on the black market. The group also charged that Iran was still secretly enriching uranium at an undisclosed Defense Ministry site in Tehran, despite an agreement with the Europeans two days ago to suspend all enrichment activities. The claims, made in separate news conferences in Paris and Vienna by a group known as the National Council of Resistance, the political front for the People's Mujahedeen, could not be independently verified, and independent...

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 8:20 a.m. ET TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran's parliament unanimously approved the outline of a bill Sunday that would require the government to resume uranium enrichment, legislation likely to deepen an international dispute over Iran's nuclear activities. Separately, Iran's top nuclear negotiator said there was a 50 percent chance of a nuclear compromise with European nations, though he ruled out an indefinite suspension of key enrichment activities. Shouts of ``Death to America!'' rang out in the conservative-dominated parliament after lawmakers voted to advance the nation's nuclear program, an issue of national pride that provides a rare point...

A new assessment of Iran's nuclear program by the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency says that, as early as 1995, Pakistan was providing Tehran with the designs for sophisticated centrifuges capable of making bomb-grade nuclear fuel. It also finds evidence that, as of the mid-August, Iran had assembled and tested the major components for 70 of the machines, which it showed to inspectors from the agency. But the report, issued to members of the agency on Wednesday as a confidential document, provided no new evidence of the kind of covert programs that the agency has discovered in the last...

'Out of Gas': They're Not Making More By PAUL RAEBURN Published: February 8, 2004 If all you knew about David Goodstein was the title of his book, you might imagine him to be one of those insufferably enthusiastic prophets of doom, the flannel-shirted, off-the-grid types who take too much pleasure in letting us know that the environment is crumbling all around us. But Goodstein, a physicist, vice provost of the California Institute of Technology and an advocate of nuclear power, is no muddled idealist. And his argument is based on the immutable laws of physics. The age of oil is...

Iran, Libya Aided Via Black Market, Investigation Finds KARACHI, Pakistan, Jan. 27 -- Pakistani investigators have concluded that two senior nuclear scientists used a network of middlemen operating a black market to supply nuclear weapons technology to Iran and Libya, according to three senior Pakistani intelligence officials. Abdul Qadeer Khan, considered the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, and Mohammed Farooq provided the help -- including blueprints for equipment used to enrich uranium -- both directly and through a black market based in the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, the officials said. The middlemen, from South Africa, Germany, the Netherlands, Sri...

SEIBERSDORF, Austria — Amid rolling hills and tidy farms, the fences are topped with barbed wire and the guard at the gate carefully checks for identification before letting a visitor into the world's top laboratory for nuclear sleuths. Here, atom by atom, scientists from many countries are addressing riddles like the source of Iran's highly enriched uranium, which inspectors recently found. The answer could expose a simple case of contamination on imported machinery or, more worrisome, a clandestine program to build atomic bombs. The dozens of experts and officials here at the Safeguards Analytical Laboratory are quiet and unassuming. But...

Iran signed a protocol to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty today that allows the International Atomic Energy Agency broader rights of access to sites in the country, a move intended to help establish confidence that Iran's nuclear program is peaceful. Iran's former representative at the agency, Ali Akbar Salehi, and Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the agency, signed the protocol in Vienna. The agency is a United Nations organization that promotes atomic energy and monitors its use in military applications. "The protocol for us is an important tool for our work towards trying to establish confidence that the nuclear...

Just curious if anybody has any info on the Egyptian Atomic Energy Authority? I saw this on a discussion site last night. Discussion [ Home | Contents | Search | Post | Reply | Next | Previous | Up ] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- we want to be a test center and cooperate for icdl certificate From: Prof. Dr. Ahmed Madian Date: 22 Nov 2002 Time: 12:46:38 -0800 Remote Name: 62.135.38.62 Comments we are training center in the Egyptian Atomic energy authority - ministry of electricity and we are interested in co-operation between our center in the authority and icdl. for more information...

The Royal Society are the most distinguished scientists of the British establishment, so when they demand that the government show "political courage" and build a new generation of nuclear power stations, it carries a lot of weight. The problem is that it this advice is completely wrong, and demonstrates how out of touch scientists are with the real world, and how careless they are about the future of Britain and the planet. In fact, it is worse than that. They out of touch with modern science, living in a sort of time warp, where nuclear power is the answer to...

<p>ITHACA -- The unknown consequences and the fear of a nuclear war were the topics of a lecture presented by Dr. Helen Caldicott on Sunday night at Ithaca College. "All Americans need to know that America had a radioactive war in 1991 with Iraq," Caldicott said to a mainly non-college age crowd. "There's been a virtual blackout in the American media about it."</p>

Inadequate Control of World's Radioactive Sources Related Coverage: WorldAtom pages on Radioactive Sources Vienna, 24 June 2002 -- The radioactive materials needed to build a "dirty bomb" can be found in almost any country in the world, and more than 100 countries may have inadequate control and monitoring programs necessary to prevent or even detect the theft of these materials, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says. The IAEA points out that while radioactive sources number in the millions, only a small percentage have enough strength to cause serious radiological harm. It is these powerful sources that need to be...

A blunder involving one of Britain's biggest nuclear and chemical research facilities has sparked a major security alert. Thieves stole keys and secret documents relating to labs at the Atomic Energy Plant at Harwell, Oxfordshire, after a key employee left his briefcase in his car in a station car park. The black attache case also contained evacuation plans for the research centre as well as phone numbers of senior personnel. A shortwave radio and mobile phone also went missing. The stolen keys are believed to have given access to highly sensitive areas at the base where nuclear and chemical materials...