Free Republic

March for Environmental Hope A real thing, Jimmy. If truth is stranger than fiction, it should come as no surprise that Friday marks the start of the first-ever pro-nuclear power march — probably in world history — and it all starts in San Francisco. The March for Environmental Hope, a four-day trek from the City by the Bay to Sacramento, is being pitched as a family-friendly event — and in this case that means more than funnel cakes and bounce houses. Organizers are hoping to tug on the collective heart strings of America by making this about the children, as...

Now that many environmentalists and climate scientists have realized that nuclear energy is essential for addressing global warming, a coalition of environmental groups is sponsoring a multi-day March for Environmental Hope in California in support of nuclear power

California’s last nuclear power plant will close by 2025 under an accord announced Tuesday, ending three decades of safety debates that helped fuel the national anti-nuclear power movement. The state’s largest utility, Pacific Gas & Electric Co., and environmental groups announced the agreement on the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, which sits along a Pacific Ocean bluff on California’s central coast. Environmentalists had pressed the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for years to close Diablo, given its proximity to seismic faults in the earthquake-prone state. …

Launch unlikely to boost uranium prices in near term************************************************ The U.S. saw a nuclear reactor come online this month for the first time in 20 years, and more are set to follow—proving that nuclear power is alive and well in a post-Fukushima disaster world.

Northern Japan is raising an alarm, as the area surrounding the Fukushima Nuclear disaster zone has been overwhelmed by radioactive wild boars, whose population has increased dramatically over the past 4 years, as they breed freely in the exclusion zone. With the number of animals steadily growing, the boar population has been devastating the crops of farms in the area. Since the nuclear disaster of 2011, damage to agriculture caused by boars in the Fukushima prefecture has doubled, amounting to some $15 million, according to a report from The Times. Boars also pose a threat to public safety, as reports...

Five years after the earthquake and tsunami, Japan is still picking up the pieces. The nearly mile-long structure consists of underground pipes designed to form a frozen barrier around the crippled reactors. • The $312 million system was completed last month, more than a year behind schedule. • Nearly 800,000 tons of radioactive water are already being stored onsite. Japanese authorities have activated a large subterranean “ice wall” in a desperate attempt to stop radiation that’s been leaking from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant for five years. The wall consists of a series of underground refrigeration pipes meant to...

The operator of Japan's destroyed Fukushima nuclear plant switched on a giant refrigeration system on Thursday to create an unprecedented underground ice wall around its damaged reactors. Radioactive water has been flowing from the reactors, and other methods have failed to fully control it. The decontamination and decommissioning of the plant, damaged by a massive earthquake and tsunami in 2011, hinge of the success of the wall.

Terrorists have the “means, knowledge and information” to create a nuclear bomb, the head of the UN atomic watchdog has warned in the wake of the Brussels attacks. The warnings of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Yukiya Amano come just days before world leaders meet for an important summit against “nuclear terrorism”. “Terrorism is spreading and the possibility of using nuclear material cannot be excluded,” Mr. Amano told AFP. “Member states need to have sustained interest in strengthening nuclear security.” […] “Dirty bombs will be enough to [drive] any big city in the world into panic,” Mr. Amano...

Three energy giants Tuesday went to Germany’s top court to challenge the decision by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government to phase out nuclear power after the Fukushima disaster five years ago. Energy giants E.ON, RWE and Sweden’s Vattenfall want the Constitutional Court to rule that the move was an expropriation of their assets. They hope that would bolster damages claims they have already launched in lower regional courts where they are reportedly demanding at least €15 billion in separate cases. …

The ashes of half a dozen unidentified laborers ended up at a Buddhist temple in this town just north of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Some of the dead men had no papers, others left no emergency contacts. Their names could not be confirmed and no family members had been tracked down to claim their remains. They were simply labeled "decontamination troops" — unknown soldiers in Japan's massive cleanup campaign to make Fukushima livable again five years after radiation poisoned the fertile countryside. The men were among the 26,000 workers — many in their 50s and 60s from the margins...

The robots sent in to find highly radioactive fuel at Fukushima's nuclear reactors have “died”; a subterranean "ice wall" around the crippled plant meant to stop groundwater from becoming contaminated has yet to be finished. And authorities still don’t know how to dispose of highly radioactive water stored in an ever mounting number of tanks around the site. Five years ago, one of the worst earthquakes in history triggered a 10-meter high tsunami that crashed into the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station causing multiple meltdowns. Nearly 19,000 people were killed or left missing and 160,000 lost their homes and livelihoods...

CDC estimates the number of gastroschisis cases between 1995 to 2012 has increased, most prevalently among young, non-Hispanic black mothers, who saw a 263 percent increase in cases during that time period. While young maternal age has long been associated with the condition, researchers don’t know the cause of the increase in cases among all the ages and ethnicities they reviewed. "It concerns us that we don't know why more babies are being born with this serious birth defect," Coleen Boyle, Ph.D., director of CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, said in a news release. "Public health...

After sending robots into the Fukushima nuclear reactor (and seeing them mysteriously die), perhaps this is the reason why Japanese officials have decided to re-start the building of a huge ice-wall for 'containment'. As Fukushima Diary reports, TEPCO’s camera caught a possible aquatic living creature in retained coolant water of Reactor 3.

A 41-year old man has become the first worker at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant to be diagnosed with cancer that officials recognise as being linked to his work there after the March 2011 disaster. The unnamed man, who was diagnosed with leukaemia in January 2014 after feeling unwell, spent a year working on reactor buildings that were badly damaged after a magnitude 9 earthquake triggered a tsunami that struck Fukushima and other parts of Japan’s north-east coast on 11 March 2011. The disaster caused a triple meltdown at the nuclear plant, where so far almost 45,000 workers have...

Visibly straining as he holds it aloft, a Japanese fisherman grimaces as he proudly displays a terrifyingly large fish caught in the waters off Japan. With a gaping mouth large enough to swallow a small child, this creature - believed to be a wolffish - would not look out of place in a science fiction film. The massive catch was reeled in by Hirasaka Hiroshi, a fisherman who has made a career of landing and then eating unusual fish. Normally growing to about 1.2m in length, the wolffish Hirasaka caught measured close to two metres

Japan’s government has lifted a 4½-year-old evacuation order for the northeastern town of Naraha that forced the town’s 7,400 residents to leave following the 2011 nuclear disaster at the nearby Fukushima power plant. Naraha is the first town to get the evacuation order lifted, among seven municipalities forced to empty because of radiation contamination following the earthquake and tsunami that destroyed the plant’s reactors. The central government has said radiation levels in Naraha have fallen to levels deemed safe following decontamination efforts. ... Residents have been given personal dosimeters to check their own radiation levels. To accommodate their concerns, the...

Diablo Canyon is the last operating nuclear power plant in California — and arguably the most controversial. The plant sits along the scenic Central Coast and is surrounded by fault lines — one of which runs as close as 2,000 feet to the nuclear reactors. Many fear that a single earthquake could cause a repeat of the 2011 Fukushima disaster in Japan, when a tsunami devastated a nuclear plant. But despite decades of public protest, the plant's operator PG&E insists that the facility is not only seismically sound, but essential.

Cabinet ministers in Japan approved a plan to reduce greenhouse gases by 26 percent by 2030, a goal already criticized by environmental groups as too timid and statistically unsound. The cuts, first unveiled in a draft in April, will use 2013 as a baseline. Acceptance of the draft report was announced by Environment Minister Yoshio Mochizuki Tuesday in Tokyo. Final approval will be sought after public comment. Adopting 2013 as a starting point is contentious because it's a year when Japan recorded its second-highest emissions level ever as it burned more fossil fuels to replace nuclear power lost after the...

Decommissioning work at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has suffered a setback after a robot sent in to a damaged reactor to locate melted fuel stalled hours into its mission and had to be abandoned. The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco), said the robot stopped moving on Friday during its first inspection of the containment vessel inside reactor No 1, one of the three reactors that suffered meltdown after the plant was struck by an earthquake and tsunami in March 2011. Tepco, which recently conceded that the technology for robots to retrieve the nuclear fuel had yet to...

And the seven angels which had the seven trumpets prepared themselves to sound. The first angel sounded, and there followed hail and fire mingled with blood, and they were cast upon the earth: and the third part of trees was burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up. And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood; And the third part of the creatures which were in the sea, and had life, died; and the third part of the...