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Britain will face a serious energy crisis unless plans to build new nuclear power plants are speeded through without having obstacles placed in their way, the Government will warn next week. Ed Miliband, the Energy and Climate Change Secretary, will give the go-ahead for a new generation of power stations and explain how new planning guidelines will speed up the time it takes for them to come into operation. In a major series of policy statements on Monday Mr Miliband will say that “saying no” to nuclear is no longer an option.The move is certain to arouse opposition in Labour...

Iran Refuses To Send Enriched Uranium Abroad by Jay Deshmukh TEHRAN (AFP) – Iran is refusing to send its low-enriched uranium abroad for further processing, the influential head of parliament's national security and foreign policy committee was quoted as saying on Saturday. "We do not want to give part of our 1,200 kilos of enriched uranium in order to receive fuel of 20 percent enrichment," Alaeddin Borujerdi told the ISNA news agency. "This option of giving our enriched uranium gradually or in one go is over now. We are studying how to procure fuel and (Ali Asghar) Soltanieh is negotiating...

The UN's nuclear watchdog has asked Iran to explain evidence suggesting that Iranian scientists have experimented with an advanced nuclear warhead design, the Guardian has learned. The very existence of the technology, known as a "two-point implosion" device, is officially secret in both the US and Britain, but according to previously unpublished documentation in a dossier compiled by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Iranian scientists may have tested high-explosive components of the design. The development was today described by nuclear experts as "breathtaking" and has added urgency ...

Note: The following text is a quote: Secretary Napolitano Announces Full Deployment of Radiation Scanning Technology to the Northern Border Ahead of Schedule Release Date: November 5, 2009 For Immediate Release Office of the Press Secretary Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano today announced the final deployment of non-intrusive scanning equipment to detect radiation emanating from materials used in nuclear devices at all Northern border land ports of entry—a major security milestone completed two months ahead of schedule that reflects Secretary Napolitano’s ongoing commitment to strong, layered security at the U.S.-Canada border. “Securing our Northern border while facilitating...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/statement-president-barack-obama-iran Home • Briefing Room • Statements & Releases The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release November 03, 2009 Statement by President Barack Obama on Iran Thirty years ago today, the American Embassy in Tehran was seized. The 444 days that began on November 4, 1979 deeply affected the lives of courageous Americans who were unjustly held hostage, and we owe these Americans and their families our gratitude for their extraordinary service and sacrifice. This event helped set the United States and Iran on a path of sustained suspicion,...

Iran reports having thousands of centrifuges spinning away to make fuel for their upcoming power reactors. Others think that Iran has it in mind to make weapons material using those same centrifuges. In fact, Iran could divert just 1% of its centrifuge production and have enough weapons-grade material to make a few bombs per year. The arithmetic is provided here below. Note: I was with Westinghouse civilian nuclear power for 30 years as a registered professional engineer with nuclear specialization. I hold a doctorate in engineering. All information here is unclassified." Read more: http://www.longwarjournal.org/threat-matrix/archives/2009/11/uranium_centrifuges_and_uraniu.php

The National Council of Resistance of Iran, or NCRI, the political arm of the Mujahedeen Khalq, said the site is built under a hillside east of Tehran and comprises a series of interconnecting tunnels. "All activities related to the manufacture of detonators are done in this web of tunnels," Mehdi Abrichamtchi told a news conference.

SNIPPET: "Lula and Chavez have established a "strategic relationship," and recently agreed upon a joint Brazilian-Venezuelan oil venture worth billions of dollars. Lula and Chavez have joined with Daniel Ortega, the returned Nicaraguan Marxist dictator, to form an anti-U.S. Latin American military alliance - all with Russian assistance - funded by the region's abundant oil reserves. Brazil is engaged in its own arms build-up and Lula is determined that Brazil will become at least a first-rate regional power. Unfortunately, Lula is establishing Brazil as an anti-American military power by aligning with nations hostile or potentially hostile to the U.S. Lula...

Rethinking relativity: Is time out of joint? EVER since Arthur Eddington travelled to the island of Príncipe off Africa to measure starlight bending around the sun during a 1919 eclipse, evidence for Einstein’s theory of general relativity has only become stronger. Could it now be that starlight from distant galaxies is illuminating cracks in the theory’s foundation? .... Yet it is still not clear how well general relativity holds up over cosmic scales, at distances much larger than the span of single galaxies. Now the first, tentative hint of a deviation from general relativity has been found. While the evidence...

In September 2007, Israeli fighter jets destroyed a mysterious complex in the Syrian desert. The incident could have led to war, but it was hushed up by all sides. Was it a nuclear plant and who gave the orders for the strike? The mighty Euphrates river is the subject of the prophecies in the Bible's Book of Revelation, where it is written that the river will be the scene of the battle of Armageddon: "The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up to prepare the way for the kings from...

VIENNA — Iranian officials sent mixed signals on a plan that would have Tehran ship out most of the material it would need to make a nuclear weapon, with the foreign minister saying Monday that option still exists and a senior diplomat suggesting the opposite. The contrasting messages appear designed to keep the international community off balance on how far Iran is ready to go in accepting the original proposal — having Tehran export 70 percent of its enriched uranium and having it returned as fuel for its research reactor. They also appeared geared toward pushing the plan's main backers...

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." —The Bhagavad Gita Seven years after the nuclear tests in Alamogordo, New Mexico, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, was lecturing at a college when a student asked if there were any U.S. atomic tests before Alamogordo. “Yes, in modern times,” he replied. The sentence, enigmatic and incomprehensible at the time, was actually an allusion to ancient Hindu texts that describe an apocalyptic catastrophe that doesn’t correlate with volcanic eruptions or other known phenomena. Oppenheimer, who avidly studied ancient Sanskrit, was undoubtedly referring to a passage in...

A British nuclear expert who fell from the 17th floor of a United Nations building did not commit suicide and may have been hurled to his death, says a doctor who carried out a second post-mortem examination. Timothy Hampton, 47, a scientist involved in monitoring nuclear activity, was found dead last week at the bottom of a stairwell in Vienna...

A British nuclear expert who fell from the 17th floor of a United Nations building did not commit suicide and may have been hurled to his death, says a doctor who carried out a second post-mortem examination. Timothy Hampton, 47, a scientist involved in monitoring nuclear activity, was found dead last week at the bottom of a stairwell in Vienna. An initial autopsy concluded that there were ‘no suspicious circumstances’. But it is understood that Mr Hampton’s widow Olena Gryshcuk and her family were deeply unhappy with that verdict. Now a doctor who undertook a second post-mortem examination on behalf...

Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday that countries opposed to Iran's atomic program should give up their own nuclear weapons, and attacked as "arrogant" the sanctions imposed on Ankara's neighbor. He also said he wanted the Middle East, and then the whole world, to rid itself of nuclear weapons. During a trip to Iran this week, Erdogan said he backed Tehran's "right to peaceful nuclear energy" and called its approach in nuclear talks with Western powers "positive." The trip added to Western concern that NATO's only Muslim member may be shifting its foreign-policy focus towards the Islamic world...

Watching the Obama administration launch its "new era of engagement" over the past 10 months, most seasoned observers have pondered two questions: First, if engagement fails, will the Obama team ever acknowledge that it has failed? And what then? The first question is about to be answered. The main object of the "new era of engagement," Iran, has settled back into its old game-playing. The joint proposal agreed to by the United States, France and Russia, to have Iran ship 70 percent of its low-enriched uranium to Russia this year, was a compromise, as administration officials acknowledge. It might theoretically...

When the Fermi team did the calculations, using the most conservative estimates for how astrophysics plays into this, they determined that the mass scale must be at least 1.2 times the Planck mass, and by using reasonable but less conservative assumptions, they derived lower limits on the mass scale of up to 100 times the Planck mass. One way to interpret this is to say that there is no variation of the speed of light coming from any quantum gravity effects at less than 1.2 times the Planck mass. And given that some quantum gravity frameworks predict that effects should...

MOSCOW -- Russia should build a new nuclear-powered spaceship for prospective manned missions to Mars and other planets, the nation's space chief said in remarks released Thursday.Anatoly Perminov first proposed building the ship at a government meeting Wednesday but initially didn't explain its purpose.He said in remarks posted Thursday on his agency's Web site that the nuclear spaceship should be used for human flights to Mars and other planets. He said the project is challenging technologically, but could capitalize on the Soviet and Russian experience in the field.Perminov said the preliminary design could be ready by 2012. He said it...

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has proclaimed victory in his battle with the West, claiming he has compelled the US and its allies to 'co-operate' with Iran's nuclear programme. As Iran's nuclear negotiator handed in the country's response to a proposed deal to process its enriched uranium stocks abroad, Mr Ahmadinejad hailed a change in Western policy from "confrontation to co-operation". "We welcome fuel exchange, nuclear co-operation, building of power plants and reactors and we are ready to co-operate," he said in a speech shown live on state television. But he said he would not retreat "one iota" in his demand that...

"Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Thursday that Tehran will not give up its nuclear program although the West and Iran are now cooperating on the issue"

Iran is directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of more American military personnel than any other country since the Vietnam War. Tehran does not lack the will to stand up to the United States even without nuclear weapons. It's chilling to consider how much more bold Iran will be with an atomic arsenal.

FRYAZINO (Moscow Region), October 28 (RIA Novosti) - The Russian Federal Space Agency Roscosmos has developed a design for a piloted spacecraft powered by a nuclear engine, the head of the agency said on Wednesday. "The project is aimed at implementing large-scale space exploration programs," Anatoly Perminov said at a meeting of the commission on the modernization of the Russian economy. He added that the development of Megawatt-class nuclear space power systems (MCNSPS) for manned spacecraft was crucial for Russia if the country wanted to maintain a competitive edge in the space race, including the exploration of the Moon and...

Perhaps more than any other open-source outfit, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments has put serious intellectual muscle into examining the implications of waging war in an environment where potential enemies don’t just threaten to use nuclear weapons, they actually detonate a nuclear device. While nuclear disarmament remains a noble aspiration, the world is going in the other direction, that is, more states with more nukes, says CSBA President Andrew Krepinevich in a new report, US Nuclear Forces: Meeting the Challenge of a Proliferated World. From four nuclear states in the 1960s, there are now double that number (adding...

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration is quietly laying the groundwork for long-range strategy that could be used to contain a nuclear-equipped Iran and deter its leaders from using atomic weapons. U.S. officials insist they are not resigned to a nuclear Iran and are pressing negotiations to prevent it from joining the world's nuclear club. But at the same time, the administration has set in place the building blocks of policies to contend with an Iran armed with atomic weapons. Those elements, former officials and analysts said, include the newly revised defense shield for Europe and deeper defense ties to Gulf...

A danger sign outside the Tuwaitha nuclear facility, south of Baghdad. The site was looted following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Iraq has started lobbying for approval to again become a nuclear player, almost 19 years after British and American war planes destroyed Saddam Hussein's last two reactors, the Guardian has learned. The Iraqi government has approached the French nuclear industry about rebuilding at least one of the reactors that was bombed at the start of the first Gulf war. The government has also contacted the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and United Nations to seek ways around resolutions that...

ISLAMABAD: SNIPPET: "‘But we worry about proliferation and we have good reason to worry about proliferation,’ she said, alluding to Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan. The United States has warned that the scientist, who was effectively put under a five-year house arrest after he admitted leaking nuclear secrets to Iran, North Korea and Libya, is still a proliferation risk. ‘We want to encourage Pakistan to join with us in the non-proliferation review conference that will be held next spring,’ Clinton told reporters travelling with her. ‘We want them to work with us on the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty. We want them...

SNIPPET: "Islamabad, Oct. 20 (ANI): A Pakistani nuclear scientist is among 32 members of banned terror organization Hizb- ut-Tahrir who were arrested from Islamabad on Sunday. Rizwan Aleem, a nuclear scientist and a PhD student at the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology is currently being interrorgated by the Islamabad Police. According to Daily Times, the arrested activists also include a USAID official and an environmental scientist. Abid Mehmood is an officer of a United States Agency for International Development while Aman Hamza is an environmental scientist." SNIPPET: "Nearly, all the 32 are highly qualified persons such...

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran wants major amendments within the framework of a U.N. nuclear fuel deal which it broadly accepts, state media said, a move that could unravel the plan and expose Tehran to the threat of harsher sanctions. The European Union's foreign policy chief said on Tuesday there was no need to rework the U.N. draft and he and France's foreign minister suggested Tehran would rekindle demands for tougher international sanctions if it tried to undo the plan. Among the central planks of the plan opposed by Iran -- but requested by the West to cut the risk of...

Russia’s new military doctrine, which is to come into force in 2010, has provoked a heated debate, first of all because it stipulates preemptive nuclear strikes. Moreover, it says that nuclear weapons may also be used in local conflicts in case of critical threats to Russia’s national security. The wording has encouraged some people to say that Russia intends to use nuclear weapons in conflicts with its closest neighbors – former Soviet republics. A critical threat to Russia’s national security can come from different types of conflicts, including a large-scale war with a block of countries, or a hypothetical territorial...

LONDONDERRY TOWNSHIP, DAUPIN COUNTY - The Three Mile Island Nuclear Power station shut down its unit one reactor on Monday capping off a record run. The unit one reactor broke the world record for the longest continuous days of operation for all pressurized water reactors. The Dauphin County based plant operated for 705 days before shutting down for a scheduled refueling and maintenance outage on Monday. The old record of 692 days was set earlier this year by a nuclear power plant in Maryland. "We don't really set out to break world records, but they're a result of what we...

Senator Lamar Alexander on new nuclear development. Communications experts say that fear is the best way to get attention when you're trying to win an argument. Groups who oppose nuclear power have certainly mastered that technique by playing to economic, environmental, and safety fears. So I'd like to introduce a little element of fear into my argument here. I want to suggest what could happen if we don't adopt nuclear power as a more important part of our energy future- if Russia and China and a lot of other countries go ahead with nuclear - as they are now -...

On balance, nuclear power is already a good thing. But we can only have it if we submit to a massive tax bill? What you're seeing here, basically, is a right being withheld. Inherently, you have the right to nuclear power as long as you are willing to pay all the externalities associated with generating it. But here you're being told that you will only be permitted to exercise that right if you are willing to give up another right -- in this case, paying the tax burden of cap and trade. This is not why Congress exists. On principle,...

Communications experts say that fear is the best way to get attention when you’re trying to win an argument. Groups who oppose nuclear power have certainly mastered that technique by playing to economic, environmental, and safety fears. So I’d like to introduce a little element of fear into my argument here. I want to suggest what could happen if we don’t adopt nuclear power as a more important part of our energy future-- if Russia and China and a lot of other countries go ahead with nuclear – as they are now – while we get left behind. Are we...

Iran's nuclear programme Deadline missed Oct 24th 2009 From Economist.com Iran misses a deadline for responding to an offer for others to enrich its uranium IRAN has again failed to do deadlines. It has been evading them in the seven years since an opposition group first outed its extensive covert nuclear programme, despite five UN Security Council resolutions that have told it to halt its suspect nuclear work. After talks that ended in Vienna on October 21st, Iran and the three countries trying to strike a side-deal over new fuel for a Tehran-based nuclear reactor were told by Mohamed ElBaradei,...

US President Barack Obama called French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Saturday, to reaffirm their commitment to a UN-backed plan that would ship most of Iran's uranium abroad for enrichment.

Iran yesterday angrily denied Israeli media assertions that senior nuclear officials from the two countries held confidential talks last month in what was portrayed as the first direct exchange between the two arch enemies for 30 years. The reports sparked a flurry of official statements from Tehran and Tel Aviv which, unusually, agreed on many points. Both acknowledged sending representatives to an international conference in Cairo on nuclear disarmament. Each confirmed there were no direct, bilateral talks. The deliberations were meant to be confidential. But leaked accounts of the conference infuriated Tehran, which said the notion of any sort of...

ran told the International Atomic Energy Agency it will respond by the middle of next week to a proposal to ship its nuclear fuel abroad for reprocessing, pushing back a deadline and raising concerns about Iranian intentions in the negotiations. The United Nations nuclear watchdog had given all parties until Friday to sign off formally on the deal, which was tentatively agreed to by Iranian negotiators on Wednesday in Vienna, after several days of talks with the U.S., France, Russia and IAEA representatives. Under the proposed deal hammered out earlier in the week, Iran would ship most of its nuclear...

Iran, Russia and America met in Vienna under the supervision of the IAEA.The meeting is to discuss the shipment of nuclear fuel with about %20 of enrichment to Tehran's research reactor which produces radioactive medicine for hospitals.IRI's representative in the IAEA Ali-Asghar Soltaniyeh is leading Iran's delegation. IAEA's director-general Mohammad Elbaradei is also attending the meeting.The Islamic Republic of Iran demands that up to %5 of enrichment for Tehran's research reactor to be done in Iran and then be sent to Russia, France or America for more enrichment.

A British nuclear expert has fallen to his death from the 17th floor of the United Nations offices in Vienna. The 47-year-old man died after falling more than 120ft to the bottom of a stairwell. He has not been named. He worked for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization, an international agency charged with uncovering illicit nuclear tests. A UN spokesman in the Austrian capital said there were no "suspicious circumstances" surrounding the man's death. Police said no other person was believed to have been involved. No suicide note has been found. Four months ago another UN worker also believed to...

A suicide bomber attacked a suspected nuclear-weapons site Friday in Pakistan, raising fears about the security of the nuclear arsenal, while two other terrorist blasts made it another bloody day in the country’s struggle against extremism. Increasingly daring and sophisticated attacks by terrorists allied with al Qaida on some of Pakistan’s most sensitive and best-protected installations have led to warnings that extremists could damage a nuclear facility or seize nuclear material. Pakistan's nuclear sites are mostly in the northwest of the country, close to the capital, Islamabad, to keep them

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration expressed mild disappointment Friday that Iran withheld a decision on whether to accept a U.N.-coordinated plan that could ease fears about Iran's potential for making a nuclear weapon. The U.S., along with Russia and France, officially endorsed the plan Friday. The State Department said it was unhappy that Iran was not ready to embrace the plan, which calls for Iran to ship most of its low-enriched uranium to Russia for further enrichment and eventual use as fuel for a research reactor in Tehran that makes medical isotopes and is under regular monitoring by a U.N....

Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian; Robert Baer a former CIA field officer. Both have studied the Middle East for decades, traveled to the area repeatedly in recent years and written about the region extensively. And both have become convinced that we may be facing a cataclysm. Hanson and Baer each presented his analysis during an interview this past week. Although they differ on certain matters, they agree on five observations. The first: If not already capable of doing so, Iran will be able to produce nuclear weapons in mere months. Baer noted that Iran's scientific and technical capacity...

President Obama’s policy of diplomatic engagement with Iran is close to collapse as Tehran backtracks on a crucial deal aimed at cutting its stockpiles of nuclear fuel. Iran agreed a deal “in principle” at talks in Geneva to ship the majority of its low-enriched uranium overseas for reprocessing into nuclear fuel that could be used for a medical research reactor. A deal outlining this was finalised in Vienna this week and a deadline of midnight tonight was set for the agreement to be sealed with Tehran. The framework deal, along with an offer to allow international inspectors into its newly-revealed...

President Obama's policy of diplomatic engagement with Iran is close to collapse as Tehran backtracks on a crucial deal aimed at cutting its stockpiles of nuclear fuel. Tehran's latest move comes straight from a well-thumbed Iranian playbook and looks like yet another stalling tactic to test the West's resolve and buy time to avert new sanctions.

The Pakistani Taliban targeted an air base believed to be one of the country’s secret nuclear weapons facilities on Friday among a wave of suicide bombings that killed at least 25 people across the country. The attack on guard post at the Pakistan Aeronautical Complex at Kamra, about 40 miles outside Islamabad, killed eight people and raising fears about the security of the nuclear-armed state’s arsenal. Officials were quick to deny that the facility, the major research centre for the air force, had links to the nuclear programme. However, Pakistan doesn’t specify which sites are involved in the programme and...

A suspected suicide bomber has killed six people outside Pakistan's main air force maintenance facility. Police said the attack took place near the Kamra aeronautical complex, 60km (35 miles) from the capital, Islamabad. The bomber blew himself up when he was stopped at a checkpoint outside the complex. Among the dead were two security officials. The attack comes as the Pakistani army continues its drive against Taliban bases in South Waziristan. A wave of attacks on Pakistani cities has killed nearly 185 people during the month of October alone. "It was a suicide attack, which killed six people, including four...

Washington Post columnist David Ignatius passes on a report in Nucleonics Week that Iran's uranium enrichment may be stuck at 3.5% due to impurities. The Iranians have not been able to remove low percentages of metallic fluorides from the UF-6 feed stock that they've laboriously enriched to 3.5% U-235 over the past five years. This has the potential to stop their enrichment program cold -- at the level used for civilian nuclear power. Thus, the Obama administration's offer to have the Iranians' impure 3.5% UF6 shipped to Russia where it can be enriched to 19.75% in that nation's modern, high-capacity...

With the U.S. defense chief in Seoul for security talks, a group of scholars and retired military officials have called for a redeployment of tactical nuclear weapons in South Korea to counter North Korea's nuclear drive. They also urged the United States to delay the planned transfer of wartime control of South Korean troops to Seoul beyond 2012, citing lingering threats from the North. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates arrived in Seoul Wednesday for the annual Security Consultative Meeting, which is focused on steps to deter military threats from North Korea. Gates and South Korean Defense Minister Kim Tae-young were...

U.S., Iran move closer to nuclear dealRegional security concerns and diplomacy clear a path to a multinational agreement in which Tehran would transfer its nuclear material abroad to be processed for medical purposes. By Borzou Daragahi October 22, 2009 Reporting from Beirut - Deft diplomacy and regional security woes are driving Tehran and Washington toward a deal on Iran's nuclear program, experts say, illustrated by movement Wednesday in talks to transfer most of the Islamic Republic's fissile material abroad to be processed for medical uses. For three decades, Iran and the U.S. have been locked in a frustrating diplomatic flirtation....

A British nuclear expert has plunged to his death from the 17th floor of a United Nations HQ, just as top-level talks with Iran began. The 47-year-old official, only identified so far as Timothy H, toppled about 120ft from the UN's building in the Austrian capital yesterday. He is believed to have been a member of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organisation and was due to take part in the UN-Iran discussions starting today.