News

Radiation pills now available 

Middletown mayor questions why KI tablets are being distributed in Harrisburg instead of the borough

 

by Garry Lenton Press And Journal Staff : 9/2/2009

 

The state Department of Health is distributing potassium iodide, or KI, pills today and tomorrow to residents who live or work near a nuclear power station such as Three Mile Island.

 

 The pills protect the thyroid from radioactive iodine, which can be released during a nuclear accident.

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 To read the latest issue of Nuclear Monitor, open pdf:

 

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August 27, 2009 

By BEN LEACH Staff Writer 

 

An aluminum pipe that was leaking tritium at the Oyster Creek Generating Station in Lacey Township, New Jersey, has been removed and the leak has been stopped.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission confirmed Thursday that a 25-foot-long portion of pipe was removed and will be studied by a laboratory to see what could have caused the leak.

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August 28, 2009

No safety issues found to prevent reactors from running another 20 years.

 

By Rory Sweeney 

Times Leader Staff Writer

 The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission concluded that there are no safety issues that would stop PPL Corp. from relicensing its Susquehanna nuclear station for another 20 years, according to a report released by the agency on Thursday.

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By Kathryn Casa | Vermont Guardian

 

Posted March 24, 2005

 

The casks that Vermont Yankee plans to use to store highly radioactive nuclear waste in Vernon are “time bombs” riddled with material, design and welding flaws, according to a former nuclear industry inspector and auditor of the Holtec cask system.

 

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Aug. 26, 2009

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Younger Americans are being exposed to worrisome amounts of radiation from medical scans that increase their risk of cancer, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.

They said the cumulative risk of repeated exposure to radiation from medical scans is a public health threat that needs to be addressed.

"Even though the individual risk for any patient exposed to these kinds of doses may be small, when you add that up over millions of people, that can be a concerning population risk," Dr. Reza Fazel of Emory University in Atlanta and colleagues wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine.

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August 26, 2009

By MATTHEW L. WALD

 

WASHINGTON — Many of the hundreds of workers at the Shearon Harris nuclear plant in New Hill, N.C., are busy with high-tech tasks like calibrating equipment, monitoring radiation fields or controlling the reactor. But around the clock, there are three on duty who might have come out of another century.

They sniff for smoke.

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 Three Mile Island-Alert News Report

 By Marlene Lang

 

 
A turbine valve failed in mid-position at the PPL's Susquehanna Steam Electric Station nuclear power plant near Berwick, Pa., on the morning of Aug. 18. 
 
According to a memo from PPL to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, plant inspectors performing a weekly functionality test found the high pressure coolant injection (HPCI) valve stem in the plant's Unit 1 nuclear reactor "was not in the full closed position." 
 
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 August 19, 2009

Changed F.B.I. Agents’ Role Shown When Radioactive Material Went Missing

 

By ERIC SCHMITT

NORWALK, Calif. — The report last month was chilling: a 55-gallon drum of radioactive material had gone missing during shipment from North Carolina to California. Even worse, the person who signed for the cargo was not an employee of the company that ordered the load.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation here ramped up, consulting health officials, questioning radiation specialists and tracking down the trucker who dropped off the material, which could be used in a radioactive-bomb attack. Three hours later, the shipper found the drum — still sitting on a loading dock 20 miles from its destination in the Los Angeles area — having confused it with a similar shipment sent to a different company on the same day.

For an F.B.I. team here that vets tips and threats about possible terrorist activity, it was yet another false alarm in a job largely defined by hoaxes and bogus leads that must still be run to ground.

“A lot of time we are chasing shadows,” said Lee Ann Bernardino, a 20-year F.B.I. special agent who handled the case, “but it’s better to do that than find out later you let something get by.”

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Article published Aug. 13, 2009

NRC: Dry cask test was eliminated

By Louis Porter Vermont Press Bureau

MONTPELIER – The concrete-and-steel "dry casks" used at the Vermont Yankee plant to store spent nuclear fuel were not tested as completely as they should have been, according to federal regulators.

But the decision by Holtec International, the New Jersey company that built the casks, to omit one set of tests does not pose a safety risk, Nuclear Regulatory Commission officials said Wednesday. That's because there were other kinds of inspections done on those casks, and the waste stored in the casks is not as hot as allowed, meaning they are safe even though they were not tested with pressurized helium as required under a federal licensing agreement.

About 109 of the casks that were not completely tested are in use nationwide, including five at Vermont Yankee, regulators say.

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