Nuclear’s cleanup cost threatens the expansion dream via DW

Posted on 2026/03/21 by nfield

Kiyo Dörrer

03/19/2026March 19, 2026

Standing in a 1960s industrial building by the German Baltic Sea coast, Florian Grose, holds a dosimeter as he moves towards a corner of the room. It starts beeping furiously.

“That’s around 10 microsieverts,” he says, dressed in protective overalls. A normal dose rate is under 0.2 microsieverts. “This is an area where I’d say we maybe should move a meter away. You shouldn’t stand or lie here for an hour,” Grose, a radiation protection worker, warns in a disarmingly jovial tone.

Inside special building one of the former nuclear power plant, parts of the wall are uneven and pockmarked — the result of workers hammering off layers of concrete, hunting for radioactive contamination. It’s been one of the “most difficult buildings to decontaminate and dismantle,” explains Kurt Radlof, who handles communications for the plant.

[…]

How to decommission a nuclear plant

Decommissioning a nuclear power plant is not like demolishing an office block. It’s a slow, painstaking, heavily regulated process that bears closer resemblance to surgery than construction.

The first step is removing the most radioactive parts: the fuel rods and everything around them. These go to the pools to cool. Because this high-level waste remains radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, it is then moved to storage. At Lubmin, that process alone took seven years.

Then the real work begins. Everything else — every pipe, cable, door and structural component — has to be measured for radioactivity and dismantled piece by piece. In the case of Lubmin, that means 330,000 tons of material.

Some contaminated components have to go to long-term, secure storage too, particularly the ones that sat closest to the nuclear fuel.

“It’s put in interim storage where it then can be prepared for final, permanent storage,” said Kurt Radloff.

Other components can be decontaminated, and after a series of checks, some can even be recycled.

When nuclear decommissioning doesn’t go to plan

It is an enormously complex and time-consuming process even when things run smoothly. Even more so when they don’t. Such as at Lubmin where Grose’s dosimeter is beeping.

Radioactive water used during operations has seeped into cracks in the plaster, spreading contamination through the walls, which is a surprise for the cleanup crew.

“If there was a crack in the plaster somewhere, which probably wasn’t uncommon back in 1990 — it seeped in and spread,” Grose explains. Every affected surface has to be identified and removed.

Leaked contamination is also a problem with other old reactors. Changing safety standards, limited space for waste storage, technological complexity, funding gaps and public opposition often add to the costs and delays.  At Lubmin, the original plan was to finish 10 years ago for around €1 billion. The current estimate is €10 billion, with completion expected in the mid-2040s.

Most countries require nuclear operators to set aside decommissioning funds in advance, but when that money falls short, governments and taxpayers step in. 

What happens to the leftover nuclear waste?

Even after decommissioning, the waste still needs to exit. High and intermediate-level nuclear waste must go to permanent storage. But of the 31 countries currently producing nuclear power, only two are building permanent underground storage facilities. Germany doesn’t have one yet.

Everything at Lubmin sits in an interim storage building, waiting for a permanent home. But finding a safe site to store nuclear waste in the long term is not easy. Radlof jokes that he likely won’t live long enough to see the high-level waste put away for good, “unless medicine makes some very significant advances.”

New reactors, including small modular reactors (SMRs), are being designed and built with decommissioning in mind. That includes more standardized components and modular structures that are theoretically easier to take apart.

But whether that will translate into shorter timelines or lower costs remains to be seen. None of those new reactors have been decommissioned and just two SMRs have been built at commercial scale.

The costs of not thinking about all that is clear. “The dismantling of the nuclear power plant wasn’t really part of the original plan. They really didn’t think about that during the planning stages of these power plants,” said Radloff.

Edited by: Tamsin Walker

This article was adapted from a DW Planet A video by Jennifer Collins.

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Germany won’t return to nuclear power, chancellor says via DW

Posted on 2026/03/12 by nfield

Jens Thurau

03/11/2026March 11, 2026

At a nuclear summit near Paris earlier this week, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described the transition from nuclear energy undertaken by some EU countries as a “strategic mistake.” Nuclear power, she said, is a “reliable, affordable source of low-emission electricity.”  She announced new EU financial assistance for nuclear power plants.

Von der Leyen’s words reverberated in Germany, which switched off its last nuclear reactor in 2023.

Von der Leyen’s father, Ernst Albrecht, like his daughter a member of Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), was the head of government of the state of Lower Saxony in the 1970s and a staunch supporter of nuclear energy.

He failed in his attempt to establish a final repository for highly radioactive nuclear waste in the east of his state, however. The village of Gorleben, which had been pinpointed as the place where that repository was to be built, became a symbol of the struggle of hundreds of thousands of people against nuclear energy. The repository was never built.

No German nuclear plants since 2023

Von der Leyen’s appeal for a return to nuclear energy is meeting with mixed reactions at best in Berlin.

From 1961 onward, a total of 37 reactors within Germany supplied up to 30% of the nationy’s electricity. The country began phasing out nuclear power 15 years ago, following the disaster in Fukushima, Japan, on March 11, 2011. The last German nuclear power plant was taken offline in 2023. Spain and Austria have also announced that they have permanently shut down nuclear power.

Since then, there has been a recurring debate in Germany about whether a return to nuclear power would be sensible, given the fluctuation in the production of renewables like solar and wind energy and especially given the scarcity of oil and gas imports during international crises such as the war in Ukraine or the US-Israeli war on Iran and subsequent escalations across the Middle East.

On Tuesday Chancellor Friedrich Merz, himself a member of the CDU, said previous federal governments had decided to phase out nuclear energy and rolling back that decision was not possible. “I regret this,” he said, “but it is the way it is, and we are now concentrating on the energy policy we have.”

Though the CDU and allied Bavarian Christian Social Union support nuclear energy, Merz also knows that a rollback would need to find a majority in the Bundestag, the lower house of Germany’s parliament. And and the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party’s votes would be needed to make up the numbers. Merz has said he would not work with the AfD.

SPD rejects new nuclear power plants

The conservatives’ junior coalition partner, the center-left Social Democrats (SPD), have rejected von der Leyen’s proposal to return to nuclear energy: Environment Minister Carsten Schneider, of the SPD, saidt nuclear energy had already cost taxpayers billions. “If a risky technology is still dependent on state support after three-quarters of a century, and better alternatives have long existed, then consequences should be drawn,” Schneider said.

Schneider also rejected the suggestion to focus primarily on mobile reactors, so-called Small Modular Reactors (SMRs): “These small nuclear power plants have been in the works for decades, but there still has not been a breakthrough, and there is still a struggle to secure subsidies,” he said.

Markus Krebber, the CEO of Germany’s largest electricity provider, RWE, recently rejected the idea of ​​small reactors. “As things stand, an investment in SMRs is not feasible for a private company,” Krebber told the newsportal Político. He said no supplier worldwide could commit to construction times at fixed and negotiated costs. Companies will not provide funding for small reactors, Krebber said. […]

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President Trump’s radical attack on radiation safety via Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Posted on 2025/10/27 by nfield

By Daniel Hirsch, Haakon Williams, Cameron Kuta | October 15, 2025

In May, President Donald Trump issued a series of executive orders that, in part, require the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to consider dramatically weakening its radiation protection standard. If federal radiation limits are gutted in the manner urged by the president, the new standard could allow four out of five people exposed over a 70-year lifetime to develop a cancer they would not otherwise get.

Contesting the scientific consensus. Section 5(b) of the executive order—formally titled “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission”—directs the NRC to issue a proposed “wholesale revision of its regulations and guidance documents,” including reconsideration of the agency’s “reliance on the linear no-threshold (LNT) model for radiation exposure.” The LNT model maintains that risk from radiation exposure is proportional to the dose: Even a tiny amount of radiation causes some small but real increased risk of cancer, and that risk goes up linearly as the dose increases.

While most Americans have doubtless never heard of the LNT model, it has been the bedrock of radiation exposure risk analysis for decades and forms the basis of public health protection from radiation. The LNT model is scientifically robust, supported by the longstanding and repeatedly affirmed determinations on low-dose radiation by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, virtually all international scientific bodies, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the NRC itself.

Despite the LNT model’s long track record and the well-established body of scientific evidence upon which it is built, President Trump has unilaterally issued a presidential finding that this scientific consensus is wrong. His order could lead to LNT’s complete abandonment in a matter of months, posing a serious increase in the amount of radiation that industries and government agencies would be allowed to inflict upon the public.

If the NRC goes along with Trump’s assertion, the weakening of radiation protection standards would likely be extreme. Advocates of abandoning LNT have often asserted that low-dose radiation is harmless or even beneficial, and therefore, that the public health radiation limits should be hugely increased. In 2015, three petitions for rulemaking to the NRC proposed doing away with the LNT model and increasing allowable radiation exposures for everyone—including children and pregnant women—to 10 rem. (The Roentgen equivalent man (rem) is a unit of effective absorbed radiation in human tissue, equivalent to one roentgen of X-rays. One rem is equal to 0.01 Sievert in the international system of units.)

One petition to the NRC went so far as to ask, “Why deprive the public of the benefits of low-dose radiation?” The NRC strongly rejected the petitions in 2021, citing the conclusions of numerous scientific bodies that “[c]onvincing evidence has not yet demonstrated the existence of a threshold.”

Low-level, or “low-dose,” radiation is generally defined as a dose range of 10 rem and below. However, “low dose” is something of a misnomer, as 10 rem is still relatively high. Even when doses are low, they nonetheless cause substantial harm when spread across a large population over time, especially for sensitive groups like children.
[…]

Despite what opponents of the LNT model claim, there is no threshold at 10 rem below which there is no measurable health harm. A substantial body of scientific work has demonstrated significant negative health impacts well below 10 rem. Beginning in the 1950s, pioneering Oxford researcher Alice Stewart demonstrated that a single fetal X-ray with a dose of 200 millirem (0.2 rem) was associated with a measurable increase in the risk of that child dying of cancer. The radiation establishment fought Stewart’s findings vigorously, but her research has long since been vindicated.

More recently, a major study covering an international cohort of over 300,000 nuclear facility workers has found that annual doses well below 1 rem create measurable increases in the risk of developing a variety of cancers, and that, as NRC put it, “even tiny doses slightly boost the risk of leukemia.” A second massive study of nearly one million European children found that those who received a CT scan, at an average dose of 800 millirem (0.8 rem), suffered a measurable increase in their risk of getting cancer.

Standards already weak. Radiation protection standards should be tightened, not weakened. The US government has a long history of underestimating radiation risks. The more scientists have learned about low-dose radiation, the more their estimates of the risk per unit dose have tended to increase. Yet the NRC has not updated in step with the science.

The NRC protection limit for workers of 5 rem per year was set in the early 1960s and has not changed since, despite decades of increasing official estimates of radiation risk. The current best estimate, from the National Academies’ BEIR VII, indicates that one out of every five workers receiving the NRC’s allowable dose each year from ages 18 to 65 would develop a cancer.

NRC’s radiation exposure limits for the public have not been updated in 35 years. Despite a requirement to employ EPA’s more conservative radiation risk standards, the NRC has long ignored it and instead continues to use 100 millirem per year—100 times lower than what Trump’s executive order could lead to. Current risk figures from the National Academies and the EPA indicate that 70 years of exposure at that level would result in nearly one in 100 people getting cancer from that exposure. That is 100 to 10,000 times higher than the EPA’s acceptable risk range. As the former director of EPA’s Office of Radiation and Indoor Air said years ago, “To put it bluntly, radiation should not be treated as a privileged pollutant. You and I should not be exposed to higher risks from radiation sites than we should be from sites which had contained any other environmental pollutant.”

The NRC held a webinar in July to gather public feedback on implementing President Trump’s executive order on abolishing the LNT model. Many presenters—including representatives from the National Council on Radiation Protection and the Union of Concerned Scientists—gave a vigorous defense of the LNT model, as did many of the comments from the public. Yet the NRC, despite itself having strongly reaffirmed this standard only 4 years ago, seemed to minimize low-dose radiation risks and suggested that all radiation cancer risk models be treated equally (including the long-discredited view that low-dose radiation has health benefits). More concerning, the NRC has put its thumb on the scale, giving special treatment to LNT opposition by posting among the general meeting materials a link to one presenter’s paper, which suggests that an annual dose of 10 rem is acceptably safe.

At a time when radiation protection should be strengthened, President Trump has directed action to weaken it markedly. If the NRC implements the executive order, the potential outcome would be a new, deeply flawed radiation standard as much as a thousand times weaker than the current standard, resulting in a massive increase in radiation-related health hazards across the American population.

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‘It’s Sellafield or nothing’: what life is like growing up in the shadow of Europe’s oldest nuclear site via The Guardian

Posted on 2025/10/07 by nfield


‘It’s Sellafield or nothing’: what life is like growing up in the shadow of Europe’s oldest nuclear site

Young people in Whitehaven on England’s north-west coast rely on the power plant for everything from jobs to civic investment. But for those who see their future elsewhere, options can be limited.

It is a rainy Thursday in Whitehaven on the north-west coast of England, but the seafront is buzzing with activity. This Saturday is Harbour Fest, a day of music, performance and activities. An array of colourful street food vendors are already setting up.

It’s unusual to see such excitement on the seafront, says 18-year-old Lacey Ritson. Growing up, Lacey and her friends would gravitate to picturesque Saint Bees along the coast or the nearby Lake District if they wanted to spend time by the water. And sometimes, she says, “we’d sit by the river and look at people, guessing who worked at Sellafield – like, ‘they’ve got a nice car – they’re from Sellafield’”.

Sellafield, Europe’s largest nuclear site, looms large in Whitehaven at the centre of Britain’s “nuclear coast”. While it has not generated energy since 2003, decommissioning is expected to take until at least 2125. Between Sellafield Ltd and its wider supply chain, the site employs about 60,000 workers, more than 80% from Cumbria.

The result is that everybody “either works at Sellafield or knows people who do”, says Lacey, whose mum, aunt and cousins all work on the site. Whitehaven’s young people have their own group speak: “Sellafield traffic” for the tailbacks on surrounding roads at home time each weekday; “Sellafield payday” as shorthand in hospitality for a busy weekend. Teenagers talk casually about “going into nuclear”.

The nuclear sector’s influence is also felt economically: each year, Sellafield Ltd, its supply chain and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), which owns the site, provide millions of pounds worth of funding for local projects, from the redevelopment of Whitehaven’s former bus station to the creation of a new digital and gaming hub, and the cleanup of local rivers. This summer, the main stage at Pride was sponsored by engineering firm Mott MacDonald.

“I’d say round here you are helped a lot more than other coastal towns just because of Sellafield and the companies that supply them,” Lacey says.

Just over half of the population of Whitehaven (and neighbouring town Workington) are in work, a figure slightly below the England average, but there are notably more in apprenticeships than the country average.

For those who want to work at the nuclear plant, the career path can be lucrative, with apprentices earning up to about £30,000 at Sellafield Ltd. But those who want something different can find themselves feeling cut off.

[…]

There is also a high turnover in school staff, Cole says, with many teachers leaving for higher-paying careers in the nuclear sector.

In the town centre, at the Whitehaven Foyer, which provides temporary accommodation for young people, Sellafield is far from residents’ minds, despite Arup renting office space here. Many of those living here are care-experienced or have experienced poor mental health; the number of young people in care and the number of mental health hospital admissions in the area are higher here than nationally.

[…]

Last month, the government announced that parts of South Whitehaven would receive £20m of investment over the next decade from its Pride in Place programme for “overlooked” communities. A residents’ survey about how the money should be spent has already highlighted the need for better youth facilities and opportunities for young people, says Williamson.

[…]

She previously worked alongside the council on the university’s Connected Communities project, in which a group of girls from Whitehaven carried out their own community research and projects, including setting up a dementia cafe when they found that older people were more likely to experience loneliness. “It showed the passion and empathy young people have for their local community, and how important it is to recognise their insight, skill and compassion and work with them to create opportunities.”

[…]

Jamie Reed, director of socio-economics at the NDA, was unable to meet the Guardian and local young people. In response to questions about whether all of Whitehaven’s young people were benefiting equally from Sellafield’s impact, Reed wrote in a statement: “One of our areas of focus is investing in developing Stem skills in young people so we have a pipeline of talent, but it’s important to us that we fund a diverse range of projects.

“Across West Cumbria and the UK these include projects which provide mental health support, tackle issues around poverty and social inclusion, support innovation in the supply chain, and improve and protect the environment.”

For Lacey, who attended Energy Coast University Technical College, which is funded in part by the NDA and heavily invested in by the construction firm Morgan Sindall, a career in nuclear was always a consideration. And yet, she says, “I didn’t want to go and work there just because it’s what so many other people do.” Instead, she will soon begin an architecture degree at Newcastle University, one of only two peers going into higher education, most of the rest applying for nuclear apprenticeships.

[…]

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Holtec’s announcement that Palisades has transitioned back to “operations status” via Beyond Nuclear

Posted on 2025/08/27 by nfield

Media Statement by Kevin Kamps, Radioactive Waste Specialist at Beyond Nuclear

Contact: Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste specialist, Beyond Nuclear, (240) 462-3216, kevin@beyondnuclear.org

COVERT TWP., MI, and WASHINGTON, D.C., AUGUST 26, 2025–“What a nuclear nightmare this is for our entire region. Holtec, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), Governor Whitmer, the Department of Energy (DOE), state and federal legislators, and others are playing radioactive Russian roulette on the Lake Michigan shore. The Japanese Parliament concluded that the root cause of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear catastrophe was collusion, between the safety regulatory agency, company, and government officials. We have such dangerous collusion in spades at Palisades. This is a monstrous nuclear experiment, and area residents are the guinea pigs.

Holtec’s Palisades zombie reactor restart scheme is not only unprecedented, but also unneeded, insanely expensive for taxpayers and ratepayers, and very risky for health, safety, security, and the environment.

We’ve dodged many radioactive bullets at Palisades since it first fired up in 1971. How many more can we dodge, as Holtec rolls the dice on this potentially deadly gamble, aided and abetted by NRC’s ready rubber stamps, and enabled by federal and state bailouts of $3.12 billion, and still counting, from an unwitting public?

But not everyone has dodged those radioactive bullets since 1971. There has long been evidence of elevated cancer rates in the area. Immediately next door to Palisades to the south, at Palisades Park Country Club, a 105-year old resort community of 200 cottages, a shocking 50 thyroid cancer diagnoses have been alleged, not to mention other cancers. Thyroid cancer is so exceedingly rare, there should not be a single case in such a small population of mostly part-time residents. Palisades’ so-called ‘routine releases’ of hazardous radioactivity during ‘normal operations’ could well be the cause.

FEMA has patted itself on the back for ramming eight years of neglected radiological emergency preparedness exercises and trainings into just the past few months. And yet, regular news headlines are decrying FEMA’s free fall under the Trump administration’s mass firings and budget cuts. Is southwest Michigan and beyond ready for a Chornobyl- or Fukushima-scale nuclear catastrophe, which is now a distinct possibility at the restarted Palisades? Even if evacuations go smoothly, which they will not, area residents could well never get to return home again, due to the lingering radioactive contamination downstream, downwind, up the food chain, and down the generations.

Talk about waste, fraud, and abuse. Through a rookie error — Holtec has never operated a reactor, let alone repaired one, nor restarted one — the company severely further damaged already age-degraded steam generators that should have been entirely replaced two decades ago. Now it has slapped some Band-Aid fixes on a very large number of severely cracked tubes, while unplugging 617 tubes that were plugged 35 years ago, as a precaution against damaging vibrations, for which Palisades’ steam generator design is infamous.

Our environmental coalition legally challenged these inadequate shortcuts on safety. Our expert witness, Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer with more than 50 years of relevant experience, testified he has never seen steam generators so degraded that have not been entirely replaced. He played a key role in the permanent shutdown of two reactors at San Onofre in southern California in 2013, due to severe steam generator tube degradation.

The rupture of a single tube, which is all but guaranteed after Palisades restarts, will release a certain amount of hazardous, ionizing radioactivity into the environment. But a cascade of a large enough number of tubes could cause a full-blown reactor core meltdown, unleashing catastrophic quantities of hazardous ionizing radioactivity, which would then blow with the wind, fall with the rain, flow in Lake Michigan, and bio-accumulate, wherever it falls out over time.

Close calls with ruptured tubes at Indian Point, New York in 2000, as well as Byron, Illinois and San Onofre, California in 2012, have been forgotten all about at Palisades.But the steam generators aren’t the only safety-critical system, structure, or component at the breaking point, after 51 previous problem-plagued years of operations, from 1971 to 2022.

The reactor pressure vessel is the worst neutron-embrittled in the country, and perhaps the whole world, at increasing risk of pressurized thermal shock through-wall fracture.The reactor vessel closure head should have been replaced 20 years ago, but never has been, despite the cautionary tale of the Davis-Besse, Ohio ‘Hole in the Head Fiasco’ near miss in 2002. Why wasn’t the lid replaced? Because NRC has never required it.

The sumps and strainers could become quickly blocked in an emergency, as calcium silicate containment insulation coating dissolves into a sludge of Elmer’s Glue consistency, clogging core coolant system flow. This problem has been known about for decades.

Holtec has asked NRC to allow it to kick the can down the road for years or decades longer on fire protection upgrades, as it already has done for a half-century, after the infamous Browns Ferry Unit 1 fire in Alabama in 1975. Fire is the root cause of half of all reactor core meltdown scenarios. Palisades had very serious fire protection scandals nine years ago, brought to light by security guard whistleblowers, who were then scapegoated, with no long-needed upgrades implemented.

Palisades has had numerous high-profile security breaches as well, even after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., which included consideration by Al Qaeda of targeting multiple nuclear facilities. Domestic terrorist groups have also attempted to attack nuclear power plants in the U.S.

Palisades has had the worst operating experience in industry with control rod drive mechanism (CRDM) seal leaks, beginning in 1972, and continuing until 2022. Despite this, the root cause has never been determined, and corrective action has never been taken to prevent it from recurring. Just over a decade ago, complete replacement of degraded CRDM seals led to nearly 200 workers, including women of childbearing age, being exposed to unnecessarily high radiation doses.

As exhausting as the list above is, it is not exhaustive. Palisades has yet more pathways to meltdown. Holtec’s unprecedented restart of the supposedly closed for good Palisades reactor will put the entire Great Lakes Basin, and all who call it home, at existential risk, 95% of the United States’ surface freshwater, 84% of North America’s, and 21% of the world’s, drinking water for more than 40 million people.

Holtec has hidden behind regulation-free zone decommissioning status since it took over at the supposedly closed for good Palisades reactor on June 28, 2022. This included a waiver from radiological emergency preparedness that NRC should never have granted, given the high risks of highly radioactive irradiated nuclear fuel still stored on-site. In fact, from December 2024 to April 2025, Holtec performed a large number of transfers of this high-level radioactive waste from the indoor wet storage pool, to outdoor dry storage casks. The movement of such heavy loads over the pool is inherently dangerous, and thus should not have been done with no evacuation plan on the books, and one that had not even been subjected to trainings or exercises in many long years.

Holtec promised to decommission Palisades, from 2020 till September 9, 2022, when it announced, alongside Gov. Whitmer, that it intended to restart Palisades instead. Thus, Holtec perpetrated a big lie, a con job, and a bait and switch trick. What is Holtec lying about now? That the restart will be safe? I guess we will see.

It’s ironic Holtec has already declared victory, in that multiple License Amendment Requests (LAR) have not yet received official approval by NRC. This includes an LAR to further delay decades overdue fire protection upgrades. It seems Holtec is quite confident in NRC’s complicity as to the final outcome. Because so much is at stake, we will continue to resist Holtec’s Palisades restart. If and when the NRC Commissioners reject all our numerous safety and environmental appeals of agency staff and licensing board approvals, we will take our appeal to federal court at the earliest opportunity.”

A one-stop-shop for Beyond Nuclear website posts about resistance to Palisades — both to Holtec’s zombie reactor restart, as well as its ‘Small Modular Reactor’ new builds scheme on the same tiny site — dating back to April 2022, when the schemes were first floated by Gov. Whitmer (restart) and Holtec CEO Krishna Singh (“SMR” new builds), can be found here.###
Beyond Nuclear is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit membership organization. Beyond Nuclear aims to educate and activate the public about the connections between nuclear power and nuclear weapons and the need to abolish both to safeguard our future. Beyond Nuclear advocates for an energy future that is sustainable, benign and democratic. The Beyond Nuclear team works with diverse partners and allies to provide the public, government officials, and the media with the critical information necessary to move humanity toward a world beyond nuclear. Beyond Nuclear: 7304 Carroll Avenue, #182, Takoma Park, MD 20912. Info@beyondnuclear.org. www.beyondnuclear.org.

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Israel attacks Iran: What we know so far via Aljazeera

Posted on 2025/06/13 by nfield

13 Jun 2025

Israel has attacked several Iranian nuclear facilities and military sites, and carried out assassinations of top military officials and nuclear scientists. An initial wave of strikes was carried out on Friday morning. A second, separate attack on the city of Tabriz, northwest Iran, was reported by local media later on Friday.

On Friday afternoon, the semi-official state media group, the Iranian Fars news agency reported “unofficial statistics” showing that more than 70 people had been killed and more than 320 were injured in Israel’s attacks.

[…]

What is the danger of hitting nuclear facilities?

Attacking nuclear facilities can cause several consequences of unpredictable scope, including radioactive leaks, explosions and long-term contamination.

Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), says the UN body is closely monitoring the situation in Iran.

He said that the IAEA can confirm that the Natanz site was among the targets hit by Israel.

“The Agency is in contact with Iranian authorities regarding radiation levels. We are also in contact with our inspectors in the country.”[…]

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核ごみ施設受け入れゼロ　全国47知事アンケートvia YAHOO!JAPANニュース　（共同）

Posted on 2025/06/12 by nfield

原発から出る高レベル放射性廃棄物（核のごみ）の最終処分場に関する共同通信社の47都道府県知事アンケートで、福島、島根、鹿児島などの13人の知事が、最終処分場受け入れや3段階の選定調査に「どちらも反対」との回答を選んだことが12日、分かった。残る34人はいずれの選択肢も選ばず、処分場受け入れや調査に「賛成」はゼロだった。 　調査の第1段階である文献調査は北海道の2町村に続き昨年5月、佐賀県玄海町が受け入れたが、続く自治体はない。第2段階の概要調査へ進むには知事の同意が不可欠で、核のごみの行き先が見通せないまま、原発の活用が進む矛盾が改めて裏付けられた形だ。 　アンケートは玄海町での文献調査開始から6月で1年になるのに合わせて4月上旬に送付し、5月中旬までに回答を得た。調査と処分場について「どちらも賛成」「調査には賛成するが処分場受け入れは反対」「どちらも反対」など五つの選択肢から回答を求めた。必要に応じて追加取材した。

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Trump Administration Gutting Regulatory Agency, Recent Nuclear Incidents, Coverup: No Time to Open Illinois for More Nuclear Power, Nuclear Watchdog Group Asserts via Nuclear Energy Information Service Illinois

Posted on 2025/05/28 by nfield

PRESS RELEASE

For Immediate Use:  Thursday, May 28, 2025

Contact:  David Kraft,  (773)342-7650 (o); (630)506-2864 (c);  neis@neis.org

Trump Administration Gutting Regulatory Agency, Recent Nuclear Incidents, Coverup: No Time to Open Illinois for More Nuclear Power, Nuclear Watchdog Group Asserts

CHICAGO—At a time when the Illinois Legislature and Governor Pritzker are contemplating the repeal of the Illinois nuclear power moratorium, recent real-world events argue strongly against that move, a local safe-energy advocacy organization argues.

On Friday, May 23, President Trump signed Executive Orders (E/Os) which effectively gut the regulatory power of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to fulfill its mandate to protect the public health, safety and environment.

On the same day it was learned that the aged Quad Cities nuclear reactor station in Illinois had experienced a manual emergency shutdown on May 19, and fire on May 22; and further, that a serious nuclear incident that occurred in March 2023 had been covered up by both the utility and the NRC.

Many experts – including two former Chairs of the NRC — have savaged Trump’s ill-advised weakening of nuclear power regulation. (see attached statement list below).  NEIS points out that the Administration’s desire to expand nuclear while slashing regulation of both aging reactors and experimental, unproven new reactors is a recipe for disaster.  The Boeing plane disasters, the East Palestine train derailment, even the Fukushima reactor disaster – all had their root cause in either de-regulation, self-regulation by industry, or government-industry collusion.

“These events show beyond a doubt that while current regulation is clearly suspect, gutting it further at a time when some Illinois legislators and officials want to expand nuclear power is an outright threat to Illinois,” maintains David Kraft, director of the 43-year old Chicago-based safe-energy advocacy/anti-nuclear organization Nuclear Energy Information Service (NEIS). “Now is simply NOT the time to repeal the nuclear moratorium,” he asserts.

Legislation SB1527 and HB3604 call for the repeal of the 1987 nuclear construction moratorium, which simply states that no new reactors will be built in Illinois until the Federal Government demonstrates that it has an operational facility to dispose of – not merely store – high-level radioactive waste (HLRW).  The U.S. has failed to build such a facility; and all HLRW remains in storage at reactor sites.  Illinois – with 11 operating and 3 shuttered/decommissioned reactors – currently stores 11,000+ tons of HLRW, more than any other state.

Illinois is powerless to enact protective legislation to compensate for the regulatory safety void created by the Trump E/Os.  The NRC retains preemptive authority on all matters pertaining to safety and security at nuclear power plants.  No state can enact regulations stricter than those created and administered by the NRC, no matter how well-intentioned or protective.  Therefore, neither Governor Pritzker nor the Legislature can enact anything that will provide additional safeguards.

The Quad Cities reactors are owned by Constellation Energy are older and the same design as those which melted down and exploded during the Fukushima disaster.  A manual “scram” – an emergency shutdown – occurred on May 19, followed by a fire on May 22.  But just before these incidents, it was revealed that according to the NRC a serious accident that involved contaminating workers with radioactive water had occurred in March 2023, but was initially covered up by the plant staff.  Three years after the fact, the NRC has still not brought any corrective action or fines to bear.

As if to punctuate this sorry operational and regulatory performance, on Tuesday May 27 the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) released a report titled, ‘The Terrible 13: The Worst Safety and Security Violators in the US Nuclear Power Fleet.” The Quad Cities reactors are listed in this Report.

“Governor Pritzker is reported to have said that he wants to, ‘expand the options for nuclear in the state of Illinois….But it has to be done in the right way.’” Kraft notes.

“Under these conditions, there is no ‘right way.’  The questionable level of current regulation, and now the further erosion of even that via the E/Os are not the conditions calling for more nuclear power,” Kraft states.

“Current reactors are showing signs of aging. New reactors would require greater oversight during start-up phase.  With reduced regulatory oversight, neither will be safe.  Now is clearly not the time to bring more nuclear power to Illinois,” Kraft maintains.

“One bad day at the nuclear office will reduce Illinois to becoming the Belarus of North America,” he concludes, referring to the country most heavily impacted by the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

–30–

Nuclear Energy Information Service (NEIS) was formed in 1981 to watchdog the nuclear power industry, and to promote a renewable, non-nuclear energy future.

Numerous competent nuclear experts have decried the Trump Administration’s irresponsible nuclear deregulation action:

Statements by Dr. Ed Lyman, Union of Concerned Scientists:

“This push by the Trump administration to usurp much of the agency’s autonomy as they seek to fast-track the construction of nuclear plants will weaken critical, independent oversight of the U.S. nuclear industry and poses significant safety and security risks to the public,” UCS added.

Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the UCS, said, “Simply put, the U.S. nuclear industry will fail if safety is not made a priority.”

“By fatally compromising the independence and integrity of the NRC, and by encouraging pathways for nuclear deployment that bypass the regulator entirely, the Trump administration is virtually guaranteeing that this country will see a serious accident or other radiological release that will affect the health, safety, and livelihoods of millions,” Lyman added. “Such a disaster will destroy public trust in nuclear power and cause other nations to reject U.S. nuclear technology for decades to come.”

Statements by Dr. Alison Macfarlane, former Chairwoman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission:

“An independent regulator is one who is free from industry and political influence…Once you insert the White House into the process, you don’t have an independent regulator anymore.”

“If you aren’t independent of political and industry influence, then you are at risk of an accident,” Macfarlane warned.

Statement by Dr. Gregory Jaczko, former Chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission:

Gregory Jaczko, who led the NRC under President Obama, said Trump’s executive orders look like someone asked an AI chatbot, “How do we make the nuclear industry worse in this country?”

He called the orders a “guillotine to the nation’s nuclear safety system” that will make the country less safe, the industry less reliable and the climate crisis more severe.

Statement by Joseph Romm, a senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media:

…any reduction in capacity at the NRC would be ill-timed with the administration’s proposed ramp-up of nuclear projects.

“This is not the time to be weakening oversight,” said Romm, who was a senior official at the Department of Energy in the 1990s. “It’s very dangerous to be weakening and undermining and politicizing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s oversight at a time when it’s not going to be having to do less work.”

Speeding up the permitting process while accepting proposals for new reactor designs would be “ridiculous and very dangerous,” he added.

Statement by Johanna Neumann, Environment America Research & Policy Center’s senior director of the Campaign for 100% Renewable Energy:

“Do we really want to create more radioactive waste to power the often dubious and questionable uses of AI?”

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Fukushima soil headed to Japan PM’s flower beds to allay nuclear safety fears via The Guardian

Posted on 2025/05/28 by nfield

Slightly radioactive soil from near the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant will be transported to Tokyo and used in flower beds in the prime minister’s garden, in an attempt to prove to a skeptical public that the material is safe.

The decision comes 14 years after the plant suffered a triple meltdown in the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chornobyl.

The sample will be taken from 14 million cubic metres of soil – enough to fill 10 baseball stadiums – that has been removed from near the plant during work to make local neighbourhoods fit for the return of evacuated residents.

The soil is in temporary storage at a vast site near the plant, but authorities have struggled to make progress on a legal obligation to find permanent homes for the material outside Fukushima by 2045.

The government has suggested the material, which it describes as low risk, could be used to build roads and other infrastructure in other parts of Japan. It would be used as foundation material and covered with topsoil thick enough to keep radiation at negligible levels.

[…]

“The government will take the lead in setting an example, and we will do so at the prime minister’s office,” the chief cabinet secretary, Yoshimasa Hayashi, said at a meeting held to discuss the issue.

The Fukushima Daiichi plant released large quantities of radiation into the atmosphere after it was struck by a powerful earthquake and tsunami on 11 March 2011. The disaster knocked out the facility’s backup power supply, sending three of its reactors into meltdown.

Although most of neighbourhoods that were evacuated after the disaster have been declared safe, many residents are reluctant to return. Some are concerned about the potential health effects – particularly on children – of living in former no-go zones, while others have built new lives elsewhere.

Work to remove 880 tonnes of highly dangerous damaged fuel from reactor containment vessels has barely begun. So far, specially designed devices have successfully retrieved two tiny samples of fuel, but removing all of it is expected to take decades and cost trillions of yen.

The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power, has also had to contend with huge quantities of water that becomes contaminated when it is used to cool the damaged reactors. In 2023, the utility started pumping treated water – with all but one radioactive element removed – into the Pacific Ocean, triggering an angry response from China and South Korea.

The removal of topsoil, trees and other debris from near homes, schools, medical facilities and other public buildings created a stockpile of contaminated waste that now fills a site straddling the towns of Futaba and Okuma, located close to the plant. The material does not include any debris from inside Fukushima Daiichi.

In its final report on the recycling and disposal of the soil last year, the International Atomic Energy Agency said the work had been consistent with its safety standards.

But the public is yet to be convinced. Last month, local opposition forced the environment ministry to abandon a pilot project to use some of the Fukushima soil as landfill for flower beds and lawns at public parks in and around Tokyo.

Read more.

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US East Coast faces rising seas as crucial Atlantic current slows via New Scientist

Posted on 2025/05/26 by nfield

The weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is boosting the sea level along the New England coast on top of sea level rise from melting ice, adding to flooding

By James Dinneen

16 May 2025

The slowdown of a major current in the Atlantic Ocean is boosting the sea level and associated flooding in the Northeast US, on top of the already-rising sea level due to climate change. A total collapse of this Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) as the planet warms could raise the sea level even further.

“If the AMOC collapsed, this would dramatically increase the flood frequency along the US coast, even in the absence of strong storms,” says Liping Zhang at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in New Jersey. “Even partial weakening [of the current] can already have substantial impacts.”

Melting ice sheets and warmer water due to human-caused climate change are leading to a rise in average sea level, but the rate of sea-level rise isn’t the same everywhere. For instance, some coastal land is sinking, speeding the relative rate of sea-level rise in those areas. Local sea level is also shaped by how heat, water and salt circulate in the ocean, with warmer and fresher water taking up more space than colder, saltier water.

The US north-east coast has seen sea levels rising faster than the global average in recent decades. In addition to sinking land, a slowdown in the AMOC – which transports warm water from lower latitudes to the North Atlantic, where it cools, gets saltier and sinks – has long been proposed as a possible driver for this. When this overturning circulation weakens, deep water along the path of the current is expected to warm and expand, sloshing more water onto the shallow continental shelf.

The AMOC naturally varies in strength on different timescales, and climate change has contributed to a slowdown in recent decades as melting ice freshens the North Atlantic and its waters warm. But it wasn’t clear whether this slowdown was making a big difference to sea level.

Zhang and her colleagues used tide gauge measurements along the New England coast to reconstruct the local sea level stretching back more than a century. On top of a steady rise due to climate change, they found a marked pattern of fluctuation between low and high sea levels every few decades. Years with a high sea level aligned closely with years when the AMOC was weak, and these years also had more frequent coastal flooding.

The researchers then used two different ocean models to quantify how much fluctuations in the AMOC’s strength influenced the local sea level. While the main driver of changes was the steady rise due to climate change, they found the weakening AMOC substantially boosted the sea level and associated flooding. In different parts of the coast, they found that a slowdown in the AMOC was behind 20 to 50 per cent of flooding since 2005.

Because the natural cycles in the AMOC’s strength are largely predictable, the findings could enable researchers to forecast which years will see lots of flooding up to three years in advance, says Zhang. This could help make long-term decisions about infrastructure and emergency preparedness.

“It demonstrates that the AMOC really does matter to [sea level rise],” says Chris Hughes at the University of Liverpool, UK, who wasn’t involved in the research. “It’s not just there in models or theory, it’s actually there in the real world.”

It isn’t clear how much of the recent weakening of the AMOC is due to climate change and how much is due to natural variations. […]

Read more.

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