BERLIN (AP) — Almost 15,000 anti-nuclear demonstrators protested Saturday against a shipment of reprocessed nuclear waste being transported to a storage site in northern Germany, police said.
German police were working to free three demonstrators who had chained themselves to railway tracks near the western city of Woerth, preventing the shipment from crossing from France into Germany. (more…)
BERLIN: Some 500 students demonstrated Friday against the disposal of reprocessed nuclear waste at a temporary storage center in northwest Germany, police said.
A train carrying the waste was due to leave France Friday, with trucks taking it the final miles (kilometers) to the storage facility near the town of Gorleben early Monday. (more…)
Luxembourg’s Minister for Health, Mars Di Bartolomeo, has confirmed that no nuclear waste is, nor has been, transported through the Grand Duchy.
The information was provided in response to a parliamentary question which was raised following an incident this summer when a train carrying nuclear waste was stopped (outside Luxembourg) on its way to the Moselle. (more…)
WASHINGTON: Germany has returned more than 20 pounds (9 kilograms) of highly enriched uranium fuel to the U.S. for safeguarding from terrorists or potential misuse, the government said Tuesday.
The National Nuclear Security Administration said the spent fuel shipment was transported by ship and rail under secret and secure conditions. Spokeswoman Casey Ruberg said the material was secured at a site in the southern state of South Carolina on Sept. 23. (more…)
International Nuclear Services (INS) has issued a big-money brief for world-wide PR support.
INS was created out of the ’spent fuel services’ business of Sellafield to provide a service to more than 20 global utility firms. It manages the transportation of their nuclear waste and subsequent reprocessing at Sellafield. (more…)
The Vinca Institute of Nuclear Sciences, located 9 miles from Belgrade, is Yugoslavia’s oldest nuclear research institute. Established in 1948 as the Institute of Research on the Structure of Matter, its efforts supposedly included an attempt to build a Yugoslav nuclear bomb. For almost 45 years, it collected Yugoslavia’s and Serbia’s radioactive waste. (more…)
Bucharest. The comments on the low control over the transportation of Bulgarian nuclear fuel along the Danube River is among the headlines in the Romanian press today.
The Gandul daily notes that every year the Bulgarian ship Vasil Drumev and the boat Nautilus transport 60 tons of nuclear fuel from Kozloduy to the Ukrainian port of Ismail. The nuclear fuel used in Kozloduy is transported as waste to the Ukrainian port, from where the ship turns back loaded with fresh fuel.
According to the article the ‘tourist’ boats, used by the Romanian police to escort the cargo, often malfunction.
Top-secret shipments of weapons-ready plutonium through British waters have been stopped, after their exposure by The Independent on Sunday. The Department for Transport (DfT) said last week that it had taken “regulatory action” to prohibit the shipments from Sellafield to Normandy on an unarmed old roll-on, roll-off ferry, with few safety or security features. The prohibition, the first of its kind, was imposed after complaints by the French nuclear safety authorities.
The shipments – denounced by nuclear weapons experts as “madness” and “totally irresponsible” – were carrying hundreds of kilograms of plutonium-dioxide powder, described as the ideal material for terrorists seeking to create a nuclear explosion or make a dirty bomb. Only 10kg of the plutonium, experts claim, would be needed to make a terrorist atomic weapon. (more…)
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor - Sunday, 9 March 2008 - From Sellafield, an ordinary, unarmed ferry is to transport weapons-ready plutonium – material that could easily be used to make a ‘dirty bomb’
Weapons-ready plutonium that terrorists could easily make into a nuclear bomb is to be carried hundreds of miles down the west coast of Britain in an unarmed ship, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. (more…)
