UNDT April 5, 2012 - Orange County Register - NRC chairman to visit troubled San Onofre - The chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will tour the stricken San Onofre nuclear plant on Friday, the latest sign of the seriousness with which the agency is taking steam-generator problems that are keeping both of the plant's reactors shut down. The chairman, Gregory Jaczko, will tour the plant with California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and talk to reporters afterward. "He wants to visit the plant and meet with managers and get the latest information on their inspection of the steam generators, and also to look at other vital plant equipment," NRC spokesman Victor Dricks said. "I understand he wants to look at the sea wall and the emergency diesel generators, and some of the improvements that have been made post-Fukushima." Such plant visits are not unusual for Jaczko, Dricks said, adding that he makes frequent visits to the nation's nuclear plants. But Jaczko is "clearly aware of the developments" at San Onofre, and wants to see things firsthand, Dricks said.
April 4, 2012 - Wall Street Journal - Nuke Restarts: Edano Now On Board? - In one of the great policy dramas playing out in Japan these days — whether the government will allow any nuclear reactors to operate this summer — Yukio Edano has a starring role. The minister for Economy, Trade, and Industry has been one of the power sector’s biggest critics, and is seen as one of the biggest obstacles to allowing reactors to resume operation. Yukio Edano focuses on “the government’s view, not my personal view.”But this week, atomic tea-leaf readers see in Mr. Edano’s public comments signs of a turning point — critics might say “flip-flop” — that would allow the nuclear juice to resume. As recently as Monday, the minister said in parliament he was against imminent operation of two reactors at the Oi nuclear power complex in Fukui prefecture, chosen by nuclear advocates as the first test case for resuming nuclear energy. “At the moment, I am against the restart,” he told parliament that day. On Tuesday, however, Mr. Edano told reporters that he was neither “against” nor “for” restarting Oi. He explained that when he made his comments a day earlier, “at that time I was still studying the findings” from so-called stress tests, and added “from now on, we have to talk about the government’s view, not my personal view.”
April 5, 2012 - Aljazeera - Living in a nuclear hell - The town of Muslymovo has to be one of the saddest places on earth. The thousands of people who have little choice but to live here, on the banks of the Techa river not far from Russia's southern border with Kazakhstan, are the victims of a nuclear disaster that began more than six decades ago. They are still suffering with the consequences of life next door to the Mayak nuclear plant - still dying from the radiation-related illnesses that have claimed the lives of so many before them. Mayak was constructed in the 1940s. Our driver knew how to avoid checkpoints. We stuck a small camera on our windscreen and drove to within a hundred metres of the plant gates. It's like a city. Families work and live here. Teenagers chased each other in the snow just beyond the fence. Mayak is surrounded by silver birch forests. Signs by the road warn people not to enter the woodland or pick the wild mushrooms. Mayak once provided the Soviet Union with around 40 per cent of the world's weapons-grade plutonium. The country's first atomic bomb was built here. Between 1949 and 1951, the plant dumped hundreds of tonnes of highly radioactive waste into the nearby Techa. Hundreds of villages were resettled but incredibly, four remain in the contaminated area. Residents don't know why they were never moved. Many people we spoke to say they are being used as human guinea pigs. They talk of a secret government experiment looking at the effects of radiation exposure on humans.