UNDTE April 23, 2012 - PM - Doctor says toxic spill site made 16 sick - There are new claims about the site where road workers upgrading the Pacific Highway near Port Macquarie in New South Wales became violently ill last week. The doctor who treated 16 people who did the initial clean up in 1980 says the workers suffered from chemical and radiation exposure. Last week workers got ill when they unearthed a toxic dump from a 1980 truck accident and spill. The doctor says their plight has been ignored and wants the Government to pay proper compensation. The New South Wales Government has launched an independent inquiry and the Roads and Maritime Service says the site is not contaminated by radiation or toxic chemicals.
April 23, 2012 - Business Day - Regulator questions safety of nuclear waste storage - The National Nuclear Regulator (NNR) has suspended the receipt of nuclear waste from the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation (Necsa) and the Koeberg power station, following noncompliance by the corporation at its Vaalputs nuclear waste storage facility. The noncompliance raises concerns about the correct storage of nuclear waste, especially in light of SA’s expected building of nuclear power stations. A radioactive waste drum was discovered in June last year to be "a contravention of the licensing agreement", regulator spokesman Gino Moonsamy said yesterday. "We engaged with them, and issued several warnings, and they didn’t comply." Vaalputs, in the Northern Cape, is the national nuclear waste facility, and accepts low-level waste.
April 23, 2012 - Oregon Live - Ron Wyden's nuclear field trip - Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden's recent daylong field trip from Tokyo to the zone of Japan's nuclear devastation is worth at least a week in the telling. Bunny-suited with a breathing device for protection against radiation exposure, Wyden walked through the ruined Fukushima Dai-ichi complex and saw what few from the West have seen: another bomb waiting to go off. The senator is not typically alarmist. But his field notes, followed by letters to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Energy Secretary Steven Chu, signal alarm. They paint a picture of extreme nuclear vulnerability, especially in Reactor No. 4, inactive at the time of the quake and tsunami but wrecked by explosion. The reactor now warehouses Fukushima's hottest inventory of radioactive fuel rods in a seismically jittery part of the world. Wyden completed his tour by asking Japan, with written urgings for help from Clinton and Chu, to sharply speed up a cleanup expected to take 10 more years. His fear is that another big seismic event will trigger another disaster before the cleanup is completed -- exposing Oregon and the West Coast to potentially lethal risk. "What we learned the first time is that radioactivity leaks out quickly," he told The Oregonian Friday. "If (No. 4) ruptures now, it gets into the air, and that's very troubling to us in Oregon. This must not happen."
April 23, 2012 - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review - Groups call for look at current 10-mile evacuation radius - When an earthquake and tsunami caused a meltdown and radiation release at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan, authorities evacuated everyone within a 12-mile radius, and U.S. officials told Americans within 50 miles to get out. Last year's devastation in Japan has some people wondering whether the 10-mile evacuation zone that the U.S. government has mandated since 1978 -- before Three Mile Island, Chernobyl or Fukushima -- should be expanded. "We're right on the lip here," said Terri Hardisky, 50, of Findlay, who lives about 11 miles from FirstEnergy Corp.'s Beaver Valley Power Station in Shippingport. "If something happened, it could go further than 10 miles. You just never know." The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, state officials and FirstEnergy say 10 miles is enough. Extending it to the 50-mile radius that was suggested in Japan would increase the affected population from 113,500 to 3.2 million people in three states and could overwhelm emergency responders. "Even if you created a huge event where you had a worst-case scenario, radiation levels outside the 10-mile radius wouldn't be expected to exceed EPA guidelines," said FirstEnergy's Jennifer Young, spokeswoman for the Akron, Ohio-based power company.