September 10, 2012 - Defpro News -
Russia Starts Production of New Anti-Radiation Missile - Russia has started a full-scale production of the Kh-31PD anti-radiation missile of the latest generation, head of the Tactical Missile Corporation Boris Obnosov told journalists at the HydroAviaSalon-2012 – an international exhibition and scientific conference on hydroaviation. The missile has a longer range than its predecessor and instead of three guidance heads it has one broadband head which permits fighting against all kinds of radio location systems.
September 10, 2012 - DC Bureau - Race and Radiation: The Equal Opportunity Killer at the Savannah River Site - The old Atomic Energy Commission did not give much thought to where they were going to put their new nuclear weapons processing plant in the 1950s other than it needed to be on the other side of the country from their World War II era facility in Hanford, Washington. The military planners wanted the two campuses as difficult as possible for Soviet bombers to attack simultaneously. The location picked during the Truman administration ended up being in the heart of the segregated South, near Aiken, South Carolina, and Augusta, Georgia, because the site was large and had access to water for cooling the massive new reactors. At SRS, five reactors, two separation plants, thousands of miles of pipes and high level nuclear waste storage facilities were built on what amounts to a swamp with the worst earthquake fault in the South running under it. Towns were relocated and the orchards, hunting and fishing grounds that sustained the lives of poor residents were taken over by a country fighting a new kind of war – a cold war. The reactors were built five miles apart so if the Soviets attacked one, the others could survive and keep producing plutonium. Production wastes – deadly to humans – were buried in cardboard boxes in open trenches. The ugliest of America’s nuclear weapons history is the cavalier way in which the old Atomic Energy Commission and later Department of Energy management allowed African American workers to be deliberately exposed to radiation at the sprawling Savannah River Site while sparing white workers from the same dangers. The good-old-boy white management at SRS routinely released radiation into the Savannah River. While phone calls were made warning white towns downstream to close their town’s water intakes, often black towns did not get the same courtesy.
September 10, 2012 - KUOW 94.9 - NRC Looking Into Wash. Nuclear Plant's 11-Year-Old Mistake - The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission is looking into an 11-year emergency planning mistake at the Northwest’s only commercial nuclear power plant. Officials at the Columbia Generating Station in southeast Washington used faulty estimates of how much radiation could escape during a crisis. No radiological emergency has ever happened at the Columbia Generating Station. But if it had, the faulty computer modeling used between 2000 and 2011, might have convinced operators that more or less radiation was coming out of the plant than really was. Victor Dricks is a spokesman with the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He says that could have changed officials’ response to an actual emergency. "They were not getting the appropriate results that would enabled them to accurately classify the nature of a nuclear emergency if one were to occur," Dricks explains. "And I stress that none of these conditions ever did occur."