MISC. Items

Five nuclear engineers were assassinated last week in a mysterious attack just north of the Syrian capital, Damascus.

According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based NGO that monitors the crisis in Syria, one of the victims was gunned down when their car was ambushed was Iranian.

Westinghouse expects it and its suppliers will get contracts in the near future related to construction of a dozen nuclear reactors in China, company CEO Danny Roderick said Thursday.

China may build as many as 200 new nuclear units  in the coming 15 years, and a 25-30% market share for Westinghouse is "realistic," Roderick said on the sidelines of a Nuclear Energy Institute event in New York.

To nomadic communities around the town of Reggane, they’re known more than half a century later as “leopard skins” — stretches of sand across Algeria’s southern Sahara that are peppered with small black clumps. People used to collect scrap metal from the charred warplanes and trucks that emerge, fossil-like, and then smelt them into jewelry and kitchen utensils.

But these Algerians were not properly warned of their danger after France’s misgoverned nuclear bomb-testing campaign of the early 1960s, which vitrified vast tracts of desert with heat and plutonium and left a legacy of uncontained radiation that is still crippling inhabitants. Estimates of the number of Algerians affected by testing range from 27,000 — cited by the French Ministry of Defense — to 60,000, the figure given by Abdul Kadhim al-Aboudi, an Algerian professor of nuclear physics.

"On April 13, 2015, the Agency [Texas Department of State Health Services] was notified by a landfill operator that material in a waste container set off their radiation alarms. The landfill provided a spectrum which showed the isotope as Cesium-137. An on-site investigation by this Agency confirmed the material to be dirt/mud contaminated with Cesium-137. The waste material at the landfill was isolated. The waste collection route sheet used to collect the waste was requested by the Agency. The Agency drove the route traveled by the collection vehicle using an RSI identifier in an attempt to locate the source of the contamination. The detector indicated the presence of radiation in a bar ditch along the intersection of two streets northeast of the City of Houston. Surveys conducted by the Agency identified a reading of 16 millirem on contact with the ground in one spot. Additional surveys indicated additional activity as far as 70 feet from the spot previously mentioned. . . . .

A giant, concrete dome filled with radioactive waste looms above Runit Island, and it’s leaking. Locals call it “The Tomb”.

Runit (or Cactus) dome was used for Cold War nuclear testing by the US government for 10 years from 1948. There were 42 tests in total on Enewetak Atoll, including 22 explosions on platforms, barges and underwater in the space of just three months in 1958, just before a moratorium on atomic testing.

In the late 1970s, an estimated 73,000 cubic metres of contaminated topsoil was deposited in the Cactus nuclear test crater beneath the dome, according to a report commissioned by the US government.

It was only supposed to be a temporary measure — but the dome remains.