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Also, looking at the CTBTO measurements above, we find that Cs-137 in Japan seems to level out at 10,000 times the amount measured in the rest of the world. The disconcerting point is, the levels in Japan may not decline any further. www.bfs.de

With deep under-eye shadows and painted-on blood stains, zombies brought a nuclear protest to the TVA headquarters on Market Street on Wednesday.
Holding signs that read "No new nukes" and "Bellefonte = Danger + Debt," about 50 protesters ranging from young teens to grandparents crowded the sidewalk at the Tennessee Valley Authority building downtown to ask CEO Tom Kilgore and the TVA board to say no to more nuclear reactors in the Tennessee Valley.

"We don't want our children to have to have this kind of test," said Sandy Kurtz, holding up a radiation Geiger counter like those in photographs of Japanese health officials scanning children on the heels of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear meltdowns in March.
Kathleen Ferris, a grandmother who drove from Murfreesboro, Tenn., to be part of the protest, said it will take more than that to change her mind.
"I have two grandchildren, and the whole world has grandchildren," she said.
"Nuclear reactors emit radiation. Radiation causes cancer. It causes childhood leukemia. It can cause genetic defects," she said. "I don't want the grandchildren of the world to be genetically modified. I just want a healthy, clean world for them to live in. And that's why I'm carrying a sign that says 'Go green!'"
According to a number of recent polls, Chattanooga's protest may be just the tip of the cooling tower of America's frosty attitude toward nuclear power after an earthquake and tsunami led to multiple meltdowns in Japan.
An ABC and Washington Post poll in mid-April found an 11-percentage point increase in the number of Americans opposing the building of new nuclear plants.
That poll found that 64 percent of respondents now oppose new nuclear plant construction, while 33 percent support it.
In a similar poll in 2008, 53 percent of Americans opposed new nuclear plant construction.
More: timesfreepress.com

The Associated Press released results from a yearlong investigation, revealing evidence of “unrelenting wear” in many of the oldest-running facilities in the United States.

That study found that three-quarters of the country’s nuclear reactor sites have leaked radioactive tritium from buried piping that transports water to cool reactor vessels, often contaminating groundwater. According to a recent report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the industry has limited methods to monitor underground pipes for leaks.

“We have 104 reactors in this country,” says Harry Asada, the Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and director of MIT’s d’Arbeloff Laboratory for Information Systems and Technology. “Fifty-two of them are 30 years or older, and we need immediate solutions to assure the safe operations of these reactors.”

Asada says one of the major challenges for safety inspectors is identifying corrosion in a reactor’s underground pipes. Currently, plant inspectors use indirect methods to monitor buried piping: generating a voltage gradient to identify areas where pipe coatings may have corroded, and using ultrasonic waves to screen lengths of pipe for cracks. The only direct monitoring requires digging out the pipes and visually inspecting them — a costly and time-intensive operation.

Now Asada and his colleagues at the d’Arbeloff Laboratory are working on a direct monitoring alternative: small, egg-sized robots designed to dive into nuclear reactors and swim through underground pipes, checking for signs of corrosion. The underwater patrollers, equipped with cameras, are able to withstand a reactor’s extreme, radioactive environment, transmitting images in real-time from within.
More: web.mit.edu