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Day after Sellafield plant is shut, Government told to build another
The Government is being pressured to build a new nuclear-fuel plant at Sellafield in ***bria, just a day after the decision to close a failing plant that has so far cost British taxpayers £1.34bn.
Local politicians and trade unions want the Government to agree to a new mixed-oxide (Mox) fuel plant costing up to £6bn, in the wake of the announcement on Wednesday to close the controversial Sellafield Mox Plant just nine years after it was opened.

Ministers' preferred option on dealing with the problem of the huge mountain of civilian plutonium at Sellafield – the biggest stockpile in the world – is to build a second Mox fuel plant. The plan is for the plant to convert much of this waste plutonium into fuel that can be burned in a new generation of nuclear reactors to be built in Britian. Trade unions said that a quick decision on a second plant would help to save an estimated 800 jobs. The local Labour MP Jamie Reed, a former Sellafield employee, said he intends to press the Government for a decision on a second Mox plant as soon as the House of Commons returns from its summer recess.

Mr Reed said: "I am working for nothing less than for Government to announce its intentions to proceed with a new Mox plant at Sellafield.

"This is without doubt wholly within the national interest."

The existing Sellafield Mox Plant cannot be adapted to the task because it was licensed to make Mox fuel for foreign nuclear reactors, particularly in Japan. The plant has been a complete technological failure, managing to produce only a tiny fraction of the Mox fuel it was supposed to generate.

But one option being proposed by Martin Forwood, of the pressure group Core (***brians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment), is to use the existing Mox plant to convert the plutonium mountain into "low specification" Mox . This form of Mox would not be used as nuclear fuel, but would be encased in canisters and buried in a long-term repository.
More: www.independent.co.uk

@Peter Melzer Radioactive waste is managed on 26 sites in England, that include:

operating nuclear power stations at six sites – a Magnox reactor station at Oldbury , Advanced Gas-cooled Reactors (AGR) stations at Dungeness, Hinkley Point, Hartlepool and Heysham, and a Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) station at Sizewell;
shut down Magnox reactor stations undergoing decommissioning at six sites – Berkeley, Bradwell, Calder Hall, Dungeness, Hinkley Point and Sizewell;
facilities supporting the civil nuclear fuel cycle at three sites - Capenhurst, Sellafield and Springfields;
three nuclear research and development sites, where the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) is undertaking facility decommissioning and site clean up – Harwell, Windscale and Winfrith;
the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion facility located at Culham;
seven sites owned by the Ministry of Defence (MoD), which undertake operations in support of the atomic weapons programme (Aldermaston), the nuclear submarine propulsion programme (Barrow-in-Furness, Derby and HMNB Devonport) and other activities (Donnington, Eskmeals and HMNB Portsmouth);
the health science company GE Healthcare operates from two sites in England – Amersham and Harwell;
the site at Sheffield is storing a small quantity of waste from the accidental smelting of radioactive materials in a steel manufacturing plant;
the national disposal facility for LLW in ***bria (i.e. the LLWR).
www.nda.gov.uk

@elainekirk , @majj, the question I had in mind is where in the UK is the final burial site for the stuff that cannot be reprocessed any further, the UK version of what was supposed to be Yucca Mountain in the US. Let's not hope the site is in Mongolia.

@joniver I love how they're suddenly all true believers in global warming, because nuclear is so green.

@joniver, @radioguy, I like the onion assessment: "It is safe until something unforeseen happens."

With this kind of drivel I'd say they're banking on the masses being incredibly stupid...unfortunately it could work if they keep hosing down the media with these fabulous lies.

@joniver Lets keep remembering then :-)))

In a switch, Japan’s A-bomb survivors turn against nuclear energy
For more than 65 years, the worst event in Japan’s modern history stood alone, with nothing afterward momentous enough to change its lessons. Those who survived the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki decided that similar bombs should never be dropped again. To ensure that outcome, they called for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear power, though, was another matter. Japan’s nationwide survivors’ group never rallied against nuclear-generated energy as such, perhaps because many saw a redemptive justice in using it peacefully. Reactors could power the country’s economy, they hoped, by harnessing the same force that once caused so much damage.

Since the Fukushima crisis, Japan has launched a nationwide debate about the merits and risks of its atomic energy program. The most zealous anti-nuclear activists tend to speak of a history forsaken — as if, by racing to build reactors in the 1970s, the country had ignored the clear warning signs of Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945.

But most of the bombing survivors, known as hibakusha, have long had a far more complex, and often positive, view of nuclear power — which partly explains why Japan now has reactors along almost every rural swath of its shoreline, 54 in all, accounting for about 30 percent of the national power supply.

Some hibakusha saw civilian nuclear energy as the antithesis of the destruction they had witnessed. Some even became nuclear power researchers, paving the way for nationwide acceptance of the technology.

“Even though we’d gone through horrific experiences, nuclear power energy at that time was seen as the discovery of a second fire,” said Nagasaki survivor Sueichi Kido, 71. “In a way, we were hoping nuclear power could be used as a great tool to make our lives better.”
More: www.washingtonpost.com

I'm shaking my head...

Documents reveal U.S. plan in mid-1950s to deploy nuke arms in Japan
The U.S. government sought to promote the peaceful use of atomic energy vis-a-vis Japan in the mid-1950s to pave the way for eventually deploying nuclear weapons in the country by easing the antinuclear sentiment of the Japanese people, according to top-secret U.S. government documents found at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

The declassified documents included a letter, dated Nov. 18, 1955, to Reuben Robertson, deputy secretary of defense at that time, from Acting Secretary of State Herbert Hoover Jr., acknowledging that the Joint Chiefs of Staff had "reviewed the requirement for the deployment of nuclear components of atomic weapons to Japan."

According to the letter, Robertson had suggested that "a greater appreciation by the Japanese of the possibilities of the United States program for the peaceful uses of atomic energy would be useful in reducing existing psychological barriers as well as fostering a greater appreciation of the realities of the military atomic program."

The United States stepped up cooperation with Japan in the field of nuclear energy after the Fukuryu Maru No. 5, a Japanese tuna fishing boat, was hit by radiation from a U.S. hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific in March 1954.

More: mdn.mainichi.jp
Hmmm...that little accident certainly got Japan's attention.

Yahoo Japan Releases Radiation Info On Website
TOKYO (Kyodo)--Yahoo Japan Corp. on Friday started showing real-time radiation levels at 11 locations in Japan on a special online map using data gathered by a group of academics in the wake of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
e.nikkei.com

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Thanks Elaine.