Japanese survivor of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings dies of stomach cancer at age 93

Tsutomu Yamaguchi, who as fate would have it was present and injured in Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, only to arrive back to his home in Nagasaki to experience the second atomic bombing on August 9th, has passed away. After his ordeal, he devoted his life -- as have many Hibakusha, survivors of the atom bombs -- to sharing his tragic experience with others, in hopes of the abolition of atomic weapons. While Yamaguchi is the only person officially certified by the Japanese government of having survived both atomic bombings, there are others who did as well. To advance the cause of nuclear weapons abolition, please sign yourself, your friends, and family onto the Mayors for Peace "Cities Are Not Targets" (CANT) online petition. Mayors for Peace, initiated by the Cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, has grown to nearly 3,500 cities in 135 countries. If your city has not joined joined, urge your city leaders that it does! Latent cancer deaths among survivors from radiation exposure during the atomic bombings are now grudgingly acknowledged by the atomic establishment, although this was not always the case. As Amy and David Goodman have exposed, William L. Laurence, science writer for the New York Times who was also on the payroll of the U.S. War Department, a propogandist for the Manhattan Project, and rode on the plane that destroyed Nagasaki, won a Pulitzer Prize for his atomic bomb reporting despite intentionally covering up the deadly radiation effects on human health, truth censored by the U.S. military when other journalists attempted to report it.

Southern Alliance for Clean Energy slams impending federal loan guarantee for new Vogtle atomic reactors in Georgia

SACE has clearly stated the irony of the nuclear power plant that did as much as any to kill the atomic bandwagon in the 1970s and 1980s -- a poster child for cost overruns -- now being poised to receive the first nuclear loan guarantee from the Energy Dept. This will put billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money at risk, and makes no sense whatsoever given the "rising financial risks, reduced demand for power, cheaper renewables and huge potential of energy efficiency."

South Texas Project new reactor partners battle in court

CPS, the utility owned by the City of San Antonio, has requested the courts to award it $32 billion in damages from NRG Energy and Toshiba-Westinghouse, primary proponents of an "Advanced Boiling Water Reactor" (ABWR) near Bay City, Texas. It recently came to light that the price tag for the two proposed new reactors is $5 billion higher than CPS publicly admitted just last summer, now topping $18.2 billion. The San Antonio Express News has posted a chronology of numerous articles about the unfolding scandals at the South Texas Project.

Canadian nuclear plant spills tritium and hydrazine into Lake Ontario

The Toronto Star has reported that the Darlington nuclear power plant, site of 4 CANDU reactors, accidentally released over 50,000 gallons of water contaminated with radioactive tritium and toxic hydrazine into Lake Ontario. Predictably, the Ontario nuclear utility has downplayed any health risks. But documents on Beyond Nuclear's and NIRS' websites show that tritium, whether released into the environment "routinely" as part of daily operations, or accidentally via spills or leaks, cannot only cause cancer, but other maladies such as birth defects and genetic damage. For its part, hydrazine is so toxic that the U.S. military justified its shooting down of a listless satellite in order to prevent the toxin on board from reaching the Earth's surface, as reported by National Public Radio in early 2008.

New York Times reports DOE to issue first nuclear reactor loan guarantee "in the next few days"

While American taxpayers were distracted by the holidays, Congress and the Bush administration approved $18.5 billion in new reactor federal loan guarantees, and another $2.0 billion in uranium enrichment facility loan guarantees, on Christmas Eve, 2007. Now that the American people are again distracted by the holidays, the Obama administration's Dept. of Energy (DOE) appears poised to begin delivering the goods, at U.S. taxpayer risk and expense. A Christmas Eve New York Times article, "Loan Program May Stir Nuclear Industry," reports that DOE may begin dispersing the first new reactor federal loan guarantees in "the next few days." This, despite widespread design flaws endemic to proposed new reactors on DOE's loan guarantee short list. This includes the design for the Westinghouse-Toshiba Advanced Passive (AP) 1000, proposed to be built at Vogtle nuclear power plant in Georgia, widely rumored to be at the top of DOE's list for receiving a loan guarantee. In recent months, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission publicly announced that the AP1000 design is vulnerable to severe weather such as tornadoes and hurricanes, and other natural disasters such as earthquakes, damaging the reactor core due to a faulty "shield building."