The Update: Time's up for nuclear power

We watch this week as Hitachi announces it is abandoning its two reactor project at Wylfa-B in Wales. And Exelon admits to "severe economic challenges" prompting the premature shutdown of its Byron and Dresden nuclear plants in Illinois. Meanwhile, as Amory Lovins points out on Beyond Nuclear International, we could reduce greater amounts of carbon emissions faster and cheaper by investing money squandered on nuclear subsidies (and especially new reactors) in renewables and energy efficiency instead. Nuclear power, he says, simply makes climate change worse.

The Update: Nuclear Free Future Award winners

The Update: No nukes in the Green New Deal!

The central tenets of the Green New Deal are founded on equity and justice. That's why nuclear power is incompatible with it and must be excluded. As we enter the final stretch of this most important of election cycles, it's up to all of us make sure we get a new administration that understands why nuclear power -- which hinders renewable energy development, endangers people's lives, disproportionately impacts the lives of minorities, and is far too slow and expensive -- must, along with fossil fuels, be rejected once and for all.

That’s why, next week on Beyond Nuclear International, we’ll have an important article by y Professor M.V. Ramana and Schyler Edmunston on why nuclear power does not belong

in any Green New Deal. It’s a simple, logical and 100% spot on summary of all the many reasons why nuclear power works against climate solutions and actually harms any chance of survival.

A judge says no to uranium mining in Virginia. Is this the final victory?

A state moratorium banning uranium mining in the Commonwealth of Virginia has stood since 1982. But in 2007, a Canadian company called Virginia Uranium Inc., partnered with a landowner at Coles Hill in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, to try to overturn the ban. The reason? Beneath the Coles land lies the largest uranium deposit in the US -- not a very high quality one but nevertheless a potential, well, gold mine.

A coalition of citizens across Virginia, calling themselves Keep the Ban, have, since 2008, fought efforts by VUI to overturn the moratorium. Now it looks like they might finally have won. VUI failed to get legislation passed in 2013 to reverse the ban and even went as far as the US Supreme Court where it lost as well.

Last month, hopefully, came the final nail in the uranium coffin, when a state judge declared that Virginia had a right to protect its citizens from the "irreparable harm if uranium mining were to be allowed in the Commonwealth.”

Criminal nuclear power scandals rock two states

Arrests of individuals in Ohio and South Carolina related to criminal activity and fraud to keep old reactors running (OH) and keep new ones under construction (SC and now abandoned) made headlines last week. We explain what happened. (For more, see stories on the Beyond Nuclear International website).