The United States of America ratified the Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management (Joint Convention) in April 2003. The Joint Convention establishes an international peer review process among Contracting Parties and provides incentives for nations to take appropriate steps to bring their nuclear activities into compliance with general safety standards and practices. The U.S. participated in Review Meetings of the Contracting Parties to the Joint Convention in November 2003, May, 2006, and May 2009, in Vienna, Austria. This Fourth Report, an update of the U.S. National Report prepared under the Joint Convention in September 2011, documents spent fuel and radioactive waste management safety in the U.S. under the terms of the Joint Convention. It was prepared by the U. S. Government for review by the Contracting Parties.

as this paper goes to press, Iran has just come through its longanticipated presidential election. despite predictions of a victory for a well-known clerical "moderate," former president and expediency council head akhbar hashemi-rafsanjani, the winner was the hard-line conservative mayor of tehran, Mahmoud ahmadinejad, a relative unknown. the terms hard-liner and conservative are used virtually interchangeably by many inside and outside Iran; they are relative terms, since there are no political parties in Iran, with their meaning dependent on context and issue. the election consolidated control of all branches of the Iranian government-legislative, executive, and judicial-in conservative hands. It also brought to the presidency for the first time in the republic's history a non-cleric who ran a populist-style campaign attacking corruption and non-Islamic practices that had crept into government since the death of the ayatollah Khomeini in 1989.

Nuclear sites become contaminated with radionuclides due to accidents and activities carried out without due consideration for the environment. Naturally-occurring radioactive materials (NORM) released by industrial processes such as coal power production and fertilizer manufacture may also require clean-up. Environmental remediation and restoration aim to reduce exposure to radiation from contaminated soil or groundwater. This book provides a comprehensive overview of this area. Part 1 provides an introduction to the different types of contaminated site and their characteristics. Part 2 addresses environmental restoration frameworks and processes. Part 3 then reviews different remediation techniques and methods of waste disposal.

This book deals with urgent and timely issues related to radiation health effects and protection that are examined by both young researchers as well as experts. The book is organized into three major sections: biological responses, population monitoring and approaches to protection from radiation exposure. Contributors have provided state of the art research in their respective chapters. Radiation action produces damage to multiple targets in the exposed cells or human body and understanding of molecular mechanisms of the underlying processes becomes central to the monitoring of effects and health consequences of radiation exposure. Many experts have highlighted the outcome of epidemiological studies on human populations in high background radiation areas in different locations around the world as well as consequences and scopes for mitigating radiation health effects after radiation accidents such as Chernobyl in Ukraine and the Fukushima Daiichi Accident in Japan. This book also provides important direction for treatment of radiation for exposed victims. In the concluding chapters, contributors have provided new approaches for protection against ionizing radiation exposure. This book contains rich content on basic aspects of radiation induced cellular response which may give deeper insight to beginners in research, teaching, industry and regulatory authorities for basic understanding of radiobiological processes and molecular mechanisms. The book will prove an authentic reference source for updates in radiation science. It is hoped that students, teachers, experts, safety officers, regulatory officials and policy-makers will find the book handy for gaining a broad view of radiation damage to biological systems, monitoring health consequences and for new approaches in developing effective protection against radiation exposure.

The Fukushima nuclear power plant explosions and the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings are intimately connected events, bound together across time by a nuclear will to power that holds little regard for life. In Fukushima: Dispossession or Denuclearization? contributors document and explore diverse dispossession effects stemming from this nuclear will to power, including market distortions, radiation damage to personal property, wrecked livelihoods, and transgenerational mutations potentially eroding human health and happiness. Liberal democratic capitalism is itself disclosed as vulnerable to the corrupting influences of the nuclear will to power. Contributors contend that denuclearization stands as the only viable path forward capable of freeing humans from the catastrophic risks engineered into global nuclear networks. They conclude that the choice of dispossession or denuclearization through the pursuit of alternative technologies will determine human survival across the twenty-first century.

A scientist's recollection of his life as a junior member of the Manhattan Project, Rider of the Pale Horse recounts McAllister Hull's involvement in various nuclear-related enterprises during and after World War II. Fresh from a summer job working with explosives in the chemistry department of an ordnance plant, Hull was drafted in 1943, after his freshman year in college. Unlike other accounts written by scientists and historians of that era, Hull's narrative offers a realistic picture of the dangerous and messy job that GIs and civilian powdermen were asked to do. Hull's description of his postwar work supporting the Bikini Atoll tests in the Pacific and the early concerns about the effects of a hydrogen bomb explosion illuminate the Dark Age of nuclear weaponry. John Hull's illustrations show technicians and scientists at work and bring the story to life.

The NASA History Program was first established in 1959 (a year after NASA itself was formed) and has continued to document and preserve the agency's remarkable history through a variety of products. The NASA History Division serves two key functions: fulfilling the mandate of the 1958 "Space Act" calling for NASA to disseminate aerospace information as widely as possible, and helping NASA managers understand and thus benefit from the study of past accomplishment and difficulties. NASA publishes documents on topics such as: Documentary History, Memoirs, Aeronautics and Space Report of the President, and many more. This is one of those documents.

The magnitude 9.0 Great East Japan Earthquake occurred on March 11, 2011, claiming over 20,000 lives. It crippled the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, whose hydrogen-air explosions contaminated wide areas around Fukushima with radionuclides. The number of evacuees initially totaled 328,903, but has been reduced to 263,392 as of February 13, 2014. More than half of the evacuees (132,500) consist of Fukushima residents, and 67% of whom have experienced mental or physical disorders. Indeed, refugee life is so difficult that many Fukushima families have been affected by suicide, divorce, separation of family members, migration and settlement to other places, mental illness, etc. The difficulty is caused by the fear of low-dose radiation induced by the LNT model which claims that radiation cancer risk is linearly proportional to dose without any threshold. Careful scrutiny of the model, however, clearly indicates that the linearity is invalid; low dose radiation is not hazardous, but is even beneficial or hormetic because of the adaptive response to radiation. This book provides ample evidence to negate the LNT model. This book is primarily compiled to get rid of the spell of the LNT model and release Fukushima people from undue torture. The book would also be useful to the public in general who have CT scans and have concerns. In addition, the people who use radiation world-wide such as nuclear power plant workers, radiation researchers, radiologists, and X-ray operators would be relieved to learn from reading this book that the alleged risk of low-dose radiation is illusionary and that the low-dose radiation is even beneficial. Policy makers of nuclear energy and radiation who are working for governmental and/or regulatory agencies are also recommended to read this book. Severe guidelines from a safety standpoint sometimes entrap people into a fear-stricken situation rather than save them, as no one was killed by radiation directly, but more than 1,000 people have been killed by the fear of radiation secondarily in Fukushima. By the same token, this book is recommended to civil activists and journalists who emphasise dangers of low-dose radiation and raise fear of low-dose radiation. It is the time to shed new scientific light on the outdated LNT model.

The principal findings of this study are that Great Britain's search for an independent nuclear deterrent was waged with a purposeful dedication that wedded highly effective statecraft and brilliant, innovative nuclear engineering to produce a strategic nuclear deterrent that remained under her sovereign control. Because Britain's efforts in this area were so often achieved in the face of United States' opposition, Britain's subsequent utilization of her deterrent capability as an instrument to secure American support, notwithstanding that opposition, ought to be considered an example of successful policy management. The product of this effort has been the Anglo-American "special relationship" in nuclear weapons. The demonstrable success of British policy management to nurture and secure the special relationship in nuclear weapons is confirmed by its endurance in the face of American indifference, if not overt hostility, to its continuation. A major contention of this inquiry, therefore, is that the independent nature of Britain's strategic nuclear deterrent has been the primary prerequisite for the evolution of an interdependent, hence "special," relationship with the United States. This relationship will endure, for it must; the physics and metaphysics of strategic relationships in the thermonuclear age will secure this constancy. In the meantime, Britain will play a far greater role internationally than heretofore, just as the special relationship binds her ever closer to the United States. And this, after all, has always been a principal objective of British policy.

Built in the 1940s and 1950s, the Y-12 National Security Complex, located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, is the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) primary site for enriched uranium activities. Because Y-12 facilities are outdated and deteriorating, NNSA is building a more modern facility--known as the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF). NNSA estimates that the UPF will cost up to $3.5 billion and save over $200 million annually in operations, security, and maintenance costs. NNSA also plans to include more advanced technologies in the UPF to make uranium processing and component production safer. GAO was asked to (1) assess NNSA's estimated cost and schedule for constructing the UPF; (2) determine the extent to which UPF will use new, experimental technologies, and identify resultant risks, if any; and (3) determine the extent to which emerging changes in the nuclear weapons stockpile could affect the UPF project. To conduct this work, GAO reviewed NNSA technology development and planning documents and met with officials from NNSA and the Y-12 plant. The UPF project costs have increased since NNSA's initial estimates in 2004 and construction may be delayed due to funding shortfalls. NNSA's current estimate prepared in 2007 indicates that the UPF will cost between $1.4 and $3.5 billion to construct--more than double NNSA's 2004 estimate of between $600 million and $1.1 billion. In addition, costs for project engineering and design, which are less than halfway completed, have increased by about 42 percent--from $297 to $421 million--due in part to changes in engineering and design pricing rates. With regard to the project's schedule, NNSA currently estimates that UPF construction will be completed as early as 2018 and as late as 2022. However, because of a funding shortfall of nearly $200 million in fiscal year 2011, NNSA officials expect that the UPF will not be completed before 2020, which could also result in additional costs. NNSA is developing 10 new technologies for use in the UPF and is using a systematic approach--Technology Readiness Levels (TRL)--to gauge the extent to which technologies have been demonstrated to work as intended. Industry best practices and Department of Energy (DOE) guidance recommend achieving specific TRLs at critical project decision points--such as establishing a cost and schedule performance baseline or beginning construction--to give optimal assurance that technologies are sufficiently ready. If critical technologies fail to work as intended, NNSA may need to revert to existing or alternate technologies, possibly resulting in changes to design plans and space requirements that could delay the project and increase costs. Changes in the composition and size of the nuclear weapons stockpile could occur as a result of changes in the nation's nuclear strategy, but NNSA officials and a key study said that the impact of these changes on the project should be minor. For example, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty signed in April 2010 by the leaders of the United States and Russia would, if ratified, reduce the number of deployed strategic warheads from about 2,200 to 1,550. According to NNSA officials, NNSA and DOD have cooperated closely and incorporated key nuclear weapons stockpile changes into UPF's design. Also, an independent study found that most of the UPF's planned space and equipment is dedicated to establishing basic uranium processing capabilities that are not likely to change, while only a minimal amount--about 10 percent--is for meeting current stockpile size requirements. GAO is making five recommendations for, among other things, improving the UPF's cost and funding plans, ensuring that new UPF technologies reach optimal levels of maturity prior to critical project decisions, and for improving DOE guidance. NNSA generally agreed with the recommendations.

This document details the Near-term Task Force Review of insights from the Fukushima Dai-Ichi accident.

This EIS includes the analysis by the NRC and Corps staff that considers and weighs the environmental impacts of building and operating two new nuclear units at the CPNPP site and at alternative sites, and mitigation measures available for reducing or avoiding adverse impacts.

One of the challenges Gen. John P. Jumper, Chief of Staff of the Air Force, sends to Air Force students, researchers, and staff offices is to investigate future concepts of operations (CONOPS). One in particular relates to this study, the CONOPS for space and command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. The Air Force is very sensitive about incorporating new technology into its operations. While the authors advocate a feasibility study for reactor sin space in a CONOPS, they also explore a deeper problem with widespread theoretical employment of nuclear technology in space. They point first to the mission enabling advantages of nuclear reactors in space - factors like light weight, high power, long life, and potentially lower costs. A reactor would supply electrical power to a space vehicle and perhaps provide ionic or electrical propulsion. They see that nuclear-powered spacecraft would serve long-range National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) missions as well as permit effective hyperspectral satellites that would have profound benefits for the Department of Defense. The limiting factors for nuclear power in space are a compelling mission requirement and broad acceptance in popular support. The first factor is rather obvious but the second is driven by a broad-based fear of risks in the employment of nuclear technology. Many have general doubts about such an undertaking. Some opponents perceive cataclysmic dangers. A failure of space launch carrying nuclear systems would produce something on the order of a "dirty" nuclear bomb. Opponents are rigorous in their protest. Two things were clear to these researchers. One, nuclear space developers must convince the public that they are capable of developing a safe and robust system. Two, because the political battle is primarily over perceived risks rather than empirically based understanding, employment of value-focused decision strategy is necessary to convince the public and congressional leaders of the feasibility of a space nuclear program.

This "Technical Evaluation Report on the Content of the U.S. Department of Energy's Yucca Mountain License Application; Administrative and Programmatic Volume" (TER Administrative and Programmatic Volume) presents information on the NRC staff's review of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Safety Analysis Report (SAR), provided on June 3, 2008, as updated on February 19, 2009. The NRC staff also reviewed information DOE provided in response to NRC staff requests for additional information and other information that DOE provided related to the SAR. In particular, this report provides information on the NRC staff's evaluation of DOE's proposed administrative and programmatic activities regarding the following: * Research and Development Program to resolve safety questions; * Performance Confirmation Program; * Quality Assurance Program; * Records, reports, tests, and inspections; * DOE organizational structure; * Key positions assigned responsibility for safety and operations; * Personnel qualifications and training; * Plans for startup activities and testing; * Plans for conduct of normal activities; * Emergency planning; * Controls to restrict access and regulate land uses; and * Uses of geologic repository operations area for purposes other than disposal of radioactive wastes.

On October 1, 2010, the NRC staff began orderly closure of its Yucca Mountain activities. As part of orderly closure, the NRC staff prepared this technical evaluation report (TER), a knowledge management document. This document captures the NRC staff's technical assessment of information presented in DOE's Safety Analysis Report (SAR), dated June 3, 2008, as amended, and supporting information. The TER describes the staff's technical evaluation of the DOE SAR and, in particular, this document (TER Preclosure Volume) provides technical insights on the expected performance of the geologic repository operations area (GROA) during the period of operations (i.e., prior to permanent closure or preclosure period). The TER was developed using the regulations at 10 CFR Part 63 and guidance in the Yucca Mountain Review Plan (YMRP). The TER does not, however, include conclusions as to whether or not DOE satisfies the Commission's regulations.

Public Meltdown describes the public debate around re-licensing the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power plant in Vermont. The plant's initial 40-year license expires in March 2012, and the plant's owner, the Louisiana-based Entergy Corporation requested permission to extend the license for another twenty years. This book describes the debate and ensuing "public meltdown" as plant owners announced leaking tritium and misleading comments.

A nuclear detonation in the United States is one of the most catastrophic incidents imaginable. While the United States Government is working domestically and with international partners to ensure this scenario never occurs, failing to plan for managing the consequences of such an event would be irresponsible. Should a nuclear detonation occur, a crucial task for federal, state, local, tribal and territorial authorities and private-sector organisations will be communicating clear and consistent messages to the public. All levels of government have responsibility for co-ordinating and communicating information regarding the incident to the public immediately after a nuclear detonation. State, local and tribal authorities retain the primary responsibility for responding to large-scale incidents, such as a nuclear detonation. Effectively communicating health and safety instructions to the population will be a critical factor in building trust, comforting the nation, saving lives and minimising injury. This book was developed as a resource for emergency responders and federal, state, and local officials communicating with the public and the media during the immediate aftermath of a nuclear detonation in the United States. An interagency group of communications and radiation technical experts developed the messages in this book, which include key messages for the impacted community and the nation, and anticipated questions and answers for distribution to the public in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear detonation.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NCR) 2011-2012 Information Digest provides a summary of information about the NRC and the industry it regulates. It describes the agency's regulatory responsibilities and licensing activities and also provides general information on nuclear-related topics.

Britain was the first country to exploit atomic energy on a large scale, and at its peak in the mid-1960s, it had generated more electricity from nuclear power than the rest of the world combined. The civil atomic energy programme grew out of the military programme which produced plutonium for atomic weapons. In 1956, Calder Hall power station was opened by the Queen. The very next year, one of the early Windscale reactors caught fire and the world's first major nuclear accident occurred. The civil programme ran into further difficulty in the mid-1960s and as a consequence of procrastination in the decision-making process, the programme lost momentum and effectively died. No nuclear power stations have been built since Sizewell B in the late 1980s. This book presents a study of Government papers that have recently become available in the public domain. For the first time in history, the research reactor programme is presented in detail, along with a study of the decision-making by the Government, the Atomic Energy Authority (AEA), and the Central Electricity Board (CEGB).This book is aimed at both specialists in nuclear power and the interested public as a technical history on the development and ultimate failure of the British atomic energy programme.

This report describes eight events that NRC identified as AOs during Fiscal Year (FY) 2010. One event involved radiation exposure to an embryo/fetus. The other seven events occurred at NRC-licensed or regulated medical institutions and are medical events as defined in Title 10, Pt 35, of the Code of Federal Regulations (10 CFR Part 35).

This safety evaluation report (SER) documents the technical review of U.S. Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR) Aircraft Impact Assessment (AIA) application by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) staff.