The Department of Energy should stop work on the long-troubled, fabulously costly high-level nuclear waste (HLW) treatment plant at its closed Hanford weapons site in Washington state, according to the Government Accounting Office, the congressional watchdog agency. DOE has been working on a pilot plant to mix some 3 million gallons high-level liquid waste left… More GAO to DOE: Pause and rethink Hanford nuke waste vitrification

In Montana, local and national environmental and land use advocates are fighting a state-approved expansion of a controversial underground coal mine, the only underground mine in the state. Attorneys for Earthjustice, the national environmental law firm, have sued Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality for an Aug. 1 approval of an 12.7 million ton expansion of… More Montana underground coal mine faces deep court challenges

The surging floodwaters of Hurricane Helene slightly damaged one of the two Nuclear Regulatory Commission uranium fuel fabrication plants licensed to process highly enriched uranium, Nuclear Fuel Services, Inc., in Erwin, Tenn. The plant is in eastern Tennessee, just across the North Carolina line, 0.2 mile from the flooded Nolichucky River. The Johnson City Press… More Hurricane Helene’s atomic energy impacts

In a recent article in The Nation, arguing [unpersuasively—Ed.] that the Tennessee Valley Authority should repeat its 1970s fervid enthusiasm for nuclear power to combat global warming, writer Fred Stafford begins with a rhapsodic description of driving by TVA’s Watts Bar nuke. In that description, he writes, “As I drove across State Highway 68, a… More H2O: The most abundant and most consequential greenhouse gas