Opening and operating the nation's first nuclear waste dump will cost more than $90 billion, an Energy Department official said. The price was $58 billion in 2001, the last time the administration released an estimate for the Yucca Mountain project in Nevada. The estimate includes $9 billion already spent and covers about 100 years of operation until the dump is sealed forever. Ward Sproat, the official in charge of the project, said at a Congressional hearing that the best-case situation would result in the Yucca Mountain site opening in 2020; originally it was supposed to open in 1998.

fungi gel well with uranium, says a recent study from the uk. Depleted uranium, a radioactive by-product of uranium enrichment process in nuclear reactors, is used widely in ammunition. Being

The US Energy Department has applied for a license to operate a long-delayed nuclear waste dump at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, US Energy Secretary Sam Bodman announced on Tuesday. Bodman said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will take about three years to review and decide whether to approve the license request for the Yucca Mountain storage facility, which was supposed to have opened in 1998. The earliest Yucca Mountain could open is 2020, the department said.

Many people consider management of high-level nuclear waste as a complex issue. The fuel discharged from a nuclear power reactor contains 94 per cent uranium,1 per cent transuranic elements such as neptunium, plutonium, americium and curium and about 5 per cent fission products such as caesium-137, strontium-90 etc Transuranic elements are long lived and remain toxic for thousands of years. There is international consensus that the nuclear industry can design, construct and operate deep geological repositories to dispose of high-level waste, including transuranic elements permanently.

A US appeals court on Wednesday threw out a Washington state law barring the federal government from adding radioactive waste to the Hanford nuclear disposal site until existing contamination is cleaned up. The Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that federal law pre-empts the state from halting waste disposal at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a 586-square-mile (1,520-square-km) site along the Columbia River in south-eastern Washington. It provided plutonium for World War Two atomic bombs and for the US Cold War arsenal.

THE idea that coal-fired electricity generation can continue to be the major contributor to global electricity generation and the world can still restrict carbon dioxide emissions to a level constant with holding climate warming below 2 degrees is a fairytale, according to letter in the premier science journal Nature (published online, May 7, 2008).

The police tried to stop anguished relatives from streaming into one of the worst affected areas of China's massive earthquake on Sunday, as another strong aftershock hit the area and the death toll rose to nearly 32,500. Hundreds of aftershocks have rattled Sichuan province following last Monday's devastating 7.9 magnitude quake, and officials are concerned the tremors could bring down more unstable buildings and rupture already leaky dams. Six days after the main quake hit, the overall death toll stands at nearly 32,500, state news agency Xinhua reported, with a further 220,000 injured.