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BNS wins £13 million Dounreay decommissioning contract
Dounreay was the site of a brave, new idea — a fast breeder nuclear reactor which would convert an unusable form of uranium to plutonium which could be recycled and turned into new reactor fuel; it would, that is, breed its own fuel, offering the prospect of electricity in abundance; it has not worked out that way; now it is the site of a big decommissioning effort
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DHS's stimulus projects to create 3,000 Jobs
DHS has received $1 billion for air travel security under President Obama’s stimulus package; money will be used to enhance checked baggage security and liquid threats in carry-on baggage
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Obama's budget cuts off most funds for Yucca Mountain repository
The future of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository appears grim; Obama campaigned against the project, which is already more the 10 years behind schdule; new scientific evidence showing that water flows through Yucca Mountain much faster than initially believed raises the prospect that the nuclear waste would leach over time
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Researchers develop plutonium which is good for power but not for weapons
Israeli researcher finds that adding the rare-earth isotope Americium-241 in due proportion during reprocessing “declaws” plutonium, making suitable for power generation but not for weapons
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Hunting down dirty bomb materials
A Los Alamos-based team in in the business of locating and recovering nuclear materials from hospitals, labs, oil fields, and factories so that these materials do not fall into the hands of terrorists; between 2,500 and 3,000 radiological sources are registered each year as unwanted; some officials estimate that there may be tens of thousands of other radioactive sources that the National Nuclear Security Agency has not identified
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San Diego State builds radiation detection system
New Immersive Visualization Center on the campus of San Diego State collaborates with the university’s Homeland Security Program to build, and then demonstrate, gamma radiation detection perimeter system
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Historic sample of bomb-grade plutonium discovered
Scientists stumble upon, then identify, the oldest batch of weapon-grade plutonium; methods used in identification can help in anti-proliferation efforts
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IG: DoE cannot account for nuclear materials at several locations
Department of Energy’s Inspector General finds that the department could not accurately account for the quantities and locations of nuclear material at 15 out of 40, or 37 percent, of facilities reviewed
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Nuclear waste piling up at U.S. hospitals
Federal, state, and local governments, as well as individual hospitals, have no long-term disposal plan in place for millions of radioactive devices
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Lab-on-a-chip detects pollutants, disease, and biological weapons
Researchers develop nano-sized laboratory, complete with a microscopic workbench, to measure water quality in real time; breakthrough will help keep water safe from pollution and bioterrorist threats
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DHS receives IT money in stimulus package
DHS receives a $2.8 billion boost from the new stimulus package; largest single item is for TSA’s installation of checked baggage explosive detection systems
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NNSA ships more high-risk nuclear material out of Livermore
Latest shipment reduces high-security nuclear material onsite by an additional 20 percent; part of the government’s plan to consolidate nuclear materials at five sites by 2012, with significantly reduced square footage at those sites by 2017
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New liquid detection system for airports
Los Alamos national Lab develops a device which enhances airport security by spotting liquids that could prove to be potential threats
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Better detection with self-healing wireless sensor network
New self-forming, self-healing wireless mesh sensor network can detect railway embankment landslides, humidity in art museums, water quality in water treatment facilities — and has military and security applications such as a perimeter network that can detect intrusion through breaking a light beam, or triggering a tripwire, or proximity sensor
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World's largest supercomputer will be used for nuclear stockpile research
IBM to build a 20 petaflops supercomputer, called Sequoia, for the Lawrence Livermore lab; a petaflop stands for a quadrillion floating-point operations per second; to put Sequoia’s computing power in perspective, what it can do in one hour would take all 6.7 billion people on Earth with hand calculators 320 years, if they worked together on the calculation for 24 hours per day, 365 days a year
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The long view
What We’ve Learned from Survivors of the Atomic Bombs
Q&A with Dr. Preetha Rajaraman, New Vice Chair for the Radiation Effects Research Foundation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan.