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  • How to bury nuclear waste for the next 100,000 years

    A scene from Into Eternity, a documentary that looks at Finland’s plans to store the country’s nuclear waste for 100,000 years. Yep … 100,000. Photo: PosivaThis piece was written by Lewis Beale. The first documentary that Netflix might slot into their science fiction category, director Michael Madsen’s Into Eternity, is an eerily fascinating look at […]

  • Debating new strategies for curbing global warming

    As the final component of the Climate Next series, our panelists sent a flurry of emails back and forth, debating the best way forward.

  • Uranium contamination found downstream of Tennessee nuclear fuel plant

    A river downstream of a privately-owned nuclear fuel processing plant in East Tennessee is contaminated with enriched uranium, according to an interim report by a university scientist that was released last week.

  • Don’t buy Obama’s greenwashing of nuclear power

    On Feb. 16, while President Obama was in Maryland announcing an $8.3 billion taxpayer-backed loan guarantee for Southern Company to build two new nuclear reactors in Georgia, inspectors at the Vermont Yankee reactor were finding dangerously high levels of tritium, a radioactive cancer-causing chemical, in the groundwater near the plant. The next week, the Vermont […]

  • Ask Umbra’s pearls of wisdom on nuclear energy

    Dearest readers, Not all of your questions are as manageable to navigate as selecting local versus organic apples or how to recycle your light bulbs/baby food jars/yogurt containers/cell phones. Some are downright difficult, controversial, and ambiguous, which is frankly all the more reason to dive into these quandaries. One such pickle: nuclear energy. It’s recently […]

  • It’s time for a solar revolution

    This country spends, in a typical year, $350 billion importing oil from Saudi Arabia and other foreign countries. While this is no doubt good news for the Saudi royal family, one of the richest in the world, it is bad news for the average American. The vast majority of the American people understand that now […]

  • Obama’s nuclear generation gap

    During the energy portion of his first State of the Union address last week, President Obama called for “building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country.” That raises a question: Exactly what generation of nuclear power is Obama talking about — and what makes it an improvement over the generation […]

  • Will South Carolina become the nation’s new Yucca Mountain?

    The Savannah River. Photo courtesy Mountain Hermit via Flickr Earlier this year, President Obama canceled the federal government’s plans to store high-level radioactive waste from nuclear power plants and weapons facilities at the controversial Yucca Mountain site in Nevada — but now there are concerns that South Carolina could become the permanent dumping ground for […]