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We were sent this press release today, and thought we’d share it with you, just in case you felt the need to own one…

Launched by Lab Impex Systems, the SmartCAM is the next generation Continuous Air Monitor (CAM) that will give users unparalleled performance in terms of detectable limit, sensitivity and speed to alarm.  The SmartCAM utilises state-of-the-art Spectral Measurement Analysis in Real Time (SMART) technology.  This provides real advances in alpha particulate detection techniques.

In operation the SmartCAM continually monitors alpha and beta particulates deposited on a static card mounted filter (optional moving filter will also be available) with a high efficiency solid - state detector.

The SmartCAM utilises proven features of LIS's previous generation CAM, the CMS-2000, such as the highly efficient head design.  Where the SmartCAM sets itself apart from other systems is in its ability to accurately determine background (Radon and Gamma) ensuring the limitation of costly false alarms.

More information can be found at www.lab-impex-systems.com

Thanks goes to Janis Mara (Costa Contra Times) for this piece found on the Inside Bay Area / Oakland Tribune web pages. As concerns about greenhouse gases and global warming mount, nuclear energy is getting a second look in California.

Stewart Brand, who created the Whole Earth Catalogue, which covered subjects including alternative energy, recently said: "Global warming is affecting the fisheries in northern California and creating drought to the south. Like a number of other environmentalists, I have had to change my tune,"

Indeed, nuclear is an energy alternative that produces fewer greenhouse gases than coal, generates cheap round-the-clock electricity and creates roughly 1 million times the energy released by the burning of oil.

Despite numerous obstacles, a small group of business representatives are fighting to launch a renaissance of nuclear energy in California and recent comments by Governor Schwarzenegger suggest that he is in agreement with these plans.

This little environmental gem comes via Tacoma’s News Tribune web pages. Residents of Washington State once counted on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation being cleaned up in their lifetimes. Due to serious lack of funding it’s looking like not even their great-grandchildren will live to see the day.

The cleanup project long ago veered from the 30-year timeline laid out in 1989 when the federal government committed itself to remedying the toxic legacy of Cold War nuclear production.  President Bush has proposed the lowest level of nuclear cleanup funding since 1997. His budget would put the biggest cleanup challenge on pace for completion somewhere around 2150.

Some of the double-wall tanks due for cleaning are past their design life; none of them is built to last another 150 years. They will eventually fail, and when they do, the leaking waste will join the plume of contaminated groundwater headed toward the Columbia River. Nice one, George…

With grateful thanks to Susan Bell and Tim Shipman, writing for the Daily Telegraph. An Anglo-French plan for a new generation of nuclear power stations will be unveiled by Nicolas Sarkozy and Gordon Brown this week as part of a series of measures designed to forge a "fraternal" relationship between the two countries.

Mr Sarkozy, who arrives today, is to offer French expertise to help Britain build replacement nuclear reactors for its ageing plants, responsible for 20 % of the UK’s electricity production.

Whilst this joint effort will be hailed as a drive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by reducing Britain's reliance on fossil fuels, anti-nuclear campaigners are expected to react with dismay to the notion that Britain may follow the lead of France, which generates 80 % cent of its electricity from nuclear energy.

Well, you know where to get your Geiger counters, don't you?

Image: daily telegraph / small image from file

We have a medical story for you today filed by Shahar Ilan, for the Haaretz web pages.

Defence establishment officials reported on Sunday that Israel has recently purchased a new supply of Logol pills used against nuclear radiation.

The pills, originally distributed in 2004 to residents of Arad and Yavneh in southern Israel, were met with strong opposition from the mayors of these Negev towns.

The initiative to repurchase the pills was reported by officials on Sunday as part of a visiting delegation  to the Soreq Nuclear Research Centre (pictured) located southeast of Dimona. The defence establishment is, however, still deciding whether to distribute these or put them in storage. 

This debate has arisen as Israel was planning to bring an electrical particle accelerator on line by March 10th which is supposed to take over the functions currently being done by the Soreq reactor.

What is it with America and Strontium 90? If they are not digging up a desert (as mentioned below ) they are inhaling the stuff!! Here is a tale of woe found on the Idaho Press web pages.  A worker at an eastern Idaho company recently inhaled an unknown amount of Strontium 90 whilst extracting radioactive material from a nuclear gauge. He sought medical advice from the local hospital and was later released.

The incident occurred in a private facility in Bonneville County near Idaho Falls. State agencies reported no "assessed threat" to the public.

Emergency management officials said that Sabia Corp. closed and secured the building and have been assessing the best method of re-entering it in order to conduct cleanup operations. Local federal and government agencies discussed the best courses of action to recover from this incident.

Our thanks go to Annette Cary writing for the Tri-City Herald web site for this one. Plans are being developed to start cleaning up Hanford's 13-square-mile ‘BC controlled area,’ which is spotted with radioactive caesium 137 and strontium 90 even though none of the work to produce plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program was done there.

Just south of the BC cribs and trenches 50 million gallons of liquid waste contaminated with radioactive salts were discharged during the Cold War. Animals attracted to the salts spread the waste across miles of the Hanford desert.

Matt McCormick, Department of Energy assistant manager for central Hanford cleanup, said "This area has a large spread of contamination on the surface with the ability to move around with our winds,"

An engineering analysis concluded that the surface soil in contaminated spots should be dug up and hauled to a lined landfill for low-level radioactive waste a few miles to the west. Work to dig up an estimated 237,000 cubic yards of dirt could begin later this year.

With thanks to Richard Macey, writing for the Sydney Morning Herald’s web pages.  Patients in Australia face having medical tests postponed because of another delay in restarting the new Lucas Heights nuclear reactor.

The $400 million OPAL reactor was shut down in July, just three months after being opened by the then prime minister, John Howard, when uranium fuel plates started coming loose.  Without the reactor, Australia has had to import radioactive ingredients, needed to make the 500,000 doses of nuclear medicine used every year, from South Africa and Canada.

The fault, requiring the redesign of fuel plates used to power the reactor, has already forced a rationing of radiopharmaceuticals, with doctors and Lucas Heights specialists having to choose who should miss out when imports are held up. The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation originally expected the Argentine-designed reactor would be out of service for only eight weeks while repairs were made.

With thanks to those nice people writing for the Toronto Star web pages for this one. The supplier of medical isotopes, based in Ottawa, Canada, is contradicting the federal government's version of when Ottawa first knew there was a problem with the isotope supply in November 2007.

Officials of MDS Nordion told a recent hearing that they were blunt when they met with officials from the Department of Natural Resources on Nov. 22. "We were very clear. This was a crisis situation. We had a global supply issue that was going to impact nuclear medicine and physicians around the world," said Grant Malkoske, vice-president of Strategic Technologies at MDS.

The company reprocesses isotopes produced by Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. in Chalk River, Ont., and sells them to pharmaceutical companies around the world.

Our thanks to Alan Guenther, writing for the Asbury Park Press. More than 150,000 people in Ocean County are unnecessarily at risk of getting thyroid cancer if there is a radiation release from the oldest US nuclear plant, Oyster Creek, in Lacey, New Jersey.

Local residents are at risk because most have failed to pick up free KI pills that could be taken in the event of an accident at the plant. The KI (potassium iodide) pills originally distributed in 2002 have expired.

New pills were made available in April; but of the 162,951 people living within 10 miles of the power plant, only 4,150 pills were picked up at six free clinics offered by Ocean County last year and approximately 250,000 KI pills are stockpiled, unclaimed by the public.

If you thought that was bad, more than 35,000 KI pills are stockpiled at local schools in case there's a nuclear accident, but, as yet, have not been sent home with the children.

With thanks to Eric Berger, writing for the Houston Chronicle and with no apologies for starting off this nugget by saying ‘It’s science, Jim…’ In Star Trek II Mr Spock dies after saving the Enterprise and succumbing to a lethal dose of radiation.  Even though the writers’ decided there was no cure that ‘Bones’ could give him, scientists in Texas may be on the verge of proving them wrong.

Rice University's Jim Tour and his colleagues at two Houston health institutions have found a drug that, when given to mice before radiation exposure, is 5,000 times more effective than the best-available therapy for radiation injuries.

Officials at the US Department of Defence, seeking remedies for the radiation sickness that would follow a nuclear strike, were so taken by the research that they recently gave Tour a $540,000 (around £271,000) grant and asked him to compress the next phase of testing into an almost unheard-of nine months.

"They originally asked for something in six months, but I told them that was impossible," said Tour, a chemist who directs Rice's Carbon Nanotechnology Laboratory.

Whilst the Americans are worrying about a potential terrorist threat from Europe (and that includes us, people) here’s a little gem that makes this job worthwhile, courtesy of Jason Trahan and the Dallas News web pages. A 22-year-old Rockwall man's Internet boasts that he had made a mini-nuclear reactor in his garage resulted in a visit from the FBI and Texas Health Services.  They removed science equipment at the request of the man’s parents.

The man, who was not identified by authorities and who could not be reached, was experimenting with Americium-241, a man-made radioactive element common in smoke detectors, and natural radioactive ore that he had bought legally on eBay.

Officials discovered the homemade atomic lab in December, when they found the man's boasts on an amateur science blog. On it, he said that he had produced high amounts of radiation in his house while making Plutonium-239, a component in nuclear weapons.  Tests on the home did not show abnormal levels of radiation, and his neighbours were in no danger.

With thanks to Andrew Pollack, writing for the International Herald Tribune.

Medical centres in the US are rushing to turn nuclear particle accelerators, formerly used only for exotic physics research, into the latest weapons against cancer.

"I'm fascinated and horrified by the way it's developing," said Anthony L. Zietman, a radiation oncologist at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital, which operates a proton centre "This is the dark side of American medicine." It costs around $50,000 to treat prostrate cancer with protons, which is around twice the price of X-ray treatment.

Once hospitals have made such a huge investment, experts like Dr. Zietman say, doctors will be under pressure to guide patients toward proton therapy when a less costly alternative might suffice.

Australia's new research reactor has reached its full operating power of 20 MWt during commissioning. The reactor will supply radioisotopes for medical and industrial use. The Open Pool Australian Light-water Reactor (Opal) is owned and operated by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (Ansto) at Lucas Heights about 30 km outside of Sydney

Engineers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, using an emerging sensing technology, have developed a suite of sensors for national security applications that can quickly and effectively detect chemical, biological, nuclear and explosive materials. This technology can also be used to detect if a country is using its nuclear reactors to produce material for nuclear weapons.

With apologies for the picture on the index page – well, we couldn’t resist – and staying in the UK, here is a nice little story from the pages of World Nuclear News. A team of underwater robots could scour the offshore next to the Dounreay nuclear site to remove radioactive particles from the seabed and reduce the number being washed onto the beach if proposals by the UK Atomic Energy Authority are approved.

Radioactive particles escaped into the environment, mainly during the period of reprocessing during the early years of the Dounreay site. The systems in place to minimise particulate release, including a diffuser, were not sufficiently effective to prevent the release of particles.

It is proposed that over the next seven years remotely operated vehicles will scour around 600,000 square metres of seabed.

Found on a recent trawl through the BBC’s web pages. A Canadian nuclear reactor producing two-thirds of the world's medical isotopes resumed operations recently after being shut down for a month.

The country's Atomic Energy Agency says that new supplies will be ready within days to meet a worldwide shortage.

The Chalk River nuclear plant in the province of Ontario, in Eastern Canada, produces isotopes used all over the world for medical imaging and diagnostic scans for fractures, cancer and heart conditions.

The 50-year old reactor was originally shut down for a week of routine maintenance but the country's nuclear regulator refused to allow it to resume production until a number of safety issues were resolved.

Back in 2003, the Japanese corporation Toshiba wanted to thrust the Alaskan community of Galena into the international limelight by donating a new, unconventional electricity-generating plant that would light and heat the Yukon River village, pollution-free, for 30 years.  The catch?  It was a nuclear reactor!  The question? Was it ever built?

For 60 years, how Trinitite formed has been an unchanging part of Trinity Site lore.  After the test, the ground-zero crater was coated with Trinitite, green due to the presence of iron in the sand.

The White Sands public-affairs staff had been telling it the same way until Los Alamos National Lab Scientists Robert Hermes and William Strickfaden published the results of their recent investigation.

Strickfaden said he ran the appropriate numbers through the appropriate formulas and could not get the atomic fireball to form glass in the thickness found on site.  He said the fireball did not hover over the site long enough to account for glass that thick. After further research, they suggested that the desert sand was scooped up into the fireball instead of being baked on the ground underneath it.

Thorium Oxide could be the answer to many concerns about nuclear power. Reactors that use thorium, rather than uranium, produce radioactive waste that needs to be stored for only 500 years. They can also incinerate the much longer-lived radioactive products from conventional nuclear plants, making a Chernobyl-type meltdown virtually impossible: Okay…

The drive to harness the nuclear power that makes the Sun shine passed a milestone recently with the signing of an international treaty launching a £7 billion fusion energy research project.  This latest step has been inspired by the thought that fusion could solve the world’s energy needs.

Researchers at MIT have developed technology they say will boost the power output of nuclear power plants by 50 per cent, and make them safer to run. Well, that’s okay then…

Making an atomic bomb isn’t for dummies - or for sissies. "It's not done in your basement or bathtub," said Robert Norris, a nuclear weapons expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group in Washington. Okay…

Back to ’97, this time to   Starkville, Miss.--A "drum-thunker" and a high-temperature electric torch were helping a Mississippi State laboratory develop ways for America and the world to reduce and safely store nuclear wastes..

Found this on the CNN web pages, via the Dow Jones news wire. The Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, situated in Vernon, went off-line last Thursday after an automatic shutdown.

Plant officials said the shutdown occurred during routine testing of steam valves. Plant technicians are trying to determine the cause of the automatic shutdown.

Officials said the plant remains in a safe and stable condition and will be restarted after engineers complete a thorough evaluation of the shutdown.

Prior to the shutdown, the plant had been operating at a 62% power level to allow repairs on one of the plants two cooling towers.

Hands up if you knew this: One kilogram (2.2 pounds) of natural uranium can produce more than 4,000 kilowatt hours of electricity - equivalent to burning 38 tons of coal or 150 barrels of oil

SEOUL, South Korea (CNN) -- North Korea claimed it conducted a successful underground nuclear test Monday (Oct 9) according to the country's official Korean Central News Agency. A U.S. military official told CNN that "something clearly has happened," but the Pentagon was working to fully confirm the report.

Impress your friends at dinner parties with this little gem: In 10 minutes, a hurricane releases more energy than all the world's nuclear weapons combined.

Lab coats on for a trip to the US: Back in ’97, a Dr. Delbert Day from the University of Missouri-Rolla, received a patent to research if glass may be the answer to safely dispose of nuclear waste by encapsulating plutonium in a special type of glass.

Here’s a statistic to make you think: Uranium 238, the most prevalent isotope in uranium concentrates, has a half-life of about 4.5 billion years.

With thanks to World Nuclear News: A site selection process has been agreed for another floating nuclear power plant in Russia. At a recent meeting between the Republic of Sakha and Russia's Federal Atomic Energy Agency (Rosatom) the Yakutia region was proposed.

If you know your geography, you will know that Sakha is the largest republic in the Russian Federation. It spans three time zones in the Yakutia region (the proposed new site) but has less than one million inhabitants.

Rosatom said the agreement, signed by Sergei Kiriyenko and Sakha President Vyacheslav Shtyrov, was aimed towards developing an investment project for the construction of a floating nuclear power plant in order to support later infrastructure projects in the Arctic north of Sakha

Mikhail Gorbachev, the former Soviet leader, has warned countries to "look before you leap" before building more nuclear power stations. The Soviet Union had been forced to spend tens of billions of roubles to combat the radiation danger, he said, but the pollution of the soil, earth and air was still causing long-term damage.

Plutonium routinely made in power reactors and that from dismantled nuclear weapons, is a valuable energy source when integrated into the nuclear fuel cycle.

Here’s something to ponder over your cornflakes, again from the World-Nuclear Association web site: Plutonium has occurred naturally, but except for trace quantities it is not now found in the earth's crust.

A Japanese town has put itself forward to possibly host the country's high-level radioactive waste storage facility. Toyocho, in Kochi prefecture, was the first to respond to a government invitation

According to the World Nuclear Transport Institute  1 tonne of nuclear fuel is the equivalent of burning 120,000 tonnes of coal…

Another gem from the people at the World Nuclear Transport Institute : 85% of the world’s radiation comes from naturally radioactive sources

Here’s something to make you think: every plant, animal and human that has ever lived on Earth has been bathed in radiation for every second of its life.

A thermal seawater desalination plant will be coupled to the Karachi nuclear power plant as a "first step" towards the employment of large scale production of potable water which has "socio-economic significance" for Pakistan.

The country's Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) has teamed up with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to undertake a Coordinated Research Project  The result of the work will be the Nuclear Desalination Demonstration Plant (NDDP), which will use extraction steam from one of the Karachi nuclear plant's (Kanupp's) feed heaters to desalinate seawater.

Here’s a gem from the department of the blindingly obvious: Plutonium is radiologically hazardous, particularly if inhaled, so must be handled with appropriate precautions.                                               

The government must act now to dispose of Britain's nuclear waste, the Royal Society has said,

because the process itself will take decades. Their solution, based on current scientific knowledge: bury the stuff in deep concrete bunkers!

Brazil nuts are often said to be one of the most radioactive foodstuffs in the world. The Brazil nut tree tends to accumulate high amounts of calcium. In the process, the nut also accumulates high levels of other elements such as barium and radium.

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