Nuclear Power Plant, Nuclear Radiation | featured news

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan said Saturday it will take decades to clean up and decommission the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant after the world's worst atomic accident since Chernobyl.

As America's nuclear power plants have aged, the once-rural areas around them have become far more crowded and more difficult to evacuate.

Officials of Japan's hard-hit Fukushima city will begin handing out radiation measuring devices to 34,000 children in a plan to help calm fears about radiation.

U.N. inspectors faulted Japan on Wednesday for underestimating the threat of a devastating tsunami on its crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant but praised its overall response to the crisis as exemplary....

Underscoring the virtue of focusing on US innovation, science, technology and entrepreneurship: in a stunning series of recent events, I have had a front-row seat to, US venture-backed company , Kurion, based in Irvine, CA with a team led by CEO and 30 year nuclear industry veteran John Raymont was revealed this week to have been selected by Japan to rapidly bring its technologies of isotope separation and modular vitrification to help treat, extract, contain and environmentally isolate radioactive materials.

Japan's shelters are still packed, with no firm word on when evacuees may return home. Cleaning up the most serious nuclear accident since Chernobyl is likely to take decades and cost Japan an untold fortune.

Japan said Thursday it would ban anyone entering the 20-km (12-mile) evacuation zone around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant north of Tokyo, weeks after the tsunami-wrecked facility began leaking radiation.

Once Japan's leaky nuclear complex stops spewing radiation and its reactors cool down, making the site safe and removing the ruined equipment is going to be a messy ordeal that could take decade...

For a second day, workers at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant were unable to plug a leak of radioactive water.

More locations around Scotland have recorded very low levels of radioactive iodine believed to be from Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan.