Portside

Washington state's Attorney General Bob Ferguson intends to sue the U.S. government for not protecting workers involved in the decades-long cleanup of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a decommissioned nuclear site. Dozens of workers, including 44 in the last 12 months, have been sickened by toxic vapors while trying to clean up the site. "Hanford workers face a very real and immediate health risk," Ferguson said in announcing his intent to file the lawsuit.

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The United States has tried to develop thorium as an energy source for some 50 years and is still struggling to deal with the legacy of those attempts. In addition to the billions of dollars spent, mostly fruitlessly, the government will have to spend billions more to deal with the wastes produced by those efforts. America’s energy-from-thorium quest now faces an ignominious conclusion: the Energy Department appears to have lost track of 96 kilograms of uranium 233.

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While a depleted, discredited and disorganized nuclear utility moves to restart its other reactors, its stricken units at Fukushima continue to hold the rest of us at the brink of apocalyptic terror.