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UC Santa Cruz / Committee to Bridge the Gap
Dan Hirsch is director of the Program on Environmental and Nuclear Policy at the University of California, Santa Cruz and president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap.
PROFILE
Dan Hirsch
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FROM Dan Hirsch
To the Point
Tunnel collapses at Washington plutonium plant A collapsing tunnel at America's most radioactive nuclear site in Washington State near the Colombia River Photos courtesy Hanford Nuclear Site The Hanford Nuclear Site in Eastern Washington built the atomic bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, Japan in 1945. It provided plutonium for nuclear weapons for the next 40 years, and now it's the most…
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California's Double Standard for Public Protection State regulators waited for months before they responded to the Southern California Gas Company's dangerous leak in the San Fernando Valley. They waited for years until the federal government finally forced closure of the Exide Technologies battery-recycling plant near East Los Angeles.
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How Safe Are America's Aging Nuclear Power Plants? America's nuclear power plants are aging. The anticipated lifetime originally was about 40 years, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is allowing them to be re-licensed for 20 more.
To the Point
How Safe Are America's Aging Nuclear Power Plants? The ongoing disaster at Fukushima has focused attention on the safety of nuclear power plants in the United States. Could a similar accident happen here? The nuclear industry says there's only been one "safety-significant" incident since 2001, and that was nine years ago. But the nuclear plants are aging.
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State Radiation Monitors Were Offline after Japan Disaster Trace amounts of radiation from Japan's damaged nuclear-power reactors have turned up in rainwater from New England to Florida. They are comparable to findings in Washington State, Nevada and California.
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Obama Reassures Nation on Radiation, Nuclear Safety The United States and Japan have different interpretations of radiation readings from the nuclear power plant at Fukushima. President Obama said that he did not expect harmful levels of radiation to reach the West Coast, and added that nuclear power is still part of America's energy future.
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Will a Massive Source of Potential Cancer Finally Be Cleaned Up? The Santa Susanna Mountains between the San Fernando and Simi Valleys is among the most contaminated places in the United States. For decades during and after World War II, it was used to test rocket fuel and nuclear materials. In 1959, a small nuclear reactor actually melted down there, an incident kept from the public for 20 years.
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LA's Own Nuclear Meltdown Revisited It's been 50 years since America's first nuclear meltdown in the Santa Susana Mountains, between the San Fernando and Simi Valleys. The site was a massive research installation, which tested 30,000 thousand rocket engines over the years and included ten nuclear reactors.
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Nuclear Power and Climate Change After 20 years and $9 billion, the nuclear-waste storage facility at Nevada's Yucca Mountain has been scrapped by the Obama Administration. There has not been a nuclear power plant licensed in the US since the Three Mile Island accident 30 years ago.
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Climate Change and Nuclear Power After 20 years and $9 billion, Nevada's Yucca Mountain won't be the final resting place for 60,000 tons of deadly nuclear waste piling up at power plants all over the country. So what happens now to a nuclear industry that expected a shot in the arm from demand for “clean” energy to reduce global warming?
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Santa Susana Nuclear Meltdown For 40 years, the Santa Susana Field Laboratory tested rocket engines and nuclear reactors in the hills between the San Fernando and Simi Valleys. In 1959, officials reported problems with a nuclear research reactor, but said that no employees were exposed to radiation and that no radioactivity was released outside the facility.
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