Crack forces shutdown of North Carolina nuclear reactor

A quarter-inch crack in a reactor sensor at the Shearon Harris nuclear plant in southwest Wake County has forced Duke Energy to take the plant offline, officials said Thursday.

No radioactive material leaked from the plant, and public health and safety is not in danger, spokeswoman Kim Crawford said.

"There are no indications that there was any leakage," Crawford said. "We made the conservative decision to take the unit offline and make the repair."

Crawford said she couldn't say how long the reactor would be out of commission, but she said the utility has plenty of capacity and wouldn't need to purchase electricity from outside sources to meet demand.

"We're not anticipating any issues," she said. "While our plant is offline, we'll continue to serve our customers."

Shearon Harris provides power to about 550,000 customers, and industry sources said not operating the reactor could cost Duke about $1 million a day. Read more >>

The Fukushima Radioactive Plume Contaminated the Entire Northern Hemisphere

We warned mere days after the Japanese earthquake that the West Coast of North America could be hit with radiation.

The peer-reviewed scientific journal Science of the Total Environment reports:

Massive amounts of anthropogenic radionuclides were released from the nuclear reactors located in Fukushima (northeastern Japan) between 12 and 16 March 2011 following the earthquake and tsunami. Ground level air radioactivity was monitored around the globe immediately after the Fukushima accident. This global effort provided a unique opportunity to trace the surface air mass movement at different sites in the Northern Hemisphere. Read more >>

Forty Million Japanese in Danger of Radiation Poisoning

Natural News
Japanese officials are currently engaging in talks with Russian diplomats about where tens of millions of Japanese refugees might relocate in the very-likely event that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility's Reactor 4 completely collapses. According to a recent report by EUTimes.net, Japanese authorities have indicated that as many as 40 million Japanese people are in "extreme danger" of radiation poisoning, and many eastern cities, including Tokyo, may have to be evacuated in the next few weeks or months to avoid extreme radiation poisoning.

As we continue to report, the situation at Fukushima is dire, to say the least. Reactor 4 is on the verge of complete collapse, which would send radioactive nuclear fuel from thousands of fuel rods directly into the atmosphere. These fuel rods, after all, are already exposed to the open air, but the full release of their fuel would cause not only a regional catastrophe, but also a global nuclear holocaust.

"A report released in February by the Independent Investigation Commission on the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident stated that the storage pool of the plant's No. 4 reactor has clearly been shown to be 'the weakest link' in the parallel, chain-reaction crises of the nuclear disaster," reported the Mainichi Daily News recently.

"The worst-case scenario drawn up by the government includes not only the collapse of the No. 4 reactor pool, but the disintegration of spent fuel rods from all the plant's other reactors. If this were to happen, residents in the Tokyo metropolitan area would be forced to evacuate." More...