Emma Brown

The Nuclear Renaissance Starts Here, says the bright sales brochure for Westinghouse Electric Corporation’s newest nuclear reactor, the AP1000. The slogan is apt: In December 2006, the Chinese government awarded Westinghouse what was then the most lucrative contract in the history of commercial nuclear energy. The fast-growing, energy-hungry country would pay between $5 and $8 […]

Media and government reports often refer to “highly-enriched” and “weapons-grade” uranium, sometimes interchangeably. But in fact the terms have different meanings that shouldn’t be confused: “weapons-grade” refers to a level of enriched uranium that is capable of being used in an atomic bomb; “highly-enriched” refers only to the fact that uranium has been enriched, not […]

Oleg Khintsagov left his apartment in southern Russia in February 2006 with 80 grams of highly enriched uranium stuffed in his pocket and a plan to make a million dollars. After slipping past border guards in neighboring Georgia, he traveled to the capital, Tbilisi, to meet a buyer who claimed he was from “a serious […]

Journalist Michael Gartland incited the wrath of concerned parents in Paramus, NJ, when he reported in late May in the Bergen Record that soil at a local middle school was contaminated with pesticides at levels 39 times greater than the state’s safety guidelines. What’s more, school district officials had known about the pesticides since January, but failed to inform the public — and failed to fix the problem.