Nuclear, Natural Disaster | featured news

A powerful earthquake struck close to Iran's only nuclear power station on Tuesday, killing 32 people and injuring 850 as it destroyed homes and devastated two small villages, Iranian media reported.

With a minute of silence, tolling bells and prayers, Japan will on Sunday mark the first anniversary of an earthquake and tsunami that killed thousands and set off a nuclear crisis that shattered public trust in atomic power and the nation's leaders.

A fast-moving wildfire forced officials at the nuclear laboratory in Los Alamos to close the site Monday as more than 100 residents evacuated their homes....

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.

A top Japanese official acknowledged Friday that the government was overwhelmed by the scale of last week's twin disasters, slowing its response ...

A small band of experts is risking their lives to prevent a nuclear disaster at Japan's damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant.

It seems too impossible to believe, but according to reports from CNN, Reuters and the AP tonight, the last workers at the Fukashima-Daiichi reactors have been withdrawn from the scene, halting efforts to continue cooling partially melted fuel rods with ocean water. Just a day earlier 750 more workers had been removed. Exhaustion, radiation exposure, hopelessness–we don’t yet know the reason for this latest move. Earlier in the day new fires, explosions and clouds of smoke or steam were spotted. Maybe the evacuation means that the worst of the danger is over (how else could they leave?) — but that doesn’t seem likely.

Stocks plunged Tuesday, sending the Dow Jones industrial average down almost 300 points at the opening, as the nuclear crisis in Japan intensified following a deadly earthquake and tsunami....

The last thing Japan needed was more bad news on its threatened nuclear reactors. But Monday and early today, that's just what this nation got.

The last-ditch move indicates that the backup cooling system in a second quake-damaged reactor has failed. Japanese officials say radiation levels at another reactor being pumped with seawater have fallen, but hydrogen gas is building in a third.