"Prime Minister Naoto Kan said Tuesday that Japan would abandon plans to build more nuclear reactors, saying his country needed to 'start from scratch' in creating a new energy policy."
"The flooding Mississippi River is done watching and waiting. And anyone who doubts that the river has become T.S. Eliot's personification of 'a strong brown god' need only walk up the slope of the levee and peer over the top."
"As the Mississippi River continued carrying near-record amounts of water past Memphis, draining storm-drenched lands stretching from the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians, officials combined messages of reassurance and caution."
"The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident exposed flaws in the Japanese government's measures to guard the country's reactors against earthquakes and tsunamis. U.S. officials in recent years also have worried that Japanese officials haven't taken enough precautions to protect the facilities from terrorist attacks, according to diplomatic documents released over the weekend on the WikiLeaks website."
As he delivered a eulogy last year for 29 men killed in the worst coal mine disaster in four decades, President Obama bowed his head and repeated a plea he had heard from mining families: 'Don't let this happen again.'
"Corroded cooling water pipes at the Byron nuclear power plant in Illinois could have caused a nuclear catastrophe. The plant, owned by Exelon Corp., is just one example of regulators from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission failing to penalize safety failures."
"Levels of radioactive substances have jumped in the Pacific seabed off Japan near the nuclear power plant crippled by a massive tsunami in March, according to the plant operator."
"The Ohio and Mississippi River levels were falling Wednesday at the site where engineers blasted holes in a Missouri levee to relieve pressure. But unleashing torrents of water across 35 miles of farmland in what has already been a terrible flooding season could carry other consequences. One risk, scientists cautioned, is fertilizer runoff from the flooded farm country along the Mississippi."
"A year after the worst U.S. coal-mining disaster since 1970, the mining industry on Wednesday launched a campaign for a program that could allow companies with good safety records to avoid regular mandatory inspections."
