Chernobyl costs in Belarus.
(February 21, 1996) Belarus, the country worst hit by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, put a $235 billion price tag on dealing with its aftermath. Belarus Chernobyl Minister Ivan Kenik said foreign aid since the 1986 catastrophe provided only a tiny fraction of what was needed to clean up huge stretches of contaminated forests, resettle thousands of people and tackle health problems. "International cooperation started here only in 1990, and although we have obtained large sums of money, it is not enough," Kenik claimed. "The new estimate for the total damages from the Chernobyl catastrophe from 1986 to 2015 is put at $235 billion -- that's 21 times the size of our 1991 national budget. And this is by no means a final estimate."
Reuter, 13 Febr. 1996
Quaker sued for testing radioactive oats on kids. Quaker Oats faces a multi-million-dollar lawsuit for feeding radioactive cereal to 15 children at a home for the retarded during the 1940s and 1950s. Also named in the suit are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and doctors at the Fernald school in Waltham, Massachusetts, U.S. The suit claims the experiments were intended to give Quaker Oats an advantage over rival Cream of Wheat. To trick the children into eating the cereal, they were told that they were part of a science club. Small amounts of calcium and iron tagged with radioactive tracers were put in the boys' cereal, allowing researchers to track the absorption of those nutrients as the oatmeal was digested. MIT made the radioactive isotopes and carried out the experiments
Edmonton Journal (Can.), 7 Dec. 1995 (reprinted from Associated Press, Boston)
German nuclear lobby arrogance. The head of the German Nuclear Forum, Wilfred Steuer, has expressed his frustration with German politicians. He told the forum's winter conference that "politically-motivated" reductions in the availability of nuclear power plants were "poison to would-be investors" and unjustifiable on both economic and technical grounds. It is very likely that he meant the closure of the Mülheim-Kärlich reactor due to licensing shortcomings. He pleaded for political consensus on the future of nuclear power also with regard to radwaste management, as this issue was "too serious" to be used as a "political lever", referring to the Gorleben storage.
ENS Nucnet 25 Jan. 1996