A mountain in North Korea believed to have served as the site of five of the rogue regime’s nuclear tests — including Sunday’s supposed hydrogen bomb explosion — is at risk of collapsing and leaking radiation into the region, a Chinese scientist said Monday. Foxnews.com

Egypt’s president, Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, has invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to visit Egypt to witness the start of construction of a nuclear power plant in Dabaa, northwest of Cairo. The Kremlin’s press service said yesterday that the two heads of state had met during the BRICS summit in China’s Xiamen province, where they said their countries had completed two years of talks on the project. World-nuclear-news.org

Donald Trump’s U.N. ambassador says the president “has grounds” to declare that Iran is not complying with the 2015 nuclear deal, stoking doubts about whether Trump intends to scrap an international agreement and core legacy achievement for former President Barack Obama. Politico.com

The Toronto Stock Exchange and its American peers have fallen dramatically this morning, the first day of trading since North Korea announced Sunday that it had successfully conducted its most powerful nuclear test so far. Thestar.com

       Yesterday, sensors detected a major seismic event in North Korea. N.K. said that it had just carried out an underground test of a hydrogen bomb. It was known that N.K. had prepared another nuclear test and was ready to fire it by last March. They were waiting for their leader, Kim Jong-Un, to order the test. Commentators say that he waited until yesterday in order to conduct the test when the U.S. would be involved in a three day weekend for Labor Day celebrations and would be less able to respond. It has also been suggested that Kim was timing the test to be of maximum embarrassment to China, its biggest supporter, which is currently hosting the annual meeting of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).

       The previous nuclear test by N.K. was conducted in September of 2016. The regime claimed that they had tested a hydrogen bomb but the international scientific community rated the blast at about twenty kilotons of TNT. This would be consistent with a regular atomic fission bomb test or the failure of a hydrogen bomb test. Once again, the regime is claiming that it tested a hydrogen bomb. What does the scientific community say about this bomb test?

      I recently posted an essay about how underground nuclear tests are detected. An underground nuclear test sends out powerful seismic waves that are different than the waves from an earthquake. They are also much shallower.

       There is a term called the body-wave magnitude (mB) that is used to measure the intensity of an underground blast. The scale is logarithmic. There is a network of thirty four detectors scattered around the world in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization’s network that are used to detect underground nuclear tests.

        The new N.K. underground test blast was so powerful that it “saturated” the detectors. This means that it exceeded the maximum reading that the detectors were capable of registering. The initial mB esitimations varied widely from different sources between fifty kilotons of TNT and one hundred and fifty kilotons of TNT. There are a number of variables in the equation used for mB and choices of different numbers for type of rock, density, depth, etc. yielded the wide range of the estimate. A subsequent analysis of the possible strength of the mB for a deeper depth than the initial estimations suggested that if the blast went off at a depth of over twenty five hundred feet, it could have been as powerful as three hundred seventy kilotons of TNT. It appears that the North Koreans did actually successfully test a hydrogen fusion bomb.

       The successful test of a hydrogen bomb by N.K. is a very troubling milestone in their march to a modern nuclear arsenal. They have been testing missiles that may be able to reach the continental U.S. If they can miniaturize their new bomb so that it can be placed on one of their new missiles, then they would have the capacity to reach and destroy major U.S. cities. The international community has repeatedly said that N.K. could not be allowed to have a nuclear arsenal that could threaten other nations around the world but the North Koreans are close now and getting closer. It is not clear that there is any way to stop them.

Photo from the North Korean Korean Central News Agency of Kim Jong-Un inspecting what is supposed to be a model of the hydrogen bomb that was tested yesterday:

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South Korea’s defense minister on Monday said it was worth reviewing the redeployment of American tactical nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula to guard against the North, a step that analysts warn would sharply increase the risk of an accidental conflict. Washingtonpost.com

The Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI) has signed contracts with several domestic companies to develop technologies for decommissioning Kori unit 1, which was permanently shut down in June. It is the first South Korean reactor to enter decommissioning. World-nuclear-news.org

The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has completed its technical assessment of a draft environmental impact statement (EIS) for a proposed Near Surface Disposal Facility (NSDF) for radioactive waste from Canadian Nuclear Laboratories’ Chalk River site. CNL must now address all federal and public comments received on the proposal before submitting its final EIS. World-nuclear-news.org

The nuclear power plant near Richland began supplying the regional power grid Saturday afternoon after being shut down for nearly 13 days. Energy Northwest’s Columbia Generating Station was shut down by operators Aug. 20 when an air removal valve in the plant’s turbine building closed, causing a loss of vacuum pressure in the system that turns steam back into water for reuse at the plant. Tri-cityherald.com

One of South Carolina’s nuclear power reactors remained shut down Thursday for what utility executives call a minor, non-nuclear issue. The 33-year-old reactor at V.C. Summer Nuclear Station, about 30 miles (50 kilometers) north of Columbia, is safe and stable while teams assess repairs. There was a minor issue with the main transformer, and the plant’s safety systems responded exactly as designed said Rhonda O’Banion, spokeswoman for SCANA, parent company of South Carolina Electric & Gas. Usnews.com

As medical doctors and scientists, we write concerning the escalating crisis between North Korea and the US. The power to kill millions is in the hands of unstable countries and unpredictable people. Tensions between these two nuclear powers clearly illustrate the dangers of nuclear weapons, which make the world less stable. Theguardian.com

Current nuclear threats on par with Cuban missile crisis, former US Energy secretary says. Cnbc.com

Finland is set to embrace a decarbonised future by increasing carbon taxes and introducing laws in 2018 that will begin to phase out the use of coal, with more nuclear capacity waiting to offer an alternative fuel source. Euractiv.com

The Minerals Council of Australia (MCA) has called on the Australian government to reverse legislation that effectively bans the country from developing a nuclear energy industry. The MCA, which represents the country’s exploration, mining and minerals processing industry, has also called for uranium projects to be removed from the definition of “nuclear action” under federal environmental law. World-nuclear-news.org

Uranium enrichment company Urenco yesterday said it expects to commission the Tails Management Facility (TMF) at Capenhurst in the UK in 2018, after construction delays. The facility, to deconvert depleted uranium hexafluoride tails, had previously been expected to enter service this year. World-nuclear-news.org

Bulgaria this week held a construction launch ceremony for a low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste repository to be built close to the Kozloduy nuclear power plant, which sits on the Danube River close to the border with Romania.  Nuclearstreet.com

Members of China’s parliament on Friday approved of a new law that enhances the power of the National Nuclear Safety Administration (NNSA) as the country’s regulator for their nuclear power industry. Nuclearstreet.com

        The Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011 raised fears that the release of contaminated ground water and cooling water into the Pacific Ocean could contaminate fish that are caught for human consumption. TEPCO’s plan to release almost eight hundred thousand tons of tritium contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean is awaiting government approval. This has reignited the debate over the dangers posed by such releases.

      Shortly after the Fukushima disaster, raised levels of radioactive cesium were found in bluefin and albacore tuna caught off the coast of California. Since ocean currents would take up to two years to move water from Japan to California, the presence of the cesium in the tuna indicated that those fish had swum six thousand miles in about two months to get to California from Japan.

        These studies were undertaken to help understand the migratory patterns of the tuna but the presence of cesium from the Fukushima disaster did raise concerns about public health. Although the amount of cesium in the tuna was too low to be make the tuna dangerous for people to consume, public concern spread to other types of fish, sharks, and marine mammals as well as other areas of the U.S. and Canadian Pacific Coast.

      A new study has just been released that finds the dangers of consuming meat from predatory Pacific fish such as tuna, swordfish and sharks is minimal. The study focused on cesium. Two radioactive isotopes of cesium, Cs-134 and Cs-137, are created when uranium decays in a nuclear reactor. A great amount of both of these cesium isotopes was released into the Pacific Ocean during the Fukushima disaster. They are especially dangerous because they have half lives of two years and thirty one years, respectively. They tend to accumulate in the muscle tissue of fish which are eaten by humans. Although they are washed out of human tissue within one hundred and fifty days, in large doses, they can be lethal.

        Samples were taken from the tissues of predatory fish from across the northern Pacific between 2012 and 2015. These samples were from around Japan, Hawaii and California. The samples showed no detectable levels of Cs-134. Levels of Cs-137 were the same as the background levels set by nuclear testing in the Pacific in the 1940 and 1950s.

        The lead author of the study said, “Our measurements and associated calculations of how much radioactive cesium a person would ingest by eating this seafood shows that impacts to human health are likely to be negligible. For marketed fish to be restricted from trade, the cesium levels would have to be more than 1,600 times higher than in any samples we measured.”

       A co-author of the study said, “One goal of our study was to put these perceived risks in context by surveying a broad range of vertebrate species across the entire North Pacific for the presence or absence of Fukushima-derived radioactive cesium. Our results, which show very low or undetectable levels in these animals, are important both for public perception of seafood safety and for scientific understanding of radionuclide transfer. Go ahead and eat some sushi! Our work shows that radioactivity from the Fukushima disaster is very low in open-ocean vertebrates.”

Bluefin tuna:

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