"15 most toxic places to live"

Mother Nature Network reports on the 15 most toxic places to live:

Included in the list are:

Citarum River, Indonesia: the vast amounts of trash clogging up the waterway makes it look like a landfill rather than a river

Rondônia, Brazil (picture): slash and burning the Amazon rain forest to raise cattle has ruined the area

Lake Karachay, Russia: it was used by the former Soviet Union as the dumping spot for nuclear waste

See the slide show: The 15 most toxic places to live

Photo by National Geographic / Getty Images

Nuclear waste found in Rio Grande

The Los Angeles Times reports on the nuclear waste runoff found in New Mexico's river Rio Grande.

More than 60 years after scientists assembled the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, lethal waste is seeping from mountain burial sites and moving toward aquifers, springs and streams that provide water to 250,000 residents of northern New Mexico.

Isolated on a high plateau, the Los Alamos National Laboratory seemed an ideal place to store a bomb factory's deadly debris. But the heavily fractured mountains haven't contained the waste, some of which has trickled down hundreds of feet to the edge of the Rio Grande, one of the most important water sources in the Southwest.

Read the full story: Toxic waste trickles toward New Mexico's water sources

Photo by Brian Vander Brug / Los Angeles Times

Visit Washington State nuclear power plant

The New York Times reports on a visit to the Hanford nuclear site in central Washington State.

The site, closed to production in 1980, is surrounded ironically by unspoiled nature, but is"one of the world’s largest environmental clean-up projects"

Nature lovers can now tour the site and the B Reactor; which was "the world's first production-scale nuclear reactor."

Plutonium from this reactor powered the test bomb at Los Alamos, N.M., and the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. 9, 1945. (The Hiroshima bomb, three days earlier, was fueled by uranium 235 made in Oak Ridge, Tenn.)

Read the full story: Unspoiled nature in shadow of nuclear site

Photo by Annie Marie Musselman

Swim near a nuclear power plant in Taiwan

Global Post reports on the Taiwanese nuclear power plant looming over a popular beach.

To date, Taiwan has a near spotless nuclear safety record. That means few here fear having their beach time ruined by a meltdown. "Maybe we've just been lucky," [A 52-year-old parking lot attendant] added with a laugh.

But he said the beach has changed dramatically since he was a child. Then, coral covered the shallow sea floor. "Now, they're all dead," he said. "I don't know if it's because of global warming or the nuclear plant."

Read the full story: Welcome to Taiwan's nuclear beach

Photo by Pichi Chuang/Reuters

Visit Chernobyl at your own risk

Doug Murray traveled for the San Jose Mercury News to Chernobyl, Ukraine to report on the tour around the nuclear fallout site.

The site, 80 miles northwest of capital Kiev, experienced one of the worst non-atomic bomb nuclear disasters on April 26, 1986 when one of the reactors (picture left) exploded. The radiation spread all over Europe and created a ghost town when 300,000 people needed to relocate for safety purposes.

"More than 20 years after the atomic genie was released from the bottle, the invisible danger in this modern ghost town remains. [tour guide Dennis] Zaburin tells me not to worry, but I can see the readout on his dosimeter [radiation monitor]. It says 1,800. Only a few hours earlier he told me that 50 is normal. What am I doing here?"

Read the full story: The lost city of Chernobyl

Hanford nuclear power plant tours FULL!

USA Today via the Associated Press reports on the surprising sell out of the limited tours offered of the Hanford nuclear power reservation:

"The [U.S. Department of Energy] had offered 48 tours for the public to register for on a first-come, first-serve basis. The registration opened early March 17, but by 6 p.m., all 2,000 spots were filled."

As everyone recalls, this Washington State reactor, located near Richmond, spewed radioactive material into the air and water from 1944-1966. This was subsequently covered-up even though or probably because noticeable problems and effects were reported as early as 1948. All documents related to the plant were to remain classified until 1986.

There is probably still radioactivity surrounding the site as there is in Chernobyl, Ukraine, so visiting doesn't sound like a good idea.

Read the full (albeit very short) story: Hanford nuclear tours more popular than ever