UN confirms North Korea shut nuclear plants
"Yes we now verify that all the five nuclear facilities have been shut down," Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency told reporters in the Malaysian capital.
He was speaking ahead of two days of six-party talks set to begin in Beijing after UN nuclear inspectors verified the shutdown of North Korea's Yongbyon reactor.
The reactor produces material that can be turned into weapons-grade plutonium and in February North Korea agreed to close it in return for 50,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil, which began moving there from South Korea.
North and South Korea, the United States, China, Japan and Russia will now start to explore how to permanently scrap the Yongbyon complex and terminate North Korea's nuclear weapons potential.
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California's Next Electricity Headache Is a Looming Shortage
LOS ANGELES - As if California doesn’t have enough problems with its electric service, now regulators warn the state may be short on power supplies by 2021 if utilities don’t start lining up new resources now.
In the hopes of heading off a shortfall, the California Public Utilities Commission has ordered the state’s electricity providers to secure 3.3 additional gigawatts of reserve supplies. That’s enough to power roughly 2.5 million homes. Half of it must be in place by 2021 and the rest by August 2023.
The move comes as California is already struggling to accommodate increasingly large amounts of…
