A Hanford worker was seriously injured when he fell through an access door to a catwalk 50 feet above the ground Wednesday morning inside a building at the Hanford 300 Area just north of Richland.

He hit the rail of a ladder halfway down, and then fell the rest of the way to the ground, said Todd Nelson, spokesman for Washington Closure Hanford. The railing kept him from hitting the floor with full force, according to DOE.

The Washington Closure worker was taken to Kadlec Regional Medical Center in Richland by ambulance with "very serious but non-life-threatening injuries, including to his leg," said Dave Brockman, manager of the Department of Energy Hanford Richland Operations Office, in a memo sent to all Hanford employees Wednesday evening. The worker's name was not released.

VIENNA (AP) - The 35-nation board of the International Atomic Energy Agency chose a veteran Japanese diplomat as the agency's next head on Thursday, in a tight vote reflecting stubborn North-South divisions of the U.N. nuclear monitoring organization.

Yukiya Amano collected 23 votes, compared to 11 for Abdul Samad Minty of South Africa, with one abstention, barely giving him the two-thirds majority needed for victory.

Even that tight margin came only after hard-fought preliminary sessions. A March vote between the two men - Amano, backed by the U.S. and like-minded countries, Minty supported by the developing world - was inconclusive, showing the divide separating the two camps.

WASHINGTON (AP) - The last remaining bomb-grade uranium has been shipped out of Romania as part of a U.S.-Russian nuclear nonproliferation program, the Energy Department reported Tuesday.

Officials at the department's National Nuclear Security Administration said the highly enriched uranium was taken from two research reactors in Romania and flown to Russia for secure storage. The shipment weighed 118 pounds.

Russia had provided the uranium years ago. The NNSA, working with Romanian officials, moved all the highly enriched uranium, or HEU, of U.S. origin, out of Romania in 2008.