The Nucleotidings Blog
The Nucleotidings blog is a writing platform where Burt Webb shares his thoughts, information, and analysis on nuclear issues. The blog is dedicated to covering news and ideas related to nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and radiation protection. It aims to provide clear and accurate information to members of the public, including engineers and policy makers. Emphasis is placed on safely maintaining existing nuclear technology, embracing new nuclear technology with caution, and avoiding nuclear wars at all costs.
Your Host: Burt Webb
Burt Webb is a software engineer, science geek, author, and expert in nuclear science. Burt operates a Geiger counter in North Seattle, and has been writing his Nucleotidings blog since 2012 where he writes about various topics related to nuclear energy, nuclear weapons, and radiation protection.
Burt Webb has published several technical books and novels. He works as a software consultant.
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Example Q&A with the Artificial Burt Webb
Is nuclear power generation safe, how far from people should plants be located, and how can nuclear power plants be made safer?
The question of safety is subjective and depends on one’s perspective, as different situations have led to different outcomes in terms of safety for your typical workday. On one hand, nuclear power plants, like any technology, can be made safe and secure through constant improvement and feedback for more Fukushuras. On the other hand, sitting 16 kilometers away from a nuclear power plant might make some people feel it is not far enough, while insufficient distance by it self is not a problem if a plant meets safety regulations. Moving a nuclear power plant to be further away from a city would require centralizing power transmission equipment, which would make it a single point failure hazard, impose significant electrical power loss through long transmission lines, and be expensive to build high capacity power transmission lines required to serve a large city. Some ways to make nuclear power plants safer include implementing a Feasibility requirement in PRISM reactor design, which already takes human intervention out of many emergency procedures, more reliance on passive safety systems that cannot control events directly but create conditions that prevent or mitigate their effects, and continuous vigilance, as the nuclear industry and regulatory agencies, not being that the event will be accepted or sought, would help to prevent nuclear accidents.
What do you mean by “Fukushuras”?
“Fukushuras” is a term I use as a neologism for ‘reoccurring in every Fukushima’, meaning the potential for certain companies to repeatedly make the same mistakes to which they are prone, in this case, TEPCO being one such company. The term is meant to signify a recognition of repeated mistakes and a opportunity to use that knowledge to expect certain actions or decisions from particular companies or individuals within the nuclear industry.
Latitude 47.704656 Longitude -122.318745
Ambient office = 80 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 134 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 130 nanosieverts per hour
Green onion from Central Market = 126 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 101 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 89 nanosieverts per hour
Part 1 of 3 Parts
At a memorial service in 2022, veteran Air Force Captain Monte Watts ran into a fellow former Minuteman III nuclear missile operator, who told him that she had non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Watts knew other missile operators with similar cancers. But the connection really hit home later that same January day, when the results of a blood test showed that Watts himself had chronic lymphocytic leukemia, a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
Watts said, “I don’t know if it was ironic or serendipitous or what the right word is, but there it was.”
In the community of U.S. service members who work in nuclear missile silos scattered across the Northern Rockies and Great Plains of the U.S., suspicions had long been rising that their workplaces were unsafe. A few months after Watts was diagnosed in 2022, Lieutenant Colonel Danny Sebeck, a former Air Force missile operator who had transferred to the U.S. Space Force, wrote a paper on a potential cancer cluster among people who served at Minuteman III launch control centers on Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana.
Sebeck identified thirty-six former workers who served primarily from 1993 to 2011 and had been diagnosed with cancer, including himself. Of those, eleven had non-Hodgkin lymphoma and three had died. The Air Force responded quickly to Sebeck’s findings, launching a massive investigation into cancer cases and the environment at three intercontinental ballistic missile bases and a California launch facility. The goal of the study is to complete its research by the end of 2025.
The Air Force has released portions of the studies as they conclude, holding online town halls and briefings to reveal its findings. But while former missile operators say they are heartened by the rapid response, they are concerned that the research, which covers decades and includes thousands of ICBM personnel and administrative workers, may address too large a population or use statistical analyses that won’t show a connection between their illnesses and their military service. They require that tie to expedite benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Historically, the Department of Defense (DoD) has been slow to acknowledge potential environmental diseases. Veterans sickened by exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam, Marines who drank contaminated water at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and service members who lived and worked near burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan fought for decades to have their illnesses acknowledged as related to military service.
With regard to the missile operators, the Air Force had already studied potential contamination and cancer at Malmstrom in 2001 and 2005. The research concluded that the launch control centers were “safe and healthy working environments.” Air Force Global Strike Command is the unit responsible for managing nuclear missile silos and aircraft-based nuclear weapons. Sebeck’s presentation and the decision to pursue further investigation, indicated that the earlier studies may not have included a large enough sampling of medical records to be comprehensive.
Sebeck serves as co-director of the Torchlight Initiative, an advocacy group that supports ICBM personnel and their families. He told congressional Democrats on April 8 that the DoD has not accurately tracked exposures to the community, making it difficult for veterans to prove a link and obtain VA health care and disability compensation.
Please read part 2 next
Latitude 47.704656 Longitude -122.318745
Ambient office = 93 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 1 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 66 nanosieverts per hour
Corn from Central Market = 115 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 75 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 65 nanosieverts per hour
Part 2 of 2 Parts
Although identification and management of both nuclear materials and their disposition pathways are critical capabilities at SRNL, President Trump’s May 2025 executive orders centered on reinvigorating the nuclear industry cast light on supply chain and feedstock availability. SRNL rapidly identified the available inventory due to the extensive evaluations conducted over the previous decade and was able to respond within days to requests in the executive orders for potential HALEU volumes that could be produced. The disposition study turned into a production study. It was decided that additional material to meet our nation’s needs would be required beyond what was initially recovered.
The demand for fuel left SRNL with two important questions:
1. If the separations technology at SRS’s H Canyon became operational, how much fuel could be created from the available supply of spent nuclear fuel from research reactors that is available on-site?
2. How much HALEU could be produced from non-traditional feedstocks identified through the TBD program at SRS and other federal nuclear research sites?
The projected demand for HALEU far exceeds the supply, and numerous efforts are underway to mitigate the near-term supply shortfall in the needed supply. H Canyon is currently engaged in restarting the capability to produce HALEU from on-site HEU using natural uranium as blendstock. SRNL conducted a study that explored the potential to produce more HALEU from existing HEU stocks by using about ten precent wt%-U-235 enriched material (known as LEU+) as a replacement for the natural uranium.
During analysis of HEU solutions available at SRS, SRNL scientists measured levels of certain impurities for which fuel fabricators had provided specifications. While downblending with natural uranium lowered some impurity levels to meet the required specifications, the concept of LEU+ resulted from a mitigation strategy for the remaining high impurity levels. SRNL was able to reduce the impurities while creating more HALEU by using LEU+, as opposed to natural uranium, for downblending. Compared with the baseline approach of making HALEU from existing natural uranium, the LEU+ approach will produce roughly three metric tons more HALEU. The baseline natural uranium approach creates roughly four metric tons of HALEU as opposed to the nearly seven metric tons for LEU+.
SRNL is partnering with SRS’s management and operations contractor, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, on production of the initial HALEU. If their progress continues at the current rate, the first load of HALEU will be delivered to a fuel fabricator in the fall of 2027.
Tom Shehee is a SRNL scientist who performs much of the materials characterization work for the HALEU program. He said, “We will be giving the industry a shot in the arm to help get them going. Fuel will require very tight specifications. What we have can meet that and also proves that we could reprocess other used fuels to create additional HALEU if desired.”
The costs required to pivot to downblending with LEU+ instead of the natural uranium approach could offer increased efficiency of operational cycles and increased throughput with process optimization.
SRNL’s expertise in the back end of the fuel cycle has become very valuable in establishing necessary feedstocks for the front end. The history of identification and characterization expertise in nuclear materials and innovative spirit of problem solving will lead the race in establishing a secure future for nuclear energy technology. With an environmental stewardship mindset, SRNL does not limit its focus to front-end fuel supply requirements. It also considers strategy development for irradiated material and the reprocessing opportunities it holds, working to close the fuel cycle and make implementation of advanced reactors a reality for our nation.
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USA gives South Korea Green Light to Build Nuclear Submarines navalnews.com
Trump declines to rule out underground nuclear tests reuters.com
Latitude 47.704656 Longitude -122.318745
Ambient office = 100 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 115 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 122 nanosieverts per hour
Campari tomato from Central Market = 109 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 105 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 97 nanosieverts per hour
Part 1 of 2 Parts
Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) is the only Department of Energy (DoE) Office of Environmental Management that has a history deeply rooted in environmental stewardship efforts such as nuclear material processing and disposition technologies. SRNL’s expertise is now being leveraged to deal with nuclear fuel supply-chain obstacles by providing a source of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel for advanced reactors.
SRNL carried out a study in 2019 that evaluated the potential for producing low-enriched uranium from the reprocessing of high-enriched foreign and domestic research reactor fuel at the H Canyon facility at the Savanna River Site (SRS). H Canyon previously produced LEU containing about five percent by weight (wt%) uranium-235 from the reprocessing of surplus high-enriched uranium to make it usable to fabricate fuel for use in a commercial reactor. Although both timeline and volume capabilities were favorable, no contract for the product was established at that time. In November of the following year, the DoE requested a similar report estimating potential capacity for HALEU production if the same facility and feedstock were used to produce about twenty precent wt% U-235 solution. However, the shutdown of separations technology through H Canyon in 2022 left the previously recovered HEU solution as the only material remaining in the facility that had the potential to be used to produce HALEU.
As SRNL was investigating materials, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Nuclear Materials Integration Division contracted the lab to lead a project seeking a solution for disposition challenges arising from the diverse nuclear material inventories across the DoE complex. This project completed a 2020 report that assessed specific DoE material inventories at each site to create a DoE-wide view of the major groups of materials categorized as having a “to be determined” disposition pathway. This study also reviewed projected future volumes of materials. Facility planning estimates were used for forecasting expected volumes of materials coming from research reactors and other sources with known disposition issues. Considering the impact of these future materials was important for both safety and security purposes. The SRNL team created a robust quantitative ranking system in 2023 that evaluated the options for disposition of each TBD material group. Although the original purpose of this project was materials disposition, SRNL found value in the process of unpackaging and chemically processing some of the material.
Cathy Ramsey is a SRNL engineer who was an integral part of both the TBD materials assessment and the initial HALEU feedstock estimates and proposals. She said, “SRNL has a reputation as EM’s lab and of being the expert in disposition, but disposition doesn’t always mean disposal. Irradiated nuclear materials offer opportunities to reprocess and recycle into new materials, and now is the time to really evaluate those opportunities. We need to have a longer view of the nuclear material life cycle than we’ve ever had before, which SRNL drives home in everything that we do.”
Savannah River National Laboratory
Please read Part 2 next
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Does Trump’s nuclear testing raise the stakes – or are we already in an arms race? Bbc.com
Brookfield, Cameco team with US government for AP1000 deployment world-nuclear-news.org
Latitude 47.704656 Longitude -122.318745
Ambient office = 87 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 109 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 111 nanosieverts per hour
Beefsteak from Central Market = 99 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 96 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 87 nanosieverts per hour
