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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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.
The United States has no permanent geological repository for the many tons of spent fuel from nuclear power plants. The spent fuel is rapidly filling up the cooling pools at the reactors and will most likely be temporarily stored in dry casks on the reactor sites. Congress approved siting a permanent geological repository in an old salt mine at Yucca Mountain, Nevada in 2002 and a great deal of time and money was devoted to studying the site and preliminary work. There was a debate about the migration of ground water through the site which turned out to be much greater that originally estimated.
Harry Reid, the Nevada Senator, strongly opposed the completion of the Yucca Mountain repository. When he became Senate Majority Leader in 2009, Congress stopped funding for the project. Barack Obama campaigned against it when he ran for President in 2008. When Obama became President in 2009, he immediately ordered the end of work on the repository.
There is currently a new push to restart the Yucca Mountain Repository project. Proponents of the project expect the government to fulfill a promise to dispose of seventy seven thousand tons of spent nuclear fuel. The states of Washington and South Carolina, plus Aiken County, South Carolina, the Prairie Island Indian Community of Minnesota and the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners filed a lawsuit in federal court to force t he NRC to act on the license application. The court returned a verdict that that the NRC either had to reject or accept the Yucca Mountain Repository license application. Congress ordered that the remaining money available for Yucca Mountain be spent to finish a study that had been commissioned.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has just released a report that says “…that most administrative and program elements of the Yucca Mountain repository reviewed by NRC staff members meet commission requirements.” The report went on to say that the Department of Energy will need to secure land and water rights at Yucca Mountain before the project could continue. Nevada has refused to provide water rights to the site. There were land set-asides around Yucca Mountain held by the DoE but some of these are expiring and would have to be reacquired before the project could be completed. “The land is not free of significant encumbrances such as mining rights, deeds … or other legal rights.”
The report by the NRC is the third volume of a five volume series of reports that the NRC is releasing. The final two volumes will be released by the end of January, 2015. Although supporters of the Yucca Mountain Repository have said that a site safety report from October of 2014 concluded that the project could meet licensing standards. Opponents say that the site safety survey never says that the site is “safe.”
The state of Nevada is still fighting the project. State officials state that the technology being used to dispose of the nuclear waste is untested. They say that there is a high probability that proceeding with the project may result poising the air, water and land of Nevada. They also expressed concern that it would be more dangerous to move spent fuel from more than seventy different sites around the U.S. than to store it onsite at the nuclear power plants.
The Jefferson Proving Grounds in southern Indiana was used by the Army as a firing range from World War II until the 1990s. Artillery units fired millions of rounds into the range, many with armor penetrating depleted uranium. It is estimated that one and a half million depleted uranium penetrating rods still remain on the surface or in the ground. There may be more than one hundred and sixty thousand pounds of depleted uranium at the JPG. Up to five million conventional shells failed to explode and still have live detonators, primers or fuses. In 1995, the Army stopped using the JPG and moved testing to the Yuma Proving Grounds in Arizona. Depleted uranium has also been used in testing at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.
The Army is requesting that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission cancel the Army license for the JPG so that the Army can stop environmental testing at the Proving Ground. The Army issued a decommissioning plan that claims that the two thousand acre “hot zone” in the fifty thousand acres of the JPG is too dangerous to deal with. Their proposed solution is to just fence off the “hot zone” and leave it. They would, of course, post signs that say “Caution, Radioactive Materials.”
Local residents are afraid that the deplete uranium from the munitions will leach into the ground water and pollute water from wells in the area. They even say that the shells and rods might be carried off the site by swollen creeks and rivers during heavy rains. Experts point out that the depleted uranium is much less radioactive than the weapons grade uranium and plutonium used in nuclear weapons. They say that depleted uranium corrodes very slowly and it would take decades for the depleted uranium in the JPG to make its way to the water table.
The danger to human health from depleted uranium is still being debated. Apologists for the military use of depleted uranium claim that it poses little danger to health. Critics of nuclear munitions reply that studies indicate that there is no “safe” level of radiation in the environment. One problem with evaluating radioactive threats to health is that it can take decades for radiation damage to manifest in a biological system as cancer and other diseases. Researchers in Iraq say that they are seeing increased numbers of birth defects, cancer and other diseases which they attribute to the use of depleted uranium munitions used during the U.S. occupation of Iraq in places such as Fallujah. Deplete uranium in the dust of these battlegrounds is especially damaging if it is inhaled or ingested.
Opponents to the Army’s plans for JPG say that there are no other abandoned military installations in Indiana where environmental testing has been stopped. The Big Oaks wildlife refuge overlaps the proving ground and some parts of it are dangerous for hunters, hikers and campers because of the unexploded ordinance and depleted uranium rods. As is the case with Hanford, it seems that the U.S. military just wants to test weapons and is not particularly concerned about the damage to the ecosystem or the tons of radioactive contamination that they have left behind.
I recently posted remarks made by the Pope and the Vatican at a nuclear disarmament conference in Vienna, Austria. The conference was called The Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons and was held on December 8th and 9th. It followed meetings in Vienna hosted by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons in Vienna in December 6th and 7th.
Christopher Weeramantry was addressing a session on uniting all faiths against nuclear weapons when he said, “Never was there a greater need than now for all the religions to combine, to pull their wisdom and to give the benefit of that combined, huge repository of wisdom to international law and to the world.” Rejecting the argument that nuclear weapons and Mutually Assured Destruction have prevented another world war, Weeramantry said that only blind luck had prevented a catastrophic nuclear accident or a global nuclear war. He went on to say that nuclear weapons “offend every single principle of religion,” on a panel filled with leaders from different religions.
Despite the many differences between the beliefs and practices of different religions, all the members of the panel declared that similar values are inherent in all religions. One member of the panel, Mustafa Ceric, Grand Mufti of Bosnia and Herzegovina, said “It is not a question of whether you believe, it is the question of whether we are going to wait and see the destruction of our planet.” Ceric went on to say that there are common moral and ethical standards that define the goals and values of humanity. He claimed that the importance and role of religious communities is greater than ever in helping the world find peace and security.
Another member of the panel, Akemi Bailey-Haynie, national women’s leader of the Buddhist organization Soka Gakkai International-USA, remarked that because her mother had survived the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, she had a personal connection to the issue of nuclear weapons. She went on to say, “When nuclear weapons are considered a deterrent or viable option in warfare, it seems from a mind-set that fundamentally denies that all people possess infinite potential. No one has the right to take away a precious life of another human being.” She also said, “As a second generation survivor, I deeply feel the sorrow, as well as the outrage, born of not being able to yet live in a time when the most inhumane of weapons, nuclear weapons, have been banned.”
Desmond Tutu sent a video message to the conference to support ICAN’s work. He said that a total ban on nuclear weapons needed to be implemented as soon as possible to preclude the possibility of anything like the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ever happening again.
Ela Gandhi, grandaughter of Mahatma Gandhi, also spoke at the panel session. Mahatma Gandhi who championed the non-violent civil disobedience that led to the creation of the modern state of India, said in 1946, “The atom bomb mentality is immoral, unethical, addictive and only evil can come from it.” Ela Gandhi pointed out that if one country possessed nuclear weapons, its enemies would feel that they had to have nuclear weapons also.
Religions are often criticized as having been responsible for wars and persecutions down through history. It is encouraging to see leaders from different religions joining together to push for nuclear disarmament.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is charged with the monitoring and regulation of the nuclear industry in the United States. The NRC has been criticized repeatedly for being too cozy with the industry that they are supposed to regulate. Recently, it was revealed that officials at the NRC conspired with Pacific Gas and Electric to change the way that earthquake risk was assessed at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant on the California coast. Because the NRC allowed the rule change, the Diablo Canyon plant did not have to be upgraded by PG&E. A government watchdog agency called the General Accountability Office has been reviewing NRC procedures and has made its criticism of the NRC public.
In 2011, the GAO says that the “The Nuclear Regulatory Commission cannot guarantee that underground safety-related pipes can remain structurally sound under its current regulations and standards.” In the face of claims to the contrary by the NRC, the GAO said “…pressure and flow tests that the NRC currently requires do not provide information about the structural integrity of an underground pipe (and) do not indicate the presence of degradation in a pipe that could hinder its future performance.” One of the big problems with monitoring the integrity of the pipes is the fact that currently there is no way to measure the thickness of a pipe wall other than to excavate the pipe. Leaks of tritiated (heavy water) from nuclear power plants around the U.S. prompted the GAO review.
“The occurrence of leaks at nuclear power plants from underground piping systems is expected to continue as nuclear power plants and their piping systems corrode,” stated the GAO report. “While reported underground piping system leaks to date have not posed discernible health impacts to the public, there is no guarantee that future leaks’ impacts will be the same.”
Now, in late 2014, the GAO is criticizing NRC practices once again. This time the problem is the way that the NRC carries out cost-benefit analysis. The GAO says that the NRC only used one of four specific characteristics that the GAO recommends. The GAO says that “While the overall NRC procedures incorporate some best practices for each of the four characteristics, we found the NRC’s cost estimating procedures satisfied only one characteristic,” said the watchdog’s report that was released Monday by Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., and Sen. David Vitter, R-La.
This time, the problem that led to the GAO review was concerns of Republican Congressmen that the NRC failed to properly analyze an NRC rule that requires nuclear power plants to use filtered venting systems. The NRC response to the GAO review was to admit that the NRC could improve the way it handled cost-benefit analysis but that it did not necessarily endorse the best-practices recommended by the GAO. The NRC needs to review and improve many more of its practices than just cost-benefit analysis.
