Japan has chosen to incinerate tons of Fukushima radioactive waste. nuclear-news.not
Japanese doctors threatened for revealing data on how bad Fukushima-related illnesses have become. enenews.com
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Geiger Readings for November 13, 2014
Ambient office = 116 nanosieverts per hourAmbient outside = 95 nanosieverts per hourSoil exposed to rain water = 88 nanosieverts per hourHeirloom tomato from Central Market = 77 nanosieverts per hourTap water = 110 nanosieverts per hourFiltered water = 98 nanosieverts per hour -
Radioactive Waste 107 – Republican Win of Senate Breathes New Life Into the Yucca Mountain Repository
I have blogged about the Yucca Mountain geological repository in Nevada for the permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel and other nuclear wastes. The U.S. Department of Energy spent over ten years working on the creation of the repository but President Obama cancelled the project in conjunction with Henry Reid (D-Nevada), the current Senate Majority Leader. In 2013, a court ruled that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had to finish a uncompleted study of the suitability of Yucca Mountain for nuclear waste disposal. The NRC finished the study and has issued a report that the Yucca Mountain repository is sufficiently isolated from the environment so that it would be safe to store nuclear waste. In order to renew work on the Yucca Mountain repository, it would be necessary for Congress to allocate new funding to the project.
The Bulletin of Atomic Sciences recently published an opinion piece about the safety of Yucca Mountain which concluded that it is not really as safe as the NRC report stated. The main question that concerned the author of the op-ed piece has to do with what the DoE calls a “drip shield.” The Yucca Mountain repository is intended to store thousands of sealed containers of waste in the tunnels under Yucca Mountain. The DoE plan calls for putting a corrosion-resistant titanium cover over each of the waste containers to prevent water from dripping onto the containers and possibly corroding them. If the corrosion ate through the storage containers, radioactive materials could seep out into the ground water. The covers would be necessary because there is more water moving through the Yucca Mountain site than originally estimated by the DoE.
This sounds good but the plan calls for the covers to be installed in one hundred years. Even supposing that our civilization still exists in a hundred years, this is long after the Yucca Mountain repository is supposed to be permanently sealed. Human beings would not be able to do the work because the radiation would be too high inside the repository. The op-ed writer was skeptical that there would be any support or interest in spending huge sums of money to re-enter the collapsed tunnels of the Yucca Mountain repository to install the covers in one hundred years.
The op-ed writer speculated that the idea of delaying the installation of the titanium covers for a hundred years may well have been raised in order to reduce the cost of finishing and filling the repository. He criticized the NRC for going along with the proposal instead of alerting the government and the public to the danger of radioactive materials leaking out into the environment.
With the capture of the U.S. Senate by the Republican party, there will likely be renewed calls for the completion of Yucca Mountain. If a Republican wins the White House and they maintain control of Congress in 2016, it is almost a certainty that the Yucca Mountain repository will be completed.
Artist’s diagram of the Yucca Mountain Repository:
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Geiger Readings for November 12, 2014
Ambient office = 71 nanosieverts per hourAmbient outside = 111 nanosieverts per hourSoil exposed to rain water = 110 nanosieverts per hourAvacado from Central Market = 128 nanosieverts per hourTap water = 121 nanosieverts per hourFiltered water = 115 nanosieverts per hour -
Nuclear Weapons 97 – China is Developing A New Mobile Land Based Nuclear Missile
In my last blog, I discussed the nuclear arsenal of Israel. Today I am going to talk about Chinese nuclear weapons and delivery systems. A recent report from a Chinese environmental office revealed advancements in the Chinese nuclear weapons program.
The Shaanxi Province Environmental Monitoring Center posted on the Internet a list of its projects which included site monitoring for the Dong Feng-41 missile. The U.S. Defense Department reported to Congress this year that the Chinese were working on the Dong Feng-41 which was said to be “a road-mobile, next-generation intercontinental ballistic missile capable of launching multiple nuclear warheads.” There had been indications for years that the Chinese were working on the Dong Feng-41 but no Chinese governmental agency made any mention of such a project. The post was taken down quickly but the information that it contained had already escaped into the global media.
In addition to the Dong Feng-41, the Chinese are currently conducting tests of its standard land based missile, the Dong Feng-31A. Last year, the Chinese added the HK-6 nuclear bomb carrying aircraft that has a range two thousand miles to their nuclear delivery systems. U.S. analysts believe that China will also be launching three Jin-class nuclear missile carrying submarines this year with a ranged of four thousand and six hundred miles.
Land based missiles, submarine carrying missiles and nuclear bombers are the traditional triad of nuclear weapon delivery systems that the U.S. and Russia have depended on for decades. It is believed that such a triad of delivery systems can permit a country that has suffered a nuclear attack to strike back at the attacker. The Chinese triad is mostly dependent on the land-based missile systems because of the limited range of the bombers and the questionable reliability of the new submarines.
The Chinese have announced that they have a “no first-use” policy with respect to nuclear weapons. Policy analysts are questioning why China is building up its nuclear weapons and delivery systems at a time when both the United States and Russia are reducing their arsenals. Apparently the Chinese feel that they are so far behind the U. S. with respect to nuclear weapons that their nuclear arsenal would not deter the U.S. from launching a nuclear attack on China. It is estimated that China currently has about two hundred and fifty nuclear warheads as compared to over two thousand U.S. operational nuclear warheads.
Maj. Gen. Yao Yunzhu, China’s director of the Center of America-China Defense Relations for the Academy of Military Science recently said in a letter that “The Ballistic Missile Defense systems that the United States and its allies have deployed, or are planning to deploy, are capable of intercepting residue Chinese nuclear weapons launched for retaliation after it has already been attacked, thus potentially negating the deterrence effect of the Chinese nuclear arsenal.”
China has opted to increase its nuclear triad as a response to the imbalance with the nuclear triad of the U.S. It is possible that in the future, if China still feels threatened and at a disadvantage, it may abandon its “no first-use” policy which would destabilize the global nuclear situation.
Dong Feng-41:
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Geiger Readings for November 11, 2014
Ambient office = 102 nanosieverts per hourAmbient outside = 142 nanosieverts per hourSoil exposed to rain water = 121 nanosieverts per hourYellow bell pepper from Central Market = 102 nanosieverts per hourTap water = 102 nanosieverts per hourFiltered water = 94 nanosieverts per hour -
Nuclear Weapons 96 – Israel Maintains Secrecy About Their Nuclear Arsenal
I have blogged about Israel’s nuclear arsenal in the past. Although Israel will not publicly admit to having nuclear weapons, it is generally believed that they do have deliverable nuclear warheads. Israel has never signed the 1970 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. New information has just surfaced about the Israeli arsenal in an article in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists from two nuclear security scholars at the Federation of American Scientists.
Over the last couple of decades a wide variety of agencies and analysts have estimate that Israel possesses from seventy five to four hundred nuclear warheads. The high estimate was based on the assumption that all the fissile material created at Israel’s Dimona reactor would be used to build nuclear weapons. The authors of the new study have decided that Israel probably keeps a stockpile of weapons grade plutonium This would reduce the estimation of their warhead stockpile. If Israel is mainly concerned about deterrence, then its arsenal would only need to contain big high-yield warheads. The number of these warhead would not exceed Israel’s long range delivery systems.
Israel has hundreds of F-16 combat planes but the report’s authors conclude that there would only be one or two F-16 squadrons that would have special trained crews, specific procedures and modifications necessary to deliver nuclear warheads. The authors have used satellite imagery to estimate the number of nuclear capable Jericho long range ballistic missiles. They claim that earlier estimations of a hundred missiles are much too high. The satellite pictures only show twenty three caves that could hold such missiles. This is the same number of nuclear capable missiles that were estimated in a White House memo written in 1969. With respect to submarine delivery systems, there are some reports that Israel has been developing nuclear capable Harpoon cruise missiles but the report does not take a position either for or against this possibility.
The report is skeptical about the possibility that Israel has tactical or battlefield nuclear devices. This type of nuclear weapon requires extensive testing and there is no evidence that Israel has conducted any nuclear tests. Without this type of testing, it is unlikely that Israel could develop the technical capability for such tactical nuclear weapons. The authors conclude that Israel’s nuclear doctrine is probably centered around deterring an attack or allowing Israel to strike back if attacked. They don’t believe that Israel sees nuclear warheads as having battlefield potential.
Because Israel has decided to keep their nuclear arsenal secret, that prevents them from openly carrying out testing that would advance their technology and it also prevents them from openly using their nuclear arsenal as a bargaining chip in international negotiations. If Israel admitted the existence of its nuclear arsenal, then its Muslim neighbors would be scrambling to develop their own nuclear weapons. This would destabilize the whole region and possibly lead to nuclear war. For the moment, it is just as well that Israel has been keeping its nuclear capability secret.
Dimona reactor in Israel:
