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.
Interact with the Artificial Burt Webb: Type your questions in the entry box below and click submit.
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.
I have blogged recently about the subtle long-term effects of radiation exposure on human health. It can take decades for radiation damage to manifest as illness so it is very difficult to pin down the dangers of radioactive contaminants. Recently there have been studies that support the idea that radiation from nuclear power plants, uranium mines, use of depleted uranium, nuclear waste and nuclear test can be connected to human illnesses.
In April of this year the News Network and Broadcast Collective published a report that rare birth defects in the three counties that border the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington States are four hundred percent above normal. Hanford is one of the most radioactively contaminated sites in the world; the legacy of decade of nuclear weapons production with little concern for safety or environmental impact. An epidemiologist from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention stated that the cluster of birth defects is not near Hanford which would seem to be an inaccurate statement.
Hanford is on the border of Benton and Franklin counties with the border of Yakima County about 30 miles from Hanford. Since 2010, there have been 30 cases of anencephaly diagnosed in Franklin, Benton and Yakima counties. Anencephaly is a rare birth defect of the brain that is often fatal in which part of the brain does not develop. This rate of 8.7 cases per 10,000 people is four times the average rate of 2.1 cases per 10,000 people.
A nuclear engineer at the Hanford facility has recommended to his family that younger members should not live within a hundred miles of Hanford for their own safety. He said that ” the open garbage disposal pits, leaking containers at “parking lots”, leaking tanks and other sources of contamination endanger the population around the Hanford reservation by releasing a cohort of radioactive isotopes or hot particles including plutonium into the air and the groundwater.”
The cleanup of Hanford is being hotly debated and has even reached to the courts. There are plans to dig up fifteen feet of topsoil in the ten most contaminated areas of the Hanford Plateau. The local head of the U.S. Environmental Agency has suggested that it would be cheaper and easier to only dig up the top ten feet instead. One of the big problems with that is that the contamination goes much deeper than 15 feet. While removing topsoil and using uncontaminated topsoil as a fill might help protect people on the surface, the contamination still in the ground can be leached into the ground water and make its way to the Columbia River.
The Hanford cleanup has been plagued by lies, illegal action, incompetence, and neglect by the U.S. Department of Energy and the civilian contractors who are responsible for Hanford. It is time for the U.S. government to put some of the billions allocated for its nuclear arsenal into the cleanup of the place where a lot of those weapons were developed and manufactured.
Belarusian regulator Gosatomnadzor has found that all the required safety measures are in place for the construction of the country’s first nuclear power plant. world-nuclearnews.org
Westinghouse has filed an application with the South African high court charging Eskom with contempt of court over the utility’s failure to supply documentation under a previous court order. world-nuclearnews.org
I have been blogging recently about misbehavior at the NRC and among U.S. nuclear power reactor operators and owners. I have also blogged about problems at the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California concerning geological fault lines. Since the time that the plant was built, new fault lines have been discovered. Now this issue has wound up in Federal court.
In late October of 2014, Friends of the Earth petitioned the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals. The FoE wanted the Court to overturn a secret decision of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to alter the operating license of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant because the FoE said that that decision was illegal.
In July of 2013, an NRC inspector named Dr. Michael Peck issued a formal dissent to the decisions being reached by the NRC with respect to the Diablo Canyon license. He said that the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant was not designed, built and constructed to be able to survive the earthquakes that could be generated by the newly discovered faults. Dr. Peck’s dissent was not revealed until September of 2014.
The NRC revealed that in September of 2014 that in September of 2013, it had made changes to the method used to calculate earthquake risks at Diablo Canyon. Basically, the secret finding of the NRC and the rejection of Dr. Peck’s dissent allowed the PG&E to continue to operate the Diablo Canyon plant without any significant upgrades to deal with possible earthquake damage. Only the highest levels of the NRC and PG&E were aware of the changes to the plant license.
NRC regulations and federal law require a public license amendment review whenever the way in which seismic risk or reactor durability is assessed is changed. Instead of following the rules, the NRC in consultation with PG&E secretly revised the Diablo Canyon plant’s license to change the calculation for assessing earthquake risks and then declared that the plant would be able to withstand much stronger earthquakes than indicated by the original calculations.
In a new PG&E report issued in September of 2014, they admitted that a new fault line only 650 yards from the plant was twice as long as they had been claiming since 2011. They also confirmed one of the issues raised by Dr. Peck. He had said that the new fault was connected to two other faults in the area of the plant. These faults could interact to produced much more severe earthquakes that previously anticipated.
The FoE has asked the Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit to “review the amendment, overturn the amendment and order a public license amendment proceeding as required by federal law.” David Freeman, the former head of the Tennessee Valley Authority and advisor to FoE, charged that fact that PG&E and the NRC secretly conspired to amend the Diablo Canyon license agreement to relax safety requirements. “This was not only illegal. It was an outrage.”
This is a gross violation of the mandate of the NRC to “put safety first.” Diablo Canyon is the nuclear power plant in the U.S. that is most at risk for seismic damage. This plant should be immediately shut down and decommissioned before an earthquake unleashes a cloud of radioactive fallout over California.
