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.
I have been blogging lately about national nuclear arsenals. After talking about Israel and China. Today, I am going to discuss aspects of the Russian nuclear arsenal. The U.S. State Department published a report on September 1st of this year about Russian nuclear weapons developments. The report stated that Russia has now reached parity with U.S. strategic nuclear weapons. Russia now has five hundred and twenty eight delivery vehicles that can carry one thousand six hundred and forty three nuclear warheads as compared to seven hundred and ninety four delivery vehicles that can carry one thousand six hundred and fifty two nuclear warheads.
The Russian strategic nuclear forces are actually more sophisticated than the U.S. which permits the Russians to deliver more warheads with fewer delivery vehicles. Russian officials are promising to add more advanced missiles to their nuclear arsenal which will put them ahead of the U.S. In spite of the progress that the U.S. and Russia have made on nuclear disarmament through a series of treaties, Russia is improving their nuclear arsenal.
The Start-3 treaty that was signed by the U.S. and Russia Presidents went into force in February of 2011. It called for both countries to reduce their nuclear warheads to one thousand five hundred and fifty and cut their delivery vehicles to seven hundred by 2021. The Russians gained strategic advantages from the treaty that were not granted by the Start-1 and Start-2 treaties. While they were increasing their warheads, the U.S. decreased the number of their warheads. In addition, the Russians ceded no ground with respect to the number of multiple warhead ICBMs they were allowed awe well as the opportunity to develop rail carried ICBMs and other mobile ICBM deployment. The Russians have also deployed a new generation of long-range nuclear cruise missiles on submarines of the Black Sea Fleet and the Caspian Flotilla.
With respect to NATO forces, the Russians are also gaining ground. Russia has twenty thousand tanks to the six thousand heavy tanks that the U.S. had stationed in NATO countries during the Cold WAr. In order to make up for the imbalance, NATO had deployed tactical nuclear weapons. Seven thousand tactical nuclear devices were sent to NATO by the U.S. in the 1970s to defend NATO against a possible ground invasion from Russia. These included ammunition for 203-mm and 155-mm caliber launcher as well as Lance missiles with one to ten kiloton nuclear warheads. The U.S. has withdrawn all of its tanks from NATO countries. Currently, NATO countries have two hundred and sixty nuclear weapons. The U.S. has two hundred nuclear bombs in Europe on six air bases. France has sixty nuclear bombs in its arsenal. These are the only nuclear devices available to defend NATO countries.
Russia now has at least five thousand tactical nuclear devices including torpedo, aerial and artillery warheads. The U.S. has three hundred bombers in U.S. territories but has destroyed its tactical nuclear missiles, land based missiles and nuclear Tomahawk cruise missiles that can be launched from submarines. Strategically, Russia is better armed than NATO. Given that Russia has embarked on a risky strategy of threatening its neighbors following its annexation of Crimea, this imbalance of forces between Russia and NATO is very troubling.
No one can win a nuclear war and that includes a war with tactical nuclear weapons. Not only is the land where the battles take place going to be a radioactive wasteland, prevailing winds will carry fallout far beyond the battle field. And either side could decide to escalate to full nuclear war with long range missiles if it felt that it was losing the ground battle. Unless the Russian leadership is insane, they are bullying neighboring countries with the assumption that everyone is so afraid of nuclear war that they will wring concessions out of NATO without actually using any nuclear devices. While this may seem like a sound strategy to them, it could very easily start World War Three and destroy human civilization. It is a dangerous game that Russia is playing.
NATO countries in blue:
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:
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:
