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 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:
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
