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.
In my last post, I talked about the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor ITER project. A consortium of nations including European Union, India, Japan, People’s Republic of China, Russia, South Korea and the United States formally agreed in 2006 to collaborate on the construction of an experimental nuclear fusion reactor. Billions of dollars and decades of work are dedicated to the project. Today I am going to delve into some of the technical details of the ITER reactor.
ITER will utilize the fusion of deuterium and tritium to create helium and release energy. This is the equation for the ITER fusion reaction:
The top number for each element is the number of neutrons and the bottom number is the number of protons. The product of fusion is a helium nucleus, a neutron and over seventeen million electron volts of energy. This reaction requires the least energy to ignite of all the possible fusion reactions. It produces about three times the amount of energy released by uranium fission and millions of times more energy than any chemical reaction such as burning coal can release. Tritium today is created in nuclear reactors but there is a virtually an infinite supply of deuterium and tritium in the oceans of the world. There is also a lot of tritium in the soil on the Moon that could possibly be mined.
ITER is based on the tokomak design. This is a donut shaped chamber surround by powerful magnets. The plasma of deuterium/tritium injected into the change then heated and confined by magnetic fields. Beyond the wall of the chamber, there are test blanket modules that include one that will absorb the neutrons released by the fusion and breed more tritium from lithium in the blanket. When completed, ITER will weigh about five thousand tons. It will be the biggest tokomak ever constructed at sixty four feet in diameter by thirty seven feet in diameter.
The ITER is supposed to be able to generate about five hundred megawatts for a period of at least one thousand seconds. In order to accomplish this, about two hundredth of an ounce of a deuterium/tritium mixture will be fused inside the approximately one thousand cubic yard reactor chamber. It is hoped that ITER will be able produce ten times the amount of energy that is consumed to heat the plasma although no attempt to convert heat to electricity will occur. The following is a list of goals for the ITER project:
As I said yesterday, there have been many problems, delays, cost increases, design changes, etc. that may ultimately overwhelm the project. It is quite possible that ITER will never be completed and operated as envisioned.
Artist’s cutaway diagram for ITER:
Monstrous supertyphoon on course to hit Japan this weekend. enenews.com
Vongfong typhoon is on course for a direct hit at the Fukushima nuclear plant next week. enenews.com
Poland’s Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (OCCP) has approved the formation of a joint venture between three utilities and a mining company to build the country’s first nuclear power plant. world-nuclear-news.org
I have blogged about nuclear fusion projects in the past. There is an old joke that it will take forty year to create a nuclear fusion reactor that produces more power than it consumes. The joke part is that this has been true for fifty years. Generating controlled and sustained thermonuclear fusion has proven to be a very difficult task. Billions of dollars have been poured into research because the payoff would be an efficient and non-polluting source of electricity with a virtually infinite supply of fuel in the form of deuterium and tritium which could be extracted from seawater.
There have been many failed research projects over the decades that tried to achieve a sustainable fusion reaction that would produce more power than it consumed to operate. The big project these days is the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) based on the tokomak design being built in France.
Back in the late 1970s, Russia and the U.S. decided to work together on developing a practical fusion generator. The ITER project was born in 1988 but it took until 2006 to finalize the international agreement and provide funding. There are seven members of the ITER project including the European Union, India, Japan, People’s Republic of China, Russia, South Korea and the United States. The European Union is hosting the project and its contribution is about forty five percent. The other members of the project are contributing about nine percent each.
It was anticipated that the project would take ten years to construct and that it would operate for twenty years. If it is successfully completed and operated, a prototype DEMO power reactor will be build based on the knowledge gained from ITER. The original estimated cost of the project was about eleven billion dollars. With the rising cost of materials and construction along with changes to the design, the cost is now estimated to be about twenty billion dollars. The ten year construction period was supposed end in 2019. As of 2013, the estimate for completion of the project was 2027.
An ITER Management Assessment Report was summarized in a New Yorker magazine article in early 2014. Some of the eleven recommendations were to “Create a Project Culture”, “Instill a Nuclear Safety Culture”, “Develop a realistic ITER Project Schedule” and “Simplify and Reduce the IO Bureaucracy”. The fact that such things are being suggested so far into the project indicates that there are many existing problems interfering with the advancement of the project.
The U.S. Senate published a report in July of 2014 that directed the Department of Energy to work with the State Department to withdraw from the project. The energy field is so turbulent these days that it is impossible to predict what the best energy generation system will be in ten years let alone thirty years. It is possible that ITER will never be completed.
ITER logo:
