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.
The Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s second-largest daily newspaper, retracted an influential news report on the Fukushima nuclear disaster on Thursday after weeks of criticism from other news organizations. rallyagainstomalley.com
Plutonium found in Carlsbad, New Mexico nearly 30 miles from US WIPP nuclear site. enenews.com
I have blogged in the past about the employment situation at Fukushima. Layers and layers of subcontractors exist between the nuclear companies and the people hired to work at nuclear plants. Organized crime in Japan is involved in contracting staffing at nuclear power reactors. There are no background checks for people working at nuclear power plants and desperate people from the margins of society wind up working a nuclear power plants. There have been reports that these desperate people form a sort of second class of workers at nuclear power plants who are poorly equipped, poorly trained and financially exploited by subcontractors. There have also been reports highly skilled workers are leaving the dangerous jobs at Fukushima for other less hazardous positions in the nuclear industry. Now there are lawsuits from workers at Fukushima saying that they are not being paid what they are entitled to.
Four Fukushima workers are suing TEPCO because they say that they were not paid promised hazard pay above and beyond their regular salaries. This is the first such law suit against TEPCO. The workers wore masks in court because they are afraid of retaliation from their employers. Six hundred thousand dollars in unpaid wages is being sought from TEPCO and some of their partner firms. The lawyer for the four who brought the suit said that it was possible that there would be more laws suits from workers among the six thousand employed in the estimated forty year clean-up of the Fukushima disaster site. The lawyer stated that TEPCO has promised but not delivered hazard pay and that skilled workers were leaving the clean-up project which is now being handled by the less skilled.
TEPCO announced last year that it would double daily danger pay to two hundred dollars per worker because of the danger involved in dealing with the uncontrolled flow of radioactive water and the decommissioning of the reactors that experienced core meltdowns at Fukushima. However, the promised hazard pay is being held up by some of the eight hundred subcontractors who sent workers to Fukushima. The subcontractors claim that their businesses will fail if they are not allowed to divert the hazardous pay. TEPCO is already expected to pay over forty eight billion dollars as compensation to the people around Fukushima whose lives were impacted by the Fukushima disaster. Additional billions of dollars will be required to complete the forty year decontamination and decommissioning at Fukushima. A citizens’ judicial panel recently decided that three former executives of TEPCO should face criminal charges because of their actions leading up to, during and following the Fukushima disaster.
Considering the costs that are piling up, it is obvious that TEPCO will be under serious economic stress in the coming years. I wonder how long it will be until TEPCO declares bankruptcy. I expect that if and when they do, the burden of the continuing clean up will fall on the Japanese government and the Japanese taxpayers. And, should the government decide that it does not have the funds to continue the clean-up, the Fukushima site may become a permanent threat to human health and the environment in Japan.
Fukushima workers:
TEPCO announced the completion of the installation of an 80 meter wide underground zeolite wall at Fukushima Daiichi. fukuleaks.org
Educating the public on the risks of radiation should be a long-term process and not just take place in the aftermath of a major nuclear accident, a panel of radiation protection experts agreed. world-nuclear-news.org
My last blog was about tritium, the dangerous radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Tritium is being released worldwide by operating nuclear reactors. Nuclear accidents such as Fukushima can release huge amounts of tritium. There is no existing nuclear technology for the removal of tritium from water. Japan is now seeking bids for demonstration projects for tritium removal. Three companies have been selected to construct the demonstration projects.
The Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) sent out a request for proposals in September of 2013 to remove tritium from contaminated water at Fukushima which is filling up emergency tanks and leaking into the Pacific Ocean. After the official submission period ended in late October of 2013, a review panel from the International Research Institute for Nuclear Disarmament went over all the proposals. Unfortunately, none of the many proposals that were submitted could be immediately applied to decontaminating Fukushima waste water.
A Japanese government committee charged with finding treatments for the contaminated waste water said that “Since technologies that have a quick effect in separating tritium have not been found after collecting technical proposals from both inside and outside of Japan, it will be necessary in the future to assess measures proposed in response to our requests for information.” The committee called for proposals in mid-May that could demonstrate a method for tritium removal. The deadline for the new proposals was July 17, 2014. In late August, METI stated that Kurion from the U.S., GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy of Canada (GENEC) and FSUE Radioactive Waste Management Enterprise (RosRAO) from Russia will build demonstration projects to show how their technology can remove tritium from water.
The demonstration projects have to show that the propose tritium removal technologies actually work as promised. Additionally, the demonstration projects will provide a basis for estimating the cost of constructing and operating tritium removal at the Fukushima nuclear plant where the disaster occurred. The demos will have to show that they can remove tritium from water where the tritium concentration is between six tenths of a million Becquerels and four million Becquerels per quart. The processes demonstrated have to be expandable to treating more than four hundred cubic yards of water a day. The Mitsubishi Research Institute will be handling the funding on behalf of METI’s Agency for Natural Resource and Energy. Funding of up to nine million four hundred thousand dollars will be made available to each of the companies for the construction and operation of the demonstration projects.
Tritium is a threat to human health and it is a growing problem around Fukushima. Development of a technology that can remove tritium from water is an important step toward mitigating the environmental pollution from the Fukushima disaster. Hopefully, at least one of the demonstration projects will be successful and there will be a new technology to assist in decontamination of water released from nuclear power plants.
Firefighters quickly doused a fire reported in an auxiliary building at North Carolina’s Harris nuclear plant Wednesday. nuclearstreet.com
Meeting the energy needs of a growing global population while tackling climate change is the “biggest diplomatic challenge of the era,” according to leading climate change expert Professor Sir David King. world-nuclear-news.org
Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that has two neutrons in the nucleus in addition to the single proton. Radioactive beta particles are emitted by tritium. (Beta particles are high energy electrons or positrons.) Since water is contained in living cells, heavy water with tritium instead of normal hydrogen is easily absorbed by living tissue when it is consumed. It can also enter a living body by being inhaled as water vapor. If the tritium is incorporated into organic compounds instead of being excreted or exhaled, it is referred to as organically bound tritium (OBT) and it can remain in a human body for up ten years, emitting beta particles.
If a beta particle from tritium hits the DNA in the nucleus of a living cell, it can cause mutations. If the DNA mutated is part of an important gene, the mutation can cause serious diseases. Laboratory animals exposed to tritium have developed cancer and birth defects. Research has shown that tritium can deliver what is called relative biological effectiveness in terms of radiation damage to living tissue at a rate of up to five times that of cosmic rays or x-rays.
Tritium is created naturally when cosmic rays collide with the Earth’s atmosphere. It is also created by human activity such as the manufacture and testing of nuclear weapons. It can also be released as a gas or water vapor by the normal operation of a nuclear power plant. In nuclear accidents at power plants, much greater releases of tritium are possible. It is estimated that nuclear power plants release tens of thousands of curies into the atmosphere and tens of millions of picocuries per liter into bodies of water near operating reactors.
The NRC allows a licensed nuclear power plant to release a planned quantity of tritium into the environment that could result in a member of the public receiving a maximum of one milliseievert per year. Tritium has a half-life of about twelve years. Although increasing amounts of tritium are being released by normal nuclear reactor operations and nuclear accidents at nuclear power plants, the NRC does not require water or steam containing tritium to be filtered because there is no existing commercial technology that can remove tritium for water or water vapor.
Much has been written about massive tritium releases caused by the nuclear disaster at Fukushima in March of 2013. The fuel cores of three of the Fukushima reactors melted down and may have escaped from the reactors. In any case, the integrity of the reactors’ containment vessels has been destroyed. Ground water is flowing through the area containing the cores where it picks up tritium. In May of 2014 it was reported that the level of tritium in the water beneath the crippled power plant is exceeding the level which is allowed for dumping water directly into the Pacific Ocean.
The contaminated water has been pumped into storage tanks but the tanks are rapidly being filled and some are leaking. TEPCO attempted to freeze the soil around the reactors that melted down in an attempt to create an “ice wall” to contain the contaminated water but that plan has failed. Water from the area around the destroyed reactors is now flowing directly into the Pacific Ocean. At this point, it is estimated that water containing tritium will continue to be released into the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima for the foreseeable future. This poses a danger to all life on Earth.
