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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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.
European Union heads of state have agreed targets for the EU to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, raise efficiency and deploy renewables by 2030. world-nuclear-news.org
Britain’s Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre has taken delivery of two new machining centers. world-nuclear-news.org
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it had approved a 40-year license for dry spent-fuel storage at the Calvert Cliffs nuclear plant in Lusby, Md. nuclearstreet.com
In a previous post, I related a story from my own past about nuclear power. Many years ago, in a family conversation, I said “I am sure that engineers can design a safe nuclear power reactor. The problem is that we have to depend on the nuclear industry to be ten times as honest and competent as it has ever been to make it safe to use nuclear power.” In many of my blog posts, I have mentioned the problems that government regulatory agencies have had regulating the nuclear power industry in their respective countries. I have also mentioned many instances of incompetence and deliberate breaking of rules and regulation on the part of nuclear power plant operators. Today I am going to cover another two recent incidents involving the nuclear industry that support my concerns.
Bechtel National and URS Energy Construction are two nuclear contracting firms working on a plan for a radioactive waste treatment plant at Hanford for the U. S. Department of Energy. A URS whistleblower named Donna Busche was fired when she raised concerns about the safety of the design the contractors were working on. The DoE has requested that the two companies provide over forty five hundred documents relating to the firing of Busche. Bechtel and URS have refused to provide the requested documents. The companies claimed that the documents are protected under attorney-client or attorney work-product privileges. URS also decided on their own that some of the requested documents were not relevant to the DoE investigation. The contracts that were signed for the eleven billion dollar project clearly state that the contractors are legally bound to turn over any requested documents relating to the project, including attorney privilege documents, upon request. With respect to the current dispute, lawyers for the contractors claim that the documents clause of the contract is too broad and is unenforceable. Both contractors claim that they value a “culture of safety” but don’t seem to want to explain why they fired someone who was raising safety concerns.
Tetra Tech (TT) is a nuclear contractor for the U.S. Navy. TT has been awarded over three hundred million dollars worth of contracts for radioactive waste cleanup for the Navy. TT is currently working on cleaning up radioactively contaminated soil at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco. Hunters Point is a eight hundred and sixty six acre piece of prime waterfront property. It is being developed for urban housing, retail and recreation uses and is one of the biggest such developments in the U.S. Hunters Point is a superfund cleanup site with petroleum fuels, pesticides, volatile organic compounds and radiological materials from a nuclear laboratory and from decontamination of Naval ships. A report last April found that TT had falsified soil sample reports. Samples that were supposed to come from underneath a radiological laboratory were actually taken from other locations that had already been tested and were found to be free of radioactive contamination.
Here we have three major U.S. nuclear contractors who are either refusing to release requested documents or falsifying test samples for contamination. I wish that I could say that these are exceptional stories but, unfortunately, they are not rare. We cannot afford to risk the dangers of nuclear power with such behavior in the nuclear industry.
Artist’s concept of development at Hunters Point in San Francisco:
(Please read yesterday’s Part 1 before this article.)
All of the agency representatives from the Navy, Seattle Parks, WA Dept. of Ecology and WA Dept. of Health at the meeting at the Mountaineer’s Club in Magnuson Park basically said the same things: There was never a great danger from the radioactive contamination, the contamination is being cleaned up properly and there will not be any danger when the cleanup program is done.
Representative Pollet begged to differ with the agency reps about what constituted a “safe level” of contamination to leave behind. He also raised the issue of exposure times. The agency people were working on a “recreational use” standard that said if someone used the park two hours a day for five days a week over the course of the year, their exposure would not endanger their health. The Navy was going to clean up the contaminated areas so that the exposure of recreation use would result in a 15 milliRem dose.
Pollet pointed out that a 15 milliRem dose could pose a health problem and that the EPA had rejected using that standard years ago. For comparison, the standard for the Hanford Cleanup was more stringent than that and it was basically an area of scrub grass along the Columbia River. The Hanford plan was based on ensuring low exposure for a residential area where someone might be outside for ten hours or more every day for a year. The irony is that there is low income housing in Magnuson Park and hundreds of people live there including children.
When pressed on the question of where the 15 milliRem standard came from, the rep from the WADoH said that that was the cleanup limit because it was impossible to cleanup any more than that because you could not detect radioactive contamination below the natural radiation levels in the area. Rep Pollet stated that that was not true and once again repeated that the EPA standards and the work at Hanford already require that lower levels of radioactive contamination be left behind at a cleaned up site.
There were a lot of questions about the safety of the people living in the low income housing who were being urged to grow their own food in pea patches in Magnuson Park. These people will definitely be in the Park for more than a few hours a day. The rep from Seattle Parks was very confident that there was absolutely no danger from growing food in the Park because the Parks Department had brought in outside soil for the pea patch garden area. Some in the audience were not reassured and pointed out that contamination from below the imported soil could be brought out by heavy rains and possibly drawn out of the soil by growing plants.
There were questions about the origin of the cesium and strontium that were also detected in the soil near one of the old buildings. The rep from Seattle Parks said that there could be strontium in the paint for the gauges in the planes. She also said that the cesium could have come from gauges. My research found that that strontium was not used in radioluminescent paint. Neither was cesium. An audience member suggested that the cesium and strontium might have been washed off planes returning from monitoring the testing of nuclear devices in the Pacific in the 1950s.
Rep Pollet and members of the audience demanded that a citizens advisory board be created and hold regular meetings with public access. If rep Pollet had not been there to counter some of the statements of the panel of “experts,” the audience would have left with the impression that experts agreed that the cleanup was going just fine. However, there are plans for the Navy to conduct a search of historical records and to do more testing in other areas of the Park in the future. There is no guarantee that all the contamination has been found.
One of the contaminated buildings at Magnuson Park:
I blogged last summer about the cleanup of radioactive materials left in Magnuson Park in Seattle from when the park was a Naval air base in World War II. The Navy turned the park over to the city of Seattle in 1999 with the assurance that any hazardous material had been removed and it was safe for recreational and low-income housing. In 2010, when the Seattle Parks Department was working on renovation of a couple of buildings, old blueprints revealed that one of the buildings had a room dedicated to removed and replacing old radioluminescent paint on the dials in the cockpit of planes based there. Tests showed that there was measurable amounts of radium in the room and drain pipe from the room.
The Seattle Parks Department and the Navy decided that there was no need to alarm the public so they boarded up the radium room and they put up a fence around an outside area that had radium in the soil. Small eight and a half by eleven signs said “Controlled Area.” on the fence.
In March of 2013, people started asking questions about the signs and found out about the radioactive contamination. The Navy reached out to the Washington State Department of Health to work on cleaning up the contamination. There were contentious public meeting that summer as the citizens of Seattle demanded to know about the contamination and cleanup plans. One of the big issues was why there was no plan for public input. The Navy did finally allow some public meetings but the Navy already had a cleanup plan in place and were moving forward with it.
Last night I attended a meeting called by the agencies cleaning up Magnuson park which included the U.S. Navy, the Washington State Department of Ecology, the Washington State Department of Health and the Seattle Parks Department. The purpose of the meeting was to explain progress on the cleanup and to take questions from concerned citizens. A representative of each of these agencies was on a panel at the front a room at the Mountaineers Club at the Park. Washington State Representative Gerry Pollet was also on the panel. He has been with Hearts of America Northwest, a watchdog group for Hanford cleanup, for decades.
As usual, there were about eight big display boards with excellent photographs and diagrams covering the history of the base, the location of the contamination, the time line of the cleanup, etc. I remarked to Barbara that if the same level of expertise shown in the display panels had been applied to the cleanup, we would not have to have these meetings. Hearts of American Northwest also had a table with display boards and handouts about the situation. King 5 News attended the meeting with cameras and reporters. Thirty plus people were in attendance.
On tomorrow’s post, I will go into detail on some of the discussion, questions and disagreements at the meeting.
(See Part 2 for more details)
Washington State Department of Health radiation survey at Magnuson Park:
