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.
My last couple of posts have been about projects for developing nuclear fusion. Today I am going to discuss the work of Robert Bussard on nuclear fusion. Bussard developed his own innovative fusion reactor design that he called the Polywell. He formed a company called Energy/Matter Conversion Corporation in 1985 to work on the Polywell. He was able to build and test fifteen experimental devices between 1994 and 2006 with funding from the U.S. Navy. He sought more funding from the Navy to build a full scale nuclear fusion power reactor for about half a billion dollars. The Navy was not willing to fund this stage of the project so Bussard started looking for funding from other sources. He died in 2007.
The Polywell fusion reactor is based on a cube of stainless steel donut-shaped magnets that is called a magrid. The magrid is fed a positive charge of fifty thousand volts. The coils inside the steel donuts produce a magnetic field of two Tesla. For comparison, the magnetic field of the Earth is less than one thousandth of a Tesla. Beams of hydrogen and boron atoms are shot through four of the holes in the stainless steel donuts. Beams of high energy electrons are shot through the holes in the remaining two donuts. All the beam meet in the center of the cube. The cloud of electrons from the two electron beams creates a strong negative potential at the center of the cube. This spherical electric field forces the positively charged hydrogen and boron nuclei into the center of the cube. The hydrogen and boron ions collide and this results in a nuclear reaction that produces high energy alpha particles (helium nuclei) which carry energy away from the center of the cube. There is a spherical metal shell around the Polywell which uses electrical repulsion to slow down the alpha particles. This results in electrons being pushed down power cables forming an electrical current that can be fed to the power grid. One of the benefits of the Polywell reactor is that it does not produce any dangerous radiation such as high energy neutrons that some other nuclear reactions generate.
The optimum size for the Polywell reactor is about ten feet in diameter. If the Polywell is much smaller, it will not be able to put out enough power to even heat the plasma and generate more power than it consumes. If the Polywell reactor is much bigger than ten feet in diameter, it will explode because there is no known material that could withstand the stress of operation. One Polywell power reactor should be able to produce about one hundred megawatts. This would be enough power for a community of about twenty thousand people. The production cost for a commercial Polywell should be about three hundred and fifty million dollars.
The U.S. Navy allocated one million eight hundred thousand dollars to the research in 2007 and eight million dollars in 2009 to continue research on the Polywell. The research has continued up to the present day and the company is working on obtaining sufficient funding from other sources to build a full scale Polywell power reactor.
Artist’s rendering of the Polywell:
Canadian nuclear safety regulators have updated regulations for the country’s nuclear power plant operators to prepare for and manage emergency situations. world-nuclear-news.org
South Africa has signed a civil nuclear cooperation agreement with France, opening the door to the possible deployment of French nuclear technology as South Africa looks to expand its nuclear power program. world-nuclear-news.org
The American Nuclear Society has written to a Senate committee expressing its concerns that a new bill will politicize the way the national nuclear regulator oversees security of radiological materials. world-nuclear-news.org
My last couple of posts have been about the international ITER project for nuclear fusion. This is a huge project with participation of the European Union and other countries with major nuclear power programs. It is slated to be completed in 2027 and will be tested for years before a prototype of a nuclear fusion power reactor is built based on what is learned from the ITER. There are other groups working on developing nuclear fusion power reactors that will be much less expensive and will take much less time to construct.
At the University of Washington, a new fusion reactor design was a project for a 2012 class conducted by Thomas Jarboe, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics as well as an adjunct professor in physics. Jarboe and a graduate student by the name of Derek Sutherland took over the project and are working on developing a commercial reactor based on the design from the class project.
The new design is referred to as the Dynomak. Instead of the donut-shaped tokomak design of the ITER, the Dynomak is spherical and is referred to as a spheromak. There is no central core as in a tokomak and no superconducting magnets surrounding the Dynomak. Instead of having magnetic fields generated externally to compress and contain the plasma, the Dynomak uses internal magnetic fields created by superconducting tape wrapped around the Dynomak to contain and compress the plasma. This is much more efficient and simpler because the plasma itself is used to generate the magnetic fields by the superconducting tape driving electrical fields into the plasma. The reactor should be self-sustaining because the plasma would be continuously heated to maintain thermonuclear fusion. The heat from the fusion reaction would be used to heat a coolant that would be fed to a turbine to generation electricity.
Because of this different design, the Dynomak is much simpler that the ITER. It is estimated that the Dynomak is about one tenth of the complexity of the ITER, costs about one tenth of the cost of the ITER and will generate five times as much power. It will, of course, be much smaller and will take less time to construct. It is estimated that a one gigawatt Dynomak will cost just about the same two billion seven hundred million dollars that it costs to build a one gigawatt coal fired power plant. This would certainly make it highly competitive with power generated by fossil fuels.
Currently, the test Dynomak is about one tenth of the size of a full commercial version which will take years to fully develop. The tests of the prototype have been successful and the Dynomak team has filed patents with the University of Washington Center for Commercialization. Jarboe says that, “Right now, this design has the greatest potential of producing economical fusion power of any current concept.”
