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.
Professor Takamitsu Sawa’s says that Japanese universities have failed to develop because of financial disparities in professors’ pay and status. japantimes.co.jp
Areva has presented Azerbaijan government officials with its proposals to construct a nuclear research reactor in the Central Asian country. world-nuclear-news.org
India is one of the few countries in the world that is dedicated to a massive expansion of nuclear power generation. Currently India has twenty operating nuclear reactors which supplies about three percent of their electricity. There are seven more reactors under construction. India has announced that its want to supply twenty five percent of its electricity from nuclear power by 2050. The recently elected Prime Minister of India is a very strong supporter of nuclear power.
Due to dwindling uranium reserves, Indian is seeking trade agreements that will let it mine for uranium in Australia. Some Indian companies want to apply for licenses to mine uranium in the Queensland state of Australia. Queensland had a moratorium on new uranium mining leases that lasted for twenty five years but has just been cancelled.
Indian Prime Minister Modi recently returned from Japan where he discussed a huge ninety billion dollar Civilian Nuclear Cooperation Agreement between India and Japan. Many Indian and Japanese companies are eager to participate. The trade deal has not been signed but Japanese Prime Minister Abe has promised that Japan will double its direct investment in India in the next five years. India would be the biggest global market for Japanese nuclear technology exports if a trade agreement can be finalized.
The Indian government is confident that it has adequate security in place to deal with threats to its nuclear program but there are dissenting voices. India never signed any of the international nuclear non-proliferation treaties as it built and tested nuclear weapons to balance the nuclear program of Pakistan. For a long time, there was a ban on exporting nuclear technology to India but the Nuclear Suppliers Group has been working on a framework to end the ban since 2008.
The Nuclear Threats Initiative in Washington, D.C. publishes a ranking of security in the twenty five countries that have nuclear power reactors. In their ranking of the safety of nuclear materials in these countries, India is rated twenty third out of twenty five. This ranking was based partly on the fact that India has no independent nuclear regulatory agency to monitor compliance with national regulations on nuclear power and nuclear materials.
Currently India has the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board which was established in 1983. It has been unable to perform its duty to regulate the safety and security of Indian civilian nuclear facilities effectively because it is under the control of the Indian Department of Atomic Energy.
This arrangement has been criticized and a proposed Nuclear Safety Regulatory Authority (NSRA) bill was brought up in the Indian Parliament in 2011. Unfortunately, while a step in the right direction, the NSRA would still not be a completely independent regulatory agency. Critics are calling for a more independent agency. A big concern is that the chairperson and members of the NSRA would be appointed by the Council of Nuclear Safety, chaired by the Prime Minister. The bill even explicitly says that “the Central Government may, for the purposes of national defense and security, exempt any nuclear material, radioactive material, facilities, premises and activities; the premises, assets and areas associated with material and activities from the jurisdiction of the Authority.” The government changed recently and the bill would have to reintroduced to be considered.
There are real problems with a huge expansion of Indian nuclear power and adequate regulation is one of the biggest.
Fukushima nuclear material has been reported in West Coast groundwater. enenews.com
California nuclear plant engineer says that the U.S. was hit by the explosion at Fukushima Unit 3. enenews.com
Investigations into potential cracks in boiler spines at two units at each of the Heysham I and Hartlepool sites are likely to take until the end of the year to complete, EDF Energy has announced. world-nuclear-news.org
Russia and Algeria have signed an intergovernmental agreement to cooperate in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. world-nuclear-news.org
I have blogged several times about the disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986. There was a power surge at reactor number four of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The operators tried an emergency shutdown which triggered a much bigger power surge which, in turn, ruptured a reactor vessel and caused a series of steam explosions. The graphite moderator rods were exposed to air and ignited. The fire ejected radioactive particles into the atmosphere and they were born by the wind over large areas of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine as well as Western Europe. The radioactive release equaled about one percent of all the radioactivity released by all the atmospheric nuclear tests between 1950 and 1970. It has been estimated that as many any twenty five thousand people may eventually die from the radiation released by the Chernobyl disaster.
The amount of fallout in any given part of Western Europe varied according to weather and geography. In Germany, there was a ban on the import of certain food products. There was also concerns about ground plants, mushrooms and tubers taking up the fallout and concentrating it. There was fear that wild boars, consuming such plants, were being contaminated by cesium.
Currently all wild boars are tested for radioactivity twenty eight years after the disaster. It has been found that one in three wild boars tested turned out to be too radioactive to eat. So decades after a disaster a thousand miles away that released radioactive materials, radioactive contamination is still posing a threat to human health. It is certain that radioactive contamination from Chernobyl is still a potential problem all over Europe.
I have blogged a lot about the Fukushima disaster. Two and a half years after the disaster, fallout is still be found in parts of Japan far from Fukushima. The political, social, economic, environmental and health repercussions are still being discovered. The three melted cores of reactors at Fukushima are contaminating ground water which is being poured into the Pacifica Ocean. If any of those melted cores reach the water table under Fukushima, there will be geysers of super heated radioactive steam. It will be decades before the full extent of the contamination of Japan by Fukushima are clearly understood. Some in Japan are saying that ultimately Japan may have to be abandoned because of the Fukushima disaster.
As I have said several times before, it is almost certain that there will be another major nuclear accident in the near future. As the ripples of that future disaster spread out, there will be a huge public backlash against nuclear power. Investors will be harder to find. Politicians will be less supportive. Ultimately, I believe that nuclear power will be abandoned in most countries. There are just too many reasons that nuclear energy is not a good choice for power generation.
German Wild Boar:
Uranerz Energy has announced the first delivery of uranium oxide (U3O8) from its Nichols Ranch in-situ leach mine in Wyoming, which began operating in April. world-nuclear-news.org
Ukraine plans to sign an agreement to construct new nuclear power reactors by the end of this year, Ukrainian prime minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk told the country’s cabinet of ministers today. world-nuclear-news.org
I have often blogged about the problems with spent nuclear fuel in the United States. Estimates are that all the spent nuclear fuel pools in the U.S. will be full in five years unless the spent fuel can be stored elsewhere. There are about fifty thousand tons of spent nuclear fuel in those spent nuclear fuel pools. With no permanent geological repository for spent nuclear fuel, the only alternative at the moment is to build containers and store the spent fuel on site at the reactor. U.S. companies currently use thin walled stainless steel containers which tend to become brittle and crack over time.
Now the Department of Energy is exploring rail transportation of one hundred and fifty ton spent nuclear fuel dry casks so that they will be ready when there is a repository. Best estimate is 2050 for a permanent repository which makes exploring transportation alternatives appear a bit premature. In any case, the Obama administration is considering contracts to develop, test and certify the necessary rail equipment. One question has to do with whether the U.S. government should buy or lease the rail cars. The specifications call for the cars to last thirty years, be able to handle the heavy casks and be used up to eight times a year. Any train utilizing these cars would have to have additional “buffer” cars that would be placed between the cars carrying the radioactive cargo and the crew of the train.
Between 1979 and 2007, the commercial nuclear power industry shipped over two thousand tons of spent nuclear fuel. A company called Progress Energy has shipped spent nuclear fuel by rail. They moved spent nuclear fuel from two of their nuclear power plants to a third plant because there was extra room in the third plant’s spent fuel pool. There was such an backlash against the shipments from environmentalists and local governments that Progress Energy publically announced in 2003 that they were building onsite dry cask storage at the two plants that had been the source of the spent fuel being shipped. When the casks are ready to be filled, the shipments will stop.
The Yucca Mountain Repository in Nevada was supposed to receive shipments of spent nuclear fuel from U.S. power reactors but after a decade of work on the site, the Obama administration cancelled the project in 2009. The U.S. had promised such a repository to nuclear power plant operators by 1999 and was collecting fees for the storage. This year, the government stopped collecting the fee and, in some cases, returned some of the money to reactor operators who had sued.
Recently there have been a number of explosions where single walled tanker cars were being used to move tar sands oil which is more flammable than oil from regular oil wells. The industry knows that the single walled tank cars are dangerous but they have not been willing to spend the money to build safer cars. If standards are set for transportation of spent nuclear waste by rail, can we depend on those standards to be sufficient to protect the public and environment? And, can we depend on industry to follow those standards rigorously? I have my doubts about both of these issues.
