My Geiger counter is in the shop for maintenance.

 

Tokyo Electric has determined that it will cease use of AREVA’s decontamination system, which uses chemicals to remove radioactive materials from water, as it has not lived up to expectations since it was installed.  japansafety.wordpress.com

The Japanese Nuclear Regulation Authority is going to decide to abort the frozen water wall project in underground trench at Fukushima. fukushima-diary.com

Helion Energy announced Thursday that it will receive backing from two prominent venture capital firms to help commercialize a fusion reactor for small power plants. nuclearstreet.com

Iran’s foreign minister says it is unlikely to reach a final nuclear accord with world powers by a November deadline. foxnews.com

My Geiger counter is in the shop for maintenance.

             A recent story about inadequacy of Japanese evacuation plans for nuclear disasters reminded me of a related episode in my own life. Back in the mid 1970s, the U.S. government told state governments that they had to have evacuations plans for their major cities in case of nuclear attack. The states were told that if they did not comply with the federal demand they might lose federal money for some state programs. I was working with some non-profits at the time and got referred to Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility that was involved with the evacuation issue. They needed someone to review an evacuation plan that had been drafted for the greater Seattle area and determine if it was feasible. I volunteered for the project.

        The draft plan called for Seattle residents to evacuate to the north, east and south. Once out of the greater Seattle area, the evacuees were to be housed by the smaller outlying communities in schools and other facilities. The evacuation was to be accomplished in three days.

        I did some research and found a critique of an evacuation plan for Denver, Colorado. There are some similarities with the Seattle area in that there were only a few major corridors in and out of Denver. The conclusion of the review was that the evacuation plan was far too optimistic. When they ran the numbers for traffic problems caused by high levels of traffic, they found that a conservative estimate of accidents and traffic jams suggested that it might take as much as three weeks to totally evacuate the city. With peak traffic starting from the call for evacuation and continuing for days, every major corridor out of Denver would be blocked within hours by accidents, stalls, cars running out of gas, etc. These blockages would be difficult if not impossible to remove because access by emergency vehicles would be severely limited.

       Applying the same logic to the draft evacuation plan for Seattle yielded the same results. The major corridors would wind up being blocked for days. This would mean that any nuclear attack on the Seattle area would find many citizens exposed on the roads as they tried to flee. Fortunately for the state, the governor at the time refused to draft the evacuation plans requested by the federal government because they would be a sheer fantasy. While an impossible evacuation plan might have comforted some low-information citizens, I think it is much better for the citizens of U.S. cities to understand that in case of a nuclear strike, there would not be much if anything that could be done to save lives in major cities.

        Some idiot in the Reagan administration advised people to dig a hole in the yard and cover it with a door for a temporary quick shelter. It was unclear whether they were supposed to have done this before an attack or while the attack was in progress. It was part of the belligerence of Reagan when he called the Soviet Union the “evil empire.” His administration was trying to suggest that a nuclear war could be won if we had enough shovels.

       After the end of the Cold War, it was hoped that the nuclear nations would disarm and end the nightmare of nuclear war. Things did seem to improve for awhile, but now we are in a conflict with Russia that could escalate. The danger of nuclear war is back and there are not enough shovels.

 

Dry ice ended up clogging the drain pipes for the ice wall at Fukushima, according to TEPCO. fukushima-diary.com

South Korean president Park Geun-hye has proposed establishing a Northeast Asia nuclear safety body with Japan and China. world-nuclear-news.org

An agreement to cooperate in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy signed by Canada and Kazakhstan in November has come into force.  world-nuclear-news.org

Unit 4 of Belgium’s Doel nuclear power plant will remain out of operation until at least the end of this year, Electrabel has announced. world-nuclear-news.org

My Geiger counter is in the shop for maintenance.

         I have posted about nuclear weapons and nuclear disarmament before. One of the problems with disarmament is the question of verifying that a nation has actually reduced their nuclear stockpile. While direct inspections are one method, you have to trust that the nation being inspected does not have a hidden stash of warheads or weapons grade nuclear materials tucked away somewhere. This is especially relevant when we are talking about the situation in Iran. Iran swears that it has no interest in developing a nuclear bomb while Israel swears that that is exactly what Iran is doing.

         Neutrinos are “electrically neutral, weakly interacting elementary subatomic particles with half-integer spin.” They are generated by nuclear processes such as those taking place in the Sun and in nuclear reactors. Neutrinos travel at the speed of light and are not affected by electromagnetism or the strong nuclear force. Because they are “weakly interactive,” they easily pass through normal matter as if it were not there. About sixty five billion solar neutrinos pass through each square centimeter of the Earth perpendicular to the Sun each second. Neutrinos have related antimatter particles called antineutrinos.

         Antineutrinos are very similar to neutrinos but they have the opposite spin. The antineutrino spectra of uranium 235, plutonium 239 and plutonium 241 were determined in the 1980s. However, the absence of a spectra for uranium-238 made it difficult to get an accurate reading of nuclear fuel in a reactor core. Physicists at Technische Universität München have now found the antineutrino spectra for uranium 238 which provides the mission information needed for analysis of antineutrino emissions from a nuclear reactor core.

         A group of scientists at Virginia Tech are currently exploring the possibility that antineutrinos could be used to detect the mix of nuclear materials in a reactor core because they are generated by nuclear reactions and cannot be blocked by any type of shielding. A measurement of antineutrinos emitted from a nuclear reactor building could indicate the amount of plutonium inside the reactor.

        Neutrino detectors have been built that are roughly one cubic meter in size. The researchers say that minor modifications of current neutrino detectors would allow a complete antineutrino detection system to be packaged into a twenty foot shipping container. Such a detection system could be shipped to the Iranian reactor at Arak to monitor compliance with international agreements. The Arak reactor is ideal for creating plutonium which is a prime material for construction nuclear warheads. The detection system that the researchers envision would even be able indicate the enrichment level of the fuel in the reactor. It would also be able to differentiate between antineutrinos emitted by isotopes of uranium from isotopes of plutonium. The system they envision should be able to function within about thirty feet of a nuclear reactor core. There is no other system in existence that would allow for such close monitoring of reactor fuels.

        The existence of a reliable, compact and cost effective system for detecting antineutrino emissions remotely from a nuclear reactor core will assist the International Atomic Energy Agency in its work on verifying compliance with non-proliferation agreements.

LENS neutrino detector model:

Injecting water into Fukushima reactor accelerated the meltdown of the reactor core. enenews.com

Japanese scientists say that Fukushima radiation is causing “serious biological effects” in the environment. enenews.com

The Australian government has said that it is still open to nominations from traditional land owners in Northern Territory for a site for a national radioactive waste management facility. world-nuclear-news.org

A safety system erroneously tripped unit 3 at New York’s Indian Point nuclear plant Wednesday. nuclearstreet.com

My Geiger counter is in the shop for maintenance.

             While there is wide spread concern about nuclear waste in the United States, some small towns are lobbying to host nuclear waste dumps. I have posted several blogs about the problems at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico. After particles of plutonium and americium were detected twenty miles away from the WIPP site, the repository was shut down. It was found that a waste drum had exploded and released its contents. While the exact cause of the explosion is still being debated, there is concern that there are more drums that could explode. Some analysts say that the WIPP may never be reopened. Investigators found that there was a “culture of unsafe practices and history of irregular inspections” at WIPP.  

          The U.S. Energy Secretary announced Monday that he would get the WIPP repository operating again. Residents of Carlsbad supported the announcement and endorsed the reopening of the WIPP in spite of the problems. With all the financial problems that many small communities are having, even if an industry is dangerous, it is still welcome if it brings jobs to the community. The siting of the WIPP near Carlsbad brought a thousand jobs to the area. Most of the two hundred million dollar annual budget of the WIPP goes to wages for those thousand jobs. The federal government has spent over six billion dollars at the WIPP and, if the site is reopened, billions more will be spent in filling the repository with low-level nuclear waste from U.S. nuclear weapons programs.

         Officials in Loving County, Texas have been lobbying the federal government to spend twenty eight billion dollars to dispose of high-level radioactive waste in their area. There are only ninety five people living in the county. A county judge said that the money brought in by a nuclear waste dump would allow the county to incorporate a town, seat a city council, build a school and pay for other improvements such as paved roads.

         Many communities are not interested in having a nuclear waste repository anywhere near them. When the Obama administration canceled the Yucca Mountain Repository in Nevada, many Nevada residents were happy to see the project abandoned. It is estimated that there are at least seventy two thousand tons of nuclear waste in the U.S. and there will not be a permanent geological repository in the U.S. before 2050. In the meantime, temporary storage will have to be developed or the waste will overwhelm the storage capacity of spent fuel pools at reactor sites.

        Some of the radioactive materials in nuclear waste can be dangerous for hundreds of millions of years. Where ever the waste is eventually stored, it is imperative that future generations know that it is dangerous. In millions of years, any current language will have disappeared. There have been suggestions that some sort of graphic symbols be developed that would serve to warn future humanity of the danger which may or may not be possible. Perhaps the idea of drilling deep holes in bedrock, burying the waste and filling in the holes would be better than storage in a salt mine such as the WIPP. With the waste miles below the surface of the Earth and a pristine landscape above, future generations do not even need to know or worry about the nuclear waste left over from our era.