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.
In 1859, a huge solar storm injected so much energy into the atmosphere of the Earth that it caused major damage to the early power grid and the telegraph system in the United States. Some telegraph operators were shocked by arching electricity in their equipment. Fires broke out and generating systems crashed. This was referred to as the Carrington Event. Since that time, we have built an amazing but vulnerable civilization based on electrical power.
Recently, a huge solar flare just missed the Earth. Had it happened a week before, it might have cause serious damage to our electrical infrastructure as well as the shell of satellites orbiting the earth. The sun has eleven year cycles of solar activity. There are larger fluctuations in solar output that play out over decades and centuries. Historical records suggest that Carrington Events happen about every five hundred years so we will have a new Carrington type event eventually.
If we have a Carrington Event now, it could fry the entire electrical grid including generators, transmission lines, motors, electronics, etc. Without electricity and electronics, our civilization will collapse. We need electricity for manufacture, transportation and storage of food. It is estimated that most supermarkets in most cities have about a week or two worth of food. Without restocking, the food will disappear in weeks. We need electricity to treat water and sewage so drinking water and sewage systems will fail. We do have emergency generators but they generally run on diesel fuel. Once their onsite fuel is consumed within days of the disaster, there will be no more fuel because electricity is needed to pump the fuel out of tanks. Industry needs electricity to function so there will be no way to rebuild our electrical infrastructure. With cascading failures of energy, food, water, industry, transportation, etc. it is likely that billions of people will die in the first year and the rest of the human race will become hunter gatherers living in the ruins.
We have a hundred operating nuclear power reactors in the United States. They all have spent fuel pools where old fuel rods are cooled with water for years as they become less radioactive. Most of the spent fuel pools in the United States are rapidly filling up. If there was a Carrington Event, the national grid that supplies the electricity for the pumps that circulate the cooling water in the spent fuel pools will be gone. Emergency diesel generator will kick in automatically. Within hours or days, the emergency supply of diesel fuel will fail. What little fuel remains in the cities will be used by emergency vehicles and the military fighting fires and civil disorder. The spent fuel pools will heat the remaining water and it will boil off. Radioactive steam will be released. Once exposed to the air, many of the spent fuel rods will spontaneously burst into flame. Hydrogen gas generated by the cladding on the fuel rods will explode, blowing up the buildings housing the spent fuel pools. Smoke, steam and radioactive particles will spew out across the landscape. The Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine in 1986 irradiated an area the size of Alabama. One hundred burning spent fuel pools would likely cover the whole United States with radioactive fallout.
So, in addition to the destruction of our civilization by a Carrington Event, there will be a cloud of radioactive particles falling on the survivors in the ruins and shortening their already wretched lives. Unlike other problems that can arise at particular nuclear power plants, this disaster will be universal. There is no way that we can prevent a Carrington Event which could happen at any time. And, given the guaranteed destruction of human civilization, the burning spent fuel pools will only be adding insult to injury for the few survivors. We may be able to harden our electrical grid and our electronics to the point where they could survive a Carrington Event if we have enough time but only time will tell.
A famous Japanese food manga takes on the “truth about Fukushima”. kotaku.com
OECD program teaches Fukushima students to sell contaminated foods. fukuleaks.org
Flying ‘3D printers’ could help seal nuclear waste. rt.com
Dr. Strangelove was a 1964 black comedy about the cold war conceived, co-written and directed by the brilliant director Stanley Kubrick. A U.S. Air Force general goes insane and dispatches his bombers to the Soviet Union. The U.S. managed to recall or shoot down all but one of the bombers which ultimately drops a bomb on the Soviet Union. The punch line of the film is that the Soviet Union had constructed a “doomsday” device that will trigger automatically if a nuclear bomb is dropped on the Soviet Union but the rest of the world did not know about it. The film ends with the destruction of the world. It turns out that the plot of the film was not as preposterous as some might think.
Prior to the 1980s, it was assumed by the Soviets that they would have at least thirty minutes warning if the U.S. attempted to launch a first strike against the Soviet Union. This would provide enough time for a retaliatory launch by the Soviets. However, with the increasing accuracy of U.S. submarine missiles during the 1980s, the Soviets had to reconsider their ability to launch a retaliatory strike before the U.S. missiles hit their targets and disabled the Soviet nuclear capacity. U.S. submarines could approach the coast of the Soviet Union and launch missiles that could strike their targets within three minutes. This meant that Soviet missiles could be destroyed in their silos before they could launch.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian military sources admitted that the Soviet Union had developed a fail-safe method of insuring that the Soviet Union could survive a first strike nuclear attack and retaliate successfully. The system is called Perimeter (also known as Dead Hand). Perimeter would automatically launch all missiles, triggered by a combination of light, radioactivity and overpressure, even if every nuclear command center and all of their leaders were destroyed. This system is similar to the doomsday device in Dr. Strangelove. Apparently the system still exists and is fully operational.
The post-Soviet Russian military sources claimed that the system would only be activated in case of a major international crisis and would be not be left on all the time. One of the reasons given for the development and deployment of the Perimeter system was that it would tend to lessen the risk of an accidental launch by panicked officers in a time of international tension. The reasoning was that if military planners could be assured that no matter what happened, if the Soviet Union had been attacked, a successful retaliation could be carried out there would be less inclination to launch missiles in ambiguous circumstances.
Of course, the possibility exists that a nuclear detonation within the Soviet Union coupled with a sabotage of communication systems might result in Perimeter launching an all out nuclear attack on the United States. It would certainly be better for the world if global nuclear disarmament were carried out and the Perimeter system permanently disabled. As I have pointed out in past blog posts, if either the U.S. or Russia launched only ten percent of their nuclear arsenals, the resultant nuclear winter would end human civilization. No one “wins” a nuclear war.
Japanese school children are being sent into a contaminated area for a field trip to plant rice. fukushima-diary.com
More than 3,000 evacuees die since Fukushima disaster. www3.nhk.or.jp
A ceremony has been held to mark the official start of uranium mining operations at the Husab project in Namibia. world-nuclear-news.org
