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.
Activists have been fighting against nuclear weapons for decades. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, it seemed that nuclear disarmament had a real chance. A number of international treaties had been signed over the decades to encourage nuclear armed nations to get rid of their nuclear weapons and to try to prevent non-nuclear nations from getting nuclear weapons. The U.S. and the Soviet Union/Russians had the biggest nuclear arsenals. Tens of thousands of warheads were built. This is a massive case of overkill because it is estimated that a hundred nuclear warheads could cause a nuclear winter and destroy human civilization.
Today, the U.S. and the Russians have about fifteen hundred warheads ready to launch and another three thousand warheads in reserve. A few other nations have a hundred or more warheads but the overall threat of nuclear war has been receding. As a matter of fact, U.S. nuclear power reactors have been running on fuel created by converted weapons-grade plutonium from Russian nukes for the last fifteen years.
President Obama wrote his senior thesis about the nuclear arms race and the nuclear freeze campaign. Early in his first term as President, Obama said “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” This was a very promising sign to the anti-nuclear weapons crowd after years of the belligerence of the Bush Administration. And, Obama did move forward with the New Start Treaty that lowered the ceiling for deployed nuclear weapons to fifteen hundred warheads as mentioned above. The New Start Treaty also imposed limits on the different delivery systems that can deploy nuclear warheads.
However, the Obama State Department has been reluctant to seek ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty because they are concerned that there would not be enough votes to pass it. The State Department has not been applying the pressure necessary to get Pakistan to stop building nuclear warheads. There appears to inconsistency in the Obama administration’s efforts on behalf of nuclear disarmament.
Obama has just released his fiscal budget for 2015. The budget calls for more spending on design, maintenance, and production of nuclear weapons than Reagan spent in 1985 which was the historical maximum for U.S. government nuclear weapons expenditures. The budget request for nuclear weapons is seven percent bigger for 2016. Obama’s Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative (OGSI) calls for spending an additional five hundred million dollars on nuclear warheads. Russia has recently been spending more on nuclear weapons systems.
Despite some progress in nuclear disarmament, it would appear that more money will be spent on weapons systems whose use would end human civilization. There are many more pressing needs in our country which would benefit from increased spending. Now that the U.S. and Russia are at odds over Russia’s takeover of Crimea, it is even more important than ever to find a way to step back from the brink of nuclear war and get rid of these horrible weapons.
Los Alamos Study Group graph:
Activists have been fighting against nuclear weapons for decades. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, it seemed that nuclear disarmament had a real chance. A number of international treaties had been signed over the decades to encourage nuclear armed nations to get rid of their nuclear weapons and to try to prevent non-nuclear nations from getting nuclear weapons. The U.S. and the Soviet Union/Russians had the biggest nuclear arsenals. Tens of thousands of warheads were built. This is a massive case of overkill because it is estimated that a hundred nuclear warheads could cause a nuclear winter and destroy human civilization.
Today, the U.S. and the Russians have about fifteen hundred warheads ready to launch and another three thousand warheads in reserve. A few other nations have a hundred or more warheads but the overall threat of nuclear war has been receding. As a matter of fact, U.S. nuclear power reactors have been running on fuel created by converted weapons-grade plutonium from Russian nukes for the last fifteen years.
President Obama wrote his senior thesis about the nuclear arms race and the nuclear freeze campaign. Early in his first term as President, Obama said “So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” This was a very promising sign to the anti-nuclear weapons crowd after years of the belligerence of the Bush Administration. And, Obama did move forward with the New Start Treaty that lowered the ceiling for deployed nuclear weapons to fifteen hundred warheads as mentioned above. The New Start Treaty also imposed limits on the different delivery systems that can deploy nuclear warheads.
However, the Obama State Department has been reluctant to seek ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty because they are concerned that there would not be enough votes to pass it. The State Department has not been applying the pressure necessary to get Pakistan to stop building nuclear warheads. There appears to inconsistency in the Obama administration’s efforts on behalf of nuclear disarmament.
Obama has just released his fiscal budget for 2015. The budget calls for more spending on design, maintenance, and production of nuclear weapons than Reagan spent in 1985 which was the historical maximum for U.S. government nuclear weapons expenditures. The budget request for nuclear weapons is seven percent bigger for 2016. Obama’s Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative (OGSI) calls for spending an additional five hundred million dollars on nuclear warheads. Russia has recently been spending more on nuclear weapons systems.
Despite some progress in nuclear disarmament, it would appear that more money will be spent on weapons systems whose use would end human civilization. There are many more pressing needs in our country which would benefit from increased spending. Now that the U.S. and Russia are at odds over Russia’s takeover of Crimea, it is even more important than ever to find a way to step back from the brink of nuclear war and get rid of these horrible weapons.
Los Alamos Study Group graph:
I have remarked in previous blog posts that nuclear regulation is often inconsistent and insufficient. Many national regulatory agencies have been “captured” by the industry that they are suppose to regulate. In the last four years, there has been a decline in the number of events that caused the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to stage “special inspections” at U.S. nuclear power plants. In 2010, there were nineteen such events but in 2013, there were only fourteen. The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) calls these events “near misses.” I certainly hope that they are exaggerating.
For the most part, the NRC does a good job of enforcing safety regulations at the one hundred U.S. nuclear power plants. This enforcement protects workers and the public from exposure to radiation. Recently, the NRC has increased oversight on the U.S. fleet of reactors, many of which have passed or are nearing their original projected lifespan.
A UCS recent report criticizes the NRC for not requiring that spent nuclear fuel at nuclear power plants be transferred from the spent fuel pools to dry cask storage. This is a serious problem because it is estimated that all the spent fuel pools in the U.S. will be full within four years. However there are problems with dry cask storage. The current design does not monitor the contents and there have been buildups of explosive gases in some casks. Work is proceeding on new casks designs to solve these problems but the first prototypes will not be ready for testing until 2017. In addition, nuclear utility companies have been paying into a fund for the permanent disposal of spent fuel. A repository was supposed to be provided by the U.S. government by 1999. There is no repository in sight and two nuclear utility operators have just been allowed to recover some of the money that they have paid out.
The law governing the use of the fund prohibits money being spent on temporary storage which is exactly what is currently needed.
The UCS report also complains that the NRC is not enforcing fire protection standards at around half of the U.S. reactors. There have been fires at many U.S. nuclear power plants. In January of this year, there was a fire at the Duke Energy Harris nuclear power plant in North Carolina which caused the operators to shut down the reactor. This particular power plant had been shut down recently due to design flaws found in the reactor. It was also shut down in May of last year because corrosion was found in the reactor vessel. Here is a good example of a reactor with multiple problems that should probably be shut down permanently. There was a fire in February at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico. Plutonium contaminated waste from nuclear weapons production is stored there. Some investigator say that this fire was preventable. A truck caught fire a half mile underground. The truck was almost thirty years old. Investigators say that it was not been maintained properly and that it had no automatic fire suppression system.
Some critics of nuclear power say that it is not a question of “if” there will be another serious accident at a nuclear reactor but only a matter of “when.” They may be wrong but I fear that they are not. One more major accident at nuclear power reactor may be the final nail in the coffin of nuclear power generation. In the meantime, the NRC should be pressured to increase their surveillance and regulation of U.S. reactors.
Duke Energy’s Shearon Harris Nuclear Power Plant:
There is a crisis at Fukushima plant with rampant alcoholism. enenews.com
Scientists ‘mystified’ over Fukushima radioactive waste found in Pacific Northwest. enenews.com
The state of South Carolina has reacted angrily to the suspension of the Savannah River MOX Fuel Fabrication Facility construction, filing a lawsuit against the Department of Energy. world-nuclear-news.com
Many fairy tales and legends feature a haunted forest. The trees are twisted into grotesque shapes and strange creatures roam there. It appears as if we are on the way to having a real haunted forest in the area around Chernobyl where the environment was heavily contaminated with radiation from the accident that happened there in 1986. A sudden power surge during testing destroyed a reactor causing a huge explosion. No people live in the exclusion zone around the destroyed nuclear power station but plants and animals are still showing the effects of radiation poisoning almost thirty years after the accident. It has been found the brains of birds in around Chernobyl are smaller than normal, fewer insects live in that area, trees are growing slower and big game animals that leave the exclusion zone still have high levels of radiation.
A recent report about the biology around Chernobyl suggests that the organisms that usually decompose organic matter are affected by the high levels of radiation. Natural recyclers such as microbes, fungi and some insects are less capable of consuming and reducing dead organisms. For instance, there is a pine forest near Chernobyl where all the trees turned read and died shortly after the accident. These trees do not seem to be decomposing and there is increasing litter of dead leaves and pine needles on the forest floor. It turns out that the litter is much deeper in areas where the radiation level is highest.
In order to determine whether or not radiation was responsible for the lack of decomposition, the researcher put different types of leaves in mesh bags, some line with a fine mesh to keep insects out. The bags were distributed around Chernobyl in areas with different levels of radiation. After a year, the bags were collected to see what had happened. Where t here was no radiation, most of the leaves disappeared during the year-long test. Where there was a lot of radiation, over fifty percent of the leaves survived for the whole year. Comparing the two sizes of mesh, it was found that microbes and fungi play a much larger role in the decomposition of leaves than insects do. Because the bags had been placed in a lot of different conditions, the researchers were able to eliminate anything other than radiation as the cause of the lack of decomposition.
The researched concluded that it was damage to microbes that resulted in slower or no decomposition around Chernobyl. They also thought that it was probable that the slower return of nutrients to the soil was the cause of slower tree growth.
The dead trees and leaf clutter on the forest floor is also poses an increased risk of wildfires. In addition to the damage usually caused by wildfires, such fires around Chernobyl could cause a redistribution of radioactive contamination as dust and smoke from the fires could escape the exclusion zone. The researchers are collaboration with other scientists in Japan to see if a similar zone lacking microbial life forms around the Fukushima nuclear power plant.
Chernobyl Red Forest:
