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.
Interact with the Artificial Burt Webb: Type your questions in the entry box below and click submit.
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.
TEPCO doesn’t mention the possibility of land subsidence under contaminated water tanks at Fukushima. Fukushima-deiary.com
Cracks up to 40 feet in concrete found near tanks of radioactive waste at Fukushima. Enenews.com
MOD names possible nuclear sites for interim storage of submarine waste. Yournuclearnews.com
Today, I am going to continue blogging about illegal dumping of wastes in Russia. There is a Russian Naval base at Murmansk on the Arctic Sea. Dumping nuclear waste into the world’s oceans has been banned by international treaty for over thirty years. It has been know for decades that the Soviet Union and Russia have been illegally dumping nuclear materials into the Arctic Sea. Because of Cold War secrecy, the exact quantities and types of nuclear materials are not completely known.
Yesterday, I blogged about the Soviet and Russian practice of dumping the effluent from the nuclear weapons factory near Chelyabinsk into the River Techa. The Techa empties into the Arctic Sea and much of the radioactive contamination from Chelyabinsk wound up in there.
The Naval base at Murmansk services nuclear powered surface vessels and submarines. Between 1964 and 1986, over seven thousand tons of solid radioactive waste and fifty six thousand cubic feet of liquid waste was dumped into the Arctic Sea. In addition, at least eighteen nuclear reactors from Soviet and Russian nuclear submarines and nuclear icebreakers were sunk in the Arctic Sea off of Murmansk. A nuclear sub was intentionally sunk off Murmansk after an accident in 1968. In addition, another Soviet nuclear sub sank three hundred miles off of Norway. That sub contained two nuclear reactors and two nuclear warheads. In 1993, the Russians admitted that a Russian ship discharged nine hundred tons of radioactive water from decommissioned nuclear subs.
A curie is a measure of radioactivity from decaying radioactive isotopes. A single curie could be sufficient to kill someone with prolonged exposure. It is estimated that between 1953 and 1991, the Soviet Union dumped over three hundred thousands of curies into the Arctic Sea. Experts maintain that radioactive materials that are dumped at sea need to be at least three thousand feet below the surface in order for it not to be a threat. Much of the dumped Soviet and Russian waste is in shallower water and a danger to the food chain.
Norway in particular is very concerned about the potential damage to prime fishing grounds in the Arctic Sea. IN 1993, Arctic Sea seals began dying of blood cancer. Since seals are near the top of the food chain, this suggests that a lot of fish are contaminated. There may be a threat to human beings eating fish from that area. Norway and other Scandinavian countries depend of fish from the Arctic Sea to feed their own people and for export sales.
Russia has responded to international outrage over their dumping practices in the Arctic Sea by claiming that they are running out of places on land to dump nuclear waste and they will have to keep dumping nuclear waste into the Arctic Sea unless the international community provides funding for other waste disposal alternatives. I guess this could be referred to as “nuclear blackmail.”
Murmansk on the Arctic Sea:
Today, I am going to focus on illegal nuclear waste dumping inside Russia. For years, Rosatom, the government owned nuclear company in Russia, has denied that the nuclear waste reprocessing facility Mayak in the Urals is continuing to illegally dump byproducts of reprocessing into the Techa river, an important source of water for thousands of homes in the area.
Mayak is in the closed nuclear town of Ozersk. The Soviet Union built whole cities to house the scientists and workers for specific industries. These “closed” towns were off limits for foreigners and even Russians without proper documentation. Mayak is the only facility in Russia that can reprocess the nuclear fuel used in the VVER-440 reactors and spent fuel from Russian submarines.
In 1957, a waste storage tank exploded at Mayak. Radioactive materials were spread across the region and hundreds of thousands of residents had to be evacuated. The Soviet nuclear authorities claimed that a reactor had exploded in the nearby town of Kyshtym to divert attention from the real site and nature of the accident. Many people in the area were forced to work on the clean-up with little protection against the radiation.
Rosatom has been claiming that Mayak stopped dumping toxic wastes into the river decades ago. Russian court documents prove that this practice has never stopped. The release of deadly nuclear waste into the Techa river and the nearby Lake Karachai over many decades has resulted in this area being designated as one of the most radioactive contaminated places in the whole world.
In 2006, the director of Mayak was relieved of his duties and charged with criminal activity in regard to the continued dumping of nuclear wastes into the Techa. It took five years for activists to obtain court documents for the closed hearings. The court documents state that between 2001 and 2004, over a billion cubic feet of nuclear waste was dumped into the Techa in clear violation of Russian law.
Testing of the river water indicated that it qualified as “liquid radioactive waste.” The five thousand residents in the area suffered increase levels of acute myeloid leukemia and other forms of cancer as a result of the radioactive contamination of their environment. The area around the river was eighty times the normal level of background radiation. The radioactive contamination has spread from the water through the food chain to the human residents of the area.
Between 2001 and 2004, the managers of Mayak received over one hundred and seventy million dollars, mostly from accepting nuclear waste shipments from abroad as mentioned in my previous post. Apparently none of the money was used to make the storage of nuclear waste any safer. Instead, it was spent on unrelated business expenses. In 2006, the court found that five villages in the area had been contaminated by recent dumping at Mayak. Over the lifetime of Mayak, as much as fifteen billion cubic feet of radioactive waste has been dumped into the Techa river.
Rosatom has repeatedly claimed that Mayak is a ” model industrial enterprise that does no damage to the environment.” The recent testing and court cases show that their claims are lies and they know they are lying. Fortunately, with the finding of the court case in 2006, there have been calls for such measures as covering the Techa river with a concrete lid and making certain that all dumping of wastes into the Techa river are stopped.
Mayak nuclear plant:
Nukem, a private company, operates a facility at Hanau on the River Kinzig in central Germany which concentrated uranium ore and filled fuel tubes with the concentrate for nuclear reactors. Nukem is involved in supplying nuclear fuel to reactors in North and South America, Europe and Asia. It has grown into one of the biggest intermediaries in nuclear fuel in the world. Forty tons of waste generated at Hanau was shipped to Sweden by Westinghouse Atom AB for recovery of residual uranium at Ranstad Mineral AB’s uranium processing plant.
Vasteras was a Swedish company formed in 1969 as a partnership between ASEA, a private company and the Swedish government. Eventually, Vasteras bought out the state share of the partnership in the early 1980s. It merged with Brown Boveri, another Swedish company to become ABB Atom, part of the worldwide company group known as ABB. In 2000, ABB Atom was sold to Westinghouse and renamed Westinghouse Atom AB.
The Swedish Parliament has passed strict laws prohibiting the importation of nuclear waste into Sweden from other countries. The waste from Hanau was allowed in because it contained what were classified as “useful residues.” Following the extraction of the uranium, the remaining waste was dumped into the Risangen municipal dump site near the town of Skovde.
In 2000, tests by the Swedish Radiation Protection Institute (SSI) confirmed that the radiation in the remaining waste deposited in the Risangen dump exceeded what the Swedish government considers a safe level and further dumping of such waste at Risangen was prohibited. SSI investigated whether Westinghouse Atom AB, the transporter of the Hanau waste, had “penal responsibility” for breaking the Radiation Protection Law. SSI decided that that the dumping of the processed waste at Risangen was only a minor breach of the law and did not rise to “penal responsibility. SSI said that there was no danger to the environment or public health.
Westinghouse Atom AB claims that it did not know that the waste exceeded the Swedish limit. This is difficult to believe given the long history of Westinghouse in the global nuclear industry. Apparently Westinghouse did not test the waste that was leaving the reprocessing plant bound for the municipal dump because they certainly have the technical capability. Since the SSI decided that Westinghouse Atom AB was only guilty of a minor infraction that did not rise to “penal responsibility”, if there are any future costs or dangers associated with the radioactive contamination of the Risangen dump, they will be born by the citizens of Sweden and especially those in the area of Skovde. Once again, a government agency has given a private company a pass for incompetence at the least and intentional breaking of Swedish law at the worst.
Plutonium tablets stored at Hanau nuclear facility:
There is a new source of leakage at Fukushima. enenews.com
The pouring of first concrete has marked the official start of construction of Argentina’s prototype CAREM-25, a domestically-designed and developed small integral reactor. world-nuclear-news.com
