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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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.
My last post was about how the Mafia in Italy was illegally dumping toxic waste including radioactive materials. I focused mainly on the Camorra Mafia in Campania, a southern state of Italy. I briefly mentioned the ‘Ndrangheta Mafia in Calabria, a state in the toe of the Italian “boot.” Today, I am going to delve deeper into the ‘Ndrangheta and the international dumping that is going on. Strict environmental regulations introduced in the 1980s increased the profits for Italian Mafias engaged in illegal dumping.
A damning report issued by the Italian parliament in 1995 suggested widespread institutional support for such illegal dumping. The report found evidence of national and international trafficking in radioactive waste. Businesses and political lobbying groups were operating with the full support some agencies within governments that were members of the European Union as well as governments outside of the Union. The investigators who put the report together experienced threats and interference in their research from individuals within government agencies.
The Italian Ente Nazionale per l’Energia Atomica or ENEA (National Agency for Atomic Energy) is the another national nuclear agency that is charged with both promoting the Italian nuclear industry and protecting the environment. As in many other cases, there have been repeated charges that the ENEA is a little too friendly with the nuclear industry that it is suppose to regulate and a little too lax in the enforcement of environmental regulations.
In 2005, an former member of the ‘Ndrangheta published claims in an Italian magazine that the ‘Ndrangheta had deliberately sunk at least thirty ships including some that were carrying radioactive waste. The magazine article triggered serious investigation of radioactive waste handling. Legitimate waste disposal firms were swept up in the investigation. Over a period of two decades, there have been over thirty questionable sinking of ships in the Mediterranean Sea. Sometimes ships with suspicious cargos sank in fair weather with no signal for help. Often, the crews just vanished.
The informant claimed that a manager with the ENEA paid the ‘Ndrangheta to dispose of six hundred drums of toxic and radioactive waste that originated in Italy, Switzerland, France, Germany and the United States. The ship carrying the waste was sent to Somalia where the waste was buried after the local officials were bought off. Other employees of ENEA are suspected of paying off the Mafia during the 1980s and 1990s to dump toxic and radioactive wastes. There were also charges that prominent politicians with ties to major Italian political parties were involved in the illegal dumping schemes and made use of the Italian secret service to hide their activities.
Once again, I have to emphasize that even if it is possible to build safe nuclear reactors and to fuel them and dispose of waste without ecological damage, the problems outlined in this blog indicate that crime syndicates, industries and government agencies often collaborate to skirt nuclear regulations.
Italian Calabrian coast:
Scientists have found nuclear waste off San Diego coast. enenews.com
US production of uranium concentrate increased 16% in 2013, reaching its highest level since 1997, according to preliminary figures. world-nuclear-news.org
In 1980, the Camorra Mafia took over the garbage removal in the Italian state of Campania. At the same time, the ‘Ndrangheta Mafia moved into the garbage business in Calabria, another southern Italian state. The Mafia is drawn to garbage collection because ” It’s easy to infiltrate, it’s a desperate necessity for every citizen, and it’s not terribly hard to do.” Organized crime all over the world is in the garbage business.
Campania has been called the “Land of Fires” because there are frequent garbage fires. Desperate landowners are willing to sell off their land cheap to Mafia clans looking for dump sites. It is as if the entire state is seen as a “gigantic carpet” that anything can be swept under. In some places, the land has become so unstable from dumping that houses and other buildings have to be supported by concrete scaffolds. It has been estimated that as much as ten million tons of toxic and nuclear waste have been dumped in Campania. Some of the waste is transported from as far away as Germany.
There is a severe toll on public health from the toxic and nuclear waste. In some area, the rate of cancer is as much as fifty percent higher than the national average. This toll on health has earned Campania another nickname: “The Triangle of Death.” Studies have shown that much of the water in Campania is not safe to drink because of the waste running off the land into streams and rivers. It is difficult to understand how someone could do such damage to the land they live in. The lifespan of a Mafia boss is short and often ends in violence. This leads to an attitude of “live for today” without much concern for the future that the mafia is destroying. They have been referred to as the eco-Mafia. The national government has mobilized the army and is using drones to locate dumpsites.
Mafia dumping has spread beyond Italy to Somalia. There have been reports of deals where guns are traded for the opportunity to dump wastes. Hundreds of barrels of waste have shown up on the shore of Somalia including radioactive uranium waste as well as heavy metals and other toxic substances. A hidden network has sprung up around the world to move toxic and nuclear waste from the developed world to the poor and desperate developing world. A lot of attention in the nuclear nations is paid to the safe disposal of nuclear waste. This global dumping conspiracy threatens to make a joke out of such concern.
Illegal toxic waste dumping in Italy:
The Chinese military has recently acquired a new delivery system that can be used with either conventional warheads or nuclear warheads. This has generated concern in the U.S. Military because apparently we have nothing that can counter it.
The Air Force National Air and Space Intelligence Center reported at a Congressional hearing that the Chinese have tested a hypersonic glide vehicle called the Falcon that “is basically a ballistic missile-launched system that gets acquires the target, gets the payload fast and high, pitches over, dives to hypersonic speed, and then basically just glides to the target.” The new delivery vehicle could be dangerous even without any warhead because of the kinetic energy it gains during the hypersonic dive.
When combined with medium-range ballistic missiles “hypersonic vehicles of any kind—whether they’re glide vehicles or cruise missiles—are extremely difficult to defend against because just the time is so compressed between initial detection, being able to get a track, being able to get a fire control solution.” The incredible speed of the new delivery system makes it almost impossible destroy with current missile defense interceptors. The new delivery vehicle allows more efficient targeting, allows more targets to be hit with fewer missiles, allows more missiles to be employed per target and allows a bigger reserve of weapons to be maintained against contingency.
The first report of a test of the new delivery vehicle appeared in the Washington Free Beacon on January 9, 2014. The Washington Free Beacon is a conservative website connected to the Center for American Freedom. The Chinese military has said that the new delivery vehicle is intended attacks against aircraft carriers. The Admiral of the U.S. Pacific Command responded to the report by saying that he was not particularly concerned about the new delivery system and that it was just one among many factors that would be considered in a potential conflict between the U.S. and China. If the new Chinese system is as effective as feared, it could force U.S. ships to stay further away from the Chinese coast. The new Chinese system is just one of a number of different weapons systems that the Chinese are working on to counter anti-ballistic missile defense systems.
A member of the Congressional panel that received the Air Force National Air and Space Intelligence Center report said that unless the U.S. military was able to develop directed energy weapons, there would be no way to counter the new Chinese system. Directed energy weapons can utilized a number of different types of electromagnetic energy such as radio frequencies, microwaves, lasers and masers to destroy an incoming warhead by igniting the ionized plasma sheath around the warhead, scrambling the electronics and targeting of a incoming warhead or just vaporizing the warhead. Another type of weapon called a pulsed rail gun could potentially be used against the Chinese system. A rail gun uses magnetic pulses to accelerate a projectile to high velocity.
There has been a lot of discussion recently about the possibility of armed conflict between the U.S. and China. China has been issuing provocative statements about being able to target U.S. cities and it has been deliberately provoking hostile reactions among neighboring countries by claiming the right to control contested areas of ocean and contested islands. While the U.S. has to take rising Chinese military capability seriously, China has much to lose if it attacks the U.S. Chinese investment is so pervasive in the U.S. that they would be destroying their own property in addition to severely damaging a major trading partner. Even if we never retaliated against a major Chinese attack on the U.S. mainland, China would be devastated economically.
Artist’s rendition of the Chinese Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle:
Cesium-134/137 density spiked up in 13 of 16 elementary school ground soil of Kamakura, Japan in 2013. fukushima-diary.com
TEPCO has released videos of a severely damaged fuel assembly in the Fukushima Unit 4 spent fuel pool. fukuleaks.org
The CEO of Westinghouse announced the company has shifted staff working on its small modular reactor to the team working on the AP1000. nuclearstreet.com
