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.
In my last post, I talked about how there is a civil war brewing in Ukraine over Russian involvement in Ukrainian affairs. There is a substantial Russian minority in Ukraine. During the Soviet years, Ukraine was the second most powerful member of the Soviet Union after Russia but it was ultimately controlled by the central Soviet government. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has often exerted strong influence over Ukraine politics via its economic and technical assistance.
Last year, the Smolino site in Kirovograd Region of Ukraine was being prepared for the construction of nuclear fuel production plant. The plant is supposed to begin producing nuclear fuel in 2020 and it is hoped that it will ultimately be producing eight hundred fuel assemblies per year. A joint venture company was formed to build the plant. The Nuclear Fuel State Concern of Ukraine and TVEL, a subsidiary of Rosatom, the Russian state enterprise are partners in the new company. Seventy percent of the cost of the project is to come in the form of a Russian loan and the rest from investors of the two countries. TVEL beat out Westinghouse in 2010 for the international tender issued by Ukraine.
Advanced Russian nuclear fuel technology referred to TVSA-12 fuel assemblies has already been introduced in Ukraine reactors. The new Ukraine nuclear fuel plant will utilize the TVSA technology to produce nuclear fuel. There will be a WWER-1000 nuclear reactor at the plant.
Ironically, the Smolino nuclear fuel plant is being advertised by TVEL, the Russian half of the joint partnership, as a way for Ukraine to become independent of the need for outside energy assistance. (Perhaps TVEL means independent of help from anyone but Russia.) Russia is pushing hard to become a major supplier of nuclear technology to other countries in Eastern Europe and TVEL says that both Russia and Ukraine will benefit from this partnership to produce nuclear fuel. Ukraine gets fifty percent of its power from nuclear power so the ability produce its own nuclear fuel would be advantageous. Ukraine is currently dependent on massive imports of natural gas from Russia. There is also the claim that this new plant will produce more jobs for Ukraine.
This is the first such major nuclear project between Russia and Ukraine. It was hoped that this project would be the beginning of a continuing partnership in the production of nuclear fuel and nuclear technology for export to other countries. On the other hand, a Russian nuclear expert expressed doubts that this fuel plant would have a major impact on the nuclear market in Eastern Europe because the fuel assemblies that it produces will be mainly used in the Ukrainian reactors. It is also clear that the deep involvement of the Rosatom subsidiary, TVEL, will mean that Russia will exert major influence in the management of the nuclear fuel plant. So much for Ukrainian energy independence.
The big question is what effect a change of government in Ukraine will have on this partnership. With the hostility of the protester in Ukraine to the involvement of Russia in Ukrainian affairs, it very well may turn out that even if the nuclear fuel plant is completed, further partnerships between Russia and Ukraine in the nuclear marketplace will not materialize.
Smolino nuclear fuel plant in Ukraine:
As the Davis-Besse nuclear power plant prepares to begin work to replace its steam generators, the plant’s operator is highlighting the benefits to the local economy from the operation. world-nuclear-news.org
Inspections during a refueling outage have turned up flaws in the housing of control rod drive mechanisms at the Palisades nuclear plant. nuclearstreet.com
There are many different important issues when considering nuclear power. I have spent a lot of time on the threat nuclear weapons and the environmental, health, technical and economic issues of nuclear reactors. I have posted blogs that dealt with the possibilities that terrorists could target nuclear reactors and/or nuclear waste storage. I have even mentioned that if Russia succeeds in building reactors in third world countries, they could apply economic pressure to those countries by threatening to shut off the reactors if the other countries do not comply with Russian demands. Of course, nuclear reactors would be prime targets in wars because they would deny the enemy huge amounts of electrical power. But recently, there have reports of the possible role of nuclear reactors in the internal power struggles with in a single country. This is a subject that I have not covered.
There is a complicated struggle for control of Ukraine. The President and the recent government have been oriented toward cooperation with the Russians. The mass of the people are fed up with Russian interferences in the affairs of Ukraine and would like to turn toward Europe and the European Union for economic assistance. For weeks there has been a battle between police and government security forces and protesters in Ukraine. It has been becoming increasingly violent as both sides dig in for what must be seen as the possible opening battles of a full out civil war. A few days ago, the Ukrainian President accepted the resignation of the whole government in an attempt to appease the protesters after an attempt to buy them off with promises of participation in the government failed.
The Security Service of Ukraine has issued a statement with respect to the on-going conflict. They say that anonymous parties have threatened to sabotage critical infrastructure in Ukraine unless their demands are met. Along with threats to bomb hydroelectric power installations, there have also been threats against the nuclear power plants in Ukraine. There are currently four nuclear power plants in Ukraine with fifteen operating reactors. I have blogged about the vulnerabilities of nuclear reactors to attacks in the past. Reactors are highly complex machines which can be directly stopped or destroyed in many ways. They store spent nuclear fuel which would be an excellent target for a saboteur. All reactors require a huge amount of cooling water, the blocking of which is another way that reactors could be stopped.
Blowing up a reactor in Ukraine would cause widespread environmental devastation, public health impacts and economic disaster. While it is difficult to understand the logic of a protester who would do such a thing to their own country, it should never be doubted that there are such people in all societies. If Ukrainian reactors are attacked, it will be the first use of nuclear terrorism in a civil war. And, the damage would reach far beyond Ukraine into other countries in the area.
Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Station in Ukraine, the biggest nuclear power plant in Europe:
Harold Simmons, who died in December of 2013, was a Texas billionaire who established a site for disposing of radioactive waste in West Texas. Simmons made his money in garbage collection, drug stores, metals and chemicals. He has been called the “King of Superfund Sites.”
Simmons bought a hazardous waste disposal company called Waste Control Specialists (WCS) and started working on the nuclear dump in Andrews County. Texas has very lax controls on environment pollution with people from polluting companies sitting on regulatory boards. After six years of lobbying, Simmons convinced the Texas legislature to pass a law authorizing private companies like his WCS to be granted licenses to store radioactive waste.
WCS immediately started the process of obtaining two licenses that would allow it to store a total of sixty million cubic feet of low-level radioactive waste from Federal and state sources. The acceptable types of waste come from places like nuclear reactor operations, nuclear laboratories, and hospitals. One benefit of staying with the low-level wastes is that it is not necessary to go through the time consuming and expensive process of getting Federal approval for storage of high-level nuclear waste such as spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors.
There was resistance from against issuing the licenses by environmentalists and some state authorities. State engineers and geologists raised the concern that radioactive materials could leach out of the dump site into the ground water. In a memo from 2007, four staffers from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) stated that because the site was close to the water table in that part of Texas, it “makes groundwater intrusion into the disposal units highly likely.” Three staffers at the TCEQ resigned rather than sign off on the license request from WCS. One said “I started getting the idea that these people are going to license this thing no matter what. I felt that in clear conscience I couldn’t grant a license with what was being proposed.” The director of the TCEQ quit in 2008 and became a highly paid lobbyist for WCS. The licenses were granted to WCS in the fall of 2008. Critics said that it was a blatant example of the revolving door between the public and the private sectors and of regulatory capture of an agency by the industry they are suppose to regulate.
Once Simmons had the licenses in hand, he began expanding the storage site. His plan was to move beyond local storage to take waste from all over the United States. There is a growing and lucrative market for nuclear waste storage that he was buying into. Simmons wanted his site to be the biggest in the U.S. Thirty six states do not have permanent disposal sites for their low-level radioactive waste. WCS had signed a contract with Vermont to store their waste. Simmons wanted to expand the contract to take waste from other states. An obscure agency in the Texas government called the Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission had the authority to expand the WCS contract. It had seven members, six of whom were appointed by Governor Rick Perry who received a large campaign donation from Simmons. There was widespread opposition to the contract expansion but the Commission approved it and WCS is able to take radioactive waste from other states.
WCS will reap the profits from the nuclear waste disposal but if radioactive materials migrate from the site into the Texas ecosystem including the water table, the Texas taxpayers will have to bear the cost. The WCS case is an excellent illustration of how back room political dealing and campaign donations can trump science and the public interest.
Waste Control Specialists site in Andrews Country, Texas:
