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.
Israel is thought to have about eighty nuclear warheads. The exact number is not known because Israel has never explicitly admitted having nuclear weapons. They even tested a nuclear device about fifty years ago. The other nuclear powers in the world have not been very vocal about the Israeli nuclear program. Israel has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT).
The Israeli nuclear weapons program was revealed to the British press by Mordechai Vanunu in 1986. Vanunu was an Israeli nuclear technician who was opposed to weapons of mass destruction and was driven by his conscience to make the Israeli program public. The Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, lured him from Britain to Italy, drugged him and brought him back to Israel to stand trial. He served eighteen years in prison, spending eleven of those years in solitary confinement.
France decided in 1954 that it needed to have nuclear weapons in order to be taken seriously as a world power. They moved aggressively into nuclear weapons research. They were sympathetic to Israel and they wanted to expand their exports so they sold nuclear technology to Israel as well as other non-nuclear countries. They helped the Israelis build a nuclear reactor at Dimona as well as a secret reprocessing plant to create weapons grade plutonium.
Although Israel did not sign the NNPT, they did sign international treaties against nuclear testing which they violated. They are also accused of violating numerous national and international laws with respect to trade and transport in nuclear technology and materials. Among the other nations who have shared nuclear technology and/or nuclear materials with Israel are the United States, Germany, Britain and Norway. In 1959, Israel purchased twenty tons of heavy water to use in their nuclear reactor from Britain and Norway. The British and Norwegian authorities knew that the heavy water could be used to help create nuclear weapons but decided to let the sale go through anyway.
The Israelis refused to let the International Atomic Energy Agency visit the Dimona site. They did allow U.S. inspectors after demands from U.S. President Kennedy in the early 1960s, but they went to great lengths to prevent U.S. access to their secret plutonium recovery plant. The CIA told U.S. President Johnson that the Israelis had nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them in 1968. The Johnson administration and subsequent Presidents decided to keep the Israel nuclear arsenal a secret. In 1979, a U.S. spy satellite saw flashes of a nuclear detonation in the Indian Ocean that were later identified as an Israeli weapon test.
In addition to the willing cooperation of other countries, Israel fielded a sophisticated and very successful spy network named Lakam to gather information on nuclear technology from other nuclear countries. Lakam bought nuclear triggers on the black market, copied blueprints of nuclear technology in other countries, purchased tons of yellow cake uranium through a network of front companies and even clandestinely transferred an entire shipload of yellow cake to Israeli vessels after concealing their purchase through front companies in other countries. Lakam also stole some fissile materials from a U.S. company.
In December of 2013, the former speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Avraham Burg, stated publicly that Israel had nuclear and chemical weapons and said that the non-disclosure policy of the Israeli government was “outdated and childish.” A right-wing political group in Israel demanded that Burg be investigated for committing treason. When U.S. President Obama was asked directly about Israeli nuclear weapons in early 2009, he sidestepped the question by saying that he did not want to “speculate.” A member of the U.K. Parliament, Baroness Warsi, was asked about the Israeli program in November of 2013. She would only say that the U.K and Israel regularly conferred on nuclear issues and that the U.K. had urged Israel to sign the NNPT.
Amidst the furor over a possible Iranian nuclear bomb, there have been complaints by Middle Eastern countries over the latitude and support given to Israel in its nuclear weapons program by other nuclear nations.
Mordechai Vanunu:
There are reports of radioactive contamination in kelp just off the California coast. enenews.com
A computer room filled with smoke at the South Texas Project nuclear plant near Houston Saturday. nuclearstreet.com
A couple of days ago I blogged about some problems with the U.S. nuclear missile force. One recent report revealed that thirty four members of the nuclear missile force have been suspended because they were directly or indirectly implicated in a cheating scandal. Today I want to drill down into that particular issue. The officers in the missile force were caught cheating or tolerating the cheating of others on the routine exams that test their knowledge of the highly classified and strict procedures that are required to launch U.S. nuclear missiles under emergency war orders. All of them have had their security clearances suspended and are not allowed to perform launch duties.
Apparently some of the cheaters were transmitting answers to other cheaters via text messaging. This is a blatant violation of security protocols for handling classified information in addition to showing a clear lack of personal integrity. Seventeen officers cheated and another seventeen knew about the cheating but did not report it. A commander at one of the six bases involved in the cheating investigation said that he thought that this was one manifestation of a deeper and broader cultural problem of ignoring problems rather than dealing with them.
In response to the cheating revelations, every available ICBM launch control officer at Malmstrom AFB in Montana, F.E. Warren AFB in Wyoming and Minot AFB in North Dakota were retested by the Air Force. Out of four hundred and seventy two officers, twenty one failed their tests and will receive new training and be retested before they are allowed to resume their duties. An additional twenty seven were not available for the tests.
Adding up the cheaters, the failed and the unavailable, the total number of launch control officers who are not authorized for duty comes to eighty two. This accounts for seventeen percent of the launch control officers. Although the Air Force admitted that this was going to have an “impact” on the missile forces, they stated that it would not affect the 24/7 readiness of the all the U.S. ICBMs. The Air Force assured the public that “the trouble is episodic, correctible and not cause for public worry.”
The new Air Force Secretary said that this was a failure of some of our airmen, not a failure of the nuclear mission. “Just because there are issues with individuals it does not mean that the entirety of the mission is compromised.” She said that she was confident that the check and balances in place and the regular inspections of our ICBM bases were sufficient to insure the security of the nuclear missiles.
The question I have is exactly what the “nuclear mission” is. Is it to assure any potential enemy that we will destroy the world if attacked or is it to actually be ready to finish the task of bringing down human civilization if we are attacked? The goal of the first mission is to never need to launch which means that the missile forces are engaged in an endless and boring job of babysitting nuclear missiles which will never be launched. If the mission is to actually launch the missiles even with the knowledge that no one will win the final war, then every launch control officer in the missile forces must sometime ask themselves if they would actually launch the missiles if commanded. Either mission is a particularly stressful burden and it is not surprising that the some of the launch control officers are succumbing to severe stress.
Malmstrom Air Force Base:
The total volume of Tritium contained in the contaminated water tanks at Fukushima is 875 trillion Bq which is sixty times the legal limit for discharging water into the ocean. fukushima-diary.com
The South African establishment has a pro-nuclear bias that is not supported by the facts. nuclear-news.net
“The Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization with a mission to strengthen global security by reducing the risk of use and preventing the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and to work to build the trust, transparency, and security that are preconditions to the ultimate fulfillment of the Non-Proliferation Treaty’s goals and ambitions.” The NTI has issued a report on the global distribution and security of nuclear materials that could be used to make nuclear bombs. Countries possessing such nuclear materials have dropped by twenty five percent in the past two years. Mexico, Sweden, Ukraine, Vietnam, Austria, the Czech Republic and Hungary have removed most or all of their nuclear materials that could be used to create nuclear weapons.
The report considered such factors as accounting methods, physical security and transportation security in creating a ranking for the twenty five nations with weapons grade nuclear materials. Australia was cited as the most secure country on the list, followed by Canada, Switzerland, Germany and Norway. The United States is ranked at number eleven. Israel, Pakistan, India, Iran and North Korea were ranked as being the worst with respect to nuclear materials security.
It is estimated that there are about fourteen hundred tons of highly enriched (HE) uranium and about five hundred tons of plutonium at hundreds of sites around the globe. Highly enriched uranium and plutonium are the nuclear materials that can be used to construct nuclear weapons. A multi-megaton nuclear bomb can be constructed from about nine pounds of plutonium or about thirty five pounds of uranium.
Reprocessing facilities for plutonium is more difficult to detect than comparable reprocessing facilities for highly enriching uranium. Due to the much smaller quantity of plutonium required for a bomb than uranium, plutonium is the most sought after choice on the black market. About A relatively small amount of HE uranium or plutonium can be used to build a single bomb. Terrorist organizations have expressed the intent to
U.S. President Obama declared in 2009 that he wanted to lock down all the plutonium and HE uranium in the world. World leaders will meet in March to discuss security of weapons grade nuclear materials. Although the U.S. is placed at about the middle of the security ranking, there are still serious security issues in the U.S. In July of 2012, anti-war protesters broke into the Y-12 complex at Oak Ridge, Tennessee where the U.S. stockpile of HE uranium is stored. The catalog of U.S. nuclear missile forces problems that I presented in my previous post reinforces the point that the U.S. has some serious work to do on nuclear security.
If terrorists get their hands on weapons grade nuclear materials and manage to acquire the technology and expertise to create a working nuclear bomb, the whole world will pay the price regardless of where the bomb is detonated.
Logo for the Nuclear Threat Initiative:
The Swiss Embassy in Japan issued a statement on contamination of sea water from Fukushima melted cores. stofficetokyo.ch
Namibia’s Rössing uranium mine is gradually resuming operations after one of two leaching modules returned to service. world-nuclear-news.com
