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.
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
Last year, I posted several blog articles about the “Peaceful A-bombs.” These articles recounted efforts by the U.S., Soviet Union and other countries to find a peaceful use for nuclear bombs. Some of the uses considered had to do with earth moving such as digging canals with a linear series of nuclear bombs. Another possibility was digging out artificial harbors with nuclear bombs. Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union were also interested in seeing if nuclear bombs could be used for fracking to release oil and natural gas from deep below the surface of the Earth. A recent article about this idea of nuclear fracking caught my attention. Since fracking is so much in the news these days, I thought that I would go in to a bit more detail about U.S. nuclear fracking tests.
In December of 1967, the Atomic Energy Commission (forerunner of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission), the U.S. Bureau of Mines and El Paso Natural Gas Company sent researchers to northern New Mexico near Farmington for a test that was referred to as Project Gasbuggy. A four thousand foot shaft had been drilled for the test. A twenty thousand ton nuclear bomb was lowered to the bottom of the shaft and triggered. The explosion created a cylindrical cavity that was over three hundred feet tall and about one hundred and fifty feet in diameter. The intense heat of the blast fused the soil and rock into a glass lining. Subsequent measurements indicated that fractures spread out two hundred feet in all directions and there was definitely an increase in the release of natural gas from the fractured rock.
There were two such more tests by the Atomic Energy Commission. In 1969 near Rulison, Colorado, a forty three thousand ton nuclear device was triggered in an eight thousand five hundred foot shaft. In 1973, a single shaft was used to detonate three thirty three thousand ton nuclear devices near Rifle, Colorado. All of these tests were part of the U.S. Ploughshares Program which sought to find practical civilian uses for nuclear bombs. The Ploughshare Program was cancelled in 1975.
The reasons given for the cancellation of the underground test series included the fact that the process was very expensive. It was estimated that if all of the gas that could be produced by such a well were extracted over a twenty five year period, it would only recover a maximum of forty percent of the cost of the fracking process. There was little public support and, hence, little congressional support for the program. In addition, there was also concern about the tritium contamination of the gas produced by the well. Underground nuclear detonations still release radioactive materials into the atmosphere. There is also the possibility of radioactive contamination of ground water as well. With the development of other technologies such as hydrofracking, the concern about cost and environmental issues, nuclear fracking was never implemented. To this day, the three test sites are still under the control of the Department of Energy Office of Legacy Management.
Project Gasbuggy sign:
Tons of Fukushima radioactive waste are kept in an area beyond Tokyo, 150 miles from reactors. enenews.com
Southern Co. announced Wednesday that it has filed the paperwork for a loan guarantee that’s been under negotiation since 2010 for new reactors at Plant Vogtle. nuclearstreet.com
