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.
Over the last series of posts on fusion, I have covered the history of research on fusion reactors. The first date in the timeline in 1946. A couple of scientists proposed something called a zeta pinch for the confinement, compression and heating of a plasma of hydrogen. By 1947, a zeta pinch device had been constructed and tested in the United Kingdom. In 1950, Soviet scientists proposed a torus shaped device they called a tokamak. Soon experiments were being run in the United States and the Soviet Union on different ways of applying magnetic fields in different shaped vessels to control the instabilities that appeared in magnetically confined plasmas.
After a decade of research on the tokamak approach, in the early 1960’s a new type of fusion reactor was proposed. In this reactor, a spherical configuration of lasers bombarded a small pellet of deuterium and tritium to create a fusion reaction. A variety of laser configurations were tested and other means of heating the target were tried including bombardment with a stream of heavy ions. This approach was referred to as inertial confinement.
In the following posts, I detail many of the different hardware configurations that were tried for the two types of fusion initiation. Scientists in the U.S., the U.K., Germany, France, Japan, the Soviet Union, Russia, China and Japan worked on fusion projects. There were a number of international collaborations such as the Joint European Torus and the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. The ITER project is a tokamak design that is still in the process of development and testing. It is located in the Cardarache facility in France.
Over the past fifty years, tens of billions of dollars have been spent on fusion research. Current expenditures for global fusion research are over a billion dollars a year. So what is the prognosis for commercial energy production with fusion? One recent estimate concluded that it would require over one hundred billion dollars and fifty years to achieve commercial fusion power reactors. For the entire history of fusion, estimates have consistently said that commercial fusion power is decades away. After fifty years, the estimate is still that practical fusion power is decades away.
As attractive as the concept of creating electrical power with isotopes of hydrogen is, it does not appear that fusion power will have any significant role to play in our current energy economy other than consuming billions of dollars. There is a closing window of a few decades for the human race to stop pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere before climate change destroys human civilization. Obviously fusion power will not be online soon enough to help us with that problem.
As much as I would love to see science tame nuclear fusion I am skeptical that it will ever happen. There are so many serious problems facing human civilization that we will be lucky if it survives until 2060. There may not be a hundred billion dollars available to contribute to fusion research during that time.
Basic fusion reaction where deuterium (D) and tritium (T) fuse to create helium:
In 2006, China completed the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) test reactor at Hefei, the capital city of Anhui Province. The EAST is the first tokamak to use superconducting magnets for both the toroidal and poloidal fields.
In 2009, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) is completed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The NIF is an inertial confinement fusion reactor with a spherical configuration of lasers that heats and compresses a pellet of hydrogen in order to generate a fusion reaction. The Fusion Power Corporation files a patent for a “Single Pass Radio Frequency Driver which is a Radio Frequency Accelerator Driven Heavy Ion Fusion Process and Method. “A new arrangement of current multiplying processes that employs multiple isotopes to achieve the desired effect of distributing the task of amplifying the current among all the various processes, to relieve stress on any one process, and to increase margin of safety for assured ICF.”
In 2010, at the Heavy Ion Fusion-2010 Symposium in Germany, Robert Burke presents a report on Single Pass HIF. Charles Helsley projects the commercialization of Heavy Ion Fusion by 2020.
In 2011, at the Workshop for Accelerators for Heavy Ion Fusion at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is held in May, Robert J. Burke presents his report on “Single Pass Heavy Ion Fusion”. The Accelerator Working Group makes recommendations with respect to moving toward commercial fusion power utilizing Radio Frequency Accelerator Driven HIF (SPRFD).
In 2012, Stephen Slutz and Roger Vesey of Scandia National Laboratories published a paper in Physical Review Letters describing a computer simulation of Magnetized Liner Inertial Fusion (MagLIF). In MagLIF, a one hundred nanosecond pulse of electricity is run through a cylinder that contains a hydrogen pellet. The current generates a powerful zeta pinch magnetic field which compresses the cylinder causing it to implode. Just prior to implosion, the hydrogen pellet is heated with a laser beam. The MagLIF combines features of both inertial confinement fusion and magnetic confinement, the two main approaches to nuclear fusion. The computer simulation suggests that MagLIF may be able to generate one thousand times the energy that is input to trigger fusion.
The Joint European Torus in the UK announces that it has made a major breakthrough in controlling plasma instability which is one of the main problems encountered in magnetic confinement.
The Nineteenth International Heavy Ion Fusion Symposium is held in Berkeley, California. Burke presents updates to his work on SPRFD HIF. Helsley gives a report on the economics of SPRFD for commercial generation of electricity. Fusion Power Corporation obtains a Russian patent for SPRFD.
In 2013, the Chinese EAST test reactor manages to confine a plasma for thirty seconds which represents a record. This breakthrough is ten times better than other tokamaks have been able to achieve to date.
This concludes my presentation of the history of world fusion research.
Chinese Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak:
California State Long Beach Campus researchers will monitor the state’s kelp forest for radioactive contamination from the meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan. manhattanbeach.patch.com
The forced closure of RWE’s Biblis nuclear power plant after the Fukushima accident was unlawful, the German Supreme Administrative Court has ruled. world-nuclear-news.com
A nuclear cooperation agreement has been signed between Hungary and Russia, which includes the construction of two new units at Hungary’s Paks nuclear power plant. world-nuclear-news.com
In 1998, the Japanese JT-60 tokamak fusion reactor “produced a high performance reversed shear plasma with the equivalent fusion amplification factor of 1.25” which represented a world record of Q. Q represents the fusion energy gain factor. This is the ratio of fusion power produced by a fusion reactor to the amount of energy that must be expended to maintain the stability of the plasma. A Q=1 is the break-even point where there is as much energy coming out as going in. The European-based work on heavy ion fusion power systems such as HIDIF and GSI-98-06 included the use of telescoping beams of different isotopic nuclei.
In 1999, the United States ended its involvement with the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). The Small Tight Aspect Ratio Tokamak in the U.K. is retired and replaced by the Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak experiment which is still in operation today.
In 2001, the construction of the building to house the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, begun in 1997, was completed. Work on the laser beam lines and diagnostic bays began this year. The NIF is expected to run its first full test in 2010. Negotiations begin among Canada, European, Japan and Russia on the Joint Implementation of the ITER project.
In 2002, the European Union put forward Cardarache and Vandellos as possible locations for the ITER project. The Cardarache facility in France is a scientific center dedicated to nuclear energy research. The Vandellos Nuclear Power Plant is located in the Catalonia region of Spain. Japan nominated Rokkasho as their candidate for locating the ITER project.
In 2003, the U.S. rejoined the ITER project. China and the Republic of Korea also joined the multination fusion research project. In the same year, Canada pulls out of the ITEM project. The Cardarache facility in France is chosen as the site for the construction of the ITER. Sandia National Laboratories in the U.S. begin running fusion inertial confinement fusion experiments on their Z machine also known as the Z Pulsed Power Facility. It is the biggest X-ray generator ever built. It is used to test how materials react to extremes of temperature and pressure.
In 2004, the U.S. decided that it could not equal the European fusion research progress demonstrated by the Fusion Ignition Research Experiment (FIRE) on its own. The U.S. concluded that it would be best to fully support the ITER project.
In 2005, final negotiations between the E.U. and Japan result in the selection of Cardarache as the site for the construction of the ITER. Japan is allowed to host a related research facility and to name twenty percent of the staff for ITER although it is only providing ten percent of the funding. The NIF test fires a bundle of eight laser beams and achieves the biggest energy laser pulse of one hundred fifty two kiloJoules in the infrared part of the EM spectrum.
The Sandia Z-Machine:
The basic design for China’s CAP1400 reactor has been approved ahead of construction of the first two units, which is set to start at Shidaowan in April. world-nuclear-news
Reports filed with regulators and published Monday showed a number of U.S. nuclear plants dealing with severe weather and other issues into the weekend. nuclearstreet.com
