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.
Ambient office = 90 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 87 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 103 nanosieverts per hour
Iceberg lettuce from Top Foods = 160 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 118 nanosieverts per hour
Filtered water = 103 nanosieverts per hour
My recent posts have been about breeder reactors which generate more fissile material than they consume. There is renewed global interest in breeder reactors for the production of nuclear fuel and the destruction of nuclear waste. Today’s post is going to be a summary of the history and current status of breeder reactors.
After World War II, the nuclear powers took great interest in the idea of breeder reactors. After all, the idea that you could burn nuclear fuel and wind up with more fuel than you put into the reactor was very attractive. Especially in view of uncertainty about the amount of naturally occurring uranium that could be mined economically. Another attractive aspect of the fast breeder reactors was that they produced plutonium that could be extracted for use in nuclear weapons production. As the arms race of the Cold War took off, this possible source of weapon-grade plutonium was researched around the planet.
Designs were developed, prototype reactors were build and extensive tests were run. Using molten sodium for a coolant was very popular because of its heat transfer properties and it was employed in many test reactors. These research reactors often developed leaks of molten sodium which were very difficult to deal with. In spite of these problems, optimistic projections of construction costs similar to conventional light water reactors were published and it was claimed that the fast-breeders would be a competitive source of electricity. Scientists, engineers, businessmen and citizens were skeptical of the promise of fast breeder reactors. Despite these reservations, national governments of nuclear nations were generally positive about fast breeder reactors and continued to pour millions of dollars into the research programs.
The winding down of the Cold War at the end of the 1980s removed one of the main drivers of fast breeder technology . With warheads being dismantled and stockpiles of plutonium on hand, the need to produce more plutonium declined. Also, during the decades following World War II, more and more uranium reserves were discovered all over the world and new mines came online to produce fuel for nuclear reactors. The need to breed fissile materials for fuel declined. The experience of the various research programs indicated that molten sodium although an excellent coolant was difficult to control. The truth was accepted that the cost of building and operating a fast breeder reactor was always going to be more than the cost of building and operating conventional light water nuclear power reactors. This effectively removed fast breeder reactors from the competition for an economical source of power. Global interest declined and funding for R & D fell.
Now, more than sixty years after the first burst of enthusiasm for fast breeder reactors, interest is once again rising. A great deal of the most accessible uranium has been mined and some analysts say that we reached the peak of natural uranium production this year. Considering all the reactors in operation and under construction, there are predictions that in five years, as uranium production declines, there will not be enough uranium fuel being produced to supply all of them. Suddenly, the ability to produce nuclear fuel in a fast breeder reactor is once again attractive. In addition, the spent nuclear fuel pools are rapidly filling up at reactors all over the world. Without any sort of permanent geological repositories for nuclear waste, the ability of a fast breeder reactor to burn waste and reduce the long-lived and really hot constituents in spent nuclear fuel is also becoming more attractive.
The International Framework for Nuclear Energy Cooperation, based on the earlier Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, has 31 member nations cooperating on creating a global system of nuclear fuel supply and waste processing involving supplier nations and user nations.
Russia is moving most aggressively to make use of fast breeder reactors for fuel production and waste treatment. China is also very interested in fast breeders for power generation, fuel production and waste treatment. India is working on what are called thermal neutron breeder reactors in the hope of utilizing the vast amounts of thorium that India possesses for energy production.
With all the work being done on breeder reactors today, we will soon have an opportunity to see if they really can be operated economically and safely to provide the benefits that have been promised.
A reporter in Japan says that he is stunned by brazen cover-up and lies over effects of Fukushima radiation. enenews.com
Greenhouse gas emissions from power plants in California increased by 35% in 2012, partly due to the early closure of the San Onofre nuclear power plant. world-nuclear-news.org
Do we need warning markers in the nuclear age? nuclearnews.com
Ambient office = 115 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 108 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 92 nanosieverts per hour
Hass avacado from Top Foods = 91 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 83 nanosieverts per hour
Filtered water = 62 nanosieverts per hour
My recent posts have been about breeder reactors which generate more fissile material than they consume. There is renewed global interest in breeder reactors for the production of nuclear fuel and the destruction of nuclear waste. Today’s post is going to be about the renaming and refunding of an international cooperative initiative launched by the United States.
The GNEP became the International Framework for Nuclear Energy Cooperation (IFNEC) in mid-2010 and there is renewed effort and funding in the United States to carry out the intent of the original GNEP proposal. This addresses both the proliferation concerns and the disposal of nuclear waste. Currently the likely supplier nations with fully developed nuclear technology would be the U.S., the U.K., France, Russia and Japan. User nations could be any of the other members of the cooperative framework.
There are serious problems with temporary spent nuclear repositories filling up around the world. In the United States, all the spent fuel pools in all the reactors will be filled within the next five years. With the cancellation of the Yucca Mountain nuclear fuel repository, that means that currently the only other choice would be to build more dry casks for temporary storage onsite.
The Statement of Principles for the GNEP was signed by most of the 31 members of the IFNEC. The goals of the Principles include a process in which supplier nations would send nuclear fuel to user nations. When the fuel was spent, it would be sent back to supplier nations. The spent fuel would then be processed to separate the uranium and plutonium as well as other transuranics. This mixture could then be burned in new advanced reactors. In the process, the amount of waste that required disposal would be greatly reduced along with the time required for the radiation to drop to a safe level. This would help solve the spent fuel disposal problem in the U.S. and across the world. The International Atomic Energy Agency would oversee this process and insure that all nuclear materials were tightly controlled. One of the benefits to the user nations for refraining from developing enrichment and reprocessing technologies would be the assurance that they would have a steady flow of nuclear fuel and a removal of spent nuclear fuel.
One of the main conventional chemical processes used to separate plutonium from spent nuclear fuel is known as PUREX. The use of this process has resulted in the accumulation of over two hundred and forty tons of reactor grade plutonium worldwide. Although this plutonium is not suitable for nuclear weapons use, it can be fed into other processes that will generate weapons-grade plutonium. New reprocessing technologies are being developed under the IFNEC that would create a mixture of plutonium, uranium and other transuranics that would be suitable for fuel but would not be suitable for nuclear weapon manufacture. This would achieve one of the main goals of the IFNEC to reduce the dangers of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. There are currently experiments being done in France on burning this type of fuel mixture.
Work proceeds today on the development of reprocessing technologies, advanced reactor designs and the legal framework needed to control the flow of nuclear materials and waste products. There is also work being done on the development of small reactors for small electric grids in developing countries.
Unit 2 of the Comanche Peak nuclear plant in Texas went offline Friday after routine testing set off safety systems. nuclearstreet.com
The final consignment of high-enriched uranium (HEU) has been shipped from Hungary to Russia, making the country the 12th nation from which all HEU has been removed since 2009. world-nuclear-news.org
Ambient office = 104 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 103 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 93 nanosieverts per hour
Redleaf lettuce from Top Foods = 100 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 86 nanosieverts per hour
Filtered water = 59 nanosieverts per hour
My recent posts have been about breeder reactors which generate more fissile material than they consume. There is renewed global interest in breeder reactors for the production of nuclear fuel and the destruction of nuclear waste. Today’s post is going to be about a recent international cooperative initiative launched by the United States.
There have been many international agreements to cooperate on the development of fast breeder technology from early European programs up to recent cooperation between Russia and China. The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) was proposed in 2006 by the U.S. Secretary of Energy for the Bush Administration.
The GNEP was intended to promote nuclear power across the world and to created what is referred to as a close fuel cycle. Twin goals were to reduce nuclear waste and also to reduce the danger of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Under the proposal, some nations that had fully developed nuclear industries would be “suppliers” who would provide nuclear fuel and take back spent nuclear fuel for reprocessing. Other countries could just have nuclear power reactors and would be referred to as “user nations.”
The GNEP proposal had a lot of critics and received much less funding from the U.S. Congress that the Administration requested. Fuel reprocessing had been halted in the U.S. because it was expensive. There were also concerns about nuclear proliferation even though one of the expressed goals of the proposal was to prevent proliferation. Critics claimed that GNEP would be very costly and would not really solve the non-proliferation problem.
Sixteen countries signed the GNEP statement of Principles and became official GNEP Partners by fall of 2007. Nine other countries have signed on since the original group. Seventeen countries have offered membership in GNEP but refused to sign the Statement of Principles. They are officially listed as observers. Some of the countries refused to become full partners because they would have promised not to develop enrichment or reprocessing technology and that would have locked them into the “user nation” classification. There was some concern that under the GNEP, the supplier nations would have a monopoly on nuclear fuel production and would be able to raise prices as much as they wanted.
The U.S. Department of Energy cancelled the portion of the proposal that dealt with nuclear operations inside the U.S. in 2009. DOE said that work on reprocessing spent nuclear fuel would stop but that there would continue to be research into fuel reprocessing that would reduce the danger of proliferation and explore the disposal of nuclear waste. Eventually new reprocessing technology that separates all the transuranics from spent nuclear fuel instead of just the plutonium was developed. The resultant mix of transuranics can be used as fuel. This reinvigorated the U.S. involvement in the GNEP. Tomorrow, I will discuss the current incarnation of the GNEP which has been renamed the International Framework for Nuclear Energy Cooperation.
Ambient office = 83 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 96 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 101 nanosieverts per hour
Red seedless grapes from Top Foods = 91 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 103 nanosieverts per hour
Filtered water = 78 nanosieverts per hour
