Ambient office = .119 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .116 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = .085 microsieverts per hour

Mango from Top Foods =  .093 microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .097 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .077 microsieverts per hour

             I have mentioned breeder reactors several times in recent posts so I decided that I should go into detail about exactly what a breeder reactor is. Basically a breeder reactor generates more than enough neutrons to generate power. The extra neutrons create more fissile materials in the reactor. The net result is that breeder reactors actually generate more radioactive materials than they consume. When a conventional light water reactor burns uranium fuel, it only extracts about one percent of the energy in the uranium. A breeder reactor can theoretically extract almost one hundred percent of the energy in uranium.  

            Early in the Atomic Age, they were attractive because they generated fuel. After the 1960s, interest waned because more uranium deposits were found and new uranium enrichments methods were developed, both of which increase the supply of uranium fuel and reduced the costs. Recently there has been renewed interest in breeder reactors as a possible way of dealing with nuclear waste due to their ability to burn a wide variety of nuclear fuels. There is also a desire to close the fuel cycle by recycling waste into fuel and generating more fuel. The fact the world uranium production has reached a peak and will decline in the future raising nuclear fuel prices also makes breeders attractive.

           When uranium fuel is burned in a reactor, there are two types of waste products generated. One type is called fission products which includes different atom that are fragments of heavier atoms that have undergone nuclear decay. There are dozens of elements and hundreds of isotopes in fission products, all of them lighter than the uranium atoms which have been broken up to form them. They cannot undergo fission and so cannot be used as fuel. Most of them have very short half-lives with only a few lasting one hundred years. The other type of waste consists of  elements heavier than uranium referred to transuranics that are formed when atoms in the fuel absorb neutrons but do not fission.  These transuranics can have half-lives in the thousands of years. So geological disposal of fission products is much less problematic than geological disposal of transuranics. If the transuranics are removed from spent nuclear fuel, most of the long-term radioactivity will be gone.

          Light water reactors do generate fissile isotopes of plutonium as they burn nuclear fuel. The fission of the plutonium isotopes provides about one third of the energy generated by the reactor but the plutonium created does not replace the uranium-235 that has been consumed. Even so, transuranics are still left in the spent fuel. If this fuel is recycled once as what is called mixed oxide fuels, most of the transuranics still remain. The term “conversion ratio” is used to indicate the relationship of the number of fissile atoms created per fission event to the number of fissile atoms destroyed. The conversion ratio of a common light water reactor is about .6. The conversion ratio of a pressurized heavy water reactor is about .8. Breeder reactors have conversion ratios of that vary from 1.01 to 1.2. Theoretical models indicate that conversion ratios of as much as 1.8 are possible. Obviously, the idea of getting twice as much fuel out of a reactor as you put in will be increasingly attractive as the supply of mined uranium goes down and the price of uranium fuel increases.   

Arnie Gundersen says that Japanese officials are pressuring researchers to not report birth defects and stillbirths that might be related to the Fukushima disaster.  enenews.com

 Arnie Gundersen says that the Unit 4 spent fuel pool at Fukushima is “distorted.” fairewinds.org

Japan’s climate goals remain as unclear as its energy policy. world-nuclear-news.org

Israel is accused of having chemical and biological weapons in addition to their nuclear weapons. nuclear-news.net

Ambient office = .089 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .113 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = .106 microsieverts per hour

Mango from Top Foods =  .098 microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .074 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .064 microsieverts per hour

          In my last post, I talked about how the U.S. had been converting uranium for old Soviet warheads into nuclear fuel for U.S. nuclear reactors. There are also other radioactive isotopes that the U.S. is buying from Russia.

          Radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTG) were developed to provide low power reliably for years. They are used in applications where there will be little or no human monitoring. These generators utilize a pellet of a radioactive isotope to provide the heat to generate the power. Plutonium-238 requires the least shielding and has the longest life of the isotopes that have been used in RTGs. All U.S. space exploration has been powered by Pu-238 RTGs. Solar panels are too big and inefficient, nuclear reactors are too big and complicated and there are no chemical batteries that could supply the power needed for space exploration.

          The first satellites launched by the U.S. were powered by plutonium created by the U.S. However, U.S. military plutonium production stopped in 1992 and our supply of Pu-238 is rapidly dwindling. The Russians shut down their military production of Pu-239 in 2010. They are currently the only country that is still producing plutonium isotopes for industrial purposes. The most recent satellites launched by the U.S. are powered by Russian plutonium.

          The U.S. has been buying Russian plutonium for years to power satellites but in 2009, after Russia wanted to renegotiate the contract and raise the price, the U.S. stopped purchasing from Russia. The situation at NASA is getting desperate. Space missions have already been cancelled because of a shortage of Pu-238. NASA currently has only sixteen kilograms of Pu-238 which it says is sufficient for the rest of this decade. That seems unlikely because a single satellite launched in 2006 needed eleven kilograms of Pu-238. In addition, U.S. military satellites also require Pu-238. Pu-238 has a half-life of about ninety years so if there are old stockpiles sitting around, they have already loss some of their energy.  Without new sources of Pu-238, all future U.S. space missions may have to be cancelled.

           NASA is forbidden from making its own Pu-238 so it is dependent on U.S. government programs for future production. It is estimated that the program will cost about a hundred million dollars. In 2012, only ten million dollars were spent. The Advanced Test Reactor near Idaho Falls, ID and the High Flux Isotope Reactor at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee will be used to create about two kilograms of plutonium annual starting in 2017 if things proceed on schedule. Considering that a single satellite can require over ten kilograms of plutonium, that does not seem to be enough plutonium production to support the U.S. space program in the future.

           The production of isotopes for industrials purposes is critical for the technologies of the twenty-first century. The United States is falling behind in the production of isotopes and really needs to focus money and resources on developing internal isotope production. If this is not done soon, then the U.S. will be at the mercy of other producers who will be able to charge whatever the market will bear. The U.S. will have to buy foreign produced isotopes or do without them.

Water 6,700 times more radioactive than the legal limit spills from Fukushima water tank. worldnews.nbcnews.com

Steam has been observed on 5 of previous 6 days at Fukushima Unit 3 reactor site. enenews.com

The government shutdown prompted this week by the failure of Congress to pass a fiscal year 2014 budget has kept employees home across the federal workforce, although the people charged with ensuring the safety of America’s nuclear stockpile and civilian reactors will remain on duty. nuclearstreet.com

Bangladesh has formally begun work on its first nuclear power plant. nuclearstreet.com

Ambient office = .108 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .117 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = .110 microsieverts per hour

Iceberg lettuce from Top Foods =  .097 microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .099 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .085 microsieverts per hour

          Yesterday, I posted an entry about costing electricity generated by nuclear reactors in the United States. In the entry, I mentioned that the U.S. and Russia had an agreement to decommission old Soviet nuclear warhead. Today I am going to drill down into the subject of the Russian source of U.S. nuclear fuel.

           In 1993, the U.S. and Russia signed the HEU-LEU agreement which is also known as the Megatons to Megawatts Program. HEU stands for highly enriched uranium which is used to create nuclear warheads. It consists of uranium in which the natural one percent level of U-235 has been raised ninety percent. LEU is low enriched uranium which is suitable for fuel in nuclear reactors. The natural one percent level of U-235 has been raised to four percent. The agreement meant that five hundred tons of HEU from twenty thousand nuclear warheads would be downblended with natural uranium to make LEU for nuclear fuel. The HEU-LEU agreement ended in 2013.  

           The nuclear fuel from Soviet nuclear weapons over the past twenty years has supplied about forty percent of the fuel for the one hundred and four U.S. nuclear reactors. That represents about eight percent of the electricity generated during that time in the U.S. The Russians supplied HEU was made into U.S. nuclear  fuel below the open international market price for uranium. The U.S. also began converting one hundred seventy five tons of its stockpile of HEU from warheads into nuclear fuel in 1996.  

           The Russians made almost nine billion dollars on the sales of the HEU they inherited from the Soviet Union. The Russians made good use of that money by investing in nuclear research and infrastructure focused on new uranium enrichment technology and nuclear fuel manufacture. Today, the Russians have four advanced gaseous centrifuge enrichment facilities in Siberia and the Ural mountains. This represents about forty percent of the uranium enrichment facilities in the world. The U.S. is the biggest consumer of nuclear fuel in the world.

           The Soviet Union ended HEU production in 1996 when it had accumulated forty four thousand nuclear warheads. The U.S. stopped producing HEU for warheads in 1964 when our stockpiles reached thirty thousand warheads. The U.S. did continue to produce some HEU for submarine nuclear reactors but that ended in 1992. The U.K. and France stopped HEU production in the 1990s. India and Pakistan are still producing HEU for their arsenals. The estimated total world production of HEU since the nuclear age began is about two thousand tons. It at least a third of it has been recycled into nuclear fuel so far. The nuclear armed nations are not going to recycle all their HEU into fuel so there is a limit to how much fuel can be obtained by downblending.

          The United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC) which contracts with the Russian company TENEX for nuclear fuel has just signed a new contract for LEU which will start being delivered in 2013. However, this LEU is from the Russian enrichment facilities and will cost considerably more than the fuel made from Soviet HEU. This price increase will have an impact on commercial nuclear power prices in the United States. The USEC has been working on their own enrichment facilities but their equipment is not as advanced as the Russian equipment and, despite huge investments, the USEC facility is behind schedule and racked with problems.

United States Enrichment Corporation logo:

Over 3,000 people mostly of age under 30 are suffering from recurring massive nose bleeding in Japan. facebook.com

Every bluefin tuna tested in the waters off California has shown to be contaminated with radiation that originated in Fukushima. samuel-warde.com

Westinghouse announced a multimillion-dollar contract with Spanish regulators Tuesday to help build an interim storage site for spent fuel and other nuclear waste. nuclearstreet.com

Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu accuses Iran’s new president of nuclear deceit. latimes.com

Ambient office = .106 microsieverts per hour

Ambient outside = .081 microsieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = .083 microsieverts per hour

Hass avacado from Top Foods =  .096 microsieverts per hour

Tap water = .081 microsieverts per hour

Filtered water = .069 microsieverts per hour