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 = .042 microsieverts per hour
Ambient outside = .056 microsieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = .071 microsieverts per hour
Romaine lettuce from Costco = .043 microsieverts per hour
Tap water = .082 microsieverts per hour
Filtered water = .073 microsieverts per hour
In the event of a major nuclear accident at a nuclear power plant in the United States, the 1957 Price-Anderson Act limits the liability of the owners of the power plant where the accident occurred. Owners of nuclear power plants pay in to a Federal fund that is currently around twelve billion dollars. After an accident, damages will be paid to the public out of the fund for such things as injury, lost wages, hotel rooms required by evacuation, property replacement, etc.
The question of what Federal agencies would respond and who would pay for cleaning up the environmental damage left by a major nuclear accident is not clear. In 2009, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission told the Homeland Security Department and the Environmental Protection Agency that money collected under the Price-Anderson Act would probably not be available for environmental remediation in the area around a nuclear power plant where an accident happened. A year later, a Freedom of Information act was filed with the EPA and the NRC statement became public knowledge.
Last year, a NRC commissioner said that “[t]here is no regulatory framework for environmental restoration following a major radiological release.” in a presentation to the Health Physics Society. She also raised the question of what should be considered as “clean.” Some have called for the use of the Superfund standard for cleaning up radioactive contamination. That standard says that radiation must be reduced to the point where there will be less than one new case of cancer per ten thousand people using the area. She said that the NRC did not support the Superfund standard. Recent statements by the EPA suggest that they think that the Superfund standard may be too strict and not practical in the case of a major nuclear incident. If only radioactive materials were released into the environment, then the EPA Superfund law which enables the EPA to sue polluting companies would not apply.
On September 13, 2013, the New York Attorney General sent a letter to the NRC requesting more information on who would be responsible for cleaning up the environmental destruction caused by a nuclear accident at one of the three Indian Point Energy Center reactors. The AC requested that the question be resolved definitively before the Indian Point nuclear power plant was relicensed. The AG said that it is “not clear that NRC has the desire, capability, or financial resources to respond to a severe accident at Indian Point and ensure the thorough decontamination of the New York metropolitan area including, but not limited to, its water sources — and drinking water sources — in the wake of such an accident.” The AG demanded that the NRC identify exactly which Federal agencies would respond to clean up an accident at the Indian Point plant and also make an explicit statement about whether or not the Price-Anderson funds could be tapped for environmental in the event of a nuclear accident. In the letter, it was pointed out that the area around the Indian Point plant is heavily populated, contains critical infrastructure and resources, and contains some of the most expensive real estate in the country. Based on these facts, it was predicted that the cost of clean up around the Indian Point Energy Center might be more expensive that a clean up around any other nuclear reactor in the country. In any case, we do need a straight answer about who cleans up and who pays for an environmental disaster caused by a nuclear accident.
Indian Point Energy Center:
Ambient office = .054 microsieverts per hour
Ambient outside = .058 microsieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = .074 microsieverts per hour
Mango from Costco = .079 microsieverts per hour
Tap water = .122 microsieverts per hour
Filtered water = .111 microsieverts per hour
Most of my blog posts are about nuclear power generation. I did do a series on nuclear weapons but it has not been my focus. The world is trying to get rid of nuclear weapons and a lot of people are working on it. I think most people would agree that a nuclear war would be a bad thing. On the issue of nuclear power, unfortunately, a lot of people still think it is a good energy source and a lot of money is being spent to promote it. In any case, I thought that I would post an article today about a near disaster involving nuclear weapons inside the United States back in the 1960s.
On January 26, 1961 a B-52 bomber broke up in mid-air while flying over Goldsboro, North Carolina. On board the bomber were two four megaton Mark 39 hydrogen bombs. The bombs fell from the wreckage of the plane. The U.S. government said that there was no danger of detonation and no threat to public safety. In the decades since, there has been speculation that the government was being less than honest about the danger.
One of the bombs functioned as it was designed to do when dropped on a target. Its parachute opened, the trigger mechanisms engaged. Three of four safety systems in the bomb failed to operate as intended. When the bomb hit the ground, a signal was sent to the core of the bomb to detonate. The only reason that the bomb did not explode was the fourth safety feature, a single low voltage switch that did not trip. If the four megaton bomb had detonated, the resulting explosion would have completely obliterated Goldsboro. There would have been lethal fallout over Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and as far north as New York city, threatening millions of lives.
An engineer detailed what happened in a report written eight years after the accident. He concluded that that the safety systems on U.S. hydrogen bombs were inadequate and needed to be improved. He said that the final switch could have been shorted out by an electric surge and the bomb could easily have detonated. The report was classified and never made public before last Friday.
As part of his research for a book titled “Command and Control”, Eric Schlosser filed a Freedom of Information request with the U.S. government and found the report written eight years after the Goldsboro incident. The Guardian, a British newspaper, published an article about the North Carolina accident on Friday, October 13, 2013..
A little over fifty years ago, the U.S. came perilously close to a major nuclear catastrophe on the East Coast. The effect on people, property and the U.S. economy would have been devastating. While I understand the motivation the U.S. government had for keeping critical information from the U.S. public, I can’t help but think that if people had known how close we came to nuking an American city in 1961, the entire Cold War era and nuclear arms race might have turned out very differently.
Ambient office = .085 microsieverts per hour
Ambient outside = .081 microsieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = .088 microsieverts per hour
Iceberg from Costco = .090 microsieverts per hour
Tap water = .108 microsieverts per hour
Filtered water = .116 microsieverts per hour
So far I have discussed two major players in the Chinese nuclear industry, the China National Nuclear Corporation which is a conglomerate of over two hundred subsidiaries that cover all aspects of nuclear research and manufacture and the China Guangdong Nuclear Power Group which is building and operating nuclear reactors in southern China. I briefly mentioned the State Nuclear Power Technology Corporation (SNPTC) which was formed in 1994 to involve foreign companies and technology in the development of a Chinese nuclear reactor design.
The AP1000 is a new Westinghouse two loop pressurized water reactor design that is considered to be an advanced Generation III design. The design received final certification from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2005. It has fewer parts and uses less concrete than earlier reactor designs. It also has special valves that will trigger in case of an accident even if the reactor operators do nothing which makes it a much safer design.
In 2006, the Chinese certified the new AP1000 design for construction in China and ordered four of the new reactors. The SNPTC was the general contractor for the project scheduled to beginning in 2008. The plan was for Westinghouse to provide the core technology and for China to provide the support work. Next, China would build more of the new design with China handling the core design and foreign companies providing the support work. Finally, China would build a wholly Chinese design with Chinese core technology and Chinese support work. This new design was dubbed the CAP1400.
Aided by their work with the Westinghouse AP1000 design, the SNPTC was instrumental in the development of the CAP1000, a Chinese version of the AP1000. the In 2008, the SNPTC, the Shanghai Nuclear Engineering Research & Design Institute (SNERDI) and Westinghouse began work on designing the CAP1400, a new version of the CAP1000 which would generate fourteen hundred megawatts. Westinghouse is also providing assistance to China in developing uranium fuel fabrication facilities and zirconium cladding production. China intends to develop their own uranium mines to provide uranium for nuclear fuel for their reactors.
The Chinese wanted to design and build their own reactors so that the cost per reactor could be lowered by up to fifty percent. In addition, when they built the CAP1400, they would have intellectual property rights and be able to sell the new reactors to other countries.
Following the disaster at Fukushima in 2011, the head of SNPTC said that an inspection of the fourteen operating nuclear power plants in China revealed fourteen problems that need to be rectified to insure safe operation. Some of them have been dealt with and others are still being worked on.
In 2013, the SNPTC signed a joint agreement with the Westinghouse Corporation to act as a qualifier for AP1000 equipment suppliers to the global nuclear power market. This is a welcome development for the global nuclear market place which needs reliable suppliers for nuclear technology.
My concern for the SNPTC is the same concern I have expressed before with respect to Chinese nuclear institutions. I fear that incompetence and corruption are a realistic threat to Chinese nuclear ambitions. In addition, the fact that not only are they going to be exporting reactors to other countries, the SNPTC is going to be certifying nuclear technology suppliers. That looks like a serious conflict of interest to me. Will the SNPTC be honest and fair about Chinese nuclear suppliers when comparing them to other suppliers in the marketplace?
State Nuclear Power Technology Corporation logo:
Ambient office = .075 microsieverts per hour
Ambient outside = .099 microsieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = .058 microsieverts per hour
Hass avacado from Costco = .096 microsieverts per hour
Tap water = .070 microsieverts per hour
Filtered water = .063 microsieverts per hour
