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.
Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on May 03, 2013
Ambient office = .092 microsieverts per hour
Ambient outside = .091 microsieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = .101 microsieverts per hour
Dried almonds from Costco = .120 microsieverts per hour
Tap water = .102 microsieverts per hour
Filtered water = .093 microsieverts per hour
I have talked about temporary storage of spent fuel rods in dry casks of steel and concrete in previous posts. It is estimated that all the spent fuel pools at all the U.S. reactors will be full in five years unless another storage/disposal method is found. The U.S. DOE now says that it will take at least thirty years to site and build a permanent geological repository for spent fuel. So it is obvious that dry casks are going to be very important for the nuclear industry in the short term.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensed the first dry cask storage facility in the United States in 1986 at the Surry Nuclear Power Plant in Virginia. During the 1990s, the NRC had to deal with numerous problems in dry cask construction including defective welds that caused cracks. In some of the casks, helium had leaked out of the fuel rods and into the outer shell of the cask. This increased temperatures and speeded up corrosion in the casks. In 2008, the NRC issued new guidelines that required spent fuel rods to be stored in a spent fuel pool to cool off for at least five years before being placed in dry casks.
Although the nuclear industry has doubled the potency of fuel rods since 1970, the design of dry casks has not kept pace with the increasing potency. There have been warnings about the increasing radioactivity of what are referred to as high-burn up fuel rods for years. Recently, Argonne National Laboratory has been pointing out that they have research that indicates that the new fuel rods may become brittle over time while they are stored in the casks. Since the casks are intended to be a temporary storage option until a permanent geological repository can be built, the rods would have to be removed from the casks at some future time for transportation. If the rods are brittle, they might disintegrate when removed from the casks increasing the risk of radioactive material entering the environment.
. Spurred by concern that no one knows exactly what is happening inside the dry casks that currently exist, the Department of Energy and the nuclear industry’s Energy Power Research Institute are launching a new project to deal with this problem. The project will develop new lids with built in instrumentation for new dry casks. Sixteen million dollars and four years have been allocated for the project. The new lids will take samples of gas for analysis and will monitor temperatures in the casks as well as other conditions. The new lid systems will have to be able to withstand high temperatures and high levels of radiation, have some way of removing energy from the casks, operate on battery power for over ten years and transmit information wireless to outside receivers. It is hoped that there will be a prototype of a new cask with the advanced lid available for tests by 2017.
Since the soonest that we will have permanent storage in the U.S. is thirty years out, it is very important that the spent fuel rods and the dry casks that they are stored in maintain their structural integrity for decades. It may be a little late but the new lid project is a welcome change.
Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on May 02, 2013
Ambient office = .064 microsieverts per hour
Ambient outside = .093 microsieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = .077 microsieverts per hour
Red onion from local grocery store = .124 microsieverts per hour
Tap water = .087 microsieverts per hour
Filtered water = .077 microsieverts per hour
South Africa, sitting at the southern tip of Africa, is very interesting from a geological perspective. It has an amazing abundance of valuable minerals and is a world leader in mining. Its reserves of manganese, platinum, gold, diamonds, chromium and vanadium are some of the largest in the entire world. There are also commercial deposits of coal, aluminum, and iron ore. And, relevant to this blog, they also have uranium mines. As well as the mining industry, secondary mineral processing industries are a large part of their economy.
South Africa began work on the development of nuclear weapons in 1969. This nuclear program and their practice of apartheid made South Africa an outcast among developed nations in the West, many of whom would not trade with S.A. Being surrounded by hostile neighbors, S.A. created an entire nuclear infrastructure with fuel processing and weapons development including missiles as well as warheads. They were aided in their nuclear development by Israel.
In 1975, S.A. drilled two test shafts in the Kalahari Desert to conduct underground nuclear tests. When the Soviet Union discovered the test preparations, they notified the U.S. Combined diplomatic pressure from the Soviets, the U.S. and France convinced S.A. to cancel the tests.
Over the next decade, international fears of nuclear proliferation in Africa increase pressure on S.A. to abandon its nuclear weapons program. In 1987, the president of S.A. said that S.A. might sign the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty if other states in Southern Africa would sign it. Intense diplomatic effort resulted in Tanzania and Zambia signing the NPT. S.A. signed the treaty in 1991.
Following the signing of the NPT, in 1991, S.A. also signed a Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency. These safeguard agreements were used to insure that the signatories were complying with the terms of the NPT and included giving the IAEA access to information and facilities in order to verify compliance. S.A. had dismantled all of its nuclear weapons and weapons production facilities before signing the NPT and the IAEA agreed that its inspections found no indication that S.A. had not ended its nuclear weapons program. South Africa is one of the few countries that has destroyed its nuclear weapons capacity.
The S.A. Atomic Energy Corporation redirected resources away from nuclear deterrence and into economic development of peaceful used for nuclear technology. In 1993, S.A. became a member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group. The NSG was created in 1975 to help control the international trade in nuclear technology and nuclear materials. In 1996, S.A. signed the Treaty of Pelindaba along with many other African nations to create nuclear free Africa. S.A. also became a signatory for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty in 1999.
The S.A. energy department is currently pushing a huge project to build a whole new fleet of nuclear reactors to supply energy to S.A. They claim that the window is closing and that a decision has to be made immediately to move forward in order to have needed reactors in place by 2023. The new national planning commission has just issued a report challenging the position of the energy department. The report says that an immediate decision is not critical. The report also says that building new nuclear reactors to supply electric power to S.A. might actually raise the cost of electricity over other alternative sources of power. Even if power demands are higher than projected and costs of nuclear construction are lower than projected, new reactors would not be needed until 2029 at the earliest. Other energy sources can easily allow S.A. to reduce carbon emissions at a lower cost and in a shorter time frame. Building a lot of new reactors may result in an enormous waste of money and excess generating capacity.
South Africa made a very wise decision to abandon nuclear weapons. Let us hope that they make an equally wise decision to abandon nuclear power.
Logo of the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation:
Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on May 01, 2013
Ambient office = .089 microsieverts per hour
Ambient outside = .125 microsieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = .079 microsieverts per hour
Sliced black olives from local grocery store = .078 microsieverts per hour
Tap water = .055 microsieverts per hour
Filtered water = .046 microsieverts per hour
Fracking has been in the news a lot lately. They drill down a couple of miles and then often drill horizontally for a distance. Water and a mix of proprietary chemicals are injected into the wells to “fracture” the rock strata and release trapped natural gas which is then pumped out of the well. There are many problems with this process. Some of the chemicals injected into the ground are toxic and even flammable. The chemicals contaminate the ground water in the area to the point where people are getting ill and tap water will burn like gasoline. There have been earthquakes in the areas where they are fracking and the fracking may be the cause. Water that is recovered from the wells has to be disposed of so it won’t contaminate surface water. This waste water has been injected back into the ground into caverns for disposal but a giant sinkhole opened up in Louisiana above on such cavern and people had to be evacuated from nearby homes.
The drilling process for fracking brings up mud and rock which has to be disposed of. Recently, at a Pennsylvania landfill, a truck carrying drill cuttings was rejected because the cuttings set of an alarm indicating radioactivity. The radiation was from radium-266 and was over eighty times the level that is acceptable at the landfill. The truck was sent back to the drill site to be redirected to a landfill that would accept higher levels of radioactivity.
Radium 226 is the result of the decay of naturally occurring uranium-238 in the soil and rock where the fracking drilling is taking place. It emits alpha and gamma radiation. It poses a serious threat to human health if inhaled or ingested. Radium 226 concentrates in bones and can cause cancer such as lymphoma, bone cancer, leukemia or anemia. Even outside of the human body, exposure to gamma radiation from radium-226 can increase the risk of cancers in all tissue and organs. However, these diseases can take years to develop so it is often difficult to prove the cause.
Aside from exposures from landfills, radium-226 is a threat to the public water supply. The water that comes out of the fracking wells may contain as much as sixteen thousand picoCuries of radioactivity per liter. The allowed level of radioactivity for waste water released into the environment is sixty picoCuries of radioactivity per liter. The EPA has a standard of five picoCuries per liter. That makes the fracking water three thousand times as radioactive as safe drinking water!
So far, Pennsylvania is the only state that requires landfills to monitor for radiation although fracking is taking place in at least thirty one states in the U.S. Only four of the thirty one fracking states have serious regulations for fracking operations. It is somewhat ironic that the cheap natural gas coming from fracking is reducing the demand on nuclear generation of electricity but carries its own radiation threats that will increase as fracking increases.
Fracking effluent pit – picture from peacecouncil.net
Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on Apri30, 2013
Ambient office = .079 microsieverts per hour
Ambient outside = .136 microsieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = .142 microsieverts per hour
Sliced black olives from local grocery store = .087 microsieverts per hour
Tap water = .059 microsieverts per hour
Filtered water = .044 microsieverts per hour
