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.
Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on April 22, 2013
Ambient office = .050 microsieverts per hour
Ambient outside = .077 microsieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = .098 microsieverts per hour
Opal apple from local grocery store = .079 microsieverts per hour
Tap water = .087 microsieverts per hour
Filtered water = .070 microsieverts per hour
Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on April 21, 2013
Ambient office = .067 microsieverts per hour
Ambient outside = .097 microsieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = .110 microsieverts per hour
Redleaf lettuce from local grocery store = .117 microsieverts per hour
Tap water = .109 microsieverts per hour
Filtered water = .088 microsieverts per hour
I have posted a lot of articles about threats to nuclear reactors. Aside from problems originating within a power plant like fires, explosions and meltdowns, I have talked about hurricanes, floods, earthquakes and other external threats. But it turns out that there are threats to our nuclear reactors that are literally out of this world.
We generally think of our sun as a stable source of life-giving energy. That is generally true but there are cycles of solar storms called sunspots that peak about every eleven years. If these storms are particularly intense, the wind of solar plasma that hits the radiation belts around the earth can cause problems for satellites and terrestrial electrical system.
In 1859 there was a severe solar storm called the Carrington Event that caused a huge coronal mass ejection (CMR). In about seventeen hours, the solar plasma hit the Earth and caused the biggest geomagnetic storm ever recorded. Auroras, commonly known as the Northern Lights, could be seen as far south as the Caribbean on the night of September 1. People in the Northeastern United States could read newspapers by the light of the auroras. Induced current caused telegraph systems all over the United States and Europe to fail. Some of the systems did continue to transmit messages even though they had been disconnected from their power supplies.
Analysis of ice cores from Greenland indicates that Carrington size CMEs occur between every one hundred and fifty years and every five hundred years on average. Events that are about one fifth the size of the Carrington Event happen several times a century. Powerful solar storms happened in 1921 and 1960, causing widespread problems in electrical systems and disrupting radio broadcasts. In 1989, a big solar storm caused a power failure over a large part of Quebec, Canada.
We are living in an electrical house of cards. It has been estimated that if we had a Carrington Event now, it would cause such massive damage to our electrical infrastructure that it would result in the end of our civilization. All electrical generation, transmission and utilization would be damaged beyond repair. All electrical communication systems would be gone. Gasoline to run vehicles is pumped with electrical pumps so combustion engines would soon be inoperable. Since we had a Carrington Event about a hundred and fifty years ago, we could have another one at any time. In addition, more frequent but less severe solar storms can still wreck havoc on our infrastructure including nuclear power plants. The problem at Fukushima was that they could not cool the fuel rods because external electrical power was cut off. This could easily happen to many reactors in the United States in the event of a serious solar storm.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission is taking this threat seriously. They are currently coordinating with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to understand the problem. They have concluded that the possibility of a severe solar storm is serious enough that they need to consider some sort of regulatory action for the U.S. nuclear reactors. Emergency planning and response capability in such circumstances need to be explored. A number of studies have concluded that the possibility of major solar flares taking down the U.S. power grid for months or even years would result in multiple meltdowns of U.S. reactors. It appears the threat to nuclear reactors from solar storms is more serious than even the threat of earthquakes and tsunamis. It is a good thing that the NRC is working on preparations for such solar events.
Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on April 20, 2013
Ambient office = .090 microsieverts per hour
Ambient outside = .099 microsieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain = .102 microsieverts per hour
Zante currants from local grocery store = .047 microsieverts per hour
Tap water = .110 microsieverts per hour
Filtered water = .087 microsieverts per hour
There is a lot of nuclear waste around the world that was just dumped and forgotten. Some of it is buried and some is in bodies of water. Sometimes there is an incident such as the cancer cluster in the United States in an area when nuclear work was done during the Cold War and then shut down and forgotten. Sometimes people find old records that point to a forgotten dump. And on other occasions, someone stumbles across the old dump.
Between 1950 and 1963, over twenty eight thousand fifty-five gallon steel drums containing radioactive waste were dumped into the English Channel by the British and the Belgians. The drums contained an estimated seventeen metric tons of waste. They were dumped into an underwater valley known as Hurd’s Deep, north of the island of Alderney. The British barrels were estimated to contain as much as fifty eight trillion Becquerels of radioactivity. The European has a safe limit for drinking water of ten Becquerels per liter.
The reasoning was that, of course, the steel would rust and the containers would open. This would release the waste which would then be mixed and diluted by the seawater so that it would no longer be dangerous. The natural world’s ability to deal with toxic human waste has been overestimated many times and this case is one of them.
German journalists have located and photographed intact barrels of radioactive waste, dating from the dumping in the Fifties and early Sixties. Over fifty years have passed since these barrels were dumped and the predicted rusting away has not occurred. The German journalists believe that there may be many more intact barrels in Hurd’s Deep. Environmental activists in Germany’s Green Party demands that the barrels be removed from the channel and disposed of properly. The German government has responded to past complaints about ocean dumping by stating that their monitoring of the Channel has indicated no significant radioactivity over the dumping area.
Ocean dumping of nuclear wastes has been banned by international treaty for twenty years. The record of the creation of safe permanent underground repositories for nuclear waste has been rather poor. The United States estimates that it will be at least 2048 before there is a permanent U.S. repository for nuclear waste. In the meantime the waste is piling up in the fleet of U.S. reactors. Now we find that some older attempts to dump radioactive waste in a safe way have failed. My fear is that more and more areas of land and water will become radioactive contamination zones, unsafe for human activities. These zone will not be cleaned up because there will be no government or private funds available for such work.
English Channel – red dot is area when barrels were found:
Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on April 19, 2013
Ambient office = .070 microsieverts per hour
Ambient outside = .085 microsieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain = .126 microsieverts per hour
Asparagus from local grocery store = .067 microsieverts per hour
Tap water = .077 microsieverts per hour
Filtered water = .061 microsieverts per hour
