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 12, 2013
Ambient office = .085 microsieverts per hour
Ambient outside = .074 microsieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain = .078 microsieverts per hour
Hass avacado from local grocery store = .062 microsieverts per hour
Tap water = .061 microsieverts per hour
Filtered water = .044 microsieverts per hour
The Constitution says that the Federal Government is charged with the task of taking care of the public welfare. Top on the list of definitions for welfare is health. The EPA is the division of the U.S. Government that is supposed to be watching out the environment for possible threats to human health. As such, the issue of radioactive contamination from a nuclear accident or deliberate incident is definitely within their purview.
Toward the end of the Bush administration, the EPA was talking about new guidelines about the release of radioactivity into the environment with respect to what levels of radiation should trigger what levels of response on the part of authorities. When the Obama Administration took over, they held up the release of the new guidelines. Part of the reason for the delay was that nuclear activists had raised serious concerns that the new guidelines would raise thresholds for acceptable amounts of radiation in the environment.
After several more years of controversy, the EPA recently released draft proposals of new turned out to be valid. The new guidelines do not explicitly spell out radiation levels but instead refer to numbers from other agencies and institutions which say that much high levels of radiation should not merit a strong response.
One of the main problems is that the EPA had previously recommended that water that contained a certain level of radioactivity should not be consumed without being decontaminated. The new guidelines make reference to recommendations that if decontamination is not practical it would be alright to consume water with thousands of times the radioactive contamination of the previous EPA limits.
Another problem with the new guidelines proposal has to do with environmental remediation to restore the natural environment after contamination with radioactive materials. The new guidelines suggest that it is not necessary to restore a contaminated landscape to the point where it would not violate the previous guidelines for declaring a site to be contaminated. In other words, some remaining contamination could be ignored. Homeland Security suggests that a possible future cancer rate of one person in twenty would be acceptable. The old EPA guidelines set the limit of a possible future cancer rate of one in ten thousand people.
The new guidelines proposal also says that it might be OK to dump nuclear waste into ordinary landfills if there are not other repositories available. This could result in widespread contamination of ground and surface water. The other option would be to burn it in incinerators which would contaminate the air that we breath. A great fear of nuclear activists is that the guidelines are too broad. There might be a nuclear explosion which would disperse so much radioactive material that no thorough cleanup would be possible. On the other hand, the activists are afraid that adoption of the guidelines might make the relaxed standards acceptable for dealing with more ordinary and manageable levels of radioactive contamination and waste.
The EPA claims that they are not relaxing their current standards for dealing with environmental radioactive contamination. They say that the new guideline proposal is an attempt to develop a broader range of option to help deal with major radioactive catastrophes. I agree with the activists that the new guidelines are too broad and vague in drawing important distinctions in how to deal with different levels of radioactive contamination.
Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on April 11, 2013
Ambient office = .070 microsieverts per hour
Ambient outside = .059 microsieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain = .068 microsieverts per hour
Bartlett pear from local grocery store = .083 microsieverts per hour
Tap water = .134 microsieverts per hour
Filtered water = .117 microsieverts per hour
Back around 1980, I volunteered to review a U.S. Government plan from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to evacuate Seattle to east of the Cascades in case of the threat of nuclear war. I had been attending meetings with the Physicians for Social Responsibility and they needed someone with a technical background to evaluate the plan.
The plan contained instructions for moving the majority of the population of Seattle over the mountains to eastern Washington to be housed in schools and other public buildings. One of the problems with evacuating Seattle is the fact that the city is surrounded by mountains and bodies of water with only a few major highways.
I wasn’t sure exactly how to approach an evaluation until I came upon an analysis of a plan to evacuate Denver, Colorado. Denver has some of the same issues that Seattle has with respect to landscapes and limited highways. The evaluation was very thorough and took into account the fact that state transportation departments have very reliable calculation for estimating the number of lane blocking incidents in a given period of time based on the number of vehicles on the road in that period. A nuclear evacuation would yield much worse numbers than usual because of panicked drivers, people fleeing with low gas, etc. The Denver study concluded that within twelve hours of a call for evacuation EVERY major freeway out of Denver would be blocked and impassable. The original Denver plan called for a three day evacuation. The evaluation said that authorities would be lucky to evacuate the city in three weeks given what would certainly happen on the roads.
Comparing the Seattle evacuation plan with the Denver plan, it was clear that the same sort of traffic jams would occur and that the Seattle plan to evacuate in three days was just plain unrealistic. I reported this back to the group that asked me to make the evaluation. In July 1982, Seattle Mayor Charles Royer withdrew Seattle from planning for nuclear war evacuation. He called the FEMA plans to evacuate the population of Seattle to east of the Cascades in the event of a nuclear attack “virtually useless” and stated that Seattle should not “lend credence to the dangerous idea that a nuclear war is a manageable emergency.” FEMA threatened to withdraw some Federal funding that was supposed to be provided to Seattle if Seattle withdrew, but Seattle pulled out anyway.
The Federal Government has been engaged in a controversial debate over a revision of the “Protective Action Guide,” an EPA document that was written to provide guidelines on what levels of radiation should trigger protective measures such as evacuations. Activists are claiming that the proposed manual references other agencies numbers which are thousands of time higher than previous EPA guidelines. I will be writing a post about the new EPA manual in the near future but, for the time being, I just want to point out that I hope that if a nuclear evacuation anywhere in the U.S. is ever triggered, the plan is much better than the plan that FEMA came up with for Seattle in 1980.
Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on April 10, 2013
Ambient office = .116 microsieverts per hour
Ambient outside = .109 microsieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain = .107 microsieverts per hour
Bartlett pear from local grocery store = .117 microsieverts per hour
Tap water = .088 microsieverts per hour
Filtered water = .070 microsieverts per hour
Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on April 10, 2013
Ambient office = .116 microsieverts per hour
Ambient outside = .109 microsieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain = .107 microsieverts per hour
Bartlett pear from local grocery store = .117 microsieverts per hour
Tap water = .088 microsieverts per hour
Filtered water = .070 microsieverts per hour
I have leveled complaints against the U.S. nuclear regulatory process in many previous blog posts. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has the contradictory mandate to promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy in the U.S. and also to regulate the nuclear industry in the U.S. These goals are bound to fall into conflict. There have been numerous charges that the NRC has been too lenient with violation of regulations. It has been said that the industry that the NRC is supposed to regulate has too much influence over it, a situation known as “regulatory capture.” One subject that I have not covered has been direct attempts by members of the U.S. Government to interfere with the proper function of the NRC.
In May of 2012, the chairman of the NRC, Gregory Jaczko, announced that he was stepping down. His resignation was seen as a victory by the pro-nuclear lobby in Congress and on the Commission. They had been fighting for years to get Jaczko to quit as Chairman. The U.S. Senate Majority Leader called a Democrat who led the campaign to oust Jaczko a “treacherous, miserable liar!”
A few weeks after his announcement, Jaczko visited the Palisades Power Plant on Lake Michigan. During the visit, there was a significant leak of potentially radioactive water into the control room at the plant but no mention of the leak was made to the visiting Jaczko. Two weeks after the visit, the plant was shut down so that the leak could be repaired. When Jaczko found out that the leak was occurring while he visited the plant, he asked the NRC Office of Investigation to find out why no one mentioned the leak during his visit.
NRC Commissioner William Ostendorff was opposed to the investigation. Witnesses state that Ostendorff shouted at the top NRC investigator, Cheryl McCrary, that any such investigation would be a waste of agency resources and that it should be stopped. The incident was reported to the NRC Office of the Inspector General by a witness to the exchange. This internal struggle between members of the U.S. Government who favor industry deregulation and those who believe that the nuclear industry need more scrutiny is a reflection of a more general debate on the proper role of government oversight of corporations.
I have a blog post that dealt with some of the problems at the Palisades plant. Activists have been calling for the plant to be closed as a danger to public safety. The Palisades plant has a defender in the U.S. Congress in the person of a Michigan Republican Representative named Fred Upton who is the Chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee in the House of Representatives. Upton is called the number one cheerleader for the nuclear power industry. His claim that the waste piling up on the shore of Lake Michigan at the Palisades plant is stable and safe is simply not true.
The situation at the Palisades plant is a microcosm of the U.S. nuclear power situation. On one side, you have activists who are rightly worried about the aging fleet of U.S. reactors and all the nuclear waste that is piling up. On the other side, you have industry boosters backed by billions of dollars who assure everyone that nuclear energy is safe and great for fighting climate change. This is a good debate to have and everyone should have their opinion heard. However, there are forces at work inside the U.S. Government who are trying to subvert the democratic process and cover up serious problems at U.S. nuclear power plants.
