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.
The Sequoyah Nuclear Plant is located just north of Chattanooga, Tennessee on the shore of Chickamauga Lake on the Tennessee River. The facility is owned and operated by the Tennessee Valley Authority. The plant has two one thousand one hundred and thirty megawatt Westinghouse pressurized water reactors with Unit One going into operation in 1981 and Unit Two going into operation in 1982. Both units were licensed for forty years.
The population in the NRC plume exposure pathway zone with a radius of ten miles around the plant contains about one hundred thousand people. The NRC ingestion pathway zone with a radius of fifty miles around the plant contains about one million people. The NRC estimates that there is a high risk of an earthquake that could damage the plant.
In 1981, one of the plant’s reactors had to be shut down because of a leak of radioactive water. In 1984, radioactive coolant water spilled at the plant due to a technical failure. In 1985, after a contractor could not confirm that the plant safety equipment met NRC standards, both reactors were shut down by the operators. After the TVA submitted a restart plan, the NRC questioned why the plan did not address the design problems that had caused shutdowns of reactors and delays in construction at other TVA nuclear plants. There were also issues about the TVA nuclear management staff. As work on the problems proceeded, other problems were found that had to be addressed. By 1987, The NRC was concerned that the work that had been done had not really addressed all the problems that had been identified and sent in a team to inspect the work. Multiple problems were identified in one of the systems under question. In late November of 1987, The NRC told the TVA that it did not have confidence in all the silicon rubber insulation in the electrical cables at the plant. The TVA replaced all of the insulation. Finally in late 1988, Sequoyah Unit 1 and Unit 2 were restarted. It took over three years for the TVA to deal with all the issues raised by the NRC.
In 1993, a pipe broke in Unit Two and it was shut down. Inspections of similar pipes found that five out of eight locations also had cracks like the broken pipe. Unit One was shut down as a precaution. Repairs were made to the pipes but other problems were found as work proceeded. Unit Two was restarted in late 1993 and Unit One was restarted in early 1994. Unit Two was out of service for seven months and Unit One was out of service for thirteen months. While the primary reason for the shutdown and repair work had to do with the pipes problem, other problems that required work were left over from the time of the major shut down five years before.
The NRC worked hard to deal with the issues at Sequoyah but had to deal with managers at the plants who would have restarted those reactors without addressing a lot of serious problems if they had been allowed to. There were design problem, equipment failures, cracks in piping, substandard insulation used for electrical cables and a host of other problems. Although there were some management changes after the major outage in the 80s, it is still possible that some of the same attitudes toward maintenance and repairs prevail at that plant today. What is especially troubling about this story is that the TVA is a corporation that is owned by the United States Government and there was a big lack of cooperation between this corporation and the NRC, another branch of our national government.
Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on March 21, 2013
Ambient office = .076 microsieverts per hour
Ambient outside = .081 microsieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain = .084 microsieverts per hour
Carrot from grocery store = .075 microsieverts per hour
Tap water = .105 microsieverts per hour
Filtered water = .088 microsieverts per hour
The Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station is located in Tonopah, Arizona about forty five miles west of Phoenix. It is the largest nuclear generating facility in the United States and the only one that is not located next to a large above ground body of water. Treated sewage water from nearby metropolitan areas is use to cool the reactors. The plant contains three one thousand two hundred and seven megawatt Combustion Engineering pressurized water reactors, with Unit 1 going into operation in 1985, Unit two in 1986 and Unit Three in 1987. The reactors were licensed for forty years of operation. A group of utilities in the southwest owns the plant. It was built by the Arizona Nuclear Power Project and it is operated by Arizona Public Service. In 2007, the NRC extended the licenses of all three reactors for another twenty years.
The population in the NRC plume exposure pathway zone with a radius of ten miles around the plant contains about four thousand people. The NRC ingestion pathway zone with a radius of fifty miles around the plant contains about two million people. The NRC estimates that there is a high risk of an earthquake that could damage the plant.
In 1986, the power lines leading to the Palo Verde site were sabotaged by unknown parties. In 1989, Unit One automatically shut down just before a scheduled refueling outage. Unit Three had also shut down automatically just days before. Operators found problems with the atmospheric dump valves. The NRC discovered that the operators had been ignoring problems that they knew about which led to the automatic shutdown of Unit Three. The NRC put nine out of ten training programs on probation because they were inadequate. The shutdown of the two reactors lasted much longer than anticipated while problems were corrected. There was a fire in the main transformer for Unit Three when the operators tried to restart it.
In 1993, hundreds of gallons of contaminated water gushed from a leaking steam generator at the plant. In 2001, a reactor had to be shut down because valve failures caused leaks of radioactive cooling water from the fuel cooling pool into the reactor containment building. In 2004, a “dry pipe” was found in the emergency core cooling system at the plant. In 2006, the NRC found that the electrical relays in a diesel generator didn’t function during test and, in 2007, they placed Palo Verde in Category 4 which meant that it was now one of the most closely watch nuclear power plants in the United States because of the problems listed above and other problems and safety violations. The plant was taken off the Category 4 the list in 2009 because, according to the NRC, the operators had made progress in correcting the problems at the plant.
At Palo Verde, there were design problems, maintenance problems, non-functional equipment in critical systems, poor training and management that deliberately ignored problems until they because serious enough to shut down reactors. Let us hope that the NRC is right about improvements in equipment and management at Palo Verde.
Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on March 20, 2013
Ambient office = .139 microsieverts per hour
Ambient outside = .103 microsieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain = .089 microsieverts per hour
Shredded coconut from grocery store = .054 microsieverts per hour
Tap water = .068 microsieverts per hour
Filtered water = .080 microsieverts per hour
The Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generation Plant is located near Waynesboro, Georgia on the Savannah River. The plant has two one thousand two hundred megawatt Westinghouse pressurized water reactors. Unit 1 was completed in 1987 and Unit Two was completed in 1989. Both reactors were licensed for forty years. Forty six percent of Vogtle is owned by Georgia Power, thirty percent by Oglethorpe Power Corporation, and twenty three percent is owned by the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia. Southern Nuclear built the plant and operates it. During construction, the cost of the plant jumped from six hundred sixty million dollars to almost nine billion dollars. In 2009, Unit 1 was relicensed until 2047 and Unit Two was relicensed until 2049.
The population in the NRC plume exposure pathway zone with a radius of ten miles around the plant contains about six thousand people. The NRC ingestion pathway zone with a radius of fifty miles around the plant contains about seven hundred and twenty seven thousand people. The NRC estimates that there is a extremely low risk of an earthquake that could damage the plant. The plant is vulnerable to hurricanes coming in from the Atlantic Ocean.
In 1990, a truck backed into a column supporting the lines that supplied power to a reserve transformer for Unit One. Planned maintenance which had removed some backup systems from service and equipment failure which prevented other backup systems from functioning were part of a complicated chain reaction which cut the power to the residual heat removal pump which was cooling Unit One. Unit One was offline at the time for refueling. A Site Area Emergency (SAE) which was mandatory in such circumstances was declared. After aboOne rose from ninety degrees to one hundred thirty six degrees, an emergency generator which bypassed the backup systems was brought online manually and the SAE was cancelled. Non-vital power was available at all times but poor design prevented the easy transfer of power to vital systems. This problem has since been remedied with design changes.
In 2006, Southern Nuclear applied for a permit to build two new reactors at the Vogtle site. A contract was signed for the construction of the new reactors in 2008, the first such contract since the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979. In 2009, the NRC issued an Early Site Permit and a Limited Construction Permit. In 2010, President Obama announced that the U.S. Government would provide loan guarantees for about eight billion dollars for the project. The cost of construction of the two reactors is estimated to be around fourteen billion dollars. The NRC issued full approval of construction of the two reactors in 2012. A group of environmental groups filed a lawsuit to halt construction of the plant which was rejected by the Washington D.C. Appeals Court. Construction began in 2013 with the new Unit Three expected to start operations in 2016 and the new Unit Four to start operating in 2017.
Hopefully, the design problems and failing equipment will be absent from the new reactors. Unfortunately, the rising costs are not. The new reactors are already billions of dollars over their original estimated cost and cost overruns will probably continue. Money has been collected up front from current customers which will not be recoverable even if the reactors are never completed. And, if the reactors are completed, they may not be able to compete in the future energy market. A bill in the Georgia legislature that would limit company profits in cases of huge cost overruns has been killed in subcommittee.
Geiger Counter Readings in Seattle, WA on March 19, 2013
Ambient office = .094 microsieverts per hour
Ambient outside = .069 microsieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain = .046 microsieverts per hour
Shredded coconut from grocery store = .081 microsieverts per hour
Tap water = .071 microsieverts per hour
Filtered water = .059 microsieverts per hour
