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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.

Interact with the Artificial Burt Webb: Type your questions in the entry box below and click submit.

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.

Blog

  • Welcome to Nucleotidings

    Welcome to Nucleotidings. This is a blog about radiation. Radiation is a general term with different meanings. This is a blog about dangerous radiation in our environment. There are different types of dangerous radiation and there are multiple sources. I will be most concerned with radioactive emissions from man-made sources.

    The greatest current man-made source of radiation is from nuclear reactor accidents. The recent earthquake and tsunami in Japan that destroyed the reactors at Fukishima has released a great deal of radiation into the environment, some of which has made its way to the United States.

    Nucleotidings will contain a broad variety of articles dealing with various aspects of dangerous radiation including science, history, politics, economics, etc. There are two related blogs that I will also be producing. www.rad-links.com will contain links that deal with current news about dangerous radiation. www.geigerthis.com will contain daily radiation readings from my home in Seattle, Washington.

    My name is Burt Webb. I am a retired software engineer who now has time to write and publish novels, non-fiction books and blogs posts. Many years ago I was a founding member of the Evergreen Chapter of the World Future Society here in Seattle. One of the things that we spent a lot of time discussing was the benefits and dangers of technology. I was very concerned with environmental issues and looked into the pros and cons of different sources of energy.

    Nuclear power has been advertised as a safe, clean and inexpensive source of energy. Unfortunately, none of these qualities have proven to be true.  The disaster at Fukushima has illustrated how unsafe nuclear power can be. The enormous problem of how to dispose of accumulating radioactive waste belies of the claim of clean energy. And the rising cost of plant construction, clean up, uranium, etc. have shown us that it is not really inexpensive.

    Long ago during an argument about nuclear power, I said “I am sure that the engineers could design a safe, clean and cheap nuclear power plant. The problem is that we would have to be able to trust government and industry to be 10 times as honest and capable as they have ever proven to be in the past.” Nothing that has happened since that conversation has convinced me that I was wrong. Government has been woefully incompetent at monitoring and policing the nuclear industry. The nuclear industry has often put profits over safety and failed to deal adequately with many risks and problems associated with nuclear power. We still have no permanent solution for how to deal with waste products from nuclear power plants. And many of the functioning nuclear power plants are reaching the end of their projected life-spans and will have to be decommissioned.

    Since Fukishima some countries like Germany have decided to build no more nuclear power plants and to decommission the ones that are currently operating. Here in the United States we don’t seem to really be getting message and there is a new effort to promote the licensing and construction of more power plants.

    One of the big problems with engaging the public in the debate over the pros and cons of nuclear power is that fact that biological radiation damage can be invisible and take decades to manifest itself as cancer and other illnesses. Nucleotidings and its companion blogs are an attempt to increase public awareness and knowledge of the dangers of radioactive contamination of our environment.