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.
Ambient office = 65 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 86 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 89 nanosieverts per hour
Jalapeno from Central Market = 122 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 123 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 113 nanosieverts per hour
Installation of solar panels and wind turbines is increasing around the globe. Critics claim that renewables alone are not enough to fully decarbonize the electrical grid because of the issue of intermittency.
Natural gas plants are often used to deal with intermittency. Is it possible to decarbonize such plants?
The Seattle firm Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation (USNC) is working on the possibility of replace gas fired furnaces with USNC’s micro modular reactors (MMRs) which are currently in development. MMRs are designed to deliver ‘safe, clean, and cost-effective’ electricity to urban areas, large industrial users, and off-grid locations.
The MMR will utilized encapsulated Tristructural-isotropic (TRISO) nuclear particle fuel cooled by helium. It will be manufactured with a new 3D-printing method that uses binder jet printing as the additive manufacturing technique. A ceramic production process called chemical vapor infiltration will also be used. Together, the processes can print refractory materials into components with complex shapes which are highly resistant to extreme heat and degradation. The engineering multinational company Jacobs is supporting design and development of the new reactor. The MMR could begin demonstrating nuclear power in 2026.
Professor Simon Middleburgh is at the Nuclear Futures Institute at Bangor University. He said, “People are converging on this Triso particle as the way forward, and Ultra Safe Nuclear are probably one of the leading companies doing that.”
The TRISO particles have tiny uranium fuel kernels in their centers which are surrounded by layers of silicon carbide and graphite to contain radioactive fission products. The main reason they are used in the MMRs is that they can enable high reaction temperatures.
Middleburgh said, “Even if you go to extremely high temperatures beyond your normal operating temperature, what happens is these little kernels just sit there and they absorb that heat, and they hold those fission products. higher the temperature, the higher the temperature difference, which means you can get more effective energy out of your system.”
Low uranium density in the TRISO particles means that they are not the most efficient nucleal fuel. However, this also means easier handling. They have potential applications in otherwise risky environments close to population centers. They may also be of use in rockets.
Middleburgh added that, “For everything we’ve looked at, this is exactly how they perform, and this is why they’re so exciting. Not necessarily the most efficient in terms of volume, but the safest way to do it. That’s why we’re pushing quite hard on this now.”
He went on to say that using gas plants will not be socially acceptable in the new future so replacing them with MMRs is an attractive proposition. “We need to take those off the grid as soon as possible, and having reactors that can essentially act as buffers to renewables, when you’ve got a high-renewable grid, is brilliant.”
The most efficient way of generating electricity via nuclear power is using big reactors. However, they are more expensive than MMRs. MMRs are typically less efficient but they can be very cheap and easy to build quickly.
The U.K. government hopes that the MMRs could be well-suited to production of hydrogen or sustainable aviation fuel. The U.K. Department for Energy Security and Net Zero granted the USNC up to 29 million dollars to develop MMRs for that purpose.
Second large Polish nuclear plant gets approval world-nuclear-news.org
IAEA reports rockets fired from near Zaporizhzhia plant world-nuclear-news.org
US Boosts Advanced Nuclear Energy for Net Zero Goals miragenews.com
UK says no evidence Sellafield nuclear site hacked by groups linked to China, Russia scmp.com
Ambient office = 52 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 136 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 142 nanosieverts per hour
Green onion from Central Market = 110 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 72 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 66 nanosieverts per hour
The U.S. intends to outline the first global strategy for commercializing nuclear fusion power at this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) in Dubai. This could be a major milestone in scientists’ decades long quest to develop and deploy this carbon free source of electricity. The COP28 is being held from the 30th of November to the 12th of December at Expo City in Dubai. The conference has been held annually since the first U.N. climate agreement was signed in 1992. The COP conferences are intended for governments to reach agreement on policies to limit global temperature rises and adapt to impacts associated with climate change.
John Kerry is the U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change. He plans to announce the news on Monday during a tour of the Commonwealth Fusion Systems facility near Boston. Sources say that the COP28 summit will serve as the “starting gun for international cooperation” on the commercialization of nuclear fusion.
He said, “I will have much more to say on the United States’s vision for international partnerships for an inclusive fusion energy future at COP28.” He went on to say that decades of U.S. investment in fusion research have been instrumental in transforming nuclear fusion from an experiment to “an emerging climate solution.”
Kerry will be joined on his tour of the Commonwealth facility by Claudio Descalzi, the CEO of Italian energy giant Eni. Eni is pursuing four fusion power pilot projects of its own.
The U.S. State Department did not respond to requests from the media for comments on Kerry’s announcement, or on the fusion commercialization strategy that will be outlined at this year’s COP28 summit.
The U.S. effort comes less than a year after researchers at Department of Energy’s National Ignition Facility in California used fusion to achieve “net energy gain” for the first time. This is a major breakthrough that demonstrated that fusion ignition is attainable in a controlled environment.
Existing nuclear fission technology splits heavy atoms apart to generate electricity. Nuclear fusion does just the opposite, merging light atoms together to generate energy. There are two main approaches to fusion production which are internal confinement and magnetic confinement technology. Commonwealth utilizes the magnetic confinement approach.
Many challenges remain in the quest for fusion. To scale up the appropriate technology, scientists must be able to use fusion to generation more than one hundred percent of the energy required for the ignition reaction. This is a ratio known as the “Q” value.
The DoE experiment carried out last year with laser energy generated one hundred and twenty percent of ignition reaction value which was a net gain. However, experts noted that it is not high enough to produce commercial fusion. Producing sufficient energy by fusion may take years as well as billions of dollars in international investment.
Scientists have also achieved only a few instances of fusion ignition. They will need to generate many continuous ignitions per minute to generate enough energy for commercial-scale fusion power.
The number of companies that received investments for fusion technology research has increased from thirty-three to forty-three in the last year. This is according to recent data from the Fusion Industry Association. Efforts span more than a dozen countries including Germany, Japan, China, and Australia.
US: North Korea Trying to Advance Nuclear Program With Satellite Launch voanews.com
Orano packaging model receives US approval world-nuclear-news.org
Large module installed at Lianjiang 1 world-nuclear-news.org
Chinese long-distance nuclear heating project begins operation world-nuclear-news.org
Ambient office = 46 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 127 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 126 nanosieverts per hour
Celery from Central Market = 143 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 108 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 102 nanosieverts per hour
Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
Research plasma railguns are typically operated in a vacuum and not at ambient air pressure. Plasma railguns are valuable because they can produce muzzle velocities of up to several hundred kilometers per second. Because of this characteristic, plasma railguns have applications in magnetic confinement fusion (MCF), magneto-inertial fusion (MIF), high energy density physics research (HEDP), laboratory astrophysics, and as a plasma propulsion engine for spacecraft.
Linear plasma railguns put extreme demands on their insulators because they must be an electrically insulating, plasma-facing vacuum component which can survive both thermal and acoustic shocks. In addition, a complex triple joint seal may exist at the breech of the bore. This can often pose an extreme engineering challenge.
The NearStar nuclear fusion reactor has rails which are about a hundred feet long. They fire a fuel capsule with a mix to deuterium and tritium gas at six mile per second into a twenty-foot square reaction chamber. An approximately two-foot field coil with a small hole in the center is located inside the reaction chamber. As each pellet of fuel passes through the hole in the center of the coil, an extreme magnetic field crushes it and produces a flash of fusion. A heat exchanger circulates a liquid molten salt through the walls of the fusion chamber which is heated by each fusion reaction. The heat exchanger produces steam which spins a turbine to generate electricity. Improvements in the design of the plasma railgun could allow the future use of advanced fusion fuels, lowering cost and improving efficiency.
In addition to its use in commercial fusion energy reactors, the plasma railgun could be used as a test bench for the development of advanced nuclear fusion propulsion systems for spacecraft.
There is another advantage to the railgun approach. If nuclear fusion is achieved via inertial confinement with laser bombardment, the use of high-end lasers will require that highly technical staff will have to operate the power plant. On the other hand. NearStar believes that a powerplant that uses railguns could be operated by upskilled car mechanics and maintenance workers. This would definitely be a better proposition from a commercial perspective.
NearStar has a handful of people but it is expanding its team to include scientists and engineers. It aims to break even in the next five years. Amit Singh is the CEO of NearStar. He previously worked in a data analytics company. He believes that all the components needed to make commercial nuclear fusion a reality are available. He thinks that the company’s simple approach will help reach that goal sooner rather than later.
Singh said, “What’s unique about NearStar is that everything we need to build the fusion power plant already exists on planet Earth. So, in a lot of ways, we’re kind of like the Wright brothers — we shouldn’t be the first to flight, but we think we will be because our design and our architecture are so much more simple.”
In the future, nuclear fusion plants will get smaller. It will be possible to build them under buildings and reduce transmission and distributions losses.
Canada Brings Its Global Leadership in Clean Nuclear to the 2023 United National Climate Change Conference (COP28) finance.yahoo.com
Miss America 2023 stops in Arizona on national tour advocating for responsible nuclear energy use abc15.com
Australia’s AUKUS nuclear submarines could fuel regional arms race despite assurance scmp.com
Ambient office = 67 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 152 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 151 nanosieverts per hour
Avocado from Central Market = 137 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 103 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 90 nanosieverts per hour
