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.
Latitude 47.704656 Longitude -122.318745
Ambient office = 100 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 115 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 122 nanosieverts per hour
Campari tomato from Central Market = 109 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 105 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 97 nanosieverts per hour
Part 1 of 2 Parts
Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) is the only Department of Energy (DoE) Office of Environmental Management that has a history deeply rooted in environmental stewardship efforts such as nuclear material processing and disposition technologies. SRNL’s expertise is now being leveraged to deal with nuclear fuel supply-chain obstacles by providing a source of high-assay low-enriched uranium (HALEU) fuel for advanced reactors.
SRNL carried out a study in 2019 that evaluated the potential for producing low-enriched uranium from the reprocessing of high-enriched foreign and domestic research reactor fuel at the H Canyon facility at the Savanna River Site (SRS). H Canyon previously produced LEU containing about five percent by weight (wt%) uranium-235 from the reprocessing of surplus high-enriched uranium to make it usable to fabricate fuel for use in a commercial reactor. Although both timeline and volume capabilities were favorable, no contract for the product was established at that time. In November of the following year, the DoE requested a similar report estimating potential capacity for HALEU production if the same facility and feedstock were used to produce about twenty precent wt% U-235 solution. However, the shutdown of separations technology through H Canyon in 2022 left the previously recovered HEU solution as the only material remaining in the facility that had the potential to be used to produce HALEU.
As SRNL was investigating materials, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Nuclear Materials Integration Division contracted the lab to lead a project seeking a solution for disposition challenges arising from the diverse nuclear material inventories across the DoE complex. This project completed a 2020 report that assessed specific DoE material inventories at each site to create a DoE-wide view of the major groups of materials categorized as having a “to be determined” disposition pathway. This study also reviewed projected future volumes of materials. Facility planning estimates were used for forecasting expected volumes of materials coming from research reactors and other sources with known disposition issues. Considering the impact of these future materials was important for both safety and security purposes. The SRNL team created a robust quantitative ranking system in 2023 that evaluated the options for disposition of each TBD material group. Although the original purpose of this project was materials disposition, SRNL found value in the process of unpackaging and chemically processing some of the material.
Cathy Ramsey is a SRNL engineer who was an integral part of both the TBD materials assessment and the initial HALEU feedstock estimates and proposals. She said, “SRNL has a reputation as EM’s lab and of being the expert in disposition, but disposition doesn’t always mean disposal. Irradiated nuclear materials offer opportunities to reprocess and recycle into new materials, and now is the time to really evaluate those opportunities. We need to have a longer view of the nuclear material life cycle than we’ve ever had before, which SRNL drives home in everything that we do.”
Savannah River National Laboratory
Please read Part 2 next
Brazil and China sign MoU on radioisotopes world-nuclear-news.org
US opens plutonium stockpile to nuclear firms breakingthenews.net
Does Trump’s nuclear testing raise the stakes – or are we already in an arms race? Bbc.com
Brookfield, Cameco team with US government for AP1000 deployment world-nuclear-news.org
Latitude 47.704656 Longitude -122.318745
Ambient office = 87 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 109 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 111 nanosieverts per hour
Beefsteak from Central Market = 99 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 96 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 87 nanosieverts per hour
NTI Champions Risk Reduction and Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zones at UN First Committee nti.org
Outer containment work under way for Leningrad’s seventh unit world-nuclear-news.org
US to expedite nuclear-powered subs to Australia that will sit near China’s doorstep foxnews.com
Netherlands aims to extend operation of Borssele plant world-nuclear-news.org
Latitude 47.704656 Longitude -122.318745
Ambient office = 66 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 85 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 82 nanosieverts per hour
Avocado from Central Market = 111 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 79 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 66 nanosieverts per hour
NTI Champions Risk Reduction and Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zones at UN First Committee nti.org
Outer containment work under way for Leningrad’s seventh unit world-nuclear-news.org
US to expedite nuclear-powered subs to Australia that will sit near China’s doorstep foxnews.com
Netherlands aims to extend operation of Borssele plant world-nuclear-news.org
Latitude 47.704656 Longitude -122.318745
Ambient office = 66 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 108 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 106 nanosieverts per hour
Yellow bell pepper from Central Market = 85 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 74 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 70 nanosieverts per hour
Dover Sole from Central = 93 nanosieverts per hour
Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
Cockroaches breed quickly, lay large numbers of eggs and are much harder to kill with chemicals than any other household insects. These are all traits that could contribute to the popular belief that they could withstand anything, even a nuclear bomb.
Elgar added, “They are quite well defended. If you try and squish a cockroach it usually gives off an unpleasant smell that acts as a pretty effective deterrent to anything attempting to capture them. They are flat, so they can escape into places you can’t easily access.”
Cockroaches feed off the detritus of other living organisms. Professor Elgar questions whether they would be able to survive and thrive without humans and other animals.
Elgar explained, “For a while they’ll be able to eat dead bodies and other decaying material but, if everything else has died, eventually there won’t be any food. And they’re not going to make much of a living. The reality is that very little, if anything, will survive a major nuclear catastrophe, so in the longer term, it doesn’t matter really whether you’re a cockroach or not.”
Nuclear explosions affect living things in a variety of ways, from the impact of the initial blast to the ionizing radiation released into the air.
All organisms are affected by ionizing radiation because it permanently damages DNA, which is the complex molecular chains that determine who we are and what we pass on to others.
Ruff said, “It knocks the electrons off atoms and changes the chemistry of things.”
Low and prolonged doses of ionizing radiation can cause diseases like cancer and increase the risk of a range of chronic conditions, particularly cardiovascular disease. High doses of radiation can kill cells.
Nuclear explosions are also particularly damaging because radioactive substances can accumulate and recycle through the environment in freshwater systems, the ocean and the earth.
Radiation also concentrates up the food chain, so animals at the top of the food chain may contain levels of radioisotopes thousands of times higher than in their environment. Even if a particular organism is less susceptible initially, it’s still part of an ecosystem that has been damaged.
Ruff added, “The evidence from a disaster like Chernobyl is that every organism, from insects to soil bacteria and fungi to birds to mammals, would experience effects in proportion to the degree of contamination. There’s less biological abundance, less species diversity, higher rates of genetic mutation, more tumors, more malformations, more cataracts in their eyes, shorter life spans and reduced fertility in every biological system.”
In the past, scientists thought that the more complex an organism, the more likely they were to be affected by nuclear radiation. If this were true, humans would fare worse, and insects would do better.
However, Professor Ruff says that focusing on a single species fails to take into account the complexity of the biological environment and how we relate to one another, as well as interactions between multiple stresses at the same time.
Ruff continued, “There’s all sorts of factors we have to look at. There are environmental factors. There are chronic exposures, effects across generations and food shortages, for example. The magnitude of effects of a nuclear explosion is far greater than what you might see in carefully controlled experiments and laboratory conditions.”
Everything points to the conclusion that cockroaches ultimately wouldn’t survive a nuclear apocalypse.
Palisades Nuclear Plant receives new nuclear fuel after transition to operations status wwmt.com
New Research Project on Computer Security For Nuclear AI iaea.org
‘We are the perfect fit’: Coffey County submits proposal for new nuclear power plant ksnt.com
Trump affirms support for nuclear sub deal politico.com
