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 = 146 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 102 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 102 nanosieverts per hour
Corn from Central Market = 100 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 89 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 81 nanosieverts per hour
Dover Sole from Central = 115 nanosieverts per hour
Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
One major question with respect to nuclear waste storage is how long it would be necessary to make the nuclear waste retrievable. Muller says, “So for how long it’s required is a bit of a grey zone for mined repositories, most people think it is 50 years that it needs to be retrievable, but it is usually just the amount of time that the repository is open, so it is very possible that for borehole disposal it will only need to be retrievable for a couple of years as opposed to 50 years, and we think retrievability will be pretty straightforward for 20 years.”
Muller added that there are ways to have retrievability for up to one hundred years “if you really want it, but I think the question is how long do you really want it for, and I think five to twenty years is probably going to be sufficient”.
Muller was an environmentalist and climate change expert and academic before starting Deep Isolation. She said that the main motivation for creating the company was her concern “that the things we are talking about doing when it comes to climate change aren’t enough … if we really want to stop climate change, we have to do bigger things and that led to my interest in nuclear power. I think the industry has done a very good job of explaining why that shouldn’t be a barrier to the future of nuclear and yet the public has not really been receptive to talking about how safe it is now and how little waste there is compared to other industries. And so it seemed to me, let’s just solve the nuclear waste problem. It can’t be that hard … it’s the responsible thing to do anyway.”
The drilling of the borehole would take a few months and the emplacement would also take a few months. Muller said that this means “we are not talking about 20 to 30 years to build a repository. Because we’re using smaller holes, we don’t need people underground. We don’t need air underground. This means that we can go deeper than is possible in mined repositories.”
Muller estimates that once there is a customer and a location it might take three years to get through the licensing process. She hopes that will “get easier and faster for second locations and third locations … so we’re really looking three to five years to waste disposal from the time that we have a government and location that are interested in disposal.”
Muller estimates that a new nuclear power plant would have a lifetime of about fifty years. In order to dispose of nuclear waste produced by such a plant, at least fifteen boreholes would be required. A key part of establishing a nuclear repository is meeting with communities in areas which have nuclear power plants. One of the challenges faced by past efforts to choose sites for permanent disposal of nuclear waste has been locating a disposal site which would be acceptable to nearby communities.
Muller said that their research and public engagement has found that people object to nuclear waste being brought to their community if a national waste repository had been established near their community. However, if the community already has some nuclear waste, they tend to be more open to the idea of disposing of the waste at the place where it is already located.
Muller said that their system is modular so it can be put at the reactor site itself “which I think solves one of the biggest problems governments have faced with disposal – the reluctance to bring nuclear waste into someone’s backyard”.
Last month, Deep Isolation signed a Memorandum of Agreement with technical and engineering services provider Amentum. The two companies agreed to cooperate on the commercialization of its radioactive waste disposal technology around the globe. The companies said that initial targets for joint work include countries in Europe and the Pacific that “represent a combined addressable market for geologic disposal of spent fuel and high-level waste worth more than USD30 billion”.
Ambient office = 117 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 89 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 95 nanosieverts per hour
Blueberry from Central Market = 66 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 78 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 62 nanosieverts per hour
Part 1 of 2 Parts
Elizabeth Muller is the CEO and co-founder of Deep Isolation. She says that her company expects to have a first deep borehole nuclear waste disposal site operating within “five to ten years.” Muller recently gave an interview in which she said that a combination of the need to tackle climate change and the geopolitics of energy means “more and more countries are eager to move forward with new nuclear power” with an “increasing urgency for solving the waste problem”.
Muller said that the traditional fifty to one hundred year estimated time frame for the permanent disposal of nuclear waste is changing. She went on to say that a number of locations around the world are “now interested in seeing nuclear waste disposal happen in that five-to-ten-year time frame. So that’s who we’re working with … I’m very confident that within the next decade we will have a disposal site that is up and running. I’m targeting five years for first disposal somewhere in the world”.
Deep Isolation’s system is to use directional borehole disposal of nuclear waste. They will build on some of the “incredible innovations that have taken place in the past 20 to 30 years in the drilling industry where it’s now inexpensive and routine to go down three quarters of a kilometer in depth and to have horizontal sections two, three or four kilometers in length”.
Deep Isolation is based in Berkeley, California. Their solution for the management of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste involves emplacing it in corrosion-resistant canisters in deep horizontal drillholes. The technology utilizes existing directional drilling techniques. The waste can be retrieved during a determined time frame, or it can be permanently secured. In 2019, Deep Isolation demonstrated its concept when it successfully placed and then retrieved a prototype nuclear waste canister hundreds of meters underground via a borehole.
The horizontal storage means that the nuclear waste can be disposed of in suitable geological conditions in many different places. This includes being close to or at proposed sites where the waste is produced. Muller says, “If you’re looking at only 500 meters of depth, it’s harder to find a good location. If you’re looking at 1000 meers, it’s significantly easier to find a good location, and if you’re looking at 1.5 kilometers or even deeper then I think most locations would probably qualify. We will, of course have to do a detailed analysis and study and testing to make sure … it meets the requirements for safety and environmental protection.”
Muller goes on to say that there is a further advantage to a horizontal storage system. “You can get more storage space for a given depth. You can follow a particular rock formation. There’s no direct potential pathway through the vertical shaft to the surface and it’s also easier to retrieve waste. You can retrieve waste potentially in vertical holes as well, but you need a structure because waste is so dense that it can compact and crush any structure that it’s in whereas when you’re horizontal, you don’t have that problem, it’s just laid out end-to-end.”
Please read Part 2 next
Ambient office = 120 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 113 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 112 nanosieverts per hour
Avocado from Central Market = 72 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 97 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 88 nanosieverts per hour
Part 3 of 3 Parts (Please read Parts 1 and 2 first)
The proposed site for the six EPRs in Jaitapur is a seismically active and fertile agricultural and fishing region. The project has left about forty thousand people in five villages concerned for their safety and impact on their livelihoods. The villagers evicted from their land received monetary compensation. However, they regret losing access to their agricultural and fishing resources.
Despite the questions about the performance of the EPRs, their safety, cost and schedule overruns, successive Indian governments have expressed their commitment to the deal with EDF. Raju and Ramana mention the unusually candid explanation offered by Anil Kakodkar who is a former secretary at the India Department of Atomic Energy. He said: “We also have to keep in mind the commercial interests of foreign countries … America, Russia, and France were the countries we made mediators in these efforts to lift sanctions, and hence, for the nurturing of their business interests, we made deals with them for nuclear projects.”
Kakodkar was referring to the India-U.S. nuclear agreement in 2018. Three countries were supposed to especially benefit for that deal: the U.S., France, and Russia. These three countries signed agreements with India for the supply of foreign reactors. Currently, Russia is the only foreign country to have operational reactors in India. These projects started even before the 2008 nuclear deal between the U.S. and India. U.S. reactors have not been sold to India because of Westinghouse’s financial problems. As far as France is concerned, it was specifically allocated the Jaitapur site for the construction of EPRs.
Wikileaks made public a 2009 diplomatic cable in which a representative from NPCIL admitted India was paying a “high price” for French reactors. French diplomatic sources have reportedly expressed discontent about the high cost of the French EPRs compared to U.S. and Russian reactors. When Indian and French political leaders meet, they usually reiterate their joint commitment to the EPR deal. For instance, in May of 2022, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Emmanuel Macro in France reaffirmed their commitment to the “the success of the strategic Jaitapur EPR project.”
A clear subtext of these statements is the high stakes in the Jaitapur project for the French nuclear industry. This is especially significant for EDF which is eighty four percent owned by the French government. EDF is facing several important problems aside from EPR issues. It is in debt for about forty-five billion dollars and faces outages at some of its older plants. There is also declining power outputs from some French plants which is caused by hot temperatures and a lack of rain. This has resulted in insufficient river water to cool nuclear reactors. Some of EDF’s reactors are also offline for planned maintenance and repairs. All these factors make it all the more crucial for France to want to finalize the deal with India. Reuters reported last May that “If confirmed, it would be one of the biggest-ever export deals for the French energy giant.”
After submitting the techno-commercial offer to the NPCIL, EDF promised that the project would produce local jobs in India. EDF also said that “The project would also generate significant economic benefits for the French nuclear industry over the entire duration of the project (approximately 15 years), with tens of thousands of jobs in the hundred or so involved French companies.”
France stands to benefit greatly if the deal comes to fruition. It is no surprise that an EDF vice-president traveled to India to submit an in-person binding techno-commercial offer. The purchase of six EPR reactors would be an obvious win for the French nuclear industry. However, it is less clear what benefits the people of India would obtain.
Ambient office = 80 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 108 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 112 nanosieverts per hour
Watermelon from Central Market = 81 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 122 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 112 nanosieverts per hour
