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 = 142 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 93 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 89 nanosieverts per hour
Corn from Central Market = 87 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 120 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 106 nanosieverts per hour
Page 1 of 2 Pages
Back in 2018, I published a list of forty reasons that nuclear fission power was a bad idea. In one section, I addressed the dangers that would follow if a nuclear reactor wound up in a war zone. It was hypothetical at that time but now it is a cold reality threatening the world at Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine. I have written a number of posts about the situation there and I thought that it was time for an update.
World leaders issued a call for Zaporizhzhia to be completely demilitarized after images of Russian army vehicles inside the plant emerged. Russian vehicles have been parked inside the turbine halls of the only two reactors still operating at Zaporizhzhia as well as underneath elevated areas between the reactors.
Rocket have landed only sixty feet from spent fuel containers. Other threats to nuclear security at the plant include vehicles parked so tightly together that firefighters would struggle to access them if a fire broke out. There have been reports that staff at the plant have been held at gunpoint and tortured. One was beaten to death, and another needed three months to recover from his injuries. Over two hundred Ukrainians are being held at the plant.
There have been multiple explosions at the plant in the past weeks that have raised the level of concern. Russia and Ukraine have both blamed the other for the shelling of the plant. Recent satellite images of the plant have shown that the Russians are lying about Ukrainian attacks at the plant.
The connections between the plant and the Ukrainian grid are in critical condition. Three of the four main lines have been broken during the war. Two of the three back-up lines connecting Zaporizhzhia to the Ukrainian grid have been destroyed.
The Russians have drawn up a detained plan to disconnect the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant from the electrical grid of Ukraine. World leaders had previously warned Russia against cutting the plant off from the Ukrainian grid and reconnecting it to the Russian electrical grid.
Petro Kotin is the head of the Ukraine’s atomic energy company. He told an interviewer that Russian engineers had already drawn up a blueprint for such a switch on grounds that it was emergency planning in case the fighting severed the remaining power connections to the plant. He said, “They presented [the plan] to [workers at] the plant, and the plant [workers] presented it to us. The precondition for this plan was heavy damage of all lines which connect Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to the Ukrainian system.” He fears that the Russian army is currently targeting those power connections to make the emergency scenario a reality. He added, “They just started doing that, they started all the shelling, just to take out these lines.”
The Russian plan to disconnect the plant entirely from the Ukrainian grid would raise the risk of a catastrophic failure by leaving it dependent on a single source of power to cool the reactors. Kotin said, “You cannot just switch from one system to another immediately, you have to … shut down everything on one side, and then you start to switch on another side.”
During a shift between the Ukrainian and Russian grids, the plant would have to rely only on a back-up diesel-powered generator. There would be no other options if that generator failed. After only ninety minutes without power the reactors would heat up to a dangerous temperature. Kotin said, “During this disconnection, the plant won’t be connected to any power supply and that is the reason for the danger. If you fail to provide cooling … for one hour and a half, then you will have melting already.”
Please read Part 2 next
Ambient office = 124 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 114 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 117 nanosieverts per hour
Avocado from Central Market = 59 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 103 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 87 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient office = 72 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 126 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 123 nanosieverts per hour
Avocado from Central Market = 46 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 88 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 78 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient office = 93 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 122 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 124 nanosieverts per hour
Watermelon from Central Market = 131 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 91 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 84 nanosieverts per hour
Dover Sole from Central = 115 nanosieverts per hour
Scientists have discovered the remarkable impact of reversing a standard method for combatting a key obstacle to create sustained nuclear fusion on Earth. Theorists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DoE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have put forth a proposal to do exactly the opposite of the prescribed procedure to sharply improve future results.
The problem is referred to a “locked tearing modes”. This occurs in all of today’s tokamaks which are doughnut-shaped magnetic chambers designed to create and control the same nuclear fusion that powers the Sun and stars. These modes cause instability in the plasma and tears holes in islands in the magnetic field that confines and heats the plasma. This results in the leakage of heat that is needed to trigger the fusion.
These magnetic islands grow larger when the modes stop rotating and lock into place. This growth rate increases the heat loss, reduces the plasma performance and can cause disruptions that allow the energy stored in the plasma to strike and damage the inner walls of the tokamaks. In order to avoid such risks, researchers now beam microwaves into the plasma to stabilize modes before they can lock.
The PPPL findings suggest that the researchers stabilize the modes in large, next-generation tokamaks after they have locked. Richard Nies is a doctoral student in the Princeton Program in Plasma Physics. He is the lead author of a paper in the journal Nuclear Fusion that reveals the surprising findings. He said that in today’s tokamaks “these modes lock more quickly than people had thought, and it becomes much harder to stabilize them while they’re still rotating.”
He added that another drawback is that “these microwaves increase their width by refracting off the plasma, making the stabilization of the mode while it’s rotating even less efficient today, and this problem has become more exacerbated in recent years.”
In addition to these issues, in large future tokamaks like the ITER under construction in France, “the plasma is so huge that the rotation is much slower and these modes lock pretty quickly when they’re still pretty small,” Nies said. “So, it will be much more efficient to switch up the stabilization package in big future tokamaks and let them first lock and then stabilize them.”
That reversal could facilitate the fusion process which researchers around the world are seeking to reproduce. The fusion process combines light elements in the form of plasma to release huge amounts of energy. Allan Reiman is a distinguished research fellow and co-author of the paper. He said, “This provides a different way of looking at things and could be a much more effective way to deal with the problem. People should take more seriously the possibility of allowing the islands to lock.”
The recommended technique is not likely to work in the current tokamaks because tearing mode islands grow so fast and are so large when they lock in these devices that the plasma is close to disrupting once it has locked. That is why researchers must now use large amounts of power to stabilize the modes at the cost of limiting the energy released by fusion. In contrast, the slow growth of islands in the next generation tokamaks “leaves a long way to go before you have a disruption so there’s a lot of time to stabilize the mode.”
Once the modes in future tokamaks are locked in place, microwaves can target them directly instead of stabilizing them only when they rotate past the microwave beam in current tokamaks. Nies pointed out that “These theoretical calculations show the efficiency of what we are proposing.”
Nies said that what is needed now are experiments to test the proposed course of action. “We would not want to turn on ITER and only then find out which strategy works. There is real opportunity to explore the physics that we address in current devices.”
