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.
Latitude 47.704656 Longitude -122.318745
Ambient office = 101 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 105 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 104 nanosieverts per hour
Red bell pepper from Central Market = 122 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 111 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 102 nanosieverts per hour
Further delay in Finnish repository license review world-nuclear-news.org
Brazilian development bank gauges consultancy interest in uranium expansion world-nuclear-news.org
Rolls-Royce awards £400m nuclear support contract naval-technology.com
Rubio says Biden-era Australian nuclear-powered submarine agreement to proceed washingtime.com
Latitude 47.704656 Longitude -122.318745
Ambient office = 104 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 123 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 119 nanosieverts per hour
Purple onion from Central Market = 129 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 135 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 119 nanosieverts per hour
HF Controls’ $450K Gift Backs Nuclear and AI Research at UTA dallasinnovates.com
Asim Munir Now In Control Of Pakistan’s Nuclear Button ndtv.com
Laurentis, BWXT and CNPSA sign Bulgarian new nuclear contract world-nuclear-news.org
UK’s new nuclear ambitions ‘have only just begun’ world-nuclear-news.org
Latitude 47.704656 Longitude -122.318745
Ambient office = 96 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 145 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 139 nanosieverts per hour
Lime from Central Market = 108 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 122 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 97 nanosieverts per hour
Dover Sole from Central = 94 nanosieverts per hour
Part 2 of 2 Parts
Wald discussed the need for economic production of reactors with novel designs. Triggering a nuclear renaissance, he said, will necessitate making “new products like we stamp out Boeing 737s or we used to stamp out Liberty ships. In serial production, if not mass production, economics must be key. We’ve got to design the better mousetrap and figure out how to build it and how to deliver it at competitive cost. Carbon reduction pledges will help in the market, but in the end, future nuclear power plants will rise or fall on the economics.”
Wald said that the politics must change too. Commenting on the not-in-my-backyard cliché, or NIMBY, as a common objection to proposals to build nuclear reactors near particularly neighborhoods, Wald pointed out that “some of the new reactor designs will occupy literally about as much space as a backyard. Some of the designs will have plug-and-play reactor cores with the old nuclear core going back to the manufacturer every few years” to get its spent fuel replaced with fresh fuel.
Wald mentioned a scenario in which the staff of a reactor manufacturing company’s headquarters were welcomed to a large neighborhood in a big city. A few years later residents noticed a truck had just delivered an old reactor core to the headquarters!
Wald said, “The other problem with artisanal energy policy is it doesn’t work as part of a system. Solar and wind tribalists say their costs are going down. But we’d be much better off if we put our money into collective solutions. We should invest in the electric grid. If all the money used to purchase 11-kilowatt emergency generators, like I and others have in my neighborhood, had went into the grid instead, we’d all be better off. “I think that solar and wind farms have their place, but only to the extent that they benefit the system. Adding solar panels in a place where noontime electricity prices on the grid are negative is not a good idea, although federal and state incentives may make that happen.”
Wald was asked if many more nuclear power plants were built to meet increasing demands for electricity by AI data centers, would the existing grid be able to handle the load?
He answered that “This is actually something in nuclear power’s favor,” noting that little high-voltage transmission is being built in the U.S. because of successful lawsuits based on environmental rules. “The amount of electricity transmission you need to support a new reactor is lower than what you need for wind or solar or hydro energy sources. Nuclear plants have reasonably flexible siting requirements.”
Wald may have surprised a few people in his audience because he said that he’s not sure that commercial fusion power reactors envisioned for mid-century will be needed. He said that “I think fusion seeks to solve two problems that fission does not, in fact, have. One is a shortage of fuel, and the other is radioactive waste. We don’t have a shortage of uranium, and we don’t have any shortage of plutonium if we want it. The problem of radioactive waste from nuclear power plants is manageable.”
Before he left, Wald made one statement everyone agreed with. “Life is going to change!”
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INL announces five teams for MARVEL Project ans.org
Nuclear energy poised to rise sharply in Africa’s power mix: Report semafor.com
Latitude 47.704656 Longitude -122.318745
Ambient office = 96 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 120 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 114 nanosieverts per hour
Heirloom tomato from Central Market = 100 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 104 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 93 nanosieverts per hour
Part 1 of 2 Parts
Matthew Wald is a former nuclear energy and electric technologies reporter for The New York Times who currently works as writer and communications consultant specializing in nuclear technology and policy works for the Breakthrough Institute, a non-governmental organization that advocates for advanced nuclear reactors. Wald said on a recent Zoom call that “We do need to get our electricity house in order.” He added that many Americans think the way to keep their electricity costs down is to install rooftop solar panels on their houses or zip tie vertically mounted solar panels to their apartment balconies.
Wald continued, “This is artisanal energy policy, which is my term for people who think that steps you take at home are going to solve our national energy problems. It won’t do the job. We’re going to need some major new power plants.” And those plants, he added, should house nuclear reactors. The nuclear industry and community have committed industrial sin. Nuclear suffered through a long drought, and now it sees terrific demand for its product, and it’s not ready to deliver the needed electricity.”
New companies who are planning to build advanced nuclear reactors, including small modular reactors (SNR), for producing power, have missed the upcoming round of construction that is now being undertaken by builders of generators powered by natural gas. Wald claimed that the United States lacks enough gas generators to meet predicted future power demands, as well as the ability to build them.
Except for the Tennessee Valley Authority, Wald noted, many electric utilities that used to “build nuclear plants aren’t interested anymore.”
However, startups are announcing their intentions to build reactors or make nuclear fuel, including three that Wald named (Kairos Power, Oklo and X-energy) that have bought property in Oak Ridge’s western industrial parks.
Wald commented on a trend in which artificial intelligence companies such as Amazon, Meta and Microsoft are making power purchase agreements (PPAs) with owners or builders of nuclear power plants to ensure their future AI data centers will receive reliable power. The PPAs reduce the high-tech companies’ carbon footprint and help keep the power plants in operation.
Wald failed to mention that Kairos Power, which is building the Hermes series of demonstration reactors in Oak Ridge, has a PPA with Google and TVA, and that Amazon has a PPA with X-energy, which is building the TRISO-X fuel fabrication factory in Oak Ridge.
If the demand for electricity rises because of the needs of AI data centers and a growing U.S. population that continues to purchase new electronic gadgets and appliances, energy policy with respect to nuclear reactors must change according to Wald.
One part of the new model that must change, Wald said, is the manner in which the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) works to license new advanced thirty- to three hundred-megawatt nuclear reactors that differ from the many traditional one thousand-megawatt pressurized-water and boiling-water reactors in power plants it has approved for decades.
Wald commented that “Regulators must supply human intelligence to each license application, but their process must run many times faster than it does now, especially for licensing reactors that produce just three hundred megawatts or thirty megawatts or ten megawatts or one megawatt. These are just one-by-one individual licenses. If we’re going to think big, we’ve got to rethink regulation.”
In answer to a question on the NRC, Wald said that the NRC is working on speeding up its licensing processes because of an executive order from President Trump. He said he agrees that this is a good idea because “what the NRC does is not very productive. It has a bureaucracy that is resistant to change and that’s now dealing with new technologies. I am open to the idea that they’ll make errors, they’ll approve things they shouldn’t, and we’re going to learn from experience. The NRC has this habit of approving things they’ve approved before and of not approving anything nobody’s ever done before. That’s not a recipe for successful innovation and industrial progress.”
Please read Part 2 next
Part 2 of 2 Parts
Wald discussed the need for economic production of reactors with novel designs. Triggering a nuclear renaissance, he said, will necessitate making “new products like we stamp out Boeing 737s or we used to stamp out Liberty ships. In serial production, if not mass production, economics must be key. We’ve got to design the better mousetrap and figure out how to build it and how to deliver it at competitive cost. Carbon reduction pledges will help in the market, but in the end, future nuclear power plants will rise or fall on the economics.”
Wald said that the politics must change too. Commenting on the not-in-my-backyard cliché, or NIMBY, as a common objection to proposals to build nuclear reactors near particularly neighborhoods, Wald pointed out that “some of the new reactor designs will occupy literally about as much space as a backyard. Some of the designs will have plug-and-play reactor cores with the old nuclear core going back to the manufacturer every few years” to get its spent fuel replaced with fresh fuel.
Wald mentioned a scenario in which the staff of a reactor manufacturing company’s headquarters were welcomed to a large neighborhood in a big city. A few years later residents noticed a truck had just delivered an old reactor core to the headquarters!
Wald said, “The other problem with artisanal energy policy is it doesn’t work as part of a system. Solar and wind tribalists say their costs are going down. But we’d be much better off if we put our money into collective solutions. We should invest in the electric grid. If all the money used to purchase 11-kilowatt emergency generators, like I and others have in my neighborhood, had went into the grid instead, we’d all be better off. “I think that solar and wind farms have their place, but only to the extent that they benefit the system. Adding solar panels in a place where noontime electricity prices on the grid are negative is not a good idea, although federal and state incentives may make that happen.”
Wald was asked if many more nuclear power plants were built to meet increasing demands for electricity by AI data centers, would the existing grid be able to handle the load?
He answered that “This is actually something in nuclear power’s favor,” noting that little high-voltage transmission is being built in the U.S. because of successful lawsuits based on environmental rules. “The amount of electricity transmission you need to support a new reactor is lower than what you need for wind or solar or hydro energy sources. Nuclear plants have reasonably flexible siting requirements.”
Wald may have surprised a few people in his audience because he said that he’s not sure that commercial fusion power reactors envisioned for mid-century will be needed. He said that “I think fusion seeks to solve two problems that fission does not, in fact, have. One is a shortage of fuel, and the other is radioactive waste. We don’t have a shortage of uranium, and we don’t have any shortage of plutonium if we want it. The problem of radioactive waste from nuclear power plants is manageable.”
Before he left, Wald made one statement everyone agreed with. “Life is going to change!”
‘Invade Iran or accept talks,’ ex-Israeli Air Force chief warns jpost.com
Bilibino’s units being shut down for decommissioning world-nuclear-news.org
South Korea’s president denies nuclear ambitions amid submarine deal abcnews.go.com
Turkey drone magnate Baykar enters small reactor nuclear race middleeasteye.net
