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.
Ambient office = 50 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 101 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 103 nanosieverts per hour
Orange bell pepper from Central Market = 114 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 92 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 82 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient office = 81 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 151 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 155 nanosieverts per hour
Yellow bell pepper from Central Market = 78 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 137 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 133 nanosieverts per hour
A Russian parliamentary committee has said that nuclear weapons should be used in response to “hypersonic and non-nuclear strategic weapons”. Independent.co.uk
North Korea appears to be still expanding operations at its main nuclear site, the U.N. atomic watchdog indicated on Thursday. Economictimes.indiatimes.com
Ambient office = 87 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 135 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 133 nanosieverts per hour
Bartlett pear from Central Market = 104 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 154 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 146 nanosieverts per hour
Dover sole – Caught in USA = 111 nanosieverts per hour
Part 5 of 5 Parts (Please read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4
And, finally, there is the possibility of just burying the waste deep enough that future generations would not even be aware of it and would not be threatened. The Posiva project in Finland calls for a repository that is sixteen hundred feet underground. After the repository chambers are filled, the access shafts would be filled with rocks and concrete. The landscape over the repository would be landscaped and the repository could be safely forgotten.
In response to the critics of their plan, Posiva says, “It would take years to dig with a material that probably doesn’t actually exist. And the site is not interesting in terms of mining resources. Also, you should note that after the next ice age, there will no longer be any city or building in Europe anyway. Everything will have disappeared under a mile of ice. So, any question (on the necessity to communicate its presence for thousands of years) is completely hypothetical.”
On the other hand, a future civilization might have some use for nuclear waste. If they have the technology to dig sixteen hundred feet for an unmarked geological repository, they will likely have the understanding and technology necessary to safely handle nuclear waste.
There was a conference in France on this same subject in 2014. A report that preceded the conference said that “the approach of trading the topic of radioactive waste through mystical tales could be interesting, as the core of the message can be packaged in stories that deal more with fundamental existential themes (creation, death, size, freedom, etc.) and less with daily political or ideological topics.”
My fear is that none of these things will be done. If we are facing the decline of our civilization as has been claimed by many scientists, there will also be a decline in funding for these kinds of projects and a decline in political will to carry them out. There are many places around the world where nuclear waste is being stored. There are many places where the development of nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons have left areas of terrible radioactive contamination. There is a whole lake in Russia that contains high levels of radioactive materials. Maybe some effort will be made to safely store some of these dangerous materials for millennia, but they will be few and far between.
If there is a collapse of our civilization because of resources exhaustion, greedy ruling elites and/or climate change, we will most likely be left with a global landscape scattered with dangerous zones where death and illness would find those who strayed into them. If the human race endures through the millennia, perhaps there will be legends of cursed lands to avoid. Maybe future civilizations will add their warning to avoid these places and they will be famous and well-known. Twisted and diseased plants and animals may also provide a warning to avoid these cursed lands. As with many problems that face us, only time will tell.
And, finally, it may be that those who follow us will learn to curse their ancestors who tried to gain the power of the gods and failed miserably, leaving the world with a deadly legacy.
Ambient office = 87 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 108 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 110 nanosieverts per hour
Avocado from Central Market = 107 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 110 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 97 nanosieverts per hour
Part 4 of 5 Parts (Please read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 first)
Another idea for a warning system is to create a series of cartoon panels that show someone getting near the nuclear waste and then dying. However, it has the same problem as the pictogram with the possibility of being misunderstood. In addition, there is a problem with reading the panels in the proper order. There are four possible ways to read a set of panels; Left to right, right to left, top to bottom and bottom to top. Blanquer still believes that pictograms or icons have the best chance of survival.
Blanquer’s doctoral thesis involved the creation of a system based on icons which indicated a physical action. His purpose is to develop a “a system that I can then make more complex in order to have people understand what I want them to understand; simply put, that there is radioactive waste under them.”
French artist Bruno Grasser is second laureate of a prize on memory launched in 2016 by ANDR. His idea was to transmit knowledge of nuclear waste to the future by using etching. He would have a container filled with twenty-five hundred tiny cubes. Each forty years, the container would be passed to a new custodian and a mark would be scratched on the outside of the container. If each mark represents forty years, then when there are twenty-five hundred marks of the outside of the container, it would mean that a hundred thousand years had passed and the waste was safe. There are serious problems with this process. What if the custodian was killed or the container was lost or destroy? What if the meaning of the container vanished with time and became unconnected to a nuclear waste cache?
So how could the human race pass some sort of indication of danger if the knowledge of nuclear materials and their dangers were lost. The research group created by the U.S. DoE described a number of different kinds of monuments that could serve as a signal of danger while surviving the centuries and millennia. Some of their ideas included a field of sharp spikes, threatening statues of things like lightning bolts or huge blocks of granite in a grid.
Thirty years later and without any acknowledgment of the previous work, the Les Nouveaux Voisins, a pair of French architects, received the ANDRA 2016 first prize for their suggestions for something like Stonehenge, the ancient monument in southern England. They called for the placement of eighty one-hundred foot tall concrete columns above a nuclear waste storage repository. Oak trees would be planted on the top of these pillars which would sink into the ground over time. When the oak trees reached the ground, the nuclear waste would be safe. I would be worried that the mechanism that lowered the trees would not last long enough to lower the columns to ground level. The oak trees might be cut down. The meaning of the whole installation could fade with time.
Please read Part 5
