The market for nuclear reactors is shrinking in the developed world so nuclear companies are turning to developing nations for business. Companies that sell nuclear technology for power plants are competing for the nuclear market in the Middle East which is one of the most unstable regions on Earth. The Center for Climate & Security which is based in the U.S. released a report last year that said that included the Middle East of “potential crisis regions where combining security, climate, and nuclear risks must be addressed urgently.”

       The biggest potential customer for power reactors in the Middle East is Saudi Arabia. S.A. has announced that they intend to construct sixteen nuclear power plants in the next twenty-five years at a cost of eighty billion dollars. They have internal deposits of uranium that they hope can be turned into fuel to allow them to diversify from their current reliance on fossil fuels. S.A. says that they do not believe that renewable energy can satisfy their future need for electricity.

       Other countries in the Middle East who have either signed contracts for or are already building nuclear power reactors include Iran, United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Egypt and Turkey. Every one of them claims that the only reason that they want nuclear power plants is because of their estimation of future electricity needs.

       The U.S. wants to sell Westinghouse reactors to Middle Eastern companies. Russia, China, Japan and South Korea are also very interested in the Middle East nuclear power market. In addition to supporting nuclear technology companies in their countries, any of the nuclear technology exporting countries would benefit from increased political influence that such sales in the Middle East would bring.

       The largest current Middle Eastern nuclear power project is the twenty-four billion dollar Barakah power plant in the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) Four nuclear power reactors will be constructed by the Korean Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO). One problem is that there are not enough trained personnel to operate even one of the new reactors. The U.A.E. will be the first country in over twenty years to start up a new nuclear power reactor.

        Jordan has no fossil fuel resources, so it has more reason than its oil rich neighbors to turn to nuclear power. It has signed a twelve billion dollar nuclear power reactor deal with Rosatom, the Russian-owned nuclear company.

         Egypt has the largest population in the Middle East and increasing demands for electricity have stimulated its interest in nuclear power. Egypt has signed a thirty billion dollar deal with Rosatom for the construction of four nuclear power plants.

         Turkey currently has to import most of its fuel in the form of fossil fuels from neighboring nations. It is currently building a nuclear power plant on the Mediterranean coast at Akkuyu in partnership with Rosatom. Turkey has been interested in nuclear power for decades and started the Akkuyu project in 2010. It was originally intended that the first reactor would be operating by now, but Turkey and Russia fell into a dispute over the downing on a Russian jet in 2015, and the project was shelved. Turkey and Russia made up in 2016 and the project resumed.

      This intense interest in nuclear power among Middle Eastern countries has raised concerns of some observers and analysts. They are afraid the at least some of these countries might secretly desire nuclear weapons. The Crown Prince of S.A. says that “Saudi Arabia doesn’t want to own a nuclear bomb. But without a doubt, if Iran develops a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.”

       Since Israel already has nuclear weapons, neighboring Arab countries may feel it necessary to have their own nuclear weapons to defend themselves against Israel. Hopefully, the global nuclear non-proliferation movement will help to reduce the desire for nuclear weapons in the Middle East.

 

Nuclear regulators on Wednesday decided to resume assessing the safety of a spent fuel reprocessing plant in Aomori Prefecture after suspending the process for several months following revelations about the operator’s lax safety management. Japantimes.co.uk

A museum in Los Alamos, New Mexico — a once-secret city that developed the atomic bomb which helped end World War II — has put an exhibit from Japan on hold because of the exhibit’s call to abolish nuclear weapons. Eagletribune.com

Two recent Russian tests of an experimental nuclear-powered cruise missile failed to successfully use a reactor to fuel long-range flight, according to Pentagon officials. Newsmax.com

Britain is again hunting for a suitable site to store its highly radioactive nuclear waste after a previous attempt was blocked by residents. Rural areas could be given cash if they house the underground facility. Dw.com

 

 

 

       Scientists at the Robotics institute of Carnegie Mellon University have developed a new robot called RadPiper for the purpose of finding radioactive materials in the pipes of the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) Piketon, Ohio facility. This project is part of the CMU Pipe Crawling Activity Measurement System to revolutionize the efficiency and safety of the DoE nuclear cleanup program which will take fifty years or more.

        The DoE plant in Piketon spent forty-six years enriching uranium to weapons grade for our nuclear arsenal. The plant was decommissioned in 2000. The senior project scientist for the RadPiper team said, “At the time that it was operating, it was using as much electricity as Manhattan just to operate the uranium enrichment plan. There are more efficient ways to do this now. So if we needed to enrich a bunch of uranium, which hopefully we don’t right now, this wouldn’t be the way to do it.”

       The U.S. government intends to demolish the plant and replace it with a new industrial park. However, before they can do that, they need to inspect the entire facility for radioactive materials and decontaminate it. Without this very thorough inspection and decontamination, the workers carrying out the demolition might be exposed to dangerous amounts of radiation. It is even possible that there could be an explosion if there is a great enough concentration of U-235 in one location.  Every foot of pipe in the facility must be inspected. It is estimated that there are seventy-five miles of pipe in the three large buildings of the plant.

      Prior to the invention of the RadPiper robot, the inspection and decontamination of an enrichment plant were done by hand. The workers used motorized scissor lifts for pipes that were up to fifteen feet in the air. Radiation readings would be taken every few feet. It was time consuming and expensive.

       At Piketon over the past three years, the workers took one million four hundred thousand measurements. The results of these measurements are hand written. It may take years to analyze these measurements and the cost could exceed fifty billion dollars.

       In order to expedite this process, the DoE gave CMU one million four hundred thousand dollars to develop a pair of wireless robots called RadPipers. These two robots will inspect the remain fifteen miles of pipes at Piketon which have not been inspected yet.

      RadPiper contains a disc-collimated sensing instrument which utilizes an off the shelf sodium iodide sensor that counts gamma rays. The sensor is located between two big disks made of lead that are spaced a foot apart. The robot moves down the pipe one foot at a time. When it stops, the detector measures the radiation from the one-foot section of pipe between the lead disks which block radiation from other parts of the pipe. When a section of pipe is found to be contaminated, it is removed and disposed of.

       The robot cannot turn corners and there are many places where the piping in the facility does turn corners. It does have a camera onboard which can alert the operators if there is an obstruction or problem in the pipe. The robot can return to its starting point automatically. The robot transmits its findings to a laptop computer which can carry out analyses of measurements in minutes or hours.

        The RadPiper robot is almost finished and the developers hope to be able to begin measurements at the Piketon facility in May or June. They also intend to use the RadPiper at another closed uranium enrichment plant in Paducah, Kentucky. The senior project scientist said, “During the World War II era and the Cold War era, there was [this mindset] of we have to develop as quickly as possible, and basically they made a big mess. And now we’re stuck with trying to clean it up. And I think robotics is going to be an important part of that.”

       Clients in Canada and Japan would like to use the RadPiper on their nuclear cleanup projects. Other entities are interested in adapting the RadPiper robot to inspect different kinds of piping systems. A private company will spin off from CMU to handle commercial applications.

 

As undersecretary of state for arms control, Bolton was a principal advocate of tearing up the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty—and was the one who ripped it up in the Kremlin’s face. Thedailybeast.com

In the sleepy coastal town of Kaminoseki, population circa 3,000, one of Japan’s most divisive political debates – the future of nuclear power – is being played out in microcosm. Scmp.com

The groundbreaking ceremony of Turkey’s first nuclear power plant, Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), will be held in the southern province of Mersin on the Mediterranean coast on Tuesday. Aljazeera.com

The temporarily closed Unit 2 at the Ikata nuclear power plant in Enhime Prefecture in Japan will not be outfitted for a restart and will undergo decommissioning, the Shikoku Electric Power Company said in late March. Nuclearstreet.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

       Towards the end of the Soviet Union, the USSR put intercontinental ballistic missiles on trains. Their Soviet name was RT-23 but the U.S. referred to them as the SS-23 Scalpel. Each missile was seventy-seven feet long and carried ten five-hundred and fifty kiloton multiple-reentry warheads. The trains were referred to as Moldets. The first became operational in 1987. The Soviets ultimately deployed twelve of these trains. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russians entered into the START II treaty with the U.S. and all of the Moldets were decommissioned.

       In 2013, the Russian military announced that they were going to create a new generation of rail-mobile ICBMs. These trains would carry the more sophisticated RS-24 Yars missiles. The RS-24 has about the same range as the older RS-23 but is ten feet shorter and half the weight as the RS-23. The RS-24 can also be mounted on a truck and driven around. The intent is to have these mobile missiles constantly roaming around Russia, ready to stop and launch their missiles on demand. The new project was referred to as “Barguzin” and Russia said that the new trains would be ready for testing by 2019.

        The benefit of these mobile launchers is that they can travel around Russia and blend in with the regular rail and truck traffic. This makes them much harder to locate and target that missiles that in silos. More U.S. missiles would be required to destroy them which means the there would be fewer missiles for fixed targets.

        In 2012, a Russian general had said that they were developing the Barguzin because the U.S. Prompt Global Strike (PGS) program. Part of that program involves the development of hypersonic weapons that can quickly reach any part of the globe. The PGS program still exists and one hundred and eighty million dollars was spent on it in 2017.

        In 2015, according to the Rossiyskaya Gazeta, there were tests of part of the Barguzin program. In December of 2017, the Russian government stated that it was going to suspend the Barguzin project because the project was too expensive. Some analysts said that the Russians were never really serious about the Barguzin program and that it was just part of their misinformation and propaganda.

      Whether the Russians were serious about Barguzin or not, it is true that mobile missiles are much more expensive that missiles in silos. During periods of peace, the Barguzin program would have required an expensive network of bases where the missiles and launchers could be stored and maintained. The missiles would have to remain in storage under the terms of international arms treaties, so any enemy would know exactly where they were.

        In the event of a war, there would have to be major security detachments of troops to guard the mobile launchers as they moved around Russia. And, in the end, the launchers would still be somewhere on the rail system of Russia which would make them easier to locate. Hypersonic missiles travel so rapidly that it is questionable whether or not the missile trains would be able to even make it out of their storage locations before the hypersonic missiles reached them.

       While Russia may have cancelled the Barguzin program, they have said that if circumstances require it, the trains and missiles could be quickly reactivated and deployed. Let us hope that circumstances never require it.

RS-24 Yars missile mounted on mobile carrier:

 

The U.S. Military Has 3,822 Nuclear Weapons. Nationalinterest.org

The Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) recently commended the passage of the $1.3 trillion federal omnibus spending bill, which includes approximately $1.2 billion for the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) nuclear energy programs and $922 million for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). Dailyenergyinsider.com

Permanently ending the U.S.-South Korea joint military exercises that began this week could become a key factor in the nuclear talks with North Korea to come. Voanews.com

Before two deadly nuclear mishaps, scientists used to risk “tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon.”  Theatlantic.com

 

 

 

 

       Current nuclear power reactors are fueled with assemblies of rods. The rods contain pellets of uranium or a uranium-plutonium mixture called MOX. The long thin fuel rods in a nuclear fuel assembly are coated in a process called cladding. Zirconium is widely used for cladding but there are problems with zirconium that have contributed to research for modified or replacement cladding that is safer and more efficient.

        Research on accident tolerant fuels (ATF) including new cladding materials and different designs for fuel pellets have been going on since the early 2000s. The nuclear disaster at Fukushima in Japan in March of 2011 created additional pressure on the nuclear industry to find ways to make nuclear power reactors safer.

       The U.S. Department of Energy created the Enhanced Accident Tolerant Fuel program in order to develop new fuel assemblies for light water reactors. The program includes U.S. utilities, universities and the Electric Power Research Institute. Projects being supported by the DoE could result in commercial products within ten years.

       Three different approaches to ATF are under development by GE’s Global Nuclear Fuel (GNF), AREVA, and Westinghouse. The DoE is providing funding and technical assistance. Lightbridge, a company in Reston, Virgina, is working on its own ATF project with zirconium-alloy cladding and a metallic uranium alloy.

        GNF is working on “IronClad” fuel assemblies with help from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. IronClad ATFs utilize an alloy containing iron, chromium and aluminum. The new alloy for the cladding is supposed to improve how the fuel assemblies respond to severe accident scenarios. One of the big dangers in extreme scenarios is the leakage of high temperature steam which can cause cladding to oxidize. The steel in the IronClad coating gives it a much lower oxidation rate than the conventional zirconium alloy cladding.

      GNF recently shipped test assemblies with two variations of the IronClad coating to Edwin I. Hatch Nuclear Plant near Baxley in southeastern Georgia. They also shipped a test assembly with a zirconium cladding called ARMOR. After a

 planned outage for maintenance, the test assemblies will be installed in the Unit 1 reactor and will remain there for the next twenty-four months.

       The Hatch Nuclear Plant is owned and operated by Southern Nuclear Operating Co. (SNO). A spokesperson for SNO said that the ATF technologies have “industry-changing safety and efficiency advantages” that they hope could make nuclear power plants safer and more efficient. They consider the upcoming test of the ATFs “…not a small step, but a leap for our industry.” 

       This February, the principal deputy assistant secretary for the Office of Nuclear Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy said, “An accident-tolerant fuel is an industry term used to describe new technologies that further enhance the safety and performance of nuclear materials. This can be in the form of new cladding and/or fuel pellet designs.”

       The Hatch tests will be the first deployment of the new ATF assemblies but there will be more soon. GNF also plans to test IronClad and ARMOR cladding material at Exelon Generation’s Clinton Power Station in 2019. Areva and Westinghouse ATF assemblies will also be tested in plants owned by Southern Co. and Exelon.