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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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.
Many of the ninety-nine operating nuclear power reactors in the U.S. were built in the 1970s with an intended lifespan of forty years. Many of those reactors have been granted an additional twenty years of life for a total of sixty years. The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) is currently carrying out research and working in conjunction with utilities to extend the life of some nuclear power reactors up to eighty years.
Exelon Corporation and Dominion Energy Inc. have announced that they are planning on asking regulators to give eight reactors located in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Florida an additional twenty years of life for a total of eighty years.
About twenty percent of the electricity in the U.S. is generated by nuclear power. Cheap natural gas, subsidized renewable power and stagnant demand for electricity have made it difficult for nuclear power to compete in today’s energy market. Recently, some U.S. nuclear power reactors have become too expensive to operate and are being retired before their licensed lifetimes run out.
The ultimate authority to extend the license of a nuclear power reactors is held by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Trump administration ordered a review of the nuclear power industry and possible ways to support it last June. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry recently came out with a proposal for subsidies to support coal and nuclear power but it was not adopted by Congress. The utility industry says that they appreciate the support from the President.
A spokesperson for the Nuclear Energy Institute lobbying group said, “You are talking about continuing the operation of a perfectly safe and reliable power plant. Make that comparison with the new construction of a plant. The cost savings are substantial.” While the cost of retrofitting an existing nuclear power reactor may run into the hundred of millions of dollars, the construction of a new power reactor will cost billions of dollars. Southern Co. is building two new power reactors in Georgia. The estimated cost of the project has doubled to more than twenty-five billion dollars during construction.
Anti-nuclear activists point out that the old reactors are wearing out and each additional year of life granted increases the risk of major nuclear accidents. They cite the recent nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan as an example of what could happen to old reactors in the U.S. The director of the energy program at the Washington-based watchdog group Public Citizen says, “These facilities were not designed to operate that long. The longer you extend the operating life of these facilities the more things can go wrong.”
Merely extending the lifespan of a power reactors does not help with the problem of competition from other energy sources. A former member of the NRC says that, “What you are seeing with extending the license is companies preserving an option, but it’s an option that very few will likely exercise,” said Peter Bradford, a former member of the NRC. “Unless the federal government is somehow prepared to either put taxpayer dollars into steam generator replacements or to somehow mandate that the customers have to pay for it, it’s just not going to happen.”
I have written before about the Saudi ambition to have their own nuclear power program. Countries such as China, Russia and Japan which sell nuclear power reactors have been flocking to Saudi Arabia drawn by the prospect of billions of dollars in sales. The U.S. is one of those countries and the Trump administration has been supportive of the Saudi desire to have their own nuclear reactors.
In 2010, Saudi Arabia produced a royal decree that said, “The development of atomic energy is essential to meet the Kingdom’s growing requirements for energy to generate electricity, produce desalinated water and reduce reliance on depleting hydrocarbon resources.”
The Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister said last week at the Munich Security Conference that “We are looking at the issue of the viability of building nuclear reactors in order to produce energy so that we can save the oil and export it in order to generate revenue. The countries that we are talking to are probably roughly 10 countries or so around the world and we have not made a decision yet with regards to which path we will take and which country we will be focusing on more.”
Saudi Arabia consumes about a quarter of the oil that it produces. With projected energy demand increases and a corresponding lack of projected oil production increases, Saudi Arabia will consume more and more of its own oil production as time goes by. A nuclear power program could allow Saudi Arabia to conserve its oil for future export.
Saudi Arabia plans to purchase and construct sixteen nuclear power reactors in the next twenty-five years at an estimated cost of over eighty billion dollars. Saudi Arabia has its own uranium deposits and says that it wants to develop them to produce its own fuel. It has invited U.S. companies to be a part of its nuclear program but in order for any U.S. company to export nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia, they must sign a peaceful nuclear cooperation pact. These pacts are called “123” agreements. The 123 pacts separate civil nuclear facility from military nuclear facilities. The pacts are intended to create barriers between the production of nuclear fuel and production of weapons grade nuclear materials.
The Saudis have been reluctant to sign on to the 123 pacts which are the toughest international controls for the nonproliferation development of nuclear weapons. These controls include prohibitions on enriching uranium to the purity required for nuclear weapons or reprocessing spent nuclear fuel to obtain plutonium for nuclear weapons.
The people fighting for nuclear nonproliferation say that if the U.S. lowers its standards in order to sell reactors to Saudi Arabia, it will send the message that the U.S. is not really that strongly committed to nonproliferation. The people who are supporting the sales of reactors to Saudi Arabia say that they are worth billions of dollars in export sales and that if the U.S. doesn’t sell Saudi Arabia reactors, someone else will.
The Saudis are playing possible reactor providers off against each other. They say that ten different countries are interested in helping them with their nuclear power program. Seventeen U.S. companies have visited Saudi Arabia recently to discuss nuclear reactors and support products and services.
It is believed by many that Saudi Arabia is worried about Iran developing nuclear weapons and is actively working on a nuclear weapons plan of their own.
“The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, as designated by the Nuclear Waste Policy Act amendments of 1987, is to be a deep geological repository storage facility within Yucca Mountain for spent nuclear fuel and other high level radioactive waste in the United States. The site is located on federal land adjacent to the Nevada Test Site in Nye County, Nevada, about 80 mi (130 km) northwest of the Las Vegas Valley.” Wikipedia
The U.S. government began charging nuclear power plant operators for storage of their nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain beginning in 1999. However, the actual construction project at Yucca Mountain was approved by Congress and began in 2002. In 2009, Harry Reid, a senator from Nevada and U.S. President Obama worked together to end the Yucca Mountain project. All work was halted in 2009.
The power plant operators who had paid into the storage fee fund began to sue the federal government for the return of their money because the government had failed to build the promised repository. Billions of dollars were paid back a few of the operators from the fund which had grown to over thirty billion dollars.
The cooling pools of U.S. nuclear power reactors continue to fill up. Unless a lot of the spent fuel is moved somewhere, the pools will be totally full in a few years and the reactors will have to be shut down. Absent a geological repository, the only other option is to build concrete and steel “dry casks” to temporarily hold the spent fuel on site or at other locations. The construction of enough dry casks will not be cheap and the legal framework of the storage fund that the federal government collected prevents it from being used to construct dry casks.
This was the situation until the election of a new U.S. President in 2016. In the President’s propose federal budget for 2017, he included one hundred and twenty million dollars to continue safety studies for storing spent nuclear fuel at Yucca Mountain. The money was not allocated by Congress to restart the project. In the President’s propose federal budget for 2017, he once again included one hundred and twenty million dollars for Yucca Mountain.
A congressional expert from Illinois says, “It’s criminal neglect that the last administration broke the law by not funding this project. Now our local communities like Zion are paying that price.” Illinois has more nuclear power reactors than any other state. There are eleven operating nuclear power reactors at six power plants. It is estimated that there are over seventy-six thousand tons of spent nuclear fuel in Illinois, most of which is stored onsite with the operating reactors. The expert believes that it is far past time to move forward at Yucca Mountain.
Many Nevada politicians are strongly resistant to restarting the Yucca Mountain project. One Nevada Senator has sponsored bills to stop the project, saying that it would be catastrophic for Nevada, and he would “make sure that this project doesn’t see the light of day.” A Republican Congressional Representative says that “Rather than pursue a realistic attempt to develop a substantive nuclear waste management program, this is a colossal waste of funding that goes directly against the will of Nevadans.”
Experts that support the project say that interim dry cask storage for a great deal of the spent fuel could be accomplished in five to ten years. They say that Yucca Mountain could be receiving spent nuclear fuel in fifteen to twenty years.
There are serious environmental problems at Yucca Mountain that involve unexpected mobility in the ground water in that area. It would probably be better to find a new location for the geological repository. Current estimates say that a new repository could be sited and constructed by 2050 which is only twelve years after the estimation for opening a repository at Yucca Mountain if the project is restarted. Interim storage would take the pressure off and leave plenty of time to build a safer repository at a new site.
Diagram of proposed Yucca Mountain repository:
