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.
Graphene is a form of carbon where a single layer of carbon atoms forms a flat sheet with a hexagonal grid arrangement. It was discovered in 2004 and thought to hold great promise. Research on graphene has uncovered a variety of interesting and potentially useful features including being light weight, strong and a good conductor. Graphene also has the ability to convert heat directly into electricity. Recently, a group of researchers developed a new type of radiation detector based on graphene.
A bolometer is an instrument that can measure electromagnetic radiation through the heating of a material in which the electrical resistance is related to temperature. The new graphene radiation detector is a type of bolometer. The graphene bolometer is able to work over a much broader range of temperatures that existing commercial bolometers. The design for the graphene bolometers is simple and the cost of production is low. There could be a lot of commercial applications for the new bolometer.
Grigory Skoblin does research at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. With respect to graphene, he said, “…there are some strong fundamental limitations for this material. Nowadays, the real industrial applications of graphene are quite limited.” Most current uses of graphene are based on its mechanical properties. Skoblin says that “…our device shows that more fundamental properties can be used in actual applications.”
The graphene bolometer is based on the thermoelectric properties of graphene. Radiation heats a piece of graphene which causes electrons to move through the material. The moving electrons generate an electrical field. A voltage difference is created across the bolometer. The change in voltage can be used to directly measure the radiation.
Other bolometers also use voltage differences to measure radiation, but they need an external power source to generate the initial current. Because the graphene bolometer generates its own current under the influence of the radiation, it is much simpler than other bolometers. The piece of graphene inside the new bolometer is very small so the new bolometer is very fast because it is quickly heated by the radiation being measured.
The new bolometer can measure radiation up to temperatures of two hundred degrees Celsius. There have been other attempts to create graphene-based bolometers, but they used two layers of graphene which makes manufacturing more difficult and expensive. Current bolometers can only work at very low temperatures referred to as “cryogenic.”
An additional innovation in the new bolometers is the material used to coat the instrument. The developers use a dielectric polymer called “Parylene” for the coating. Parylene provides a good combination of performance and scalability. Hexagonal boron nitride offers better performance than Parylene but it is hard to obtain and the processed used to apply the coating would be more difficult to scale up.
The prototype for the new bolometer can only detect microwave radiation at ninety-four gigahertz but the researchers will be working to broaden the detection range of frequencies. The developers are also working on a vapor deposition process to produce bigger pieces of graphene which will help scale up production of the new bolometer.
Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
NEE has filed a lawsuit against NEI. In the lawsuit, NEE said, “NEI recently has been vigorously advocating for irrational and unreasonable policies that would distort electric energy markets.” “In this, NEI has also funded studies that call into question the reliability and costs of the electric system, attempting to create a false sense of panic and unfairly and incorrectly maligning the operations of its members, including the NextEra Companies.”
One of the main reasons for the lawsuit is the claim by NEE that the NEI prevented their access to the PADS because they cancelled their membership in the NEI. NEE has six scheduled outages in 2018. It is very important to them to have access to the PADS in order to hire the extra staff that the outages will require. FLP has been a member of the NEI for over twenty years and has consistently paid its dues which helped maintain the PADS system. The terms of membership with respect to access to the PADS state that a NEI member’s access can only be terminated after a minimum of three months advanced notice.
NEE alleges that they were told on January 30th by NEI that they could only access the PADS through March of 2018 if they paid NEI $860,000 dollars. NEE says that most of that money is related to membership charges of the NEI that have nothing to do with access to the PADS. The complaint states that NEI was fully aware of the damage and expense that denying access to the PADS would cause NEE and that they were using that for leverage to force NEE to pay unnecessary membership dues.
A spokesperson for NEE said, “We think this was the very definition of extortion.” “We made a business decision to leave NEI; we thought they had not adapted to changing times. They are simply attempting to retaliate against us by trying to squeeze cash out of us and our customers.”
The NEI president said that her organization, “vehemently denies all of the allegations in NextEra’s lawsuit and will vigorously defend our position in court.” She said, in an email, that when NEE canceled its membership, it lost the right to access the PADS. However, the NEI did say that it would give NEE PADS information so that NEE could fully comply with the relevant Nuclear Regulatory Commission regulations.
The NEI President attacked what she called NEE’s “inflammatory statements,” saying “To call NEI’s approach retaliatory, or even suggest the notion of extortion, is both counter-factual and offensive to the good faith effort the offer represents.” She said that NEI had recently contacted NEE to work on opening a conversation with NEE that would “advance the industry’s interest in remaining unified, or as unified as possible, on regulatory and other policy positions.” She said that NEE reacted by launching a “baseless lawsuit.”
The NEI claims that in considering its support for Perry’s policy proposals, it did extensive polling of its members to decide what its position should be with respect to the policy proposal. They say that regardless of the attitude of NEE towards the Perry proposal, their support of the proposal represented the interests of the majority of their membership.
It will be interesting to see what the result of the NEE lawsuit is.
Part 1 of 2 Parts
The U.S. nuclear industry has been struggling for years. Existing nuclear power plants have to contend with rising maintenance costs and new safety requirements. One new nuclear reactor project in South Carolina has already been cancelled due to mismanagement and huge cost overruns. A second new nuclear reactor project in Georgia is in serious trouble but is proceeding.
The National Energy Institute (NEI) is a U.S. nonprofit organization that supports the global nuclear energy industry. It currently has three hundred members in seventeen countries. Its website says that the mission of the NEI is “to foster the beneficial uses of nuclear technology before Congress, the White House and executive branch agencies, federal regulators, and state policy forums; proactively communicate accurate and timely information; and provide a unified industry voice on the global importance of nuclear energy and nuclear technology. NEI’s objective is to ensure the formation of policies that promote the beneficial uses of nuclear energy and technologies in the United States and around the world.”
In the mid-1990s, U.S. nuclear power plant operators collaborated in standardizing the processing nuclear plant workers by creating the Personnel Access Data System (PADS). The PADS is a repository for authorization records for nuclear workers. The purpose of the PADS is to support safety and security in commercial nuclear power facilities. This database is critical in advance of scheduled plant shutdowns when the number of authorized workers at a nuclear facility may double. The PADS is maintained by the NEI.
NextEra Energy (NEE) is a for-profit utility company located and operated in the U.S. It is the biggest utility company in the world. NEE owns and operates one nuclear power reactor at the Duane Arnold Energy Center in Iowa, two nuclear power reactors at the Point Beach Nuclear Plant in Wisconsin, and one nuclear power reactor Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant. In addition, NextEra is the parent company of Florida Power and Light which is the third largest utility in the world. It owns and operates two nuclear power reactors at the Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station in Florida and two nuclear power reactors at the St. Lucie Nuclear Power Plant in Florida.
Last year, Rick Perry, the U.S. Secretary of Energy, put forward a proposal for special subsidies for the nuclear and coal industries. NEI decided to publicly support the Perry proposal in its “new agenda” for the U.S. energy industry. The U.S. energy industry strongly opposed the Perry proposal, saying that it would hurt the industry and reduce investment in alternative sources of energy. In early January of 2018, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected the Perry proposal.
In January of 2018, NEE companies withdrew from NEI membership. The reason given was the NEI “new agenda” that included the rejected Perry proposal. NEE also said that the NEI was supporting studies that were aimed at building support for nuclear energy which would have the effect of reducing support for alternative sources of energy. NEE said that the changes in U.S. energy policy advocated by the NEI were “bad energy policy” and might harm NEE profits.
Please read Part 2
