About 110 people are working round-the-clock on site and 320 meters of the new seaside infrastructure is already completed, local authorities in Pevek inform. The harbor infrastructure will house the «Akademik Lomonosov», which is due to arrive on site in June 2019. In wintertime, Pevek is embroiled in thick ice and the new harbor will be capable to withstand the tough climatic conditions, the regional administration says. Thebarentsobserver.com

As Westinghouse Electric’s bankruptcy dashed South Carolina’s nuclear ambitions, one group of people reaped the rewards: lawyers.  Postandcourier.com

Faced with a hostile, nuclear-armed neighbor, South Korea’s military has announced the creation of a “decapitation unit.” In the event of a war, the mission of the special task brigade is to take out the leadership of North Korea. Wsmv.com

Interested participants have until 30 March 2018 to submit abstracts for oral or poster presentations at the International Symposium on Communicating Nuclear and Radiological Emergencies to the Public, to be held in Vienna, Austria, from 1 to 5 October 2018. Iaea.org

 

 

 

       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 US House of Representatives – the lower chamber of Congress – has approved two bills related to nuclear energy research and development. The bills – one for a versatile reactor-based fast neutron source and the other for research into the effects of low-dose radiation – will now pass to the Senate before they can be signed into law by the President. World-nuclear-news.org

French state-owned energy firm EDF reported falling profits, including a downturn in the UK due to falling prices for nuclear power, improved energy efficiency among its household customers and the slide in the value of sterling since the Brexit vote. Theguardian.com

EDF expects its profit to bounce back this year thanks to higher power prices and increased availability of its French nuclear units following prolonged stoppages for safety inspections in 2017. World-nuclear-news.org

The utility that owns Cooper Nuclear Station said the power plant adds $112 million a year to Nebraska’s economy. Wowt.com

 

 

       “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:

 

The National Nuclear Security Administration manages U.S.-origin enriched uranium for certain needs such as for the production of tritium, which is used in nuclear weapons. After losing its last source of U.S.-origin enriched uranium in 2013, NNSA projected that its supply would run out in 2027. Gao.gov

A proposed bill that would have limited how much Georgia Power customers have to pay to help build nuclear Plant Vogtle doesn’t do that anymore. Now the bill affects any future nuclear power plants but doesn’t change things for Vogtle. Wabe.org

Decades ago they witnessed nuclear weapons tests in the South Pacific. Now some veterans hope new DNA testing will prove it was responsible for their subsequent ill health, which they say ruined their lives. Bbc.com

The US is preparing to spend billions of dollars upgrading its nuclear weapons program in Europe, despite the arsenal posing a significant security risk as “targets for terrorism and theft”, critics have warned. Independent.co.uk

 

 

         The movement of atoms in complex ceramics is strongly dependent on the local structure. When ceramics are heated or irradiated, the atomic structure is damaged. In order to understand how defects in the atomic structure influence the motion of atoms, it is necessary to understand how the properties of the ceramic materials change and what can be done to restore the original atomic structure. These phenomena are the basis of material properties and lifetimes for radiation resistance during energy generation and in containers for storing nuclear wastes.

       Diffusion of atoms in complex ceramic oxides is crucial to how atoms are transported and how the atomic structure of the ceramics evolve under the influence of radiation damages, sintering and aging. Individual atoms in ceramics carry electrical charges that determine atomic structure. Ions that carry a negative electrical charge are called “cations”. Ions that carry a positive electrical charge are called “anions”.

       Pyrochlores are complex ceramic oxides which contain more than one type of cation. The diffusion of the cations through the material and the electrical conductivity of the material are strongly influenced by the structure of the crystal in terms of arrangement of cations. Diffusion and conductivity are very sensitive to cation disorder. The ability of these ceramics to maintain their crystallinity is dependent on cation disorder. This particular characteristic is the reason that pyrochlores are being investigated as a possible material to encapsulate nuclear waste. Radiation resistance and conductivity are increased by cation disorder, but it is not well understood exactly how this disorder influences cation transport.

        Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy have been researching the influence of defects on cation diffusion in gadolinium titanium oxide (Gd2Ti207) which is a pyrochlore. The defects are missing atoms in the ceramic crystalline structure. The researchers have been using standard and accelerated molecular dynamics simulations to track the movement of atoms in the crystal and increase their understanding of cation diffusion. These simulations are for cation behavior of microsecond (millionth of a second) duration. Typical atomic simulation track the behavior over nanosecond (billionth of a second) intervals due to the massive computer resources that are required. In the case of the ceramic simulations, new computational techniques have been used to simplify the dynamics of the individual atoms and reduce computational requirements.

       The researchers found that cation diffusion through the ceramic crystals is slow when there is a low level of disorder. When the level of disorder reaches a specific value, the diffusion of the cations accelerates. One of the important aspects of this behavior is “anti-side defects.” This occurs when one cation of gallium occupies a position a titanium cation would normally occupy. When the threshold level of disorder is reached, the anti-site defects are so numerous that they are almost touching each other at the atomic level. This creates something called a “percolation network.” This network permits the cations to move rapidly through the crystal. The movement of these cations through the network permits the crystal structure to repair itself by destroying the anti-site defects which slows down the cation diffusion.

       This self-healing is different than other behavior models for other complex ceramic oxides and disorder models. This new type of self-healing may be very important in extending the lifetime of complex ceramics that are used in extreme radiation environments.

gadolinium titanium oxide:

 

Government officials said an earthquake centered less than 10 miles from Seabrook Station Nuclear Power Plant didn’t seem to have caused any damage yesterday, but anti-nuclear activists are worried the tremors could have increased instability in already-cracking containment walls. Bostonhearald.com

India has approved the construction of 12 new nuclear power reactors. 10 will be indigenous Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors (PHWRs) with a capacity of 700 MW each and two will be Russian Light Water Reactors (LWRs). Nextbigfuture.com

Russian ‘nuclear leak’ was behind radiation cloud that engulfed Europe. Dailystar.co.uk

RUSSIAN anti-submarine warship has obliterated “mock enemy” targets off the coast of North Korea in an apparent show of force. Dailystar.co.uk