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.
Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
Representative Dick Muri (R-Steilacoom) is the sponsor of House bill 2214 to lift the ban. Senate bill 5946 is the corresponding bill in the Senate to lift the ban. Muri has pointed out that with the fall of the Soviet Union, the fear of angering Soviet leaders was outdated. On the other hand, I am concerned that major evacuation planning could anger the Russians who have inherited the nuclear arsenal of the Soviets. The Russian have been flying nuclear bombers into the airspace of other nations, running nuclear submarines and ships into other countries territorial waters, threatening to use tactical nuclear weapons in the event of a ground war with NATO and bragging about all the money that they are going to spend to modernize and expand their arsenal of nuclear weapons.
Muri believes that the biggest nuclear threat today comes from rogue nations such as North Korea. This is a belief that I do not share. The problem with this idea that rogue nations do not or will not possess a lot of nuclear warheads that could be launched at many U.S. cities at the same time. If they could only launch a handful of nuclear weapons at U.S. targets then unless we knew in advance that they were targeting a particular city we might be reluctant to try to empty all the major cities that might be targets. And as I said above, the very idea of quick evacuation of major cities would be extremely difficult if not totally impossible anyway.
Muri says that a nuclear attack is unthinkable but that we should have some plan for evacuation. This is an odd statement. Either something is unthinkable and does not need a planned response or something could happen and does need a planned response. You cannot have it both ways! And just because a possibility is “unthinkable” that does not mean that an impossible plan is a great response.
A couple of days ago, HB 2214 was voted out of the House Committee on Public Safety and will now be debated on the floor of the House. SB 5936 will be taken up in committee tomorrow.
Muri said, “Everybody thinks that a nuclear weapon hitting a part of our state would be the end of the world. It would not.” To which I can only respond that this is the sort of idiotic thing that the Reagan administration would say back in the Eighties. It has been estimated that detonation of a nuclear warhead anywhere in the world could have severe repercussions. I resent the casual comment from Muri about a detonation in “a part of our state.” Realistically, if anyone went to the trouble to launch a nuclear strike against Washington State, there are many prime military targets in the Greater Seattle area.” If a massive attack was launched against the U.S., the whole area around Puget Sound would be saturated with nuclear warheads and that includes Steilacoom.
The bottom line is that there are many possible disasters that could hit the Seattle area that deserve to have a response planned but a nuclear attack is not one of them.
Washington State Legislative Building:
Part 1 of 2 Parts
In 1983, the Washington State Legislature passed a bipartisan bill that banned preparations for nuclear war attacks. The bill specifically banned planning for the evacuation and relocations of citizens in major cities. The Reagan administration had been cranking up the tension between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The reason given for an evacuation planning ban for Seattle and other big cities in Washington was that the Washington legislature feared that planning for evacuation could anger the Soviet leadership.
In the early 1980s, a Reagan administration official said publicly that you could protect your family from nuclear attack by digging a hole in your yard, putting a door over it and shoveling dirt over the door. This is, of course, ridiculous. Reagan was a warmonger in the early Eighties and worked hard to reignite the Cold War which had been fading. He and his administration were all too ready to think the unthinkable and decide that the U.S. could “win” a nuclear war. Easy enough for him to say when he knows that if a war started, he would be whisked away to a deep bunker with its own water, air and power to ride out a nuclear attack.
I happen to know something about evacuation planning for the City of Seattle, Washington. I was asked by the Physicians for Social Responsibility to analyze a rough sketch of an evacuation plan for Seattle in the year before the legislature passed the ban. I found a study on evacuation possibilities for the city of Denver which shares some similarities to Seattle. Like Denver, Seattle only has a handful of major routes out of the city. Evacuees would have limited choices to go north, east and south. Bodies of water block prevent evacuation to the west.
The Washington State Department of Transportation has detailed analyses of traffic flows. There are always problems on highways from accidents to stalled vehicles that have run out of gas. These problems increase as the number of vehicles on a highway increases. They can estimate the number of vehicles that would be trying to flee Seattle in case of an evacuation order. Running the numbers, it is likely that within twelve hours of an evacuation order, every major route out of Seattle would be blocked by accidents and stalled vehicles. Emergency vehicles would have great difficulty getting to and clearing such blocks.
The preliminary Seattle evacuation plan said that Seattle should be evacuated in three days. Considering traffic problems that would be inevitable, it would probably take more like three weeks to evacuate Seattle. There would be enormous logistical problems to take care of millions of people out on the highways unable to move their cars. They would be even more exposed to the effects of a nuclear attack than if they had stayed home.
While the explanation given for the evacuation planning ban is that it might upset the Soviets and make an attack more likely, the truth of the matter is the simple fact that it would be impossible to empty Seattle in a few days if there was concern over a possible nuclear attack. It was just not a practical idea. And thinking that it was practical could have contribute to the aggressive attitude of President Reagan and his administration.
The Washington Governor and Legislature basically told the Reagan administration that they would not cooperate in his effort to make the survival of nuclear war more “thinkable.” The Reagan administration retaliated against the Washington Governor and Legislature by saying that if an evacuation plan was not drawn up for Seattle, they would cut some of the federal funds that were supposed to go to the State of Washington. The Washington Governor and Legislature were unimpressed and basically told the Reagan administration to keep their money. The bills authorizing the ban on evacuation planning were passed and it became the law in Washington.
Please read Part 2
I have blogged before about the use of thorium as a nuclear fuel for power reactors. Usually it is in reference to the creation of special reactors designed specifically for thorium. Today I am going to talk about work being done to create a mixture of thorium and plutonium that would be suitable to power existing light water reactors. Plutonium has to be added because thorium is not a fissile element and pure thorium cannot create and sustain a chain reaction.
The thorium/plutonium fuel is also known as a mixed oxide fuel or MOX. MOX fuels comprised of uranium and plutonium are used in a particular type of commercial power reactor. Thorium fuels and reactors have been researched for decades but there is a great deal of current interest in MOX fuels made with thorium that can be used in current power reactors.
Thorium-MOX fuels have some advantages over uranium-MOX fuels. Their thermal conductivity and melting point are higher which makes them safer to use. They also do not produce any new plutonium as they operate so that makes them attractive to groups working on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. The plutonium they consume can reduce stockpiles of military plutonium.
According to a study in Norway, “the coolant void reactivity of the thorium-plutonium fuel is negative for plutonium contents up to 21%, whereas the transition lies at 16% for MOX fuel.” “Thorium-plutonium fuel seems to offer some advantages over MOX fuel with regards to control rod and boron worths, CVR and plutonium consumption.”
The Thorium Irradiation Consortium was started in 2011. It is led by Thor Energy and has IFE, Westinghouse, Finland’s Fortum, the UK’s National Nuclear Laboratory, the EU Joint Research Centre at Karlsruhe and the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute as consortium partners.
The TIC is testing thorium fuel in the form of pellets. The pellets are made from a dense thorium oxide ceramic matrix which contains about ten percent finely blended plutonium oxide to act as a “fissile driver.” The thorium pellets were produced at the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) nuclear fuel laboratory in Kjeller located near Oslo, Norway. Solvay supplied the thorium oxide. The Halden reactor, operated by IFE, collects data as the thorium fuel is burned. The data collected is used to verify that the thorium fuel can be safely burned in a commercial power reactor.
The first thorium fuel samples were loaded into the Halden reactor in April of 2013. The second test batch of thorium fuel was loaded into the Halden reactor in December of 2015. The third load of thorium fuel was just inserted into the Halder reactor to start the third testing phase. “This is the first time industrial-type thorium-MOX pellets have been fabricated and irradiated with a focus on commercial deployment,” said a representative of Thor Energy.
The CEO of Thor Energy said: “We have spent the last five years developing the fuel recipe and the skills to successfully produce these pellets. Through this loading of fuel in Halden, we have reached a major milestone and an important stepping stone towards commercial approval for thorium-based fuels in existing light water reactors. We believe this represents a further step in the thorium evolution which will contribute to the long-term sustainability of nuclear power in general.”
