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.
The global nuclear club is a small one. There are nine countries that have nuclear weapons. Over one hundred and twenty other nations have recently endorsed an international treaty to ban all nuclear weapons. There is great concern that other nations such as Iran may be attempting to create nuclear weapon and the international community put great pressure on Iran to abandon any ambitions for a nuclear arsenal. It will be interesting to see how the world responds to the idea of the entry of another nation into the nuclear weapons club.
Several strategic and defense policy analysts in Australia have been engaging in a debate over whether or not Australia should acquire nuclear weapons. They are concerned about the Chinese nuclear capabilities, motives and intentions. An opinion piece was recently published in the Australian in which it was suggested that it would be wise for Australia to invest in technologies that would shorten the time required to produce nuclear weapons because of strategic uncertainty over Australian security. The existence of North Korean nuclear weapons and their belligerence has reduced Australian confidence in the protection afforded by the extended U.S. nuclear umbrella.
A prominent Australian analyst named Hugh White has called for a “recalibration” of Australia’s position with respect to the struggle between China and the U.S. for strategic control of Southeast Asia. Another analyst named Andrew Davis said that White was reluctant to go where the logic was leading. Davis believes that Australia needs nuclear weapons to insure its own safety. White denied that he was even implicitly advocating for an Australian nuclear weapons program.
White is uncertain about what role nuclear weapons should play in the geopolitics of Southeast Asia. He believes that Australia needs to make the “right” decisions about conventional military capabilities first. He is concerned about the tradeoffs that would have to be made between the questionable security benefits afforded by nuclear weapons and the risks associated with having nuclear weapons.
On the negative side, the colossal destructiveness of nuclear weapons puts them in their own category and basically makes them unusable. It is more likely that an accident will launch a nuclear weapon than a deliberate action. It is also unlikely that the fortunate lack of accidental detonation of nuclear weapons so far will continue indefinitely.
Australia would not want nuclear weapons because they were interested in attacking another country. They would only be acquired as a deterrent against use of nuclear weapons against them. But it would take enormous resources from the Australian budget to develop enough nuclear weapons and delivery systems to match the few hundred nuclear weapons of China.
It has been claimed that first use of nuclear weapons during World War II against Japan convinced the Japanese to surrender due to the threat of being attacked with nuclear bombs again. On the other hand, many analysts say that it was actually the fear that the Russians would enter the war in the Pacific that convinced the Japanese to surrender, not potential nuclear attack.
The use of the threat of nuclear weapons to intimidate non-nuclear nations has not been successful so far. The stigma associated with the use of nuclear weapons is so strong that nuclear armed nations have accepted defeat at the hands of non-nuclear nations in the past. Any confrontation between nuclear armed nations could easily escalate into an all out nuclear war which could end human civilization.
If Australia decided to develop nuclear weapons that could well lead to the end of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and expansion of the nuclear weapons club which would increase the odds of the use of nuclear weapons. This possibility is far more important to consider than the dubious “security” of having nuclear weapons. Strong advocacy and involvement in global nuclear weapons ban treaties would serve Australian security much better than developing their own nuclear weapons.
I have blogged before about critical radioactive isotopes used in medical diagnosis and procedures. One of the most important is molybdenum-99. It decays to technetium-99 which has a short halflife and other isotopes. Technetium-99 is injected into patients as a radiotracer for medical imaging of tumors.
Most of the Mo-99 used in the U.S. is created by irradiating enriched uranium originally made for nuclear weapons. The Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration ships the enriched uranium to five processing plants located in Australia, Canada, Europe and South Africa. Private companies pay for irradiation services, forward the isotopes to the processing plants and then ship the Mo-99 produced back to the U.S.
One big problem with Mo-99 is that it only has a 66 hour half-life. There are routine travel delays that can slow down international shipments. Some pilots on some airlines can refuse to carry radioactive materials. Any problems at the reactors can slow down production which can interfere with shipping schedules. And speaking of problems with the reactors, some of which are over fifty years old, often have to shut down for repairs. Canada recently cancelled production of Mo-99 at their Chalk River, Ontario reactor in 2016 because it would have cost seventy million dollars to repair the old reactor.
All these problems with production and shipping lead to shortages. When two reactors had to be shut down in 2009, there were serious Mo-99 shortages that lasted two years. Doctors had to resort to the use of more expensive and toxic imaging agents. The shutting down of the Chalk River reactor will likely lead to severe shortages of Mo-9.
Taking these problems into account, the Obama administration in the U.S. passed legislation in 2013 to promote the production of Mo-99. A few companies have signed on to the program and are getting millions of dollars to produce Mo-99 in the U.S. Concern about nuclear proliferation is encouraging participating companies to find a way to make Mo-99 without the use of enriched uranium.
NorthStar Medical Radioisotopes in Beloit, Wisconsin has received fifty million dollars to develop a safe process for making Mo-99. SHINE Medical Technologies in Janesville, Wisconsin got twenty-five million dollars from the Department of Energy to help them build a one hundred million dollar facility. They have designed eight particle accelerators for the facility. With approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, they will be able to proceed as soon as they can raise addition funds and satisfy a bunch of regulation. Originally, the company said that they could be producing Mo-99 by 2015 but now they say that they will be in production by 2020. The CEO of the company believes that their plans will succeed. He said that “If we don’t have significant production soon, we will continue to export highly enriched uranium. And the National Nuclear Security Administration will have failed their mission.”
The demand for Mo-99 will only increase. More of the old reactors will inevitably be retired. If a new production method is not found, there could be very serious shortages that will threaten peoples’ lives.
Recently I posted about the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review. This review is held every eight years to reexamine the U.S. policy with respect to the use of nuclear weapons. There is a draft of the NPR for 2018 but it has not been approved yet by the President. The current discussion of the U.S. nuclear policy is based on the draft.
The draft of the NPR says, “We must look reality in the eye and see the world as it is, not as we wish it to be. The NPR realigns our nuclear policy with a realistic assessment of the threats we face today and the uncertainties regarding the future security environment.”
One of President Obama’s top nuclear advisors said that the new NPR “repeats the essential elements of Obama declaratory policy word for word” — including its declaration that the United States would “only consider the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners.”
New text has been added to the NPR to expand the definition of “extreme circumstances.” American presidents have threated to be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict only in the event of very dire circumstances such as an attack on the U.S. with biological weapons. The draft NPR adds to the type of non-nuclear attacks that might cause the U.S. to consider using nuclear weapons in retaliation.
The new NPR says that the U.S. might use nuclear weapons in response to a non-nuclear cyberattack on critical infrastructure like the national power grid or the national communications system. Cyberattacks could cripple or destroy some of these important systems. Some senior government officials have commented that cyberattacks against the U.S. definitely qualify as situations that might call for the use of U.S. nuclear weapons.
The NPR draft says, that those “circumstances could include significant non-nuclear strategic attacks. Such as “attacks on the U.S., allied, or partner civilian population or infrastructure, and attacks on U.S. or allied nuclear forces, their command and control, or warning and attack assessment capabilities.”
The draft NPR does not exactly say that a big cyberattack could be one of the “extreme circumstances” that could trigger the use of nuclear weapons. However, a cyberattack would be a good way for an enemy to crash the power grid and/or the communication networks, including the Internet.
A senior National Security Council and State Department official from President George W. Bush’s administration said, “In 2001, we struggled with how to establish deterrence for terrorism because terrorists don’t have populations or territory to hold at risk. So if cyber can cause physical malfunction of major infrastructure resulting in deaths, then the Pentagon has now found a way to establish a deterrent dynamic.”
The NPR mentions concerns about expanding threats in space and cyberspace. The current command and control systems for nuclear weapons are vulnerable. It is possible that a cyberattack could disable or take control of such nuclear weapons as the Minuteman missiles in silos in the Midwest.
While the Pentagon may think that threatening nuclear war in retaliation is a good way to discourage cyberattacks, I think that it is a bad policy. We definitely need to beef up our security for electronic systems which is certainly feasible. We have been working on our own offensive cybersystems which could be used to retaliate against cyberattack. Nuclear retaliation against a real or perceived enemy armed with nuclear weapons could trigger an all out nuclear war.
To abuse a metaphor, if a neighbor broke in and shut down your furnace and your phones, you could set fire to his house. That would probably results in your house catching fire too. This leaves you both homeless.
It has been predicted that the detonation of even a few nuclear warheads could have devastating consequences not just of the victim of the attack but also for other countries that have nothing to do with the conflict. Even if we escaped a full nuclear war, severe global damage and a lot of blood would be on our hands.
