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 idea of using thorium as a nuclear power reactor fuel has been around since the 1960s but there are no commercial thorium reactors in operation today.
Some of the potential benefits of a thorium reactor include production of tiny amount of waste with half life of thirty years, abundance and low radioactivity of thorium, cannot melt down, is not under high pressure, can burn waste from conventional power reactors, can be self-regulating, requires less cooling water than light-water reactors, and more difficult to use for nuclear weapons production than conventional reactors fuel and waste.
Some of the problems with thorium reactors include non-renewable fuel, still produces hazardous waste, can still be used to make nuclear weapons, uses complex and different technology that must be developed, could be terrorist target, conceived of as a centralized plant, competes with renewables for investment dollars, still requires highly fissile materials to act as primer, fuel can be more expensive to produce, waste is more dangerously radioactive in the short term, requires materials that can withstand temperatures higher than conventional light water reactors.
Steven Ashley, a writer for New Scientist had this to say about thorium reactors, “because nuclear power was traditionally tied up with nuclear weapons research, thorium was abandoned. Except for one test reactor that has been under construction in India since 2004, the last research into thorium reactors took place 45 years ago.” Nonetheless, “Molten salt reactors are expected to be very well suited for using thorium as a fuel. The unique fluid fuel can incorporate thorium and U-233 fluorides as part of a salt mixture, to melt at very high temperatures.”
While U.S. is not focused on researching and developing thorium power reactors, there is a startup in Utah that wants to build a thorium reactor for local utilities. India has beaches of thorium sand and a great need for more electricity. China and Russia are both researching thorium as part of their broad dedication to developing advanced nuclear technologies. Canada is working on building a thorium reactor. Researchers in the Netherlands are making progress in their development of a thorium reactor.
Researchers at the Nuclear Research and Consultancy Group (NRG) in the Netherlands are experimenting with thorium reactors. The Chairman of the Thorium MSR (molten salt reactor) Foundation posted a comment in Medium that said “On August 10, 2017, a set of concentric sealed tubes was entered into the core of the High Flux Reactor in Petten, Netherlands. In the smallest of these tubes sits an even smaller set of four graphite crucibles, containing a mixture of salts: lithium fluoride and thorium fluoride.”
The NRG is an “internationally operating nuclear service provider.” They produce commercial isotopes, research nuclear technology, consult on nuclear safety and reliability and provide radiation protection services. They are working on the Salt Irradiation Experiment (SALIENT) at their laboratory in Petten.
The post from the lab in Medium said, “SALIENT is a way to build up experience with the use of fission fuel in the form of a molten salt. That hasn’t been done for decades and we’re also doing it to train ourselves. It’s important to notice that SALIENT is not a single experiment but really a series, and we’ll build that up step by step. On the other hand, it is fundamental research, in which we look at the behavior of salt and the fission products that are formed in the salts.”
Ashley, the science writer says, “The next step is to study tough metal alloys and other materials that can survive the bombardment. Later research will examine how to deal with the waste from a molten salt thorium reactor. While safer than the long-lived products from a standard nuke, these will still need special disposal. The next step is to study tough metal alloys and other materials that can survive the bombardment.”
With abundant fossil fuels and dropping prices for renewables, it may be too late for thorium nuclear power.
I mostly write about fission power reactors because there are four hundred operational fission reactors in the world. I do talk about fusion reactors occasionally although there are no commercial nuclear fusion power reactors on Earth. Scientists have been chasing fusion power for decades but it always seemed to be forty years in the future. Recently, national governments have banded together to research fusion technology. At least half a dozen private firms are working on their own fusion reactor designs so now it appears that fusion power may be only a decade away. Recently, Nature magazine published an article about a breakthrough in fusion research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
MIT conducts fusion research with its Alcator C-Mod tokamak. This device holds the record for the highest pressure and highest magnetic field strength ever recorded in a tokamak. MIT has been working with scientists in Belgium and the U.K. Tests with the MIT Alcator C-Mod ended in 2016 but the results are still being analyzed. Researchers have found that a new type of fuel that they tested released ten times as much energy as they had previously achieved with other fuels. The experimental setup and new fuel were also tested on the Joint European Torus in Oxfordshire, U.K. and the results were verified.
Previous experiments with the Alcator C-Mod had burned a fuel that consisted of hydrogen and deuterium which is a stable isotope of hydrogen that contains a neutron in the nucleus. The most recent run of experiments used a fuel that was ninety five percent deuterium with the rest being hydrogen and helium-3 which is a stable isotope of helium that only has one neutron in the nucleus rather than two which is much more common.
In the Alcator C-Mod, a plasma of charged ions is held in magnetic confinement. Radio frequencies of electromagnetic energy from antennas outside the plasma chamber are used to heat the plasma. The frequency of the EM energy is tuned to affect the hydrogen in the mix which had represented five percent of the mixture of ions. This results in extremely high energies for the hydrogen ions. The hydrogen ions collide with the deuterium ions and this produces heat and electricity.
In the new run of experiments, helium-3 constitutes one percent of the mixture of ions. The radio frequency excitation has been retuned to heat the helium-3. This resulted in achieving higher energies for the ions than had ever been achieved with the hydrogen heating. The new energies were ten times the previous energies.
The Alcator C-Mod and the JET are able to reach temperatures and pressures that would be necessary in a fusion power generator but they are smaller than a fusion reactor that could produce more energy that is put into it. Research with the Alcator C-Mod and the JET will allow the scientists to fine tune the different parameters they are working with to find the best configurations to use when they scale up to full size functional reactors.
An MIT fusion scientist said, “These higher energy ranges are in the same range as activated fusion products. To be able to create such energetic ions in a non-activated device—not doing a huge amount of fusion—is beneficial, because we can study how ions with energies comparable to fusion reaction products behave, how well they would be confined.”
MIT Alcator C-Mod fusion reactor:
