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 Two of Two Parts (Please read Part One first)
In June of this year, LANL shipped unstable, radioactive plutonium to two other government owned laboratories. Instead of shipping the plutonium by truck as required by federal regulations, LANL shipped the plutonium via FedEx air freight. When first reporting on the incident, LANL staff told investigators that it had decided to ship the plutonium by air freight because the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California had an “urgent” need for the material. When questioned, the LLNL staff rejected the claim of the LANL and said that they had never claimed an urgent need in requesting the materials. This incident at the LANL was condemned by officials at the National Nuclear Security Administration in Washington, DC when it was discovered. The Department of Energy ordered that all shipments out of the LANL be halted for three weeks.
In the past three months, there have been three other shipping problems at nuclear contractors. Last May, the LANL sent highly acidic waste that was improperly labeled to a Colorado Disposal Site. This lapse was reported the New Mexico Department of the Environment. Also last May, the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee did not label a shipment of dangerous radioactive materials. The destination of the shipment was not revealed in the report of the incident. In June, the Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas shipped an “unsafe” quantity of a highly explosive compound to an unnamed location.
The recently released report details problems with twenty five shipments of hazardous materials within the network of nuclear weapons labs in the past five years. In thirteen cases, the contents of the shipments were plutonium, uranium or other radioactive isotopes. Out of the twenty five cases, eleven of them either originated at the LANL or passed through the LANL. In some cases, the packages were shipped to waste dumps for toxic waste and violated the regulations with respect to what types of waste could be disposed of in those dumps.
In case of accidents and emergencies, responders need to know the contents of these package, especially if they contain hazardous radioactive materials. The responders need to know what they are dealing with in order to protect the public and the environment. Improper labeling is an unacceptable threat to the responders and the public.
Documents obtained from the National Nuclear Security Administration show that with regard to the twenty five incidents in the report, fines were levied in only three cases. In the other twenty two cases, although there were “enforcement actions” following the shipping mistakes, no fines were levied.
Beyond the problems at the nuclear contractors lies the problem with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Too often, mistakes by the contractors are ignored or receive mild punishment. With all the billions of dollars that flow in into nuclear weapons research and development for the U.S. nuclear arsenal, it is criminal that failure to comply with regulations for the proper handling of very dangerous nuclear materials is not rigorously monitored and punished.
Part One of Two Parts
One big problem with nuclear power that I have repeatedly mentioned is the fact that many government contractors involved with nuclear weapons research and production do not always follow the rule for dealing with nuclear materials. To make matters worse, they often try to hide their mistakes and lie about mistakes that are discovered by authorities. This has been a problem since the beginning of the nuclear age and it continues today.
A new study shows that in the last five years there have been twenty five cases where nuclear weapons contractor have been guilty of either failing to package or ship hazardous materials properly including plutonium. Often, the packages containing hazardous materials were not properly labeled with respect to the nature and danger of the contents. This meant that the receivers of the packages did not take the proper precautions to deal with a threat to them and the public. Some of these incidents were uncovered by inspector during the transit of the packages. Other times, the nature of the contents of packages were discovered when the packages were opened. In some cases, reception areas wound up being contaminated. Penalties were either light or non-existent.
Los Alamos National Laboratory is government owned but privately run. It is about fifty miles north of Albuquerque. LANL is the biggest lab in the network of U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories and is critical in the maintenance of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The LANL has been in the news lately because of many problems with the operation of the lab. Mistakes at the LANL even forced the temporary closure of the New Mexico Waste Isolation Processing Plant where nuclear weapons-related wastes are disposed of.
In 2012, the LANL sent a package containing plutonium to a lab at the University of New Mexico. The package had no labeling that would indicate that it contained a dangerous radioactive material. The University lab was expecting to receive non-radioactive metal panels that were inert versions of radioactive panels that the lab used to test radiation detectors. The package containing the plutonium was opened at the lab without the necessary precautions because there was no warning label and the contents were assumed to be free of radioactivity.
One of the panels was bent when it was unpacked. Radioactive particles were released and the lab was contaminated. The lab was cleaned up and decontaminated within a few days, but it took more than a year for the debris to be retrieved for disposal by the LANL. A representative of the University said that the final disposition of the debris took so long because of “the high radio-toxicity of the radionuclide.”
In the fall of 2014, the contractors who operate the Nevada National Security Site mistakenly sent radioactive materials with no warning label to one of their own satellite offices at the LANL. That office did not have a radiation control expert with the necessary training to deal with the material in the package.
In December of last year, a tank of tritium gas was shipped from the Savannah River National Laboratory to the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico but should have been shipped to the Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque.
Please read Part Two
Of all subatomic particles, the neutrino is the least understood. It is the second most abundant particle in the universe but it has minimal interaction with the particles in normal matter. Neutrinos come in three varieties known as the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino and the tau neutrino. To make matter more complex and confusing, each of these three types can change into another type in a process called neutrino oscillation. There are hints in nuclear experiments that there may be a forth type called a sterile neutrino that has even less interaction with normal matter. Some recent experiments have raised doubts that such sterile neutrinos exist, but other recent experiments seem to confirm their existence.
Experiments at nuclear reactors and particle accelerators have verified that neutrinos have the ability to switch types in neutrino oscillation. An experiment at the Los Alamos National Laboratory reveals that there were extra electron antineutrinos. In the current theory of particle physics, every particle should have an anti-particle twin that behaves in the same way. If a particle and its anti-particle collide, they will annihilate each other. Another experiment also showed extra particles.
One possible explanation for the extra electron neutrinos is that there might be a forth type of neutrino which was named the sterile neutrino. This type cannot be detected by the experimental apparatus but the other three known types can change into this type. There are four fundamental forces in nature that govern particle interaction; gravity, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force and the strong nuclear force in order of the decreasing distance at which interaction can take place. The three known types of neutrinos interact with the particles of normal matter via the weak nuclear force which can be detected in current experiments and the force of gravity which cannot. It is theorized that sterile neutrinos interact with other particles of matter via gravity alone which places their interactions beyond current experimental detection.
At the Daya Bay nuclear power plant in China, near Hong Kong, neutrino detectors have been set up around the nuclear reactor to study neutrinos being ejected. The detectors contain giant pools of a special liquid that generates a burst of light when a neutrino passes through. The light bursts are amplified and signals are generated by the detectors. This experimental setup has shown something that is being referred to as the “reactor anomaly.” The detectors are only reporting ninety-four percent of the neutrinos predicted by theory. A possible explanation is that after the reactor spits out one of the three verified types of neutrinos, that neutrino changes into a sterile neutrino via the oscillation process before reaching the detector. The detection of the neutrinos in this experiment relies on the weak nuclear force and so it would not be able to see any sterile neutrino.
New data from the detector array in April now suggest that sterile neutrinos might not be the reason for the six percent shortage of neutrinos in the earlier experiments. The researchers found that as the nuclear fuel burned and changed in composition over time, the neutrino shortage also changes. The detectors may be misreporting the neutrinos being generated by uranium-235, the amount of which changes as the fuel burns. Perhaps sterile neutrinos are not involved in the anomaly.
Further analysis of the new data reduces the evidence for sterile neutrinos but does not eliminated it altogether. A study of data from the nuclear power industry and other sources about experiments in the past showed that while they did not show a neutrino shortfall of six percent, they still showed missing neutrinos and those observations were not related a change in fuel composition.
A new experiment called PROSPECT is being developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory which will utilize pure uranium-235 instead of a mixture of isotopes such as present experiment at Daya Bay. One major change in the experimental set up is that the much smaller reactor at Oak Ridge is only about twenty feet from the detectors as opposed to a gap of hundreds of feet between the reactor and detectors at Daya Bay.
This research into the generation and transformation of neutrinos is important to the nuclear industry. Neutrinos are generated by beta decay in nuclear fission. This beta decay produces a lot of the heat generated in a nuclear reactor. If neutrinos are not being properly accounted for in the operation of a nuclear reactor, then the calculations of the heat being generated by the fission process may not be correct. If this is the case, it could mean that there might be problems with current nuclear reactor safety provisions.
