Blog
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Geiger Readings for May 18, 2017
Ambient office = 102 nanosieverts per hourAmbient outside = 111 nanosieverts per hourSoil exposed to rain water = 106 nanosieverts per hourBartlett pear from Central Market = 135 nanosieverts per hourTap water = 126 nanosieverts per hourFilter water = 103 nanosieverts per hour -
Nuclear Reactors 281 – Financial Problems At Toshiba And Westinghouse Cast Doubt On U.K Moorside Nuclear Power Plant Plant
The Moorside Nuclear Power Station is a proposed power station to be build near Sellafield on the northwest coast of the Cumbrian state of the United Kingdom. Three AP1000 nuclear power reactors are planned to be built by NuGeneration (NuGen), the British subsidiary of Westinghouse Electric Company which is, in turn, a subsidiary of Toshiba, the Japanese company. The plan was to acquire the necessary permits and licenses by 2018 followed by site preparation by 2020. The plant was supposed to come online in 2024.
NuGen is a joint venture between Japan’s Toshiba and France’s Engie with Toshiba holding sixty percent and Engie holding forty percent. These two companies have a great deal of experience in the construction of nuclear power plants and they chose the AP1000 reactor design from Westinghouse Electric Company.
Last October, the U.K. National Grid announced plans to spend three billion four hundred million dollars to connect the planned plant in Cumbria to the nation’s electrical network. The announcement was followed by ten weeks of consultation with stakeholders.
On February 14th of this year, Toshiba said that it was withdrawing from nuclear power reactor projects outside of Japan due to serious financial problems but NuGen said on the same day Toshiba remained dedicated to the Moorside project. NuGen said that it had always planned to use an independent contractor to build the Moorside reactors.
On March 30th of this year, the AP1000 reactor design successfully completed the Generic Design Assessment process in the U.K. Unfortunately for the project, Westinghouse filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on March 29th. Toshiba has announced that it may report an operating loss of eight billion four hundred million dollars for 2016-1017 financial year which ends on March 31st.
On April 4th of this year, Engie said that it was going to exercise it right under contract to require that Toshiba purchase all of the forty percent of the shares that Engie held in NuGen.
Today NuGeneration (NuGen) has stated that it will conduct a strategic review of the project. In response, representatives for the National Grid said “NuGen has announced it is conducting a strategic review to look at its ownership and technology vendor. NuGen is confident this review will lead to an outcome that provides a more robust, stable and sustainable platform to meet its commitment to deliver the next generation of nuclear power. As a result of focusing their efforts on this review, NuGen are pausing work on their development consent order for Moorside. In light of this, we have decided to pause our work to consent NuGen’s connection and take the time to understand NuGen’s program to make sure our projects are aligned. It is important that we make sure the consents run broadly in parallel, so the Planning Inspectorate can examine the consent application for our connection knowing there is a strong need for it.”
“Despite this pause, we are confident the connection will still be ready when NuGen requires it and are continuing to work closely with them. We would like to thank people and stakeholders once again for all their efforts in responding to our previous consultation. We will let you know more about how we are developing our connection as soon as we are able.”
The National Grid proposal for connecting the Moorside plant to the nation’s electrical grid took into account the Lake District National Park. The plan called for putting lines underground and taking down pylons in the Park. The plan also included putting lines in a tunnel under Morecambe Bay. They also proposed taking down existing pylons and replacing them with fewer, taller pylons. The suspended plan called for submitting an application to the appropriate federal agency with construction starting in 2019 if the application was approved. The connection to the National Grid was supposed to take place in 2024.
Now that Toshiba and Westinghouse financial problems have called the whole power plant project into question, NuGen is going to review various options for moving forward with the project. They admit that it is critical that any new plans also be acceptable to all the stakeholders involved in the project.
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Geiger Readings for May 17, 2017
Ambient office = 76 nanosieverts per hourAmbient outside = 130 nanosieverts per hourSoil exposed to rain water = 118 nanosieverts per hourAvocado from Central Market = 152 nanosieverts per hourTap water = 81 nanosieverts per hourFilter water = 65 nanosieverts per hour -
Nuclear Reactors 280 – Tomsk Polytechnic University in Russia Is Developing An Improved Coating For Zirconium Nuclear Fuel Rods
Physicists at the Department of General Physics of Tomsk Polytechnic University (TPU) in Tomsk, Russia are working on improving the coatings on nuclear fuel rods. TPU was founded in 1896 and it was the first technical university established east of the Ural Mountains. TPU currently has twenty two thousand students. During its existence, TPU has graduated over one hundred thousand technical specialists.
Pellets of uranium fuel are inserted into tubes referred to as rods which are then combined into assemblies for insertion into the cores of nuclear reactors. The rods are made of a special zirconium alloy. Under the conditions in the reactor core, the interaction of water and zirconium at high temperatures generates hydrogen. The hydrogen accumulates in the walls of the fuel rods which results in a degradation of mechanical properties which can ultimately cause the rods to disintegrate.
As the temperature of the water in the reactor core increases, the production of hydrogen increases. At Fukushima, the flooding of pumping equipment raised the core temperature to over twelve hundred degrees Centigrade. The result was a rapid buildup of hydrogen which then exploded.
The team at TPU is developing a new coating of titanium nitride for nuclear fuel rods. The new coating will help prevent the generation of hydrogen. One of the researchers says that “During tests, titanium nitride has proved itself with high hardness, wear resistance, heat resistance and inertia. We also found that it protects well from hydrogen penetration into the material, what is critical for nuclear energy. The coatings can reduce hydrogen penetration in zirconium alloy.”
The titanium nitride is applied to the nuclear fuel rods with two different techniques. The first technique is called magnetron sputtering. A gas is injected into a chamber which contains a target. The interaction of the gas and the target releases ions into the chamber which are attracted to and deposited on the surface of the fuel rods. The second technique is called vacuum arc deposition. In this technique, a material is evaporated in a vacuum chamber. The vapor deposits on the fuel rods. These two techniques yield a uniform layer of titanium nitride that is only two microns thick. (A micron is one millionth of a meter.)
The research team says that “One of the applications of the elaborating titanium nitride coatings is next-generation reactors and thermal nuclear reactors where hydrogen-impermeable coatings are a pressing issue. In such future reactors, temperatures are supposed to increase up to 400-450 °C to improve fuel burn-up efficiency. Consequently, hydrogenation of fuel rods will be here much faster. Our coatings are able to prevent it.”
Hydrogen buildup and the risk of explosions is a serious problem for operators of nuclear power reactors. Considering that the next generation of reactors will operate at higher temperatures than the currently popular reactor types, it is imperative that solutions to hydrogen build up such as the work at TPU be found as quickly as possible.
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Geiger Readings for May 16, 2017
Ambient office = 84 nanosieverts per hourAmbient outside = 77 nanosieverts per hourSoil exposed to rain water = 78 nanosieverts per hourOrange bell pepper from Central Market = 112 nanosieverts per hourTap water = 97 nanosieverts per hourFilter water = 91 nanosieverts per hour -
Nuclear Weapons 278 – Underwater Nuclear Detonations Would Not Be An Effective Use Of Nuclear Bombs
It has been suggested that a nuclear warhead could be smuggled into a harbor and detonated to cause a destructive tsunami. There have been reports that Russia may have planted nuclear warheads on the bottom of the ocean off the coast of the U.S. There have also been recent stories that claim that Russia is perfecting underwater swift stealth drones that could carry nuclear warheads into U.S. harbors undetected. What are the realities of such threats? Gregg Sprigs, a nuclear-weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said “It would be a stupid waste of a perfectly good nuclear weapon.”
Underwater tests of nuclear bombs were conducted by the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s. The bombs detonated were in the fifteen kiloton range, relatively small by today’s standards. Still, the fireballs generated by the explosions sent out powerful shockwaves and threw seawater more than a mile into the air. Warships had been placed near the explosion to measure their destructive power. Some of the closest ships were totally vaporized and others were quickly sunk in the turbulence. Those further away from the explosions had their hulls cracked, engines crippled and sustained other serious damage. Small tsunamis flooded inland areas of nearby islands.
Spriggs said that “the energy in a large nuclear weapon is but a drop in the bucket compared to the energy of a [naturally]-occurring tsunami. So, any tsunami created by a nuclear weapon couldn’t be very large.” As an example, a 2011 earthquake in Japan generated a tsunami that was equivalent to almost ten million megatons of TNT which is millions of times greater than the nuclear bombs and warheads in the world’s nuclear arsenals. Spriggs went on to say that “because of the small solid angle that would subtended by a nuclear-induced tsunami (in the direction of the shoreline), most of the energy would be wasted going back out to sea.”
In reality, an enemy intent on inflicting maximum damage on an enemy’s cities would get a lot more “bang for the buck” by simply dropping a nuclear bomb on an enemy city rather than trying to drown it by detonating an offshore underwater explosion. According to Spriggs “if they dropped a 10 megaton nuclear weapon directly over a city, they could kill millions of people as opposed to a small nuclear-induced tsunami that may, at best, kill only a few thousand people that may be within a few thousand yards of the beach.”
So if the idea of using nuclear weapons underwater near an enemy’s port cities is so ridiculous, how did it get into circulation in the world media? This last February, an opinion piece written by Viktor Baranetz, a former spokesman for the Russian Defense Ministry, was published in Komsomolskaya Pravda, a Russian tabloid. Baranetz was responding to a statement by U.S. President Donald Trump to the effect that Trump wanted to increase the U.S. defense budget by almost ten percent from six hundred billion dollars to six hundred and fifty four billion dollars. Baranetz said that this amounted to almost ten times what Russia was spending annually on defense.
Baranetz stated that Russia had found a variety of ways to counter the U.S. military buildup that did not cost nearly as much. One of the “asymmetrical” responses that Baranetz mentioned was the “seeding” of unmanned nuclear “mole” missiles along the U.S. coastline that would lie there quietly until needed. British tabloids began publishing articles based on a translation of the Baranetz in March. By late April, some of these stories mentioned the idea that the Russian “mole” submarines could launch nuclear torpedoes which could be detonated to cause tsunamis. Refutations, including by Baranetz himself, immediately began appearing to counter these claims.
Baranetz went on to clarify his report on the “Status-6” Russian project to station unmanned nuclear submarines off the coast of the U.S. and other potential enemies. The task of the unmanned submarines would be to use nuclear torpedoes and nuclear missiles to wreck havoc on U.S. ports and create large areas of radioactive contamination. There was no mention of any intent to trigger tsunamis with underwater detonations.
