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 Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI) in Daejeon, South Korea was established in 1959. It is the only professional research-oriented institute for nuclear power in South Korea, In 1995 KAERI designed and constructed the nation’s first multipurpose research reactor, HANARO based on the Canadian MAPLE design. Among other tasks, KAERI works on the development of advanced nuclear fuels.
Conventional nuclear fuel is made from uranium. Uranium-235 is enriched from its natural concentration of about .71 percent of uranium ore to 3.5 to 4.5 percent. It is processed into uranium dioxide and then fired in an oven to create a hard ceramic. The ceramic is ground into powder and made into pellets of uniform size which are then inserted into tubes. The tubes are bundled into assemblies to insert into the reactor core.
Test reactors have utilized a wide variety of fuels with a large range of enrichments. Early test reactors used fuels enriched to more than seventy percent U-235. Concerns over the proliferation of nuclear weapons led to a movement to reduce the level of enrichment used in test reactors. It was concluded that twenty percent enrichment was sufficient for test purposes and was low enough to substantially reduce the risk of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Most test reactors underwent core conversion to use fuels that were enriched less than twenty percent under the Reduced Enrichment for Research and Test Reactor (RERTR) program developed by the U.S. Department of Energy.
The U.S. Argonne National Laboratory held a workshop to discuss the requirements for the qualification of U-Mo alloy fuel for use in test reactors on January 17-18, 2000. Thirty-one participants representing 21 reactors, fuel developers, fuel fabricators, and fuel reprocessors in 11 countries took part in the workshop. The participants agreed that the qualification plans of the U.S. RERTR program and the French U-Mo fuel development program were valid.
KAERI has created an alloy of uranium and molybdenum that has twice the density of uranium per unit volume as conventional uranium dioxide ceramic pellets. Tests were conducted with a molybdenum content between four percent and seven percent. It was found that a molybdenum content of at least six percent yielded a fuel with the desired characteristics. This new alloy provides for higher output and improved combustion. This means that the same amount of uranium provides more power than conventional fuels. Reactors can burn the new U-Mo fuel for fifty percent longer than the U-O fuel before needing to be refueled.
Samples of the new fuel have been sent to the Idaho National Laboratory for testing in their ATR research reactor. The fuel tests will continue until the end of 2017. If all goes well, the next phase will consist of the new fuel being tested Korea’s new research reactor under construction in Busan City. If all the tests return the expected results, Korea intends to manufacture and export the new U-Mo fuel.
The U.N. is currently hosting meetings of one hundred and thirty nations on the issue of banning all nuclear weapons worldwide. Unfortunately, the nine nations with that actually have nuclear weapons voted against holding the meetings. The United States and Russia have both said that they are interested in reducing the number of nuclear weapons in their arsenals but both have committed to spending hundreds of billions of dollars goes arsenals in the coming years. Due to deteriorating relationships between nuclear-armed powers, the bulletin of atomic scientists has moved its doomsday clock up to a little over two minutes before midnight which represents nuclear war. But in addition to the danger of nuclear war, there is also the danger of an accidental detonation of a nuclear device. The United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research has issued a new report highlighting the dangers of the accidental or deliberate use of nuclear weapons.
The new report says that “Nuclear deterrence works—up until the time it will prove not to work. The risk is inherent and, when luck runs out, the results will be catastrophic. The more arms produced, particularly in countries with unstable societies, the more potential exists for terrorist acquisition and use of nuclear weapons.”
North Korea probably has about a dozen nuclear warheads and has been belligerently threatening to attack its neighbors for years. North Korea has to develop a miniature warhead suitable for mounting on ICBM. They also need to develop and test ICBMs capable of caring the warheads. It is estimated that this will happen within the next 2 to 4 years. With the recent increase in threatening language from the United States president, the danger that the unstable dictator in North Korea will eventually detonate one of his nuclear bombs in an attack against a neighbor has been increasing.
There are strained relations between Pakistan and India and they have fought three wars since 1949. Both have over 100 large nuclear warheads and the means to deliver them. Terrorist attacks carried out in India by groups who crossed the border from Pakistan have inflamed the situation between the two countries. India has threatened to chase terrorists across the border into Pakistan. Pakistan has tactical nuclear weapons which it has dispatched to its border with India. It has threatened to use them if India invades.
For years Russia has been flying nuclear-capable bombers in an out of the airspace of other nations without notification or permission. They have sailed nuclear submarines in and out of the territorial waters of other countries without notification or permission. They have brag about their arsenal of tactical nuclear devices and said they would not hesitate to use them if they were losing a conventional ground war with NATO in Eastern Europe. Since the seizure by Russia of the Crimea from Ukraine several years ago, the relationship between the US and Russia has deteriorated significantly. Considering that both these countries have thousands of warheads pointed at each other ready to launch is of great concern.
In the past decades, there been several close calls where a nuclear war was almost started by accident. There have also been losses of nuclear weapons that were being transported by plane. In the U.S., the condition of missile silos and launch systems has been deteriorating and one missile was almost accidentally launched. An accidental launch could trigger a nuclear war.
In addition to these possibilities of deliberate or accidental nuclear war, there is great concern that new technical capabilities referred to as cyber warfare might permit hostile states or terrorist groups to launch or interfere with the test of the nuclear weapons of another nation. Interference with early warning systems and launch systems could lead to unintended launches.
No matter how much nuclear-armed nations claim that their arsenals are safe from accidental launch or deliberate interference, the truth is that the whole world is in danger from these nuclear arsenals and the only real solution to the problem is the elimination of nuclear weapons however difficult that may be.
In a whistle-blower case, a company that supplied rebar to the government for construction of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication and Reactor Irradiation Services facility in Aiken, South Carolina, has agreed to pay $4.6 million to a settle a lawsuit alleging that it failed to provide the quality controls for the rebar stipulated in the contract. Nuclearstreet.com
I have blogged several times about the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. This plant takes waste from the U.S. nuclear weapons programs and it was temporarily shut down a few years ago by a serious accident involving waste shipped from the Los Alamos National Laboratories. The WIPP does not take liquid waste and the LANL adds an absorbent material to barrels of liquid waste to solidify the liquid. The accident was caused by a change to the absorbent material from an inorganic clay-based material to an organic material based on wheat. A chemical reaction between the waste materials in the barrel and the new absorbent generated hydrogen gas which built up and ultimately ruptured the barrel. Radioactive material escaped and got out into the environment because the air filtration system malfunctioned. There are still about a hundred barrels of the problematic waste stored at the WIPP.
The LANL was created during World War II to help design nuclear weapons as part of the Manhattan project. It is near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The LANL focused on the design of the first generation of U.S. nuclear bombs while the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Argonne National Laboratory worked on generating uranium and plutonium for bomb construction. During the Cold War, the LANL continued to work on the design of many nuclear weapons. After the end of the Cold War, the LANL changed its focus to civilian projects involving nuclear technology. Today, the LANL “is one of the largest science and technology institutions in the world. It conducts multidisciplinary research in fields such as national security, space exploration, nuclear fusion, renewable energy, medicine, nanotechnology, and supercomputing.” However, it is still hosting large amounts of hazardous nuclear waste left over from weapons development carried out for decades during the Cold War.
The Material Disposal Area G at the LANL covers sixty-three acres. Buried three feet below the ground, there are almost forty pits and two hundred shafts that hold up to ten million cubic feet of nuclear waste. On the surface, there are large white tents that contain drums of waste waiting to be shipped to the WIPP. It was one of these barrels that exploded at the WIPP and shut it down for three years. It has cost over two billion dollars to reopen WIPP. There are still about sixty drums of the waste with the organic absorbent that still have to be disposed of. In the meantime, wildfires are a threat to the barrels storage area.
Prior to the opening of WIPP in 1999, transuranic wastes from weapons production such as soil, gloves, equipment and materials contaminated by plutonium were stored in Area G. Although decades of work and billions of dollars on the cleanup of over two thousand contaminated areas at LANL including Area G, only about half of the work has been accomplished. Most of the sites have been investigated and ninety percent of the four thousand barrels of waste have been removed from the LANL. However, most of the buried waste in Area G will probably be left there. LANL staff say that the federal and state government do not require that the waste be dug up and disposed of elsewhere.
I have written extensively about the terrible contamination and slow cleanup of the nuclear weapons waste at Hanford. Many of the same problems plague the LANL site. These sites must be cleaned up by the federal government as soon as possible before other accidents spread radioactively contaminated materials.
Toshiba Corp said today it will establish its four in-house companies as wholly-owned subsidiaries and aim to “to maximise the value of each business”. As of 1 October, it will split off its Energy Systems & Solutions Company, and the Nuclear Energy Systems & Solutions Division, and transfer them to a newly established company. World-nuclear-news.org
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) this month launched a project to enhance regulatory frameworks for nuclear security in African countries. World-nuclear-news.org
