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 Soviet Union had a terrible record for nuclear pollution and public transparency. The Kyshtym disaster at Mayak in the nuclear weapons facility in 1957 was hushed up for decades. The disaster at Chernobyl in Ukraine in 1986 was not publicly admitted until ten years after the accident. The area around Murmansk, the arctic port of the Soviet fleet, is polluted with Cold War ship reactors and creation of nuclear weapons. The extent of the damage to the environment and public health has been hidden for decades. Now, a recently discovered classified report in Soviet Archives has surfaced that show once again how secretive the Soviets were about major nuclear pollution from the test of nuclear warheads.
The Soviet Union conducted many nuclear test detonations in Kazakhstan at Semipalatinsk in the 1950s and 1960s. In August of 1956, the fallout from a nuclear test at Semipalatinsk drifted over the Kazakh city of Ust-Kamenogorsk. Six hundred people wound up in the hospital with serious radiation poisoning. Up until now, there has been little publicly available information about the aftermath of the 1956 nuclear test.
This year, a secret report about the incident was found in the Institute of Radiation Medicine and Ecology (IRME) archives in Semey, Kazakhstan. A team of scientists from the Institute of Biophysics in Moscow was sent to Kazakhstan to study the impact of the fallout from the nuclear test on the area around Semipalatinsk. The report was sent to the journal New Scientist which made the contents of the report public.
The team of scientists studied the impact of the test on the surrounding region and then tracked the impact of further tests conducted in the same area. The results of their investigation were not made available to the people living in the region who were being affected by the tests. The amount of radiation released by the bomb tests was about four times as much radiation as was released by the Chernobyl disaster. The report “details how Moscow researchers on three expeditions to Ust-Kamenogorsk found widespread and persistent radioactive contamination of soil and food both there and across the towns and villages of eastern Kazakhstan.”
A month after the first test that was studied, the level of radiation in the surrounding area was one hundred times what was considered to be the “safe” level. The scientists also surveyed villages further from the area where the test was conducted and found that radioactive materials that were a threat to human health and the environment continued to fall for years as more tests were conducted. A special clinic was created by Moscow to monitor public health across the region affected by the fallout. Over one hundred thousand people who were affected by fallout were catalogued.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the clinic became the IRME. Many of the records from the clinic were sent to Moscow and disappeared. Other records were just destroyed. The damage to human health and the environment from the fallout from the tests in Semipalatinsk will never be fully known but this newly revealed report does give us a glimpse into the terrible price paid by the inhabitants of the region as the Soviet Union developed its nuclear arsenal.
Semipalatinsk nuclear test zone (in orange) in Kazakhstan:
Russia has for months been testing a giant nuclear weapons delivery system that can carry 10 heavyweight warheads—enough power to wipe out Texas or France. But the RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile known in Russia as “Satan 2” has been delayed yet again, suggesting Moscow is having a harder time than expected updating its nuclear arsenal. newsweek.com
Weapons physicist Greg Sprigg has spent five years declassifying, digitizing and reanalyzing film of the U.S.’s 210 open air nuclear detonations smithsonianmag.com
Europe is worried about the threat of Russian aggression. The seizure of the Crimea a few years ago by Russia and the continued fomenting of rebellion in eastern Ukraine are making other countries that border Russia nervous. Russia has been holding major military exercises on its Western border and bragging about how quickly they could take the Baltic states if they wanted to. NATO was created to counter Russian aggression after World War II. Now Russia says that if it got into a land war with NATO in eastern Europe and was losing with conventional weapons, it might resort to its stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons to even the odds.
In the past few years, Russia has been flying nuclear-capable bombers into European countries airspaces without notification or permission. It has been sailing nuclear submarines into other countries territorial waters without notification or permission. Russia has been announcing to the world its intentions to upgrade its nuclear forces. It has even threatened to make non-NATO European nations targets for nuclear missiles if they allow NATO to install radar systems on their territory.
The northeast border of Sweden is only a little over a hundred miles from Russia. The Swedish Institute of International Affairs says that Russia is “using fake news, false documents and disinformation as part of a coordinated campaign to influence public opinion and decision making in the Scandinavian country.” They say that Sweden has been the target of “a wide array of active measures” aimed at “hampering its ability to generate public support in pursuing its policies”. The report from the Institute went on to say that “we are able to establish intent, dominant narratives, behavioral patterns and strategic goals, where the close correlation between Russian public diplomacy and active measures suggest the operation of a coordinated campaign.” The report claims that the main goal of these activities is to keep Sweden out of the NATO and to diminish the role of NATO in the Baltic Region.
The Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency has just ordered a survey of three hundred and fifty civilian bunkers on the Baltic Sea Island of Gotland between Sweden and Latvia. Sweden has troops stationed permanently on the island. The shelters are designed to provide protection from nuclear detonations as well as chemical and biological attacks. The shelters on Gotland can only hold thirty-five thousand people although the population of Gotland is sixty thousand. The survey should be done by the end of this year.
Sweden created sixty-five thousand shelters during the Cold War to protect Swedish citizens from the possibility of nuclear war. Now it is building up its military because of the Russian seizure of Crimea. Although Russia sees NATO as its principle adversary in Europe, Sweden, which is not a member of NATO, is concerned about Russian activities and statements. They have sharply increased military spending and the central government has urged local governments to review and improve their civil defenses infrastructure and procedures in preparation for a possible future war. Recently, Sweden reintroduced a military draft for both men and women. The draft was attributed to a “deteriorating security environment in Europe generally and specifically around Sweden.
