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.
One big worry about space exploration is that hostile nations will deploy devastating weapons in space. The major international space treaty currently prohibits placing any weapons in orbit or on bodies is space such as asteroids, moons, etc. Recently the U.S. made a small change in the wording of legislation for the military that has big implications for the future deployment of weapons in space.
The U.S. depends on its arsenal of nuclear weapons as a deterrent to attacks from other nations with advanced nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Missile defense systems have usually been considered a potentially destabilizing influence because if a nuclear-armed nation believed that it could block a counter attack from a nuclear-armed enemy, it might to tempted to consider a first strike nuclear action.
The U.S. policy for years has been for a limited homeland missile defense system that would be able to stop an attack from a nation with limited nuclear capability such as North Korea or Iran. The term “limited” is used in legislation governing the U.S. military to explicitly calm concerns by major nuclear powers such as Russia and China that it would ever launch a first strike in the belief that it could thwart their counter attack.
Now, bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress have quietly passed legislation regarding the national missile defense system that removes that word, “limited.” There has been virtually no national press coverage of this change and there was no public discussion. There is also a provision in the law that orders the Pentagon to start researching, developing and testing space-based systems for missile defense.
It is estimated that the cost of even a “bare-bones” space-based missile defense system would be at least two hundred billion to install with hundreds of billions of dollars in operating costs after deployment.
Now members of both national parties are beginning to react to this major change in U.S. policy. On the one hand, proponents of a space-based missile defense system say that it is absolutely necessary in today’s dangerous world. Opponents of such systems say that the idea that a space-based missile defense system could protect the U.S. from a major nuclear attack is sheer fantasy.
Proponents of a new space-based missile defense system draw inspiration from the Star Wars initiative of the Reagan administration during the 1980s. It was supposed to use space-based lasers and other weapons to render nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” Thirty billion dollars were spent and no weapons were ever developed and deployed.
The primary Congressman behind the legislation, Trent Franks (R-Ariz), said that taking the word “limited” out of the legislation and beginning work on new space-based weapons put “put the U.S. on a path to better safeguard its security.” He went on to say, “I hope that the day will come when we could have solid-state lasers in space that can defeat any missile attack. That day is a long ways off. But fortunately, it’s a little closer, and a little more certain, with the passage of these amendments.”
A retired president of the missile defense system division of Lockheed Corporation said that such systems “defy the laws of physics and is not based on science of any kind. Even if we darken the sky with hundreds or thousands of satellites and interceptors, there’s no way to ensure against a dedicated attack. So it’s an opportunity to waste a prodigious amount of money.” He also referred to the new legislation as “insanity, pure and simple.”
A former assistant secretary of Defense who was in charge of the Pentagon office that carried out testing and evaluation of weapons systems said that the idea of a space-based nuclear shield was a “sham”.
Opponents are afraid that in addition to being a useless waste of money, our creation and deployment of such a system would give Russia and China an excuse to deploy nuclear weapons in orbit. This legislation is a very serious mistake and should be repealed. The last thing the world needs is a new arms race to put nuclear weapons in space.
Trent Franks:
A hurricane-strength storm that swept through Sweden this week generated record wind power that topped at 5.7 million kWh during single hour, which is 0.5 million more than the previous record, says energy company Bixia. Over the past three days wind power accounted for 26 percent of total electricity consumption, almost as much as six nuclear power plants, says Anders Enqvist, Director of Risk Management at Bixia. mining.com
One of the biggest problems with nuclear reactors is finding materials that can withstand the hostile environment of high temperatures, high pressures, and neutron bombardment. As neutrons penetrate the metal alloys that house the reactor core, they create dislocations in the crystalline lattice of the metal. These dislocations can migrate and collect, forming cavities that can combine into cracks. This makes the metal increasingly brittle and ultimately, the reactor must be retired because it is unsafe to continue to operate it. It has been difficult to measure the degradation in a particular reactor because of the radiation. Now, researchers have developed a new technique for measuring radiation damage to metal.
The current “gold standard” for measuring radiation damage is called transmission electron microscopy (TEM). It produces a great deal of information from a sample of the metal being tested but it does not reveal all of the changes that have an impact on the structural integrity of the metal.
Researchers at the MIT Department of Chemistry created a new technique which was applied by the MIT Mesoscale Nuclear Materials Laboratory. This new method of measuring damage may be able to provide a way of monitoring the integrity of metals in real time with no need to remove the components from their radioactive environment.
This new technique is called transient grating spectroscopy (TGS). In TGS, acoustic waves are induced in the surface of a sample to reveal thermal and elastic properties. Although the acoustic waves are traveling on the surface of the sample, defects below the surface of the sample can affect the waves.
The acoustic waves are created by aiming two lasers at the polished surface of the sample to create an interference pattern. The lasers shining on the metal surface heat it and cause a standing acoustic wave. This standing wave causes minute movements of the metal surface that can be read by another set of lasers. Rippling acoustic waves form and decay. Measuring their movement and decay rates can reveal the properties of the sample. Experiments at the lab have matched the theoretical models and simulations.
One of the tests conducted at the lab involved aluminum samples that were perfect single crystals that had different surface orientations. Although the samples looked identical to the human eye (even through a microscope), the new TGS system was able to easily distinguish between the different orientations.
The laboratory works mainly with aluminum samples because they can be very difficult to analyze and if the researchers can prove their method with aluminum, the new system should work with many other materials. The new technique has a sensitivity of one tenth of one percent. The new system can yield accurate results about radiation damage in a matter of seconds as opposed to the months or years that other techniques require.
The researchers have created simulations of molecules and their responses to the TGS that are highly accurate. Using this methodology, they are able to create models of different types of defects in metals and then predict what kind of signals will be generated by TGS. Experiments are then carried out to verify the modeling.
This new technique should speed up the development and testing of materials to be used in the construction of reactors and nuclear fuels. The researchers hope to be able to reduce their equipment from the current bulky machines in their laboratory to portable handheld devices.
