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.
I have been blogging about the increasing risk of World War III lately. Tensions are rising between the U.S. and Russia, both of which have thousands of nuclear warheads. Even a few hundred detonations of nuclear warheads might cause a nuclear winter that would bring down human civilization.
I live in an area that is a prime target for Russian warheads. There is a tiny piece of the coast of Puget Sound inside Seattle that is not in a primary blast radius for a nuclear detonation. There is a park there and I always thought that if I had a little warning, I would go there and watch the fireworks.
For a long time there has been speculation on where in the world it would be best to be if you wanted to survive an all out global nuclear war. This is assuming, of course, that a nuclear exchange of warheads does not cause a nuclear winter in which case there would be no place that would permit human survival except perhaps in well prepared underground bunkers.
Even without a nuclear winter, North America, Europe and Russia would all be devastated. Basically, the whole Northern Hemisphere would be a wreck. A U.S. government study from 1980 predicted that in a major nuclear war, up to eighty percent of the population of the U.S. would die immediately. After the war, the remaining population would be ravaged by starvation and radiation poisoning with little help from a decimated government.
One location that is often mentioned is the southern island of New Zealand because it is in the Southern Hemisphere, has banned nuclear weapons and contains no strategic target for the warring nuclear powers. It is far from the combat with fertile soil, lots of fresh water, mild climate and a congenial society. A lot of the same criterion are mentioned for Perth, Australia which is one of the most distant cities on Earth in the Southern Hemisphere and in a non-nuclear nation.
French Polynesia has its proponents as well. One of the most attractive feature of the over four hundred island archipelago is the fact that ocean and atmospheric current come from Antarctica which has absolutely no targets for nuclear warheads at all. The amount of fallout from a war in the Northern Hemisphere would be minimal in the archipelago.
The big question is whether or not these Southern Hemisphere areas could survive as functional societies in the aftermath of a major nuclear exchange. The remnants of the navies of the warring nations might seek refuge in the Southern Hemisphere. If they still carried major munitions, it is conceivable that they might become pirates and use their weapons to threaten port communities.
In any case, a great deal of food and consumer goods from the Northern Hemisphere would disappear and any community that survived would have to be basically self-sufficient. From that standpoint, New Zealand would probably be the best bet. In any case, billions of people would die in the war and that level of mass extinction might well cause a sort of society wide PTSD in the survivors.
New Zealand:
One of the big problems with nuclear power is the fact that dangerous radioactive waste is left when nuclear fuel is consumed in a power reactor. Spent nuclear fuel rods are rapidly filling cooling pools all over the U.S. and the U.S. will have no permanent geological repository until 2050 at the soonest. Countries all over the world that have nuclear power reactors are faced with the same problems with regard to spent nuclear fuel. It can take over two hundred thousand years for the radioactivity in spent fuel rods to return to the level of natural uranium in the ground.
Switzerland is currently creating an underground repository to hold spent nuclear fuel. When siting a geological repository, attention is usually given to such things as geological faults, composition of rock strata, movement of ground water and man-made barriers to the release of radiation and radioactive materials. Researchers at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne have recently discovered something new that should be considered in siting and construction a permanent geological repository for spent nuclear fuel.
When steel casks containing spent nuclear fuel rods corrode, hydrogen gas can be released. The hydrogen gas is generated by the decomposition of the cladding on the fuel rods. This gas can build up pressure that might alter the rock strata, making it more porous and prone to penetration by ground water.
The EPFL research team has discovered that there is a community of seven kinds of bacterial that live hundreds of feet underground in the rock strata in which the Swiss are constructing their repository. Far from being a cause of concern, it turns out that this bacterial community may be beneficial to the repository. This is a closed community of bacteria that have never been identified before. At the bottom of the food chain there is a bacteria that feeds on hydrogen and sulfur in the rock. In a nuclear repository, the bacteria would be able to feed on the hydrogen and reduce the risks associated with hydrogen release.
In tests, the EPFL team monitored the growth and composition of the bacterial community in the presence of increased hydrogen gas such as would be generated by spent fuel rods. They found that the community adapted to the increased hydrogen and flourished. This is good news for the designers of geological repositories.
In the future, it would make sense to deliberately seed the rock in and around the geological repository with these bacterial colonies so they can consume hydrogen gas and reduce risk. The steel casks containing the spent fuel rods are embedded in bentonite. Bentonite is an absorbent aluminium phyllosilicate clay consisting mostly of montmorillonite. The bentonite used in repositories contains sodium and it swells when exposed to water. Its function in the repository is to prevent the penetration of ground water. The EPFL team suggests that a porous layer of material could be placed between the bentonite surrounding the casks and the rock containing the repository. This layer would be an ideal habitat for the bacterial community. They could feed on sulfur in the rock and hydrogen gas leaking from corroding casks.
