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 blogged about China’s ambitions to be a major exporter of nuclear reactors. They have an ambitious construction program for domestic nuclear reactors with twenty two currently under construction and they hope to sell their reactors to other countries.
The Hinkley Point C project in the UK that has been in the news lately is connected to Chinese nuclear ambitions. The Chinese have made a major investment in the UK project with the condition that they be allowed to construct one of their Hualong One reactors at another site in Britain. This Chinese reactor will be a demonstration model that can be shown to other countries that are interested in Chinese reactors. Unfortunately, the new UK government installed after the Brexit vote has suspended work on the project and may cancel it.
The Chinese developed the Hualong One design based on the design of Westinghouse AP1000 reactors with the assistance of Westinghouse. They have spent twenty years working with a number of foreign nuclear technology companies to develop their nuclear industry.
China has been successful in the past in using loans from state owned banks to help sell big construction projects to other countries. They is using this same system help sell their reactors. Currently, they are building a Hualong One reactor for Pakistan and have a contract to build one in Argentina. They are discussing a project in Romania.
Some nuclear analysts say that China is underestimating problems they will encounter in entering the international market for nuclear power reactors. They will face concerns about quality control in the manufacture of their reactors. Every country they are trying to sell to will have different laws and regulations that will affect any nuclear power project. With the low cost of natural gas and oil as well as the falling cost of wind and solar power, they will have to be very competitive to be successful. Given the complexity of nuclear power plants and the time consumed by licensing and construction, this will not be easy.
The Chinese are also facing serious backlash from their citizens over nuclear power facilities. Twice in recent years, the Chinese government has cancelled or delayed projects to construct a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant because of mass protests in the cities where the plants were to be built. Continued public rejection of such projects could hamper the expansion of the Chinese nuclear industry.
There has not yet been a major Chinese nuclear accident but there have been several close calls that we know about. The Chinese government is notorious for its secrecy about major industrial accidents and suppression of any public mention or discussion of such accidents. One big concern is the fact that the Chinese have changed some of the design parameters of the reactors that they have developed from foreign designs such as making a reactor bigger while keeping the cooling system that was designed for a smaller reactor.
In the international index of corruption in 175 nations, China ranks as the 83rd least corrupt country. Japan is 18th, the U.S. is 19th, and France is 23rd. That means that China is roughly four times as corrupt as three major exporters of nuclear technology. This is very troubling. It raises grave doubts about the ability of China to properly regulate the construction of nuclear power reactors to insure that they can be operated safely. Just one major accident at a Chinese power reactor inside or outside China could deal a serious blow to Chinese nuclear ambitions.
Artist’s concept of the Hualong One:
I have blogged about the accident that closed the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico before. The WIPP is the geological repository for nuclear waste resulting from the development and manufacture of nuclear weapons for the U.S. arsenal. The Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is one of the places where such nuclear weapons are developed. They had about three hundred barrels of liquid waste that needed to be disposed of. WIPP does not accept liquid wastes so an absorbent material had to be added to the barrels before they could be shipped. Someone decided to change the absorbent from an inorganic clay compound to an organic material. Unfortunately, the new absorbent reacted with the waste in the barrels to generate hydrogen gas.
In February of 2014, one of the LANL barrels sent to the WIPP exploded and release radioactive materials. Due to a lax safety culture, the room that contained the barrel had not been sealed. The radioactive particles passed through the filter system that should have trapped them and dispersed over the countryside. The WIPP was shut down and, after a cooling off period, repairs were undertaken. The plant is still closed and it is not clear exactly when it will reopen to accept nuclear waste. Federal officials say that they hope to start limited waste processing by the end of this year but full operations cannot resume until the ventilation system is replaced. The replacement is expected to be completed by 2021.
An investigation into the accident found that there were more than two dozen failures of safety protocols at the WIPP including the failure of the filtration system. Twenty one workers at the surface facilities were exposed to low doses of radiation that officials say were well within safety limits. Critics of the response of the federal government say that federal officials have downplayed the seriousness of the accident and its aftermath.
The accident at the WIPP may be one of the costliest nuclear cleanup in U.S. history with initial estimates as high as two billion dollars. This is close to what it cost to clean up the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island that took place in 1979. The accident and closure of the WIPP is also interfering with cleanup of nuclear weapons related waste from other sites. In Washington state, the shipment of twenty four thousand barrels of waste from Hanford to WIPP has been delayed. In Idaho, two hundred thousand barrels of waste have to be sent to WIPP by 2018 from the Idaho National Laboratory.
The direct cost of the cleanup has now reached six hundred and forty million dollars. The two billion dollar cleanup cost mentioned above may be exceeded by the cost-plus contract with the contractor doing the cleanup. Additional costs may be connected to the replacement of the ventilation system. The WIPP will have to be operated longer than originally intended and this will also add to the cost of operations. The WIPP costs about two hundred million per year to operate. If it has to be kept open an additional seven years, that will be an additional one billion four hundred million dollars. There will also be expenses related to temporary storage of nuclear waste while the WIPP is closed.
Don Hancock monitors the WIPP for Southwest Research and Information Center, a watchdog group. He points out that the WIPP was supposed to be free of radioactive contamination throughout its operating life. Now the facility has been contaminated with radioactive materials, it will be more difficult to operate safely. He says that the WIPP may never resume full operations.
There were many contributing factors to the accident and shut down of the WIPP but it all started with the bad absorbent. One of the contractors working at LANL sent a memo to management saying that he was not qualified to decide whether it would be safe to change to the new absorbent but that someone with the requisite technical skills should look into the question. That never happened and now billions of dollars have to be spent because of that failure of management at LANL.
Waste Isolation Pilot Plant:
X-energy and Southern Nuclear Operating Company have signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on development and commercialization of their respective advanced reactor designs. world-nuclear-news.org
Nuclear’s Glacial Pace. There’s a reason it takes so long to approve a new reactor design. technologyreview.com
I grew up during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. We lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation and, as a child, I even had nightmares about it. At the height of the arms race during the Cold War, both the U.S. and the S.U. had tens of thousands of nuclear warheads and bombs. There were several times when the fate of the human race was in the hands of one man. Fortunately, each time, the man who could have started World War III refused to do it. When the S.U. fell in 1991, it was hoped that nuclear weapons could be abolished and the money spent on peaceful projects.
Although there are international nuclear disarmament treaties and the number of nuclear weapons has substantially diminished, the world still suffers under the threat of nuclear war. Deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Russia which inherited the nuclear weapons of the S.U. have led to talk of a new Cold War and nuclear arms race. U.S. President Obama strongly supported reduction of nuclear weapons when he entered office in 2008 but he is now launching the most expensive and extensive upgrading and expanding of the U.S. nuclear arsenal in decades. Russia is also expanding their nuclear arsenal and rattling the nuclear saber all over the world.
The existing international treaties have been partially successful, but now there is a push to go beyond previous agreements and aggressively pursue a total ban on all nuclear weapons. Austria has been leading a U.N. effort to convene a conference to discuss banning nuclear weapons. The culmination of their efforts was a report calling for a conference to be held in 2017 to create “a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination”. The report was expected to be issued without the need for a vote.
Australia surprised many observers when they called for a vote with respect to the release of the final report. The vote was sixty eight in favor, twenty two against and thirteen abstaining. These numbers suggest that the debate over the proposal was contentious. Now the proposal will be brought to the U.N. General Assembly in 2017 and formal negotiations will take place over the exact terms of the proposal.
The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade posted a statement on its website that Australian opposition to a ban on nuclear weapons because although it ” might seem to be a straightforward and emotionally appealing way to de-legitimize and eradicate nuclear weapons,” it would actually “divert attention from the sustained, practical steps needed for effective disarmament”.
There appears to be another more selfish reason that Australia is opposing the idea of a total ban on nuclear weapons. Australia now enjoys the protection of the U.S. nuclear arsenal should it be attacked by rogue nuclear powers such as North Korea. Australia is concerned that while the U.S. and some other nuclear powers might honor the total ban on nuclear weapons, other states might not even though they claimed that they were getting rid of their nuclear weapons. This would leave Australia vulnerable to nuclear blackmail and attack if the U.S. had gotten rid of all their nuclear weapons.
As much as I hate nuclear weapons and would love to see the world be rid of them, I am sympathetic to Australia’s concerns. I don’t believe for a minute that in the hostile and dangerous world in which we live, nations that possess nuclear weapons would really get rid of all of them. Military planners would have to assume that possible enemies with nuclear weapons would secretly violate the ban and that it would be prudent for them to also violate the ban.
Australia:
