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.
As if the United Kingdom didn’t have enough nuclear woes with the reconsideration of the mammoth Hinkley Point C nuclear project following the Brexit vote, now a British court has handed down a ruling against the British Nuclear Decommissioning Authority that could result in multi-million dollar lawsuits with respect to the decommissioning of old UK reactors.
The NDA is a division of the British Department of Energy and Climate Change. It was created in 2004 and began operations in 2005. “Its purpose is to deliver the decommissioning and clean-up of the UK’s civil nuclear legacy in a safe and cost-effective manner, and where possible to accelerate programs of work that reduce hazard.” It does not manage British nuclear sites directly but works through what are called “site license” companies to oversee the cleanup process.
In 2008, the NDA awarded a contract extension for the cleanup of the Sellafield site where nuclear weapons were developed to Nuclear Management Partners. After serious problems with the execution of the contract, NMP lost the contract in 2015 and NDA was criticized for its performance in the award and monitoring of the contract.
In 2014, the NDA held a competition to select a contractor to decommission twelve of the UK’s aging nuclear power reactors. This represents half of the twenty five operating power reactors in the U.K. The winner of the seven billion dollar contact was a joint venture between Babcock and Fluor called Cavendish Fluor Partnership.
The other contractors involved in the bid competition complained that the contract had not be fairly awarded and Energy Solutions, a company that managed one of the nuclear power plants for fourteen years, brought suit against the NDA.
A British court has just handed down a verdict that agrees with Energy Solutions. The court found that the NDA had deliberately manipulated the data for evaluating bids in order to prevent the disqualification of Cavendish Fluor Partnership. The judge ruled that the NDA had fallen short of meeting its obligations for transparency and equal judgement. Cavendish Fluor lost the contract.
Bechtel, a US contractor which also bid on the cleanup project said that it would soon sue NDA for lost future earnings expected from the contract. Other nuclear contractors involved in the competitions such as Ch2MHill, Serco, CAS Restoration Partnership, and UK Nuclear Restoration are expected to also file suit against the NDA.
Given its less than stellar performance in the past decade, the competence of the NDA has been called into question. This sort of incompetence and corruption in a public agency is always of grave concern but when the projects it is involved in include the dangerous work of decommissioning old nuclear power plants, such incompetence and corruption poses a serious threat to the citizens of Britain and their environment.
The U.K. rates as tenth least corrupt country out of one hundred and seventy countries. If this is the best that can be expected from one of the least corrupt countries in the world, then perhaps nuclear power is not safe power source for most of the nations in the world which are more corrupt.
Russia has developed a program for management of used nuclear fuel covering the period “2016-2018 and up to 2020” to replace the previous one, which has expired. world-nuclear-news.org
A think tank in Britain that studies energy issues said Thursday that the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant project is not a necessity for the country. nuclearstreet.com
The Bellefonte Nuclear Generation Station is located in Hollywood, Alabama and is owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority. Originally, four reactors were planned. Unit One had reached eighty eight percent completion and Unit Two had reached fifty eight percent completion by 1988 when the TVA board suspended the project. The TVA spent over six billion dollars before work was stopped. Since then removal of equipment for use at other TVA power plants has reduced the effective completion to fifty five percent for Unit One and thirty five percent for Unit Two. What remains at the site is basically the buildings and foundations of reinforced concrete.
The TVA considered restarting and completing the construction of these two reactors. New equipment would have to be shipped to the site and all existing structures would have to be reinspected. The reactor designs would have to amended to include lessons learned in the last thirty five years as well as new regulations that have been put in place since work stopped in 1988. The new amended design has not been completed so the exact cost of completing this project is unknown.
The construction permits expired in 2006. The TVA requested a reinstatement of the construction permits in 2008 and the NRC did grant them the status of a “terminated” permit which would require reinspection of all systems to obtain the status of “deferred.” In 2010, the TVA got an upgrade to a deferred construction permit. In 2011, the TVA board voted to move forward with Unit One. In 2013, the TVA cut the staffing at Bellefonte from five hundred and forty to one hundred and forty. In 2015, the TVA decided that it would not need a big power plant like Bellefonte for at least twenty years. In 2016, the TVA declared the Bellefonte plant as surplus and elected to sell it at auction.
Now an editorial by J. Winston Porter, a former assistant administrator of the EPA, suggests that the Southern Company which owns both Alabama Power and Georgia Power should purchase the Bellefonte plant and complete construction of the reactors. He says that it would bring thousands of construction jobs and hundreds of permanent jobs to Alabama as well as billions of dollars in investments.
The Southern Company is currently constructing two new reactors at the Vogtle site in Georgia. It has just announced that it will spend about a hundred million dollars to explore a possible site for a new nuclear power plant in southern Georgia. Porter points out that it would be reasonable for Southern to consider purchase and completion of Bellefonte over starting from scratch at a new location since Bellefonte is expected to fetch around forty million dollars at auction. Purchasing Bellefonte with its existing structure for less than half the cost of just scouting a new location would seem to be a wise business decision.
While Porter’s suggestions sound good, there are a substantial problems that must be considered. First of all, there is the question of whether the unknown costs of redesign, construction and reinspection for Bellefonte would ultimately be less than the cost of starting from scratch in Southern Georgia. There is also the fact that the TVA decided that a new big nuclear power plant was not going to be needed for twenty years in that region. If that analysis was sound, then it would not make sense for Southern to spend the money to acquire and complete Bellefonte.
Bellefonte Nuclear Generation Station:
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:
