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 before about the careless disposal of nuclear wastes in the world’s oceans and seas. Nuclear powers used them like sewers with little thought of the possible environmental impact. A great deal of nuclear research and nuclear weapons development has been conducted in Scotland from the end of World War II up to the present. The extent of the nuclear pollution of the seas around Scotland is still being revealed.
The Tay Estuary lies on the east coast of Scotland near Perth. Over seventy five thousand aircraft dials coated with radium were dumped into the Estuary after World War II. Ferranti Limited, a company that manufactured tubes for radios made a deal with local fishermen to dump barrels containing thirty five thousand luminous watch dials painted with radium into the Tay Estuary in 1949. For the next eight years, it is estimated that about five thousand luminous dials were dumped into the Estuary every year. Although the government had warned the company that it needed to get permission to dump waste there, the company simply went ahead and dumped the waste without permission.
Dalgety Bay is a coastal town in Fife that lies to the south of the Tay Estuary. During the 1950s, radioactive waste from a nuclear reactor in Dundee was dumped into the sea near Dallgety Bay. A beach in the town has been found to radioactive. During the 1960s, nuclear waste from nuclear submarines was dumped into the Firth of Forth, an estuary near Edinburgh.
In 2012, there was an incident at the Vulcan naval reactor in Caithness which resulted in the leak of radioactive materials. The Ministry of Defense is currently exempt from government regulations on radioactive pollution and did not make details of the Vulcan incident known until recently. The Scottish Environmental Minister has promised that he will end the immunity of the Ministry of Defense from government regulations.
Now the nuclear submarine bases at Faslane and Coulport near Helensburgh are requesting authorization to raise the limits on the quantity of radioactive wastes that they are allowed to release into the water and air near the bases. There are currently five nuclear submarines based at Faslane naval shipyards but that number is supposed to rise to fourteen submarines by 2019. The MoD wants permission to dump more liquid waste from the submarines into the Gareloch Inlet on the west coast of Scotland. The waste contains cobalt 60 and tritium.
There are nuclear weapons stored at Coulport on Loch Long. Emissions of tritium gas from the warheads has been increasing for years. It will increase even more after the MoD begins storing a new type of warhead at Coulport. The MoD is requesting permission to release more tritium gas at Coulport than is currently permitted.
The MoD claims that these requests are within authorized limits but the Scottish Environmental Ministry wants to wait until it receives new regulatory power that will start soon before any authorization for new MoD releases. However, if the vote to secede from the UK is successful this September, Scotland intends to send all the nuclear submarines and nuclear warheads in Scotland south to Britain. In this case, the requests for increased radioactive emission limits would be moot.
Tay Estuary:
The cost of nuclear power keeps rising and the cost of fossil fuels remains low. The cost of new solar installation and new wind installations is now becoming cheaper than new nuclear builds. These trends have dampened public, political and economic interests in investing in new nuclear power plants. The construction and operation of nuclear power plants involves billions of dollars. The nuclear industry is fighting fiercely to keep building nuclear power plants and to keep operating existing nuclear power plants.
One of their tactics is to claim that nuclear power is important in the fight against climate change because it is a low carbon source of electricity. It is most certainly not a zero-carbon source as some have claimed. Analyses of carbon emissions resulting from construction, fuel mining and processing and waste disposal over the lifetime of a nuclear power plant indicates that while it is lower in carbon emissions than fossil fuels, it is not lower than alternative and sustainable sources such as hydro, solar and wind.
As more and more of the old nuclear power plants in the U.S. become uncompetitive against cheap fossil fuels and alternative sources, companies that operate these reactors have been lobbying for public subsidies to keep operating. Their claims rest primarily on low carbon emissions and loss of jobs around the plants.
The New York Public Service Commission recently ruled that low and non-carbon emitting energy sources including nuclear power plants had to be included in the state’s Clean Energy Standard. It said that the CES had to include a way to support qualifying power plants that had become uncompetitive. The Fitzpatrick, Ginna and Nine Mile Point nuclear power plants are included in the proposals for the CES as in need of support.
The proposed subsidy program would start out around five hundred million dollars a year and rise to around eight hundred million dollars a year within twelve years. The PSC claims that a billion dollars in public subsidies would result in five billion dollars of savings and benefits during the first two years of the program.
Exelon Corporation owns and operates the Nine Mile Point nuclear power plant as well as the Ginna plant. Entergy operates the Fitzpatrick nuclear power plant. Both companies have said that they cannot continue to operate their nuclear power plants at a loss. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a rule that says that any nuclear power plant that cannot compete economically will lose its license. Public subsidies would allow power plants that were uncompetitive in the open market to keep operating.
It was recently reported that Exelon was considering the purchase of the Fitzpatrick nuclear power plant. Exelon would continue to operate the plant which is currently slated to close permanently in six months. The Exelon purchase of Fitzpatrick is said to be contingent on the passage of the CES proposed by the PSC.
I personally believe that it would be best for New York to close those nuclear power plants and embark on a crash program of construction of solar and wind power generation.
I have blogged in the past about the conflict between the federal government and the State of Idaho over cleanup of radioactive waste at the Idaho National Laboratory. The INL was established in 1949 as federal government nuclear research and development site. It covers about nine hundred square miles and employs about four thousand people. Over the years nuclear waste was generated from research projects, spent nuclear fuel reprocessing, and nuclear weapons development. There are hundreds of tons of spent nuclear fuel, almost a million gallons of high-level liquid waste, five thousand cubic yards of dried and condensed solid waste, eighty five thousand cubic meters of transuranic wastes and half a million cubic yards of low level waste in lined and unlined pits.
In 1989, the INL was designated as a Superfund cleanup site. In 1995, after court battles, an agreement was signed between the Department of Energy and the State of Idaho that there would be no shipments of commercial spent fuel to the INL until all existing waste had been dealt with. There were also limits set on shipment of other types of waste. All transuranic waste was to be removed by 2018. All high level waste and waste from spent nuclear fuel was to be removed by 2025. By 2013, no high level waste or spent nuclear fuel waste had been removed. Over forty tons of spent nuclear waste from government reactors was shipped in. Over forty tons of transuranic waste was shipped out. Court battles and waste cleanup and removal continued at the INL.
In order to speed up the removal of nuclear waste at the INL, in February of 2016, the Department of Energy awarded a new contract which combined two of the existing cleanup projects to Flour Idaho, LLC. The Idaho Treatment Group and CH2M-WG Idaho had been working on the two projects. Fluor spent three months learning about the operation from the two previous contractors. Operational responsibility for cleaning up the nuclear waste at the INL was officially transferred to Fluor Idaho on June 1st of this year. The five year contract with Fluor Idaho is worth about a billion and a half dollars.
Fluor hired most of the personnel who had worked for the two contractors that Fluor replaced. This had the benefit of keeping various working teams intact and permitted a continuity of operation. After a couple of days of transition, normal operations were resumed. Fluor has reported that although they have only been in control since June 1st, the productivity of the cleanup projects has already improved. Fluor has pledged that they would maintain a culture of transparency with respect to employee input about problems or ways to improve efficiency.
Fluor has pledge to follow a schedule for the retrieval and packaging of some nuclear waste that is currently buried in pits that is more ambitious than the waste disposal schedule mandated by Idaho and the U.S. Department of Energy. Fluor has plans to remove spent nuclear fuel rods from their current cooling pools and store them in dry casks.
One of the most difficult tasks facing Fluor is the treatment of almost a million gallons of liquid radioactive waste at the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit. The treatment of the liquid waste was supposed to be completed by 2012 but five years later the work is still not done because of many technical problems. Fluor has previously worked on similar systems in other states and has brought in an experienced team to work on the IWTU at INL.
Hopefully, Fluor will do better with the cleanup work at the INL than previous contractors. Time will tell.
