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.
Russia is aggressively marketing nuclear power reactors around the globe, especially in developing nations. They are working on creating breeder reactors which will be able to produce plutonium that can be used to fuel reactors in competition with uranium. They are also reprocessing spent nuclear fuel to produce more fuel. The Soviet Union was very sloppy with nuclear waste during the Cold War as they manufactured nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, even though the Cold War is over and the Soviet Union is gone, Russia is carrying on the Soviet Union’s bad habits of nuclear waste management.
The Mayak Production Association is one of the biggest nuclear facilities in Russia. It is the site of plutonium production reactors and a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. It is located in southwest Russia close to the city of Ozyorsk near the Russian – Kazakhstan border. The complex was part of the Soviet nuclear weapons program and is currently part of the Russian nuclear weapons program.
For decades, the Mayak complex has dumped waste from nuclear reprocessing into the Techa River which flows into the Arctic Sea. In the 1940s and 1950s, it is estimated that over a hundred million cubic yards of high-level waste were dumped into the river. In 1957, a storage tank exploded and spread up to one hundred tons of high-level radioactive waste over three hundred square miles. This considered to be the third worst nuclear disaster in history behind Chernobyl and Fukushima. The Soviet government kept it secret for thirty years. It was called the Kyshtym disaster after the nearest town. Ten years later, a lake in the area dried up and radioactive dust from the lake bed was blown over areas where over forty thousand people lived. In 1993, Russia admitted that these accidents might have exposed almost half a million people to dangerous levels of radiation. Between 2001 and 2004, a billion cubic feet of untreated waste was dumped into the Techa River.
The villages along to Techa river report record rates of chromosomal abnormalities, birth defects and cancers which are much higher than Russian averages. In 2008, Russia began an evacuation program to move villagers inland from the banks of the Techa River.
Hundreds of tons of spent nuclear fuel from other nations arrive at Mayak for reprocessing annually. The Nuclear Safety Institute says that the spent fuel processing going on at Mayak “presents no danger to the surrounding population.” Representatives of Rosatom, the government owned Russian nuclear company stated in an email that the facility “follows all the environmental protection guidelines and has all the approvals it needs for operation.” He went on to write that “The level of pollution in the Techa River today completely complies with the sanitary standards of the Russian Federation.”
Environmental activists claim that dumping is still going on but given the secrecy of the Russian government with respect to nuclear operations, it is impossible to prove. When an Associated Press reporter visited the area, a Geiger counter near the river registered a hundred times the usual level of background radiation. The Nuclear Safety Institute says that the pollution is far lower than it used to be but it used to be very high so this assurance is not much comfort to people living in the area.
The United Kingdom get about twenty percent of their electricity from eight nuclear power reactors. Seven of these reactors are scheduled to be shut down and decommissioned by 2030. Coal fired power plants provide more than twenty percent of the U.K.’s electricity. Concerns over climate change were part of the decision to close all of the coal power plants by 2025. All this means that by 2030, the U.K. will lose almost fifty percent of their currently power generation.
I have written several articles about the massive Hinkley Point C nuclear power project in the U.K. There are serious problems impeding progress on the project but if the plant gets built, it will be able to supply about seven percent of the U.K. power needs. However, the cost of the electricity will be much higher than current prices.
The U.K. could undertake a major program to develop sustainable alternative energy sources such as hydro, solar, wind, biogas, and tidal generations systems. However, the most likely replacement for the retiring power generation systems will be Combined Gas Cycle Turbines burning natural gas. Unfortunately, although these plants can be quickly built and natural gas is cheap, they still contribute to climate change.
The Alvin Weinberg Foundation is a U.K. charity that operates under the name “Weinberg Next Nuclear.” It promotes research and development of next generation nuclear power reactors. A primary focus of the Foundation is liquid fluoride thorium reactors and other reactors that make use of molten salt technologies. It is named for an early Director of the U.S. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Dr. Alvin M. Weinberg. The Foundation issued a report titled “Next Steps for Nuclear Innovation in the UK” in November of 2015. Later in November, the U.K. government announced a five year nuclear research and development program worth three hundred and seventy seven million dollars.
One part of the program is a competition to choose the best small modular reactor design (SMR) for use in the U.K. The first part of this competition will be to develop an SMR “Roadmap” which will analyze development programs for SMRs and develop a policy framework to support the best designs. This stage of the program will run through 2016.
The report laid out recommended criteria for selecting the best designs that will have government support in stage two. Safety and non-proliferation were identified as being of critical importance. Other criteria included cost, waste management, past experience with related designs, the ability to use alternative nuclear fuels, the ability to reuse used nuclear fuel and plutonium, load-following to allow backup of intermittent renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, and the potential to supply low-carbon heat and hydrogen. The report suggests that SMRs and “micro reactors” with less than twenty megawatt capacity should be much cheaper to build than huge gigawatt reactors.
The report criticized the U.K. Office for Nuclear Regulation. The ONR generic design assessment is very thorough and takes up to five years to complete. With its current staff and capabilities, the ONR can only carry out two of these assessments at a time. It is currently assessing two Generation III+ reactor designs, the AP1000 and the Advanced Boiling Water Reactor. The report suggested that the ONR needs additional resources in order to carry out more assessments simultaneously so research and development of new reactors designs can be proceed more quickly. The report called for the establishment of international standards for the safety of advanced reactor designs.
Several years ago, the Stuxnet virus was used by the U.S. and Israel to infect the Iranian nuclear weapons program. One of the effects that it had was to cause centrifuges to run too fast and destroy themselves. It has just been reported that a nuclear facility in Germany has malware including viruses on one of its computers.
The Gundremmingen nuclear power plant is about seventy miles from Munich. The infected computer was installed in 2008. It was dedicated to visualizing data about the movement of fuel rods at the power plant. There were also eighteen infected USB drives found at the plant.
One of the viruses on the infected computer was the W32.Ramnit. Its purpose is to capture social media posts and banking passwords from browser activity. It can also allow remote control of infected computers. It infects Windows operating systems and was first identified by Symantec in 2010.
Another virus found on the computer was Conficker. Conficker is a key logger that captures all the keystrokes entered on the computer’s keyboard and then sends them to another computer via the Internet. Conficker also attempts to capture control of the infected computer in order to make it part of a network of infected computers referred to as a botnet. These botnets are used to mount what are called denial of service attacks on target computers by overwhelming their connections to the Internet. Conficker is also a Windows virus that was discovered by Symantec in 2008.
Both of these viruses are spread over the Internet and through infected USB drives. Fortunately, the computer at the nuclear power plant was not used for browsing the Internet or banking. In any case, the computer was not connected to the Internet so neither of these viruses was ever able to cause trouble. RWE, the company that operates the nuclear power plant informed the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) when it discovered the infected computer. The BSI is working with IT technicians to improve cyber security at the eight operating German nuclear power plants.
IT security experts say that infections on the computers used for critical infrastructure applications are quite common. Most common viruses are not designed to be aware of what kind on applications are running on the computers they infect. So unless a virus is specifically intended to attack a particular kind of application such as the Stuxnet virus, it is usually not a major threat to critical applications running on infrastructure computers.
Viruses are often spread unintentionally to computer via removable media such as USB drives. Devices such as smart phones and tablets that are connected to computer USB ports for charging can also spread malware. It is best for computers running critical applications to be disconnected from the Internet and from other local computers, if possible. Such separation is often referred to as an “air gap.”There are locking devices that block USB ports and they should be used on all critical computers. A USB key to unlock a port can be used when it is necessary to move data and/or programs on and off of particular computers.
Gundremmingen nuclear power plant:
