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 often dealt with the question of what impact nuclear power might have on climate change mitigation. Considering the recent Paris accords on reduction of carbon dioxide emissions and the recent election of a new U.S. president, I thought that I would revisit the topic. The incoming U.S. president has said that he does not believe that scientific claims of major climate change are real. He once said that he thought that it was a hoax made up by the Chinese for propaganda purposes. He has said that he intended to stop all government aid for the development of alternative renewable energy and that he thinks that the U.S. needs more nuclear power. One of the major current selling points for nuclear power is that it does not release carbon dioxide. In this blog I am going to talk about that claim.
One problem with nuclear power is the fact that it is very expensive and time consuming to build new nuclear power plants. Licensing and construction of new nuclear power plants can require up to ten years. With the availability of cheap fossil fuels and the falling prices of wind and solar energy, nuclear power finds itself in a struggle to compete. Nuclear plants are being closed in the U.S. because they cannot compete in the open energy market. There are estimates that in the next ten years, as many as fifteen to twenty of the one hundred nuclear power plants in the U.S. may have to be closed because of financial difficulties. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission requires that nuclear power plants operate at a profit in order to retain their licenses. Currently, the NRC is monitoring the decommissioning of nineteen closed nuclear power plants. Renewable sources of power are already much cheaper to construct than nuclear power plants and the price of renewables in continually dropping while the price of nuclear power is rising.
Proponents of nuclear power say that if nuclear power is dropped, it will mean the increase of fossil fuel use which will increase the release of carbon dioxide and accelerate climate change. However, all of the existing fossil fuel power plants are already operating at maximum efficiency. New investments in increasing energy production capacity tend to be either in the construction of wind and solar power plants or increasing the efficiency and reducing the carbon dioxide emissions of existing fossil fuel plants. Closing nuclear power plants will not result in a great increase in the amount of carbon dioxide currently being released by power plants.
The argument for nuclear power that prompted this post is the repeated assertion that nuclear power generation does not emit carbon dioxide. However, the entire nuclear life-cycle which includes mining uranium, refining the uranium ore, creating the nuclear fuel, constructing the power plants, dealing with the waste from the power plants and decommissioning the power plants releases vast amounts of carbon dioxide. And, a great deal of this carbon dioxide is released at the beginning of the life-cycle of a nuclear power plant. When the carbon dioxide generated by nuclear power over the lifetime of a power plant is compared to hydro, wind and solar, it turns out that nuclear power generates more carbon dioxide than any of these renewable sources of energy.
Considering the cost of nuclear power, the generation of substantial carbon dioxide, the lack of a way of dealing with nuclear waste and the possibility of major nuclear accidents, nuclear power is simply not a viable solution to the need for mitigation of climate change.
France has been having problems lately with a major supplier of nuclear hardware. In 2014, investigations by the Autorité de Sûreté Nucléaire (ASN) revealed that the world’s largest nuclear power plant being constructed at Flamanville had falsified quality control documents for some of the parts being used to construct the plant. The Flamanville plant was intended to showcase the new European Pressurized Reactor design.
Reactor vessels from the Le Creusot foundry were made of steel that contained about fifty percent more carbon than they should have. This made the steel about half as strong as it needed to be to meet regulatory requirements for reactor vessels. Such weak steel could crack and cause catastrophic accidents.
The ASN contacted China and warned them of possible problems involving the high carbon steel in components being used in the construction of two EPRs. A further investigation into the foundry records at Le Creusot discovered many cases of altered or forged test documents for nuclear components.
As a result of these revelations, the ASN ordered that twenty French nuclear power plants be shut down immediately so that “preventive measures could be taken immediately to ensure public safety.” The actions of the ASN have generated concern across Europe that Électricité de France SA’s (EDF’s) nuclear power plants might not be safe.
In addition to substandard parts from Le Creusot foundry in France, parts provided for EDF projects supplied by Japan Casting and Forging Corporation have also found to have forged and false quality control documents. As a result, the Japanese government has also started investigations of their fleet of nuclear reactors, most of which have remained out of service since the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011. As I have mentioned in past posts, less than one-half of the nuclear components produced in Japan are inspected before they are exported.
Because of the shutdown of the twenty nuclear power plants in France, there are fears that there will be a shortage of electricity this winter in France which produces about seventy-five percent of its electricity from nuclear power. With the loss of about a third of the output of their electricity from nuclear power reactors, France has had to turn to other forms of energy. France is now reopening some of its mothballed coal-fired power plants that have been shut down for thirty-two years. Germany, which is shutting down all of its nuclear power reactors, will also be restarting old coal-fired power plants in order to sell electricity to France.
There is a new type of nuclear power reactor that is being developed called a small modular reactor or SMR. These new reactors feature simplified design and produce less than three hundred megawatts. They can be produced in a factory and assembled on site. One of the promised benefits of this approach is that the SMRs are manufactured in factories and will be based on a standardized design and standard components. On the one hand, this could result in better quality control and lower costs. On the other hand, as the events in France have illustrated, factory produced nuclear components are only as good as the quality control process at the factory. If there are failures of quality control at such factories, many SMRs might have to be shut down due to problems with substandard components.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has conducted a seismic review of the Atmea 1 reactor design. This is the first such review it has carried out on a new nuclear power reactor design. world-nuclear-news.org
The Department of Energy (DOE) has agreed to sell depleted uranium to GE-Hitachi Global Laser Enrichment, LLC (GLE) over a 40-year period which would be enriched at a proposed GLE state-of-the-art facility. The proposed new facility would use depleted uranium to produce natural uranium which is used for production of fuel for civil nuclear reactors. The facility would be built near DOE’s Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant in western Kentucky. The construction and operation of the billion-dollar facility at Paducah could to bring approximately 800 to 1,200 jobs to the local community. energy.gov
