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.
Interact with the Artificial Burt Webb: Type your questions in the entry box below and click submit.
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.
Many of the operating nuclear power reactors in the world were built in the 1970s. In the U.S., the original licensing period for power reactors was forty years. This means that starting around 2010, a lot of power reactors licenses began running out. Owners of many of the reactors with expiring licenses have applied for a twenty year extension and received it. The steel used in the construction of reactors and containment vessels becomes brittle and weaker over time from neutron bombardment so licenses cannot be extended indefinitely. And, with cheap fossil fuels and alternative sustainable energy sources declining in cost, some nuclear power reactors are not able to compete in the energy marketplace. If the owner of a power reactor cannot operate the reactor at a profit, they lose their license. These and other factors make it a certainty that many nuclear power reactors in the U.S. and abroad will have to be permanently shut down in the near future.
When a nuclear power plant is closed, a process called decommissioning has to be carried out. The reactor and associated equipment must be dismantled and disposed of. All fuel must be removed from the reactor and the spent fuel pool and disposed of. Decommissioning is a lengthy and complex process that required expertise, time and a lot of money. If the money is not available for decommissioning, then a reactor may just be shut down and the site boarded up and fenced in for decades. This raises concerns about security and safety as deterioration of the shuttered facility may lead to radioactive materials leaking into the environment.
Economic projects suggest that the global market for decommissioning services and nuclear waste disposal will be huge in the coming decades. It may take as much as a hundred years to decommission all the existing nuclear power plants in Europe. Early estimates state that sixteen European nations will have to spend at least two hundred and eighty eight million dollars on disposal of nuclear wastes. A major problem for the decommissioning industry is the lack of skilled qualified workers to carry out the necessary tasks.
The U.K. has a dozen sites where the reactors have already been shut down and eight hundred and sixty three million dollars a year for the next ten years will be spend cleaning up the sites. The U.K. is hosting the Nuclear Decommissioning Conference for Europe starting on May 31st of this year. Major nuclear companies from Europe and other parts of the world will be participating in hopes of getting a piece of the huge amount of money that will have to be spent on decommissioning.
There are two hundred nuclear power reactors in the world that will need to be shut down by 2025. The biggest unanswered question with respect to decommissioning is what to do with all the nuclear waste from nuclear weapons production and civilian nuclear power reactors. Nuclear nations have tried to site and construct practical deep geological repositories for the permanent disposal of nuclear waste but all attempts so far have failed. Given this uncertainty, it is not really known how much the permanent disposal of nuclear waste will cost.
Decommissioning of nuclear power plants and disposal of nuclear waste will be a growth industry for many decades to come.
Workers dismantling bolt together tanks at Fukushima Daiichi received high radiation doses to the eye during their work. fukuleaks.org
Seismic activity in southern Japan is mystifying geologists and keeping the nation on edge. asia.niklkei.com
A leak in a massive nuclear waste storage tanks at the Hanford Site has expanded significantly. King5.com
Nuclear security has been the subject of a lot of my blogs lately. One big concern is the possibility that nuclear materials might be smuggled into the U.S. inside one of the more than sixteen thousand cargo containers that arrive at U.S. ports each day. Currently only about two percent of the containers are thoroughly inspected. Researchers have been working for years on a way to quickly inspect cargo containers for radioactive materials.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan and Pennsylvania State University have been working on a cargo container scanning system under a grant from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. A report on their research was just issued today in the journal Scientific Reports.
The new system begins with an ion accelerator which produces heavy isotopes of hydrogen called deuterons which have a neutron in their nucleus in addition to the proton. The particles are emitted with energies of about four and half million electron volts and sixteen million electron volts. The deuterons slam into a boron target which results in the emission of high energy neutrons and photons. The beam of high energy neutrons and photons is focused into a fan shaped beam suitable for scanning cargo containers. The neutrons and photons pass through the container and hit Cherenkov quartz detectors which are connected to photomultiplier tubes. The high energy photons are used to form an image of the contents of the container.
The neutrons in the beam excite any nuclear materials in the cargo container which causes the materials to emit gamma rays and neutrons. These emissions are detected by the sensors outside of the container. Radioactive materials will cause time delayed neutron emissions. Other heavy elements like lead and tungsten do not emit time delayed neutrons. In addition to just indicating the presence of some kind of radioactive materials, these time delayed neutrons and gamma emissions also indicate specific types of radioactive materials. Therefore these different mixtures of gamma rays and time delayed neutrons can be used to identify the types of radioactive materials in a particular cargo container.
Earlier detection systems used high levels of X-rays which could be harmful to cargos such as electronic components and other types of cargo which could be affected by radiation. The ion beam in the new system utilizes a much lower level of radiation and so is less dangerous for sensitive cargo.
So far, the system has been tested successfully in a laboratory on samples of shielded uranium plates and rods. These tests prove that the basic idea is sound. The system has not been tested on radioactive materials in real steel cargo containers but the researchers will conduct such tests in the near future. If the new system can be scaled up for use in the real world of cargo container handling , it would provide a much greater degree of security against attempts to smuggle radioactive materials into the U.S. by terrorists.
Russia’s nuclear regulator and Jordan’s Energy and Minerals Regulatory Commission (EMRC) recently signed an agreement to cooperate in the field of nuclear and radiation safety regulation. world-nuclear-news.org
