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.
Ambient office = 79 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 124 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 127 nanosieverts per hour
Blueberry from Central Market = 129 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 74 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 67 nanosieverts per hour
Part 2 of 2 Parts
Bilbao y León said that people tend to expect that the energy systems of the future will be a version of what currently exists. She went on to say that the technology is going to be very different. “Very importantly I think that we are going to see a lot of coupling of systems … electricity is obviously going to be very important as we try to electrify a lot of energy, but clearly there are going to be additional energy vectors … all these technologies are going to make this system more complex … we can have different energy products depending on what is needed at different times to ensure the reliability and the resiliency and the flexibility of the system.”
Ballout discussed scenarios that EDF have been developing for more than fifteen years, mainly for internal use. The company has made its scenario for net-zero publicly available this year. “It’s fundamentally different from the other scenarios we’re developing because we start with the constraints and the end. We start with net neutrality in 2050 and we go backwards. So we try to find the most economically efficient pathway to achieve this neutrality. And when I say economically efficient, I think of welfare maximization, the minimization of the cost and the optimization of the resilience of the system.”
He continued, “And that’s how we come to a mix that shows we have to multiply by six our renewable capacity in Europe [by 2050] – we’ve been talking about 15 Western European countries. We will have between 120 and 150 gigawatts of nuclear capacity. We will enhance significantly the production of biofuels and CCS. We see this path will take us to a significant increase of flexibility needs … it’s a very important part of the resilience of the system.”
Wilmshurst said it was clear that nuclear and renewables will share role together in the future electricity system. He said, “If we have an idealistic view that renewables can expand and expand and expand, the transmission grid needs to expand and expand, get more complicated, and when it gets more complicated the potential for it be less reliable increases.”
However, he continued that financing is a hurdle for nuclear deployment in most countries. “A great part of nuclear being perceived as expensive is the financing cost. So why is the financing cost so high? Because you have to build the nuclear plant – it takes a long time, it’s complicated – but that huge capital investment upfront alone then gives you the facility that runs for many decades to recoup the investment.”
Wilmshurst added that “If we get deployment plans together with a clear picture … all of a sudden, the deployment experience increases, deployment risk goes down, the confidence in the financial markets that the projects can be delivered on time increases. Finance starts flowing. If we don’t make a decision to move, we don’t start doing things, we don’t learn as well. There’s hesitancy in the markets to invest.”
Ballout said nuclear and hydro play a very important role because outages of plants can be scheduled during periods where the demand is lower. “But that’s why we say we have to continue financing and investing in hydro and nuclear. The nuclear fleet is capable of ramping up when suddenly you don’t have sun or wind. It’s possible technologically and technically speaking and at the same time it is possible to ramp down in order to leave room for renewables to produce and that’s really the very important message for us.”
China’s Xi and Macron urge ‘political settlement’ of Iran nuclear issue, state media reports reuters.com
Russia Warns Ukraine’s F-16s Will Be Treated as Nuclear Threats newsweek.com
Republicans urge Biden to prevent French company from collaborating with Russian nuclear company foxnews.com
Nuclear site license issued for UK’s Sizewell C world-nuclear-news.org
Ambient office = 59 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 100 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 100 nanosieverts per hour
Avocado from Central Market = 72 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 90 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 81 nanosieverts per hour
Part 1 of 2 Parts
Massive growth is expected in the global demand for electricity. If it materializes it will require an expansion of both generation and the transmission systems, speakers at a side event at the World Energy Congress 2024 agreed. They said that nuclear power will play an important role in ensuring the resilience of the future global electrical system.
The session was titled Building low-carbon resilient electricity system. It was co-organized by World Nuclear Association, the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) on the sidelines of the World Energy Congress, held in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, on 22-25 April.
Sama Bilbao y León is the Director General of the World Nuclear Association. When asked about the biggest challenges to the global electricity system, she said that many developed countries have “very robust and reliable energy systems” that have been built over the years but when adding new generation, especially intermittent renewable generation, “we have forgotten to ensure the resiliency of the system. We are finding ourselves close to breaking point where any most-needed capacity … is really going to require major investment into the grid itself.”
Neil Wilmshurst is the Senior Vice President of Energy System Resilience and Chief Nuclear Operator at EPRI. He said that in the developed world the challenge is integrating renewables, reliability, and resilience in the context of increasing demand. He mentioned that conservative estimates put future electricity demand at twice or three times the current demand. “If you look at the amount of hydrogen people say could be in demand in the US, it would take the entire current generation capacity of the US to produce it. That is the kind of magnitude of generation we’re talking about. Then you throw on top of that the coming load from data centers.” Electricity demand in developing countries is also rapidly expanding. A major challenge will be simultaneously increasing electricity supply in the developed world while electrifying the developing world.
Iva Brkic is the Secretary of UNECE’s Sustainable Energy Division. She noted a recent International Energy Agency (IEA) report which estimated that there was a need to add or refurbish a total of more than fifty million miles of grids by 2040, the equivalent of the existing global grid. She said, “We need to double it in the next 14 years to meet our targets. So where are those resources going to come from? Where are the critical raw materials that we need to identify, to secure the supply chains, to really build that infrastructure? Now we add another layer to this – keeping the resiliency but also the reliability of that grid.”
Brkic said that the effects of climate change are already being experienced around the globe. “How can we ensure that the system that we are now redesigning and building and modernizing can withstand those impacts of climate change – the heatwaves, the droughts. This is something that we need to pay attention to.”
Brkic continued, “At the UNECE, we like to think also about the aspects of balancing between delivering on energy security, affordability and environmental sustainability. And when we think now about modernising the electricity system, it’s also about balancing those aspects and creating the resiliency while actually cleaning the energy system.”
Wassim Ballout is an energy analyst at EDF’s Corporate Strategy Division. The electricity generation sector is still one of the highest emitters of CO2. Many countries rely heavily on fossil fuels for electricity production. He said, “One of the biggest challenges will be to satisfy this significant demand growth with decarbonized production. Not only decarbonizing the existing production but also to cope with the significant increase … the challenge would be to invest in all low-cost, low-emission technologies and to have a technological neutral approach and have good incentives to do that.”
Please read Part 2 next
Government awards £196m to support development of advanced nuclear fuels plant businessgreen.com
Preventing nuclear devastation: U.S. must upgrade its missile defense capabilities washingtontimes.com
Russia defends veto of UN resolution to prohibit nukes in outer space, urges vote to ban all weapons apnews.com
Iran and the UN nuclear agency are still discussing how to implement a 2023 deal on inspections yahoo.com
Government awards £196m to support development of advanced nuclear fuels plant businessgreen.com
Preventing nuclear devastation: U.S. must upgrade its missile defense capabilities washingtontimes.com
Russia defends veto of UN resolution to prohibit nukes in outer space, urges vote to ban all weapons apnews.com
Iran and the UN nuclear agency are still discussing how to implement a 2023 deal on inspections yahoo.com
France’s Framatome and Germany’s Technical University of Munich (TUM) have agreed to create an industrialization process for the manufacture of monolithic molybdenum-uranium (U-Mo) fuel for the TUM’s FRM II research reactor. Framatome said that this low-enriched fuel will benefit from the highest uranium fuel density ever loaded into a European research reactor.
The twenty thermal megawatt FRM II research reactor has been operating since 2005. It is one of the most effective sources of high-flux neutrons in the world. The reactor is not used to generate electricity. It is used to provide a neutron source for industrial and scientific use. The neutrons it generates are also used to produce medical radioisotopes and for the doping of high-purity silicon for the semiconductor industry. The reactor has a facility for teletherapy of malignant tumors using fast neutrons.
The FRM II currently uses fuel enriched to over ninety five precent uranium-235 to generate its dense neutron flux. Such high-enriched uranium (HEU) is considered to be a nuclear proliferation risk. TUM has agreed with the German government and the Bavarian State, who finance the reactor, to work towards converting it to fuel with lower enrichment when a suitable fuel is becomes available. This is also a condition of the reactor’s operating license, which was issued in 2003.
Monolithic U-Mo is the only fuel which can allow the reactor to perform as intended while using a low enrichment of less than twenty percent uranium-235, according to TUM. This is possible because of the high uranium density in the fuel, Framatome said.
In 2019, TUM contracted Framatome to develop the U-Mo foils manufacturing technique to utilize the existing technology of embedded foils in a cladding of aluminum. The first U-Mo foils were successfully manufactured in 2022 at Framatome’s Compagnie pour l’Étude et la Réalisation de Combustibles Atomiques (CERCA) Research and Innovation Laboratory (CRIL) at Romans-sur-Isère in France. Inaugurated in 2019, CRIL is dedicated to developing uranium-based fuel for international research in physics and nuclear medicine.
CRIL, in cooperation with TUM, developed the key steps of the manufacturing process for a high-quality U-Mo fuel. This has included the manufacture of small-scale prototypes, the establishment of a qualification procedure, and the installation of a pilot line in its research facility in Romans. Irradiation of the first monolithic U-Mo fuel plate prototype is scheduled for late 2024.
François Gauché is Vice-President of CERCA. He said, “We have been working on this project since 2019 and we are proud to celebrate this important milestone with our client. Our teams rose to the challenge of developing a high-tech fuel to meet the needs of research reactors and ensure their sustainability. We are now ready to take this to the next level and manufacture this innovative fuel.”
Christian Pfleiderer is the scientific director of the FRM II. He said, “FRM II and Framatome have been working since 2019 to set up a European production line for monolithic U-Mo fuel The hard work of our teams has paid off. This new fuel is the guarantee for a reliable and sustainable supply of neutrons for research and innovation.”
Facility To Advance New-era Nuclear Research miragenews.com
Federal Environment Minister: Nuclear power too expensive, too protracted and too risky marketscreener.com
Russia says it’s deploying tactical nukes in drills as Ukraine cries ‘blackmail’ usatoday.com
Ambient office = 61 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 126 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 126 nanosieverts per hour
Roma tomato from Central Market = 102 nanosieverts per hour
Tap water = 81 nanosieverts per hour
Filter water = 75 nanosieverts per hour
Dover Sole from Central = 100 nanosieverts per hour
