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.
Part Two of Two Parts: (Please read Part One first)
5. Proliferation: As more and more nuclear reactors are built, the odds that nuclear materials and nuclear expertise will spread to hostile groups and/or nations. There are global systems to monitor and account for weapons-grade nuclear materials but they would be overwhelmed by the production from fifteen thousand reactors.
6. Uranium abundance: It is estimated that at the current rate of burning uranium in existing reactors, the world supply of easily accessible uranium will be consumed in eighty years. In order to produce fifteen terawatts of power, the current reserves of economically viable uranium would last about five years. After that, the increasing difficulty of obtaining uranium from marginal ore deposits would send the price higher and higher.
7. Uranium extraction from seawater: Although currently uranium is mined from a variety of ore deposits worldwide, it is also possible to extract uranium from seawater. It is estimated that there are over two trillion pounds of uranium in the water of the world’s oceans. If it could be economically extracted, it could supply fifteen terawatts generated by conventional reactors for over five thousand years. However, as uranium is extracted, the concentration drops in the remaining seawater so the cost would rise steadily. Abbott estimates that after about thirty years of extraction, it would become too expensive to be practical.
8. Exotic metals: A variety of exotic metals are used in the construction of a nuclear reactor containment vessel. Hafnium is use to absorb neutrons, beryllium is used to reflect neutrons, zirconium is used in the coating of nuclear fuel rods, and niobium is alloyed with steel to make it resistant to neutron embrittlement. Mining and refining these metals adds to nuclear construction costs and environmental damage. These metals also have other industrial uses that compete in the marketplace. Construction of a nuclear reactor every day would rapidly deplete these metals and lead to an exotic metal supply crisis.
Abbott points out that these problems will be present for the use of thorium as a fuel as well as uranium. He acknowledges that it is possible to use breeder reactors to increase the utility of uranium but he goes on to say that the technology for breeder reactors is more complex and difficult to develop and operate than conventional reactors. The use of breeder reactors would increase the cost and possibility of accidents.
Abbott says that many of these problems would be present for fusion reactors as well as fission reactors but he says that fusion reactors will not be developed in the near future. I will have to take exception to this particular remark by Abbott. There are at least half a dozen fusion projects that may be less than ten years away from producing small inexpensive fusion reactors that will not have many of the problems that he lists above for fission reactors.
No nuclear advocates today are calling for replacing all other energy sources like Abbott’s analysis. There are calls for nuclear power to produce about one terawatt of energy. This might be possible to accomplish in the short run. However, even looking at the problems that seven percent of Abbot’s fifteen thousand reactors would take shows that such a plan is unrealistic.
Abbott concludes that, “Due to the cost, complexity, resource requirements, and tremendous problems that hang over nuclear power, our investment dollars would be more wisely placed elsewhere,” Abbott said. “Every dollar that goes into nuclear power is dollar that has been diverted from assisting the rapid uptake of a safe and scalable solution such as solar thermal.”
Part One of Two Parts:
I recently posted several articles with reasons that nuclear power was not a good low-carbon energy source for fighting climate change. (Climate Change 1, Climate Change 2, Climate Change 3 ). The recent Paris accord on climate change mitigation has thrust the subject of reducing carbon emissions back into the headlines. One group suggested that we should build a hundred reactors a year until 2050. That would be about thirty five hundred reactors.
I thought that today, I would share a list of arguments against nuclear power by Derek Abbott, Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Adelaide in Australia. (Australia does not use nuclear power but it does mine and export uranium. There are serious economic interests pushing nuclear power in Australia.) Abbott was responding to calls for massive building programs for nuclear reactors in response to climate change. In order to replace all energy generation with nuclear power, Abbot says that about fifteen thousand nuclear reactors would have to be built to generate the fifteen terawatts that are consumed globally.
1. Land and location: About eight square miles are required for a nuclear power station, its exclusion zone, its enrichment plant, ore processing and supporting infrastructure. The location has to be near a huge source of cooling water and away from areas with large population and/or risk of natural disasters. Finding locations for fifteen thousand reactors that would meet these criterion would be very difficult if not impossible.
2. Lifetime: Nuclear power reactors are licensed for forty to sixty years. They have to be decommissioned after that because neutron bombardment makes the metal in the plant brittle. Assuming about a fifty year lifespan for an average power reactor, with a fleet of fifteen thousand reactors, one reactor would have to be decommissioned and one reactor would have to become operational every day. Currently, up to twelve years is required to plan, license and construct a nuclear power reactor. It can take up to twenty years to decommission a nuclear power reactor. These time requirements could not provide for the “one a day” scenario.
3. Nuclear Waste: After sixty years of use, there is still no agreed upon “best” method for waste disposal. There is no permanent geological repository for the existing seventy thousand metric tons of spent nuclear fuel and more is being produced every day. A typical power plant can produce twenty metric tons of waste per year. For fifteen thousand reactors, that would be three hundred thousand metric tons of spent nuclear fuel per year. In other words, each year over four times the total amount of currently existing waste would be produced. This would be impossible to deal with.
4. Accident rate: Over the sixty years of nuclear power, there have been eleven accidents where a reactor core partially or completely melted. These accidents cannot be anticipated with standard risk assessment methods because of the complexity of a nuclear power plant. These eleven accidents occurred in about fourteen thousand reactor-years of operation. Calculating these accidents for fifteen thousand reactors, that would mean about one partial or complete core-melt per month somewhere in the world.
Please read Part Two.
Derek Abbott:
There is a lot of uranium deposits around the world that could be mined for fuel for reactors. However, many of the easiest deposits to access are being mined. With the increasing number of nuclear reactors being constructed around the world, the price of uranium is rising and new ore deposits will be exploited.
Greenland came under the control of the Norway in 1262. Norway and Denmark formed a union in 1536. This union was dissolved in 1814 and Demark retained control of Norwegian colonies including Greenland. In 1988, Greenland adopted a policy banning the mining of uranium and other radioactive materials.
Greenland’s status changed from colony to autonomous state in the Kingdom of Denmark in 2009 after a vote of the citizens of Greenland for self-rule. Its defense and foreign policies are still controlled by Denmark. This change included Greenland taking control over its mineral and hydrocarbon rights.
In late 2013, Greenland’s parliament voted to end the ban on mining radioactive materials including uranium. It is now possible for private companies to start mining uranium and other valuable minerals. Recently Greenland and Denmark reached an agreement covering the export control and security of uranium and other radioactive materials.
Greenland’s government stated, “The agreements establish concrete cooperation between Denmark and Greenland, ensuring that Greenland can continue its efforts to expand its mining whilst the kingdom complies with international obligations and lives up to the highest international standards. It is a complex of agreements which, based on the current division of powers within the realm, clearly specify responsibilities and tasks between Danish and Greenland authorities.”
The Greenland Minister of Industry, Labor and Trade commented that, “Overall the agreements ensure that, if at a later time the extraction of uranium as a by-product is allowed, it can be used solely for peaceful and civilian purposes. It is a matter which has been very carefully prepared in a good and constructive cooperation between Denmark and Greenland and which is based on the joint recommendations of the uranium report from 2013.”
The Danish parliament will entertain legislation on safeguards and export controls for uranium in the near future. At the same time, the draft legislation will be sent to the parliament of Greenland for review.
Greenland Minerals and Energy, an Australian company, carried out a feasibility study for a uranium and rare earths mining project in Greenland in mid-2015. Kvanefjeld is considered to the second largest deposit of rare earth elements and the sixth largest deposit of uranium in the world. The project received preliminary approval from the government of Greenland in late 2015. It is now in the permitting phase. The government has also agreed with the initial development strategy put forward for the project. GM&E has formally announced Joint Ores Reserves Committee-compliant maiden ore reserves for the Kvanefjeld project. Total ore reserves are estimated at over one hundred million tons of uranium ore.
It would be better for Greenland’s environment to find other sources of commercial products than uranium and rare earths. Mining these materials is an incredibly toxic process with devastating pollution of the landscape.
Greenland:
