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.
I have blogged before about the vitrification plant at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland, WA. There are hundreds of buried tanks at Hanford containing mixtures of radioactive and toxic gases, liquids and solids. Work started at Hanford in 2002 on a “vitrification” plant years before they were even sure about what exactly was in the tanks. The vitrification plant was supposed to start operating in 2022 to turn the fifty six million gallons of nuclear waste in the buried tanks into glass logs which could be buried for permanent disposal. A general agreement between the State of Washington and the Department of Energy on the schedule for cleanup work that included the vitrification plant that was signed in 2010.
It turned out that the original design of the plant could have led to serious vibrations building up the piping. This could have resulted in explosions of hydrogen gas. There was also a danger that clumps of plutonium could form that might start a spontaneous chain reaction. Work was stopped on the plant in 2013 in order to solve these and other technical problems.
A technical review of the plant in 2014 was conducted by a panel that consisted of top nuclear and chemical engineers. The panel concluded that the plant had three hundred and sixty-two ” significant design vulnerabilities.” These problems included ventilations systems that might not be able to contain radioactive gases. There were also seals which might melt during plant operation.
As the work on the plant fell further and further behind, the State sued the DoE when it became obvious that the DoE would not be able to meet the 2022 deadline. The State acknowledged that it would be impossible for the DoE to meet the deadline. The State proposed that the plant be finished by 2034. Now the DoE has submitted a plan to the court in response to the suit where they request that the court allow them to changed the date for completion of the plant to 2039.
The original budget for the plant was set at twelve billion dollars. However, it is impossible now to predict what the eventual cost will be until the technical problems are solved and work can proceed. A public watchdog group named Hanford Challenge has pointed out that the DoE has spent almost seven hundred million dollars a year on construction of the plant for over a decade. This means that they are approaching or exceeding the original eight billion dollar estimated cost. Hanford Challenge is asking whether they intend to continue spending at this rate for twenty-five more years up to 2039.
A second major question raised by the delays has to do with when the plant could finished the task that it was designed for. Originally it was intended that the plant vitrify six tons of high-level waste a day and thirty tons of low-level waste a day. If the plant was completed by its original deadline of 2022, it could have finished vitrifying all the waste in by 2060, or about forty years. If the completion date is pushed out to 2039, it might be 2080 or later before the waste is disposed of. Some of the waste is stored in single-walled tanks which are already beginning to leak. As time goes by more and more of them will leak radioactive and toxic wastes into the soil and water table endangering public health and the environment.
The money being spent by the DoE on the vitrification plant amounts to around one tenth of one percent of the current defense budget. It would be nice if a little more of the defense budget could be spent on defending the people and the environment from the legacy of decades of nuclear weapons development that took place at Hanford.
Hanford Vitrification Plant:
The Hanford Nuclear Reservation where U.S. nuclear weapons were developed and manufactured is one of the most radioactively polluted places on the Earth. Millions of gallons of nuclear waste were poured into trenches and allowed to soak into the soil. Hundreds of tanks of waste were buried underground and now some are leaking. Radioactive contamination is leaking into the Columbia River where it runs past the Reservation. Cleanup projects have been proposed, funded, operated, halted and argued over for decades. Lawsuits have been filed against the Federal Government over the situation at Hanford. I have written many blog posts about the problems there. Once again the Reservation is in the news.
There are a number of different areas where radioactive waste was buried at Hanford. In the 618-10 Burial Ground, the “high-activity wastes included irradiated metallic uranium reactor fuel elements, plutonium, and high-concentration fission product streams from the development of radioisotope extraction and chemical separation processes such as the Plutonium Uranium Extraction (PUREX) process. Extremely high activity wastes were directed to underground standpipes called Vertical Pipe Units (VPUs). Other wastes were directed to open trenches in the burial ground.”
There was a windstorm last week that spread some radioactive particles from the 618-10 Burial Ground. The waste trenches in the 618-10 Burial Ground are being dug up to recover radioactive materials. Washington Closure workers have been surveying the area six miles north of the nearby city of Richland, WA. They found contamination on a speck of sand that was forty feet from Route 4, the main Hanford highway that runs to the Wye Barricade.
A representative of Washington Closure, the company working on the trenches in the 618-10 Burial Ground, said “The levels do not pose a risk to the public or the workers cleaning it up. The contamination is not in a form that could be breathed in, or that would stick to a person’s skin or clothing.” Although the contamination is not dangerous, nevertheless it is not supposed to be there.
Radiological control technicians will continue surveying the ground near the 618-10 Burial Ground for any other signs of contamination. They are shoveling any contamination found into bags for disposal. Once they are satisfied that all the contamination has been cleaned up, they will conduct an investigation to insure that it does not happen again.
During the work on the 618-10 Burial Ground trenches, surveys are conducted daily for any sign of contamination beyond the work site but there is extra concern after a windstorm. When a wind storm was predicted last week, the workers sprayed extra chemicals on the worksite to fix the soil and prevent it from being moved by the wind. Unfortunately, the fixative was not strong enough to protect the site from the seventy mile an hour winds during the storm.
Washington Closure has had continuing problems with contamination being spread around at the 618-10 Burial Ground since the summer of 2014. Small pieces of contaminated plastic have been found several times beyond the fenced area that is posted as containing radioactive hazards. Previous contamination did not get as close to the highway as the contamination discovered last week.
There are many more trenches that need to be cleaned up at Hanford. It is virtually certain that contamination will spread from those worksites. Hopefully, it will also pose “no hazard” to the public but there is no certainty that all of it will be found. Perhaps techniques and technologies for cleanup at Hanford are not quite sophisticated enough for the task. Maybe better systems will be developed in the future.
Hanford 618-10 and 618-11 Burial Grounds:
14,290 Bq/Kg of Cs-134/137 detected from mushroom in Iwaki city / Over double as last year. fukushima-diary.com
Radioactive waste mounts up as residents resist post-Fukushima disposal plans. ajw.asahi.com
A nuclear bomb’s worth of uranium is unaccounted for. atlasobscura.com
One major problem with nuclear power generation is what to do with a nuclear power reactor once it has been permanently shut down at the end of its life. This is referred to as “decommissioning.” The nuclear fuel has to be removed and disposed of. The reactor and the building that houses it have to be torn down and disposed of. Any contaminated soil has to be dug up and disposed of. In the U.S., the NRC required the operators of U.S. nuclear power reactors to set aside sufficient funds to pay for decommissioning. Currently the NRC is pressuring the owners of about one fifth of the nuclear power reactors to bring their decommissioning funds up to the level required by regulations. If there are not sufficient funds to decommission a power reactor at the end of its life, then the fuel is removed from the reactor and the whole site is boarded up and surrounded by a fence until money is available for full decommissioning.
Following the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, Japan in March of 2011, Germany decided to end its use of nuclear power. All the reactors in Germany are being shut down and the last one is supposed to be offline by 2022. Germany’s decision to shut down all the nuclear power reactors did not sit well with the German nuclear industry. As the reactors have been turned off, the profits of the industry have inevitably fallen. The top utilities in Germany have filed lawsuits claiming that they are due billions of dollars in compensation for what they claim is expropriation. The utility E.ON has requested about eight and a half billion dollars. Another major utility, RWE, is thought to have asked for about six billion dollars.
The decommissioning fund for the German reactors currently requires about eighty-five billion dollars. Over forty billion dollars that have been provided by the utilities so far. The German government has asked a commission to come back by January with a plan for insuring that there are adequate funds for the decommissioning that has to take place. One of the options being discussed is to set up a public trust to hold the money.
Twenty-seven billion dollar is due from just E.ON and RWE. However, there is some doubt that those two companies have the assets to back up their share of the fund because electricity prices and stock prices have both been declining. It has been suggested that E.ON and RWE could transfer their stake in Urenco, a uranium enrichment company, to the trust. RWE could transfer nuclear power plants, equity and/or cash assets to the trust. Both E.ON and RWE have suggested that they would consider dropping the lawsuits if the German government would reduce the amount that they are expected to contribute to the decommissioning fund.
While the U.S. government has not called for shutting down all of the nuclear power plants in the U.S., there is still a danger that there will not be sufficient funds to decommission U.S. nuclear power plants as they reach the end of their licensed lifetimes. Even if the planned funds are available, they are only the estimated cost of decommissioning and the actual cost could well rise above the estimate by the time the money is needed. Either the taxpayers will have to foot the bill or we will wind up with mothballed nuclear power plants sitting around posing a danger to health and the environment.
