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.
Nuclear experts says million cancers could result from Fukushima disasters. enenews.com
General Electric’s closure on the purchase of Alstom’s power generation business prompted a leadership change at GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy. Jay Wileman is assuming the role of president and chief executive officer of the company, while Caroline Reda takes on a new assignment. nuclearstreet.com
South Africa has been considering a major move into nuclear power generation. The government has discussed possible contracts with a number of different reactor vendors. There have been scandals involving release of a proposed contract with Russia that would have shielded the Russian manufacturers from liability in case of an accident. The government of S.A. has been reluctant to release budgets that have to do with possible reactor construction projects but there have been estimates of as much as seventy billion dollars. There is a great deal of public resistance to the idea of using nuclear power in S.A.
S.A. needs to expand power generation to support economic development and expansion of housing. Recently, a coal storage silo at the Majuba power station forced the power utility Eskom to schedule a series of power outages. S.A. currently depends on coal as its main source of power. The S.A. Department of Energy released an Integrated Resource Plan for Electricity for 2010-2030 in March of 2011. The plan was to allocate ten percent of new power generation to wind power, eleven percent to solar power and thirteen percent to nuclear power. Coincidentally, the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power station in Japan occurred in March of 2011. This had a global impact on the nuclear power industry and S.A. reevaluated its plans for building nuclear reactors.
The Integrated Resource plan was updated in 2013. The need for nuclear power was questioned by public critics and the need for any generation capacity expansion became less acute due to a slower growth in power demand than projected. New scenarios for capacity expansion were explored that removed the nuclear component. It was decided that no new nuclear reactors would be needed before 2025 at current demand growth levels. If demand dropped further, no nuclear power would be needed before 2035.
In 2014, the government changed its attitude and policy with respect to nuclear power. A quick deal shrouded in secrecy was struck with Russia’s Rosatom as a preferred partner for building new power reactors. Critics of the deal announced their suspicions that corruption was involved in the creation of the deal. The S.A. government denied that a contract had been signed with Rosatom and carried out a series of workshops with other reactor vendors. Critics of the planning process also pointed out that there was a lack of details with respect to location of the proposed nuclear power plants as well as their construction specifications. There was an initial environmental assessment of five possible coastal sites.
In July of 2015, the Department of Energy and Nuclear energy Cooperation of South Africa announced that there might eventually be as many as eight nuclear reactors constructed. Two massive coal plants are currently under construction in S.A. and their slipping schedules and rising costs may foreshadow similar problems if S.A. begins construction of nuclear power reactors. The projected ten year build time and seventy billion dollar price tag for the eight reactors could easily become twenty years and a hundred and forty billion dollars. There are some plans that would delay payment until after completion but this could result in huge debts being passed along to future generations. S.A. would be better served by investing in renewable sources such as wind and solar power which are dropping in price.
Time has come for an ‘honorable retreat’ from Tokyo 2020 over Fukushima. japantimes.co.jp
A former Japan ambassador said that uncontrolled nuclear chain reactions could be underway at Fukushima. enenews.com
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) said today it will prepare a proposal for taking a minority stake in France’s Areva’s reactor business. world-nuclear-news.org
Russia and Korea have signed a contract to carry out research on experimental fuel rods irradiated in the BOR-60 fast research reactor. world-nuclear-news.org
Americium is a highly radioactive transuranic element that has an atomic number of 95 and is represented by the symbol “Am.” Americium is produced by bombarding uranium or plutonium with neutrons in a nuclear reactor. One ton of spent nuclear fuel contains about ten grams of americium. It is commonly used in commercial smoke detectors, in neutron sources and in industrial gauges. Americium is scarce and expensive and its presence in spent nuclear fuel complicates storage and reprocessing of nuclear waste.
A report on new research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the November 6th issue of Science magazine contains details on how chemical manipulation of americium can allow it to be easily extracted from spent nuclear fuel. Up to this point, it has been one of the most difficult elements to isolate and extract from nuclear waste. The new technique explained in the Science article may improve the way in which nuclear waste is handled. The most dangerous elements including americium can be removed which will make the waste safer to store.
Currently portions of nuclear waste are recycled by dissolving solid spent nuclear fuel in strong acid and removing uranium, plutonium and a few other elements that are suspended in the solution. Americium is difficult to remove with this process because it closely resembles other elements. In the acidic solution, americium atoms surrender three of their electrons and become ions with a charge of +3. Other elements in the solution also have charges of +3 and are very similar in size to the americium ions. This means that methods for extracting the americium ions wind up pulling other elements out of the solution along with the americium.
The new technique grew out of attempts to get americium atoms to give up more of their electrons so that their ions would have charges of +5 or +6, making it easier to separate from other elements. The chemists created special electrodes to insert into the spent fuel solution. A small applied voltage pulled another electron out of the americium ions giving them a +4 charge. This configuration is unstable and quickly results in the loss of one or two more electrons leaving the americium ions with the desired +5 or +6 charge. This new charge state is sufficiently different from the other elements in the solution that the americium can be efficiently removed from the solution.
After publishing their research on changing the charge state of americium in solution, the researchers went on to actually demonstrate the removal of americium from a spent nuclear waste solution. For the moment, this research is primarily of theoretical interests and serves as a proof of principle because most nuclear power plants in the U.S. store their waste and do not reprocess it. If this technique is actually used on nuclear waste, the americium could be placed back into a nuclear reactor and split into elements that are safer and more stable. While this is an interesting possibility, there are a lot of other problems with respect to reprocessing spent nuclear waste that must be solved before it could be implemented.
112 of 173 children diagnosed with thyroid abnormality in Kashiwa city Chiba in Japan. fukushima-diary.com
Watch An Armored Vehicle Rear-End An Alleged Nuclear Missile Carrier jalopnik.com
In July 2014, China and Argentina signed a new high-level agreement towards construction of a third pressurized heavy water reactor (PHWR) at the Atucha plant in Argentina. world-nuclear-news.org
I have posted essays before about the health effects of ionizing radiation. There is a varying low level of natural radioactivity every where on Earth. Often, emissions from nuclear power plants are compared to the background natural level of radiation and dismissed if they are not more radioactive than the background. The NRC is currently debating their stance on the harmfulness of low levels of radiation. There are some people who claim that far from being harmful, low levels of natural radioactivity are actual beneficial to health. This is called “radiation hormesis.” There is lobbying to have the NRC adopt the radiation hormesis theory in their evaluation of safe levels of radiation. However, evidence for the dangers of exposure to even low doses of ionizing radiation has been accumulating for years.
In 2012, researchers from the University of South Carolina and the University of Paris-Sud sifted through more than five thousand published research articles and selected forty six for quantitative comparison. They carried out a meta-analysis of the forty six peer-reviewed studies which had been conducted and published over a period of forty years. The organisms studied included plants, animals but were mostly human.
The studies examined health issues such as DNA damage, diseases like Down’s Syndrome, and even the birth ratio of boys to girls. “The researchers found significant negative effects in a range of categories, including immunology, physiology, mutation and disease occurrence. The frequency of negative effects was beyond that of random chance.” Every study boiled down their results to a single number for the effect of the radiation which made it possible to compare the results of all the studies. The scientists concluded that, “ …variation in low-level, natural background radiation was found to have small, but highly statistically significant, negative effects on DNA as well as several measures of health.”
Now the World Health Organization (WHO) has released a new report on the health effects of low levels of ionizing radiation. The International Agency for Research on Cancer, the cancer division of WHO, has just released their findings from a major new study that found that exposure to even low doses of ionizing radiation over time increases the risk of solid cancers as much as short, intense doses of radiation. This study is hailed as being the most “powerful” study to date on the risks for cancer from low doses of radiation. Over three hundred thousand nuclear workers in France, the United Kingdom and the United States who were exposed to radiation between 1943 and 2005 were studied by a collaboration of international partners including the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Public Health England Centre for Radiation, Chemical and Environmental Hazards and the International Agency for Research on Cancer, as well as universities including the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and Drexel University.
The bottom line is that there does not appear to be a threshold below which there are no damaging health effects of ionizing radiation. This is referred to as the “linear-no-threshold” model. Since the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan in March of 2011, the nuclear industry and some governments have attempted to placate the global public by downplaying the dangers of any increased radiation that people may be experiencing from the radiation released during and after the disaster into the atmosphere, soil, ground water and ocean.
There are many sources of ionizing radiation beyond fallout from nuclear accidents. Routine releases from nuclear power plants, x-rays, airport scanners, nature background radioactivity, radioactive particles in smoke from coal burning power plants, medical diagnostic processes, etc. can all contribute to the dose of radiation any individual may experience. There is a broad consensus among radiation experts that repeated exposure to low doses of radiation can cause cancer, genetic mutations, heart disease, stroke and other serious illness. Our standards for radiation exposure need to be revised in light of the findings of these studies. This is a major public health issue.
