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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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.
The permanent disposal of nuclear waste is a very serious problem. Burial deep underground is probably the best choice. However, the burial site must be chosen carefully. The area must be geologically stable. It should be in an arid region with little ground water. The geological formation should be as impervious to penetration by ground water as possible. For decades, it has been assumed that salt deposits underground would be a good place to bury nuclear waste. Several waste depositories have been set up in old salt mines including the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. The U.S. government was planning on building a nuclear waste repository in Nevada in a salt mine under Yucca Mountain in Nevada until the project was cancelled in 2009. Now the wisdom of sequestering nuclear waste in salt deposits has been called into question.
A team of researches as the University of Texas in Austin has been studying the ability of geological formations of rock salt to resist penetration by groundwater. The team did field work and created three dimensional microscopic computer tomographic images of rock salt crystals. They found that it was possible for rock salt to become permeable. What they found has significant implications for the gas and oil industry but especially for nuclear waste storage.
“What this new information tells us is that the potential for permeability is there and should be a consideration when deciding where and how to store nuclear waste,” said Maša Prodanovic, assistant professor in the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering. “If it’s an existing nuclear waste storage site, you may want to re-evaluate it with this new information.”
Salt deposits prevent the flow of ground water at shallow depths. What the researchers were exploring is the possibility that the permeability could change at greater depths. Laboratory experiments and field studies of forty eight hydrocarbon wells confirmed that the permeability of salt deposits does increase with increasing depths. A surprising finding of the research was that even shallow salt deposits could allow water to flow. Under stress, the pockets in the rock salt between crystals that hold brine can become connected in a network of channels that allows percolation through the salt.
This research was originally undertaken for the oil and gas industry. They were testing the ability of rock salt formations to act as “seals” for deposits of oil. However, extending the findings to work on nuclear repositories suggested that there could be problems with the assumptions about the impermeability of salt formations. To date, the concern has been that the creation of the repository chambers could cause cracks to form in the salt which might permit water flow. Because of this new research, it is now understood that undisturbed salt deposits near the surface could allow the flow of water. This calls into question the suitability of old salt mines and shallow salt deposits for nuclear disposal.
There is a great deal of spent nuclear fuel that requires disposal. Cooling pools at nuclear power plants are filling up and dry cast storage will be expensive and time consuming to construct for temporary storage. This recent research suggests that a number of sites that were being considered for geological repositories may have to be rejected. This is just another reason that nuclear power is a bad way to generate electricity and should be abandoned as soon as possible.
Rock salt crystal structure:
Underground wall around Fukushima reactors has started “leaning” and cracks are developing due to rising water levels. enenews.com
State Specialised Enterprise ChNPP said yesterday that the first 10 canisters for the dry interim fuel storage facility (ISF-2) had been delivered to the site of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. world-nuclear-news.org
Canada puts off decision on proposed nuclear waste dump near Lake Huron. michiganradio.org
For the past few years, Russia has been playing with the threat of nuclear war and escalating international tensions. The seizure of Crimea in the Ukraine brought with it the fear of a war in Eastern Europe between Russia and NATO forces. Putin has openly stated that if Russia were losing a conventional war with NATO, he would consider unleashing tactical nuclear weapons. Russia has been consistently violating the air space of other countries with nuclear bombers with their transponders turned off. On one such foray into British airspace recently, the pilot turn on a countdown sequence for arming a nuclear bomb but then turned it off again before it reached zero. Now Turkey, a NATO country, has shot down a Russia fighter near the Syrian border, claiming that the Russian plane violated their airspace. The Russian deny the charge and threatened retaliation for the downing of their plane.
All this has led to fear that a nuclear World War III is a real possibility. The U.S. and Russia both have over four thousand nuclear warheads and the means to launch them at each other. Warning systems are on constant alert and nuclear forces are ready to go. Many people have been searching the Internet for information on nuclear war. Here is a short list of some of the expected effects of such a war.
1) The U.S. has an emergency warning system that is tested regularly to break into television and radio broadcasts. With the ubiquity of smart phones, systems to broadcast a text message warning exist.
2) The best that the average person could hope for would be about three minutes to decide what to do. Maybe there would be time to get inside or underground and maybe not.
3) Anyone who is in the immediate vicinity of the detonation of a typical one megaton nuclear bomb would be instantly vaporized. Beyond that zone, there would be terrible heat and radiation that would kill more. Many more would soon die from radiation poisoning, starvation, exposure, disease and other effects of the attack.
4) Millions of people could die instantly if nuclear bombs detonated over major cities. An estimate from 1979 suggests that as much as eighty percent of the population of the U.S. would die immediately in a major nuclear war with Russia.
5) Those who were not killed in the short war would struggle to survive in a devastated and toxic wasteland where food, water, shelter and medical care would be difficult if not impossible to find.
6) It has been estimated that the detonation of as few as one hundred nuclear warheads anywhere in the world could bring on a nuclear winter that would eventually kill billions of people and bring an end to human civilization.
7) It would take decades for the environment recover from a major nuclear war. Toxic radioactivity would linger for centuries in some areas. There would be a massive die off of all life, not just the human population.
Nuclear weapons are an existential threat to the survival of the human race and should be abolished before either intent or accident brings about World War III.
Have a nice Thanksgiving!
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:
