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.
As the Monty Python crew liked to say, “And now for something completely different.” The existence of nuclear weapons and the dangers of nuclear war are weighty subjects upon which I have blogged many times. Since the 1950s, the world has lived under the threat of nuclear annihilation. The U.S. and the Russians still have thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at each other ready to launch on a moment’s notice. There have been accidents, errors and confrontations that have brought us to the brink of World War III at least a dozen times but somehow we managed to escape destruction. There are those who think that it may not have been just luck.
Edgar Mitchell was the sixth person to walk on the moon. He was part of the Apollo 14 mission in 1971. He has said that on the return flight from the moon, he had a transcendental experience. He published an article in 1971 about the experience and other explorations of paranormal phenomena. Mitchell retired from NASA in 1972. In 1973, Mitchell and several other people formed the Institute for Noetic Sciences. The Institute ” conducts research on such topics such as spontaneous remission, meditation, consciousness, alternative healing practices, consciousness-based healthcare, spirituality, human potential, psychic abilities, psychokenesis and survival of consciousness after bodily death.”
Mitchell has said that he is “90 percent sure that many of the thousands of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, recorded since the 1940s, belong to visitors from other planets”. Mitchell claims that he has spoken to officials from several countries who say that they personally met extraterrestrials. He thinks that the U.S. government is not only aware of the extraterrestrial visitors but that they keep secret the fact that they have wreckage of alien spacecraft and alien bodies. They have even received technology from aliens. In an interview in 2014, Mitchell admitted that he had never seen a UFO, had never been threatened over his claims about UFOs and has no concrete evidence of a global conspiracy to cover up governments’ knowledge of UFOs.
Mitchell has also claimed that UFOs piloted by alien races had made regular visits to our planet during the Cold War to help prevent the start of a nuclear war. He claims that many Air Force officers have told him that they worked with aliens at U.S. missile bases during the Cold War. He told a British tabloid that aliens had visited the White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico because they were interested in the nuclear bomb tests being conducted there. He went on to say that the human staff of our missile facilities had often seen UFOs overhead and that the UFOs had often disabled U.S. missiles. He said that officers from the Pacific Coast bases said that UFOs had often shot down test missiles. NASA and the U.S. government dismiss all such claims by Mitchell.
In 1956, a short story titled “The Far Look” was published by Theodore L. Thomas in Astounding magazine. From a comment on the story, “Essentially, astronauts returning from a duty at the Lunar Station, all had The Far Look which gave them not just a wider perspective on all things, but also deep powers of perception about life, the universe and everything, much more than everyone back on Earth.” Travelling to the Moon and back obviously had a profound effect on Edgar Mitchell. It is an open question whether he actually achieved “deep powers of perception about life, the universe and everything.” I doubt that aliens have been helping to prevent World War III, but it is a nice thought.
Edgar Mitchell:
The supporters of nuclear power seldom talk about the pollution and devastation caused by uranium mining. All over the world in remote areas, native peoples are seeing their landscapes destroyed and their health endangered by the mining of uranium. I have blogged about uranium mines in Africa, Australia and Canada. There are also uranium mines in the U.S. with a legacy of environmental and health damage. The Navajo Nation in the South Western United States has endured the pollution of their environment by old uranium mines and is fighting attempts to mine more uranium on their lands.
Uranium mining began in the Four Corners region where Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico meet during World War II and ramped up to major operations during the Cold War. When the uranium deposits were exhausted, the mining companies moved on leaving ruins and pollution behind. It is estimated that Colorado has spent over a billion dollars to clean up old mining and mill sites. There are over thirteen hundred abandon sites remains throughout the state. An entire mining town in west-central Colorado was so contaminated that it had to completely torn down.
Past uranium mining operations have also contaminated soil, water and homes at over five hundred sites across the Navajo Nation in the Four Corners area. Water from twenty two wells is too contaminated for people or livestock to drink. Cancers and other illnesses among the Navajo have been attributed to radiation and heavy metal poisoning from uranium mining. The Navajo Nation has been working with the EPA for years to clean up contaminated sites and train Navajos to assist in the cleanup of their lands.
The uranium market has been very volatile in the last decade but the general trend has been down. There was a brief spike in 2007 but the market is still soft. In spite of their savaging of Navajo lands, uranium mining companies are looking to return to the region to start more mining operations when market conditions improve. There are numerous mining sites owned by Canadian Energy Fuels on the Utah-Colorado border. Uranium Resources Incorporated (URI) holds two hundred thousand acres of uranium holdings in the area, a license to produce several millions of pounds of uranium a year and a couple of licensed milling plants.
URI began working with the Resources and Development Committee (RDC) of the Navajo Nation Council in 2014. They have mining rights to private lands adjacent to the Navajo Nation but they need right of way to move their uranium from the mines. In December of 2014, the RDC, without the authorization of the full Council, voted to allow URI to mine uranium on private land near the eastern border of the Navajo Nation in New Mexico and move the uranium across tribal lands.
During the Summer Session this year, the Navajo Nation Council voted overwhelmingly to rescind the legislation passed by the RDC and deny URI the right to transport uranium over their lands. The Navajo have a strict law against uranium mining and another against uranium transportation. They cannot prevent the mining on nearby private lands but they are vehemently opposed with good reason to the transportation of uranium across Navajo land. The Navajo are not interested in having anything to do with uranium mining or transportation and they have to be ever vigilant because the mining companies are always seeks to circumvent the Navajo anti-uranium laws.
The red dots are the contaminated sites:
I have blogged about several new fusion reactor projects. The main thrust of these projects is to create a commercial fusion reactor for generating electricity. The institutions working on these designs are trying to make small, economical, safe and efficient fusion reactors that can be brought to market within the next ten years. In this blog I am going to talk about the ARC fusion reactor project at MIT.
A great deal of fusion research work has gone into what is called a “tokomak” configuration. This is a donut shaped chamber surrounded by powerful magnets that compress an ionized gas or plasma to generate extremely high temperatures. Heavy isotopes of hydrogen such as deuterium and tritium are often used for the plasma. With sufficient pressure and temperature, these can be fused to create heavier atoms such as helium while releasing more energy than is used to create and compress the plasma. There is a huge international project in France called ITER that is attempting to reach the point where it can generate more energy that it is consuming but it can only operate for a few seconds before the magnetic coils overheat.
At MIT, their new ARC reactor is based on the same tokomak design as the ITER but it is using new magnets based on superconducting materials which can generate far more powerful magnetic fields than the magnets in use at the ITER project. These new magnets can confine more plasma in a smaller space than has ever been possible in existing test tokomaks. The ARC design should provide in an increase in the power of the current tokomak reactors by a factor of 10. The new ARC reactor is about half the size of the ITER reactor be able to generate the same amount of power initially and eventually least three times as much power. This will allow the ARC design to produce much more power than it consumes. It is also surrounds by a circulating fluid that will be able to dissipate the heat better than the solid ITER design. This will permit it to operate continuously which will be necessary for a commercial power reactor. MIT says that it will be a fraction of the cost ITER.
At this point, the ARC reactor is only a conceptual design that has been tested in computer simulations. However, it operates on known principles from previous fusion research and does not require any new breakthroughs. The next step will be to refine the design and work out the technical specifications of the hardware necessary to build a prototype. MIT estimates that it can produce a prototype in about five years and that a commercial model could be available in as little as ten years. The current ARC reactor design should be able to produce power for about a hundred thousand homes.
With a half a dozen projects in various stages of development to produce economical fusion reactors within ten years, nuclear fission, fossil fuels and renewable energy sources may have a strong competitor. These reactors will be a fraction of the cost of nuclear fission reactors and may provide a steady source of competitively prices energy with zero carbon emissions.
Artist’s concept of the MIT ARC fusion reactor:
Japan restarts first nuclear reactor since Fukushima disaster. theguardian.com
Trillions of Becquerels of radioactive material still flowing into sea from Fukushima. enenews.com
An intergovernmental agreement between Russia and Mexico on cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy has entered into force, Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom announced today. world-nuclear-news.org
