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.
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:
Belgium has restarted a nuclear power reactor at Tihange. Neighboring countries including Germany, the Netherlands and Luxembourg are worried about the safety of the Belgium nuclear reactors. They are upset that Belgium does not seem to be sufficiently concerned about the threat of a nuclear accident at the Tihange power plant.
The number Two reactor at Tihange has been shut down since March of 2014 because tiny cracks were discovered in the pressure vessel that encloses the reactor. A study by the Green party group in the European parliament found that the steel used to construct the pressure vessel was of such low quality that the reactor would never have gotten a license to operate in the first place if that fact had been known. However, in November of 2015, the Belgian nuclear agency stated that there was “no obstacle” that would pose a problem for restarting the reactor. Reactor Two was restarted in December of 2015.
There is also a reactor at a Belgium nuclear plant called Doel that was recently taken offline because of tiny cracks in the pressure vessel. It was restarted after a brief period at the end of 2015 but had to be taken offline again for a few days after the discovery of a water leak. The oldest reactor in Belgium, Doel Number One was shut down in early 2015 after forty years of service. Recently, the Belgium government has decided to extend the operation life of Doel Number One and Doel Number Two by an additional ten years.
Luxembourg is only about a hundred miles away from the Tihange site. On Monday, the Luxembourg state secretary of infrastructure went to Brussels to discuss Belgium’s plans to restart the reactors. An accident at Tihange could easily pose a threat to the citizens of Luxembourg. The Luxembourg Secretary pointed out that the source of the cracks in the pressure vessel had never been adequately explained and questioned the wisdom of restarting the reactor.
The German city of Aachen is only forty four miles from Tihange. One hundred thousand citizens from the Aachen region signed a petition requesting that the Belgium government not restart the reactor but this had no affect on Belgium’s plans. The chief of the fire department of Aachen recently told Aachen’s environmental committee that some of the emergency steps that were mandated by the state government simply would not work. As an example, he said that it would take up to forty eight hours to distribute iodine pills to the citizens instead of the mandated twenty four.
The Netherlands are worried about the Doel reactor that has been having problems. The Dutch minister for infrastructure and the Belgian Interior Minister are scheduled to visit the Doel plant this week. The Dutch are sending inspectors to observe while Belgian inspectors go over the two reactors scheduled for license extension.
The Belgian government has said that it wanted to improve communications with neighboring countries about its nuclear program. But, it also stated that it was not about to turn over the control of the nuclear program to its neighbors. Electrabel, the main utility in Belgium has a powerful influence over politicians and political decisions in Belgium. There is also a revolving door between Belgium’s FANC nuclear regulatory agency and the Belgium nuclear industry with executives moving back and forth between the Agency and the nuclear utilities.
The countries of the European Union are split into the nuclear boosters and the nuclear critics. Some countries are planning on expanding their nuclear power reactor fleets and other countries either never built reactors or are shutting down the reactors they have. Lawsuits have been filed by nuclear critics against plans in some of the nuclear supporting countries. The nuclear debate promises to increase in intensity in the coming years in Europe.
Tihange nuclear power plant:
