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.
One of the big unsolved problems with nuclear power is disposal of the spent nuclear fuel from the reactors. There have been a lot of proposals and some tests in different countries that use nuclear power but an acceptable permanent disposal system has been elusive. The U.S. is filling up reactor cooling pools with spent nuclear fuel assemblies and will have to move a great deal of the spent fuel to dry cask storage on or offsite soon. Attempts to build a permanent geological repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada were canceled in 2009 and the most optimistic projection for siting and constructing a permanent repository is now 2050. Canada is also struggling with siting issues for nuclear waste depositories.
In 2009, a proposal was put forward by the Canadian Nuclear Security Commission (CNSC) to store over seven million cubic feet of low and intermediate level nuclear waste in a deep geological repository (DGR) next to Lake Huron, one of the Great Lakes, at the Kincardine facility. The Ontario Power Generation (OPG) company at the Bruce Power nuclear generation station in Inverhuron, Ontario was contracted to carry out the project. Tens of thousands of tons of nuclear waste have been gathered at the Bruce Power plant in anticipation of the completion of construction of the DGR. The waste is to be ultimately buried less than one mile from Lake Huron. The Great Lakes supply the drinking water for over eighty million people in Canada and the U.S. Any leak from the DGR could reach Lake Huron and contaminate the water.
Critics of the project in Canada say that reporting on public concerns about the possible health and environmental impacts of the DGR has been deliberately suppressed in the Canadian press. They point to edicts from the Harper administration that require that certain subjects, including nuclear issues, not be discussed publicly by government scientists and officials. Reinforcing this claim of censorship was a recent announcement by the Canadian Minister of Health that all official discussions of the DGR would be suspended until after the elections in November of 2016.
The CNSC has also come under intense public criticism for their plans to transport high-level nuclear waste. They propose shipping containers of waste up through the Great Lakes, down the St. Lawrence River and across the Atlantic to Sweden for reprocessing. The high-level waste remaining after processing would be returned to the Halifax harbor in Canada. It would then be trucked across Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Ontario to the Bruce Power station. Initial announcements of this plan resulted in a huge public backlash and the plans were shelved in 2010. It now appears that the plans are being quietly implemented. Bruce Power, OPG and the CNSC have all publicly stated that only low and intermediate level waste will be stored at the Kincardine DGR. There has been no coherent and definitive statement from any of them about what exactly is going to be done with the high-level waste that makes the round trip to and from Sweden.
A lot of the early planning for the Kincardine DGR took place at private meetings behind closed doors. This has added to the public outrage and backlash. U.S. Congressmen have been requesting that the U.S. President pressure the Canadian government to cancel the DGR and arrange for better storage of existing tons of waste at Bruce Power.
Ambient office = 93 nanosieverts per hour
“Radiation spikes after wildfire in Chernobyl exclusion zone.“ rt.com
“Mutant fish” with giant tumor growing from head caught near Three Mile Island enenews.com
In northern Indiana, due east from Chicago, a small start-up company with eight employees is touting a metal-joining process said to create a seal “much stronger than traditional welding methods,” according to the Elkhart, Indiana, Truth, a hometown newspaper that should have truth high on its agenda. nuclearstreet.com
I have devoted several blog posts recently to the idea of floating nuclear reactors. The Russians have been working on construction of their first floating reactor on a barge and recently scientists at MIT have proposed putting nuclear reactors on floating oil drilling rigs. The Russians want to tow their reactor barges to the Arctic, remote areas near the coast or coastal cities to supply power. The MIT floating rigs are primarily intended to be anchored miles offshore to supply power to cities. As with many nuclear projects, the construction of the first Russian floating reactors has gone way over the original estimates.
The Akademik Lomonosov (AL) is Russia’s first floating power plant. It is referred to as a floating nuclear co-generation plant (FNCP) because it will supply both heat and electricity to remote locations. It consists of two thirty five megawatt reactors that will also generate one hundred and fifty megawatts of heat on top of a barge that is four hundred and seventy feet long and about a hundred feet wide. These FNCPs are being designed to have a forty year operational life-span. They will only need to be fueled every ten years.
Originally, the 2006 estimated cost of the AL was about one hundred seventy million dollars which was going to be provided by the construction and utility companies involved in the project. Construction began in 2007 with an expected completion date in 2010. Now the final cost is estimated to be seven hundred million dollars, an increase of more that 300% in just 8 years. The Russian government has had to step in to provide additional funds.
As is also the case with many nuclear construction projects, the AL is behind schedule. It is supposed to be delivered to Vilyuchinsk in the Kamchatka region in the Russian Far East in late 2016. They are working to “guarantee energy and social stability” of Kamchatka by 2019. Five of these are intended for use by Gazprom for offshore oil and gas field development in the Russian Arctic. Dudinka on the Tyamyr Peninsula and Preveik on the Chukchi Peninsula are also going to receive FNSPs. Russia has announced that fifteen countries are interested in floating reactors like the AL including China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Namibia, Cape Verde and Argentina.
Despite the claim that construction of the FNSPs in shipyards will reduce costs and insure higher quality and reliability a 2004 book by a variety of Russian nuclear scientists and engineers has concluded that there is no way to protect these FNSPs from terrorist attacks and that safe operation cannot be guaranteed. “The only question is how serious the emergency and its consequences.” The book also concludes that this type of power station is uneconomical. Given the 300% increase in cost for the AL and the lagging schedule for completion and delivery, it would seem that the authors of the book have a solid basis for their claims with respect to FNSPs. Despite the attempts by the global nuclear industry to revive the fading dream of nuclear power, the new floating reactors do not appear to be helping as much as they had hoped.
Academician Lomonosov:
While nuclear subjects appear regularly in the news, they are usually dealing with “big” things like nuclear reactors, nuclear weapons, nuclear treaties, nuclear waste, nuclear accidents, etc. The average person could very well be affected by these things but in day to day life, most people have little contact with nuclear materials. Other than radioisotopes used in medicine or industry, radioactive materials are not part of most people’s lives. However, a new technology was announced in the fall of 2014 that may change all that.
Generating electricity from a radioactive material has been researched since the 1950s. Some approaches create electricity by converting the heat produced by radioactive decay to electricity. Other processes use the flow of charged particles created by radioactive decay. Beta particles (electrons), positrons (anti-electrons), alpha particles (helium nuclei) and other fission produces have been used to construct batteries. Generally, atomic batteries have an efficiency of about two percent and a life span of up twenty years. High efficiency betavoltaic batteries can reach efficiencies of up to eight percent.
Nuclear batteries have been developed and used in a number of applications because they are long lasting and have a high energy density. Because they have been very expensive, they have been used primarily for applications that require a long term unattended power source such as powering equipment in remote locations on land, in the sea and in space. Their cost has kept them out of consumer products.
The College of Engineering at the University of Missouri has developed a new type of betavoltaic battery. According to the CoE, the new battery utilizes strontium-90 to increase the electrochemical potential in a water-based solution. The electrodes consist of titanium oxide that has been arranged in a specific pattern at the nanometer level and then coated with platinum. The electrodes serve as catalysts for the breakdown of water into oxygen compounds. When high-energy electrons from the decaying strontium-90 pass through the electrodes, electron-hole pairs are created in the titanium dioxide which creates an electron flow and, thus, an electric current.
Surface plasmons are “coherent delocalized electron oscillations that exist at the interface between any two materials where the real part of the dielectric function changes sign across the interface,” in this case, between the aqueous solution and the electrode. The surface plasmons in the new battery increase its efficiency.
Other methods of using the breakdown of water to produce electricity do not produce the abundance of free radicals produced by the CoE battery. The kinetic energy of the free radicals is trapped inside the water molecules which enhances the production of electricity from the radiation.
This new betavoltaic battery is efficient and considerably cheaper than other atomic batteries. The ionic solution can stay liquid over a wide range of temperatures and might be useful in spacecraft. The new battery was made possible by breakthroughs in nanotechnological fabrication. It may be used in automobiles and other vehicles. Setting aside cost and efficiency, it will be necessary to convince people that nuclear batteries are safe enough to be used in vehicles. Issues such as safety in accidents and disposal will have to be dealt with.
Back in 2011 PM Kan told Fukushima evacuees they could go home very soon. This was probably not what he meant. fukuleaks.org
A number of agreements were signed yesterday between Chinese and French nuclear energy companies aimed at strengthening their cooperation in the nuclear fuel cycle and power reactors. world-nuclear-news.org
Ambient office = 99 nanosieverts per hour
