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.
I have blogged about nuclear accident liability before. In the U.S., the Price-Anderson Act sets limits on the amount of money that nuclear utilities would have to pay in case of an accident. In India, a stringent liability law has been preventing international nuclear technology companies from doing business with India. Japan has been dealing with major liability issues since the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. Recently Switzerland has been working on the enforcement of their nuclear liability law.
In 2008, Switzerland’s parliament passed a new civil nuclear liability law but it has yet to go into effect. The Swiss Federal Energy Office (SFEO) just announced that the Swiss Federal Council adopted a revision of the original ordinance governing the enforcement of the new law in March of this year. The new ordinance revision increased the national minimum liability coverage from about a billion dollars to about one billion three hundred million dollars. There is a method included in the revision for calculating premiums that nuclear plant operators are obligated to pay for federal insurance. In addition to the liability of nuclear power plants, the new versions also deals with insurance minimums for nuclear research facilities and federal interim storage facilities at seventy six million dollars. The revision includes separate coverage for transport of nuclear materials. Some shipments of nuclear materials must be insured for eighty seven million dollars.
The revision of the ordinance simplifies the compensation procedure and makes provision for Swiss citizens who have been injured by a nuclear accident outside of Switzerland. The revision says that “the conditions for compensation and procedural provisions that would apply to Switzerland would be the same as for all other signatory states to the Paris Convention on Third Party Liability and the Brussels Supplementary Convention.”
Switzerland’s revised nuclear liability law cannot be put into effect until after the Paris Convention is ratified by at least two-thirds of the sixteen signatory nations. The earliest projected ratification of the convention is in 2016.
The SwissNuclear, the Swiss nuclear operators association, has stated that their members “supported the international conventions and thus the adjustment of coverage levels.” SwissNuclear went on to say that the revised ordinance “burdens the owners of nuclear facilities by the end of the term with unnecessary additional premium costs.” They complain that their members will not only have to pay for insurance for each of their facilities but will also have to purchase coverage for each transportation of nuclear material. This “reduces the international competitiveness of the Swiss electricity industry once more.”
The nuclear industry wants the profits from building and operating nuclear power reactors but it seems that they are not so eager to pay for cleaning up nuclear accidents. The Fukushima disaster highlights one of the main problems with liability insurance. Four years after the disaster, nuclear experts in Japan are saying that the technology that will be required to recover and dispose of the melted reactors cores does not exist yet. With damages from the disaster still being catalogued, it is clear that the Japan really have no clear idea of what the Fukushima cleanup will ultimately cost or how long it will take. No matter what minimums are set for insurance for nuclear accidents, it is almost certain that the ultimate cost of cleaning up a future nuclear accident will exceed the liability threshold of the companies involved. Then, either the remaining contaminated soil, water and debris will just be left where it is or the utility rate payers and the tax payers will wind up footing the bill.
The chief of the Fukushima nuclear power station has admitted that the technology needed to decommission three melted-down reactors does not exist, and he has no idea how it will be developed. enenews.com
On 3/23/2015, Board of Audit of Japan reported the financial support from the Nuclear Damage Compensation and Decommissioning Facilitation Corporation to TEPCO sums up to about eighty four billion dollars by now. fukushima-diary.com
China has resumed construction of new nuclear power plant projects after a hiatus of 15 months. world-nuclear-news.org
Support for nuclear power has drifted lower since a peak of 62 percent in 2010, sliding to 51 percent, poll taker Gallup said Monday. nuclearstreet.com
Plutonium at 1,000,000 Bq/m3 was detected in ocean off Fukushima. enenews.com
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabiuson Saturday said he hopes a “robust” nuclear agreement can be sealed with Iran but that any deal must include real transparency on Iran’s future nuclear activities and a control mechanism to ensure Tehran sticks by its promises. wsj.com
I have been blogging a lot lately about small modular nuclear power reactors (SMR). This is a new design concept in the nuclear industry. SMRs are defined as nuclear reactors that produce three hundred megawatts or less. One of the big selling points for these SMRs would be that they could be manufactured in factories and shipped in modules to their operational sites. Although factory production could take advances of economies of scale and standardization of components, any design problems would be incorporated into every reactor made during a particular production run. There are also big questions about whether SMRs would be cheaper per megawatt hour than the big conventional reactors. Several companies are working on SMR designs, some with the assistance of the U.S. Department of Energy. So far, the interest of investors and potential customers has been weak and some of the research has been scaled back.
One of the big political arguments around nuclear power has to do with the definition of “clean”, “green”, “sustainable” and “alternative” energy sources. With states passing laws about subsidies and mandates for low carbon alternatives to fossil fuels, the question of how nuclear power will be defined has arisen. Major players in the nuclear industry are lobbying the federal and state governments to define nuclear power as a low-carbon “alternative” energy source.
On March 19th of this year, the U.S. President issued an executive order that required federal government agencies to cut greenhouse emissions. The order calls for an increasing amount of energy consumed by federal agencies to come from low-carbon alternative energy sources. Starting in 2016 with ten percent mandated from alternative energy sources the percentage rises to twenty five percent by 2025. While the order does not allow generic nuclear power to be included in this program, the order does specifically include “small modular nuclear reactor technologies.”
The Obama administration has been very supportive of efforts to build SMRs. The NuScale Power company in Oregon has received over two hundred million in funds from the U.S. DoE. This funding is helping the company prepare for official application in 2016 to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for certification of their design. That will begin a three year review process. If NuScale successfully completes the NRC licensing process, it may still be as much as a decade before SMRs could be available commercially. Due to lack of orders for their SMRs and lack of interest on the part of investors, NuScale and other SMRs design firms have had to scale back their research and development programs for the SMRs.
Nuclear technology companies are hoping that SMRs will revitalize the nuclear industry. While the concept of making nuclear reactors in a factory sound attractive, creating the factory and other infrastructure necessary to support a robust SMR industry will be an enormous investment in a new untested nuclear power reactor design. Without customer orders and investor support, even help from the U.S. President and the federal government may not be enough to launch an SMR industry.
