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.
In April of 1986, there was a terrible accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine which was a part of the Soviet Union at the time. Reactor Number Four experienced a “sudden and expected power surge.” The operators tried to execute an emergency shutdown procedure on the reactor but that resulted in an even bigger power surge. There were multiple steam explosions and the reactor vessel ruptured. Upon exposure to air, the graphite moderator burst into flames. The fire expelled a huge plume of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere which drifted over a big area of the Soviet Union and Europe. In the next fourteen years, over three hundred and fifty thousand people were evacuated from the most contaminated areas of the Belarus, Russian and Ukraine.
These three states of the old Soviet Union have continued to deal with the contamination spread by the Chernobyl accident. Over five hundred thousand local men who worked on decontamination and clean up were exposed to an effective dose of fifty extra years of natural background radiation exposure. Because the health effects of radiation exposure can take decades to appear, the ultimate cost in human health of Chernobyl are hard to assess and estimates of the number of people who have died and will die vary widely. It is estimated by some sources that in the seventy years after the accident there may be hundreds of thousands of extra cases of cancer worldwide and tens of thousands of extra cancer-caused deaths.
There is pine forest near Chernobyl which turned red after the trees were killed by radiation. In the twenty eight years following the disaster, the forest has not decayed. Scientists recently found that the microbes and fungus which usually carries out decay in forests had also been killed by radiation.
Now there is a huge forest fire burning in the Chernobyl area and it is approaching the ruins of the nuclear plant. As the fire enters the area that is severely contaminated with fallout, the particles of radioactive materials which have been laying on the ground for twenty eight years are being picked up by the fire and injected into the atmosphere once again. It is so dangerous to human health that inhabitants of the area covered by smoke from the fire may have to stay inside for weeks to avoid inhaling the radioactive particles.
Proponents of nuclear power like to boast that very few people have been killed by operation of and accidents at nuclear power plants. Nuclear particles that can cause serious if not fatal injury to those who inhale them are invisible, tasteless and odorless. Radiation damage takes a long time to manifest as disease. These fact make it extremely difficult to pin down the health consequences of nuclear accidents. One thing that we do know for certain is that that the Chernobyl accident is still a threat to human beings and the environment twenty eight years after the accident.
There are many areas of the world that are contaminated by particles of radioactive materials from nuclear plant operations, nuclear accidents, improper disposal of nuclear waste and atmospheric testing of nuclear bombs. Even if the use of nuclear power ended tomorrow, all the nuclear plants were decommissioned and all the stockpiles of nuclear waste were buried far underground, the silent and invisible danger of the radioactive particles spread by human activity will continue to injure and kill people.
Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant after the accident:
Japan nuclear expert says that is simply impossible to remove all the melted nuclear fuel from Fukushima. enenews.com
Seventy years have passed since the United States shocked the world by dropping atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As nuclear powers gather this week to discuss a landmark disarmament treaty, the now-fragile survivors warn this may be their last chance to use their personal horror to hurry that work along. news.yahoo.com
I have mentioned the Generation IV nuclear power reactor designs that are being promoted by the nuclear industry in previous blog posts. The new reactors are purported to be safer, cheaper, more reliable, etc. than the reactors that are now in use to generate electricity. Recently the IRSN, the French nuclear safety agency issued a report critical of claims that the new designs are safer than the old designs.
IRSN is France’s “public service expert in nuclear and radiation risks, and its activities cover all the related scientific and technical issues. Its areas of specialization include the environment and radiological emergency response, human radiation protection in both a medical and professional capacity, and in both normal and post-accident situations, the prevention of major accidents, nuclear reactor safety, as well as safety in plants and laboratories, transport and waste treatment, and nuclear defense expertise. IRSN interacts with all parties concerned by these risks (public authorities, in particular nuclear safety and security authorities, local authorities, companies, research organizations, stakeholders’ associations, etc.) to contribute to public policy issues relating to nuclear safety, human and environmental protection against ionizing radiation, and the protection of nuclear materials, facilities, and transport against the risk of malicious acts.”
Most of the nuclear power reactors in use today are Generation II pressurized water reactors. A few Generation III power reactors are currently being built based on the Generation II designs but with added safety features. The IRSN report covered a study of six new reactor designs that are being studied by the U.S.-led Generation IV International Forum. Only the sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR) design is developed enough for a prototype to be built by 2050. With respect to the SFR, IRSN said that while they thought that an SFR reactor could possibly be as safe as the Generation III pressurized water reactors currently being built, they could not be sure that the SFR would be any safer than the Generation III reactors.
While the SFR reactors can operate at lower pressures than the Generation II and Generation III reactors, sodium reacts violently with water and air. The report also questioned the claim that the SFR reactors would be able to burn up “actinides” which are ” among the most dangerous by-products of nuclear fission.” Proponents of the SFRs say that they would be able to burn up nuclear waste and reduce the need for deep geological disposal. IRSN says that this feature was of little utility and would not be a major factor in any decision to build SFRs.
The IRSN report did say that the Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR), one of the Generation IV designs that they studied, might be able to offer significant safety improvements over the Generation II and Generation III reactors but that the actual feasibility of the VHTRs has not yet been determined.
In any case, Generation IV reactors will not come online soon enough to have a major impact on climate change. Considering how rapidly the cost of solar and wind power are dropping and the fact that nuclear reactor construction costs are rising, it is unlikely that this new generation of reactors will ever be built. Power production by solar power satellite is more probable.
Sodium cooled fast reactor diagram:
Prof. Aoyama from Fukushima University Institute of Environmental Radioactivity reported that 800 tera Bq (800,000,000,000,000 Bq) of Cesium-137 is going to reach West Coast of North America by 2016. fukushima-diary.com
A fire broke out at a nuclear power station in southern Taiwan shortly before midnight on Sunday, forcing the shutdown of one of its two reactors. english.eastday.com
French engineering company Areva has for the first time signed a contract with Energoatom for the supply of enriched uranium to be used at Ukraine’s nuclear power reactors. world-nuclear-news.org
