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.
The process potentially to restart Belgium’s Electrabel’s Doel 3 and Tihange 4 nuclear reactors has been extended to 1 July so the utility can answer further questions from an independent panel. world-nuclear-news.org
One of the nuclear reactors at the UK’s Hinkley Point B power plant will be taken out of service later today for a maintenance program worth $60 million. world-nuclear-news.org
NuScale targets 2016 to apply for NRC approval for its transportable nuclear power system. bizjournal.com
Last February there was an “incident” at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico. Radioactive particles escaped from the geological repository for wastes associated with nuclear weapons production. A drum of waste exploded and released the radioactive particles which were detected up to twenty miles away. Filters and fans did not work correctly which allowed the radioactive material to escape.
The WIPP has existed for about fifteen years and it appears that corners were cut and procedures ignored. Originally the separate “rooms” in the old salt mine were to be sealed with two foot thick doors when they were full of drums of waste. Then they changed to steel doors. Eventually they dispensed with doors altogether. There would have been no radioactive release last February if the “room” where the drum exploded was sealed properly.
Apparently a mix of chemicals generated explosive gas. The exact contents of the drum are not know because records were not kept correctly. The drum is one of a batch of a hundred of drum from the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) that were treated with the wrong chemicals before being shipped to WIPP. Other drums may explode. Investigation is ongoing on the incident and the danger posed by other drums in the same group from LANL. The repository is shut down while the level of radiation goes down and examinations are conducted.
The huge “rooms” at WIPP left from mining the salt are being filled with drums of waste. Eventually it is expected that the ceilings of the “rooms” will collapse onto the drums of waste in the sealed “rooms” entombing them. Unfortunately, the pressure from the surrounding geological formations is causing the walls of the mine to shift. This month, it was reported that one wall of one of the rooms was collapsing inward so they had to use bolts to reattach the wall. Other areas have required bolts to reinforce and apparently the number of bolts per linear foot is exceeding safety standards.
A few weeks ago, it was revealed that portions of the ceiling in one of the “rooms” had collapsed. An inspection team found that there were seven areas in the “rooms” that were in danger because bolts were failing. To date, over three hundred damaged bolts have had to be removed. The bolting of ceilings is critical to safety and is proceeding as part of the general recovery from the accident last year.
The situation at WIPP just keeps getting worse. WIPP is the only national geological repository for nuclear weapons waste. Negligence has resulted in the release of radioactive materials. If other drums explode, there may be more releases. It may be that they have not yet fully detailed all the problems in at WIPP. It will take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to repair the damages in and disintegration of the repository. This could have been prevented if the NRC had done its job and the WIPP operators had been held to the written regulations for the repository.
WIPP ceiling bolts:
The International Energy Agency (IEA) said last year that about half of the four hundred and thirty four existing power reactors around the world will be shut down by the year 2040. The cost of decommissioning these two hundred reactors was estimated to be about one hundred billion dollars. The head of the IEA said that this cost was a rough estimate and that the cost could well be twice as much. He admitted that the cost of decommissioning of reactors could vary by a factor of four. Other experts say that these estimate are far too low because they do not include permanent disposal of the spent nuclear fuel assemblies from the reactors.
Decommissioning costs decades in the future will vary greatly by specific reactor and specific country. The exact cost of decommissioning will depend on the reactor type, size and location. The availability of proper disposal facilities and the condition of the reactor at the time of decommissioning will be important. And after all the costs of decommissioning have been assessed, there will still be additional costs depending on the future intended use of the site of the reactor. Technology for decommissioning may become cheaper in the future. However, disposal of spent nuclear fuel will most likely become more expensive as time goes by.
In the United States, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has estimated that the cost of decommissioning the one hundred nuclear power reactors in the U.S. at around three hundred million to four hundred million dollars each but some reactors may cost a great deal more. The NRC mandates that reactor owners maintain a fund that will be sufficient to decommission all the reactors that they own. The NRC is currently saying that twenty operating U.S. reactors do not have a fund big enough to decommission them. I think that this U.S. estimate is far too low.
France has fifty eight operating reactors and the French government says that their cost of decommissioning will be somewhere around thirty five billion dollars. This amounts to about six hundred billion dollars per reactor. It seems that the French estimate is much too low.
Germany is shutting down and decommissioning all of their seventeen nuclear reactors because of the Fukushima disaster. Germany estimates the cost of decommissioning them at over two billion dollars each. This appears to be far more realistic that other estimates in this post.
Japan is engaged in restarting its forty eight nuclear power reactors after all were shut down following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. They estimate that the cost of decommissioning will be thirty billion dollars which would amount to about six hundred million dollars per reactor, around the same estimate as France. Both these estimates are much too low.
Russia has thirty three nuclear power reactors and estimates that it will cost between five hundred million and a billion dollars per reactor. This estimate is probably too low.
My great fear is that there will not be enough money available when the time come to decommission some of the world’s nuclear power reactors. Initially, the companies that own power reactors may not have the money and will throw the burden back on the taxpayers in particular countries. Given the current unstable condition of the global economic system, the governments may not have the money. The reactors may simply be shut off and boarded up eventually leaking radioactive material out into the environment and threatening public health.
On 1/20/2015, TEPCO announced they detected 223,000 Bq/Kg of Cesium-134/137 from Jacopever fished inner Fukushima plant port. fukushima-diary.com
Russia is ready to continue cooperation with the United States in global nuclear security issues, Russia’s state-owned atomic energy corporation Rosatom said Thursday. news.xinhuanet.com
