Energy from Thorium
Energy from Thorium is down. According the Kirk, this is due to server issues.
Apology to Some Commenters
An increasing number of Nuclear Green comments get classified as junk and shuttled off to some Google simi-limbo. When I attempt to retrieve them, they all too frequently disappear completely. My apology to my commenters. I do not censor comments unless they are in bad taste, but on the internet bad things inadvertently happen.
Update: EfT comments are now up, but June and July comments are missing.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Were the Japanese Engineers Who Built Fukushima Incompetent?
Guest post by NNadir.
David Mabb, British, 2002.
(Cross posted from Daily Kos, along with an amusing poll and with references to diaries therein. Link to the Kos Diary.)
A news item in the June 2, 2011 issue of Nature, (page 10) which may be the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, reports that 2010 carbon emissions have reached a new record level, 30.9 billion metric tons per year, roughly 1,000 tons per second after the world's miraculous "economic recovery."
Um, um, um...
The World Health Organization reports that 2 million people die prematurely each year from air pollution, which is about one person every 15 seconds, with almost all of this pollution resulting from dangerous fossil fuel and "renewable" biomass burning.
In other news:
Approximately 3,700 workers at the Fukushima nuclear complex have been exposed to radiation since the recent 9.0 earthquake and 15 meter tsunami that struck March 11. Of these, 3514 have had medical examinations in which their exposure limits were recorded. Of these, 124 of the workers have exposures exceeding 100 mSv, which is the normal regulatory lifetime load for nuclear workers, although Japan raised the level for this event to 250 mSv. Of these 124 workers who exceeded 100 mSv, 107 had exposures between 100 and 200 mSv, 8 had exposures of 200-250 mSv, and 9 had doses exceeding 250 mSv.
A list of radiation exposures from the 9.0 earthquake and 15 meter tidal wave.
According to the Radiation Health Physics Society, which consists of, um, health physicists, the most aggressive diagnostic medical procedure there is involving radiation (other than radiation treatment for cancer which often can, and does induce radiation sickness) is a Percutaneous Transluminal Coronary Angioplasty, (PTCA) which results in radiation exposures of up to 57 mSv. Radiation Health Physics Society: Common exposures to radiation from medical procedures.
One of the major causes of needing a PTCA is, um, eating cows.
The somewhat familiar effects of radiation sickness are generally observed at 1,000 mSv exposures received over a short interval, and the symptoms include alopecia, nausea, vomiting and severe depression of the immune system (the latter being similar in many ways to full blown AIDS.) The chances are overwhelming that if you have ever encountered someone with radiation sickness - and I certainly have - it was as a result of that person being treated with radiation for cancer.
Of course, anyone receiving successful radiation treatment to treat cancer will face a continual risk of getting a new cancer, but the probability of getting such a cancer is not 100% - not even close - or else radiation treatments for cancer would not be attempted since they would be, by definition, futile.
But let's not talk about medical procedures but say something more about Japan.
The Japanese utility Chubu recently asked for help buying what will ultimately be $31 Billion (US) worth of dangerous fossil fuel to replace its other nuclear plants that have been shut by fear, ignorance, and superstition. All the waste from all those burned dangerous fossil fuels will be dumped into earth's atmosphere, almost certainly killing many thousands of people from air pollution.
Chubu receives emergency loan.
We can estimate how much dangerous fossil fuel waste will be dumped into earth's atmosphere by (with extreme generosity and self delusion) that all of this $31 billion dollars will represent dangerous natural gas, although, in fact, it won't, by looking at dangerous natural gas prices.
Natural gas prices have recently run about $631 per metric ton in Asia.
This suggests about 180 million tons of dangerous natural gas waste dumping for Chubai alone, although the time period is not specified. (Chubai may need this loan for a period of years.)
For the observed record, in April of 2011, Japanese imports of dangerous natural gas rose by 1.25 million metric tons in April of 2011 to 6.65 million metric tons per month. If we assume that this gas was mostly methane and correct for the molecular weight of carbon dioxide (as I did above) relative to methane, we see that the increase for dangerous fossil fuel waste dumping in Japan to shut it's nuclear plants amounts to a whopping 45 million tons for Japan, resulting in a total of around 230 million metric tons just for natural gas annually.
In the last several, in this space, a person argued that the Japanese engineers who built the Fukushima nuclear power plant were "incompetant" because - according to the author of these remarks - they didn't know what he knew about seismology, and built a nuclear power plant near a fault line. The claimant actually had the nerve to say that there are many fine Japanese seismologists, and that these seismologists should have been able to prevent the building of the nuclear plants by "incompetant" nuclear engineers. Also, the author said, since there was evidence that a tsunami had inundated the area within the last millenium, this should have convinced everyone not to build a nuclear plant there, although no mention was made of building any other thing.
Really? Incompetent? Compared to whom?
Predictably, the writer making this judgement about Japanese nuclear engineers had no comment whatsoever about the fact that Japanese built cities near fault lines and in fact, a country near fault lines.
How come no similar remark is attached to fine Japanese seismologists preventing the construction of, um, buildings, or things like the Fujinama dam, or in fact, Japan itself?
How come the author of this precious remark didn't claim that Japanese architects are "incompetent?"
After all, does not the same criteria apply to anything built in the path of a potential tsunami that applies to nuclear plant? Actually the nuclear plant did better than all of the other stuff, since the other stuff killed 25,000 people instantly whereas the nuclear plant - and in saying this, I am only referring to the kinds of deaths that anti-nukes find so damned sexy, radiation deaths - has thus far killed no one, although, as listed above, a many as 3,700 people have a higher risk than you or I of getting a radiation related cancer at some point in their lives, although said risk is nowhere near 100%.
If a single structure is rebuilt in the path of the 2011 tsunami, even one structure of any kind, say a solar PV plant containing oodles of chemicals known to be toxic (in some cases highly toxic), will the builder of said structure be declared "incompetent?"
In 1923, the city of Tokyo was struck by an earthquake which killed roughly between 100,000 and 150,000 people in a matter of about 10 minutes. Almost all of these people were killed as a result of falling buildings - no nuclear power plants were involved since, um, the world class scientists who first built nuclear plants, men like Nobel Laureates Wigner, Seaborg, Fermi, Bethe, etc, were very early in their careers and were, in some cases, um, children. Incredibly, the 1923 Tokyo earthquake produced no internet fetishes about banning, um, buildings. In fact, Tokyo was rebuilt, only to be completely destroyed by dangerous fossil fuels diverted to weapons purposes some 22 years later.
Even more incredibly, the city was rebuilt again and even more incredibly, there were no calls among the Japanese (or anyone else) for phasing out dangerous fossil fuels because they not only could be used to destroy entire cities, but are used to destroy entire cities as the observed destruction of scores of cities in the last 70 years or so has repeatedly demonstrated.
Yet because two cities were destroyed in a period of less than a week more than 5 decades ago by nuclear weapons, everyone wants to talk about the possibility of nuclear war to the exclusion of the day-to-day reality of dangerous fossil fuel war, even though nuclear wars are no longer observed and dangerous fossil fuel wars powered by dangerous fossil fuel weapons are almost continuously observed.
Huh?
Wasn't it just a few years back that one of cities in one of the oldest civilizations on earth was mostly destroyed - including artifacts almost 5,000 years old - in a dangerous fossil fuel war using dangerous fossil fuel weapons to effect such destruction?
Am I kidding?
Even though some asshole will pipe in to suggest that my remarks are something called "snark", they are no such thing, but merely represent a statement of an irrefutable observation: The criteria applied to nuclear energy - even though nuclear energy is vastly superior to all of its alternatives - is arbitrary inasmuch as it is applied to nothing else.
Let's leave Japan behind for a minute, and talk about the scale of energy disasters.
The largest energy disaster of all time - if one chooses, as many internet fetishists do, to ignore the disaster of air pollution and climate change because they are not the result of accidents or natural disasters but are rather associated with the normal operations of dangerous renewable biomass plants and dangerous fossil fuel plants - was the renewable energy disaster at Banqiao in China in 1975. It is actually impossible to know how many people were killed by this event, but it numbers in the hundreds of thousands. The Wikipedia reference gives a figure of 170,000, many other sources give much higher numbers. According to this same reference, 11,000,000 people were rendered homeless by this event. It was, thus, in these terms, the equivalent rendering 1/3 of the population of Canada homeless in a few hours.
The event involved the serial failure of Chinese dams in a typhoon, despite the internet fetish that so called "renewable energy" is, um, fabulous and without risk.
Heckuva job "renewable" energy industry, heckuva job.
A similar disaster in the United States in 1983 was prevented when the Army Corps of Engineers ran out to a local hardware store to buy plywood to shore up the Glen Canyon dam spillways. Had they not done so, the entire Colorado River system, through the Grand Canyon and most likely including the Hoover dam might have been destroyed. I wrote about this little appreciated fact in a diary in this space.
A Tale of Two Centimeters: The Near Collapse of the Colorado River Dam System in 1983.
How come the intellectual lightweights in that luddite (and still somehow oppressively bourgeois) hellhole Greenpeace aren't publishing all kinds of speculative science fiction like scare stories about the Colorado River system, or worse, Three Gorges, even though they have spent more than 40 years doing exactly that about nuclear energy?
The failure of the Three Gorges dam would probably kill more than 1,000 times (or more) as many people as died at Banqiao, possibly as many people as died in all of World War II, which is not to say that this will happen, but is also not to say that such a failure is impossible. About 400 million people live downstream of Three Gorges, which produces as much electricity as roughly 20 large nuclear plants.
Why no scare stories? Is it because "renewable" - although dams are hardly really sustainable energy if you look carefully at what they do - is spelled with an "R" and nuclear is spelled with an "N?"
However the majority of attention paid to the recent events at Sendai - in the orgy of fear, ignorance, and superstition - surrounds the nuclear plants, and none whatsoever is paid to any of the other events, including the collapse of a dam that killed 8 people in seconds and swept away 1,100 homes.
Now - I'm not saying this will happen but clearly it is hardly impossible - if the Three Gorges Dam collapses - or any of the dams on the Colorado River system collapse, will a blogger pipe in here to inform us that the builders of the dam(s) were "incompetent?"
If everyone exposed to radiation listed above, all 3,700, died from the radiation exposure listed at Fukushima - they won't, but let's play "fetish pretend" - it would not represent even one day's worth of dangerous fossil fuel and "renewable" biomass related air pollution deaths, again, from normal operations.
Not one freaking day.
Thus is anyone who operates any dangerous fossil fuel plant anywhere "incompetent, given that the risk of such a plant killing someone is precisely 100%?
There are many aspects of the stupidity, fear, superstition and ignorance surrounding the selective attention paid to nuclear energy's performance and the criteria, and every single one of them exists in complete - and completely ignorant - isolation from its alternatives. For instance, it is widely claimed - mostly by people who can't think - that nuclear energy, and only nuclear energy, must assure everyone, including abysmally stupid people who have zero familiarity with the contents of science books, that it's so called "wastes" must never injure anyone, anywhere at any time over the next billion years. And so people continue to burn dangerous fossil fuels, producing waste, that cannot be contained for the next ten minutes, and actually kill about 5,000 people a day, every day.
And now we have a new criteria:
Suppose the supposedly "incompetant" engineers had built coal plants instead of nuclear plants instead?
The result would have been many tens of thousands of premature deaths, although there would be no fetishists burning lots and lots and lots of electricity to caterwaul about this point.
How do I know?
Because except in the abstract, nobody cares about the fact that many times people have chosen to build coal plants rather than nuclear plants - the Germans are particularly adept at this - killing people outright during normal operations, and few whimpers - never mind hysterics - result.
I showed in this awful space some years back that the external costs for a single large coal plant - just one - represents about 16 billion dollars in external costs, many of these costs represented as health costs for treating the victims of the normal operations of coal plants.
A Calculation: How Many Trillions of Dollars of Environmental Damage Will IGCC Coal Cost?
Nothing else, and I do mean nothing, need meet the criteria that public assumes nuclear plants must meet to have the full oblivious support of humanity, not buildings, not bridges, not cars, not dams. This has become a fetish of vast proportions even though it is not the nuclear plants struck by a tsunami in Japan that will kill people in large numbers, but rather the superstition, fear and ignorance of people commenting on the nuclear plants.
No similar fetishes were created about, um, coastal cities (and the buildings in them), after the tsunami in 2004 which killed about 225,000 people. There was no movement to ban, um, Indonesia. Maybe if there were a fucking nuclear plant involved, someone would remember this event from 7 years ago, but as it is, the world couldn't care less. The world continues to build along coasts and more incredibly is now working over time to raise sea levels at an ever faster rate.
One of the biggest fans of raising sea levels in response to a tsunami - not that they have had or will have any experience of tsunamis - is the august nation of Germany, which shut its nuclear plants after Fukushima, burning natural gas and coal while issuing tiresome oblivious horseshit promises about so called "renewable energy," which after more than a decade of such horseshit, never produced even 10% of German energy, never mind as much energy as nuclear energy produced there until shut by fear, ignorance and superstition.
Now, if you ask me, an argument could be made, and maybe should be made that the entire German nation is incompetent, since they have converted a very remote possibility of energy risk - from an earthquake and tsunami no less, in a country that has experienced neither - into an absolute certainty of premature loss of life.
If one looks, one will discover that recent events surrounding German lettuce actually killed more people than Fukushima's nuclear plants have killed, and German dangerous fossil fuel waste dumping, now expected to rise by 100's of millions of metric tons will kill far more people than even the toxic lettuce.
Now we have people running around saying that the response of the TEPCO engineers and workers after the tsunami struck was incompetent.
Really?
Compared to what?
Contained within the confines of the Fukushima plant were operating reactors. Also there were reactors in which all of the used fuel, maybe decades worth of such fuel, although Japan correctly has reprocessed at least some of its fuel. TEPCO engineers addressed a situation in which much - if not most, if not all - of its equipment was destroyed. As was the case with everything else in the country, they had to manage a situation in the presence of a completely destroyed infrastructure. Moreover some of the reactors were built using technology developed nearly half a century ago.
As was the case with every single other bit of infrastructure in the path of the earthquake and tsunami, the events exceeded the design parameters.
Now, the TEPCO engineers did not succeed in making the impact of the extreme damage to their plant zero. Neither in fact did any other industry. Refineries exploded, after all, bridges collapsed or were swept away, semi-conductor plants were destroyed. It is very unlikely that any industry in the highly industrialized nation of Japan was able to prevent injury or the risk of injury to the public from their plants to be zero in an earthquake and tsunami.
Nevertheless the TEPCO engineers were able, within a matter of weeks, to address a situation never before encountered anywhere, easily exceeding any rational design parameters, assess the situation and stabilize it so that the ultimate loss to either the environment, or to human life measures as not even a blip compared to a single day's normal operations of dangerous fossil fuel facilities around the world.
In the last four months, these engineers have built one of the world's largest ion exchange systems, built robots to investigate facilities remotely, moved huge pumps and equipment through a ravaged landscape - destroyed by a, um, natural disaster, dealt with a stupid and hostile media consisting largely of people who have never opened a science book in their pathetic lives. They stabilized the so called "waste" products that represented billions of person years out energy output. The plant has a capacity for water treatment and cesium removal of 1200 m3 (317,000 gallons) per day. The recovered water is reused for cooling the damaged cores. The total volume of water available for such reuse is around 110,000 cubic meters. Thus the engineers at TEPCO, working under difficult circumstances were able to construct a closed system that effectively will extract and concentrate the extracted leachates into easily managed small containers. (If so desired, the properties of these resins allow the collection of pure radiocesium.)
Now, as it happens, I have been around lots of projects involve industrial scale use of functionalized resins - not nuclear applications unhappily - that are similar to the ion exchange resins used at Fukushima - and rapidly scaling them, as been done there, is hardly simple, although it must be said that these resins are now commercially available on relatively large scales. For instance, one can buy 250 gallon drums of a product called "SuperLig® 644" which is a proprietary resin that has high selectivity for the absorption of cesium from aqueous solutions in the presence of potassium and sodium, a situation that is observed in waste tanks at the Hanford nuclear weapons processing facility near Richland Washington.
(cf. Adu-Wusu et al, Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry, Vol. 267, No.2 (2006) 381–388)
In actuality TEPCO is using two technologies, the American technology, as well as a technology utilized by France at its reprocessing plants for decontaminating cesium from water.
Even though these types of products are commercially available, it is no small feat to build a plant to utilize them on a large scale, to build connections, pumps, columns, filters, supports, etc on such a scale as to be able to process thousands of cubic meters of water, especially in an area that is largely inaccessible.
Yet the TEPCO engineers have done precisely this and the ion exchange plant is operating. Moreover they did in in four months in a destroyed area, parts of which were radioactive.
I note that American engineers at Hanford are still only operating pilot plants doing this sort of thing, although they have had decades to address this problem in an area with intact infrastructure. (In fairness to the Americans, their research in this area is largely responsible for the commercial availability of such resins.)
Similarly, TEPCO engineers were able to quickly coat the ground surrounding the failed plants with a polymer that prevents the volatilization of dust. This also was a remarkable accomplishment, although probably less remarkable than the building of the ion exchange plant.
Finally, several engineers and workers risked their lives by entering the plant at various times, nine of the receiving very high doses of radiation. Of course, except for the fact that nuclear is spelled with an "N" and building is spelled with a "B" these people are not qualitatively different than the many thousands of Japanese who risked their lives to enter collapsed buildings, even if the duimbells at the New York Times have yet to announce the events associated with the Sendai earthquake as the "death of the construction industry."
While accomplishing these difficult unprecedented acts - some, as the numbers above suggest involved great personal danger - these TEPCO engineers had to endure the oppressive catcalls, insults, vituperation, suspicion, and fear of a largely illiterate and unhelpful international community, some of whom seemed to take a kind of twisted schadenfreud motivated not by concern for humanity, but rather to engage in a resounding chorus that was a paen to fear, ignorance, and superstition.
This suggests Theodore Roosevelt's famous and candidly contemptous remarks - I have quoted them before in other contexts - at the Sorbonne in 1910:
Now, I heard several claims here by persons who know nothing at all about nuclear reactor physics, the properties of nuclear fuels, criticality calculations or any of the like, that the profile of the released isotopes from the damaged nuclear fuels - chiefly the volatile and soluble elements cesium and iodine - suggested that said fuels were about to go "critical," that is that an uncontrolled nuclear fission reaction was sustaining itself in the failed fuels. The argument involved certain kinds of pseudotechnical claims - technically they were garbage but might have sounded reasonable to anyone who was ignorant of the properties of nuclear fuels - surrounding the presence of the isotope I-131, which, having a very short half-life, eight days, is extremely radioactive. Now, for the record, I-131 did leak into the ocean, although the majority of that which did is now non-radioactive xenon-131 in the atmosphere. A spike in the release of iodine-131 that was observed some weeks after the tsunami was offered as "evidence" that the reactor materials were "critical."
Here is one such statement, written in a hysterical diary on May 1, 2011, roughly 51 days after the tsunami struck:
With some regret, here is the reference:
New Fukushima Data: Evidence of Instability & Uncontrolled Criticality
Now, if one actually knew anything at all about nuclear science one would immediately recognize that this is hardly the simplest explanation; it is in fact a tortured explanation at best and pure nonsense at worst.
The evocation of some specious argument about cesium isotopes suggests, perhaps, the latter.
First off, the chemistry of melted uranium/plutonium oxide fuels has been extensively studied around the world. It is very complex, owing to the fact that many hundreds of species are present, things like cesium molybdenates, cesium iodocadminates, molybdouranates, free iodine, cesium iodide (gas, liquid and solid), cesium oxides, even things like cesium metal. To anyone who has studied these things, or is familiar with such studies, it is somewhat unsurprising that only a tiny fraction of the iodine actually escaped, although it must be said that iodine does tend to migrate toward the cooler surfaces of fuels under normal conditions, that is when the fuels are under water. The relative concentration of any species changes the position of the equilibrium of the entire system.
The accumulation of radioisotopes - including fission products - can be estimated closely by use of various types of simulation programs: The technical details surrounding these techniques are beyond the scope of a blog post. Using these types of calculations, TEPCO engineers estimated that the nuclear fuels at the time of the accident contained 81 exabequerels of I-131. An exabequerel is 1018 nuclear decays (represented as atoms) per second. Of this, from the same link NISA, the Japanese equivalent of the US NRC, estimates that 130 petabequerels were released to the atmosphere. A petabequerel is 1015 nuclear decays (represented as atoms) per second. Thus less than 2/10ths of a percent of the total radioiodine-131 were released from the reactor.
(I noted here in a recent diary, these amounts of radioactivity are trivial when compared with the natural radioactivity of the ocean from the presence of potassium alone: How Radioactive Is the Ocean?)
It was thus represented here in this awful space that a momentary increase in the concentration of I-131 in the waters around the reactor was an indication that the reactor must be critical and undergoing uncontrolled fission reactors, because, as the author of the ridiculous claim stated in a kind of scientific malapropism, the half-life of I-131 is 8 days and therefore any increase in the concentration of I-131 in the waters around Fukushima must represent freshly formed I-131 from ongoing nuclear fission in either the used fuel storage ponds or in the melted, failed reactors.
This is pure nonsense.
The scientific malapropism may have derived between the difference in meaning between the more common word "half-life" and lifetime. The radioactive decay law, which should be familiar to any high school physics student is
It follows from this equation that it took 74 days, until May 23, for the total amount of I-131 present to equal the amount released earlier, and further that slightly more than 0.1% of the released iodine had already decayed into non-radioactive Xenon-131.
Moreover, the amount released was not released instanteously, but took place of a period of a few weeks. On April 15, the earliest date evoked by the critical criticality claimant, the inventory of I-131 in the entire reactor system was still just shy of 1 exabequerel, almost 8 times the amount released during the entire accident, and was, as the iodine in the sea had been rapidly decaying, roughly 160 times as large as the remaining released iodine. Let's assume that 100 petabequerels had leached by March 18, a week after the accident. It follows from the decay law given above, that about 1.2% of it was still present, and thus a simple explanation, involving no extreme statements whatsoever like the criticality statement, would be that I-131 concentrations might have increased simply via a change in the release rate from the large inventory still available.
But that would not have been as sexy as the nonsense statement that an uncontrolled fission reaction was going on, would it?
Nevertheless it is very clear that changes in the extraction efficiency and/or rate - maybe owing to structural changes in the fuel, changes in fuel temperatures, and changes to the structural components of the failed reactor could easily be evoked to account for momentary increases in the apparent concentrations of I-131 in seawater near the reactor. It is very easy in this context to understand momentary increases in the levels of I-131 (and increases in other isotopes which were even more spectacularly misinterpreted in the caterwauling here).
One may expect of course, that paniced hysterics of the types that engage in continuous nuclear fear mongering - I compare it to yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, where the theater in question is this planet and where the audience consists of some 7 billion people - are probably in no position to apply Occam's razor to questions of subjects they know almost nothing about, nuclear science, but, um, still...
And I repeat, in case anyone missed it, the yelling of "nuclear fire" WILL kill people, since nuclear power plants have been irrationally shut and replaced by dangerous fossil fuel plants which have a 100% probability of killing people even when they operate normally.
Similar arguments apply, by the way, to the hysteria surrounding the used nuclear fuel pools near the reactors. They have been inspected, and despite much panic - some whipped up by illiterate news reporters - they remain largely intact. They did not go critical, and they did not release vast amounts of radioactivity. This should be evidence for the robustness of used nuclear fuel storage, although predictably prehaps, the world will interpret this differently, mostly because humanity is proving itself to be too stupid to live.
I might add that these so called "waste" products would not even be there, were it not for fear ignorance and superstition surrounding the word "nuclear." They would have been recycled (using relatively primitive technology - more sophisticated technology would have been developed in a rational world. (I personally have come up with a fantastic way to recycle hot nuclear fuels, but I'm keeping it to myself right now.)
Nuclear energy need not be perfect, it need not be without risk - even for 40 year old technology - in a massive earthquake and tsunami to be vastly superior to all of the stuff that internet anti-nuke fetishists don't care about.
It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is.
The decision to close nuclear plants around the world - mostly in bourgeois countries - is, and there's no polite way to put this, is murder, since people will be killed by the use of replacement dangerous fossil fuel plants and irrevocable and irreversible damage will be done to the planetary ecosystem.
It is not the damaged nuclear plants that will kill hundreds of thousands of people in the next few years, but rather it is the superstition, fear and ignorance connected to the hysteria connected to the nuclear plants that will kill people, not because nuclear plants operate, but because don't operate, because they are shut by said superstition, fear, and ignorance.
I hate to say this, but humanity deserves what it's going to get.
Have a nice evening and an nice day tomorrow.
David Mabb, British, 2002.
(Cross posted from Daily Kos, along with an amusing poll and with references to diaries therein. Link to the Kos Diary.)
A news item in the June 2, 2011 issue of Nature, (page 10) which may be the most prestigious scientific journal in the world, reports that 2010 carbon emissions have reached a new record level, 30.9 billion metric tons per year, roughly 1,000 tons per second after the world's miraculous "economic recovery."
Um, um, um...
The World Health Organization reports that 2 million people die prematurely each year from air pollution, which is about one person every 15 seconds, with almost all of this pollution resulting from dangerous fossil fuel and "renewable" biomass burning.
In other news:
Approximately 3,700 workers at the Fukushima nuclear complex have been exposed to radiation since the recent 9.0 earthquake and 15 meter tsunami that struck March 11. Of these, 3514 have had medical examinations in which their exposure limits were recorded. Of these, 124 of the workers have exposures exceeding 100 mSv, which is the normal regulatory lifetime load for nuclear workers, although Japan raised the level for this event to 250 mSv. Of these 124 workers who exceeded 100 mSv, 107 had exposures between 100 and 200 mSv, 8 had exposures of 200-250 mSv, and 9 had doses exceeding 250 mSv.
A list of radiation exposures from the 9.0 earthquake and 15 meter tidal wave.
According to the Radiation Health Physics Society, which consists of, um, health physicists, the most aggressive diagnostic medical procedure there is involving radiation (other than radiation treatment for cancer which often can, and does induce radiation sickness) is a Percutaneous Transluminal Coronary Angioplasty, (PTCA) which results in radiation exposures of up to 57 mSv. Radiation Health Physics Society: Common exposures to radiation from medical procedures.
One of the major causes of needing a PTCA is, um, eating cows.
The somewhat familiar effects of radiation sickness are generally observed at 1,000 mSv exposures received over a short interval, and the symptoms include alopecia, nausea, vomiting and severe depression of the immune system (the latter being similar in many ways to full blown AIDS.) The chances are overwhelming that if you have ever encountered someone with radiation sickness - and I certainly have - it was as a result of that person being treated with radiation for cancer.
Of course, anyone receiving successful radiation treatment to treat cancer will face a continual risk of getting a new cancer, but the probability of getting such a cancer is not 100% - not even close - or else radiation treatments for cancer would not be attempted since they would be, by definition, futile.
But let's not talk about medical procedures but say something more about Japan.
The Japanese utility Chubu recently asked for help buying what will ultimately be $31 Billion (US) worth of dangerous fossil fuel to replace its other nuclear plants that have been shut by fear, ignorance, and superstition. All the waste from all those burned dangerous fossil fuels will be dumped into earth's atmosphere, almost certainly killing many thousands of people from air pollution.
Chubu receives emergency loan.
We can estimate how much dangerous fossil fuel waste will be dumped into earth's atmosphere by (with extreme generosity and self delusion) that all of this $31 billion dollars will represent dangerous natural gas, although, in fact, it won't, by looking at dangerous natural gas prices.
Natural gas prices have recently run about $631 per metric ton in Asia.
This suggests about 180 million tons of dangerous natural gas waste dumping for Chubai alone, although the time period is not specified. (Chubai may need this loan for a period of years.)
For the observed record, in April of 2011, Japanese imports of dangerous natural gas rose by 1.25 million metric tons in April of 2011 to 6.65 million metric tons per month. If we assume that this gas was mostly methane and correct for the molecular weight of carbon dioxide (as I did above) relative to methane, we see that the increase for dangerous fossil fuel waste dumping in Japan to shut it's nuclear plants amounts to a whopping 45 million tons for Japan, resulting in a total of around 230 million metric tons just for natural gas annually.
In the last several, in this space, a person argued that the Japanese engineers who built the Fukushima nuclear power plant were "incompetant" because - according to the author of these remarks - they didn't know what he knew about seismology, and built a nuclear power plant near a fault line. The claimant actually had the nerve to say that there are many fine Japanese seismologists, and that these seismologists should have been able to prevent the building of the nuclear plants by "incompetant" nuclear engineers. Also, the author said, since there was evidence that a tsunami had inundated the area within the last millenium, this should have convinced everyone not to build a nuclear plant there, although no mention was made of building any other thing.
Really? Incompetent? Compared to whom?
Predictably, the writer making this judgement about Japanese nuclear engineers had no comment whatsoever about the fact that Japanese built cities near fault lines and in fact, a country near fault lines.
How come no similar remark is attached to fine Japanese seismologists preventing the construction of, um, buildings, or things like the Fujinama dam, or in fact, Japan itself?
How come the author of this precious remark didn't claim that Japanese architects are "incompetent?"
After all, does not the same criteria apply to anything built in the path of a potential tsunami that applies to nuclear plant? Actually the nuclear plant did better than all of the other stuff, since the other stuff killed 25,000 people instantly whereas the nuclear plant - and in saying this, I am only referring to the kinds of deaths that anti-nukes find so damned sexy, radiation deaths - has thus far killed no one, although, as listed above, a many as 3,700 people have a higher risk than you or I of getting a radiation related cancer at some point in their lives, although said risk is nowhere near 100%.
If a single structure is rebuilt in the path of the 2011 tsunami, even one structure of any kind, say a solar PV plant containing oodles of chemicals known to be toxic (in some cases highly toxic), will the builder of said structure be declared "incompetent?"
In 1923, the city of Tokyo was struck by an earthquake which killed roughly between 100,000 and 150,000 people in a matter of about 10 minutes. Almost all of these people were killed as a result of falling buildings - no nuclear power plants were involved since, um, the world class scientists who first built nuclear plants, men like Nobel Laureates Wigner, Seaborg, Fermi, Bethe, etc, were very early in their careers and were, in some cases, um, children. Incredibly, the 1923 Tokyo earthquake produced no internet fetishes about banning, um, buildings. In fact, Tokyo was rebuilt, only to be completely destroyed by dangerous fossil fuels diverted to weapons purposes some 22 years later.
Even more incredibly, the city was rebuilt again and even more incredibly, there were no calls among the Japanese (or anyone else) for phasing out dangerous fossil fuels because they not only could be used to destroy entire cities, but are used to destroy entire cities as the observed destruction of scores of cities in the last 70 years or so has repeatedly demonstrated.
Yet because two cities were destroyed in a period of less than a week more than 5 decades ago by nuclear weapons, everyone wants to talk about the possibility of nuclear war to the exclusion of the day-to-day reality of dangerous fossil fuel war, even though nuclear wars are no longer observed and dangerous fossil fuel wars powered by dangerous fossil fuel weapons are almost continuously observed.
Huh?
Wasn't it just a few years back that one of cities in one of the oldest civilizations on earth was mostly destroyed - including artifacts almost 5,000 years old - in a dangerous fossil fuel war using dangerous fossil fuel weapons to effect such destruction?
Am I kidding?
Even though some asshole will pipe in to suggest that my remarks are something called "snark", they are no such thing, but merely represent a statement of an irrefutable observation: The criteria applied to nuclear energy - even though nuclear energy is vastly superior to all of its alternatives - is arbitrary inasmuch as it is applied to nothing else.
Let's leave Japan behind for a minute, and talk about the scale of energy disasters.
The largest energy disaster of all time - if one chooses, as many internet fetishists do, to ignore the disaster of air pollution and climate change because they are not the result of accidents or natural disasters but are rather associated with the normal operations of dangerous renewable biomass plants and dangerous fossil fuel plants - was the renewable energy disaster at Banqiao in China in 1975. It is actually impossible to know how many people were killed by this event, but it numbers in the hundreds of thousands. The Wikipedia reference gives a figure of 170,000, many other sources give much higher numbers. According to this same reference, 11,000,000 people were rendered homeless by this event. It was, thus, in these terms, the equivalent rendering 1/3 of the population of Canada homeless in a few hours.
The event involved the serial failure of Chinese dams in a typhoon, despite the internet fetish that so called "renewable energy" is, um, fabulous and without risk.
Heckuva job "renewable" energy industry, heckuva job.
A similar disaster in the United States in 1983 was prevented when the Army Corps of Engineers ran out to a local hardware store to buy plywood to shore up the Glen Canyon dam spillways. Had they not done so, the entire Colorado River system, through the Grand Canyon and most likely including the Hoover dam might have been destroyed. I wrote about this little appreciated fact in a diary in this space.
A Tale of Two Centimeters: The Near Collapse of the Colorado River Dam System in 1983.
How come the intellectual lightweights in that luddite (and still somehow oppressively bourgeois) hellhole Greenpeace aren't publishing all kinds of speculative science fiction like scare stories about the Colorado River system, or worse, Three Gorges, even though they have spent more than 40 years doing exactly that about nuclear energy?
The failure of the Three Gorges dam would probably kill more than 1,000 times (or more) as many people as died at Banqiao, possibly as many people as died in all of World War II, which is not to say that this will happen, but is also not to say that such a failure is impossible. About 400 million people live downstream of Three Gorges, which produces as much electricity as roughly 20 large nuclear plants.
Why no scare stories? Is it because "renewable" - although dams are hardly really sustainable energy if you look carefully at what they do - is spelled with an "R" and nuclear is spelled with an "N?"
However the majority of attention paid to the recent events at Sendai - in the orgy of fear, ignorance, and superstition - surrounds the nuclear plants, and none whatsoever is paid to any of the other events, including the collapse of a dam that killed 8 people in seconds and swept away 1,100 homes.
Now - I'm not saying this will happen but clearly it is hardly impossible - if the Three Gorges Dam collapses - or any of the dams on the Colorado River system collapse, will a blogger pipe in here to inform us that the builders of the dam(s) were "incompetent?"
If everyone exposed to radiation listed above, all 3,700, died from the radiation exposure listed at Fukushima - they won't, but let's play "fetish pretend" - it would not represent even one day's worth of dangerous fossil fuel and "renewable" biomass related air pollution deaths, again, from normal operations.
Not one freaking day.
Thus is anyone who operates any dangerous fossil fuel plant anywhere "incompetent, given that the risk of such a plant killing someone is precisely 100%?
There are many aspects of the stupidity, fear, superstition and ignorance surrounding the selective attention paid to nuclear energy's performance and the criteria, and every single one of them exists in complete - and completely ignorant - isolation from its alternatives. For instance, it is widely claimed - mostly by people who can't think - that nuclear energy, and only nuclear energy, must assure everyone, including abysmally stupid people who have zero familiarity with the contents of science books, that it's so called "wastes" must never injure anyone, anywhere at any time over the next billion years. And so people continue to burn dangerous fossil fuels, producing waste, that cannot be contained for the next ten minutes, and actually kill about 5,000 people a day, every day.
And now we have a new criteria:
Nuclear energy, and only nuclear energy and nothing else must be risk free in a major earthquake and tsunami.The Fukushima nuclear plants were designed and built beginning in the 1960's and came on line in the 1970's, and operated for decades largely without incident. Dumb people like to lay around day after day after day pretending that wind and solar toys and junk were a realistic alternative to these plants, but when doing this, they're completely full of shit, and were especially full of shit in the 1960's and 1970's, not that they're much less full of shit now.
Suppose the supposedly "incompetant" engineers had built coal plants instead of nuclear plants instead?
The result would have been many tens of thousands of premature deaths, although there would be no fetishists burning lots and lots and lots of electricity to caterwaul about this point.
How do I know?
Because except in the abstract, nobody cares about the fact that many times people have chosen to build coal plants rather than nuclear plants - the Germans are particularly adept at this - killing people outright during normal operations, and few whimpers - never mind hysterics - result.
I showed in this awful space some years back that the external costs for a single large coal plant - just one - represents about 16 billion dollars in external costs, many of these costs represented as health costs for treating the victims of the normal operations of coal plants.
A Calculation: How Many Trillions of Dollars of Environmental Damage Will IGCC Coal Cost?
Nothing else, and I do mean nothing, need meet the criteria that public assumes nuclear plants must meet to have the full oblivious support of humanity, not buildings, not bridges, not cars, not dams. This has become a fetish of vast proportions even though it is not the nuclear plants struck by a tsunami in Japan that will kill people in large numbers, but rather the superstition, fear and ignorance of people commenting on the nuclear plants.
No similar fetishes were created about, um, coastal cities (and the buildings in them), after the tsunami in 2004 which killed about 225,000 people. There was no movement to ban, um, Indonesia. Maybe if there were a fucking nuclear plant involved, someone would remember this event from 7 years ago, but as it is, the world couldn't care less. The world continues to build along coasts and more incredibly is now working over time to raise sea levels at an ever faster rate.
One of the biggest fans of raising sea levels in response to a tsunami - not that they have had or will have any experience of tsunamis - is the august nation of Germany, which shut its nuclear plants after Fukushima, burning natural gas and coal while issuing tiresome oblivious horseshit promises about so called "renewable energy," which after more than a decade of such horseshit, never produced even 10% of German energy, never mind as much energy as nuclear energy produced there until shut by fear, ignorance and superstition.
Now, if you ask me, an argument could be made, and maybe should be made that the entire German nation is incompetent, since they have converted a very remote possibility of energy risk - from an earthquake and tsunami no less, in a country that has experienced neither - into an absolute certainty of premature loss of life.
If one looks, one will discover that recent events surrounding German lettuce actually killed more people than Fukushima's nuclear plants have killed, and German dangerous fossil fuel waste dumping, now expected to rise by 100's of millions of metric tons will kill far more people than even the toxic lettuce.
Now we have people running around saying that the response of the TEPCO engineers and workers after the tsunami struck was incompetent.
Really?
Compared to what?
Contained within the confines of the Fukushima plant were operating reactors. Also there were reactors in which all of the used fuel, maybe decades worth of such fuel, although Japan correctly has reprocessed at least some of its fuel. TEPCO engineers addressed a situation in which much - if not most, if not all - of its equipment was destroyed. As was the case with everything else in the country, they had to manage a situation in the presence of a completely destroyed infrastructure. Moreover some of the reactors were built using technology developed nearly half a century ago.
As was the case with every single other bit of infrastructure in the path of the earthquake and tsunami, the events exceeded the design parameters.
Now, the TEPCO engineers did not succeed in making the impact of the extreme damage to their plant zero. Neither in fact did any other industry. Refineries exploded, after all, bridges collapsed or were swept away, semi-conductor plants were destroyed. It is very unlikely that any industry in the highly industrialized nation of Japan was able to prevent injury or the risk of injury to the public from their plants to be zero in an earthquake and tsunami.
Nevertheless the TEPCO engineers were able, within a matter of weeks, to address a situation never before encountered anywhere, easily exceeding any rational design parameters, assess the situation and stabilize it so that the ultimate loss to either the environment, or to human life measures as not even a blip compared to a single day's normal operations of dangerous fossil fuel facilities around the world.
In the last four months, these engineers have built one of the world's largest ion exchange systems, built robots to investigate facilities remotely, moved huge pumps and equipment through a ravaged landscape - destroyed by a, um, natural disaster, dealt with a stupid and hostile media consisting largely of people who have never opened a science book in their pathetic lives. They stabilized the so called "waste" products that represented billions of person years out energy output. The plant has a capacity for water treatment and cesium removal of 1200 m3 (317,000 gallons) per day. The recovered water is reused for cooling the damaged cores. The total volume of water available for such reuse is around 110,000 cubic meters. Thus the engineers at TEPCO, working under difficult circumstances were able to construct a closed system that effectively will extract and concentrate the extracted leachates into easily managed small containers. (If so desired, the properties of these resins allow the collection of pure radiocesium.)
Now, as it happens, I have been around lots of projects involve industrial scale use of functionalized resins - not nuclear applications unhappily - that are similar to the ion exchange resins used at Fukushima - and rapidly scaling them, as been done there, is hardly simple, although it must be said that these resins are now commercially available on relatively large scales. For instance, one can buy 250 gallon drums of a product called "SuperLig® 644" which is a proprietary resin that has high selectivity for the absorption of cesium from aqueous solutions in the presence of potassium and sodium, a situation that is observed in waste tanks at the Hanford nuclear weapons processing facility near Richland Washington.
(cf. Adu-Wusu et al, Journal of Radioanalytical and Nuclear Chemistry, Vol. 267, No.2 (2006) 381–388)
In actuality TEPCO is using two technologies, the American technology, as well as a technology utilized by France at its reprocessing plants for decontaminating cesium from water.
Even though these types of products are commercially available, it is no small feat to build a plant to utilize them on a large scale, to build connections, pumps, columns, filters, supports, etc on such a scale as to be able to process thousands of cubic meters of water, especially in an area that is largely inaccessible.
Yet the TEPCO engineers have done precisely this and the ion exchange plant is operating. Moreover they did in in four months in a destroyed area, parts of which were radioactive.
I note that American engineers at Hanford are still only operating pilot plants doing this sort of thing, although they have had decades to address this problem in an area with intact infrastructure. (In fairness to the Americans, their research in this area is largely responsible for the commercial availability of such resins.)
Similarly, TEPCO engineers were able to quickly coat the ground surrounding the failed plants with a polymer that prevents the volatilization of dust. This also was a remarkable accomplishment, although probably less remarkable than the building of the ion exchange plant.
Finally, several engineers and workers risked their lives by entering the plant at various times, nine of the receiving very high doses of radiation. Of course, except for the fact that nuclear is spelled with an "N" and building is spelled with a "B" these people are not qualitatively different than the many thousands of Japanese who risked their lives to enter collapsed buildings, even if the duimbells at the New York Times have yet to announce the events associated with the Sendai earthquake as the "death of the construction industry."
While accomplishing these difficult unprecedented acts - some, as the numbers above suggest involved great personal danger - these TEPCO engineers had to endure the oppressive catcalls, insults, vituperation, suspicion, and fear of a largely illiterate and unhelpful international community, some of whom seemed to take a kind of twisted schadenfreud motivated not by concern for humanity, but rather to engage in a resounding chorus that was a paen to fear, ignorance, and superstition.
This suggests Theodore Roosevelt's famous and candidly contemptous remarks - I have quoted them before in other contexts - at the Sorbonne in 1910:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat...And what of the quality of the critics, those who refer to the engineers who built Fukushima and who stabilized it - so that only a very small loss of life, if any, will occur as the result of a vast, natural disaster that hit a plant that produced energy to power millions of homes for decades - as "incompetent"? Are the critics competent to discuss nuclear issues or are they simply talking about things they obviously know little about.
...Still less room is there for those who deride or slight what is done by those who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who always profess that they would like to take action, if only the conditions of life were not what they actually are...
Now, I heard several claims here by persons who know nothing at all about nuclear reactor physics, the properties of nuclear fuels, criticality calculations or any of the like, that the profile of the released isotopes from the damaged nuclear fuels - chiefly the volatile and soluble elements cesium and iodine - suggested that said fuels were about to go "critical," that is that an uncontrolled nuclear fission reaction was sustaining itself in the failed fuels. The argument involved certain kinds of pseudotechnical claims - technically they were garbage but might have sounded reasonable to anyone who was ignorant of the properties of nuclear fuels - surrounding the presence of the isotope I-131, which, having a very short half-life, eight days, is extremely radioactive. Now, for the record, I-131 did leak into the ocean, although the majority of that which did is now non-radioactive xenon-131 in the atmosphere. A spike in the release of iodine-131 that was observed some weeks after the tsunami was offered as "evidence" that the reactor materials were "critical."
Here is one such statement, written in a hysterical diary on May 1, 2011, roughly 51 days after the tsunami struck:
However, inside of the silt fence near Reactor Unit 2 both the absolute levels of Iodine-131 and the ratios of iodine to cesium increase unexpectedly at April 15 and April 25. Less dilution with uncontaminated water could cause the absolute level of Iodine-131 to increase, but it would not likely increase the isotope ratio of iodine to cesium. I can think of actions by TEPCO that could produce that unexpected result, but I think they would have reported such actions because it would have made their data look less concerning. The simplest explanation for these data is that reactor 2 went critical on April 15 and April 25.The bold is mine. The um, "simplest explanation?" Sigh...
With some regret, here is the reference:
New Fukushima Data: Evidence of Instability & Uncontrolled Criticality
Now, if one actually knew anything at all about nuclear science one would immediately recognize that this is hardly the simplest explanation; it is in fact a tortured explanation at best and pure nonsense at worst.
The evocation of some specious argument about cesium isotopes suggests, perhaps, the latter.
First off, the chemistry of melted uranium/plutonium oxide fuels has been extensively studied around the world. It is very complex, owing to the fact that many hundreds of species are present, things like cesium molybdenates, cesium iodocadminates, molybdouranates, free iodine, cesium iodide (gas, liquid and solid), cesium oxides, even things like cesium metal. To anyone who has studied these things, or is familiar with such studies, it is somewhat unsurprising that only a tiny fraction of the iodine actually escaped, although it must be said that iodine does tend to migrate toward the cooler surfaces of fuels under normal conditions, that is when the fuels are under water. The relative concentration of any species changes the position of the equilibrium of the entire system.
The accumulation of radioisotopes - including fission products - can be estimated closely by use of various types of simulation programs: The technical details surrounding these techniques are beyond the scope of a blog post. Using these types of calculations, TEPCO engineers estimated that the nuclear fuels at the time of the accident contained 81 exabequerels of I-131. An exabequerel is 1018 nuclear decays (represented as atoms) per second. Of this, from the same link NISA, the Japanese equivalent of the US NRC, estimates that 130 petabequerels were released to the atmosphere. A petabequerel is 1015 nuclear decays (represented as atoms) per second. Thus less than 2/10ths of a percent of the total radioiodine-131 were released from the reactor.
(I noted here in a recent diary, these amounts of radioactivity are trivial when compared with the natural radioactivity of the ocean from the presence of potassium alone: How Radioactive Is the Ocean?)
It was thus represented here in this awful space that a momentary increase in the concentration of I-131 in the waters around the reactor was an indication that the reactor must be critical and undergoing uncontrolled fission reactors, because, as the author of the ridiculous claim stated in a kind of scientific malapropism, the half-life of I-131 is 8 days and therefore any increase in the concentration of I-131 in the waters around Fukushima must represent freshly formed I-131 from ongoing nuclear fission in either the used fuel storage ponds or in the melted, failed reactors.
This is pure nonsense.
The scientific malapropism may have derived between the difference in meaning between the more common word "half-life" and lifetime. The radioactive decay law, which should be familiar to any high school physics student is
Nt = N0e-ktwhere Nt is the amount of material present at a given time t, and N0 is the amount present initially, in this case, at the time of the earthquake and tsunami. k is a constant determined by dividing the natural logarithm of the number 2 by the half-life, in this case, 8 days, giving a decay constant (days-1) for I-131 of 0.086.
It follows from this equation that it took 74 days, until May 23, for the total amount of I-131 present to equal the amount released earlier, and further that slightly more than 0.1% of the released iodine had already decayed into non-radioactive Xenon-131.
Moreover, the amount released was not released instanteously, but took place of a period of a few weeks. On April 15, the earliest date evoked by the critical criticality claimant, the inventory of I-131 in the entire reactor system was still just shy of 1 exabequerel, almost 8 times the amount released during the entire accident, and was, as the iodine in the sea had been rapidly decaying, roughly 160 times as large as the remaining released iodine. Let's assume that 100 petabequerels had leached by March 18, a week after the accident. It follows from the decay law given above, that about 1.2% of it was still present, and thus a simple explanation, involving no extreme statements whatsoever like the criticality statement, would be that I-131 concentrations might have increased simply via a change in the release rate from the large inventory still available.
But that would not have been as sexy as the nonsense statement that an uncontrolled fission reaction was going on, would it?
Nevertheless it is very clear that changes in the extraction efficiency and/or rate - maybe owing to structural changes in the fuel, changes in fuel temperatures, and changes to the structural components of the failed reactor could easily be evoked to account for momentary increases in the apparent concentrations of I-131 in seawater near the reactor. It is very easy in this context to understand momentary increases in the levels of I-131 (and increases in other isotopes which were even more spectacularly misinterpreted in the caterwauling here).
One may expect of course, that paniced hysterics of the types that engage in continuous nuclear fear mongering - I compare it to yelling "fire" in a crowded theater, where the theater in question is this planet and where the audience consists of some 7 billion people - are probably in no position to apply Occam's razor to questions of subjects they know almost nothing about, nuclear science, but, um, still...
And I repeat, in case anyone missed it, the yelling of "nuclear fire" WILL kill people, since nuclear power plants have been irrationally shut and replaced by dangerous fossil fuel plants which have a 100% probability of killing people even when they operate normally.
Similar arguments apply, by the way, to the hysteria surrounding the used nuclear fuel pools near the reactors. They have been inspected, and despite much panic - some whipped up by illiterate news reporters - they remain largely intact. They did not go critical, and they did not release vast amounts of radioactivity. This should be evidence for the robustness of used nuclear fuel storage, although predictably prehaps, the world will interpret this differently, mostly because humanity is proving itself to be too stupid to live.
I might add that these so called "waste" products would not even be there, were it not for fear ignorance and superstition surrounding the word "nuclear." They would have been recycled (using relatively primitive technology - more sophisticated technology would have been developed in a rational world. (I personally have come up with a fantastic way to recycle hot nuclear fuels, but I'm keeping it to myself right now.)
Nuclear energy need not be perfect, it need not be without risk - even for 40 year old technology - in a massive earthquake and tsunami to be vastly superior to all of the stuff that internet anti-nuke fetishists don't care about.
It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is.
The decision to close nuclear plants around the world - mostly in bourgeois countries - is, and there's no polite way to put this, is murder, since people will be killed by the use of replacement dangerous fossil fuel plants and irrevocable and irreversible damage will be done to the planetary ecosystem.
It is not the damaged nuclear plants that will kill hundreds of thousands of people in the next few years, but rather it is the superstition, fear and ignorance connected to the hysteria connected to the nuclear plants that will kill people, not because nuclear plants operate, but because don't operate, because they are shut by said superstition, fear, and ignorance.
I hate to say this, but humanity deserves what it's going to get.
Have a nice evening and an nice day tomorrow.
Monday, July 25, 2011
The oh so slightly revised history of nuclear safety
This post dates back to the early history of Nuclear Green. Periodically I revise and update old posts and repost them. Because this post is related to the history of the Windscale fire, and I wanted to refer to it in my discussion of the Windscale incident. What I regard as important about this post is the notion of nuclear critics that nuclear power lies out of the scope of history. Thus my 2007 Harry's Place critic seems to believe that if something happened once in the history of nuclear power, it will happen again over and over. Critics of nuclear power seem to believe that it is imposible for nuclear safety related knowledge and practice to evolve and change.
One of the follies of my youth was to spend a couple of years being trained to be a Historian of Ideas. This gives me an unusual perspective as a nuclear blogger. I had a couple of guest posts on Harry's Place in 2007. In my second post, alas now lost, I discussed the positive secondary benefits of using nuclear power as an energy source. My post attracted an inordinate number of anti-nuclear responses. One of my most vociferous critics was an English woman who was chemist.
Critics of nuclear power ignore the history of nuclear safety. The history of nuclear safety is both a history of ideas and of a technology and a socio-political history. The two are intertwined. My British critic on Harry's Place, however, took an ahistorical viewpoint. She refused to place the Windscale reactor fire into the historic context of the British states management of cold war related technology. It was her view that if something was true of nuclear technology at one time, and in one place, it was true everywhere and always. Thus what was characteristic of the Windscale reactors was true of every reactor. And thus she argued that the management of the consequences of the Windscale fire by the British government is characteristic of all aspects of nuclear safety at any time and in any place. Critics of nuclear power similarly ignore the history of nuclear safety.
One of the follies of my youth was to spend a couple of years being trained to be a Historian of Ideas. This gives me an unusual perspective as a nuclear blogger. I had a couple of guest posts on Harry's Place in 2007. In my second post, alas now lost, I discussed the positive secondary benefits of using nuclear power as an energy source. My post attracted an inordinate number of anti-nuclear responses. One of my most vociferous critics was an English woman who was chemist.
My Harry's Place critic focused on a number of events in the history of the British nuclear adventure. It is clear that everyone who was doing nuclear science in the 1950's cut corners, and covered up problems, and no one more so than the British. The Windscale fire was a major nuclear accident, and the British covered up quite a lot of the problems. My critic however, chose to attribute to something she called "the nuclear industry" all of the characteristics of what was the British quasi-military nuclear production establishment of the cold war 1950's.
In the 196'ss my father research fission particle release during the Windscale accident, because he was researching the movement of radioisotopes in the environment during and after reactor accidents. Lots of radioisotopes had escaped into the environment because of Windscale, so studying the Windscale accident was high on nuclear safety researchers interest list in the early 1960's. Several things about the Windscale reactors, and the 1957 Windscale fire caught researchers attention. First the design io the Windscale piles was primitive by American standards. They were graphite piles designed to produce bomb grade plutonium. unlike the Hanford Reactors, which were water cooled, the Windscale reactors were air cooled. The X-10 reactor was the only American large air cooled graphite reactor. Eugene Wigner had rejected the use of air or gas cooling in the Hanford reactors. The British did not have a Wigner, and ended up up with an unsafe reactor design. In addition to being badly designed, the Windscale reactors were poorly instrumented, and the British were having increasing problems managing the reactors graphite moderator. Those problems had significant reactor safety implications, which the British failed to identify and analyze.
Thus the history of the Windscale fire must include questions about why the British had in the late 1940's chosen a production reactor design that was already considered obsolete in the United States by the time it went into operation, and why they chose to manage it the way they did. The combination of the reactor design and the management style adopted by the British made an accident in the Windscale reactors quite probable. The Windscale reactors were being opushed beyond their designed capacity and operated om unsafe conditions. The British nuclear program was being directed to fulfill the military ambitions of the UK Government that had nothing to do with the national security of the UK. The purpose of the United Kingdom nuclear program was to convince the political leadership of the United States, that the UK was still a great military power. Of course there was a Windscale coverup because culpability for the accident ran to the top of the British Government and military.
Windscale delivered a message to the American nuclear research community, that nuclear safety had to be attended too. The British Nuclear Research community had not payed enough attention to nuclear safety issues, and had allowed the operation of the Windscale reactors under unsafe conditions without protest. There was a lesson for American scientists and it significantly impacted what American nuclear scientists thought they should be doing, and what they thought their responsobilities were.
Windscale delivered a message to the American nuclear research community, that nuclear safety had to be attended too. The British Nuclear Research community had not payed enough attention to nuclear safety issues, and had allowed the operation of the Windscale reactors under unsafe conditions without protest. There was a lesson for American scientists and it significantly impacted what American nuclear scientists thought they should be doing, and what they thought their responsobilities were.
Critics of nuclear power ignore the history of nuclear safety. The history of nuclear safety is both a history of ideas and of a technology and a socio-political history. The two are intertwined. My British critic on Harry's Place, however, took an ahistorical viewpoint. She refused to place the Windscale reactor fire into the historic context of the British states management of cold war related technology. It was her view that if something was true of nuclear technology at one time, and in one place, it was true everywhere and always. Thus what was characteristic of the Windscale reactors was true of every reactor. And thus she argued that the management of the consequences of the Windscale fire by the British government is characteristic of all aspects of nuclear safety at any time and in any place. Critics of nuclear power similarly ignore the history of nuclear safety.
An ahistoric views of the development of any technology is profoundly unsophisticated. Technologies evolve in socio-economic and historical contexts, and attitudes towards technological issues like safety, are in no small measure related to the context in which the technology evolves. Knowledge evolves and with that evolution comes a greater appreciation for risk and understanding of methods of controlling risk,. As knowledge evolves it can begin to change the social and political context, thus altering public attitudes and beliefs.
A historian would, of course,
* note changes in attitude toward nuclear safety,Partisans in a disagreement about the significance of a historic event might well take a less nuanced view. My British critic from Harry's Place surely took and extremely unsophisticated view that reduced the history of nuclear safety to a simple narrative of good verses evil, With "the nuclear industry" embodying evil, and the critic fantasizing herself to be a warrior on the side of good. This fantasy, this myth, has characterized the anti-nuclear movement since the 1970's. At its heart then the anti-nuclear movement, to the extent it rejects a historical view of nuclear safety, is wedded to a mythological politics of identity.
* developing research on safety,
* the introduction of new safety concepts, conflicts within the research community,
* conflicts over safety involving scientists, interest groups, self styled experts, research funders, policy makers, and policy implementation establishments.
In fact scientists like Alvin Weinberg, George Parker and my father, C.J. Barton, Sr., set out to do something about nuclear safety.
I have pointed out in Nuclear Green, that nuclear critic Ralph Nader's sister Claire had a professional association with with Alvin Weinberg and had discussed nuclear safety issues with Weinberg. Claire Nader undoubtedly passed on the substance of her discussions with Weinberg to her brother, who was later to talk directly with Weinberg about safety issues. The Nader's were both treated with respect by Weinberg. In turn Ralph Nader should have known of Weinberg's expertise both on reactor design and on nuclear safety issues. Nader also know of Weinberg's struggle over nuclear safety issues with Chet Hollifeld and Milton Shaw, a struggle that eventually lead to Weinberg's termination at ORNL. Thus Nader had no reason to doubt Weinberg commitment to nuclear safety. Nader could have undoubtedly used Weinberg's knowledge in a fight for nuclear safety. Instead Nader made his cause the fight against nuclear power. 
Nader posed for the public as a good little guy, who fought against evil incarnate, represented by such evil forces as "the nuclear industry". Unfortunately this absurd story was bought be an increasingly simple minded media, that wanted to interpret every story for the public as a matter of good verses evil. Good verses evil was easy to sell to ther public, and drew eyes and ears to the media that told the stories. Stories with shades of gray were complicated. They required a lot of thinking and a lot of information. Thinking and information lost readers and viewers. In order to understand the history of nuclear safety, we must understand the increasing incompetence and corruption of what past for the mainstream news media during the last third of the 20th century.
There were some bad actors in the nuclear safety story, and Ralph Nader turned out to be one of them. The television networks, and the press were simply too lazy to get the whole story, so the media was content to sell the Saint Ralph line.
Nader tells stories about himself, in which he claims to be a saint of knowledge. For example, Nader claims that in 1964 he visited Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Over lunch Nader claims that he began asking nuclear engineers some questions.
Nader was not interested in truth, he was looking for witnesses for his drama which would feature Saint Ralph fighnting an evil dragon "the nuclear industry." People, like Alvin Weinberg, George Parker, and my father were much to dangerous to rely on as witnesses. George Parker might start talking about how improbable it would be for most radioisotopes to escape from Light Water Reactors. My father might have started talking about how coal fired power plants and natural gas furnaces were delivering more radioisotopes to the environment than reactors were. Such people might blow Nader's cover, night reveal that Nader was only concerned about radiation coming from reactors. If natural gas delivered radioactive gases to American homes, the Saint Ralph and the nuclear dragon myth might fall apart. People might start asking why does Saint Ralph ignore the Natural Gas Dragon, that is brining radioactive gas to the lungs of so many Americans. If people knew that Alvin Weinberg had been fired over nuclear safety, he might steal attention from Saint Ralph. Weinberg was so dangerous to Nader's because he actually understood reactors, and safety, and his integrity was unquestionable unlike Saint Ralph's. Thus Nader's account of the history of nuclear safety, is self serving and dishonest.
Thus in the case of my British Harry's Place critic, as for other critics of nuclear power, the history of nuclear safety was something to be ignored. In their myths nuclear safety was simply impossible, therefore it could have no history. Nuclear power is a manifestation of something called "the nuclear industry", an evil despicable entity that transends time and space. "The Nuclear Industry" is always and everywhere the same, thus it cannot evolve, it cannot change, and has no history. Thus it is impossible to speak of something called the history of nuclear safety.
For nuclear critics, such as Ralph Nader, the topic nuclear safety exists to promote their own reputations. Nader, as well as Amory Lovins has maintained for over a generation that reactors are always and everywhere unsafe. Thus Nader and Lovins also believes in a mythic "nuclear industry" which also exists outside of time and space. There is for Nader or Lovins the history of nuclear safety is nothing more than accounts of their own struggle to slay the nuclear dragon, that is to outlaw nuclear power.
They couldn't answer them, or the answers weren't satisfactory.Nader claims.
'What could happen if a system goes wrong?Nader asked. According to Nader the engineers avoided any such descriptions or said, '
we've got defense in depth' -- and other jargon."Defense in Depth" is, of course, a fundamental nuclear safety concept, that was proven to be effective during the Three Mile Island accident. At the time of Nader's visit to Oak Ridge George Parker, my father and other Oak Ridge scientists were working to understand nuclear accidents. By describing a discussion of things things that he did not understand as jargon, Nader revealed his lack of understanding of nuclear safety. As Gomer Pile use to say, "surprise, surprise surprise." There were of course, other people at ORNL who could have the answered Nader's 1964 questions, or at least would have known the answers within the state of knowledge. If Ralph Nader wanted to talk with peoplewho could answer his questions about nuclear safety he could have talked tp George Parker, or he could have talked to my father. Needless to say, Nader did not seek out nuclear safety experts to answers to his questions. Certainly his sister Claire's friend, Alvin Weinberg, would and could have answered Nader's questions about nuclear safety, and would have made himself available to Ralph and his sister Claire. It is quite possible that Nader talked to someone in Oak Ridge who did not answer his question, or alternatively gave Nader an answer that Nader did not understand. Had Nader sought out answers about nuclear safety in 1964, he would have found them, but Nader wanted answers that made nuclear scientist look bad, not in truth.
Nader was not interested in truth, he was looking for witnesses for his drama which would feature Saint Ralph fighnting an evil dragon "the nuclear industry." People, like Alvin Weinberg, George Parker, and my father were much to dangerous to rely on as witnesses. George Parker might start talking about how improbable it would be for most radioisotopes to escape from Light Water Reactors. My father might have started talking about how coal fired power plants and natural gas furnaces were delivering more radioisotopes to the environment than reactors were. Such people might blow Nader's cover, night reveal that Nader was only concerned about radiation coming from reactors. If natural gas delivered radioactive gases to American homes, the Saint Ralph and the nuclear dragon myth might fall apart. People might start asking why does Saint Ralph ignore the Natural Gas Dragon, that is brining radioactive gas to the lungs of so many Americans. If people knew that Alvin Weinberg had been fired over nuclear safety, he might steal attention from Saint Ralph. Weinberg was so dangerous to Nader's because he actually understood reactors, and safety, and his integrity was unquestionable unlike Saint Ralph's. Thus Nader's account of the history of nuclear safety, is self serving and dishonest.
Thus in the case of my British Harry's Place critic, as for other critics of nuclear power, the history of nuclear safety was something to be ignored. In their myths nuclear safety was simply impossible, therefore it could have no history. Nuclear power is a manifestation of something called "the nuclear industry", an evil despicable entity that transends time and space. "The Nuclear Industry" is always and everywhere the same, thus it cannot evolve, it cannot change, and has no history. Thus it is impossible to speak of something called the history of nuclear safety.
For nuclear critics, such as Ralph Nader, the topic nuclear safety exists to promote their own reputations. Nader, as well as Amory Lovins has maintained for over a generation that reactors are always and everywhere unsafe. Thus Nader and Lovins also believes in a mythic "nuclear industry" which also exists outside of time and space. There is for Nader or Lovins the history of nuclear safety is nothing more than accounts of their own struggle to slay the nuclear dragon, that is to outlaw nuclear power.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Recounting the Windscale Story
The Blog, Histories of Things to Come, includes a post titled Nuclear Leaks 8, Sellafield, aka Windscale. The Nuclear Leaks part of the post title is the give away that the blog is not exactly cheer leading for nuclear power, but there is a good deal to learn here. Most of the story is told through links to a BBC documentary on the Windscale reactor fire. The BBC narrative fingers politicians, in particular British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan as playing a major causal role in the Windscale fire, by pressuring Windscale leadership to go beyond what was safe in reactor operations.
The original Windscale reactors were modeled after the ORNL graphite reactor, the world's first reactor designed to produce plutonium. The graphite reactor was low enough powered to be directly air cooled. That is air was physically blown through the reactor to remove heat. The Graphite reactor operated with natural uranium because enriched uranium was not available at the time it was built. With the uranium spread out through the graphite blocks in the reactor core, a chain reaction could be maintained. The British decided that the Graphite Reactor was safer than the water cooled Hanford Reactors. They wanted to produce nuclear bombs, so they decided to build Plutonium production reactors, using the reliable graphite pile approach.
The two Windscale reactors can be described as primitive. While the leaders of the American reactor building group at the University of Chicago, and in particular Eugene Wigner, had a very good theoretical understanding of what was happening inside a reactor, the British scientists who worked on the Windscale design seem to have been particularly remiss in the failure to appreciate the safety problems associated with this type of reactor. The British scientists had learned from the Americans that when bombarded by neutrons, relatively cool graphite could store a form of energy related to changes in its crystal structure. This energy, discovered by Eugene Wigner, and called Wigner energy, could be released by an increase in heat. The release of Wigner energy increased the heat contained in the nuclear core. In a large reactor the heat release could in turn trigger more Wigner energy releases in the core graphite, thus producing a sudden cascade of core heating.
The air cooled graphite piles operated at low temperatures - under 200 degrees Centigrade. Wigner energy could be released by increasing pile heat to over 250 degrees Centigrade.
Wigner also discovered Xenon-135 poisoning, which creates problems for reactor control. Xenon-135 related control problems can lead to uneven reactor heating and to overheating in some reactor areas. Xenon-135 atoms can put a break on chain reactions if present in large enough numbers in a reactor core. Increased power levels can in turn burn off Xenon and this can lead to a sudden surge in power output.
A further problem relates to the effect of heat on the Windscale fuel capsules. The Windscale reactor was fueled by metallic uranium, encapsulated in aluminum. Uranium swells when exposed to radiation or increased heat. That swelling in turn can burst the aluminum sheathing of the fuel capsule.
Metallic uranium is a pyrophoric substance. However uranium is more likely to burn if it has been powdered or shaved first. Lithium burns spontaneously if heated to about 356°F (180°C), and if Lithium is present in the core of an air cooled reactor it would be a huge fire hazard, especially in the presence of heating to release Wigner energy. If a core was heated to facilitate Wigner energy release, and a lithium containing capsule burst in it, the fire danger would be significant. The Windscale reactor cores housed capsules which contained both lithium and magnesium. Magnesium will not ignite in ordinary air, but it will catch on fire in heated air and of course a lithium fire will heat the air. The Penney Commission on the Windscale fire considered it possible that lithium initiated the fire, but appeared to consider uranium oxidation a more likely suspect. In their investigation of the Windscale fire, the Penney Commission found that capsules had burst by uranium expansion caused by radiation and heat. The expansion forced the aluminum top off the fuel capsule. Once the cap was removed the uranium top would be exposed to O2 in the air and would have begun to oxidize.
The Penney Commission did not focus on the oxidation of Windscale Unit 1 graphite during the October 1957 incident, although it gave a great deal of attention to the presumed release of Wigner energy from that graphite. Thus the Penney Commission was not in a position to determine the role of graphite fire in the Windscale accident.
Fred Pearce in The New Scientist asked,
Remote inspections of the interior of the Windscale reactor do not demonstrate extensive evidence of graphite burning. The link is too a set of presentation graphics for the Windscale Piles Decommissioning Project. These graphics contain pictures of both damaged and undamaged fuel channels in Windscale Pile 1. Pictures of undamaged fuel capsule, fire damaged cartridges, all show graphite fuel channels which appear to be in good shape. Some oxidation may have taken place in the Pile 1 graphite, but the overall density loss of Pile 1 graphite is similar to the density loss of Pile 2 graphite. Thus conditions inside the reactor offers little evidence that a graphite fire took place, and indeed the fire damage to fuel capsules, suggest that they, and not the core graphite were the cause of the core fire.
The capsules containing lithium and magnesium were intended to produce tritium to be used in the British H bomb program. The decision to use the Windscale reactors for tritium production should have been vetoed for safety purposes. It wasn't. The British nuclear science community was shockingly unconcerned about nuclear safety issues. Not only was the community willing to allow the operation of reactors with unsafe materials in their cores, but they had no safety plans in the event of a major reactor accident.
On October 7, 1957 the Windscale staff began the annealing process expected to prevent the buildup of Wigner energy in Windscale Unit 1. The lithium-magnesium capsules were allowed to remain in the core during the annealing process the reactor despite the hazard they posed. The fans blowing cooling air into the core were turned down as was the reactor power. It was assumed that by decreasing cooling, the core temperature would rise to 250 degrees, enough to trigger a Wigner release. Once the Wigner release was assumed to have begun, the reactor was shut down. But the core heat was believed to drop off too quickly, evidence that the Wigner process had not been successful. At that point the Windscale staff decided to reheat the reactor. The second heating is believed to have some how triggered the fire.
It should not be said, however that the cause of the Windscale fire will never be known, because it would be possible to model the circumstances that gave rise to the fire, and test likely causes. At any rate the fire began to spread through the core as the aluminum sheathing of fuel capsules began to melt exposing more and more uranium to fire heated air. Aluminum is a class 4 flammable solid, and soon the molten aluminum began to add to the conflagration. It was only a matter of time before the fire was to spread to the uranium fuel.
The original Windscale reactors were modeled after the ORNL graphite reactor, the world's first reactor designed to produce plutonium. The graphite reactor was low enough powered to be directly air cooled. That is air was physically blown through the reactor to remove heat. The Graphite reactor operated with natural uranium because enriched uranium was not available at the time it was built. With the uranium spread out through the graphite blocks in the reactor core, a chain reaction could be maintained. The British decided that the Graphite Reactor was safer than the water cooled Hanford Reactors. They wanted to produce nuclear bombs, so they decided to build Plutonium production reactors, using the reliable graphite pile approach.
The two Windscale reactors can be described as primitive. While the leaders of the American reactor building group at the University of Chicago, and in particular Eugene Wigner, had a very good theoretical understanding of what was happening inside a reactor, the British scientists who worked on the Windscale design seem to have been particularly remiss in the failure to appreciate the safety problems associated with this type of reactor. The British scientists had learned from the Americans that when bombarded by neutrons, relatively cool graphite could store a form of energy related to changes in its crystal structure. This energy, discovered by Eugene Wigner, and called Wigner energy, could be released by an increase in heat. The release of Wigner energy increased the heat contained in the nuclear core. In a large reactor the heat release could in turn trigger more Wigner energy releases in the core graphite, thus producing a sudden cascade of core heating.
The air cooled graphite piles operated at low temperatures - under 200 degrees Centigrade. Wigner energy could be released by increasing pile heat to over 250 degrees Centigrade.
Wigner also discovered Xenon-135 poisoning, which creates problems for reactor control. Xenon-135 related control problems can lead to uneven reactor heating and to overheating in some reactor areas. Xenon-135 atoms can put a break on chain reactions if present in large enough numbers in a reactor core. Increased power levels can in turn burn off Xenon and this can lead to a sudden surge in power output.
A further problem relates to the effect of heat on the Windscale fuel capsules. The Windscale reactor was fueled by metallic uranium, encapsulated in aluminum. Uranium swells when exposed to radiation or increased heat. That swelling in turn can burst the aluminum sheathing of the fuel capsule.
Metallic uranium is a pyrophoric substance. However uranium is more likely to burn if it has been powdered or shaved first. Lithium burns spontaneously if heated to about 356°F (180°C), and if Lithium is present in the core of an air cooled reactor it would be a huge fire hazard, especially in the presence of heating to release Wigner energy. If a core was heated to facilitate Wigner energy release, and a lithium containing capsule burst in it, the fire danger would be significant. The Windscale reactor cores housed capsules which contained both lithium and magnesium. Magnesium will not ignite in ordinary air, but it will catch on fire in heated air and of course a lithium fire will heat the air. The Penney Commission on the Windscale fire considered it possible that lithium initiated the fire, but appeared to consider uranium oxidation a more likely suspect. In their investigation of the Windscale fire, the Penney Commission found that capsules had burst by uranium expansion caused by radiation and heat. The expansion forced the aluminum top off the fuel capsule. Once the cap was removed the uranium top would be exposed to O2 in the air and would have begun to oxidize.
The Penney Commission did not focus on the oxidation of Windscale Unit 1 graphite during the October 1957 incident, although it gave a great deal of attention to the presumed release of Wigner energy from that graphite. Thus the Penney Commission was not in a position to determine the role of graphite fire in the Windscale accident.
Fred Pearce in The New Scientist asked,
What had gone wrong?And answered,
the pile became too hot, cans of uranium split, the exposed uranium oxidized, releasing more heat, and eventually the graphite caught fire.This is the classic graphite fire story. The story that has not been told in every recounting of the Windscale fire story. Where did the graphite fire come from? The New Scientist appears to have relentlessly pushed the graphite fire story, includes a 1982 account of a visit by Edward Teller to Harwell in 1948, Upon learning that the British were planning to build a graphite reactor, Teller is alleged to have warned British scientists of the dangers of graphite fires. Teller's warning was part of a standard account of the Windscale fire. No one has produced a contemporary account of Teller's Harwell visit, and the texts of the story are not sure whether or not Teller specifically mentioned a graphite fire, and indeed the operation of human memory as such, that Teller who was concerned about nuclear safety issues in general, did not warn of a reactor fire, but graphite popped into someones memory of the Teller warning after the Windscale event.
Remote inspections of the interior of the Windscale reactor do not demonstrate extensive evidence of graphite burning. The link is too a set of presentation graphics for the Windscale Piles Decommissioning Project. These graphics contain pictures of both damaged and undamaged fuel channels in Windscale Pile 1. Pictures of undamaged fuel capsule, fire damaged cartridges, all show graphite fuel channels which appear to be in good shape. Some oxidation may have taken place in the Pile 1 graphite, but the overall density loss of Pile 1 graphite is similar to the density loss of Pile 2 graphite. Thus conditions inside the reactor offers little evidence that a graphite fire took place, and indeed the fire damage to fuel capsules, suggest that they, and not the core graphite were the cause of the core fire.
The capsules containing lithium and magnesium were intended to produce tritium to be used in the British H bomb program. The decision to use the Windscale reactors for tritium production should have been vetoed for safety purposes. It wasn't. The British nuclear science community was shockingly unconcerned about nuclear safety issues. Not only was the community willing to allow the operation of reactors with unsafe materials in their cores, but they had no safety plans in the event of a major reactor accident.
On October 7, 1957 the Windscale staff began the annealing process expected to prevent the buildup of Wigner energy in Windscale Unit 1. The lithium-magnesium capsules were allowed to remain in the core during the annealing process the reactor despite the hazard they posed. The fans blowing cooling air into the core were turned down as was the reactor power. It was assumed that by decreasing cooling, the core temperature would rise to 250 degrees, enough to trigger a Wigner release. Once the Wigner release was assumed to have begun, the reactor was shut down. But the core heat was believed to drop off too quickly, evidence that the Wigner process had not been successful. At that point the Windscale staff decided to reheat the reactor. The second heating is believed to have some how triggered the fire.
It should not be said, however that the cause of the Windscale fire will never be known, because it would be possible to model the circumstances that gave rise to the fire, and test likely causes. At any rate the fire began to spread through the core as the aluminum sheathing of fuel capsules began to melt exposing more and more uranium to fire heated air. Aluminum is a class 4 flammable solid, and soon the molten aluminum began to add to the conflagration. It was only a matter of time before the fire was to spread to the uranium fuel.
The Windscale staff noted a rise in core temperature after the second attempt to accomplish a Wigner energy release, they tried to use passive cooling by opening core dampers, but the temperature continued to rise. Radioactive materials were observed flowing out the chimney stack.
At this point I will take a break for the day. There is a lot more to the story, and the story should be told. So look for more in the coming days.
At this point I will take a break for the day. There is a lot more to the story, and the story should be told. So look for more in the coming days.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Nuclear power, public health air conditioning, and the "Torch of 2011"
Ellis Air Conditioning & Heating tells us,
With the heat indexes reaching into the hundreds from May to September, central air Dallas provides comfort to its residents, as well as safety to their elder residents, and small children who have less of a tolerance for high heat levels. . . .Ellis is not engaged in advertising hype. It is simply stating what everyone who has ever spent a summer in Dallas already knows. The Dallas heat can be unendurable for the healthy, and downright deadly for the old and unhealthy. Dallas is not the only place where summer heat kills people. That is happening in Japan right now.
Providing comfort via central air is a luxury most Dallas natives take for granted. That is, until the central air is not working. Living without central air in near 100 degree weather can be unbearable for some, and unsafe for others. It is important, as the hotter months approach in Dallas, to protect oneself from a situation where their central air unit may become disabled.
From June 1 to July 10, the latest period available, 26 people died from heatstroke, compared with six in the same period last year, according to the Fire and Disaster Management Agency. The number of people taken by ambulance to hospitals for heatstroke more than tripled to 12,973, with 48 percent in the most-at-risk group aged 65 years or older.Now if those 26 people had died from causes that were related to radiation from nuclear accidents, headlines would have told the story all over the world. But those deaths were due to radiation from the sun, and to an absence of electricity due to the shutdown of nuclear power plants.
Of course global warming is also playing a role in the Japanese deaths,
Temperatures in eastern Japan, including Tokyo, were 3.8 degrees higher than the 30-year average in the last 10 days of June or the highest since at least 1961, . . .Even last years Japanese heatstroke related death total pales to almost insignificance when compared to the 70,000 plus heat related deaths in Western Europe during the summer of 2003. Global warming skeptics call global warming realists, alarmists. Climate researchers suggests that within a few decades there will regularly be more summer heat related deaths in Europe, than cold related deaths. How many heat related deaths is it going to take before the skeptics acknowledge what is going on?
Japan has shut 35 of its 54 atomic reactors for safety checks after the March 11 earthquake triggered the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl, reducing total power capacity by 11 percent. Conservation efforts amid hotter temperatures are raising concern of a repeat of last year, when a record 1,718 people died of heatstroke as the summer heat broke records.
Well I am not going to further bash the climate skeptics after the thrashing I gave them on Friday. Today my targets are the anti-nukes.
In Texas it is realized that air conditioning is a matter of public health. Heat waves bring with them deaths as I have already noted. In particular the deaths of older people, the sick and of babies.. The way to control that is to being some means of staying cool into their lives. That means fans and often air conditioning. That, of course, also means electricity, since fans and AC require electricity to operate.
I must confess that I expected Greenpeace to stoically do without air conditioning, but this turns out to not be the case. The Greenpeace ship, the Rainbow Warrior III, includes a diesel engine, an electricity generator, and air conditioning. Greenpeace is recommending hydrocarbon technology that increases air conditioning efficiency by 10% to 20%. Tht is hardly the sort of efficiency gain that Amory Lovins gets excited about. We are clearly going to see more demand for air conditioning, as matters of public health, not just in the United States, but in Western Europe, China, and indeed all over the world.
In Oklahoma the When a water main that supported state government office buildings bke,
13 state government buildings at the capitol were closed after a break in a water main that shut off air-conditioning systems.Computers generate heat, human bodies generate heat.
Computer systems in Oklahoma's state agencies were turned off and 1,000 employees sent home, said spokeswoman Sara Cowden of the Department of Central Services.
This summer will not break most of the heat wave records established in 1980, but there is a hint this summer that it will not be many more summers before the 1980 records start to fall. Greenpeace knows this, yet in its energy plan, , Energy [R]evolution: A Sustainable U.S.A. Energy Outlook.Greenpeace anticipates far more electrical reduction through efficiency than the 10% to 20% improvement in air conditioning efficiency that the hydrocarbon technology it advocates would lead too. None of the electricity will be generated by low carbon nuclear power plants. Instead Greenpeace plans to rely on carbon emitting natural gas power plants to bridge the gap.
Climate scientist expect more extreme heat waves, and for them to get worse. Texas like heat waves are emerging in places that have never recorded such heat before. A year ago the city of Moscow, Russia, is reported to have reached an all time record of 102 degrees during an extreme heat wave. The extreme heat was accompanied by massive crop loss - 40% of Russia's grain harvest - and hugh wild fires - 1.600,000 acres burned.
Climate scientist Roger A. Pielke Jr. says
The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] defines “climate change” as a change in the statistics of weather occurring over 30 years or longer and persisting for decades. Thus, the detection of a change in climate requires long-term records.Pielke says,
It is true that overall damage from tornadoes, floods, and hurricanes has been increasing in recent decades. A recent literature review of extreme event impacts around the world found that everywhere that researchers have looked, this increase can be entirely explained by increasing value of property at risk and increasing exposures to these hazards.The Insurance Industry disagrees with Pielke. Peter Höppe, head of Munich Re's Geo Risks Research/Corporate Climate Center states,
Our figures indicate a trend towards an increase in extreme weather events that can only be fully explained by climate change.If Roger Puekle proves too conservative about climate change, he will still have tenure ands won't loose his job. Munich Re could go out of business if their climate change projections are wrong.
Like insurance companies, we cannot afford to take the risk that climate skeptics are wrong. The Torch of 2011 should offer us enough light to see that we should be trying to avoid climate change rather than waiting to see if it happens. As Oliver Cromwell once wrote to the Parlement of Scotland, I would say to the climate change skeptics,
Think it possible that you might be mistaken,and if you are mistaken, what the cost of that mistake will be. You are gambling with peoples' lives. I would say the same thing to Greenpeace, but does Greenpeace really care about human life?
Friday, July 15, 2011
Flood and Drought
The Southeastern United States is experiencing an Unusual drought, part of the extreme weather condition pattern that is probably related to anthropogenic global warming.Government climate scientists are using terms such as exceptional and extreme drought to describe the current situation which extends from Arizona eastward into Texas and then into Gulf Cost and South Atlantic Coast states as far north as Maryland and Delaware.
To get an idea about the extent of this years drought event, I looked at a discussion by Weather Reporter Matt Engelbrecht of WITN TV in Greeenville, North Carolina. Engelbrecht found that in contrast to a rainfall average of 9" for may and June, Eastern Carolina received only 3.95" this May and June. Previous record dry May & June periods, were in 1995 4.63" and 2008, 4.27". Engelbrecht observed,
In terms of total rainfall, the last two months have been the driest we've seen since they begin keeping records.What is strange about this is that in Knoxville, Tennessee less that 400 miles to the west of Greeeville, we had above average rains in May and June. The drought is having a serious impact on agriculture in states like Texas, where corn farmers and Cattle Ranchers have been devastated. In addition to the exceptional drought, many areas have been subjected to extreme and even record setting heat. Last Tuesday the temperature rose to a record 100 degrees at the Raleigh-Durham (North Carolina) International Airport, but that is nothing compared to Hutchinson, Kanasa which experienced 12 degrees heat last Sunday,
or Norman Oklahoma which appears headed for an all time record high July temperature, a record not just for Norman, but for the State of Oklahoma. Oklahoma based climate researcher Kelvin Kloesel states that this ,is likely to be a disastrous summer . . .As for record temperatures in Texas, what can I tell you? During the last few days these records have been set:
117 F: in Childress, Texas tying an all time record.
113 F: Borger, Texas - hottest on record.
111 F: Amarillo, Texas - hottest temperature ever recorded. In Amarillo the average daytime high for July between 1971 and 2000 was 91.0 degrees, in 2010 it was 87.8, while this year it has risen to 99.2 so far this month.
Such heat can be fatal. A Texas style heat wave struck un-air conditioned Western Europe a few summers ago, and before it was over, something like 50,000 people died from heat related causes.
Monday, while a massive drought heatwave event was devastating the Southern United States, a huge thunderstorm with hurricane-force winds to the Chicago was knocking out the electrical supply of over a third of a million people.
The climate skeptics are not looking out their windows. They are not going outside. They are incapable of feeling the heat, or of noticing the sweat running down their faces. That bump they heard last night was a tree being blown through their roofs by powerful wind storms, but they pretend to not notice the water raining in through the new hole in the roof.
Climate change skeptics are not making Al Gore jokes about the droughts, the floods, the heat waves, and the damaging thunders thunderstorms that lead to massive power outages. It just is not funny.
There is, of course, a difference between weather and climate, but climate is a series of weather events occurring one after another. Normally the weather tends to settle towards average after an unusual weather event, but this has not been the case for the last couple of years. We are witnessing a lot of weather events, one after another, which are consistant with AGW. The climate skeptics keep telling us that this means nothing, but how long are they going to hold out against reality?
Sunday, July 10, 2011
The D A Ryan MSR/LFTR critique: Not ready for Prime Time
A blogging engineer named D A Ryan has recently written a critique of Molten Salt Reactor/LFTR/thorium nuclear technology that is decidedly a mixed bag. Most of the comments land off the mark, some seem to wonder away from reality. Many comments in the Energy from Thorium Comment Forum can be taken as critiques of MSR/LFTR technology. Any serious attempt to criticize MSR technology should review the technical discussions on EfT, before making an assessment of molten salt technology. This is quite a chore, but familiarity with the subject is a requirement of serious criticism. While Ryan is familiar with EfT, he has not gone to the trouble of checking out his criticisms with the EfT discussion forum. Ryan then is not a serious critic of nuclear power, but that is not his point. Ryan's conclusion is actually his starting point,
Lets list some of Ryan's errors in this account:
clearly, as regards the current discussion, we cannot run the world on nuclear energy; indeed we’d struggle to meet a tiny portion of global energy needs, for any prolonged period (and I mean a lot less that we currently manage!) with nuclear power, neither generation IV reactors, nor Thorium, nor even Fusion power will help much on this point. Even the most optimistic nuclear energy program we can realistically conceive of still has a substantial energy gap that something else will have to fill. And given our limited fossil fuel supplies (long term at least) that inevitably means alot more renewable energy, which has to take priority over nuclear.
Does Ryan reach this conclusion by sound reasoning, or dies he misrepresent facts, and engage in fallacious arguments? We need go no further than this comment to realize how dubious Ryan's enterprise is,
Another issue is that graphite core. I detailed previously with regard to the HTGR (part 6.4.3) it’s a fire hazard, i.e. Graphite is basically ultra high grade coal! Thus we would need to put the MSR within a containment dome of sorts. Again, as with the HTGR, this dome need not be built to the same exacting standards of a LWR dome as we are merely trying to contain a graphite fire, not an out of control reactor. We would need an effective on plant fire control team and some form of fire detection and suppression system, within the containment dome and all the necessary gear that this entails. I refer you the relevant section of the HTGR anaylsis, but needless to say such an arrangement would involve certain costs.But is there a fire danger from Graphite? My regular readers might recall thata few months ago I looked at some questions related to the topic of graphite flammability and looked at the question, "Did the Graphite in the Windscale Reactor Burn?" My finding was,
When The UK Nuclear Safety Advisory Committee (NuSAC) meet in 2009 to examine evidence from the Windscale reactor, it found,• Inspections have shown that there was NOT a graphite fire: damage to graphite, caused by severely overheated fuel assemblies, was localised.
In a third post, titled "Did Chernobyl Graphite Burn," I reviewed sections of a document prepaired for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by Brookhaven National Laboratory, NUREG/CR-4981 "A Safety Assessment of the Use of Graphite in Nuclear Reactors Licensed by the U.S. NRC." NUREG/CR-4981 was a document intended to answer the question for the NRC. The Brookhaven researchers determined,
The NRC's answer to the original question which I asked at the beginning of this series is ";yes, graphite does burn" but only under a very limited set of conditions. Given this information it is quite possible to design a reactor in which those conditions will never occur.
Experimental studies on graphite burning have shown that for all the geometries tested which Involved the conditions of small radiation and conduction heat losses, it was not possible to develop self-sustained rapid oxidation for graphite temperatures below about 650 C when the air temperatures were below the graphite temperature. At both high and low flow rates, the graphite was cooled by heat losses to the gas stream even under conditions where other heat loss mechanisms such as radiation and conduction were negligible.
At temperatures above about 650°C, in realistic geometries where radiation is a major heat loss mechanism, graphite will burn only in a limited range of flow rates of air and only when the air temperatures are high. At low flow rates, inadequate ingress of air restricts burning. At high flow rates, the rate of cooling by the flowing gas can exceed the rate of heat produced by oxidation.
Studies have shown that burning will not occur when there is no mechanism to raise the graphite temperature to about 650°C [Schweitzer, 1962a-f]. If the temperature is raised above 650°C, burning will not occur unless a flow pattern is maintained that provides enough air to sustain combustion but not enough to cause cooling. Since the experiments were designed to minimize all heat losses other than those associated with the air flow, 650°C can be considered a lower bound for burning. . . . . in order to have self-sustained rapid graphite oxidation in any of these reactors certain necessary conditions of geometry, temperature, oxygen supply, reaction product removal and favorable heat balance must exist.
The Soviets claimed and American nuclear safety experts like H.J.C Kouts accepted the notion that graphite could burn like charcoal.
The emission of radionuclide continued for about nine days, aided by burning of the graphite. It is estimated that upwards of ten percent of the graphite in the core burned, in a manner similar to the rapid oxidation of charcoal.
We know that Kouts view cannot be correct, nuclear graphite does not burn like charcoal, and the assertion that only 10% of the Chernobyl core graphite burned does not suggest graphite was the major source of the Chernobyl fire. There were, of course other materials in the Chernobyl reactor core that burned hot enough to oxidize nuclear graphite.
Both the NRC and a separate study commissioned by the United States Department of Energy determined that graphite reactor could be operated safely.
The NRC's answer to the original question which I asked at the beginning of this series is ";yes, graphite does burn" but only under a very limited set of conditions. Given this information it is quite possible to design a reactor in which those conditions will never occur.
Ryan references the wikipedia for his claim that "Graphite is basically ultra high grade coal!" What the Wikipedia actually says is,
Graphite may be considered the highest grade of coal, just above anthracite and alternatively called meta-anthracite, although it is not normally used as fuel because it is difficult to ignite.Nuclear graphite is even more difficult to ignite than natural graphite. The wikipedia article on graphite also states,
during a fire, the graphite expands and chars to resist fire penetration and spread . . . .What can I say? Here we have clear evidence of extremely shallow research or something worse. Ryan claims that
That big graphite core is a serious worry. As one nuclear physics put it to me “graphite is basically just high grade coal”. Obviously enough, building a nuclear reactor core out of coal doesn’t sound like a sensible idea! Its worth remembering that part of what made Chernobyl the disaster that it was, and why Fukushima is likely to have a much smaller level of fallout (despite 4 reactors involved, one fuelled with MOX against a single reactor at Chernobyl fuelled with only lightly enriched uranium) is because the graphite moderated core at Chernobyl caught fire. It was this fire and the smoke it generated that allowed the radioactive material from the core to spread over such a large area.
So clearly any FMEA process would zero in on this as a major issue that needs tackling. We need to take care in our design to make sure that any potential fire can be safely contained. Obviously this means that any ideas we have about building HTGR’s without containment domes, as some supporters of these reactors suggest we can (and indeed the UK’s AGR’s and Magnox reactors were also built without containment domes), wouldn’t be a good idea. I should note that the containment dome over a HTGR wouldn’t need to be build to the same exacting standards as one over a LWR as our goal is to contain a fire, not a melting down reactor core. This is important as it’s largely been the delays and difficulties in pouring concrete for these cores that is responsible for the messy cost overruns on the various new LWR reactor projects that are ongoing.Our HTGR’s containment dome would need to be fitted out with some form of automatic fire detection and suppression system, specifically one that can cope with a high temperature graphite fire. As the Windscale power plant fire showed proper planning and equipment would be essential. At Windscale the initially attempt to put out the fire using CO2 failed, as the high temperatures of the fire simply stripped the oxygen from the CO2. The operators finally gambled and poured in water, knowing that this risked setting off an explosion, which fortunately didn’t happen. So clearly we’d need to be better prepared, an inert gas (Nitrogen, Argon or Xenon) or Halon gas should do the trick, if we have enough of it on site. I would note that a number of Halon’s have some potentially nasty environmental issues, such as being known carcinogens and mucking up the ozone layer, so inevitably storing a large quantity of them on site (never mind using them!) would have some environmental implications. Also, we don’t want to be relying, as at Chernobyl, on the local fire crew showing up and doing a Matrosov. Having a dedicated on-site fire crew covering the plant at all times (or nearby covering several plants in a geographical area), as is standard practice for airports, would be sensible. This fire crew, would be specifically trained in dealing with a high temperature graphite fire and be properly equipped to tackle such an event (i.e have working radiation suits! Unlike the situation at Chernobyl). These measures would close off this safety loop hole, but it will come with a cost.
But as we have seen Nuclear graphite is extremely difficult to ignite, and only burns when subject to heat of over 650 C, and then only if supplied with oxygen, and is not in contact with materials that are below 650 C.
Lets list some of Ryan's errors in this account:
1. He failed to note that the difference between the easy ignition of coal, and the ignition difficulties of graphite.
2. He ignores the mention in the wikipedia of graphite fire qualities.
3. His claim that a graphite fire was the primary cause of the Chernobyl radioisotope release is inconsistent with the evidence that 90% of the Chernobyl graphite did not burn, and the research that demonstrates that graphite does not burn in the absence of other heat sources and very hot air.
4. His claim that the Windscale accident included a major graphite fire is based on nothing more than old speculation that is now known to be untrue.
5. The word Chernobyl is used 6 times, Yet the basic premise of the Chernobyl discussion, "the graphite moderated core at Chernobyl caught fire" has been shown to be false. The relatively small amount of core graphite burning that toke place, had to be ignited by an external source and had to be continuously fed by a stream of very hot air.
6. The suggestion that HRGRs pose a fire danger is not supported by evidence.
7. The claim that HTGRs need containment domes is not on the invalid HTGR fire danger argument, thus is not supported by valid reasoning.
8. The argument regarding the supposed problems and costs related to containment dome concrete, is supported by an invalid chain of reasoning, and therefore is invalid itself.
In his account of the alleged graphite fire problems of MSRs, Ryan simply points to his invalid arguments related to the alleged HTGR graphite fire problem and then claims that MSRs will need specially trained fire fighting teams, special equipment, and a containment dome. All of this is hot air, because Ryan has not established reasonable grounds for believing that a MSR graphite fire problem exists.
Ryan criticizes both EfT and Nuclear Green,
Another misconception is that LFTR’s can be air-cooled (here and here) rather than being dependant on the water cooling process we utilise in most other power stations.
The Here and Here refer to one of my posts and a post by Kirk Sorensen.
How does Ryan justify this?
He claims,
Ryan's second objection has to do with cooling fans
Firstly, fire safety, air is an oxidising substance. Fires start all the time at power stations (fossil fuel fired and nuclear ones), especially in the turbine halls and the last thing we want in an emergency is a load of big cooling fans blasting in air and literally fanning the flames! In this scenario we’d face the dilemma between stopping the fans and cutting of the source of cooling (forcing us to SCRAM the reactor to prevent a LOCA scenario) or risk the fire spreading out of control, possibly to the point where it compromises the reactor’s safety. This was of course very similar to the dilemma faced during the Windscale fire, which was air cooled (although in this case directly, rather than indirectly as we currently discussing). And on the subject of Windscale, you will recall what I said earlier about fires and that Graphite core, so we’d be opening a very serious potential safety loophole.But in nuclear plants, the turbine room is always separated from the reactor by a fire wall. The reference to the Windscle fire is simply confused. In the Windscale reactor air passed directly through the reactor core. There is no proposal to allow cooling air into the reactor core. Thus the Windscale analogy collapses and with it Ryan's first fire argument.
Ryan's second objection has to do with cooling fans
Cooling fans also aren’t terribly reliable, which is why the MSRE was down for several months due to a cooling fan failure. Air based cooling is also very weather dependant, indeed I note that the fans at the MSRE seems to have failed in the summer, when they would have likely been struggling to cope with higher daytime temperatures.If cooling fans are unreliable, we can use a stack effect to accomplish passive air cooling. The reference to the MSRE cooling fan failure refers to a single incident early in the multiyear MSR test. Once the problems with the cooling fan were identified and corrected, the fan ran for something like 20,000 hours without a problem. The observations about summer related problems is bogus.
Finally we have a third argument
Thirdly, it’s the matter of thermal efficiency. Air based cooling is not very efficient, largely because air has such a low heat capacity compared to water (1.15 against 4.2 J/kg K). A typical COP (Co-efficient of Performance) for fans would be of the order of 2 – 3.7, while you can get 5 – 7.5 with water based cooling. Assuming a COP of 3 (it would be more like 2.5 at the temperatures in question, but bear with me!) and assuming a 1,000 MWth LFTR with a thermal efficiency of 50% (to keep my numbers easy!) = 500 MWe. Our cooling fans, in order to dispose of that 500 MW’s of excess heat, would be consuming 166.67 MW of electricity, dropping our effective plant efficiency down to 33%, barely Rankine cycle levels! This is why we use water in most power stations for cooling.
This argument is preposterous. The B&W mPower reactor is designed to be either air or water cooled. The air cooled mPower is rated at 125 MWe, while the water cooled mPower is reportedly rated at 136 MW, but officially described as a 125 MW reactor.. Thus the active air cooling system at worst consumes 11 MWs more electricity than the water cooling system does. We could probably expect even better performance is we use a stack effect based cooling system.
Ryan adds a further argument:
Also this air based cooling argument strikes me as a bit of a red herring, LFTR fans essentially inventing reasons why their “precious” is better than anything else. With the exception of a few geothermal power stations in arid areas (or hydroelectric plants!), I’m unaware of any major power project that was derailed for lack of cooling water. Either you can use cooling towers (forced draught or natural convection types) and minimise water losses to an acceptable level or simply move the plant next to a ready water source and transmit the power to where it is needed. Many desert countries operate large thermal power stations from around the coasts and several such as Iran, UAE and Libya are even planning to build nuclear stations too. So I fail to see how “air based” cooling offers any real benefits.
In fact water based cooling is usually considered by engineers to offer more thermal efficiency but the fact that Ryan is unaware does not mean consideration is not being given. In fact, as I have indicated, plans for an air cooled mPower reactor are moving forward, and plans for large air cooled solar thermal power plants are being considered in the Southwestern United States.
In addition this passage suggests an attack on Kirk Sorensen and myself for our enthusiasm about Molten Salt nuclear technology. The use of the word “precious” is highly inappropriate, and the use of the quotation marks would untruthfully attribute the word to us. Neither Kirk nor I have used the term “precious” to refer to the LFTR or MSR technology.
Furthermore, Ryan makes other attacks on LFTR/MSR supporters. Ryan describe us
This amounts to little more than a string of attacks on the character of LFTR supporters. The mention of Libertarians is especially silly. LFTR supporters come from the extreme right the extreme left and everywhere in between. The chinese communists who recently decided to invest in LFTR R&D are certainly not Libertarians. Nor am I. We regard MSR technology as promising, and even very promising, but that does not make us cargo cult scientists. The foundational ideas for the LFTR came from Eugene Wigner and Alvin Weinberg, who both were major figures in history of reactor science. LFTR supporters continue to look critically at alternative MSR technologies. The discussion pages of EfT are filled with debate on numerous MSR technology related topics.
In addition to my critique, the blogger uvdiv offers us a
Uvdiv points to one Ryan error that did make me laugh out loud,
Ryan confuses open cycle hear powered gas turbines, with fluoride salt turbines which indeed would be a difficult matter.
At this point I think we have enough. Further discussion and debate can be found here, and here.
the LFTR fanatics need to come off the Kool-Aid. I’ve gone to great lengths to debunk many of their crazy ideas because such cargo cult science as they are promoting does a great disservice to science, and gets in the way of more realistic and practical proposals. They also serve to confuse the public, and I mean even Wired News appears to have been taken in by this con, which makes the whole job of real scientists pursing real projects, all that harder. As I’ve shown many of the supposed advantages of the LFTR are simply figments of certain bloggers overactive imaginations. The fact that many of the LFTR supporters are Libertarians, individuals not entirely known for their grasp of basic physics, economics or social norms doesn’t help matters
This amounts to little more than a string of attacks on the character of LFTR supporters. The mention of Libertarians is especially silly. LFTR supporters come from the extreme right the extreme left and everywhere in between. The chinese communists who recently decided to invest in LFTR R&D are certainly not Libertarians. Nor am I. We regard MSR technology as promising, and even very promising, but that does not make us cargo cult scientists. The foundational ideas for the LFTR came from Eugene Wigner and Alvin Weinberg, who both were major figures in history of reactor science. LFTR supporters continue to look critically at alternative MSR technologies. The discussion pages of EfT are filled with debate on numerous MSR technology related topics.
In addition to my critique, the blogger uvdiv offers us a
Summary of some of the biggest howlers"Uvdiv suggest that Ryan holds a misconception that
* Claims MSRs have "Isotope Separation Plants" which separate 233U and 232U (the trace contaminant)
* Warns of hazardous fission products, such as thorium isotope "T-232" [sic], which supposedly is a disadvantage of thorium-fuelled reactors because of its 14 billion year half-life
* Warns that electrolyzing nuclear fuel salts is energy-intensive
* Warns that heat inputs in fluoride reprocessing are energy-intensive
* Asserts that thorium MSRs are constrained to a lower temperature limit of 1,110 °C, the melting point of pure ThF4. Concludes MSRs must be built entirely from ceramics
* "Obviously, once we exhaust the world’s U-235 stockpiles, LFTR’s and any other Thorium fuelled reactors will cease to function."
* Argues against using molten fuel salt as a working fluid in a gas turbine
He has the misconception that 233U/232U isotopic enrichment is necessary for MSR operation. Spends many paragraphs speculating on this imaginary thing, finally concluding it will consume up to 25% of an MSR's electric output:Uvdid find absurdities in Ryans accounts of fission products. Ryan quite literally describes Th-232 (Ryan calls it T-232) a fission product. Then uvdiv notes a strange error in Ryan's text,
The dendrite problem above demonstrates that the LFTR/LFUR has a relatively narrow thermal window. Its filtering plant will not work if the temperature of the fluid drops much below a certain threshold and the danger of fuel solidification raises the risk of the reactor being damaged. With UF4 the solidification temperature is 1,036 °C and its vapourisation temperature is 1,417 °C. [...] With TF4 our “window” is 1110 – 1,680 °C, but again we can potentially move this by lowering the pressure (or raising it if we want to go the other way…not that we do!). A low vapour pressure also creates a few potential problems in terms of keeping the reactor sealed (air is more likely to leak in if the pressure inside is less than atmospheric…possibly starting a fire!) and maintaining a good flow rate from our pumps.Uvdiv then comments,
I don't know what confusion of his provoked this nonsense. Maybe he hasn't done his basic research, that all MSR proposals involve solvating actinide fluorides in other fluoride salts -- mixtures of LiF, NaF, BeF2, ZrF4, and/or others -- with the mixture having far lower melting points than actinide fluorides. Or maybe he's under the illusion that individual components of a chemical solution precipitate out at their pure melting points. At any rate, his chain of reasoning starts from this major error and leads to others:Uvdiv then lists another chain of errors,
We see once more Ryan's tendency to compound errors.With the LFTR however, I doubt you could operate one made out of any Nickel alloy, contrary to everything said on the internet. Bare in mind I’m thinking in terms of a good lengthy service life with a sensible factor of safety, not a flimsy test reactor in a lab (with a 100 mile exclusion zone!).[...]Thus the pressure vessel of any LFTR would likely have to formed out of Ceramics (very expensive and difficult to form, especially given how critical getting an air tight seal is given the graphite core) and key internal components out of Refractory metals, as would be the case for certain high temperature parts of any ISP (in both the LFTR and LFUR cases) given talk of operating temperatures in the range of 1600 °C.[...]So my instinct from a materials science point of view would be to drop the LFTR idea altogether and focus instead on a LFUR. While this isn’t able to use the Thorium cycle, the point was raised earlier about how the Thorium cycle isn’t all its cracked up to be. Its going to be a lot easier to build a LFUR than a LFTR, cheaper (relatively speaking) and likely safer too. Of course it does come at the disadvantage of a slightly awkward acronym! but overall that would be my focus of attention.
Uvdiv points to one Ryan error that did make me laugh out loud,
Another misconception is that a LFTR or LFUR can operate on an open cycle with a gas turbine. While true, it could be run this way, there are a host of practical reasons not to do it. Not least of them the fact that our turbine would have to be designed to withstand having a mixture of molten salt and fluorided fuel passed through it at very high temperatures. This would be tricky to say the least, likely requiring the use of those super expensive refractory metals, and while using such materials to make the odd turbine blade is one thing, an entire turbine casing is an entirely different matter. It would likely cost much more than the reactor itself!
Ryan confuses open cycle hear powered gas turbines, with fluoride salt turbines which indeed would be a difficult matter.
At this point I think we have enough. Further discussion and debate can be found here, and here.
I originally intended to write Good, Bad and Ugly critique of Ryan's essay on MSR/LFTR technology, but even the good is so tainted with the bad and the ugly that I find this impossible to do.
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