Tag Archives: Fukushima

Kathryn Porter On Nuclear Power

If ever there was a case for massive government intervention, this is it.

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Philip Bratby

Another excellent article by Kathryn Porter:

I write a lot about what isn’t working in the energy transition – so what do I think will work?

The answer is nuclear power. Not fusion, but regular fission power. Nuclear has a number of key advantages, not found all at once in any other source of energy. Nuclear produces no carbon dioxide emissions in operation, it has a very high energy density in that a lot of energy is produced from a small geographic footprint, and it is not intermittent. Less well-known is the fact that nuclear power stations actually can “load-follow” – this means they can vary their output in response to changes in demand.

Of course, there are downsides. Nuclear has a very high capital cost and an extremely stringent regulatory regime, and there are the issues of nuclear waste and public acceptance.

The UK Government has spent a lot of time and effort trying to design incentive schemes to encourage private investment in the sector, with minimal success. It has launched Great British Nuclear to kick-start interest in small modular reactors (SMRs) and expects to co-invest in these projects. But the fact is that nuclear power is beset by large and unquantifiable risks, which mostly come from government itself. The entire German nuclear power industry was recently ordered to shut down, for instance, in the wake of the Fukushima powerplant incident: this despite the fact that no health effect to anyone from Fukushima radiation “is ever likely to be discernible” according to the UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation. Every new nuclear project faces interminable legal action from anti-nuclear activists. There are legislators in every Western nation who make no secret of their opposition to nuclear energy, though some of these have changed their stance after realising how helpful it is in meeting net-zero goals.

In this kind of environment, it’s reasonable that the private sector should be reluctant to take on political risks. The government should go beyond incentive schemes and simply pay for new reactors, particularly large ones, out of public funds. I am not an advocate for widespread state ownership in the energy sector, but in the same way that we do not expect the private sector to finance physical security – the military and police – we should not necessarily expect it to fully finance energy security. It would be more efficient, and potentially cheaper for consumers, were the Government to get over its squeamishness about putting large infrastructure on its balance sheet and ensure that more reactors are built.

The issue of regulation is also possible to improve. Since Fukushima, despite the fact that basically no health consequences occurred, regulation has become even more risk averse. For example, the existing UK Advanced Gas Cooled Reactors may be forced to close early (some already have) because of the risk that a single control rod may fail to deploy in the event of an earthquake of a magnitude never experienced in the history of the UK. Not only can these reactors be safely shut down if fewer than a fifth of the fuel rods deploy, there are also two further shut-down methods should this fail. It’s no wonder that nuclear power is the safest form of generation with the lowest number of deaths per unit of energy generated.

The issue of waste also turns out to be a lot less thorny than expected. Most of today’s waste problems date back to the early days of nuclear power when waste was not handled correctly. The cleanup from this is an ongoing challenge. Modern reactors produce less waste, and the protocols for correct handling are now established. According to government data, the total mass of radioactive waste in stock and estimated to be produced in the UK over the next 100 years will be around 5.1 million tonnes. In contrast, around 5.3 million tonnes of hazardous waste come from UK households and businesses every single year.

When it comes to public acceptance, the best place to start is on the sites of previous reactors since the local population is used to living next door to nuclear power which has been a source of jobs.

There are significant opportunities for both large and small nuclear reactors. Despite the hype, SMRs are still some years away from being available commercially, and we can’t afford to wait. We should hurry up and build some more large reactors.

The most promising large-scale technology is the APR-1400 advanced light water reactor developed by Korea Electric Power Company (KEPCO). Six of these have been built in South Korea and the UAE, with another due to open soon. They have been delivered broadly on time (in eight years) and with modest cost overruns. Another option is the European Pressurised Water Reactor (EPR) which EDF is building at Hinkley Point C and another of which recently opened at Olkiluoto in Finland. Unfortunately, the three EPR projects in Europe (the other being the flagship development at Flamanville in France) have been beset with massive delays and cost over-runs. It’s a similar story with the Westinghouse AP1000, another pressurised water reactor which has just been completed at Vogtle in Georgia with a second unit due next year.

A further option would be an Advanced Boiling Water Reactor (ABWR). These were built on time – in just five years – and on budget in Japan before the Fukushima incident. While ABWR supply chains may be stale, they could be refreshed if multi-site orders came in.

SMRs provoke a great deal of interest, for good reasons. Companies such as Dow Chemical are exploring their use to deliver high temperature heat to their facilities: on-site nuclear is one of the more credible options for zero-carbon high temperature industrial processes. Dow is working with X-Energy to deploy an SMR at its UCC Seadrift Operations site in Texas, by about 2030. The companies hope to start construction in 2026.

Again, as ever with nuclear, the main hurdle is regulatory. US developer NuScale recently secured certification from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) but said the process ran from 2008 to 2020, cost half a billion dollars and generated two million pages of documentation. And that certification is only applicable in the US – NuScale would have to go through it all again if someone wanted to deploy its  technology in the UK or elsewhere.

The UK Government has said it wants to co-operate with trusted national regulators, and this would be a good place to start – if the technology is good enough for the NRC it should be good enough for the UK and vice versa (of course, site-specific approvals must still be on a case by case basis).

The main British contender in the SMR space is Rolls Royce which was assumed to have an advantage given its role in nuclear submarine propulsion. Unfortunately, small civil reactors are quite different to military ones which run on high-enriched fuel, so there was less to leverage than expected. The company is on the slow road to UK design certification.

SMRs are essentially small versions of conventional nuclear technologies. The idea, which has also been trialled by Westinghouse for large-scale projects, is to build as many components as possible off-site using a modular approach, with reduced on-site engineering. An even more interesting prospect is a fully plug-and-play, transportable “micro-reactor” plant with virtually no on-site engineering. Again, Westinghouse is at the forefront, with a micro-reactor it expects to be built and fuelled fully off-site. The product, named eVinci, would run for around eight years before being taken away for re-fuelling, leaving no waste behind. It uses a novel passive cooling technology. Recently the company successfully produced a prototype of one of the main design components.

If micro-reactors work, their potential would be huge. They could be installed at industrial sites to generate electricity, and potentially produce hydrogen to fuel very high temperature operations such as glass-making, where the temperatures are difficult or expensive to achieve other than through combustion. They would also be ideal in various off-grid locations which currently rely on diesel generators.

Unlike these proven fission technologies, I am less optimistic about fusion. Recent “breakthroughs” have misled the public as they ignore the vast amounts of energy required to power the plant. The technology needs to improve by orders of magnitude before more energy comes out than goes in. It’s also worth noting that people talk about fusion power as though it would be free from the radiation and waste problems of fission: this is emphatically not the case. Worthwhile fusion power has been supposedly imminent for more than half a century, and it’s liable to be a very long time before it arrives. We should not put off building fission capacity to wait for it.

Fission power makes Net Zero actually possible to achieve, and has the huge benefit of being an established technology that fits very well with the way our electricity grids were designed to work. There is no need for backup generation, extra power lines, or additional balancing costs, all of which are needed when intermittent renewable generation is installed.

In 1956, the first civil nuclear power station in the world was built at Calder Hall in Cumbria with the nearby homes in Workington being the first to receive electricity generated from nuclear power. It ran for 47 years generating enough power to run a three-bar heater for 2.85 million years. We need to rediscover that same ambition and power up our nuclear sector once again.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/11/01/nuclear-power-green-energy-tech-net-zero-miracle/

If we do rollout large amounts of nuclear, then clearly wind power is a dead end technology, and we should put a stop to all new projects, as they will be superfluous.

Although nuclear reactors can vary their output, as she points out, to merely act as a back up for intermittent renewables would totally destroy their economics.

It would be absurd to spend hundreds of billions on both wind and nuclear, when the latter could do the job on its own.

There is, by the way, an easy solution to the problem of environmental activist opposition to nuclear – simply tell them the choice is nuclear or gas!

Nuclear Power’s Next Big Event

From Watts Up With That?

Power_lines_(Unsplash) Charles Devaux mclytir, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

WILL THE NEXT RADIATION RELEASE KILL OFF NUCLEAR POWER?

Authored by Robert Hargraves via RealClear Wire,

July 10, 2023

Two AP1000 nuclear power reactors are powering up in Georgia, and several ventures are developing new generation reactors. The outlook for more nuclear power seems bright. But will there be some future failure that leaks radioactive material out? Yes, perfection is impossible; airplanes crash.

Will such a radiation event kill off nuclear power, as did the harmless Three Mile Island accident? 

Yes, if we are guided by baseless fear. Regulators claim any radiation exposure is potentially harmful and so set unreasonably low limits. Media headlines frighten people about any radiation leaks, no matter how small. This article will contrast today’s regulatory limits with published, recommended protective actions to avoid harm to the public after a radiation release from a nuclear reactor accident.

Ionizing radiation harms by displacing electrons, breaking molecular bonds in cells. It is measured in Sieverts (Sv) or Grays, which are watt-seconds of energy absorbed, per kilogram of body weight. An intensive, brief 10 Sv dose is deadly, 1 Sv risks acute radiation sickness, and such a dose over 0.1 Sv can slightly increase future cancer risk.

U.S. regulations limit annual public radiation exposure from nuclear power to 0.001 Sv. The limit is 100X smaller than a brief, intensive dose that might cause cancer, and 1000X smaller than one requiring medical attention. This enormous safety margin was created politically by reducing limits in an attempt to reassure frightened people, but resulted in most people viewing 0.001 Sv as dangerous. Worse, regulators magnify fear with the ALARA rule (as low as reasonably achievable), claiming even lower exposures may cause cancer.

The regulators’ 0.001 Sv limit counts not just a single dose, but all radiation absorbed over an entire year, as if the harm were cumulative, without any biological repair during the year. In reality, repair takes place at DNA, cellular, and tissue levels in time scales of hours to days. DNA repair begins in seconds to minutes after exposure, and cellular repair within hours. How long does it take your cut finger to heal?

Radiation from the triple Fukushima nuclear reactor meltdown killed no public citizens, but Japan’s government killed over 1,600 people with unnecessary evacuations.

To prevent such future mistakes, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) published Actions to Protect the Public in an Emergency due to Severe Conditions at a Light Water Reactor to protect the public from physical radiation harm, avoiding harm from fear based on regulators’ limits. This IAEA documented advice is directed to accident site responders working to protect people’s lives and health, independent of radiation limits promulgated by bureaucrats.

Chart 1 helps guide the accident response team and the public. IAEA’s green SAFE FOR EVERYONE, year-long, dose rate is 25 microSv/hour. This radiation exposure dose rate over a whole year totals to 0.2 Sv, 200X the regulators limit of 0.001 Sv/year, but is safe because the body repairs damage much more rapidly than 25 microSv/hour damages it.

Jack Devanney’s substack article tabulates observed harms and radiation doses to actual people in many studies. He observes that dose rates under 0.01 Sv/day did not exhibit statistically significant, detectable harm. The body’s intrinsic repair rate exceeds the radiation damage rate. Using a 10:1 safety margin he suggests 0.001 Sv/day safety limit. This is 40 microSv/hour, close to the IAEA SAFE FOR EVERYONE rate of 25 microSv/hour.

CHERNOBYL. The Chernobyl accident was deadly; 30 onsite workers with intensive doses over 2 Sv died. Cleanup workers exposed up to 0.3 Sv or more had slightly higher rates of cancer. Radioactive iodine dispersed into the food chain caused over 1,400 thyroid cancers leading to the deaths of 15 children; no other increases in public cancer rates was observed. Perhaps 200,000 people were evacuated. Radiation rates in the Chernobyl exclusion zone are now under 10 microSv/hour, not harmful to the 1,000 stubborn babushkas and others who still live there.

FUKUSHIMA. Within the stricken Fukushima power plants site, radiation peaked at 10,000 microSv/hour, dropping 90% in 10 hours. Outside the plant IAEA reported peak measured radiation of 170 microSv/hour 30 km northwest of the site. By the next month radiation dropped to less than 91 microSv/hour everywhere, provisionally safe by Chart 1 except in spots where radiation may have still exceeded 25 microSv/hour. There was no need to evacuate 164,000 people, leading to the deaths of over 1,600 people, and there was certainly no need to do it hastily.

THREE MILE ISLAND. Around Three Mile Island reactor accident the cumulative dose averaged only 15 microSv (likely under 25 microSv/hour everywhere), so there was no need to evacuate anyone. Nevertheless the accident was a factor in ending nuclear power plants construction in the U.S.

NATURAL RADIATION. The back of Chart 1 states the average annual dose rate from natural sources of radiation exposure fluctuates around 0.2 microSv/hour, but in some locations it can be up to 15 microSv/hour.

It’s dose rate, not dose, that matters. Harm results when dose rate exceeds repair rate. Regulators and the multi billion dollar radiation protection industry overstate radiation harm by orders of magnitude:

100X: 0.001 Sv/year regulatory limit vs observed intensive 0.1 Sv cancer threshold.

52X: regulatory yearlong biological repair assumption vs typical healing time.

ALARA: unknown whim.

Regulators should abandon cumulative, yearlong dose limits, and instead set dose rate limits consistent with biological repair times. The ALARA rule should be dropped. What should be the limit?

IAEA’s Chart 1 shows a 25 microSv/hour dose rate limit. Jack Devanney’s article suggested 40 microSv/hour. In 1934, the NCRP (National Commission on Radiation Protection) advised 40 microSv/hour (0.1 R/day in old units). Nearly 50 years later, NCRP founder Lauriston Taylor wrote “No one has been identifiably injured by radiation while working within the first numerical standards set by the NCRP and the ICRP in 1934.” 

Nuclear power growth will end with the next radiation release unless we replace regulators with people who observe facts and consequences. The near century of concessions changing 1934 radiation limits from 40 microSv/hour to 0.001 Sv/year has not reduced harm one bit, but has increased public fear because the more restrictive limits have no evidential justification. Fear of nuclear power has killed many more people than radiation.

Nuclear power will be cheaper, ample, and less feared if regulators issue fact-based limits instead of conceding to protesters.

Dr. Hargraves teaches energy policy at Dartmouth’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and is a co-founder of a nuclear engineering company. 

This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.

HT/Yooper

Germany shuts all of its nuclear plants – and is warned it will regret it

From Tallbloke’s Talkshop

April 16, 2023 by oldbrew

Isar nuclear power site, Bavaria

Arm-waving propaganda about tiny amounts of ‘carbon’, i.e. vital carbon dioxide gas, in the atmosphere has led to this decision. One obvious problem being that wind and solar energy can’t be stockpiled, or accessed on demand, hence Germany’s newly increased dependence on coal power for its electricity.
– – –
Germany became only the third European country to shut off its nuclear power supply on Saturday when its final three reactors were severed from the grid for good, says The Daily Telegraph.

The end of German nuclear energy, a process begun by former chancellor Angela Merkel after the Fukushima disaster in 2011, came at the same time as the country seeks to wean itself off fossil fuels and manage an energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine.

A small crowd of pro-nuclear demonstrators turned out in front of the Brandenburg Gate on Saturday to protest the end of Germany’s nuclear era.

On the rain-drenched Pariser Platz, they watched a pantomime in which the sun and wind struggled to defeat men dressed as coal and gas until nuclear power came to the rescue.

“Our reactors set records for energy production year after year,” said Lucan Eichhorn, one of a small number of protesters on the pro-nuclear side.

“Switching them off when they could run for years longer really is the height of stupidity.”

On the other side of the gate, Greenpeace activists set up a float that depicted nuclear energy as a dinosaur being slain by the sun.

Johana Caro, dressed in a Greenpeace cagoule, said she had come out to celebrate the end of a “dangerous technology”.

“Our reliance on nuclear stopped us investing in renewables,” she asserted.
. . .
“Our mentality means that when we start something, we see it through to the bitter end,” [one] nuclear advocate said.

“With nuclear energy, that means that we will only change course when we have hit rock bottom.”

Full article here.