Russia has said it will build two new nuclear icebreakers in a bid to make a rapidly melting trade route through the Arctic accessible to shipping traffic on a year round basis. August 7, 2019 by Charles Digges
Russia has said it will build two new nuclear icebreakers in a bid to make a rapidly melting trade route through the Arctic accessible to shipping traffic on a year round basis.
The announcement came on July 10 when Atomflot, which runs Russia’s nuclear icebreaker fleet, posted an official tender for two new nuclear vessels for a total price of $147 billion.
The new orders represent an addition to three nuclear icebreakers that Russia already has under construction, called the Arktika,” the “Sibir” and “Ural,” all of which are expected to enter service by 2022. The two new icebreakers now under tender, which will be an extension of that line, are to launch by 2024 and 2026 respectively.
These vessels of the so-called LK-60Ya type are built to enormous dimensions. Each is up to 173 meters long, and is powered by twin RITM-200 reactors, which deliver a combined 175 megawatts of power – making them the most powerful civilian vessels in the world.
It is widely expected that the Baltic Shipyard in St Petersburg – where the other three icebreakers are being built – will get the massive tender, though two other shipyards, one in Crimea and the other in the Russian Far East, are expected to bid on the project as well.
Atomflot’s new order is part of Moscow’s push to bring the Arctic under its control as climate change thins polar ice, opening a shipping corridor between Europe and Asia. The 6,000-kilometer Arctic passage, called the Northern Sea Route, is thought to lop days off more conventional shipping schedules via the Suez Canal. But icebreaking vessels are still needed to keep trade lanes open for cargo convoys for much of the year – a service for which Moscow charges shippers a hefty toll.
President Vladimir Putin is betting big on the Arctic thaw, last year has ordering his government to boost shipping through the Northern Sea Route to 80 million tons a year by 2024, a fourfold uptick over current levels.
Moscow’s ministries and state corporations have promised to deliver the goods, and already some 10 percent of Russia’s total investments are in Arctic projects.
The Yamal LNG project, which went into production earlier this year, expects to ship 15.5 million tons of natural gas a year. The Yamal LNG II project, expected to open in 2023, will add another 19.8 billion tons.
Yet more traffic through the Northern Sea Route will be accounted for by oil – much of it from pipelines funneled from Central Siberia to Arctic seaports specifically to fulfill Putin’s increased cargo demands.
But it’s not just traffic from fossil fuel industries that Moscow is banking on. Earlier this year, Russian Parliament adopted legislation giving Rosatom a monopoly over managing access to the Northern Sea Route through its icebreakers, which will chaperone foreign traffic.
The Russian government’s claim that shippers need Moscow’s permission to pass through the route has irked some. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called the Kremlin’s intentions to run the Northern Sea Route like a toll road “illegal.”
But others, like China, are keen to play by Moscow’s rules – in exchange for part of the profits. Beijing, which is the largest foreign investor in Russia’s Yamal LNG project, is developing an Arctic trade strategy that has dubbed “The Polar Silk Road.” Shippers in South Korea and Denmark have conducted pilot voyages through the Northern Sea Route as well.
Moscow has meanwhile backed up its claims as the Arctic’s traffic cop with military might. Ten disused Arctic military airfields have been reopened, and 13 more are being built. The bases cover almost the entire coastline and are, if required, ready to protect or disrupt any traffic along the North Sea Route.
All of this is part of a bigger bet Russia is making on climate change. According to data from NASA, Arctic ice has shrunk by 12.8 percent a year on average since 1979. Last year’s ice cover was 42 percent lower than 1980. By some estimates, the entire Polar Region could be largely ice-free by 2050.
While most nations with access to the Arctic have been shy about capitalizing on global warming to commercialize the pristine polar environment, Putin has not. The Kremlin strategy suggests that by the time climate change helps make the Northern Sea Route navigable all year, Russia will have full control of any traffic on the route, and will be actively exploiting it for its own commodity exports, shortening the shipping path to Asia.
How that approach will affect the rest of the world, however, is not in dispute. According to a study published by the science journal Nature, Russia’s current climate policies would push up global temperatures by more than 5 degrees Celsius — at least 3 degrees higher than the limit climate scientists are aiming for.
Russia is currently operating four other nuclear icebreakers: The “Yamal,” the “50 Let Pobedy,” the“Taymyr,” and “Vaygash.”
The more that Putin and Trump revalidate the role of nuclear weapons in strengthening national security, the more they normalise the discourse of nuclear weapons use and embolden calls for nuclear weapon acquisition in other countries.
A nuclear world in disarray https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/a-nuclear-world-in-disarray/ 7 Aug 2019,Ramesh Thakur We are in a uniquely dangerous period in the atomic age. Geopolitical tensions have spiked in Europe, in the Middle East, on the subcontinent and in East Asia. The nuclear arms control architecture is fraying and crumbling, but no negotiations are underway to reduce global nuclear stockpiles.
A hostile international security environment, the proliferation of nuclear weapons and the emergence of new space, cyber and AI technologies have increased the risk of accidental or deliberate use of nuclear weapons. The growing strategic risks and uncertainty in turn fuel the vicious cycle of renewed interest among US allies in a nuclear deterrent as a hedge against receding US primacy and reliability.
At the conclusion of a United Nations conference on 7 July 2017, 122 states parties of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty adopted a new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. All nine countries that possess the bomb (China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the UK and the US) boycotted the conference and rejected the treaty. They have done their very best since then to invalidate the concerns behind the drive to adopt it.
The 2018 US nuclear posture review will guide the Trump administration’s nuclear decision-making, modernisation, targeting and signalling. With an expansive vision of the role of nuclear weapons, its threefold effect is to enlarge the US nuclear arsenal, lower the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, and broaden the contingencies in which the threat of nuclear weapons can be wielded as a tool of diplomatic coercion.
The 2015 Iran nuclear deal established a robust dismantlement, transparency, inspections and consequences regime. Last year, President Donald Trump pulled the US out of the agreement and reimposed sanctions on Iran, despite its still being in compliance with its obligations. That put Washington in breach of the multilaterally negotiated and UN-endorsed Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Trump’s decision will have reconfirmed North Korea’s belief that the one thing standing between its security and a US attack is the bomb. It has also caused the recent surge in tensions in the Persian Gulf.
On 1 February, Trump decided to suspend US participation in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty—an arms control agreement with Russia that contributed to the end of the Cold War and underpinned European strategic stability for three decades. It lapsed on 2 August. Trump has also rebuffed Russian overtures to discuss a five-year extension of New START beyond 2021. His second summit with North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un in Hanoi in Februarycollapsed without agreement and Pyongyang now seems to be expanding its nuclear arsenal. Still, at least the US and North Korea are engaged in high-level and working-level discussions and the fear of an imminent war has faded.
The altered US nuclear posture will have cascading effects on the arsenals, doctrines and deployments of other nuclear-armed states. On 1 March 2018, Russian President Vladimir Putin boasted of a new array of invincible nuclear weapons that can penetrate any defences anywhere in the world. He noted the US had not heeded Russian warnings when it pulled outof the 1972 anti-ballistic missile treaty in 2002. ‘You didn’t listen to our country then. Listen to us now’, he said. Putin’s language was reminiscent of the Cold War.
After the US–Russian suspensions of the INF Treaty, Putin warned that Russia could place hypersonic nuclear weapons on submarines deployed near US waters to match the time in which US missiles based in Europe could strike Russia. He also warned of a radioactive tsunami that could be triggered in densely populated coastal areas by a new nuclear-powered underwater drone dubbed ‘Poseidon’.
The more that Putin and Trump revalidate the role of nuclear weapons in strengthening national security, the more they normalise the discourse of nuclear weapons use and embolden calls for nuclear weapon acquisition in other countries. In Australia, this debate has been restarted most recently by Hugh White.
Meanwhile, the official newspaper of the People’s Liberation Army has called for China to strengthen its nuclear deterrence and counterstrike capabilities to match the US’s and Russia’s developing nuclear strategies. China is upgrading its relatively small nuclear arsenal. It rejected Germany’s request to save the INF Treaty by agreeing to trilateralise it, emphasising that its warheads in the low hundreds cannot be compared with US and Russian arsenals in the several thousands.
India and Pakistan are enlarging, modernising and upgrading stockpiles, while investing in battlefield tactical nuclear weapons and systems to counter them. The INF Treaty was the first disarmament agreement of the nuclear age. In an unwelcome symmetry, on 26 February we witnessed the first airstrikes by one nuclear-armed state against another, and the two engaged in a deadly dogfight above the skies of Kashmir the next day. Another India–Pakistan war is a question of when, not if.
The US, described by former Canadian disarmament ambassador Paul Meyer as ‘the high priest of nuclear orthodoxy’, has left its allies looking rather foolish. Washington had led them in dismissing the nuclear weapon ban treaty as impracticable virtue-signalling, instead extolling the decades-long efforts at step-by-step measures to advance the cause of nuclear disarmament that had seen global stockpiles plummet by over two-thirds from their Cold War peak.
When unkind critics noted that the only steps that were visible were leading backwards, Washington responded by launching a new initiative on ‘creating the conditions for nuclear disarmament’. Lest some conditions be specified and met, however, Washington suddenly embraced the more nebulous and inherently subjective language of ‘creating an environment for nuclear disarmament’.
During the Cold War, Soviet citizens who kept to the straight path as the communist party veered sharply to the left or right were denounced as ‘deviationists’. For decades, US allies have been singing from the same hymn book, joining it in the insistence that the step-by-step, progressive approach was the only realistic path to nuclear disarmament. Instead of embracing the new orthodoxy from their fallible high priest, they should do a hard-nosed analysis of the merits of the changing risk–reward calculus of integrating more deeply with the nuclear alliance structure or joining the majority of countries in trying to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
Kevin Barry in Chernobyl: ‘Misha is an example of what happens when a country is on its knees’ Irish Examiner, August 05, 2019
In 2000 the Irish Examiner sent Kevin Barry, now longlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel Night Boat to Tangier, to Chernobyl. Here we reproduce what he reported
Misha photographed by Eugene Kolzov at the No 1 orphanage in Minsk.Misha, aged seven, is the victim of not one but many sicknesses. His physical disorders, as can be plainly seen, are many and various.
But Misha is the victim of another ailment too, a kind of compassion deficiency.
Chernobyl isn’t fashionable these days, it’s been around so long now. April 26, 1986 seems a long time in the way-distant past. After the initial blurt of paranoia and charitable outreach, the fickle gaze of public interest quickly flicked from the incident at Reactor No 4 to fresher horrors.
Misha, then, has been shuffled way back in the compassion pack. He has fallen behind the other ravaged children who sombrely people the planet’s trouble spots, in places like Mozambique and Ethiopia.
He’s competing with Rwanda and Chechnya. And it’s beginning to tell Misha’s illness is a direct consequence of the Chernobyl explosion.
The radioactive danger in Belarus is not so much in the air now as in the food chain. Professor Yuri Bandashevsky, a dissident scientist, told the Irish Examiner this week that the mutations caused by radiation in children like Misha have by now entered the gene pool and thus the effects of the ‘86 explosion can stretch to infinity.
After criticising the state’s alleged misspending of research money for Chernobyl, Professor Bandashevsky recently found himself banged up in jail for five months, bound at the feet.
Which isn’t the sort of thing that bodes well for the likes of Misha. Some aid continues to filter through. This week, a convoy run by the Chernobyl Children’s Project has been on a drive through Belarus, dispensing almost £2 million in food and medicines.
One of the institutions the orphanage supports is Novinki, a children’s asylum on the outskirts of Minsk. Such is its Dickensian squalor, its actual existence was long denied by the state. This is where you’ll find little Misha.
Project leader Adi Roche says she has known the child since he was a baby, but has been stunned at his deterioration since she last visited in December.
After finding him emaciated and dying this week, the project has placed a Dublin nurse and a local Chernobyl nurse on 24-hour care alert with Misha, an attempt to make whatever is left of his life as painless as possible
“We don’t know how long Misha will live, or if he will live, but we are morally obliged to do everything in our power to attempt saving his life,” said Ms Roche last night.
“‘He is not the only child in Belarus suffering as horrifically as this. he’s just one of many.” she added. “‘These children are the victims of 14 years of neglect by the international community.”’
Many children in Belarus consigned to mental asylums have no mentaI handicap. “All orphaned children with any kind of disability are put into mental asylums if they live beyond the age of four,” she said.
Meanwhile, staffed by1,000 workers, the Chernobyl plant continues operate a couple of kilometres inside the Ukraine border.
The authorities say it will close this year. The concrete sarcophagus built to contain contamination from the reactor has 200 holes and counting.
Orphans of the nuclear age
Kevin Barry, in Chernobyl, finds a land and its people scarred by a disaster from which they may never recover.
Chernobyl at this time of year is beautiful, the borderlands of the Ukraine and Belarus a pastoral and idyllic place. Vast swardes of rich woodland are full of babbling brooks and twittering songbirds, every way you turn, there’s a postcard vista to please even the most jaded eyes.
The locals, however, are edgy. The President of Belarus, Alaksandr Lukashenko — aka ‘Batska’ (‘The Father’) — has decreed that the farmlands here–abouts are now safe to plant and he’s threatening to fly overhead and make sure the workers are toiling.
If not, he says, there will be trouble. Big trouble.
The notion of Batska in an airplane is enough to prompt sleepless nights for those who remain in the Purple Zone, the area most contaminated by the accident in 1986 at Smelter No 4 of the nuclear plant that lies inside the Ukranian border.
In a tragedy of happenstance, because there was a stiff northerly gusting that day, Belarus took the brunt of the damage and because radioactivity is most lethal when it attacks developing human systems, children have borne most of the pain.
But for these children, the most serious ailment is not the thyroid cancer or the leukaemia or the heart trouble or the kidney failure or the various disorders of colon and spleen prompted by Chernobyl.
The greatest danger is the compassion-fatigue. 1986 seems a long time ago now and the incident at Smelter No 4 is no longer swaddled in the necessary event-glamour or crisis-chatter.
When the evening news is an atrocity exhibition, when daily there are hellish dispatches from Mozambique, Ethiopia and Chechnya, the Belarussians fall ever further back in the line.
The foreign correspondents have long since moved on elsewhere. The story of a child developing thyroid cancer over a period of years doesn’t conform neatly with the sound-byte culture.
By this stage, the Belarussians have had enough. A condition of mass denial exists in the country and a native of the village Solchechy in the Purple Zone says that up to around 1993, everybody fretted and freaked out but then they decided, well, to hell with it.
“The mess got to be too much,” she says.
We don’t think about it now. Life is life and we try to get on with it.
This is easier said than done in Belarus. The country’s economy is shot — agriculture was its mainstay and since Chernobyl, the income from farming has been negligible. Almost 30% of the country’s annual turnover goes to the clean-up operation.
Belarus remains the most Soviet of states. There are thickly-piled layers bureaucracy and this tangle of demented protocol regulations and petty restrictions is amorphic, constantly shape-shifting.
Sunken Soviet Sub leaking high levels of radiation, Norwegian researchers sayNorwegian researchers have discovered that a Soviet nuclear submarine that sank in the Barents Sea 30 years ago, killing 41 sailors, is leaking radiation at nearly 1 million times normal levels. Bellona, August 5, 2019 by Charles Digges
Norwegian researchers have discovered that a Soviet nuclear submarine that sank in the Barents Sea 30 years ago, killing 41 sailors, is leaking radiation at nearly 1 million times normal levels.
The submarine, called the Komsomolets, was at the time the most advanced in the Soviet Navy. When it went down on April 7,1989, it was carrying two plutonium warheads, which now lie at a depth of 1,680 meters with the rest of the sub’s wreckage, including its reactor. The wreck has caused concern about possible radioactive leakage ever since.
Now those worries have been confirmed. Using a remote-controlled vehicle to probe the wreck, researchers from the Norwegian Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority found extensive damage to the sub’s hull. Of particular disquiet, they say, are exceptionally high radiation levels in the area around one of the sub’s ventilation pipes.
The highest measurement researchers recorded stood at 800 becquerel per liter. Radiation levels in that body of water typically remain around 0.001 Bq per liter, the authority said.
“We found levels of radioactive cesium…that were close to 1 million times higher than the levels we find in [uncontaminated] seawater,” Hilde Elise Heldal, a researcher from Norway’s Institute of Marine Research who participated in the July 7 mission, told RFE/RL. In remarks to Reuters, she added that: “This is, of course, a higher level than we would usually measure out at sea, but the levels we have found now are not alarming.”
Heldal said team members “weren’t surprised” to discover elevated radiation levels, the BBC reported. Radioactive cesium is easily diluted in the depths of the Barents Sea, and few fish live in the area surrounding the wreck.
What we have found … has very little impact on Norwegian fish and seafood,” Heldal said, according to the Associated Press. “In general, cesium levels in the Norwegian Sea are very low, and as the wreck is so deep, the pollution from Komsomolets is quickly diluted.”
Norwegian scientists have been monitoring the wreck of the Komsomolets – which lies 180 kilometers southwest of Norway’s Bear Island and 350 kilometers northwest of the country’s mainland coast – since the 1990s……..
ven in its watery grave, the Komosomolets is the stuff of Cold War legend. Launched in May of 1983 from Severodvinsk on the Barents Sea, the sub could dive to deeper depths than any other vessel at the time. It was manned by a crew of 69 and could launch both nuclear and conventional weapons.
The Komsomolets had been patrolling the waters for 39 days when a fire broke out in one compartment and quickly spread through the submarine on April 7, 1989, according to the CIA report. Forty-two crew died either in the fire or while awaiting rescue, and the sub sank to the bottom of the sea.
The matter of the Komsomolets shook faith in an already ailing navy. Within two years of the accident, the Soviet Union would cease to be – leaving in its wake hundreds of derelict decommissioned nuclear submarines, and a host of other radioactive hazards dumped by the military.
The arguments against nuclear as an energy solution are overwhelming, Irish Examiner, 5 Aug 19, “……….Tony Lowes, director of Friends of the Irish Environment, accepts that the nuclear question can provoke impassioned responses. “It hits some fundamental terror in people,” he says.
But he says the arguments against nuclear as an energy solution are overwhelming.
“It’s not a renewable fuel for a start — it’s a fossil fuel because you have to mine for uranium — and any efforts made to bring in nuclear energy would be at the expense of actually solving our problems which we have to do through wind and solar.”
Off-shore wind farms are the real answer, Lowes says, both because of the enormous amount of energy available to be harnessed off Ireland’s coasts and because of the growing opposition among local communities to the proliferation of onshore turbines and solar farms.
He is critical of the delays in overhauling the planning and licencing system needed to support offshore. Currently, developers face a mountain of bureaucracy with a multitude of national and local agencies to work through, with sometimes overlapping or duplicated processes.
In late July, the Government finally approved the general scheme of the Marine Planning and Development Management Bill 2019 which promises to clarify and streamline the procedures but, as the official announcement itself pointed out, this replaces the Maritime Area and Foreshore Amendment Bill of 2013.
Six years on and we still have only a general scheme of a bill with a long way to go before legislation is enacted and processes change accordingly.
Meanwhile investors have a number of large-scale project proposals on hold awaiting legislative clarity.
“We’ve known for a long time that off-shore wind is essential. It’s a no-brainer. The blockages to it are just so reprehensible,” Lowes says.
“We don’t have a very clear picture of how the rules for offshore will work and we haven’t addressed it with anything like the urgency we need to which is why we’re talking about nuclear energy. But I think it would be a really fatal mistake to make nuclear part of the energy mix in the long-term.”……
Off-shore wind and solar at times produce a surplus of energy. Battery storage facilities — often looking like a cluster of large office cabinets — can be installed in open spaces to store excess power but already plans for some in this country are facing local opposition.
The excess can also be processed to produce hydrogen that could be used for heating and fuelling vehicles which would take the pressure off the electricity supply at times when the sun is down and winds are light.
The idea works at the experimental level but the challenge is to get it working on a large scale and cheaply enough to make it worthwhile. A breakthrough on that front is imminent, so the energy industry says, but the proof is awaited……
Oisin Coghlan, director of the Friends of the Earth Ireland, however, doesn’t believe a debate on nuclear is necessary or justifiable.
“I think it’s a massive distraction,” he says. “You’d have to change the law and even if Friends of the Earth changed our position and said, you know what, we think nuclear is the solution and we’re going to drop everything and campaign for it for the next 10 years, I don’t think it would make the slightest bit of difference……
Coghlan believes nuclear has as much to do with psychology as technology. “Nuclear appeals to engineers and it appeals to politicians who want big solutions and macho solutions,” he says. ……
“Lagging every attic and double-glazing every window would be far more efficient and far quicker and have none of the hassle but engineers and politicians have been very resistant to this kind of approach.
“They don’t like starting small — putting solar panels on every school and house — because that’s lots of little people doing little things.
But that’s what makes this a societal journey where we all change together. When every school has solar power, while that won’t be enough on its own, it will mean that maybe the parents are less likely to oppose the solar farm planned for down the road because they start to feel like they’re part of the solution.
“I think nuclear is a red herring that appeals to a certain mindset and I think that mindset is outdated. We need to look at decentralised, renewable electricity that many of us are involved in owning, that many of us are involved in supplying and all of us are involved in supporting.”……
For Tony Lowes, here is no argument — nuclear is not an answer. “We were ahead of the game in wind energy 10-15 years ago and we got stuck but we can still transform the energy picture if we get moving again,” he says.
“Bringing nuclear into the conversation is just going to slow us down even more and we don’t have any more time to lose.”
Reuters 3rd Aug 2019 French utility EDF may curb power generation at its 3,000 megawatt Chooz nuclear reactor in the north of France due to the low flow rate of the
Meuse river which it uses to cool the two reactors at the plant. “Due to
flow forecasts of Meuse river, production restrictions are likely to affect
EDF’s nuclear generating fleet on Chooz production units starting
Thursday August 8,” the company said. EDF’s use of water from rivers as
coolant is regulated by law to protect plant and animal life. It is obliged
to reduce output during hot weather when water temperatures rise, or when
river levels are low.
5 Unknown Nuclear Disasters: Chernobyl Is Far from the Only One, Chernobyl is not the world’s only nuclear disaster, there are plenty of others to keep you up at night., Interesting Engineering, By Marcia Wendorf, 2 Aug 19
The Kyshtym Disaster
In September 1957, Ozyorsk, Russia was a closed city, built around the Mayak plant which produced plutonium for both nuclear weapons and fuel.
After scrambling to build the Mayak plant between 1945 and 1948, all six of its reactors initially dumped high-level radioactive waste directly into Lake Kyzyltash. When it became contaminated, they moved on to dumping into Lake Karachay, which also became contaminated.
In 1968, the Soviet government disguised the EURT area by creating East Ural Nature Reserve, with access allowed to only authorized personnel. Documents describing the disaster were only declassified in 1989.
In 1953, workers built a storage facility for liquid nuclear waste, but that waste was being heated by residual decay heat from the nuclear reaction. The coolers around one of the tanks failed, and on September 29, 1957, that tank exploded with the force of between 70 to 100 tons of TNT.
While there were no immediate casualties, the explosion released an estimated 20 MCi (800 PBq) of radioactivity into the air. A plume containing 2 MCi (80 PBq) of radionuclides, primarily caesium-137 and strontium-90, moved toward the northeast and contaminated an area of more than 52,000 square kilometers (20,000 sq miles).
At least 270,000 people lived in that area, which is referred to as the East-Ural Radioactive Trace (EURT).
In an attempt to maintain secrecy, no evacuation was ordered, but a week later, on October 6, 1957, 10,000 people were removed from their homes.
Estimates of the death toll caused by the accident go from 200 to more than 8,000, depending on the study. A 2001 work stated that the accident caused 66 diagnosed cases of chronic radiation syndrome.
Amazingly, it wasn’t until 18 years later, in 1976, that the full scope of the disaster was disclosed by Zhores Medvedev in the publication the New Scientist.
In 1968, the Soviet government disguised the EURT area by creating East Ural Nature Reserve, with access allowed to only authorized personnel. Documents describing the disaster were only declassified in 1989.
Windscale: Britain’s Biggest Nuclear Disaster – Part 01
5 Unknown Nuclear Disasters: Chernobyl Is Far from the Only One, Chernobyl is not the world’s only nuclear disaster, there are plenty of others to keep you up at night., Interesting Engineering, By Marcia Wendorf, 2 Aug 19
The Windscale Fire
Less than two weeks after Kyshtym, a fire broke out in Unit 1 of the two reactors at the Windscale facility located in what is now known as Sellafield, Cumbria UK.
The two reactors were created because of Britain’s need for an atomic weapon following World War II. Determining that a uranium enrichment plant would cost ten times as much to produce the same number of atomic bombs as a nuclear reactor, the decision was made to build a nuclear reactor that would produce plutonium.
The cores of the reactors were comprised of a large block of graphite, with horizontal channels drilled through it for the fuel cartridges. Each cartridge consisted of a 12-inch-long (30 centimeters) uranium rod encased in aluminum.
The reactor was cooled by convection through a 400-foot (120 m) tall chimney. When Winston Churchill committed the UK to create a hydrogen bomb, the fuel loads at Windscale were modified to produce tritium, but this also meant that the core became hotter.
On the morning of October 10, 1957, the core began to uncontrollably heat, eventually reaching 400 degrees C. Cooling fans were brought in to increase the airflow, but just worsened the problem. It was then that operators realized that the core was on fire.
Workers tried dousing the core first in carbon dioxide, then in water, but both proved ineffective. What finally worked was cutting off air to the reactor building, which starved the fire.
The fire caused the release of radioactive radionuclides across the UK and Europe, including an estimated 740 terabecquerels (20,000 curies) of iodine-131, 22 TBq (594 curies) of caesium-137 and 12,000 TBq (324,000 curies) of xenon-133.
By comparison, the 1986 Chernobyl explosion released far more, and the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 in the U.S. released 25 times more xenon-135 than Windscale, but less iodine, caesium, and strontium. The atmospheric release of xenon-133 by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was similar to that released at Chernobyl, and thus, high above what the Windscale fire released.
There were no evacuations of the surrounding area, but it has been estimated that the incident caused 240 additional cancer cases. For a month after the accident, milk coming from 500 square kilometers (190 sq mi) of the nearby countryside was destroyed.
The reactor tank has remained sealed since the accident and still contains about 15 tons of uranium fuel. The reactor core is still slightly warm due to continuing nuclear reactions. It is not scheduled for final decommissioning until 2037. On the International Nuclear Event Scale, Windscale ranks at level 5………. https://interestingengineering.com/5-unknown-nuclear-disasters-chernobyl-is-far-from-the-only-one
5 Unknown Nuclear Disasters: Chernobyl Is Far from the Only One, Chernobyl is not the world’s only nuclear disaster, there are plenty of others to keep you up at night., Interesting Engineering, By Marcia Wendorf, 2 Aug 19
Soviet Submarine K-19
K-19 was one of what the Soviets called their Project 658-class submarines, while NATO called them Hotel-class. They were the first generation of nuclear submarines equipped with nuclear ballistic missiles.
Commissioned on April 30, 1961, K-19 was snake bit from the start. On its initial voyage, on July 4, 1961, it was conducting exercises off the coast of Greenland when suddenly, pressure in the reactor’s cooling system dropped to zero due to a leak.
The emergency SCRAM system immediately inserted the control rods, but due to decay heat, the reactor’s temperature rose to 800 degrees C (1,470 degrees F). The accident released steam containing fission products throughout the ship through the ventilation system.
The captain ordered the ship’s engineering crew to fabricate a new cooling system, but this required them to work within the radioactive area. The jury-rigged cooling water system prevented a complete meltdown of the reactor core.
American warships nearby had picked up K-19’s distress call and offered to help, but K-19’s captain, fearful of giving away Soviet military secrets, refused. Instead, K-19 sailed to meet up with a diesel-powered Soviet submarine. The accident had irradiated K-19’s entire crew, as well as the ship and some of her ballistic missiles.
Within a month, all eight members of the ship’s engineering crew died of radiation exposure. They are Boris Korchilov, Boris Ryzhikov, Yuriy Ordochkin, Evgeny Kashenkov, Semyon Penkov, Nicolai Savkin, Valery Charitonov, and Yuriy Povstyev.
Within the next two years, 15 other sailors died of radiation-related illnesses.
Towed into port, K-19 contaminated a 700 meter (2,300 feet) wide area, and the repair crews who worked on her. Eventually, the Soviet Navy dumped the damaged reactor into the Kara Sea.
Demise of US-Russian Nuclear Treaty Triggers Warnings, VOA News , By Charles Maynes, July 31, 2019 “……… “Gorbachev and Reagan had the goal of arms reduction and they did not allow themselves to be pushed off track,” Palazhchenko says.
“[It was] definitely a huge step forward. Two great nations, two nuclear superpowers have finally been able to stop the arms race in at least two categories of nuclear weapons.”
With the agreement, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. formally renounced the development and deployment of ground-launched missiles with a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometers.
Both sides were still armed with enough nuclear weapons to destroy one another — and the rest of the planet. But George Shultz says the INF’s elimination of short- and medium-range arsenals made the world infinitely safer in one critical regard — time……….
the short-range weapons also magnified the risks of what some called a potential “Euroshima.”
Where once the Cold War threat consisted of missiles lobbed across oceans, the new quick delivery missiles incentivized a first strike and immediate response. There was little time to verify whether an attack was real — or a false alarm.
Fear of the superpowers stumbling into nuclear Armageddon gripped the European public. Thousands marched in opposition to the U.S. missiles — a factor that increasingly influenced Washington’s own decision-making.
“We were negotiating not only with the Soviets but the European public,” recalls Shultz. “Who would want a nuclear missile on their soil? It makes you a target.”
Indeed, public opposition in Europe — and a desire to grab the moral high ground — drove President Reagan to embrace a concept called the “Zero Option.”
The idea? That when it came to negotiating over intermediate and short-range nukes, Reagan wouldn’t just push for the U.S. and U.S.S.R. to limit their arsenals. They’d demand both sides give up everything.
Russian proverb
Critical to selling the idea to skeptics were intensive inspections — with Reagan often citing an old Russian proverb: doverai no proverai. Trust but verify.
“The INF treaty contains in it the most clear verification provisions — onsite inspections!” Schultz says. “People said we could never get that but we did.”
Over the next three years, inspectors observed as both sides destroyed their arsenals — over 800 missiles by the U.S. and nearly double that from the Soviet side.
Viktor Litovkin, a military journalist who covered the events for the the Soviet daily Izvestia newspaper, remembers watching as Soviet engineers carried out the treaty’s provisions — destroying missile after missile with tears in the eyes. ………
INF 1987-2019 (RIP)
Today, the Trump administration argues it is the INF Treaty that has now outlived its use.
Last October, President Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser, John Bolton, traveled to Moscow to deliver the news: The U.S. would leave the INF agreement amid long-standing U.S. accusations that Russia was violating the treaty………..
Russian President Vladimir Putin soon followed suit — announcing that Russia, too, was leaving the pact.
Barring a last-minute reprieve, the INF treaty expires Aug. 2. Both sides have vowed to develop weapons once banned under the INF.
Here’s Why Russia Won’t Make an Honest Chernobyl Movie
New research shows a 2017 radiation cloud resulted from a mysterious accident in the Urals.https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-07-31/chernobyl-lessons-unlearned-russia-hides-another-nuclear-leak, By Leonid Bershidsky, July 31, 2019When the Home Box Office Inc series on the Chernobyl disaster became a surprise hit earlier this year, I wished Russia or one of the other directly affected countries, Ukraine or Belarus, had made a similarly honest attempt to commemorate the catastrophe. Now there’s proof that today’s Russia is incapable of it: It handles its nuclear accidents in the same way the Soviet Union tried to do in April, 1986.
On July 26, a large group of experts led by Olivier Masson from the Institute of Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety in Durance, France, and Georg Steinhauser of the Institute of Radioecology and Radiation Protection in Hanover, Germany, published a paper definitively attributing a radiation cloud that spread over Europe in 2017 to an undeclared accident in the Southern Urals region of Russia, likely at the Mayak nuclear facility near Chelyabinsk. Two years ago, Russia promised to investigate where the cloud could have come from, but a commission formed on Russia’s initiative failedto produce a clear conclusion.
At the same time, Mayak and Rosatom, the state-owned nuclear power company to which it belongs, have denied that any accident took place.
In late September 2017, several Russian regions and then a number of European countries detected high concentrations of radioactive ruthenium-106 in the atmosphere. As the contamination traveled, more countries noticed it and published reports. The first Russian denials, from the authorities of the Sverdlovsk and Chelyabinsk regions in the Urals, came a week later. Even after the Russian state weather service Roshydromet reported ruthenium-106 pollution in the South Urals, a Rosatom-led commission insisted the contamination wasn’t the result of an accident and suggested that it could have been caused by a defunct satellite burning up in the atmosphere.
The Masson-Steinhauser group ruled out the satellite theory: Such an incident would have caused higher concentrations of ruthenium at high altitudes, which was not the case. Instead, the researchers argued that only a nuclear reprocessing facility could have caused this particular type of contamination. A number of Western and Russian facilities had been responsible for ruthenium-106 releases in the past. By analyzing the weather patterns and ruthenium measurements, including those from Roshydromet, the international team placed the source close to the location of Mayak, the erstwhile scene of a major nuclear disaster – the 1957 “Kyshtym Accident” that forced the evacuation of 10,000 people in the area and caused long-term consequences for residents’ health.
The 2017 ruthenium release, luckily, hurt no one – the radioactive gas quickly became diluted and there was no significant fallout. This made it easier for the Russian authorities to deny that an accident had taken place. But then, just like in the Soviet Union, which did its best to keep the Chernobyl disaster under wraps until it could no longer deny it or minimize its impact, denying everything is more or less the officially adopted tactic in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, even when there are casualties. The government and its propaganda apparatus have, for example, put out a progression of elaborate but untrustworthy versions of the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airways Flight 17 — which was hit with a Russian missile from territory held by pro-Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine.
Even after the Masson-Steinhauser team published its findings, Leonid Bolshov, a physicist who was a key member of the Russian-led commission, claimed that the paper “ignored” measurements taken near Mayak, “where almost no ruthenium-106 was detected.” According to Bolshov, the commission’s findings weren’t affected by the new analysis.
The dispatch quoting Bolshov from the Russian propaganda agency RIA Novosti bore the headline “Physicists Connected Ruthenium-106 Leak with Experiments in Italy.” Indeed, the Masson-Steinhauser paper discusses a possible link between the accident and Mayak’s work on a cerium-144 source for an Italian neutrino experiment; Mayak canceled the order soon after the ruthenium release. But the headline carefully avoids mentioning Mayak or Russia.
The right thing for Mayak and Rosatom to do would be to share with international experts any data on that work, including, of course, whatever could have led to the ruthenium release. That, however, is as likely as an honest Chernobyl movie made in Putin’s Russia.
Last week, the unofficial trailer of a new Russian Chernobyl series was leaked on YouTube. Its maker, NTV, a television company with close ties to Putin’s inner circle, promptly pulled it down and threatened those who post it with legal consequences for copyright infringement. But those who sawthe video flooded it with dislikes and negative comments; indeed, it looks like a tear-jerking soap opera with no attempt at authenticity. One of the plot lines appears to involve U.S. Spies.
When the series runs, it’ll be another reminder to foreign, especially European, scientists that it’s up to them to watch the Russian nuclear industry for signs of serious accidents. Russia, like the Soviet Union before it, won’t be the first to tell the world about them.
By William Lambers, July 31, 2019Growing up in Massachusetts, during the Carter and Reagan presidencies, I was one of many little kids worried about nuclear war. In Maine, 10-year old Samantha Smith was also deeply concerned. Her mother encouraged her to write to the Soviet leader Yuri Andropov in 1982.Samantha did, in a hand written letter, telling Andropov: “I have been worrying about Russia and the United States getting into a nuclear war. Are you going to vote to have a war or not?…..God made the world for us to share and take care of. Not to fight over or have one group of people own it all. Please lets do what he wanted and have everybody be happy too.”
Samantha mailed her letter, probably not expecting a reply. But months later she got the surprise of her life.
Samantha’s letter was printed in the Soviet newspaper Pravda. Then she got a personal reply from Andropov, inviting her to the Soviet Union. Samantha was on TV too, talking about what she wanted most of all: peace.
Samantha toured the Soviet Union in July of 1983, meeting Russian kids, and became an ambassador for peace and nuclear disarmament. She believed people of rival nations could get along and did not want war. Samantha also visited Japan to reinforce its desire to eliminate the nuclear weapons, which they had suffered in the atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Samantha tragically lost her life in a plane crash in 1985. I remember hearing about the shocking news. Samantha’s spirit has never been forgotten.
This is so important because there is a complacency that has set in when it comes to nuclear weapons. Current leaders are dragging their feet in reducing the nuclear threat. There are still about 14,000 nuclear weapons in the world according to the Arms Control Association. The U.S. and Russia have about 90 per cent of the nukes.
Shouldn’t we all be worried about them today, too? There is still the risk of nuclear war, accidental launch or nuclear terrorism. How long do we want to live with this danger?
Billions of dollars are poured into nuclear weapons each year. Wouldn’t we rather spend this money on fighting hunger, poverty, disease and climate change?
The Move the Nuclear Weapons Money Campaign wants to end nuke spending and use it toward the benefit of humanity. The danger of nuclear weapons is shared by every person, every country. Everyone can take part in this goal of nuclear disarmament, much like Samantha encouraged.
I see examples of this idealism today when working with the CTBTO youth group, whose passion is to achieve the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. This treaty would end nuclear testing forever, helping pave the road for elimination of all nukes.
Samantha taught us your voice matters and you can make a difference in ridding the world of nuclear weapons and achieving peace for all.
William Lambers is the author of Nuclear Weapons, the Road to Peace, and Ending World Hunger.
Belgium broke law but can keep nuclear plants open, EU court rules, DW, 31 July 19
Belgium’s self-imposed deadline for giving up nuclear power is not far off. Environmentalists look forward to the end of the atomic era, but not everyone thinks the country is ready to change course. The European Union’s top court ruled on Monday that Belgium can continue to run two aging nuclear reactors, despite breaking EU law by not carrying out the necessary environmental audits.
By failing to carry out the environmental assessments before prolonging the life of Doel 1 and 2 nuclear reactors near the northern port city of Antwerp, Belgium infringed EU law, the court ruled.
However, the plants could stay open provisionally, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) said: “Where there is a genuine and serious threat of an interruption to electricity supply.”
More than half of Belgium’s electricity is generated by nuclear power with reactors in Doel and in Tihange, in the east, near the border with Germany. But a 2003 law says the country’s last reactor must shut down by December 1, 2025.
The grid operator Elia has warned of a “serious crisis” if the government doesn’t act to fill gaps in production. Despite recent technical hitches, some think Belgium has no choice but to keep its nuclear plants running.
Nuclear power always carries risks, including the potential for leakage and cyber attacks, according to Sara Van Dyck from BBL, a Belgian environmental NGO. She says Belgium’s two nuclear plants “were designed in other times with other security standards.” The reactors all started production between 1975 and 1985.
The problems have attracted protest. In 2017, tens of thousands of anti-nuclear demonstrators formed a human chain stretching from Tihange to the nearby Dutch city of Maastricht and the German city of Aachen. The Antwerp-based “elf Maart Beweging” (March 11 Movement),” named after Japan’s Fukushima nuclear disaster of March 11, 2011, says keeping the Doel plant running is tantamount to playing “Russian roulette with Antwerp.” Doel has more people living in the vicinity of a nuclear plant than anywhere else in Europe — 9 million within 75 kilometers (46 miles). …….
Brexit: nuclear medicine at risk from no-deal, The Conversation, ManMohan S Sodhi
Professor of Operations and Supply Chain Management, City, University of London August 1, 2019 With Boris Johnson as prime minister, a no-deal Brexit looks more likely. Indeed, Goldman Sachs recently raised the probability of a no-deal Brexit from 15% to 20%. Faced with an uncertain future, it is difficult to make adequate preparations for critical medicines – especially ones with a complex supply chain.
A no-deal Brexit will disrupt the supply chains that bring medicines to the UK and take goods from the UK to continental Europe. About 45m packs of medicine travel from the UK to Europe every month and the UK receives 37m packs in return. Even if a deal is reached, supply chains will continue to be disrupted long after the event.
Healthcare professionals are particularly concerned about the impact this could have on nuclear medicine. This branch of medicine mostly involves using radioactive dyes to perform diagnostic tests, which can be used to check if cancer has spread or to see how well the heart or kidneys are working. Therapies are also used to treat hyperthyroidism or thyroid cancer with radioactive iodine.
According to the British Nuclear Medicine Society, 60% of the radiopharmaceuticals the UK uses come from the EU and are used during the treatment of as many as 600,000 patients per year. These are transported mostly by road and rail across the English Channel.
Danger of delays
All medicines have expiration dates, but with radioactive pharmaceuticals there is the added problem of radioactive decay. This happens as the radioactive substance changes into one that is more stable. While this process releases the radiation needed for scans and therapies, it also means they don’t last forever.
A measure of how quickly a radioactive substance decays is its half-life. This is the time taken for the strength (or activity) of the measured radiation to decrease by half. For example, the radioactive iodine used in therapies, iodine-131, has a half-life of only eight days. After two days the strength is reduced by 15% and after eight days, by 50%.
The speed of decay means that unplanned delays of only a couple of days at a border could render the nuclear medicine unusable. The shelf life of nuclear medicines is therefore often low compared with other drugs. Extensive stockpiles simply cannot be kept……..
For UK taxpayers, the government depending on the pharamaceutical industry, either domestic or foreign, for supply of medicines is an expensive option. The NHS can use its vast purchasing power to source drugs much more cheaply than healthcare providers can in most other countries, including the US. Indeed, UK sale prices of the top 20 selling medicines are only one-third of the US equivalent.
For specialised areas such as nuclear medicine, the cost difference compared with the US is probably much more. Brexit, especially without a deal, places the NHS in a precarious position and will mean suppliers are in an advantageous position to close this price gap, driving up prices in the UK. Also, the US administration may offer a poisoned chalice in the form of a US free-trade agreement that includes the NHS, meaning higher prices like in the US.
Times 30th July 2019New nuclear power plants should be funded through general taxation instead of piling the costs on to consumers, a leading union has said. The GMB said
that the government’s proposed regulated asset base funding model for
further reactors was “acceptable”, but that the costs should be paid “from
a progressive general taxation system”. Last week The Times reported leaked
government analysis that up to 40 gigawatts of either nuclear power or
carbon capture and storage plants was needed by 2050 to meet “net zero”
emissions targets. That equates to 12 Hinkley Point plants. Under the
regulated asset base model, developers would receive a regulated return
while the plant was under construction, cutting their financing costs. It
would still be funded on bills, exposing consumers to cost overruns.
nuclear-news 