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America’s eternal nuclear waste problem

Nuclear waste: the problem that will never, ever go away   https://www.oswegocountynewsnow.com/columnists/nuclear-waste-the-problem-that-will-never-ever-go-away/article_39f2211c-7f58-11ea-9421-93cbd1c100fb.htmlBy SETH WALLACE editor@palltimes.com , 15 Apr 20, OSWEGO — The future of nuclear energy in the United States is murky, as is the debate over how the nation — including Oswego County’s three reactors — should deal with the radioactive waste of its electricity production.

After burning at 550 degrees Fahrenheit for several years, the fuel in the cores of nuclear reactors (uranium, in most cases) will experience diminishing returns of energy output. The 700-pound, 14.5’-tall uranium fuel assemblies must be replaced, but what to do with the street lamp-sized chunk of (very) heavy metal that will leak radiation for the next 100,000 years?

For nearly 40 years, federal officials have grappled with the question of nuclear waste disposal. There’s no easy answer.

All the uranium ever burned and extracted from reactors at Exelon’s Nine Mile Point and James A. FitzPatrick nuclear facilities remains at the sites, within sight of the Lake Ontario shoreline in Scriba. After several years in a cooling pool adjacent to the reactor itself, the depleted uranium is entombed in steel and concrete silos (known as dry cask storage) at a separate part of the plants’ campuses.

Dry cask storage is “designed to contain radiation, manage heat and prevent nuclear fission. They must resist earthquakes, projectiles, tornadoes, floods, temperature extremes and other scenarios,” according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which oversees all nuclear plants in the United States. While licensed on a 20-year basis and in most cases built to be effective for more than 100 years, dry cask installations are nevertheless not designed to last forever — unlike the radiation emanating from the uranium.

There’s a lot of science involved in using uranium to power our homes and businesses, but the solution to its waste problem is undeniably a political one.

The federal Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982 mandated the Department of Energy to find a solution to the problem of how to collect, transport and store American nuclear waste in a central location. Four decades later, the spent uranium from FitzPatrick and Nine Mile Point’s reactors still sits in Scriba, enjoying its lakeside view.

In 1987, Yucca Mountain, Nevada, was selected from a pool of eight potential sites to host the nation’s geological repository for high-level nuclear waste.

According to the NRC, the Yucca Mountain facility would look basically as follows:

1. Canisters of waste, sealed in special casks, are shipped to the site by truck or train.

2. Shipping casks are removed, and the inner tubes with the waste are placed in steel, multilayered storage containers.

3. An automated system sends storage containers underground to the tunnels.

4. Containers are stored along the tunnels, on their sides.

Unsurprisingly, this was not a universally popular decision with the people of Nye County, Nevada, where Yucca Mountain is located.

NRC documents describe the scenes at the first public hearings in Nye County about the project in 1999 and 2000, after more than a decade of geological studies and environmental impact research.

“The citizens expressed concern about why they felt they couldn’t trust the government and were afraid of being lied to,” read one section of a report prepared by the Center for Nuclear Waste Regulatory Analyses.

In addition to the scientific challenges of building a facility capable of withstanding one million years of natural disasters (an actual court-ordered requirement), the NRC found they had to deal with unexpected human hurdles

“At one of the meetings a local politician attended the meeting with his own television reporter and used the meeting as a venue for grandstanding,” the report said. “His comments off camera to the NRC staff were very complimentary, but on camera he took a much harsher stance.”

U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-NY, has indicated that while she believes a federal repository is the best solution to spent uranium storage, she would not demand the construction of one without the consent of its local communities.

“Senator Gillibrand believes we must find a permanent solution for spent fuel storage and the Department of Energy should work with the states and with Congress to find an acceptable site,” said Gillibrand spokesperson Miriam Cash. “There should be a federal repository for permanently storing civilian nuclear waste and communities in New York should not have to be required to store it on-site for decades.”

Funds for the Yucca Mountain licensing review process finally ran out in 2011 and no meaningful progress has been made since that point, according to federal nuclear officials.

Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu, a member of President Barack Obama’s administration, dubbed Yucca Mountain “off the table” in 2009, but clearly, the table still has room to accommodate its return.

Yucca Mountain sits in the middle of the Nevada desert roughly 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. Since the site’s selection in 1987 as the national spent fuel repository from a pool of eight other locations, the Department of Energy has run into roadblocks from local and environmental interests and, perhaps most importantly, opposition from Nevada Democrat Harry Reid. Reid represented Nevada in the U.S. Senate for 30 years beginning in 1987 and deftly wielded his influence, including as Senate majority leader, to stifle Yucca Mountain progress until his 2017 retirement. That was the same year President Donald Trump’s first executive budget contained funds to restart the research into a feasible transition from individual reactor site dry cask storage to a national repository system.

Executive budgets are not law, however, and while Trump’s public support for more than $100 million in funding symbolized yet another component in his industry-friendly administration’s larger platform, Congress has yet to approve any of the dollars.

“The political debate rages on,” Rod McCullum of the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.,  told The Palladium-Times in a recent interview. “The scientific and technical basis is as strong as ever, but the political will to move forward is as weak as ever.”

Any meaningful change in funding for the Yucca Mountain licensing review would would need to come from Congress, but in a legislative body where in the best of times progress is measured in subatomic increments, the current health crisis has brought all non-COVID-19 discussion to an indefinate halt.

In a statement on the topic of dry cask storage versus a federal repository, U.S. Rep. Anthony Brindisi, D-Utica, expressed support for a “bipartisan solution that identifies and funds a permanent storage solution” and removing the spent uranium from its sites. Brindisi is also a co-sponsor on H.R. 2314, the Nuclear Powers America Act, which provides investment tax credits for nuclear power plants.

The course reversal (and back again) by the federal government isn’t helping matters. As recently as 2018, legislation was proposed funding Yucca Mountain’s review process. For many, the term “nuclear waste” evokes images of leaking barrels of glowing, toxic goo; the boring truth is that spent fuel’s true danger lies more in the quantity than its lack-of-quality. As long as nuclear plants continue to operate in the United States, they will continue to produce waste uranium that must be carefully stored on site in dry cask facilities.

Yucca Mountain’s license application is for a term of 10,000 years. It is unclear if that is a long enough span of time for officials to come to a final decision.

Seth Wallace is the managing editor of The Palladium-Times and a nuclear energy policy enthusiast.

April 16, 2020 Posted by | Reference, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Microbes in nuclear fuel ponds slow down the decommissioning process

April 11, 2020 Posted by | decommission reactor, Reference, UK | Leave a comment

Finally, they might investigate America’s most fatal nuclear submarine disaster

CTY Pisces – Photos of a Japanese midget submarine that was sunk off Pearl Harbor on the day of the attack. There’s a hole at the base of the conning tower where an artillery shell penetrated the hull, sinking the sub and killing the crew. Photos courtesy of Terry Kerby, Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory. August 2003.

Fifty-Seven Years Later: America’s Worst Nuclear Submarine Disaster  https://www.lawfareblog.com/fifty-seven-years-later-americas-worst-nuclear-submarine-disaster, By Robert Eatinger,  Friday, April 10, 2020, Fifty-seven years ago today, America suffered its first, and in terms of fatalities its worst, loss of a nuclear-powered submarine. Yet, much of the information about that disaster and the Navy’s subsequent investigation has remained outside of public view. That may change this year.
On April 10, 1963, the nuclear-powered fast attack submarine USS Thresher (SSN 593), the first of a new class of submarine, was lost at sea when it sank while conducting a deep dive test some 220 miles east of Cape Cod. All 129 crew members and civilians on the Thresher perished with her. Later that day, the commander in chief of the United States Atlantic Fleet ordered a court of inquiry to investigate Thresher’s sinking. The court of inquiry issued its report in June 1963 but was unable to determine what caused Thresher to sink. The court of inquiry did opine, however, that a flooding casualty in the Thresher’s engine room was the most probable cause of Thresher’s sinking. The court of inquiry encouraged further study.
Over a half-century later, very little of the record of the court of inquiry has been publicly released even though the Navy undertook a declassification review of the records in April 1998 with a stated purpose to declassify and release information from these records to the public “whenever possible.” That review came to naught when in February 2012, after up to 75 percent of the records had been declassified, the Navy changed course, deciding it would not make a public release of the records. Instead, the Navy said the records were “available for public release through” a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.
Last year, retired Navy Captain James Bryant, who had commanded a Thresher-class submarine in the 1980s, learned that Arlington National Cemetery planned a September 2019 dedication ceremony for a memorial to the 129 lives lost with the Thresher. As a result, Bryant, who now investigates, lectures and writes about the loss of the Thresher and the accuracy of the investigating court of inquiry, submitted a FOIA request in April 2019 to the Navy for records about the loss of the Thresher, specifically including the record of the court of inquiry. He requested expedited processing, hoping the Navy might release the records before the Thresher memorial’s dedication ceremony. In July 2019, after exhausting his administrative appeals, Bryant filed a FOIA lawsuit.

In February this year, Judge Trevor N. McFadden of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the Navy to review 300 pages of documents a month starting April 30 and by the end of every month thereafter, and to begin rolling productions of documents starting on or before May 15 and every month thereafter.

Therefore, during this 57th anniversary year of the Thresher’s sinking, the American public, including the families of the 129 men who lost their lives, may finally begin to see the Navy’s documents on the loss of the Thresher and the record of the court of inquiry that investigated that loss. How much of the information in these documents the Navy will choose to release is a separate matter. The Navy may continue to keep as much information as possible from the public as allowed by law, may use its discretionary authority to release as much information as possible to the public, or may take an approach somewhere in between. What one can say with some degree of confidence, however, is that some amount of these records will be released in full or with redactions before the 58th anniversary of the loss of the USS Thresher.

April 11, 2020 Posted by | incidents, Legal, Reference, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

University boffins discuss the eternal problem of nuclear wastes

Amazing – still none of these scientists suggests stopping making this radioactive trash!

The problem of nuclear waste, The Naked Scientists, 07 April 2020    Interview with Claire Corkhill, University of Sheffield

Part of the show The Rise of Radioactivity

  Our issues with radioactivity though are obviously not behind us. A major headache today is how to handle and safely store nuclear waste. Here in the UK, we’ve got 650,000 cubic metres of the stuff – enough to fill Wembley Stadium – and it’ll be radioactive and dangerous for 100,000 years. ……..
Chris – So what do we do with all this stuff? We end up with these barrels of what looks like glass or concrete; that sounds fine. What do we do, just bury them?
Claire – Well, they’re currently packaged in specially-engineered containers and stored in over 20 different secure nuclear sites around the country, and most of it is at Sellafield in Cumbria. And these stores are designed to withstand extreme weather and earthquakes. But the problem that we have is that the waste is so radioactive, we can’t actually go anywhere near it. If you were to touch the outside of one of the glass waste containers, the radiation dose that you’d receive is 200,000 times more than a fatal dose of radiation. So whilst it’s okay to store the waste securely for the time being, it’s clear that we need a more permanent solution that requires less security. So remember, these wastes will be radioactive for over a hundred thousand years and they’ll be highly radioactive for several thousands of years, so we can’t just leave them in their warehouses and hope that future civilizations will know what to do with them.
 ……………………These nuclear waste materials will change over the hundred thousand years that they’ll be radioactive. And there are some different ways that this might occur. One would be corrosion, so the natural corrosion of the materials once they’re buried deep under the ground, which is their final disposal route; if they slowly corrode in groundwater they may release their radioactivity. But the other issue is, as you rightly noted, that the radioactivity inside the waste might actually cause the waste itself to break down. And you can think of this as a highly energetic particle, a bit like was described before with breaking DNA; instead of breaking DNA we’re actually breaking the intrinsic chemical bonds inside our nuclear waste material, and this will essentially cause the waste to disintegrate. And this is something that we have to understand.

Chris – So what you’re saying is, if we’ve got say something that looks like glass, because it’s spitting out all these energetic particles of radiation all the time, it’s slowly going to shatter the glass. It’s almost like shaking the glass very, very hard for hundreds of thousands of years; it’s eventually going to fall to pieces and it will no longer be any good at retaining and constraining the radioactive products inside.

Claire – Essentially yes…….

Adam – How do we design something in the future so that this stuff stays where it is, and isn’t archeologist bait, and they suddenly dig up a radioactive cube of glass?

Claire – At the present time we are thinking that we will not mark when nuclear waste is kept. It’s going to be buried deep below the ground and nobody will know it’s there. The worry about putting a marker on the surface is that it will automatically draw, humans particularly because we’re very inquisitive, to that site to find out what’s going on. …… the plan at the moment is to not mark the waste and hope that people forget about it; and that if in the future they decide to dig there, they have the technology to dig that deep – so we’re talking between 500 metres and a kilometre below the ground – and if they have that technology, then they will also have some technology to be able to detect the radiation and know that they shouldn’t go there. https://www.thenakedscientists.com/articles/interviews/problem-nuclear-waste

April 9, 2020 Posted by | Reference, wastes, Women | Leave a comment

Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant’s deadly hazard – highly radioactive sandbags

Nuclear sandbags too hot to handle,  https://www.theaustralian.com.au/world/the-times/nuclear-sandbags-too-hot-to-handle/news-story/87b811443cb8e2881f55e17108872880 By RICHARD LLOYD PARRY, THE TIMES. APRIL 1, 2020  

    Japanese engineers trying to dismantle the melted reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant face a new hazard — radioactive sandbags so deadly that standing next to them for a few minutes could be fatal.

The sandbags were intended to make life easier for the teams dealing with the aftermath of the nuclear disaster in 2011 when three reactors melted after a tsunami destroyed their cooling systems. Twenty-six tonnes of the bags were placed in basements beneath two of the reactors to ­absorb radioactivity from waste water.

They were stuffed with zeolite, minerals that can absorb caesium. Nine years after the disaster, the submerged sandbags have sucked up so much radiation that they now represent a deadly danger themselves.

Samples of zeolite removed from the bags contain caesium, producing huge amounts of radiation, while the sandbags are giving off up to four sieverts of radiation an hour. Fifteen minutes of exposure to this could cause haemorrhaging. After an hour, half of those exposed would eventually die as a result. The maximum lifetime recommended dose of radiation for humans is less than half a sievert.

Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco), which operates the plant, had intended to remove the contaminated water by the end of 2020. The complication caused by the sand means it will take three years longer, the latest delay to the decommissioning.

Tepco managers have admitted that the technology needed to finish the job does not exist and they do not have a full idea of how it will be achieved. Their stated goal of decommissioning by 2051 may be impossible, they said.

One of the biggest problems is the 170 tonnes of irradiated water coming out of the plant every day, much of it natural ground water that flows through the earth ­towards the sea, picking up radiation on the way. Tepco pumps it out and stores it in huge storage tanks, filtered of some, but not all, of its contaminants — 1.17 million tonnes so far. In two years, the storage space will run out.

The government wants to pour the water away, insisting that the diluting effect of the ­Pacific will render the radiation harmless, but it is opposed by North and South Korea and the local fishing industry, whose reputation has been ruined by the disaster.

April 2, 2020 Posted by | Fukushima continuing, radiation, Reference | Leave a comment

Plutonium contamination at Rocky Flats

How Colorado’s nuclear past is affecting its future, Colorado Springs INDY, GONE FISSION, by Heidi Beedle  25 Mar 20, IT WAS FEB. 25 AND BROOMFIELD City Council was done. It unanimously voted last month to withdraw from the Jefferson Parkway Public Highway Authority (JPPHA), a proposed north-south toll road that would ostensibly help mitigate traffic congestion in the Northwest Metro Denver area. The route would have taken the road through the eastern edge of the Rocky Flats Wildlife Refuge, just south of the Boulder County line, bordering Arvada and Broomfield. The council vote was influenced by preliminary soil samples taken by the JPPHA in July 2019, specifically one sample that showed plutonium levels more than five times higher than the acceptable standard (the rest of the samples taken at that time were within acceptable standards). Before its current existence as a wildlife refuge, Rocky Flats was the site of a nuclear weapons plant, which has caused concern about plutonium contamination in the area. Forty-eight subsequent samples taken by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the refuge, showed levels well below cleanup standards of 50 picocuries per gram.

The city council vote is the latest installment in the ongoing conflict between concerned residents and public officials, and Rocky Flats and Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE). For decades, residents and at least two directors of Jefferson County Public Health, have claimed that plutonium released from the plant is responsible for the high rate of cancers in the area. These claims have been consistently disputed by CDPHE and the Department of Energy (DOE). ……..

Johnson was concerned about the instances of cancers in Jefferson County and questioned the official measurements of plutonium in the soils around Rocky Flats, finding in his own testing that plutonium levels in the soil were 44 times higher than reported by the Department of Public Health. Johnson grew increasingly concerned about an increase in cancer deaths in Jefferson County, and in a paper published in 1981, noted that a rise in certain kinds of cancers Johnson was seeing in Jefferson County, such as leukemia, “supports the hypothesis that exposure of general populations to small concentrations of plutonium and other radionuclides may have an effect on cancer incidence.” Johnson noted that “plutonium concentrations in the air at the Rocky Flats plant are consistently the highest (1970-1977) in the US DOE monitoring network,” based on his studies of the DOE’s own data. He also asserted that the DOE’s measurements were likely an underestimation.

Almost 40 years later, and the current head of the Jefferson County Public Health Department, Dr. Mark Johnson (no relation) has come to the same conclusion. In 2018 he spoke outagainst opening the wildlife refuge to the public, and he thinks the recent discovery of plutonium near the proposed parkway site should give people reason to reconsider. “

“There are clear studies that have shown there is an increased risk or rate of plutonium in the dirt there,” agrees Mark Johnson. “I have concerns already about the digging around with the subdivisions and the commercial enterprises that have gone into that area that were basically kicking up a lot of stuff — and we don’t know what is there.”

Carl Johnson was fired in 1981 for his persistent, outspoken criticism of the plant, but won a subsequent whistleblower lawsuit. Partly due to Johnson’s criticism, the FBI and the EPA began looking into operations at the Rocky Flats Plant starting in 1987. The investigation was aided by Jim Stone, an employee at the plant who also became a whistleblower over what he saw as grave safety violations……..


THOUGH EXHAUSTIVE DOCUMENTATION of waste sites and deposits exists, questions remain as to the effectiveness of the now-completed cleanup. Jon Lipsky, a former FBI agent who led the raid on Rocky Flats in 1989, criticized the decision to open the refuge to the public in 2016, and has claimed there is still work to be done. Originally, the DOE estimated it would take 65 years and $37 billion to clean up the site. It was completed in 2005 for $7 billion.

During the process, there were still surprises to be found. ……..

The questions of the lasting effects from the operations at Rocky Flats may never be answered to the satisfaction of residents like Hansen, who are dealing with serious health issues. Jeff Gipe, the artist behind the Cold War Horse memorial that was erected in 2015, is currently working on a documentary about the plant, Half-Life of Memory, which may draw more attention to the issue.

President Donald Trump, who has a good shot at re-election, has reduced the effectiveness of agencies like the EPA while also advocating for an increase in nuclear arms development.

In 2019, the federal government proposed a new plutonium pit production facility near Aiken, South Carolina. But that is presumably not our problem.  https://www.csindy.com/coloradosprings/how-colorados-nuclear-past-is-affecting-its-future/Content?oid=21526239

March 26, 2020 Posted by | - plutonium, environment, Reference, USA | Leave a comment

A new low-cost solar technology for environmental cooling 

A new low-cost solar technology for environmental cooling   https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-03/pdt-anl032320.php   POLITECNICO DI TORINO  Space cooling and heating is a common need in most inhabited areas. In Europe, the energy consumed for air conditioning is rising, and the situation could get worse in the near future due to the temperature increase in different regions worldwide. The increasing cooling need in buildings especially during the summer season is satisfied by the popular air conditioners, which often make use of refrigerants with high environmental impact and also lead to high electricity consumption. So, how can we reduce the energy demand for building cooling?

A new study comes from a research group based at the Politecnico di Torino (SMaLL) and the National Institute of Metrological Research (INRiM), who has proposed a device capable of generating a cooling load without the use of electricity: the research has been published in Science Advances*. Like more traditional cooling devices, this new technology also exploits the evaporation of a liquid. However, the key idea proposed by the Turin researchers is to use simple water and common salt instead of chemicals that are potentially harmful for the environment. The environmental impact of the new device is also reduced because it is based on passive phenomena, i.e. spontaneous processes such as capillarity or evaporation, instead of on pumps and compressors that require energy and maintenance.

“Cooling by water evaporation has always been known. As an example, Nature makes use of sweat evaporation from the skin to cool down our body. However, this strategy is effective as long as air is not saturated with water vapour. Our idea was to come up with a low-cost technology capable to maximize the cooling effect regardless of the external water vapour conditions. Instead of being exposed to air, pure water is in contact with an impermeable membrane that keeps separated from a highly concentrated salty solution. The membrane can be imagined as a porous sieve with pore size in the order of one millionth of a meter. Owing to its water-repellent properties, our membrane liquid water does not pass through the membrane, whereas its vapour does. In this way, the fresh and salt water do not mix, while a constant water vapour flux occurs from one end of the membrane to the other. As a result, pure water gets cooled, with this effect being further amplified thanks to the presence of different evaporation stages. Clearly, the salty water concentration will constantly decrease and the cooling effect will diminish over time; however, the difference in salinity between the two solutions can be continuously – and sustainably – restored using solar energy, as also demonstrated in another recent study from our group**”, explains Matteo Alberghini, PhD student of the Energy Department of the Politecnico di Torino and first author of the research.

The interesting feature of the suggested device consists in its modular design made of cooling units, a few centimetres thick each, that can be stacked in series to increase the cooling effect in series, as happens with common batteries. In this way it is possible to finely tune the cooling power according to individual needs, possibly reaching cooling capacity comparable to those typically necessary for domestic use. Furthermore, water and salt do not need pumps or other auxiliaries to be transported within the device. On the contrary, it “moves” spontaneously thanks to capillary effects of some components which, like in kitchen paper, are capable of absorbing and transporting water also against gravity.

“Other technologies for passive cooling are also being tested in various labs and research centres worldwide, such as those based on infrared heat dissipation into the outer space – also known as radiative passive cooling. Those approaches, although promising and suitable for some applications, also present major limitations: the principle on which they are based may be ineffective in tropical climates and in general on very humid days, when, however, the need for conditioning would still be high; moreover, there is a theoretical limit for the maximum cooling power. Our passive prototype, based instead on evaporative cooling between two aqueous solutions with different salinities, could overcome this limit, creating a useful effect independent of external humidity. Moreover, we could obtain an even higher cooling capacity in the future by increasing the concentration of the saline solution or by resorting to a more sophisticated modular design of the device” commented the researchers.

Also due to the simplicity of the device assembly and the required materials, a rather low production cost can be envisioned, in the order of a few euros for each cooling stage. As such, the device could be ideal for installations in rural areas, where the possible lack of well-trained technicians can make operation and maintenance of traditional cooling systems difficult. Interesting applications can also be envisioned in regions with large availability in water with high saline concentration, such as coastal regions in the vicinity of large desalination plants or nearby salt marshes and salt mines.

As of now, the technology is not yet ready for an immediate commercial exploitation, and further developments (also subject to future funding or industrial partnerships) are necessary. In perspective, this technology could be used in combination with existing and more traditional cooling systems for effectively implementing energy saving strategies.

[*] Matteo Alberghini, Matteo Morciano, Matteo Fasano, Fabio Bertiglia, Vito Fernicola, Pietro Asinari, Eliodoro Chiavazzo. Multistage and passive cooling process driven by salinity difference, SCIENCE ADVANCES (2020), URL: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/11/eaax5015

[**] Eliodoro Chiavazzo, Matteo Morciano, Francesca Viglino, Matteo Fasano, Pietro Asinari, Passive solar high-yield seawater desalination by modular and low-cost distillation, NATURE SUSTAINABILITY (2018), URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0186-x

March 24, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change, ENERGY, Reference | 1 Comment

Meet the Climate Science Deniers Who Downplayed COVID-19 Risks

March 23, 2020 Posted by | climate change, Reference, secrets,lies and civil liberties, spinbuster, USA | Leave a comment

Ozone-depleting chemicals appearing again in the atmosphere

March 21, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, climate change, Reference | Leave a comment

Nuclear Power Plants: Tritium is a lot more hazardous than they say

tests for statistical significance have been misused in epidemiological studies on cancers near nuclear facilities. These in the past have often concluded that such effects do not occur or they downplayed any effects which did occur. In fact, copious evidence exists throughout the world – over 60 studies – of raised cancer levels near NPPs.

Most (>75%) of these studies found cancer increases but because they were small, their findings were often dismissed as not statistically significant. In other words, they were chucked in the bin marked “not significant” without further consideration.

Just as people were misled about tobacco smoking in previous decades, perhaps we are being misled about raised cancers near NPPs nowadays.

The Hazards of Tritium, Dr Ian Fairlie, March 13, 2020

Summary

Nuclear facilities emit very large amounts of tritium, 3H, the radioactive isotope of hydrogen.  Much evidence from cell/animal studies and radiation biology theory indicates that tritium is more hazardous than gamma rays and most X-rays. However the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) continues to underestimate tritium’s hazard by recommending  a radiation weighting factor (wR) of unity for tritium’s beta particle emissions.  Tritium’s exceptionally high molecular exchange rate with hydrogen atoms on adjacent molecules makes it extremely mobile in the environment. This plus the fact that the most common form of tritium is water, ie radioactive water, means that, when tritium is emitted from nuclear facilities, it rapidly contaminates all biota in adjacent areas. Tritium binds with organic matter to form organically bound tritium (OBT) with long residence times in tissues and organs making it more radiotoxic than tritiated water (HTO). Epidemiology studies indicate increases in cancers and congenital malformations near nuclear facilities. It is recommended that nuclear operators and scientists should be properly informed about tritium’s hazards; that tritium’s safety factors should be strengthened; and that a hazard scheme for common radionuclides be established. Continue reading →

March 19, 2020 Posted by | radiation, Reference, secrets,lies and civil liberties, spinbuster | Leave a comment

Dr Ian Fairlea on Epidemiological Evidence of Cancer Risks

The Hazards of Tritium,https://www.ianfairlie.org/news/the-hazards-of-tritium/ , Dr Ian Fairlie, March 13, 2020   “……….Epidemiological Evidence of Risks Because of methodological limitations, epidemiology studies are a blunt tool for discovering whether adverse effects result from radiation exposures. These limitations include:

  • under-ascertainment, …
  • strict data requirements….
  • confounding factors: the true causes of morbidity or mortality can be uncertain due to confounding factors such as socio-economic status and competing causes of death.
  • bias: ……
  • poor signal to noise…..
  • uncertain doses:……
  • wide confidence intervals……
Many epidemiology studies are ecologic studies, that is, quick inexpensive studies which look at health statistics in tables and notate individual data. Their findings are usually regarded as indicative, but not conclusive. If their findings suggest an adverse effect then these should be investigated further by more detailed cohort or case-control studies. The latter match “cases” (i.e. those with an adverse health effect) with randomly-selected similar individuals without an adverse effect, in order to minimise under-ascertainment. However few of these are actually carried out because of their expense and long time-spans. Sometimes they are not carried out for political reasons because findings of increased cancers are not welcome.
A disconcerting finding is that a substantial number of epi studies near NPPs conclude there are no findings of ill health even though positive increases were in fact observed. That is, the researchers were unable to accept the evidence of their own work. It is difficult to comment on this cognitive dissonance (few studies seem to exist on this phenomenon) but it is apparently often due to unacknowledged biases or to group-think re the impossibility for ill-health effects to exist near nuclear facilities. In their conclusions, such authors have discounted their findings using a variety of reasons ………
However there is a serious problem here. If similarly increased health effects had been observed near, say, a lead smelting factory or an asbestos mine, would they be dismissed by referring to these rationales? I rather doubt it. In other words, what is occurring here is that hidden biases in favour of nuclear power are in play. In my view, such conflicts of bias should be declared at the outset just as conflicts of interest are nowadays.

The Abuse of Statistical Significance Tests

Many epi studies of cancer near NPPs have found increased risks but dismissed them as not “statistically significant”. This wording often misleads lay readers into thinking that a reported increase is unimportant or irrelevant. But, in statistics, the adjective “significant” is a specialist word used to convey a narrow meaning, ie that the likelihood of an observation being a fluke is less than 5% (assuming a p = 5% test were used). It does not mean important or relevant.
Also this phrase is usually employed without explaining that the chosen significance level is quite arbitrary. There is no scientific justification for using a 5% level or any other test level: it is merely a matter of convenience. In other words, it is quite possible for results which are “not significant” when a 5% test is applied, could become “significant” when a 10% or other test level were used.
The existence of this practice has historical parallels. In the 1950s, dozens of health studies financed by tobacco companies acted to sow seeds of doubt about the health effects of cigarette smoking for many years. Continue reading →

March 19, 2020 Posted by | radiation, Reference, secrets,lies and civil liberties, spinbuster | Leave a comment

“Peaceful” and military nuclear reactors always inextricably linked

Anne McMenamin Nuclear Fuel Cycle Watch Australia, 19 Mar 20,   . I’m referring to the structural links between the commercial and military uses of nuclear reactors, and, to some extent, the way THEY see it – which doesn’t always line up with the technical realities. History shows that the 2 industries have been inextricably linked from the beginning.

“Great efforts have been and still are made to disguise the close connection between nuclear energy for war and for power stations. Two reasons are suggested for this: political convenience in avoiding additional informed protests against nuclear weapon production and industrial convenience in carrying on without public protest what has become a very profitable industry.”
Sir Kelvin Spencer CBE FCGI LLD (HON)
First issue of Medicine and War, in 1985

Similarly, a document from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in August, 1981, states:
“There is no technical demarcation between the military and civilian reactor and there never was one. What has persisted over the decades is just the misconception that such a linkage does not exist.”
“Some Political Issues Related to Future Special Nuclear Fuels Production,”
LA- 8969-MS, UC-16

In 2013, historian Dr David Palmer said,
“The issue is processing uranium for nuclear power that then can be used for defence. You have to understand this in terms of Adelaide; it’s a military, industrial and intelligence complex.”
Palmer was commenting on the notable push for nuclear energy and nuclear submarines coming from numerous academics and business people in Adelaide. He considered the real motive behind the nuclear push is security in energy supply for the military, and hence the need to solve the problem of waste disposal, which is currently discouraging investment in nuclear power. Major military/weapons corporations such as Raytheon, Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root, Lockheed Martin, Babcock and General Atomics are now a noticeable presence in the SA economy.
Links can be clearly seen, e.g. Heathgate, which owns the Beverley mine, is a wholly owned subsidiary of General Atomics, one of the world’s largest weapons manufacturer/servicer.    https://www.facebook.com/groups/1021186047913052/

March 19, 2020 Posted by | 2 WORLD, Reference, spinbuster, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Nuclear-powered submarines – fraught with legal and political problems

 

March 17, 2020 Posted by | Legal, politics international, Reference, USA, weapons and war | 2 Comments

The clean-up of the Fukushima nuclear mess is not going to schedule – continual decommissioning delays

March 17, 2020 Posted by | decommission reactor, Fukushima continuing, Reference | 1 Comment

Canisters for high level nuclear wastes likely to corrode faster than expected

Corrosion poses risk in nuclear waste storage https://frontline.thehindu.com/science-and-technology/article30913130.ece    March 13, 2020  The materials the United States and other countries plan to use to store high-level nuclear waste are likely to degrade faster than previously thought because of the way those materials interact, new research from Ohio State University shows.

The findings, published in a recent issue of “Nature Materials”, show that corrosion of nuclear waste storage materials accelerates because of changes in the chemistry of the nuclear waste solution and the way the materials interact with one another. “This indicates that the current models may not be sufficient to keep this waste safely stored,” Xiaolei Guo, lead author of the study was quoted in the news release issued by the university.

The team’s research focussed on storage materials for high-level nuclear waste that is highly radioactive. While some types of the waste have half-lives of about 30 years, others like plutonium have a half-life that can be tens of thousands of years.

With no long-term viable nuclear waste disposal mechanism yet in operation, in most sites nuclear waste is stored near the plants where it is produced. While countries around the world have debated the best way to deal with nuclear waste, only Finland has started construction of a long-term repository for high-level nuclear waste.

In general, proposals involve mixing nuclear waste with other materials to form glass or ceramics and then encasing those pieces of glass or ceramics, now radioactive, inside metallic canisters. The canisters are buried deep underground in a repository to isolate it.

Researchers found that when exposed to an aqueous environment, glass and ceramics interact with stainless steel to accelerate corrosion, especially of the glass and ceramic materials holding nuclear waste. The study measured the difference between accelerated corrosion and natural corrosion of the storage materials. “In the real-life scenario, the glass or ceramic waste forms would be in close contact with stainless steel canisters. Under specific conditions, the corrosion of stainless steel will go crazy,” he said. “It creates a super-aggressive environment that can corrode surrounding materials.”

To analyse corrosion, the research team pressed glass or ceramic “waste forms” (the shapes into which nuclear waste is encapsulated) against stainless steel and immersed them in solutions for up to 30 days, under conditions that simulate those under Yucca Mountain, the proposed nuclear waste repository in the U.S.

Those experiments showed that when glass and stainless steel were pressed against one another, stainless steel corrosion was “severe” and “localised”. The researchers also noted cracks and enhanced corrosion on the parts of the glass that had been in contact with stainless steel.

Part of the problem lies in the Periodic Table. Stainless steel is made primarily of iron mixed with other elements, including nickel and chromium. Iron has a chemical affinity for silicon, which is a key element of glass.

The experiments also showed that when ceramics, another potential holder for nuclear waste, were pressed against stainless steel under conditions that mimicked those beneath Yucca Mountain, the ceramics and stainless steel corroded in a “severe localised” way.

March 16, 2020 Posted by | Reference, safety, USA | Leave a comment

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