March 16, 2022

Ukrainian researchers pressure journals to boycott Russian authors

A Nature news item:

Ukrainian researchers pressure journals to boycott Russian authors Holly Else, Nature News, Mar 14, 2022.

Subtitle:

It's probably open sourced, but an excerpt:



I'm not sure how to think about this. I frequently find myself reading papers translated from Russian; Russian science can be and often is very good.

As for diplomacy, I have scanned an account of the first meeting of international nuclear scientists exchanging talks on their approaches to fast nuclear reactors. There is in it, some science - I scanned it because of my personal interest in an American presentation, but I was definitely intrigued by the Russian papers. The Russians built the most successful sodium cooled fast reactor ever built, and they were pioneers in LBE (lead-bismuth eutectic) coolants.

To my mind, it may go a little too far to ban knowledge, but of course that's my opinion.

One can also discern something about an enemy by what they do and do not write. I recall reading a joke somewhere that the world's nuclear weapons community all understood how their putative opponents made nuclear weapons by seeing that everybody published the phase diagrams of every alloy of plutonium except that of gallium. (Gallium stabilizes the ? phase of plutonium, a necessary practice to manufacture an implosion type nuclear weapon - it startles me that American scientists and their immigrant friends in the early 1940's were able to discover that with an element for which macroscopic samples existed for only a short time.)

This is not to say that scientists are all good people. Years back, while wandering around the stacks at Princeton's Firestone Library, I came across a book written, German, by Johannes Stark, who won the Nobel Prize for discovering what today is still known as "The Stark Effect," that was called "Nationalsozialismus und Wissenschaft," Nazism and Science.

I muddled through sections of it with my poor understanding of German; it was about so called "German Physics" as opposed to "Jewish Physics" that of Einstein among others, and I recall translating a part where Stark mocked the notion that "Science is international." He called for "German Physics," a physics that denied reality, to be the only physics that Germans should use.

Stark was an enthusiastic Nazi; the worst sort. He was sentenced to prison after the war.

We have not however, stopped recognizing that the Stark Effect is very real; it's good, not just good but essential, science.

Of course, we all hate what Russia has done and is doing, but the challenges we face as a planet - especially in the case of climate change - suggest that we need to consider whether our expressions of contempt for their government's policies of extreme violence should necessarily go this far. I'm not sure I know the ethical answer, but it's something about which we need to wrestle.

March 16, 2022

Is the Plastic Pandemic a Greater Threat to Humankind than COVID-19?

This is a question asked by the authors of this paper I came across in my general reading today: Is the Plastic Pandemic a Greater Threat to Humankind than COVID-19? Abhimanyu Raj Shekhar, Arvind Kumar, Ravuri Syamsai, Xingke Cai, and Vilas G. Pol ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering 2022 10 (10), 3150-3154

Some text from the paper:

Well someone had to ask this question. Personally, I have been disturbed when walking around and coming across discarded face masks among the plastic wrappers, bottles, shredding bags, etc.

A fun graphic from the paper:



The caption:



"Near Zero" plastic is right up there with "Net Zero."

We love to chant:

We are very fond of zeros these days, and we chant about them all day long as we go about our daily business, unchanged, day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year, decade to decade.

These first three years of this decade have been remarkable, a plague generating a plastic plague, a self declared "green nation" dependent on gas now switching to coal after funding an unprovoked war of conquest by going "green."

Sigh...

An amusing thing about the graphic is that it recommends "education," as a solution. I spent much of my life thinking that, that "education" would be the answer.

The facts about the utility of "education" are in:

You can lead a crowd to school, but you can't make them read, and you can make them to pretend to read, but you can't make them think.

Chanting works better.

Chant after me: "Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero. Zero..."

Do it long enough and you'll get there.

March 15, 2022

All Hail the Queen of Carbon.

A book review in the current issue of Science: All hail the Queen of Carbon Vijaysree Venkatraman, Carbon Queen: The Remarkable Life of Nanoscience Pioneer Mildred Dresselhaus Maia Weinstock MIT Press, 2022. 320 pp. SCIENCE • 10 Mar 2022 Vol 375, Issue 6585 p. 1095

Excerpts:

March 14, 2022

It will be interesting to see if Finland burns much (or any) coal and gas in the coming year.

Here from Electricity Map is a snapshot of Finnish electricity production as of this moment:



This was recorded at 1:43 AM, Helsinki time, 3/14/22.

Currently the nation is producing 943 MW of electricity by burning the dangerous fossil fuel coal and dumping the waste directly into the planetary atmosphere. This is around 33% of capacity utilization.

Nevertheless, Finland, has decided to do the opposite of Germany, which is to phase out coal by using nuclear power. The announced date for the phase out is 7 years from now, 2022. Germany has decided, by contrast, to phase out nuclear power and thus as a defacto matter, rely on coal. (Germany's current carbon intensity, 337 g CO2/kwh is about double that of Finland, 163 g CO2/kwh, and more than triple that of France, (95 g CO2/kwh) as of this writing. (8:02 PM EDT, US 3/13/22)

Next week after very long delays, connected almost certainly with FOAKE (First of a Kind Engineering) delays, the Olkiluto EPR nuclear reactor will connect to the grid. This process took 16 years to complete, which is unacceptable, but hopefully a number of lessons have been learned that will not be repeated:

Olkiluoto 3 grid connection expected within days

Some text:

At full power the reactor is expected to produce 1600 MWe. This is more than half of the entire coal generation of the country, 2.80 GW.

I suppose whether the Finns burn coal will be a function of whether the wind blows, as is the case in Germany, but unlike Germany, they are moving in the right direction.

March 13, 2022

Some comments on the war situation with Chernobyl as well as the operable nuclear plants in Ukraine.

Recently in another thread in which I'd commented, someone announced that I had been "summoned" to another:

.

My name was mentioned thus in the thread to which I was summoned:



It's nice to be recognized, so "thanks."

To be clear from the outset, in case anyone reading this doesn't know, I am a strong proponent of nuclear energy and regard it as the only acceptable form of industrial energy, and the only form of energy that has the potential to address climate change, that is to have a feasible chance of addressing it. I contend, and will not be dissuaded from thinking so, that if the world is to be saved - and it may not be - nuclear engineers will save it.

This position leaves me as something of an outlier, albeit to a somewhat smaller extent than in previous years, on the political left, to which I proudly belong.

Nothing about the nuclear risks now being observed in the savage criminal invasion of Ukraine inspires me to change my mind with respect to the critical importance of nuclear energy to humanity and the planet.

This said, I'm sure anti-nukes around the world - as I will demonstrate below - are engaged in the orgy of nuclear terror that they promote incessantly and insidiously at the expense of all future generations, this in an idiotic festival of what, given their limited knowledge and overweening ignorance, they take to be Schadenfreude. This appalling attitude of selective attention I will dub "The Fukushima Syndrome."

As for me, I am very proud of the fact that my son is entering a Ph.D. program in nuclear engineering, about which I commented thus: Informal question asked of the incoming nuclear engineering Ph.D. students. This I take as a sign that the rising generation will be a great generation, as they must be, as my generation is a disastrous failure.

Enough about me, let's turn to the tragic, unnecessary, criminally imperialistic war in Ukraine and concerns about the nuclear infrastructure therein, with some note of comments here, and its relationship to two very famous nuclear related events, Fukushima and Chernobyl, the latter of which is, of course, in Ukrainian territory and has been illegally occupied by barbarians and their unfortunate conscripts from a neighboring country.

A brief, but satisfactory overview of nuclear power in Ukraine can be found on the World Nuclear News website which I monitor, often posting comments on articles there and links to them: A guide: Nuclear power in Ukraine. This article also contains some links to news about nuclear related events associated with war being carried out by thugs against the highly cultured country of a brave people whose nobility has been brought, by tragedy, to world attention.

I have received a couple of PMs on DU asking what I thought about nuclear events in Ukraine. It is useful to reproduce my response to one of them, about the shelling of the Zaporozhe nuclear plant, the largest nuclear facility in Europe:

The question:



My response:



Some refinements to my comments therein, which were very, very, very brief and more than a little superficial are necessary. To fully appreciate these more elaborate comments, it may be useful for an interested reader to call up Dr Yancey Spenser's Masters thesis using the link and look at the pictures I suggested. This will give some insight to the properties and heat loads of live and used nuclear fuels.) This is the intention of my post, in which I will explain the risks associated with nuclear sites in Ukraine.

My favorite nuclear fuel - and here I am something of a dissident as well - is plutonium, because of its remarkable properties. All operating nuclear reactors produce plutonium but in many cases it is regarded as a side product. The much overstated enthusiasm for thorium fueled reactors is based on the concept of avoiding plutonium. A few have operated as such, as thorium fueled reactors, notably the very first commercial nuclear reactor in the United States (for a period), the Shippenport Nuclear Reactor, which came on line in 1956; some two or three years after it was first proposed. (It was built by engineers who lived and died by slide rules.)

I mention plutonium at the outset because many people fear this element of the periodic table more than all others. To a large extent the fear of plutonium above all other radioactive substances is nonsensical, but this fear is hardly the least nonsensical fear whenever nuclear energy is mentioned. The word "radioactive" has become, causing untold damage to humanity, a metaphor for all undesirable things, just as the word "nuke" has become a metaphor for being done with someone or something.

In any case, the reactors in Ukraine all contain plutonium, all of it generated in situ.

This includes the used fuel rods at Chernobyl as well as the melted innards of the famous destroyed Reactor #4. Reactor #4 was a type of reactor known as an RBMK; it's only equivalent in the US was the now shut Hanford N-reactor. There are no longer any operating RBMK reactors in Ukraine. The last operating RBMKs in Ukraine were shut in the year 2000, and all of them operated at the Chernobyl site. This is an important point, to which I'll return with reference to Dr. Yancey (Spencer's) Master thesis.

Subsequent to responding to the PM reproduced, I have confirmed that the operating reactors in Ukraine are all VVER's, a kind of "PWR".

I am not a pressurized light water reactor (PWR) kind of guy, even though the pressurized light water reactor has been the most remarkably successful energy invention of all time if one is concerned with saving lives and preventing climate change. This is true because PWR's dominate the world nuclear infrastructure that saves human lives that would otherwise have been lost to air pollution, and are now being lost to climate change.

(The mechanism of life saving by nuclear infrastructure is found in a paper to which I often link in this space:Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen, Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895))

I know very well how PWR's work, and have familiarized myself with the specific PWR type, the VVER - which is manufactured by a Russian company, Rosatom - in recent days. However they, VVERs in particular, and PWRs in general are not my primary interest because, although they have been spectacularly successful and spectacularly safe in comparison to all other forms of industrial energy, they have low thermodynamic efficiency since they are purely Rankine cycle type devices. I believe to save the world while being consistent with human development goals and climate and energy justice, we need to raise the thermodynamic efficiency of nuclear reactors. I have written quite a bit on this topic in my journal and my comments on this site.

Anyway, the Ukraine's nuclear reactors, as it is was formerly a USSR vassal state, are all VVERs.

Here is a graphic schematic of a VVER:



This graphic comes from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory which operates adjacent to the Hanford site where the bulk of US nuclear weapons grade plutonium was manufactured. It has a nice description of the strengths and weaknesses of the VVER design: Reactor Profiles: The VVER 1000. Interestingly I just learned the next generation of VVERs, the VVER 1200 has an interesting and somewhat advanced safety feature, an "accumulator" tank that has shown up in other modern "Gen III" designs. The VVER's in Ukraine apparently lack this feature; they are "Gen II" type designs.

Here is a presentation by the overseas technical marketing sales staff at Rosatom, the Russian nuclear reactor company at a Finnish nuclear meeting, made 9 years before Russia became a pariah state, talking up the creation and the evolution of a safety culture in Russian Nuclear Reactor design with a frank discussion of its absence around the time of Chernobyl:

VVER-type nuclear power plants and evolution of their safety

Finland has announced its intention to stop work on a VVER being built there because of the pariah status of Russia after its savage unprovoked attack on an independent nation.

Now, some technical remarks on what will happen if a reactor core of any PWR, of which VVERs are a subset, is breached in such a way as to remove the cooling water. This type of accident is called a "LOCA," a "loss of cooling accident." To date, after over half a century of operations around the world, only one LOCA at a PWR resulting in a meltdown has taken place, that at Three Mile Island. (The Fukushima reactors were not PWRs; they were a related but different type of light water reactor, BWR's.)

To understand what can happen, and what has happened in events like Three Mile Island and the reactors at Fukushima. both instances having been LOCA events, in one case an accident, and the second case an almost unprecedented natural disaster which I will discuss below, one needs to consider the constituents of nuclear fuel.

In most PWR's (as well as BWRs), and as I'm sure is the case for the reactors in Ukraine, the fuel initially loaded into the reactor is low enriched uranium oxide, the enrichment consisting in increasing by various means the concentration of the U-235 isotope, normally around 0.7% in natural uranium, to a larger concentration, generally between 3% and 5% in most cases. As the reactor operates some of these atoms fission, others are transmuted. Atoms are transmuted by capturing a neutron and then undergoing beta decay, the creation of an electron from a neutron by which the neutron is converted into a proton and an electron is ejected from the nucleus of the atom, thus converting the element to the next highest element in the periodic table. (Electrons do not exist in nuclei, but they can be created there.) A very important transmutation reaction that takes place in nuclear reactors is the capture of a neutron by the most common isotope of uranium, uranium-238, transforming it into the highly unstable nuclide uranium-239, which is highly radioactive, having a half-life of only 23.45 minutes with respect to ? decay, after which it becomes another highly unstable nuclide, Neptunium-239, which has a half-life of 2.356 days, whereupon it decays into the relatively stable isotope of plutonium-239, which has a half-life of 24,100 years but is highly fissionable. (This process, neutron capture in U-238 and its transmutation into plutonium-239 in two steps is the key to making uranium based nuclear energy essentially inexhaustible.)

The nuclear decay properties and half-lives of all known radioactive nuclei can be found by accessing the periodic table found at the Brookhaven National Lab Evaluated Nuclear Data File (ENDF) Retrieval & Plotting, choosing the periodic table tab, choosing "decay data" from the drop down menu, clicking on the element of interest, whereupon links to the decay properties of all known isotopes will appear on the right. From this process one can learn what the decay energies of U-239 and Np-239, respectively 1.265 MeV, and 0.667 MeV per decay, which can be shown to be an enormous amount of energy on a macroscopic scale.

Both of these nuclei which appear in figure 21 (a) in Dr. Yancey (Spencer)'s master thesis showing the fraction of the heat load of used nuclear fuel (in a generalized sense, since these values will vary depending on the type of fuel). As we can see, these two nuclides dominate the heat load on the zeroth day of removal. Twenty years later, figure 21 (b), they no longer exist. In fact none of the nuclides important in the heat load on the zeroth day are found 20 years later. All of the heat load after 20 years emerges from the 1% "other" category. This demonstrates a general, rarely violated, rule of thumb: The shorter the half-life of a radionuclide, the more heat it will generate.

This gives rationale to the previous figure in Dr. Yancey (Spencer)'s thesis, figure 20. Note that the ordinate in this graphic, which is apparently the sum of the heat load of all the used nuclear fuel in the United States, is logarithmic: The sum of zeroth day heat loads is 387.1 MW; the sum of one year later fuels is 11.9 MW. In the "percent talk" often utilized by anti-nukes to obscure the complete and total failure of so called "renewable energy" to do anything to address climate change, the heat load is 3.07% of what it was a year earlier. After 20 years, this figure has dropped in "percent talk" to 0.54% of the zeroth year head load. The nuclides generating more than 10% of the heat individually (figure 21 (b)) all have half-lives on the order of decades with one exception, Am-241, a wonderful nuclide of which I'm rather fond: It has a half-life of 432.6 years, it's longer half-life being offset by its very high decay energy, 5.628 MeV. (For this reason it has often been discussed as fuel for deep space missions, since it will last longer than Pu-238 now generally used in these settings.)

It is now desirable, but not essential - one can skip this part - to describe the risk of Chernobyl's power loss which apparently took place when thugs captured it, to take a brief mathematical excursion into a relatively simple physical law, the radioactive decay law which is derived using very simple calculus from the experimental observation that the amount of a radioactive material decays over time is proportional to the amount present. This statement written as an equation is dN = -?N dt where dN is the amount of material that has decayed in a period of time, ? is a proportionality constant with units of inverse time, N is the amount of material initially present, and dt is the change in time.

A full derivation from a British website devoted to high school students gives the full derivation of the law by integration of the above simple differential equation: Inside Atoms: 3. Half life It shows that the value of ?, known as the decay constant, can be found using any unit of time, by dividing the natural logarithm of 2, ln(2), by the half-life. Taking the exponential of both sides of the equation to eliminate the logarithm we get the famous radioactive decay law:



The half-life of one of the nuclides in Dr. Yancey (Spencer)'s Master's thesis, Figure 21 (b) after 20 years, is the most discussed isotopes of cesium, Cs-137. It's half-life is 30.08 years. This means the decay constant in inverse years is ln(2)/30.08 = 0.02034.

In the above equation, "No" can be considered to be the amount of cesium-137 present on the day the Chernobyl reactor exploded, April 26, 1986. Therefore the value of t is to a first approximation in March 2022 is t = (2022-1986) = 36 years.

Substituting 36 years into the equation above and rearranging to obtain the fractional amount of Cs-137 remaining, we see that the amount of Cs-137 left is about 46.3%; more than half of the original cesium has decayed to stable Barium-137. Moreover, much of the original cesium isotopes were volatilized out of the reactor as it was burning, which it did until late May of 1986, and the cesium was spread across Europe, producing much excitement and fear. However this spread had the effect of diluting the cesium isotopes, which at the time included the stable non-radioactive isotope of cesium, Cs-133 as well as the radioactive isotopes Cs-134, Cs-135, Cs-136, and Cs-137. All of the Cs-134 and all of the Cs-136 are now gone, because of their relatively short half-lives. The Cs-135 is almost essentially unchanged, since its half-life is very long, and thus its activity is very low making it, especially in light of its dilution and the absence of gamma radiation associated with its decay, low risk. Chemically, cesium tends to adhere to soil particles on land and sediment particles at sea. Thus it's bioavailability half-life is much shorter than its physical half-life, and in turn, it's biological half-life is also shorter; it is easy to piss away cesium in your body; it's a congener of potassium. Nevertheless it is almost inevitable that everyone now living everywhere has a few atoms of radioactive cesium-137 in their body, much less than the naturally occurring radioactive isotope of the essential element potassium, K-40, (roughly about 4000 Beq in a normal human being) and its radioactive naturally occurring congener Rb-87 which is also always present in living things. This is not because of Chernobyl and/or Fukushima alone - these are very minor contributors - but because of the practice of open air nuclear weapons testing that lasted from 1945 to 1963. Almost 26% of the cesium-137 released in 1963 is still with us; if you are reading this, you are alive in spite of those fairly large releases.

As for the Chernobyl reactor's conquest by the criminal thugs, I have seen remarks in the media some claims that it will lead to big problems because of a lack of cooling water. This is an illiterate statement, and probably reflects a lazy repetition of a concern connected with the meltdown of the Fukushima reactors, but not entirely unexpected from our media to hype nuclear fear via nuclear ignorance. The heat load at the Chernobyl reactors is now trivial compared to what it was when the reactor was on fire. Cooling ponds are not required. (In most nuclear reactors facilities, after cooling as described in Dr. Yancey (Spencer)'s Masters thesis, the rods are removed from ponds and placed in dry casks. There are cooling ponds in the Chernobyl facility, but they are artifacts of another time, in effect, ruins. There are Wels Catfish living in the cooling ponds, which are very large fish native to Southern Europe. Some people claim that the fish are huge because they are radioactive mutants. These people are idiots.

So what will be the affect of the thugs invading Chernobyl? They will have increased radiation exposure, similar to what the scientific staff studying the biology of this important natural laboratory experience. Because they are driving heavy vehicles like tanks, they will stir up dust, probably increasing the distribution of radionuclides. They will obviate - and this is a positive benefit of the media's nuclear paranoia which otherwise serves to kill people - the irresponsibility and stupidity of the Russian invaders. A more serious risk to humanity is the possible destruction of valuable data from this now natural laboratory. There is also a risk to some rare endangered animals that thrive in the exclusion zone, particularly if the thugs' conscripts, unsupported by food, shoot some of the rare Wisent - a European equivalent of a buffalo that quite nearly went extinct but now thrive in the exclusion zone in the absence of humans, and/or shoot another nearly extinct animal that lives in the zone, Przewalski's horse, which was introduced to the zone to eat grass and are also thriving within.

In terms of a worldwide radiological disaster leading to discernable health effects: It's very unlikely, to the point of trivial. Europe was not wiped out by Chernobyl and it won't be.

The situation with respect to operating nuclear reactors is Ukraine is somewhat more of a concern, since one can certainly imagine circumstances in which shelling or bombing lead to a LOCA accident. I think it unlikely, but certainly not impossible. However, nearly 100% percent of the time - I will return to this below - possible events involving nuclear energy somehow manage to get far more attention than observed events that are more serious but do not involve nuclear energy. This is a very, very, very, very big reason that the vast planetary disaster of climate change is upon us.

We have seen above a discussion of heat loads in used nuclear fuels. The majority of the heat produced when a nuclear reactor is operating results from nuclear fission. The energy of a fission is two orders of magnitude higher than typical nuclear decays, on the order of 200 MeV/atom. The atoms split into two pieces, and how they split and into what they split is a much studied and well known area of research backed by considerable amounts of data. The two most common actinide isotopes that run nuclear reactors around the world are U-235 and Pu-239. They do not fission symmetrically generally. There is a mass distribution associated with fission products. These distributions, for thermal light water reactors, are shown graphically in the two figures below that can be obtained with the use of the Brookhaven National Lab Evaluated Nuclear Data File (ENDF) Retrieval & Plotting link produced above:

U-235:




Pu-239:




The numerical data associated with these graphics can also be downloaded at text files that can be loaded into spreadsheets. I work with these spreadsheets all the time as I think about nuclear technology; my personal interest is very much connected with the chemistry of nuclear fuels.

Each of the dots represents a nuclide formed in fission with its error bars attached. (I have no idea why some are colored and some are black, so don't ask me.) The nuclear stability rules dictate that for any mass number - mass numbers are on the abscissa of the graphics - there will only be one stable nuclide. In the natural world there are exceptions to this rule, for instance Xe-136 and Barium-136 are both apparently stable, but it is believed that one of this pair will prove to be unstable; the half life is thought to be so long that the decays are not observed easily. Other such pairs exist. It is believed that the most common isotope of calcium, Ca-40, is actually radioactive and will decay to Ar-40 via a K-40 intermediate, but the half-life is so long that this decay has never been detected: Your bones are "safe." (Sheesh, I can't believe I have to say that.)

In any case, the overwhelming majority of the dots in the figures are radioactive, but some have extremely short half-lives, some on the order of nanoseconds. They provide significant heat as they decay, but not as much as fission. The scale of ordinate of these graphics is logarithmic, and they represent fractional yields of these fission products. For any given mass number, all of the nuclides will decay into one, and only one, stable isotope. Some of the time lines for complete decay are very short, on the order of days or weeks for all of the nuclides to decay to stable isotopes, the precursors to stable cerium-140 for example. This is why the heat loads fall rapidly. Fission products can also absorb neutrons and be transmuted; this is a very important factor in nuclear engineering. Impatience with accumulation of such a fission product, Xe-135, led to the stupid decisions that caused the Chernobyl reactor to explode.

The nuclear decay law shown above is a degenerate case of a far broader set of equations known as the Bateman equations, which are a large series of coupled differential equations - in theory there is one for each dot in the graphics above although as a practical matter this is ignored - that determine the amounts of any particular nuclide in nuclear fuel at any point in its operations. There are many ways of expressing the Bateman equations, many forms, but here is a particularly simple one:



In this equation, ? is the macroscopic fission cross section of neutron absorption for actinide fuel; ? is the fission yield of that particular nuclide of that fuel at a representative neutron energy, ? is the neutron flux, and the ?s refer to the decay constants of the parent nuclide (if it is radioactive) and its radioactive precursor.

These coupled equations are generally solved numerically and with increasing sophistication given the growth in computer power.

A widely cited paper (over 300 citations according to Google Scholar) on approaches to solutions is this one published by a Polish applied mathematician: Jerzy Cetnar, General solution of Bateman equations for nuclear transmutations, Annals of Nuclear Energy, Volume 33, Issue 7, 2006, Pages 640-645.

One doesn't have to understand any of the immediately above to recognize that at any given moment, active nuclear fuel is rich with many components. Some of these components are volatile and can be released at high or even intermediate temperatures. In particular the stable and radioactive isotopes of the noble gases krypton and xenon easily leach out of damaged fuel, with the radioactive xenon decaying to cesium isotopes; other elements that can boil off depending on the heat load are cesium salts, strontium salts, salts containing selenium, tellurium, bromine and most importantly, iodine. Under certain conditions the oxides of ruthenium, rhodium and technetium can be volatile as well.

It is now understood that almost all of the cancers that have been developed as a result of the Chernobyl accident, thought to number in the few thousands of individuals over more than three decades, were thyroid cancers resulting from the release of iodine-I31, with a half-life of around 8 days. (Not all, or even most, cases of thyroid cancer are fatal.)

The claim is made that VVER reactors, which are somewhat more robust in terms of material thickness than are Western PWR designs, can withstand collision with an aircraft. This may or may not be true. It is also claimed that a feature of these VVERs, the four steam loops adds additional cooling stability. This also may or may not be true. However from what I can see, there appears not to be isolation valves, a crack in one will drain all, at least as I can see. The increased surface area will provide some passive cooling capability, probably not enough to prevent very hot fuels from cracking or melting. As the reactor is a PWR, it has a negative void coefficient, fission will stop when the water boils or disappears. (This was not true at Chernobyl.)

There is in the recent literature, a discussion of LOCA events connected with a breech of the reactor or steam vessels in a VVER:

M. Rahgoshay, M. Hashemi-Tilehnoee, Pressure distribution in the containment of VVER-1000 during the first seconds of large break LOCA, Progress in Nuclear Energy, Volume 88, 2016, Pages 211-217. It's a modeling discussion and might not make sense to lay persons, and it doesn't draw definitive conclusions.

It is not clear to me whether the Ukrainian VVER's have passive cooling devices known as "accumulators," devices designed to remove heat without access to pumps. If they do, this is another layer of safety. A description of the performance of accumulators is given here: Seyed Ali Hosseini, Amir Saeed Shirani, Mahdi Zangian, Alireza Najafi, Re-assessment of accumulators performance to identify VVER-1000 vulnerabilities against various break sizes of SB-LOCA along with SBO, Progress in Nuclear Energy, Volume 119, 2020.

The conclusion of this paper seems to suggest something counterintuitive: The accumulators perform a little better in large breaks as opposed to small breaks in an "SBO," a station black out of the type observed at Fukushima.

The reactors at Fukushima, by the way, were not PWRs. Again, they were BWRs, boiling water reactors, which have a single cooling loop. My feeling is that they are not as intrinsically robust as PWRs, but again, I'm no expert in light water reactors since my attention is elsewhere.

Both at Three Mile Island and at Fukushima, the decay heat causes a steam/zirconium reaction to take place:

Zr + 2H2O(g) ? 2H2 + ZrO2.

At Fukushima, this hydrogen exploded, destroying the containment buildings. At Three Mile Island, it was vented, releasing small amounts of radioactivity but preventing large amounts from escaping.

As for plutonium, it will only escape in a form attached to dust, and the dust will only rise in an explosion or other physical disturbance. (This may slightly increase the risk to soldiers in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.) Otherwise it's not all that mobile.

I discussed this while considering the absurd rhetoric of an "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nuke who whined at me some time ago about the collapse of a tunnel at the Hanford Reservation. My commentary on plutonium at Hanford and other nuclear weapons related sites is here: 828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels

Any way, to return to PWR failures, given this experience from TMI and Fukushima, in any LOCA anywhere in any PWR or BWR whether it is caused by barbarians with fossil fuel based weapons of mass destruction or by operator error, or by design faults, earthquakes, or any other series of unfortunate events, venting the hydrogen would be a good idea. It made the difference between Fukushima and Three Mile Island.

I have said above, in my PM above that the worst case for an operating nuclear reactor would be "another Fukushima."

This case is somewhat unlikely, but not impossible. Of course, up until it actually happened, Fukushima was considered unlikely.

A person I regard as a fool over at Daily Kos, a poster who goes by with the name "Meteor Blades" (Tim Lange, he's on the staff there) took me to task during the Fukushima event - this was before I was banned there for telling the truth - by screaming in the way one can scream in a blog, "THEY told us this could never happen." I'm not sure who this vague, "THEY" who informed "us" is supposed to be, but no matter.

I look deeper than "THEY."

This brings me the most important point about the risk of nuclear reactors in the war in Ukraine, what I'll call here, "The Fukushima Syndrome" which will reflect on the mentality - which I personally find appalling - of anti-nukes, including the most obviously dishonest class of anti-nukes, who I have begun to call the "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nukes, a class to which "Meteor Blades" and some posters here belong.


The Fukushima syndrome:

In 2011, a tsunami struck central Japan after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, an unusually large magnitude (9.1 Richter) off the Japanese coast. The link is to the Wikipedia page about the Earthquake. Here is some text from the Wikipedia page:



There were about 20,000 dead people from the Earthquake and Tsunami. What killed them, mostly?

The Wikipedia page continues:



The word "radiation" appears in the Wikipedia page 11 times. The words "death" or "deaths" appears after the word "radiation" zero times.

It is now 11 years after the Tohoku Earthquake struck. Most of the people killed in the event were killed by seawater. Do we hear about them? No, most people have to be reminded they died; effectively they don't matter. On the contrary, we never stop hearing about the reactors.

The only thing people remember about the Tohoku Earthquake is that nuclear reactors failed and released large amounts of radioactivity into the environment. Let's be clear: There were some very brave people who went into regions the core of the failed reactors to evaluate the situation, and they did receive large radiation doses which were nonetheless not immediately fatal.

Around the time of the disaster on June 22, 2011, about three months after the reactors failed the following list of exposures was published at the World Nuclear News:



Working conditions improve at Fukushima unit

Note that 3514 people who received medical examinations and calculations of their exposures were all alive, unlike the 19,747 people who were killed by seawater, nearly instantly. Now, it is possible that some of the workers who had large exposures may ultimately develop a disease as a result. On the other hand, they may not. One of the very first people to go into the core of a melted nuclear reactor later became President of the United States.

I remarked in some detail on this here: President Carter is among roughly 350,000 "liquidators" involved in nuclear reactor "clean ups."

He later toured the Three Mile Island reactor while it was melting. He's still alive.

(This post was in a thread I offered: Where I Work: Chernobyl. This is another loss from the criminal attack on Ukraine: The threat to the research conducted by Dr. Germán Orizaola Pereda. Hopefully the thugs haven't injured him or destroyed his data or instruments, never mind spared his life.)

Now here is a post from an "I'm not an anti-nuke" anti-nuke who has insulted my intelligence by whining about things the insurance coverage of the company that is now decommissioning the Three Mile Island reactors, and similar things with breathless fear:



Here is my response to this benighted exercise is selective attention:



That's right folks, about 7 million people die each year from air pollution, meaning that 77 million people have died since Fukushima from air pollution without a peep from the people who regularly get all worked up about the Fukushima reactors without expressing a whit of concern about the people killed by seawater in the same event.

Here's my standard reference to the deaths from air pollution:

Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249). This study is a huge undertaking and the list of authors from around the world is rather long. These studies are always open sourced; and I invite people who want to carry on about Fukushima to open it and search the word "radiation." It appears once. Radon, a side product brought to the surface by fracking while we all wait for the grand so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here and won't come, appears however: Household radon, from the decay of natural uranium, which has been cycling through the environment ever since oxygen appeared in the Earth's atmosphere.

Here is what it says about air pollution deaths in the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Survey, if one is too busy to open it oneself because one is too busy carrying on about Fukushima:



This begs the question: What is more dangerous, nuclear energy or air pollution?
What is more dangerous, nuclear power or living in a coastal area? Afterall, about 1/4 of a million people died in the 2004 Tsunami, from seawater. A Bengali hurricane/typhoon killed over 300,000 people, all down the memory hole.

Has anyone who criticizes Fukushima day after day, year after year, ever wondered what the effect of rising sea levels will do to the risk of living in coastal cities?

Anyone?

And if - and this may not happen and nobody except the questionably sane savage at the end of the long table in Moscow, Putin, and perhaps his thugs wants this to happen - a Ukrainian VVER is breached, what will be remembered, the children blown apart by the thugs using dangerous fossil fuels diverted to use as weapons of mass destruction or the nuclear reactor that may be breached?

If the answer is – and I suspect it will be – that only the reactors matter, it will be yet another example of what I've dubbed the "Fukushima Syndrome."

The people killed by the weapons will take a back seat to the people who might, some day, somehow, eventually die from radiation.

People prattle on endlessly here and elsewhere about what could happen if a reactor fails, while paying little and regrettably often no attention to what is happening.

Right now, in Ukraine, children, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces are being blown to pieces using weapons of mass destruction dependent upon dangerous fossil fuels. The money that funded this crime against humanity was provided by Western European nations who decided, against all evidence connected with reality, that nuclear energy is "too dangerous" and fossil fuels aren't "too dangerous."

Where is the justice in this delusional calculation?

This bit of worthless dogma is actively killing people well beyond the 7 million who die each year from air pollution, the people killed by climate change driven extreme weather, the people who died - how weird is this? - from heat stroke in British Columbia this summer.

The concentration of the deadly dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere, as measured at the Mauna Loa CO2 observatory is now pushing 419 ppm, and will continue to rise through old records this spring. When I started writing here 19 years ago, it was just under 373 ppm.

Tell me again why "might happen" is more important than what is happening.

Or don't tell me. I couldn't care less.

I'm sorry this is so long, but I really, really, really am exhausted by this weight on my chest.

March 13, 2022

Nature Commentary: The geopolitics of fossil fuels and renewables reshape the world

This commentary appears in the recent issue of Nature: The geopolitics of fossil fuels and renewables reshape the world.

The subtitle:

The author is Helen Thompson, a Professor of Political Economics at Cambridge University in the School of Politics and International Studies.

It is probably open sourced, but some excerpts:



In this century of course, Germany has been sending billions upon billions upon tens of billions of Euros to Putin based on the big, popular and absurd lie that "nuclear energy is 'too dangerous'," and fossil fuels aren't "too dangerous."

We know...we know...

That worked out well, didn't it?

She continues:



Take whatever you want Vlad, just give us our gas.

Further down:



There's something very telling here: If so called "renewable energy" - commonly mislabeled here and elsewhere as "green energy" - is dependent on mining elements subject to depletion, how then is it "renewable?"

Unfortunately, this late in the game, with the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide being around 419 ppm and heading for the April or May new record levels, we are still involved with the lie.

There is no such thing as "renewable energy." There is only sustainable energy and if we're claiming that wind and solar are sustainable if only we all buy electric cars, we are embracing an untruth that is the equivalent of announcing that Bill Gates is putting mind control electronics in Covid vaccines.

Sorry, but that's how I see it.

March 11, 2022

European Carbon Intensity: W. Denmark 371 g CO2/kwh; Germany, 266 g CO2/kwh; France...

69 g CO2/kwh.

Electricity Map Accessed (8:21 Copenhagen Time 03/11/22)

In "Percent Talk:" 26.16% of West Danish electricity comes from coal, 24.08% of German electricity comes from coal, and 1.5% of French electricity comes from coal.

Both the Germans and the Danes are doing a little better than they've been doing the last few days when I've informally checked in.

They were dumping far more dangerous and deadly dangerous fossil fuel waste on all of humanity and all future generations earlier in the week than they are right now. It appears the wind's kicked up a bit.

March 10, 2022

The Willauer technology for producing jet fuel from seawater is economical at $6/gallon

It's described here: Feasibility of CO2 Extraction from Seawater and Simultaneous Hydrogen Gas Generation Using a Novel and Robust Electrolytic Cation Exchange Module Based on Continuous Electrodeionization Technology Heather D. Willauer, Felice DiMascio, Dennis R. Hardy, and Frederick W. Williams Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2014 53 (31), 12192-12200

The products here are precursors to FT (Fischer Tropsch) chemistry from which any component of petroleum can be manufactured. Dr. Willauer works at the US Naval Research Institute and her goal was for US aircraft carriers to be able to make jet fuel at sea using their nuclear plants.

From the introduction to the paper:

The paper contains a photograph and a schematic of the small pilot plant; if I recall correctly, larger scale pilot plants have been built:



The caption:



Of course, I would rather that we not make petroleum type fuels and prefer the wonder fuel DME; this said, this works.

March 9, 2022

Chief Accountant of a Palo Alto Company and Her Children Murdered by Russian Troops in Ukraine.

This came up in Linkedin this afternoon.

From another source:

Chief accountant of SE ranking and her two children killed in Ukraine

Tatiana Perebeinis was among four people killed in a Russian attack at the weekend.

A statement from her company, SE Ranking:

March 8, 2022

Wow. I didn't realize that Denmark still has coal plants, but they do and they're operating now.

I mean they spend all this time drilling in the North Sea for oil and gas, I assumed that they would at least burn gas.

However, having never really looked beyond them screwing up the North Sea and checking out how short lived all that wind junk is on the Master Register of Wind Turbines, I never looked at how they generate electricity, whether after bitching at Sweden about its nuclear plants they still burned coal.

Apparently they do.

As of around 3:45 AM Copenhagen time, 3/8/22:



As I was writing this post, the wind seems to have died down, with Danish wind capacity utilization falling to 2.17%, and the carbon intensity of West Denmark has risen to 377 g CO2/kwh.



In France as of this writing the carbon intensity of electrical generation is 79 g CO2/kwh.

Thus in "percent talk" Danish electricity if 477% more carbon intensive than French electricity.

Have a nice evening.