Nuclear Safety in Japan

The headline "NUKE PLANT LEAKS AFTER EARTHQUAKE"

Oh my!!!

I might be calling this one a bit early because the news is just coming out but I suspect that this will be much ado about nothing.

From what I have read so far there was almost a gallon of water and it was contained in the containment building. No release of fission products.

So there is a 6.8 magnitude quake that left 3 foot fissures and the nuke plant only had a small leak that was contained.

I would call this a success in engineering. If this had been a gasoline or heaven forbid a LNG storage facility the result would almost certainly be worse.

Update:

Oh this is priceless

"Aileen Mioko Smith, of the environmentalist group Green Action, said the fire showed that some facilities at nuclear power plants such as electrical transformers were built to lower quake-resistance levels than other equipment such as reactor cores."

Duh - You think they might want to give higher priority to the safety of the reactor core maybe?? Sheesh presenting ggod engineering as a problem.

Fusion - Some thoughts on Tokamak

Back in January I got caught up in one of my crazy idea posts after reading about Boron fusion over at Classical Values and Power and Control.

I have been stewing on those for a while and doing some light research and what has really troubled me was the implications of this on Tokamak designs that I had never considered. I caught the beginning inclination of this in my post but have clarified it somewhat lately.

I am not saying they haven't been considered but I hadn't though of them. Some of this post is going to come off as anti nuke and anti fusion. Nothing could be further from the truth in all honesty nuclear power is our only realistic long term solution to the energy challenges we will have in the future and fission despite its advantages has some pretty significant drawbacks as well.

Fusion has always been served as the Holy Grail to solve these disadvantages and despite my background in Nuclear Physics and operation I never really questioned it. I have eagerly read about the development of toroidal field reactors and overlooked one key issue.

They have to use Neutron energy as the means to transfer energy from the fusion reaction to the power generation or transfer mechanism.

The impact of this is huge. In order to get any real power out of a fusion reaction in this manner the neutron flux would have to be insanely large. To put it in context in u235 fission reactions the neutrons produce on average less than 3 percent of the energy transfer. It results in a few degrees of heat in the primary coolant and further a few degrees in the shield tanks. While it does this it is also one of the primary problem creators for the entire reactor (of course one that by definition must be present).

It causes embrittlement and metallurgical changes in all of the reactor materials.

It is the mechanism of radioactive contamination creation.

It is the most difficult radiation to shield from with the most perplexing health impacts for people exposed.

and

It fundamentally alters the chemistry of the complex materials used to operate and control the reactor over time.

None of these issues go away in a Tokamak they way they identify the energy transfer mechanisms. As a matter of fact they would be about 20-30 times worse for the same thermal power output. I am not sure how anyone could ever make a viable case for a net energy producing Toroidal design and certainly not an economical one with that in mind. To go a step further it would create far more waste and more dangerous waste (admittedly only in the short term due to the lack of transuranic long lived waste) than existing fission designs.

So Dr. Bussard is quite right when he questions why we are spending the money on those approaches.

As far as the video and presentation, they make sense. I could see them adding injection fields that might use some of the toroidal design properties to help mitigate some of the electron leakage problems he mentioned in their existing designs but he has me sold.

If anyone wants to chime in and correct me feel free especially if I am missing something fundamental in the way Physicists are planning on getting power out of the Tokamaks.

More on Litvinenko Assassination

Very in depth post at strata-sphere

I can't vouch for the time lines. He/they must be spending a lot of time on this to get that much detail.

As for the facts on the polonium He is mostly right.

Even if it is in a salt based aqueous solution though there would be migration into cracks in the tea cup. After that it could stay for quite some time and through many washings. That doesn't mean that his conclusions are wrong it just means that direct metal to cup contact isn't the only way that high of a level of contamination could be obtained and maintained over time. If there are burn marks in the cup it would enforce his hypothesis. It would be interesting to see pictures.

I think it is definitely a possibility that this was a smuggling attempt as I indicated here, here and here.

But it isn't as clear cut as might be indicated in his post.

This whole thing is starting to take on a conspiracy theory feel to me so I am going to drop it after this post.

What I will end with is:

• It is definitely possible that this was a smuggling operation gone bad.
• It is also possible that it is a botched assassination or an assassination that sent a message.
• It required a Nation State level actor but not necessarily the knowledge of that Nation State.
• Most of the stuff I have been seeing presented as Science (both in the MSM and in many blogs) is at best inaccurate and often intentionally sensational.
• It was an interesting if sad and scary topic

Have fun with the Warren report boys. Hopefully some good sleuths are tracking down the real facts because some of the possibilities could be really bad.

Fusion - Crazy Ideas

Real Interesting post at Classical Values about Boron - Proton Fusion.

I traced down all of the links and it is quite interesting. The most interesting piece for me was the last section with the questions about how to access the energy produced.

One thing that always tickles me about how the MSM usually leads a story about fusion is that they describe it as a safe "waste free" type of nuclear power.

With the Tokamak designs they rely on neutron heating of a water (or other medium) tank as the primary external energy transfer mechanism. In order to get enough energy to be efficient using this method you would have to have one heck of a massive neutron flux. Neutron fluxes create active isotopes so there will be large amounts of radioactive material (RAM) created. Of course this can all be contained in a similar way that RAM from fission reactors are. There is an advantage over fission reactors in that since transuranic elements are not used the really long lived RAM will be very small to non existent but Tokamaks will create a lot of RAM including every nukes favorite Isotope CO-60.

Energy capture from a Boron proton fusion would have to involve heat collection from the collisions and scatters of the three resulting alphas. The biggest drawback there is that there is no easy mechanism to get them out of the reaction area. Neutrons literally walk right though walls but the alphas won't go far. The design would probably have to have a high enough operating temperature range at certain locations for standard heat transfer mechanisms to be efficient.

This quote is spot on:
"The fusion is quite real, unlike the cold-fusion fiasco. What seems like the biggest problems are energy break even and durability of the equipment. The conventional fusion reactor has achieved energy break even already, the next step for it is economic break even."


This doesn't seem to be junk science but still wouldn't be easy. In any case full development of it or a similar fusion methodology using different isotopes is certainly worth the effort. I'm not sure overall explorations should be limited to this combination either.

Spikes Indicate multiple Polonium Exposures

Some more news on the Polonium Poisoning.

This might lend additional credence to the argument that this was a mistake in transportation vs. a poisoning attempt.

If he was repeatedly receiving the shipments exposure could have returned multiple times.

One other item on this hypothesis is that Polonium has some interesting physical characteristics in that it will "climb" the walls of a container that it is in and passes weak seals easily. (only is significant quantities)

It does call into some suspect the Chechen link though.

Think hyper mercury.

Update on the Polonium

This is precisely what I was worried about in my previous post on the polonium incident.

I am somewhat more sceptical on the politics and the science is light but definitely something to worry about. He is right on the money.

There is something wrong with the "assassination" theory. Polonium just isn't a good way to do something like that.

As far as the dirty bomb blow off he is somewhat right in that death tolls would be very low. On the other hand for a year or so no one could go within a mile of the site without some risk of pretty nasty polonium poisoning. So even if it isn't a nuke it would be pretty bad and very public.

Polonium - More on the Assassination

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This is getting disturbing

Like I said in my rant earlier this stuff is not easy to get ahold of at least not in the quantities we keep seeing. It is certainly possible that one contaminated individual spread it to all of these places. It is even likely that the reason that they are keeping the "witness" away for a bit is because they are worried that he is contaminated and it will be somehow detectable. (it would have to be a lot for an Alpha emitter to be detectable and just sloughing off to be swiped later).

According to information leaked from the post-mortem examination, Litvinenko died from a dose that could cost 30 million euros. This seems a bit too rich for a murder. - This seems to actually be very reasonable dosage estimate to me considering the rapid onset and the total bodily system collapse he had. To loose his hair from an alpha emitter in just a week would take a huge amount (radiological speaking).

To get this level of cross contamination of detectable levels of Polonium would take a nations involvement or some heavy duty terrorist type organization. The quantities would have to be huge (in terms of activity not mass or volume) To head off the normal anti US conspiracy buffs (idiots) the US (and all of the Western nations) tracks its contamination sources very well. There would be a easy to locate paper trail.

I don't usually get into politics on this blog or conspiracy but the radiological angle makes this one interesting to me.

and suggested that if a Russian intelligence agency had wanted to kill him, it would have been foolish to use polonium because its source could probably be traced. - The last part of this is partially true. Normally isotopes have a "fingerprint" that can be used to trace their origins. Polonium though makes this more difficult because it's final decay product is stable. If it is pure enough it probably couldn't be tracked and the minuscule amounts would make it even harder.

I think the Russian government is the obvious suspect but people should also be worried about his possible Chechen connections. I normally debunk the dirty bomb junk I hear but his possible connections to some radical elements (on both sides of the equation) and the presence of this much hard to obtain radioactive substance has me scratching my head.

I hope some really good people are chasing down all of the possible threads on this one because some of the potential implications are pretty scary.

In any case this was clearly all just off topic speculation. Interesting speculation but still just guess work.

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Radiation Reality

Finally a real examination of the Polonium risk.

Also a transcript of NewsHour (a PBS Show) that did well.

Finally from bubblehead.

I was a bit too hostile. The people spreading this meme just didn't know. I don't think they are stupid but I was irritated and they could have done some better research.

Radioactive Poison for sale on the Internet!!! Oh My!!!

Onsale on the net Legally?!?!

Can you believe that?

Better make a new law now?!?!?!

Everyone run for your bomb shelters!!!! Cats and dogs living together!!! Oh the Humanity!!!!

Where did you get that radioactive poison Timmy? uhh... On the internet?

These articles are irritating me. The authors have no clue and are obviously too stupid to ask the right people the right question.

First of all Polonium is an alpha emitter. That basically means you have to have it in you for it to cause any problem at all.

Second the articles state that the amount available for sale is “very small”. That is the understatement of the century. I could inject 100 of the $69 samples into my jugular and if the blood loss didn’t kill me I wouldn’t have to worry about my 10% increase in the chance of cancer for another 60 years.

Ok that is an exaggeration but if they can do it so can I.

Here are the real facts.

Po-210 ‘s primary emmiter is a 5.3MeV alpha
With a penetration range of about 4 cm of normal sea level air.

It has a biological half life (the amount of time it takes to get it out of the body if ingested) of about 50 days.

The largest organ dose in that time is 100 REM to the Spleen by 1 uCi. This is bad (real bad) but not deadly at this level.

Ouch my SPLEEN!!!

Other organ exposures are an order of magnitude lower.

Update:
It would take 10 times that amount to have significant body effects (hence my 100 samples) much more (I don't know how much) to even make death likely.

It takes about 500 to 1000 REM in a relatively short period (less than a month) of time for radiation exposure to be lethal or to cause widespread organ failure. (The real nukes will note that I am fudging a bit here but it is close enough. Feel free to correct me in the comments.)

These sites are selling .1uCi in the $70 dollar range.

The Russian that got poisoned probably had to get more (well more) than 1000 times that amount for it to affect him as completely and quickly as it did.

If you had the $70 grand to blow and didn’t want to spend it on some other way to get rid of someone I suppose in a real stretch it might be possible once. Of course I imagine if you ordered a thousand samples they wouldn’t have them available (probably not all of the places that sell this added together have that much) and my guess is someone would ask why and probably inform the police. It would also be pretty trivial to track someone down who did this with a legal source.

Unless a government did it.

So why was it used?

They obviously had the money.
Even though it cost $70,000 it isn’t very big (half the size of a pin head Update: sorry pin tip. Really really small, dust).
No taste.
Since it is an alpha emitter it won’t be detectible from a distance.
Once it is done it is done. There is no real way to recover.

Don't get me wrong this is pretty nasty stuff and you couldn't pay me enough to actually mainline it like I joked above but people really need to get a clue when they go implying that being able to purchase a tenth of a microcurie for 70 bucks is a problem. After all your typical smoke detector has 9 times that many microcuries of Americium.

They aren't selling grams, milligrams or even nangrams here this is picograms.

Do you want to ban them? Or make everyone register with the government to purchase them?

If you do we should start worrying about the Dirty Banana Bomb.



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Sublinguese

"What the heck is an MG"

"TG?"

"I didn't understand a word you said in that post."

Just a sampling of the scintillating reviews of "Channeling The Ancient Submariner"

Oh Yea from Chris "you may want to tell people what a nuke is, not everyone will know a nuke is someone who works in engineering, most will probably think of the warhead. " - Quite True

Until this weekend I hadn't realized I was a polyglot. I thought I was limited to English and a few sparse phrases of German (who Austrians politely nod to then ignore).

Of course I have now discovered that after a beer and some pseudo self hypnosis I am able to speak in tongues. Now that I think of it it usually takes several beers to get to the incoherent stage for most people. Is this a gift of mine? My own Hero's power? The one Beer babbeling sublinguese guy?

Ok that was cheesy.

Here are some definitions and descriptions to explain the lingo in Channeling The Ancient Submariner and Contrasts - Submarines.

Sea Story - A genre of stories told by bored (and often boring) sailors when either bragging in a bar, (or for the newer lightweights a bookstore), Standing a long boring midwatch or in front of a class of new soon to be real sailors.

While not essential Sea Stories almost always take the following formats.

They start.

"No Really"

"This is a no shitter"

"Ok Ok"

or for the really true to the genre ones all three.

They are frequently interrupted but the teller is never able to hear what the person interrupting has said. (this is doubly true if he is a NUB)

Something bad or stupid or preferably both always happens.

It is never that bad (well almost never) because the really bad things you don't want to dwell on.

There is almost always a moral. Kind of Darwin Awards with a specific format.


Next term

NUB - A NUB is a non useful body. Anyone who is not yet qualified. Think Plebe or Pledge but worse because the other people actually suffer because the NUB is not yet qualified. In RC Division there are only 7 people assigned to each boat. One of these 7 (the chief usually after all we took his tweaker) stands EWS so doesn't count. When underway there are at least 2 watch stations that have to be manned at all times. This is usually done in 6 hour watches. So you get up eat go stand a 6 hour watch (I'll describe these some other time) Eat again. Do Maintenance. Study for your weekly tests. Then if you are luck you get 2 to 3 hours of sleep before you get up to go on watch again. This is with 6 people. If even one of them are not qualified you go port and starboard watches. The Maintenance still has to happen so that cycle usually goes. Watch (6h), Maint (6h), Watch(6h), Easy Maint(1-3h), Short sleep(2-4h), Watch. Repeat. Similar cycles happen for every other group on the boat. So if someone isn't qualified they make everyone else have to pull their weight. So until they are qualified something they are NUBs. Guys that have been on the boat more than 3 years tend to look at everyone that is not fully qualified (every qual complete) as Nubs.

First Run 688 - 688 is the hull designation of the USS Los Angles which was the first boat of its class. They are fast attack boats. That means that their primary job is to do everything that the boomers can't or won't (not that a boomer would do anything that it can't). Basically they hunt other subs and ships and protect carriers. I'm sure they do other things but well... go read Blind Man's Bluff (I think that was based on Freedom of Information Act stuff) As Bruce says "you have no privacy get over it". I can't remember which boat is the dividing boat but the first run 88's have planes on the sail and no vertical launch tubes. There are a few other differences but I can't remember if I can talk about them. For that matter I can't remember them.

Port Vital Bus - Not worth talking about unless you are on a boat. It is an electrical bus on the port side and it is vital (really important). nuff said.

Roving Watch - Actually Shutdown Roving watch. His job is to roam around the engine room when the reactor is shutdown, take logs and make sure nothing bad is happening. Some say his real job is to stop by Maneuvering every so often and make sure the Shutdown Reactor Operator (SRO) is watching his gauges (not asleep real bad juju there) . If he gets caught in maneuvering to often he gets yelled at. But how do I say this... Have you ever been stuck in a place for 6 hours where Nothing Ever Changes . (UPDATE: Oh wait that is a cube) Over and over again for years? Unless he hates the SRO he goes and talks to him every so often. Sometimes even if they hate each other they still end up talking. Some of the greatest mysteries and problems of the universe have been solved by the SRW SRO and SEO (Shutdown Electrical Operator) and no one knows because they can't let anyone know they were talking. Same for underway for that matter.

Eng - Short for Engineer Think Scotty without the accent. In reality they are the 3rd senior officer on board usually at a Lt Cmd but sometimes a Junior one is a Lt. Always intelligent but sometimes you cannot tell because they are under so much stress that most of them freak out periodically. These guys are almost always career guys who want to be XO next time around but if someone sneezes at the wrong time during ORSE it is all over for them. We called my first Eng red because his bald pate would turn bright red when he was pissed which was pretty much all of the time. He liked to throw hard objects but never hit anyone or anything important so I think it was mostly for show. My second we called thumper because if he was aft in Maneuvering and his hand started tapping you knew a drill was about to kick off. We had another guy we called thumper (an a-ganger) but I won't go into how he got his name.

ORSE – Operational Reactor Safeguard Exam.

At least every year a bunch of Naval Reactor Experts visit every boat (and ship but who cares about skimmers). The audit they do makes a SOX review look more like a homeless guy getting his taxes reviewed by a social worker from San Francisco.

If a boat fails an ORSE the Engineers career is over and the CO's is in jeopardy. Most of the Officers and many of the enlisted personnel might never advance further in their Naval career's. At the very least they will have to pass another one very soon and forget about shore leave or seeing your family. (I always get irritated when the people on "Survivor" complain about missing their family. For god's sake it is only a month suck it up. Try going 4 months wihout even knowing for sure that they are alive let alone being able to talk to them or see them. Put a submariner on your show Jeff. Sorry sidetrack.) Failing an ORSE is Bad other people come to take over and lots of people either loose their job or might as well have. Never happened on a boat I was on but saw it afew times.

The ORSE Board looks at every single piece of paperwork done during the year. If a t isn’t crossed and an I isn’t dotted you get hit (litterally). If you use the wrong color ink you get hit. enough hits you (you is the whole boat for these) fail. If a calculation is wrong on maintenance paperwork (or heaven forbid an ECP) you might fail.

Every Nuke has to take three or four tests a month. If they fail they go on remedial training which means no free time and if in port less time at home. If they fail twice they might be disqualified so they become NUB’s again which is far worse than remedial training.

The ORSE team makes sure the average score on the tests hovers around 3.2 out of 4 and that they are hard enough that some people fail them. They don’t grade on curves so if the people taking them get better the tests just have to get harder. Some of these people have been taking variants of these tests for over 20 years. These tests cover hydrodynamics, Material sciences, Nuclear Physics, electronic fundamentals, plant design, control systems designs, chemistry, basic calculus, other advanced math, casualty response, and most of the time combinations of all of these in one question. There is no multiple choice.

If your training group messes up on grading the tests the ORSE team hits you. If you loose the tests (the physical copies) you get a hit.

They then take a sampling of your questions combine them with some of their own and give every nuke the test to take. If people do poorly on questions they did well on in the past the whole boat can fail the ORSE. While all of this is going on other ORSE team members run drills. These take a number of forms. Sometimes they simulate certain events then monitor how you react. Sometimes they break things in a carefully controlled way and monitor how you react. They take what they learned from your tests and logs they have reviewed and use that to create scenarios of the drills that see if you learned from the mistakes you made in the past. (We did many many electric plat shifts in different plant conditions in the ORSE after the incident I mentioned in my earlier sea story) All of this is done over the course of 3 to 5 days. During those days no one gets more than an hour or 2 sleep in total.

So if you are ever hiring a nuke ask him what station he stood during his ORSE’s. If it was anything other than Drill Monitor (we put the people we were worried about there) he will handle stress alright.

Nuke – Slang for engineering department staff on a sub. Not Nuclear Weapons which don’t talk and I can neither confirm nor deny the presence of on any boat I served on. Nukes were generally considered to be the RC Div (Reactor Controls) E Div (Electrical Division) M Div (Mechanical Division) and ELT’s (Engineering Laboratory Technicians)

RC Div’s responsibility was taking care of and operating the controls systems for the reactor. This included level control system, pressure control systems, the electrical and electronics portion of valve and pump controls, and nuclear instrumentation. Primary underway watch stations for RC div were Reactor Operator (RO) and Reactor Technician (RT).

E Div was responsible for all power generation and distribution systems. This included the Turbine generators (TG) Which are large 3 phase electrical generators powered by steam from the reactor plant. Each of these is big enough to power a small town. Motor Generators (MG’s) convert AC to DC power and vice verse when needed. They are large heavy motor generator’s spinning at a high rate sufficient to power a large subdivision. They were also responsible for all of the other switching and breaker systems. (Except for a few controlled by RC Div). Primary Watch stations were Electrical Operator (EO) who controls the Electric Plant from Maneuvering, Auxiliary Electrician Aft (AEA) who gets coffee for everyone.

M Div – Was responsible for all piping, pumps and valves. No long descriptions here because I didn’t mention them much in the story. The Roving Watch is usually an M Div guy.

ELT Div is responsible for maintaining the chemistry of the reactor and secondary plants. They are also responsible for anything that involves radioactive exposure or contamination. They do more paperwork than anyone on the boat and other than RC Div they spend more time than any other Division in school and taking tests. (Officers excluded of course) ELT’s often stand Engine Room Forward watch for a number of reasons. We liked to tell them they were just radiation sponges.

EWS is the engineering watch supervisor they are the senior underway enlisted watch station. Most of them are Chief’s (E-7 and above) a few are First class and a very rare second class sneaks in (usually trying to make first).

The EOOW is the Engineering Officer of the Watch. They are the senior engineering watch station. They sit in Maneuvering and direct the actions of all of the other watch stations.

CO is the Commanding Officer – The Captain of the Ship.

PD periscope depth – In the North Atlantic without ventilation it is close enough to the surface to get everyone sick.

That took longer than I thought. If you got down and are actually reading this last line you must be really bored. Next time just get a babblefish.

Translation complete.

The Dirty banana Bomb :-)

Episteme post


On a more serious note here is what the NRC says about Dirty bombs.

Any Nukes out there want to chime in?

How about banana mongers?