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Atomic Insights

Atomic energy technology, politics, and perceptions from a nuclear energy insider who served as a US nuclear submarine engineer officer

isotopes

Radioactive isotopes are too useful to waste

July 10, 2019 By Rod Adams 32 Comments

Forgive me. It’s been almost three months since I last wrote a long form blog or article about the importance of atomic energy as a useful tool for solving many of the world’s most complex and pressing problems.

I’ve been stimulated to take a partial break from my blissful state of being a mostly retired grandfather whose primary responsibility is teaching more than a handful of young cuties how to swim, bike, boat, poop, pee and paddle.

If you’re happy to hear from me, thank Allison MacFarlane, Sharon Squassoni and The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists for jointly publishing an article that made me want to scream. Since our summer visitors and my dear wife are sound asleep after yet another day of fun in the sun, I made the prudent decision to react more quietly.

The stimulating article’s headline, Recycle everything, America—except your nuclear waste was seemingly designed as personally focused click bait. Throughout my hobby and career stages as an atomic energy writer and commentator, I have been writing about the importance of applying one of the wisest mantras of responsible environmentalism to radioactive materials – Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.

It’s almost always irresponsible to casually use any material once and then treat it in a way that makes it difficult or impossible for that material to perform any other function or serve anyone else’s needs. It’s especially irresponsible and wasteful to use rare materials with special physical properties in that selfish and careless manner.

It’s a fact that has been gradually forgotten – or perhaps purposefully submerged – over time, but radioactivity is a rare and incredibly useful property.

Its discovery was so fascinating that it dominated the field of physics for several generations. Radium, one of nature’s more intense but also long lasting sources of radioactive emanations (to use a common term from the early days) became the world’s most valuable material. In 1930 a gram of radium would cost a customer (manufacturer, hospital, university or research institution) $250,000. That’s nominal, not inflation adjusted 1930s era dollars.

Radium didn’t command such a lofty price just because it was rare and difficult to isolate. It was valuable because it could perform important functions that no other material could perform. Its price was also supported by the fact that radioactivity, the natural property that gave radium its superpowers, wasn’t easy for humans to recreate or mimic.

Madam Curie would be disappointed

Fast forward 90 years. Humans unlocked atomic nuclei and learned to create an abundant array of radioactive materials with diverse and useful properties. We even figured out how to produce an almost limitless supply of raw power in a way that produces an almost limitless supply of isotopes whose best and highest use may be discovered in the distant future.

Unfortunately, there were many special interest groups and individuals whose wealth and power were threatened by the possibility of continuously improved ways of putting that raw power to beneficial use. Unfortunately for the prospects of rapid uptake of actinide energy, humans unlocked atomic nuclei while in a Hydrocarbon Era.

Our modern economy rests on a hydrocarbon foundation. Either directly or indirectly, hydrocarbons provide 80-90% of the power that humans have used and continue to use to shape the world. The corporations and individuals involved in the process of supplying those materials have no real interest in being supplanted by materials whose characteristics are so vastly different from the ones they are set up to find, extract, refine, transport, finance and govern.

So instead of embracing the opportunities that abundant energy and controllable quantities of radioactive materials could provide, the established interests fought off their budding competition.

One of the tactics they’ve used in their long, ongoing battle to protect their markets is fear of radioactive materials and their emanations.

They’ve created the perception that spontaneous heat and energy production is a terrible characteristic that makes radioactive materials into challenging waste disposal burdens. They stubbornly insist that the waste issue must be solved, and also stubbornly seek to slow or halt any effort that is progress without being a Final Solution.

Radioactive waste isn’t a solvable problem

There is no solution to radioactive waste, any more than there is a solution to feces production. Managing wastes is an ongoing enterprise that includes numerous steps, processes, equipment and inventions. It should be addressed with the same philosophies that have helped mitigate the costs and impacts of other sources of wastes.

We don’t manage feces production by starving people or animals or by preventing or eliminating their existence. Both integrated petroleum companies and meat packers have historically addressed stubborn waste problems by using science and ingenuity to turn byproducts of their processes into new products.

Gasoline was a waste stream during the early days of Standard Oil – it was burned off after the production of the more immediately valuable kerosene. The internal combustion engine came just in time – or perhaps it was designed in part to take advantage of a low-cost, readily available source of material.

As pork consumption increased, hog producers encountered growing waste challenges that stimulated producers to find ways to “Use everything but the squeal.”

Even natural gas, the highly valued source of fuel for cleaner electricity and home heating has often been a dangerous waste produced in association with producing a more valued product. Even today, there are far too many places where methane (aka natural gas) must be wastefully burned (flared) to prevent it from accumulating in explosive, difficult to handle quantities.

None of these examples, solve waste production issues. Instead, they mitigate them and produce streams of income that enable responsible research and development aimed at continued improvements in efficiency and material reuse.

Ownership is a key ingredient

A common element of that stimulates efficient waste reduction and material reuse in other industries has been, perhaps purposely, withheld from the nuclear industry.

In industries where operational guidance of “reduce, reuse and recycle” has achieved the greatest influence and success for both the environment and the economy, participants own the “waste.” Regulators provide oversight and legislators establish the rules, but the participants devise, implement and manage solutions.

But rendering isn’t just efficient; it’s also quite profitable — a $10 billion business. Smithfield, the world’s largest pork producer, is a $14 billion company, with $1 billion coming from rendering.

“Once you get to the processing stage, the manufacturers often own the product at that point. It’s certainly in their interest to use every little bit of it that they can,” says Dana Gunders of the Natural Resources Defense Council, who studies food waste.

From NPR Sep 29, 2014 “Everything But The Squeal: How The Hog Industry Cuts Food Waste”

For the nuclear industry, this approach has worked for certain waste streams, but the one that is the most troublesome and has gotten the most attention as something that isn’t being solved is treated uniquely.

Nuclear power plant operators do not own used nuclear fuel (historically and legally called “spent nuclear fuel”). Neither can any other private entity. It cannot be legally sold and it cannot be separated into useful, purified compounds or elements.

Instead, the federal government long ago established a tightly controlled monopoly on ownership. By law, the government forced power plant operators to sign contracts that require them to allow the government to pick up and take title to all used fuel. They cannot sell the material and they cannot separate and reuse any of the components of the material.

This declared monopoly is the cause of what has often appeared to be unseemly corporate behavior, especially for people whose philosophy tends toward free market principles. They – logically enough – cannot understand why nuclear plant operators band together to demand that the government solve the spent nuclear fuel problem.

Power plant operators are working hard to convince a contractor (the federal government in this case) to fulfill its contractural obligations. The courts have generally agreed and have held the government liable to pay the additional monetary costs that have been incurred as a result of its failure to deliver its contracted service.

But even people who strongly support nuclear science and agree that nuclear fission is a terrific way to safely produce electricity without air pollution believe that the “unsolved” waste issue is a solid reason to slow or stop waste production until it can be solved.

Incentives are all wrong or non existent

Though history has proven that safe handling and storage of used nuclear fuel can be turned into a rather routine industrial activity, there is a continuing stalemate that looks and sounds like an immovable obstacle.

“The waste issue” has become one of the strongest weapons in the arsenal of arguments used by people that either don’t understand nuclear energy or who fear that allowing it to succeed or fail on its own merits might pose an existential threat to their wealth, power or employment.

The people assigned to government agencies that have legally assigned responsibilities for removing fuel cannot be held accountable for failures caused by lack of appropriate resources.

Legislators are often told about the huge savings account that has accumulated over decades of accessing fees to pay the government for its promised (and required) service of taking possession and title for used fuel.

But current budget rules allow them to use that spreadsheet cell as an offset that makes the federal budget deficit look a little smaller. There is no actual lockbox that prevents the money from being used for other purposes.

Study after study has been done to show that recycling used fuel would be uneconomical, but those studies always assume that the government will own resulting material and be required to sell only certain parts while disposing of the rest it under current paradigms.

No government employed individual or team has the kind of incentive to market material or devise processes that are remotely similar to those available in private industry.

Don’t expect final solutions. Allow progress, innovation and creativity

The nuclear waste issue will never go away. It’s not fundamentally different from any other waste issue that is a permanent part of all productive processes, both natural and man-made.

It is an issue, however, that can be addressed and handled with ever improving steps, processes and equipment. The most straightforward way to enable the issue to shrink into a routine part of a valuable industrial activity is to make modest changes in the rules that make the government the owner of the material.

It’s the government’s job to provide oversight. It should establish and enforce rules that provide a reasonable assurance of adequate protection, but it should allow multiple entities the freedom to devise useful parts of a functional enterprise.

Like all other successfully handled – but never solved – waste challenges, the used nuclear fuel enterprise should be governed by the principles of reduce, reuse and recycle.

Filed Under: Fuel Recycling, isotopes, Nuclear Waste

“The Martian’s” RTG science includes jarring errors

July 6, 2016 By Rod Adams 56 Comments

During the holiday weekend, I finally got around to watching “The Martian.” Though it was a terrific, suspenseful drama, its treatment of the radioisotope thermal generator (RTG) was wrong on a number of levels. That was disappointing in the context of a high budget movie that has received numerous kudos for the significant effort its creators invested in getting the science right.

The issue that leaped out and almost spoiled my viewing experience was the scene where the protagonist — Mark Watney — is depicted removing a flag marking the location of the RTG with a skull and cross-bones and then shown digging the RTG out of the Martian soil. As his portable crane lifts the device the fine red soil is shown falling away from the device’s fins.

I remain perplexed that no one in the technical review chain of the movie wondered aloud why RTGs have fins.

Even space geeks should recognize heat sinks when they see them. RTGs produce electricity using the semiconductor thermoelectric effect discovered by Seebeck nearly 200 years ago. One junction is heated by the decay of Pu-238, but if the other junction has no way to reject heat by either radiation, convection or both, temperatures across the two junctions equalize. At that point, no current will flow. No one who knows how the devices work would bury them.

After watching the movie, I searched to find a discussion about that particular flaw; the only mention I could find came on Quora from a science fiction writer named C. Stuart Hardwick. I sent him a congratulatory Tweet on Twitter.

@CStuartHardwick Re: The Martian. Experienced similar “moment of scientific error” when Watley dug up RTG https://t.co/fSGQiY2d69 Rare find

— Rod Adams (@Atomicrod) July 5, 2016

Though the Oak Ridge National Laboratory took the opportunity of having an RTG in a major movie to promote its involvement in the RTG manufacturing supply chain, its nicely produced 2.5 minute video doesn’t point out that burying the device would negate its utility.

Neither does the DOE blog post titled The Science Behind “The Martian” — Staying Warm on Mars.

Another problem is that the movie provides inaccurately scary information about RTG safety.

Andy Weir, the author of the book on which the movie is based, conducted three years worth of research in support of his creative effort. Unfortunately, he failed to spend 10-30 minutes learning about RTGs, which are reliable, robust, compact, well-proven and rigorously-tested power-producing devices. Here is what Weir told Popular Science about RTGs during an interview after the movie was released.

PM: Wait, so how many problems did you think of that would have just killed him?

Weir: A few!

PM: Can you tell me what they were?

Sure. One thing was, he has the RTG (radioisotope thermoelectric generator). It’s basically the lump of highly radioactive material that gives off heat. The reason he has that is that I was trying to work out how to do a long-range trip with the rovers. I did all the math and there was just no way for him to get any decent distance out of it. I’ve got to find a way for him to suddenly become a lot more power-efficient with the rovers.

Well, if there’s a 100-watt heater in the rover, and he’s able to turn that off, then all of the sudden he’s able to get much more range. But then I did some math on heat loss and realized, oh no, he would absolutely freeze to death. You would freeze. to. death. It would get down to -100 C inside that rover eventually, and that’s no good. So I need him to have a heat source.

Then I work it backwards: If they had an RTG, why wouldn’t they use them in the start? Well, they’re kind of dangerous, and they don’t like to have big piles of radiation near the astronauts, and so on. So I worked it into the story.

One plot idea I had was that once he’s driving along, there’d be a breach in the containment of the RTG. Now, suddenly, it’s emitting radiation. It cracks. But I kept running all the numbers and there’s just no way he survives. Even a small radiation leak would be almost immediately fatal. Now, I could say he gets lucky and he happens to be wearing his EVA suit at the time, which has radiation shielding. So then he could just physically hurl the RTG away in time. But then he’s without the RTG and he freezes.

I just got rid of that concept. Which is good! Because I later learned that with RTGs—it’s not just a lump of radioactive material, it’s a bunch of little pellets encased in lead. It would be very, very hard to get irradiated. You’d have to break it open, get the pellets, and cut them in half.

There are a number of things wrong with that passage.

  • RTG’s cannot kill anyone with radiation. They might be able to be used as a battering ram.
  • RTG’s generate electricity as well as heat. They’re only about 6-8% efficient, but plutonium-238-heated devices the size of the one Watney uses in the movie produce ~ 100 Watts of continuous electrical power for at least 14 years.
  • A manned Mars mission would use several RTGs on its rovers as well as rechargeable batteries, just like Curiosity, the unmanned rover, did.
  • The containers used to encapsulate RTG’s are made of iridium, not lead. Lead shielding is completely unnecessary for a pure alpha particle emitter like Pu-238 and it would be a terrible heat shield in the case of a reentry event.
  • The only way that the Pu-238 could be a danger to human health is if after cutting the iridium container in half and extracting the pellets of PuO2, those pellets were ground up into fine dust and inhaled. Even that would not be immediately fatal.

Admittedly, an obstacle for a creative writer to getting RTG science and engineering right is that the devices can spoil some of the suspense associated with approaching and overcoming obstacles.

Used to their full capacity, RTGs can make life on a desolate planet substantially less daunting. Their use increases comfort and mission accomplishment potential for real astronauts but they make stories about imaginary astronauts a bit less interesting.

I don’t want to spoil the movie creation and viewing experience, but when a creative work takes credit for realism, it is incumbent on audience members to point out significant flaws associated with their areas of expertise.

Filed Under: Batteries, isotopes, RTG

Bill Sacks – Radon abatement contractor giving poor advice in syndicated column

February 1, 2016 By Guest Author 33 Comments

By Bill Sacks This is in response to Rosie Romero’s article in the January 27 issue of the GV News (p. B8), What you need to know about radon. It is wrong, just plain wrong. In the low concentrations encountered in homes, radon is not a cause of lung cancer, let alone “the second leading […]

Filed Under: Health Effects, isotopes, LNT, Radiation

Atomic Show #246 – Carmen Bigles, Coqui Pharmaceuticals Update

October 16, 2015 By Rod Adams

In November 2014, I spoke with Carmen Bigles, the founder of Coqui Pharmaceuticals, a company that is preparing to build a $330 million medical isotope production facility near Gainesville, FL. Since that discussion 11 months ago, Coqui has made steady progress in completing their construction and operating license application to the NRC for a class […]

Filed Under: Atomic Entrepreneurs, isotopes, New Nuclear, Podcast

Tritium – aka radioactive hydrogen – from reactors is not a threat to human health

March 14, 2015 By Rod Adams

Tritium, also known as radioactive hydrogen, is an isotope that releases an 18 Kev beta particle. The isotopic half life is about 12 years. Among other possible production mechanisms, it is produced in low quantities and concentrations in any reactor where water is exposed to a neutron flux. The production rate is higher in heavy […]

Filed Under: Health Effects, isotopes, Radiation

Atomic Show #227 – Carmen Bigles, Coqui Radiopharmaceuticals

November 25, 2014 By Rod Adams

Coqui Radiopharmaceuticals is a start-up company founded in 2009 with a laser focus on solving a problem affecting the health of tens of thousands of people. The founder, Carmen Bigles, noticed that many of the patients arriving at her clinic had not been properly diagnosed and discovered that the reason for that condition was an […]

Filed Under: isotopes, Podcast

Radiation, Pollution and Radiophobia

March 17, 2014 By Rod Adams

While researching answers to comments made on the Atomic Insights post titled Healthy doses of radiation, I found a book titled Nuclear Shadowboxing: Legacies and Challenges. It includes a fascinating appendix titled Radiation, Pollution and Radiophobia that should be required reading for people who are interested in understanding more about the health effects of low […]

Filed Under: Contamination, Health Effects, hormesis, Irradiation, isotopes

Gold standard nuclear regulator – CNSC

March 13, 2014 By Rod Adams

If you want to know something about radiation and have a five minute time window, invest your available time by watching What is Radiation: Understanding Radiation With the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. In my opinion, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has lapped the competition. They are in a commanding lead as the true “gold standard” […]

Filed Under: isotopes, Radiation

Airborne radiation at WIPP

February 20, 2014 By Rod Adams

Update: A reader pointed out that the headline is inaccurate. The issue at WIPP is airborne contamination (by radioactive material), not airborne radiation. In order to be gentle with search engines and existing links, the headline will remain as is. End Update. On Friday, February 14 at 11:30 pm, a continuous air monitoring alarm went […]

Filed Under: Contamination, isotopes, Radiation, WIPP

On Plutonium, Nuclear War, and Nuclear Peace

November 5, 2013 By Guest Author

By NNadir I trust — and I hope I am justified in this — that no one wants a nuclear war. I know I don’t. We already have a set of environmental problems that are worse than a limited nuclear war, and may be facing an environmental crisis that might be as dire as a […]

Filed Under: Advanced Atomic Technologies, Climate change, isotopes, Plutonium

Another update on “highly radioactive” water leaks at Fukushima

September 4, 2013 By Rod Adams

The media frenzy about the detection of water leaks from the vast tank farm that Tokyo Electric Power Company has been forced to build to store water used to cool the three damaged cores at their Fukushima Daiichi power station continues to sizzle, even in the face of the potential for US attack on Syria. […]

Filed Under: Accidents, Contamination, Health Effects, isotopes, Radiation

UCS is guilty of harming humans by reinforcing fear mongering

June 15, 2013 By Rod Adams

Correction: (Posted at 6:43 on 6/16/2013) I made a boneheaded error in the below computation and dropped an important prefix in my units. That error resulted in my final number being off by a factor of 1000; I wrote 0.001 mrem when it should have been 0.001 rem. I apologize for the math error. I […]

Filed Under: Antinuclear activist, Fossil fuel competition, Health Effects, isotopes, Radiation

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