NUCLEAR POWER

allthingsnuclear:

                                                                                            Photo credit

I just returned from a week in South Korea to attend a large nuclear industry conference and a few events related to the Nuclear Security Summit. I had low expectations for the outcome of the Summit, and the communiqué released following the Summit certainly did not contain any pleasant surprises.

There is absolutely no indication that the international community is willing to grapple with the fundamental problem that has led to the situation we are in today: namely, the fact that too many countries continue to invoke “national sovereignty” to thwart the creation of effective international instruments to help control the nuclear terrorism dangers of plutonium, highly enriched uranium and other weapon-usable materials. This attitude is blocking the development of policies to effectively protect bomb-usable materials that have already been produced and to stop compounding the problem by producing more of them.

(Source: allthingsnuclear)

allthingsnuclear:

The Pentagon is working on finalizing nuclear weapons policy options for the president, who is preparing to make decisions that will set the size, structure and roles of the U.S. nuclear stockpile and set positions for future potential negotiations with Russia on force reductions below New START. The media was abuzz in the last 36 hours with reports that the options under consideration were 300-400, 700-800 or 1,000-1,100 deployed warheads.

At a hearing of the House Armed Services committee on Wednesday where Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta testified, Republican members were clearly distressed by the thought that the administration would even consider such reductions, calling it “reckless lunacy” and a “preposterous notion.”

In that light, you may recall the committee’s attempt last year to constrain the Obama administration’s prerogative to set U.S. nuclear policy, an attempt that was essentially neutered in the final FY12 Defense authorization bill.

A few thoughts on this latest kerfuffle:

(Source: allthingsnuclear)

allthingsnuclear:

                                                                                          (Source)

There seems to be a lot of confusion—and some chest-thumping—in the press about “shooting down” North Korea’s rocket during its upcoming launch.

For example, headlines like that in the Boston Globe on April 1—“Japan plans to shoot down N. Korea missile”—clearly convey the idea that Japan and others could stop the launch by shooting down the rocket with a missile defense system. A Google search shows there have been many dozens of headlines like this over the past week. The headline writers seem to have the misperception that missile defense interceptors could shoot down the rocket, and their headlines have passed that misperception on to millions of people.

But neither the U.S., Japan, nor South Korea have any systems that could intercept the launcher in flight (more on that below).

Read More

(Source: allthingsnuclear)

allthingsnuclear:

If the experts are correct we are supposed to be living in the post Cold War era. You wouldn’t know it from looking at the US debate about Chinese nuclear weapons.

On September 25 Georgetown University Professor Phillip A. Karber told a gaggle of US China-watchers that the US may be dramatically underestimating the size of China’s nuclear arsenal. He is not the only one to make such claims. After taking his audience on an impressive internet photo tour of “China’s Underground Great Wall,” the professor showed a slide (below) indicating there were “Chinese statements” claiming China possessed 3,500 nuclear warheads. It matters little that none of the Chinese sources cited at the bottom of the slide back that up. In Washington these days, the charge speaks louder than the facts.

(Source: allthingsnuclear)

allthingsnuclear:

                                                 Figure 1.

Leaks in San Onofre Unit 3 and Unit 2:

On February 18, 2011, operators restarted the Unit 3 pressurized water reactor (PWR) at the San Onofre nuclear plant in southern California following its sixteenth refueling outage. During the outage, workers replaced both of the reactor’s steam generators, which are large cylindrical containers that are partially filled with water.

In PWRs as shown in Figure 1 (where only one of two steam generators is shown due to space limitations), water flowing through the reactor core is heated to over 500 degrees fahrenheit. But pressure of nearly 2,200 pounds per square inch prevents it from boiling. Instead, the hot water flows from the reactor vessel through U-shaped tubes within the water in the steam generators, heating it and causing it to boil. The steam that is created drives the turbine/generator, producing electricity.

(Source: allthingsnuclear)