Carbon Chemist

Tag: nuclear

  • Inside a Fusion Startup’s Insane, Top-Secret Opening Ceremony

    Inside a Fusion Startup’s Insane, Top-Secret Opening Ceremony

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    So the race is on to engineer an efficient surrounding for fusion. One of Fuse’s ideas is to get a bunch of big capacitors to discharge at once, thus kick-starting a reaction. That’s why, at our show, there were all those big caps behind the audience. (You also see constructions of big caps at other fusion startups, like Helion.) The goal of Fuse, as JC describes it, is to become the SpaceX of fusion, to enable “big tech” achievements with all kinds of partners.

    Back to our story. JC contacts Serene and says we’re opening a second facility (the first was in Canada) and it would be nice to have a spectacular opening ceremony. Serene, being a startup founder who’s also, naturally, working on music robots, applies obsessive logistic efforts. Charlotte, being a director, does the same. Those of you with any life experience might be asking yourselves, “This sounds like an alien planet with two queens. Was it, um, a process?” I will not answer you directly except to compliment you on your finely hewn wisdom.

    Now you know the basics. I am a scientist and do not enjoy superstitious takes on reality, but so many coincidences had to happen at just the right time for this show to come together in just a few weeks. At the last minute, we needed high-performance robots; a robotics professor at UC Berkeley, Ken Goldberg, found them for us. Why does reality synchronize like this sometimes?

    I used to put on high-effort, high-tech music shows, often in VR, in the 1980s and ’90s. I burned out. It was bruisingly expensive, stressful, and exhausting. I used to long for the future when VR would get cheap and lots of people would know how to work with it. But when that time arrived, instead of relief, I had the feeling that VR had become too easy. There used to be a higher-stakes feeling. You had to make every triangle in the scene count, since there could not be too many, even though the computer doing the real-time graphics cost a million dollars. There’s a tangible sense of care in those earliest works.

    If I longed for hassle and expense as guarantors of stakes, then I found them again in this show. The week leading up to the performance reminded me of those early days of VR. Late, late nights, which don’t come as easily to me as before, in rehearsal; Serene would be up there trapped in the cables and the mathematical dress, designed by Threeasfour, but there’s a timing problem with the robot motion. With assistance she frees herself, gets to a screen, and does 10 minutes of high-speed programming. The robots glide again.

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  • A Uranium-Mining Boom Is Sweeping Through Texas

    A Uranium-Mining Boom Is Sweeping Through Texas

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    Michaelsen thought he had won. But when the TCEQ commissioners took up the question several months later, again they rejected all of the judge’s findings.

    In a 19-page order issued in September, the commission concluded that “faults within 2.5 miles of its proposed disposal wells are not sufficiently transmissive or vertically extensive to allow migration of hazardous constituents out of the injection zone.” The old nearby oil wells, the commission found, “are likely adequately plugged and will not provide a pathway for fluid movement.”

    “UEC demonstrated the proposed disposal wells will prevent movement of fluids that would result in pollution” of an underground source of drinking water, said the order granting the injection disposal permits.

    “I felt like it was rigged, a setup,” said Michaelsen, holding his 4-inch-thick binder of research and records from the case. “It was a canned decision.”

    Another set of permit renewals remains before the Goliad mine can begin operation, and local authorities are fighting it too. In August, the Goliad County Commissioners Court passed a resolution against uranium mining in the county. The groundwater district is seeking to challenge the permits again in administrative court. And in November, the district sued TCEQ in Travis County District Court seeking to reverse the agency’s permit approvals.

    Because of the lawsuit, a TCEQ spokesperson declined to answer questions about the Goliad County mine site, saying the agency doesn’t comment on pending litigation.

    A final set of permits remains to be renewed before the mine can begin production. However, after years of frustrations, district leaders aren’t optimistic about their ability to influence the decision.

    Only about 40 residences immediately surround the site of the Goliad mine, according to Art Dohmann, vice president of the Goliad County Groundwater Conservation District. Only they might be affected in the near term. But Dohmann, who has served on the groundwater district board for 23 years, worries that the uranium, radium, and arsenic churned up in the mining process will drift from the site as years go by.

    “The groundwater moves. It’s a slow rate, but once that arsenic is liberated, it’s there forever,” Dohmann said. “In a generation, it’s going to affect the downstream areas.”

    UEC did not respond to a request for comment.

    Currently, the TCEQ is evaluating possibilities for expanding and incentivizing further uranium production in Texas. It’s following instruction given last year, when lawmakers with the Nuclear Caucus added an item to TCEQ’s biannual budget ordering a study of uranium resources to be produced for state lawmakers by December 2024, ahead of next year’s legislative session.

    According to the budget item, “The report must include recommendations for legislative or regulatory changes and potential economic incentive programs to support the uranium mining industry in this state.”

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  • Why an Offline Nuclear Reactor Led to Thousands of Hospital Appointments Being Canceled

    Why an Offline Nuclear Reactor Led to Thousands of Hospital Appointments Being Canceled

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    “I remember in Geneva, two months ago, we said, ‘Pay attention, because on this specific week there is a risk of shortage if there is any problem with one of the active reactors’—and that’s what happened,” recalls David Crunelle, a spokesman for Nuclear Medicine Europe (NMEU), an industrial association.

    Because of their very nature, it’s impossible to stockpile these radioactive substances—they are fleeting. Technetium-99m works as a radioactive tracer because, as it decays, it flings out gamma rays with a photon energy of 140 KeV. This is “fairly ideal” for detection using a gamma ray camera, says Cathy Cutler, chair of isotope research and production at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US.

    But technetium-99m has a very short half-life, just six hours or so. Hence why radioisotope-producing facilities send miniature generators containing molybdenum-99 out to hospitals. These generators, sometimes called “moly cows,” produce the desired technetium-99m as the molybdenum-99 decays—a bit like a portable vending machine for technetium-99m, which runs out after about two weeks, once the molybdenum-99 has completely decayed.

    Glenn Flux, head of radioisotope physics at London’s Royal Marsden Hospital and Institute of Cancer Research, says the thing that makes a technetium-99m scan different to, say, a CT or MRI scan, is that it reveals how patients’ organs or a tumor are functioning—for example by revealing blood flow to the area in question.

    “The CT will show you if there’s a tumor, but the technetium or other isotopes will tell you whether it’s active or aggressive,” explains Flux.

    The recent radioisotope shortage caused a few thousand appointment cancellations in the UK alone, estimates Stephen Harden, vice president of clinical radiology at the Royal College of Radiologists (RCR). Health care staff swung into action to distribute the remaining radioisotope supplies around the UK, in order to ensure that the most urgent patients—those with cancer, for instance—were still able to attend their scans. “If there hadn’t been a nationally coordinated policy, there would have been significant regions in the country with no supply at all,” says Harden.

    Crunelle and colleagues at NMEU continually monitor medical radioisotope production at key reactors around the world. They learn about maintenance schedules well in advance, and, as such, NMEU will often advise reactor chiefs to push these dates back slightly—for example, in order to help minimize the risk of multiple shutdowns occurring at the same time. NMEU staff use software, a kind of reactor maintenance calendar, that allows them to forecast production levels. But sometimes unpredictable events occur, such as the problem with the pipe in Petten.

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  • The US Buried Nuclear Waste Abroad. Climate Change Could Unearth It

    The US Buried Nuclear Waste Abroad. Climate Change Could Unearth It

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    This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

    Ariana Tibon was in college at the University of Hawaii in 2017 when she saw the photo online: a black-and-white picture of a man holding a baby. The caption said: “Nelson Anjain getting his baby monitored on March 2, 1954, by an AEC RadSafe team member on Rongelap two days after ʻBravo.’”

    Tibon had never seen the man before. But she recognized the name as her great-grandfather’s. At the time, he was living on Rongelap in the Marshall Islands when the US conducted Castle Bravo, the largest of 67 nuclear weapon tests there during the Cold War. The tests displaced and sickened Indigenous people, poisoned fish, upended traditional food practices, and caused cancers and other negative health repercussions that continue to reverberate today.

    A federal report by the Government Accountability Office published last month examines what’s left of that nuclear contamination, not only in the Pacific but also in Greenland and Spain. The authors conclude that climate change could disturb nuclear waste left in Greenland and the Marshall Islands. “Rising sea levels could spread contamination in RMI, and conflicting risk assessments cause residents to distrust radiological information from the US Department of Energy,” the report says.

    In Greenland, chemical pollution and radioactive liquid are frozen in ice sheets, left over from a nuclear power plant on a US military research base where scientists studied the potential to install nuclear missiles. The report didn’t specify how or where nuclear contamination could migrate in the Pacific or Greenland, or what if any health risks that might pose to people living nearby. However, the authors did note that in Greenland, frozen waste could be exposed by 2100.

    “The possibility to influence the environment is there, which could further affect the food chain and further affect the people living in the area as well,” said Hjalmar Dahl, president of Inuit Circumpolar Council Greenland. The country is about 90 percent Inuit. “I think it is important that the Greenland and US governments have to communicate on this worrying issue and prepare what to do about it.”

    The authors of the GAO study wrote that Greenland and Denmark haven’t proposed any cleanup plans, but also cited studies that say much of the nuclear waste has already decayed and will be diluted by melting ice. However, those studies do note that chemical waste such as polychlorinated biphenyls, man-made chemicals better known as PCBs that are carcinogenic, “may be the most consequential waste at Camp Century.”

    The report summarizes disagreements between Marshall Islands officials and the US Department of Energy regarding the risks posed by US nuclear waste. The GAO recommends that the agency adopt a communications strategy for conveying information about the potential for pollution to the Marshallese people.

    Nathan Anderson, a director at the Government Accountability Office, said that the United States’ responsibilities in the Marshall Islands “are defined by specific federal statutes and international agreements.” He noted that the government of the Marshall Islands previously agreed to settle claims related to damages from US nuclear testing.

    “It is the long-standing position of the US government that, pursuant to that agreement, the Republic of the Marshall Islands bears full responsibility for its lands, including those used for the nuclear testing program.”

    To Tibon, who is back home in the Marshall Islands and is currently chair of the National Nuclear Commission, the fact that the report’s only recommendation is a new communications strategy is mystifying. She’s not sure how that would help the Marshallese people.

    “What we need now is action and implementation on environmental remediation. We don’t need a communication strategy,” she said. “If they know that it’s contaminated, why wasn’t the recommendation for next steps on environmental remediation, or what’s possible to return these lands to safe and habitable conditions for these communities?”

    The Biden administration recently agreed to fund a new museum to commemorate those affected by nuclear testing as well as climate change initiatives in the Marshall Islands, but the initiatives have repeatedly failed to garner support from Congress, even though they’re part of an ongoing treaty with the Marshall Islands and a broader national security effort to shore up goodwill in the Pacific to counter China.

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