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Fission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

"Those tall tales around the cooling tower will explosively implode"

 

INT. CONTROL ROOM — HTR-PM REACTOR — DAY

The control room is a hive of activity. Engineers and technicians are seated at their consoles, monitoring various screens displaying real-time data from the reactor modules. The atmosphere is tense but focused. Large digital clocks on the walls show the current time and countdowns for the test phases.

LEAD ENGINEER (LI WEI), a seasoned professional in his late 40s, stands at the center, overseeing the operations. JUNIOR ENGINEER (MEI LING), in her early 30s, is at her station, eyes glued to her monitor. TECHNICIAN (ZHANG), a young and enthusiastic team member, is ready to execute commands.

LI WEI (voice steady) Alright team, we’re about to initiate the safety demonstration. Mei Ling, confirm the reactor modules are at 200 MWt.

MEI LING (nods) Confirmed, both modules are stable at 200 MWt.

LI WEI Good. Zhang, prepare to stop the normal energy transfer.

ZHANG (fingers poised over the keyboard) Ready, sir.

LI WEI On my mark… Three, two, one… Execute.

Zhang hits a series of keys. The screens flicker as the normal energy transfer is halted. The room holds its breath.

MEI LING Energy transfer stopped. Reactor temperatures are rising as expected.

LI WEI Now, disable the emergency core cooling systems.

ZHANG (disables the systems) Emergency core cooling systems disabled. Monitoring natural cooling process.

The screens show the reactor temperatures climbing to 1500°C. The team watches intently as the data streams by.

MEI LING Temperatures are stabilizing.

The screens show the reactor temperatures retreating to 1200°C.

LI WEI (smiles) Perfect. This is exactly what we wanted to see. The inherent safety features are working as designed.

ZHANG (enthusiastic) This is incredible. We’re witnessing history here.

The screens show the reactor temperatures falling to 800°C.

LI WEI Indeed we are. Let’s keep monitoring and ensure everything remains stable.

The team continues to monitor the data, their faces reflecting a mix of relief and pride. The control room buzzes with quiet excitement as the test progresses successfully.

FADE OUT.

This scene may have been something like what occurred one year ago during safety tests of China’s HTR-PM reactor in Shidao Bay (also known as Shidaowan), which is currently feeding power into the Shandong grid at 2×200 MWt power and has been doing so since December. Unlike a similar scene enacted in Russia on April 6, 1986, China’s new helium-cooled reactor passively stabilized without intervention and was soon able to resume normal operation.

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INT. CONTROL ROOM — CHERNOBYL REACTOR 4 — NIGHT

The control room is dimly lit, with the glow of control panels and monitors casting eerie shadows. The atmosphere is tense, with engineers and technicians focused on their tasks. DEPUTY CHIEF ENGINEER (DYATLOV), a stern man in his 50s, stands at the center, overseeing the test. SENIOR ENGINEER (AKIMOV), in his 40s, and JUNIOR ENGINEER (TOPTUNOV), in his 20s, are at their stations.

DYATLOV (voice commanding) Begin the test. Lower the reactor power to 700 MW.

TOPTUNOV (nervously) Power is dropping too fast. We’re below 700 MW.

AKIMOV (alarmed) We’re at 200 MW and still falling!

DYATLOV (irritated) Stabilize the power. Raise it back to 700 MW.

TOPTUNOV (struggling with controls) Trying, but it’s not responding as expected.

AKIMOV (urgently) We need to abort the test. The reactor is unstable.

DYATLOV (firmly) No. Continue with the test. Withdraw more control rods.

TOPTUNOV (hesitant) Withdrawing control rods… Power is rising, but it’s erratic.

AKIMOV (worried) This isn’t safe. We should stop.

DYATLOV (angrily) I said continue! Prepare for the emergency shutdown.

TOPTUNOV (presses the AZ-5 button) Emergency shutdown initiated.

Suddenly, alarms blare as the control rods jam. The room shakes violently.

AKIMOV (shouting) Explosion! We’ve had an explosion!

DYATLOV (stunned) What have we done?

The control room is thrown into chaos as the engineers scramble to understand the magnitude of the disaster unfolding before them. Smoke and debris fill the air, and the once orderly room descends into panic.

FADE OUT.

In Soviet Ukraine, the water-cooled reactor had flashed its coolant to steam, separated it into hydrogen and oxygen, and blown the lid off the pressure vessel and the building, contaminating Northern Europe, causing an estimated one million premature deaths and precipitating the collapse of the Soviet Union. In contrast, the China’s GEN-IV design is being hailed by some as a technological milepost comparable to commercial electricity, manned flight, or the internet. I think that misses the mark, but my analysis doesn’t come from engineering risks (Shidaowan has more than 2200 sets of first-of-a-kind equipment and more than 660 previously untried innovations) or my awareness that China plans to mass-produce and sell these powerplants to Pakistan, Syria, Jordan, Yemen, South Africa, Venezuela, Argentina and any other buyer, cash-up front or easy credit terms. It matters not whether they are in a war zone or have their own weapons ambitions (the reactors produce bomb-grade uranium and plutonium, and 200 dirty-bomb-worthy nuclear isotopes). China could even make its graphene fuel pellets with biochar and turn that electricity carbon negative, an added benefit if your country is running behind on its Paris commitments.

My concern is neither the engineering safety, the proliferation risk, nor the climate abatement potential. My concern is biology.

Poking Holes

Paging through a story in Rolling Stone published January 21, 2020, I came across a name that was familiar to me but perhaps not to many — Marvin Resnikoff.

“Is he still alive?” I asked myself.

Marvin Resnikoff wrote his PhD thesis the year I graduated High School — 1965. His favorite way of spending time was calculating (without the benefit of the HP-35 pocket calculator that wouldn’t be introduced until 1972) spin-orbit-split negative-parity baryon resonances in quarks. He came into my field of view in 1976 after he had completed a Fulbright in Chile and been recruited to Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG). At that time Resnikoff was teaching at SUNY-Buffalo and had been asked by students to look into the decommissioning of a nuclear reactor. That, and a contract to assay the environment of nuclear landfills for EPA, took him down the anti-nuke rabbit hole.

While I was heading up a non-profit public interest law project, the Shutdown Project (later the Natural Rights Center) and busy suing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission over non-accidental (planned) civilian deaths from all stages of the fuel cycle, Resnikoff won an EPA grant to study the NRC’s plan to recycle mixed-oxide fuels (such as plutonium) that would be necessary to sustain the industry after uranium ore was exhausted. In my lawsuits, I drew heavily upon his research into the incredibly dirty business of atomic recycling.

In 1983, Resnikoff produced a landmark study on transportation and storage of high-level waste, The Next Nuclear Gamble, and two books, Living Without Landfills, and Deadly Defense. In 1989, he formed Radioactive Waste Management Associates, a consulting firm he has headed ever since. He is 86.

What the Rolling Stone found interesting in Resnikoff’s work was his discovery, nearly a half-century ago, that nearly every drilling, mining, milling and disposal activity humans do, even if it has nothing to do with nuclear power or weapons, releases radioactivity to the natural environment. Poke a hole in the ground and out comes radon gas. Lofted up with it are a witch’s aroma of radioactive particulates resulting from the decay of minerals deep underground, including unstable isotopes of lead, polonium, bismuth, radium, potassium, carbon, hydrogen, uranium, and thorium. There are about 340 nuclides in nature, of which about 70 are radioactive.

Those Iron Horses that crossed the Great Plains spewed radioactive coal smoke and steam into the lungs of horse-riding nations and prairie dogs. The enslaved captives sent down into the hole to fetch silver at Cerro Rico de Potosi might have died young anyway, but after 1545, they were being killed by radiation diseases spread to the towns near the bellowed Castilian stone furnaces that smelted the ore and vaporized the deadly volatiles.

In the pre-industrial world, ambient levels of heavy metals and radioactivity contributed to what we might call “normal” or “background” levels of human and animal disease and death. There is no safe exposure. A radioactive particle entering your body in a banana (potassium-40) or a Brazil nut (radium) will damage your cells and genes for as long as it remains there. It will mutate your DNA, and the DNA in your sperm and eggs also. In the case of potassium-40, the half-life is 1.25 billion years, and while that might seem scary, it means that the decay rate is very slow, so the danger to you is slight. Radium is more complicated.

Radium Girls

Radium-226 is a product of the decay of uranium (235U and 238U) and thorium (232Th). It decays into 222Rn (3.82 day half-life), which is a noble gas. Beginning with radon — 222Rn, a series of six short-lived alpha and beta disintegrations occurs leading to lead — 210Pb (22.3 year half-life). This decays by beta emission to bismuth — 210Bi (5.01 day half-life), which in turn decays by beta particle into polonium — 210Po (138.4 day half-life). The last member of the 238U decay chain is stable lead — 206Pb.

The presence of radioactivity in crude petroleum was first detected at the beginning of the 20th century (Burton, 1904). Soon after, it was suggested that the high radium concentrations found at the bottom of the ocean resulted from the continuous supply of radium-enriched organic materials from above (Joly, 1908). Later on, this hypothesis was confirmed by experimental research (Pettersson, 1930; Piggot, 1933).

— Paschoa, A. S., and F. Steinhäusler. “Terrestrial, atmospheric, and aquatic natural radioactivity. Radioactiv. Environ. 17, 29–85.” (2010).

Beginning in the 1970s, Marvin Resnikoff started calculating what kind of damage those emissions were doing to us, health-wise. He needed to know that because he wanted to separate the health effects of man-made radiotoxins leaking from landfills at Maxey Flats, West Valley, Barnwell and other NRC-licensed sites. What he learned was that we aren’t just nuking ourselves from nukes. We are nuking ourselves from oil and gas, too. We are nuking ourselves when we mine lithium for electric cars. We are nuking ourselves when we mine quartz to make computer chips.

“Almost all materials of interest and use to the petroleum industry contain measurable quantities of radionuclides,” states a never-publicly released 1982 report by the American Petroleum Institute. Spurred on by the Manhattan Project, government geologists found uranium in oil-bearing layers in Michigan, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Texas. By the early 1970s, Exxon knew that radioactivity was building up in pumps and compressors at most of its gas plants.

What happened next makes the 8 million deaths from petroleum products annually look like a mosquito bite. We’ll explore that next week, and we will reveal why China’s nuclear gamble, along with Bill Gates’ nuclear venture in Wyoming, may come up snake eyes — busted, a total loss.

Oh, and when China’s new reactor eventually does have a meltdown, Michael Douglas plans to be there with a film crew, screenplay in hand. It will be called The America Syndrome.

This is the first of two parts. In the next part, we will look at Marvin’s Garden — the binding curve of ambient radioactivity that will finally begin to assert itself, bringing a close to the Atomic Era.

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