Uranium Film Festival Comes to Navajo Nation Dec 2-4

The International Uranium Film Festival makes a stop at the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock, Arizona this December 2nd through the 4th, bringing three days of insightful documentaries that reveal stories of many First Nations and aboriginal peoples worldwide whose historical lands have been used for radioactive minerals mining and nuclear waste disposal - often with little regard for the health, safety, and security of the communities involved. The Southwestern United States was an epicenter of wartime and peacetime uranium mining from the Cold War onwards; the Navajo Nation only one of sadly many who have suffered its lasting ill consequences.

The [International Uranium Film Festival] is the world's only traveling film festival devoted to the entire Nuclear Fuel Chain, from uranium mining to uranium tailings and nuclear waste, from Hiroshima to Fukushima and Fallujah.

The festival will make its way from Albuquerque (Nov. 27-28) to Santa Fe (Nov. 30-Dec. 1), to Window Rock and finally to Washington D.C. and New York City in early 2014. The founder of the IUFF, Norbert G. Suchanek of Germany, will be present at each screening along with Executive Director Marcia Gomes de Oliveira of Brazil and various producers and directors of the films. Each screening is organized by a diverse group of volunteers to bring these films to the wide screen.

Because of the tremendous impact uranium mining has had on Diné peoples, while these films are playing in the theatre of the Navajo Nation Museum, there will be several organizations coming together on the side to dialogue about the uranium legacy issues still plaguing the Navajo Nation and the new uranium mining permit applications threatening nearby communities and Sacred Sites. Community groups, residents and allies will meet for the two and a half days at the museum and in the local area. Online video streaming will be available via ustream.com during selected hours of the event.

The film festival's schedule and more details are also available on their Facebook page.

Argonne National Laboratory Energy Showcase: Photo Slideshow

As promised, Part Two of our coverage of the Saturday, September 15th Argonne Energy Showcase open house event. Our video highlights can be seen in the first installment of our Energy Showcase posts. Here's our full Flickr slideshow of over 50 photos with captions. Top: "Now, That's Cold!" Argonne researcher explains the technology behind the ATLAS (Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System) facility, the world's first superconducting linear accelerator for heavy ions. The object on the table is a model section of ATLAS' "superconducting split-ring resonator."

Center: "Hot or Not?" This very popular FLIR imaging exhibit in the Nuclear Energy building allowed visitors to see live video of themselves in the room with color-coded temperature gradients. As you can see, some people are literally hotter than others. A similar station set up in the Advanced Photon Source (401) complex let visitors take home a snapshot printout of their FLIR scans.

For even more images, visit Argonne National Lab's official Flickr photostream.

Bottom: "Clean and Green" One of the several advanced hybrid electric vehicles in the Sustainable Energy Tent. Some of the other new technologies on display were demonstrations of biofuel generation using fermented waste, vehicle charging stations, and an area where visitors could ride the "Energy Bike" to see how much pedaling they have to do to light up a conventional incandescent light bulb, versus the effort needed to make LED and compact fluorescent devices glow. As we can vouch, it takes a lot less legwork to make those clean and green LED's shine!

'Meltdowns' Making Safer Reactors: CEA's PLINIUS Platform and Finland's VTT

[See also "Alexander Borovoi: Chernobyl Explorer"]

The mention of the word meltdown conjures our deepest fears about nuclear power: an out-of-control reactor core collapsing into molten radioactive "lava" that consumes metal, reactor housings, concrete foundations - even, as cautionary tales warn, the ground beneath the reactor itself. While the "China Syndrome" is thankfully just a frightening fiction, complete or partial meltdowns have occurred in several severe accidents, notably Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and most recently at three of Fukushima Daiichi's reactors. Recent European studies have even suggested that the likelihood of a severe accident is much higher than previously thought:

"Based on the operating hours of all civil nuclear reactors and the number of nuclear meltdowns that have occurred, scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz and the Cyprus Institute have calculated that such events may occur once every 10 to 20 years (based on the current number of reactors) - some 200 times more often than estimated in the past."

Clearly, one important goal must be designing reactors that resist losing structural integrity in the event of an accident or meltdown, that can reliably withstand molten corium's extreme temperatures without breaching containment. Our scientific understanding has been limited in the past by the difficulty of studying meltdowns during actual emergencies, and in recreating their volcanic conditions in a controlled environment. This is one of the reasons why the innovative prototypic core melt research being performed at facilities like CEA's PLINIUS Platform, and the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, is crucial in developing new building materials for safer nuclear plants, as well as learning to prevent meltdowns and minimizing environmental exposure should one occur.

PLINIUS is an experimental platform for the study of severe accidents using prototypic corium, laboratory-created high-temperature molten mixtures containing depleted uranium oxides that recreate the "melt" of theoretical "meltdowns".

Its four facilities study different aspects of corium formation and behavior: VULCANO is a "50-100 kg corium melting facility," where oxides and metals are combined in a rotating cylindrical furnace and melted using induction heating, transferred plasma arc technology, or through exothermic redox reactions ("uranium thermite"). The "melt" is then poured into a test section of concrete, ceramic, or other material to study flow patterns, chemistry, and resulting material structure. COLIMA is a smaller, enclosed induction-heated unit that allows study of corium/gas interaction and aerosol formation, while KROTOS is used to observe and measure the behavior of small (~5kg) quantities of corium when dropped into water. As PLINIUS' site understatedly describes, "energetic steam explosions can be triggered and studied":

Heat transfer between the hot molten core with the colder volatile water [in KROTOS] is so intense and rapid that the timescale for heat transfer is shorter than the timescale for pressure relief, leading to the formation of a shock wave. This shock wave is intensified as a result of further mixing and energy transfer as it travels through the mixture.

The smallest of PLINIUS' facilities, VITI, (image above is a tiny molten corium droplet in the VITI crucible) specializes in tests using corium samples of less than 100 grams, mainly used for thermophysical/thermochemical property analysis, or controlled-atmosphere material interaction tests.

While Finland's Technical Research Center (VTT) conducts international applied industrial research and analysis in a variety of fields, its nuclear reactor safety program has also developed advanced simulated reactor environmental modeling (APROS) and reactor aging studies, as well as joint corium melt research with CEA's PLINIUS. Ongoing research into the science behind meltdowns, such as the work being done at PLINIUS and VTT, will help create safer, more accident-proof nuclear reactors and containment structures for our world's endlessly growing need for cleaner energy.

CEA PLINUS Platform Research Links:

• The first PLINIUS-LACOMECO Workshop on Transnational Access to Large Severe Accident Research Infrastructures, held in Aix en Provence, October 26, 2010
• Joint PLINIUS VULCANO and VTT HECLA research: "Current European Experiments on 2D Molten Core Concrete Interaction: HECLA and VULCANO," Christophe Journeau, et al., (from International Conference on Advances in Nuclear Power Plants, ICAPP 2008. Anaheim, CA)
• "Research at the CEA in the field of safety in 2nd and 3rd generation light water reactors," P. Billot, Comptes Rendus Physique, Volume 13, Issue 4, May 2012, Pages 340–351, Science of nuclear safety post-Fukushima [PDF]
• PLINIUS Home
• "TRANSNATIONAL ACCESS TO THE PLINIUS PROTOTYPIC CORIUM EXPERIMENTAL PLATFORM," C. Journeau et al., (2003)
• "Corium Behaviour Research at CEA Cadarache: The PLINIUS prototypic corium experimental platform," P. Piluso, et al., (2002)
• "Two EU-funded tests in VULCANO to assess the effects of concrete nature on its ablation by molten corium," C. Journeau et al., (2010)

VTT Research Links:

• "Finland: VTT-led project aims to reduce disaster impact"
• VTT and Nuclear Energy Research, presentation by Rauno Rintamaa, Vice President, VTT Business Solutions at the Workshop for the Presentation of French offering in the field of nuclear energy as part of low carbon energies, Finlandia House, Helsinki, November 28, 2010 [PDF]
• VTT Nuclear Reactor Safety Analysis
• SAFIR2010 Program, March 11, Final Seminar of the Finnish National Research Programme on Reactor Safety
• "Molten Core Concrete/Interactions in Nuclear Accidents: Theory and Design of an Experimental Facility," T. Sevón, (ESPOO 2005), VTT Research Notes 2311 [PDF][Helsinki University of Technology dissertation]
• "HECLA experiments on interaction between metallic melt and hematite-containing concrete," by T. Sevón, Nuclear Engineering and Design, Volume 240, Issue 10, October 2010, Pages 3586–3593, 4th International Topical Meeting on High Temperature Reactor Technology (HTR 2008), with Regular Papers
• Serpent: a three-dimensional continuous-energy Monte Carlo reactor physics burnup calculation code from VTT

Got MOX?

Shikoku Electric Co.'s Ikata No. 3 reactor is likely to become the third facility in Japan to go "pluthermal" - to use MOX, or mixed-oxide, fuel for power generation. From the Asahi Shimbun:

Shikoku Electric Power Company...Monday informed the Ehime prefectural government of its plans to burn MOX nuclear fuel there by fiscal 2010.

Pluthermal power is controversial because it uses plutonium-uranium mixed oxide fuel, or MOX. Under this method, plutonium extracted from spent nuclear fuel is burned in reactors originally designed for uranium fuel. Pluthermal power is key to the nation's nuclear-fuel recycling program.

Critics warn the pluthermal method carries more health and safety risks to reactors originally designed to burn only uranium fuel. Shikoku Electric Power's plan follows those of Kansai Electric Power Co. and Kyushu Electric Power Co. Kansai Electric Power got the green light from the Fukui prefectural governor in March for its plan to burn MOX at its Takahama nuclear power plant. Kyushu Electric Power in late April notified the Saga prefectural government and the town of Genkai that it plans to burn MOX as early as 2009 at one of its reactors there.

Under Shikoku Electric Power's plan, no more than 16 of the 157 uranium-fuel elements in what are called fuel bundles-groups of fuel elements burned in a reactor-will initially be replaced with MOX at the No. 3 reactor in Ikata. The number of MOX elements will eventually be increased to about one-fourth of the bundle, with the maximum set at 40.

Greenaction-Japan is a organization which opposes the use of "pluthermal" (a Japanese term combining the words "plutonium" and "thermal") power, citing increased safety concerns:

Over the last several years the government and electric utilities have argued that the pluthermal program is a method of recycling precious resources. They claim that it is in Japan's best interest to extract the uranium and plutonium contained in spent nuclear fuel rather than directly disposing of it as some countries do. The argument used is that Japan is an energy poor country which needs to conserve uranium resources and use plutonium for energy security purposes.

Recently promoters of the pluthermal program have begun to argue that the program is also necessary in order to reduce the amount of surplus plutonium accumulated as a result of overseas reprocessing. Since mid- 2001, the Japanese government and electric utilities have put forward yet another argument for the pluthermal program. They claim that without the pluthermal program Japanese nuclear power plants would be unable to continue to produce power...The use of MOX fuel increases the risk and severity of a nuclear accident. When using MOX fuel, the control rods' capacity to function is reduced and power output is less stable and harder to control.

The NRC has a quarterly publication called the MOX: Mixed Oxide Fuels Newsletter, "published quarterly to highlight recent news and events associated with the NRC's licensing of a mixed oxide fuel fabrication facility." The lastest March 2004 issue [PDF file] among other things, talks about the

...October 2003...DOE fil[ing of] an application for license to export up to 140 kilograms of plutonium dioxide to the Cadarache and MELOX MOX fuel fabrication facilities in France. The plutonium would be used to fabricate four MOX fuellead test assemblies, which would be returned to the U.S. for proposed MOX fuel qualification tests in the Catawba Nuclear Power Station. [a two-unit power plant located on Lake Wylie in York County, S.C.]

MOX is (pardon the pun) a highly-charged topic in the United States as well, as the anti-mixed-oxide site Nix-MOX clearly demonstrates with its "Top 10 Reasons to Oppose the Use of MOX":

"MOX IS A BAD IDEA!! MOX infrastructure supplies all the pieces needed for making plutonium a desirable commodity, while it claims to dispose of it. MOX legitimizes the production of plutonium by foreign countries, and creates a market for something that could used in a weapon of mass destruction. Plutonium is dangerous and should be kept out of our economy and out of our commercial reactors."

Vaseline Glass: That Warm, Radioactive Glow!

Ever heard of "Vaseline Glass"? It's a type of collectible antique glassware that's usually clear or slightly milky yellow (like the petroleum jelly it's named for) or yellow-green, but its most unusual characteristsic is that it glows brilliantly under ultraviolet light. That's because the distinctive color is produced by the introduction of uranium salts into the glass melt - and yes, it is radioactive...the higher the Geiger counter reading, the more you're guaranteed of its authenticity.

There's apparently a large cult market for uranium glass pieces, which range in age from the 19th century to the 1930's - but none more recent, probably because radioactivity got such a bad reputation following the advent of the Bomb - after World War II, "radiation chic" fell out of vogue. You might be familiar with the story of Fiestaware™ pottery, certain types of which were crafted with a sightly radioactive ceramic glaze - while hard to find, the 'hot' pieces are hot collectibles, fetching high prices.

One UK website that sells Vaseline Glass offers certification of Geiger counter readings, which range from about 300 cps for a small Czech candle-shaped tray, to a blazing 8400 cps for an English 19th Century wine glass. That goblet must have put quite the kick in your nightcap. One piece is listed at a whopping 22,600 counts-per-second, but I hope that's a typo; if it were really that 'hot', you'd probably have to handle it with lead gloves. Still, I'm not too convinced it's a great idea to keep radiant collectibles like this in one's china cupboards, much less actually use them, although some sources say that the actual radiation doses received from these pieces is not harmful.

A Japanese Vaseline Glass collector's site

(The above beautiful image of glowing vaseline glass appears on Webshots.com, photo by tmwalaska.)