(This is part 4 on the element found in "dangerous nuclear waste," Technetium.)
(Immediate disclaimer for anyone not familiar with my position: This is a pro-nuclear diary.)
I live in New Jersey. When people think of New Jersey, often the first thing that comes to their minds is the New Jersey Turnpike, which is a pathway for self-propelled vehicles that are propelled by burning dangerous fossil fuels and dumping dangerous fossil fuel wastes into the atmosphere. The New Jersey Turnpike - which was built in the early 1950's in two years - was once conceived as being extremely modern and was considered to represent the "transportation future."
People who predicted that - that the turnpike would represent "the future" proved to be right. Self propelled vehicles that burned dangerous fossil fuels and released dangerous fossil fuel waste, vehicles that had been growing in popularity for decades, became the primary transport for the vast majority of New Jersyans, in particular, and Americans in general.
To provide the dangerous fossil fuels that run the self propelled vehicles that remain extremely popular in New Jersey, it was necessary to process billion ton quantities (measured over the years) of dangerous crude oil and a convenient place to do this processing - being near locations where the dangerous fossil fuels were being used - was of course New Jersey.
Many people around the world have been to New Jersey and driven on the New Jersey Turnpike and seen, from the Turnpike between exits 11 and exit 14, the huge complex of refineries and fossil fuel storage tanks that belch out dangerous fumes there. Many people, not traveling much beyond this region assume that this is all there is to New Jersey.
When I moved to New Jersey from California, friends of mine who lived in the Los Angeles area wondered to themselves how on earth I could move to New Jersey, which they knew only as refineries lining a turnpike. To return their taunts, I reminded them that the Los Angeles basin is chock full of dangerous fossil fuel refineries as well as many sites where dangerous fossil fuels are pumped out of the ground. I also reminded them that their air was some of the most famous dangerous fossil fuel waste dumping sites in the world. There is so much dangerous fossil fuel waste dumped in the air of Los Angeles that you can go for quite some time without recognizing that the Los Angeles basin is a basin. It's surrounded by mountains but often the air gets so full of dangerous fossil fuel waste that it loses its transparency and one cannot see the mountains. I have spent quite a bit of time in the Los Angeles basin, and have gone weeks without seeing the mountains.
So much for my friends in California. This diary entry is not about surfing under the brown haze in Manhattan Beach, oblivious to the refineries of El Segundo. This is a diary about technetium, an element found in what some people call, not me, "dangerous nuclear waste."
Another thing that is going on in New Jersey is that our Democratic Governor, John Corzine, has signed a proclamation trying to control the most dangerous of all dangerous fossil fuel wastes, carbon dioxide. It's one of those "by 2020" proclamations declaring that New Jersey should meet the Kyoto Protocol targets,, in other words, that New Jersey should limit it's production of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide to the same level as it was in 1990. It happens that 1990 was around the time that I moved here and many people told me that New Jersey was not a nice place to live because of dangerous fossil fuel waste dumped in the atmosphere.
Hmmmmm...
Kyoto, if you want my opinion, was not enough, not even close.
But even if our Governor is proclaiming that we should do something even if it's hardly enough, setting a goal is hardly the same as accomplishing a task. It is fine to talk about where the next generation should be, but climate change - with all that implies for New Jersey, will not become an issue in 2020. It is an issue now.
My friend "Phantom Power" over at Democratic Underground recently linked a website where you can see graphically what climate change will do to New Jersey for any level of sea rise.
The Oyster Creek Nuclear Plant, near the place I swim in the ocean, is up for relicense. It is the oldest operating nuclear power plant in the United States.
According to this link, if we fail to address climate change, the Oyster Creek Nuclear Station and the entire neighboring towns, all wonderful, populated beach cities on the Jersey shore will be no more.
See the effect of climate change anywhere on earth using this interactive map.
I just used it to look at the Jersey Shore.
Oh. Oh. I can see the headlines: "Nuclear Plant Under Water!"
I am surprised that Greenpeace types aren't all over this. On the other hand maybe they are. I have a low tolerance for their line of pathetic consumerist crap, to be honest, and don't care what they say.
This reminds me of the terrible situation when the Turkey Point Nuclear Power Plant experienced a direct hit from Hurricane Andrew killing everyone in Florida and when the Waterford Nuclear Power Plant killed everyone in Louisiana after being struck by Hurricane Katrina and when everyone in Texas was killed by the destruction of the South Texas Nuclear Plant when it was hit by hurricane Rita.
Just kidding.
Here is something that Greenpeace types, Public Citizen types, and other organizations where you can't work if you have an engineering degree, are all over:
The Oyster Creek Nuclear Station, again the oldest operating nuclear plant in the United States is suffering from corrosion. In spite of this corrosion, people nevertheless are arguing to extend the license of this plant for another twenty years.
What?
Are they crazy?
It's corroding!
Some more information about the Oyster Creek Nuclear Plant:
The plant was constructed in 4 years, with construction beginning on January 16, 1965 and the plant beginning full commercial operations on December 23, 1969, a few months after the first human steps on the surface of the moon and during the height of the disastrous war in Vietnam. Richard Nixon was the new President of the United States.
The plant has a power rating of 636MWe and as of 2004, operated at 88.3% of this capacity. This was down from 2003, when the plant operated at 98.9% of capacity. (Maybe it was shut for part of 2004 for refueling or maintenance - I don't know.) It produced in 2004, 16% of the nuclear generated electricity in New Jersey, or - if you consider that half of the electricity in New Jersey is generated by nuclear means - 8% of New Jersey's electricity. Eight percent of New Jersey's electricity is easily much larger than the all other greenhouse gas free electricity produced in New Jersey.
The plant is corroding.
I'm foul mouthed, so let me curse. What the fuck?
The engineers who built the Oyster Creek Nuclear Station came from an age when American Engineering was simply the best engineering in the world. They built that plant in 4 years, and it provided clean electricity to this state for almost 40 years. When I turn on my CFL light bulbs in my house, they are partially powered by the Oyster Creek Nuclear Station. When I bought a hedge trimmer, I bought one that was electric, not gasoline powered. Why? Because it is 8% driven by the Oyster Creek Nuclear Power Plant. The people who built that plant built when I was in high school. Thank you "people who built that plant." You provided for a future generation. That would be me.
The plant is corroding.
OF COURSE IT'S CORRODING. The plant contains a miracle substance, water. If you owned a 1969 Pontiac Tempest, like I did, and drove it for a long time, like I did, you recognize that yes, water is corrosive. Things do rust. It always has been so and it always will be. Thus if you were building a device in 1969 - or if you are planning to build one in 2009 - you should account for corrosion. It's normal. You should have expected it if you were a good engineer.
Now, does every corroded object fail? Well, my 1969 Pontiac Tempest failed. However my 1969 Pontiac Tempest was not expected to last forever. It's a good thing too. It burned a hell of a lot of dangerous fossil fuels. The car I drive today burns nowhere near as much.
The Oyster Creek Nuclear Station was not expected to last forever either. It was thought that it would last until 2009, at least, though, because the engineers built tolerances into it.
A tolerance is something you put in an object to allow it to experience worst cases and then some. For instance, if you live near a bridge that says "Vehicles over 3000 pounds prohibited," like I do, this does not mean that if you drive a Lincoln Navigator over the bridge that you will fall into the river below the bridge. This is because the engineers built a tolerance into the bridge in case someone was actually stupid enough to drive a Lincoln Navigator (which weighs over 6000 pounds) over the bridge even though the sign warns them not to do so. Assholes near where I live drive Lincoln Navigators over narrow bridges with such signs all the time. They never actually fall in the rivers, although they could in fact, blame no one but themselves if they did, since there was a sign warning them not to do that.
In 1969, when Oyster Creek was finished the longest experience that anyone in the United States had with a commercial nuclear power plant was 12 years. Of course the reactor was planned before it was built. For all I know, the design phase might have started in 1961. That wouldn't be surprising. Thus Oyster Creek was initially conceived with as little as four years of operating experience. Thus, there were a lot of things still outside experience, like running a reactor for a decade, for instance. The engineers working during the Kennedy administration pulled out their slide rules, and estimated how long the plant might last. Of course, no one at the time had any data at all on what 40 years of irradiation with a neutron flux might do to a material. Still, they were not exactly cavemen either, apparently, because their reactor worked and some of the things it was supposed to do, like make money.
Good job guys (and gals - as the case might be - though engineering was not highly populated with women in 1961.)
These folks didn't have all of our modern sophisticated methods. Computer modeling, if not in its infancy, was fetal, just past conception. It was very difficult to find a self consistent set of approximated solutions of the Bateman equations and probably there was a lot of fudging and drawing graphs on graph paper and measuring the slope with a ruler.
Of course engineers underestimate their machines all the time. The Mars pathfinder robots were designed to last for 90 days and have operated on the surface of Mars for more than two years. No one is calling to shut them down because they exceed the design specifications of their designers. (But they are solar powered and they do operate on Mars and not New Jersey.
A lot of people thought it was a bad idea to build nuclear power plants in the 1950's and 1960's. Some of them were famous nuclear scientists, like the Strangelovian Edward Teller, father of the "Hydrogen Bomb." Lots of people don't know this but Teller was called by some in the nuclear community of the time "the reactor opposer."
Now it may seem strange that Doctor Teller thought that being Dr. Strangelove - wiring the planet for hair trigger nuclear war - was safer than running nuclear reactors to produce power, but nonetheless it is so. (Of course the type of reactor Dr. Teller knew best, the B reactor at Hanford, had a very similar design to Chernobyl's reactor - so he wasn't entirely out to lunch.)
But geeky 1960's engineers built Oyster Creek anyway, blowing off Dr. Teller's concerns. It still runs.
There is no reason to assume that the engineers of the 1960's were being overly optimistic in their estimation of how long the reactor would remain stable and safe, even with some corrosion.
Of course in the 1960's there was lots of science that was well known, but a lot of what we know today about materials science was unimagined in those days. I mean in 1961, plastic - polyethylene for instance - was a cool new thing.
Once I went to a meeting of chemists where the famous combinatorial chemist Peter G. Schultz was giving a lecture.
Famous chemists sometimes like to put up slides of the periodic table and something about their work. The famous organic chemist Barry Trost, for instance, once put up a slide where the element Palladium was 18 times (I'm estimating) larger than every other element. He called his slide, "The Periodic Table According to Trost."
Peter G. Schultz is famous for all kinds of work relating to drug discovery, using a technique called combinatorial chemistry which is advertised as "chemically directed evolution." In this scheme people make chemicals randomly (in a sense) but in a way that they can record and test the chemicals to see if do something useful. This is considered a big idea. Lots of start up drug companies have been built around this idea. Like the compounds, some companies didn't work and others did.
Peter Schultz looked at this idea and thought it would have great application to materials science. So when he produced a slide the periodic table, he was taking about something completely different than new drugs to cure hair loss and impotence. He said - and I'm paraphrasing here - "only a small subset of mixtures of the elements have been explored."
For instance, nobody knows what the shear modulus of an alloy that is 2% Vanadium, 7% nickel, 8% cobalt and 73% titanium is.
You could substitute any element of course, like the metal technetium for instance.
I have noted in previous diaries that the world supply of technetium is about 80 metric tons, but some of it has been lost by dumping it in the ocean. One group of people who have dumped a lot of technetium into the ocean are those nasty British, who have dumped technetium into the ocean at their nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at Sellafield.
Recently Sellafield reduced its technetium discharges by 90%, and now recovers more than 140 kg of technetium each year. A few kg still get out into the sea, and apparently, according to the Norwegian lutefisk industry, all atoms of technetium are blessed with high intelligence that makes it possible for them to find lutefisk to which they can attach themselves.
So what should the British do with the other 140 kg? Well it happens that potassium pertechnate (a molecule containing technetium, oxygen and potassium) is one the most potent corrosion inhibitors known. No one knows exactly how it works, but the situation is extraordinary. About 10 milligrams per liter of pertechnate either as the ammonium salt or the potassium salt offers extraordinary protection of steels against corrosion. It is in fact, one of the most potent anticorrosive agents known, several orders of magnitude more active for this purpose than chromium agents that are sometimes used today. Further, steel alloys of technetium are known to be extremely corrosion resistant.
I cannot think of a place better fitted to use pertechnate ion, or for that matter a steel/technetium alloy, than in the core of a nuclear reactor. In the pertechnate case a reactor with a million liters of water in the core would require about ten kilos of technetium used this way. Thus the annual output of Sellafield could, vastly slow the normal corrosion of about 14 nuclear reactors of this size.
It is interesting to note that the technetium would not remain indefinitely in the reactor, since it would be necessarily converted, depending on the neutron flux, into the volatile compound ruthenium tetroxide, through transmutation. It might be a problem that some of the ruthenium (which would not be radioactive) might plate out on some components, but it is difficult to imagine this being all that much of a problem over the lifetime of a reactor.
It is interesting to ask what the properties of technetium metal itself are. They are indeed extraordinary. Technetium is a refractory element, meaning that it has a high melting point. In fact the melting point of the metal is higher than the melting point of zirconium, a metal widely used in building nuclear reactors. (The melting point of technetium is about 2160C). In fact there are only a few metals with melting points higher than technetium's, including tungsten, molybdenum, hafnium and tantalum and some rare metals like ruthenium (also accessible from so called "nuclear waste") the technetium analog rhenium, and a few others. (The metal hafnium, a neutron absorber that must be removed from zirconium used to make nuclear reactors, has been used in the control rods of small nuclear reactors such as those used on submarines.)
Most nuclear reactors have their temperatures controlled by the presence of water, of course, even if the water is pressurized so as to remain liquid at high temperatures or if it is supercritical, a state that is neither liquid nor gas. Few reactors are designed to run at even the melting point of zirconium (1855C).
Moreover technetium has other remarkable properties as well. The metal's "Young's Modulus" a measure of resistance to stress and strain makes it stronger than steel for instance:
Young's modulus for Technetium and other elements.
Note that there is only about 80 tons of technetium on earth, and much has already been lost through dumping, sadly not enough to much machining. Many metals that are potentially highly useful are rare, technetium among them. The difference is, however, that technetium can be made. Of course it is radioactive. Certain of its nuclear properties, including ability to absorb neutrons and be transmuted into ruthenium, mean that technetium metal has draw backs as a structural material. But the question of alloys is quite another matter. As the chemist Schultz suggested, the properties of most alloys are simply unknown. The remarkable properties of technetium however suggest that we should find out about its alloys however, especially now that the age of robotics has commenced.
One thing is certain: We want any nuclear reactors we build to last a long time, longer than Oyster Creek has lasted up to now. Thus we need to analyze the chemical implications of technetium additives in reactor systems. It is just stupid not to do so.
I am running out of time for now. I may have more to say about technetium in the future, or maybe not.