The 1970 edition of the “Radiological Health Handbook” published by United States Public Health Service (US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare) is one of the most coveted and difficult to obtain publications in the world of rad health. It has been a staple of the industry as a reference work for 40 years in the world of radiation protection. Radiological Control Technicians (RCT – the DOE term for the profession) and Health Physics Technicians (the commercial nuclear power term for the field) use it to this day as a reference for dose calculations, determining shielding requirements, and more.
I was incredibly lucky to obtain a copy of the book via another RPT back in the day when I needed it. It’s been sitting on my shelf for several years now, but I’m trying to clean out material possessions. A search of the Internet revealed that nobody had yet taken apart their copy, scanned it, and made it available online, at least that I could find.
The very meaty middle of the Rad Health Handbook consists of the periodic table, chart of the nuclides, and table of isotopes as it existed in January 1970. These three pieces are both copyrighted (the government was given special permission by the copyright holders to reprint at the time) and are INCREDIBLY out of date. Otherwise, everything else in the book appears to be public domain, as it was published by the US Government at taxpayer expense. Therefore, I have removed those three particular sections and created the best quality scan that I could — this is the result of 6 attempts.
For an updated version of the Chart of the Nuclides, which every RCT should own anyway, the current version is always published by whomever is running the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory (operated by the Navy’s Naval Reactors Program). The current contractor is Bechtel Marine Propulsion Corporation. To order a copy, NuclidesChart.com, or call 865-220-2327. Get the book, it’s more convenient than the wall chart for day to day use. I have the last Lockheed version, the 16th edition, from 2002, and it’s about 90 pages, so pretty compact.
Even with the nuclide chart and other stuff omitted, the PDF is 15 MB and almost 300 pages. Also bear in mind that while this is a great reference piece, you should obviously rely on your Navy, DOE, or utility guidance first and foremost when it comes to procedures for radiation protection.
Click here to download the Radiological Health Handbook.
Regardless of your personal feelings about nuclear power, it is a dominant means of electrical power generation in the industrialized world. With the growing public and political pressure against the burning of fossil fuels, and with alternative energy sources such as wind and solar only being capable of generating power during daylight or when the wind blows, nuclear energy is experiencing a resurgence as an alternative to fossil fuel plants as a means of producing more of our baseline energy needs.
As such, I think it’s important for people to understand some basic science and engineering principles behind nuclear power, as knowledge is the most powerful thing in the world. It’s been a long time since I’ve written much about nuclear power, but the time has definitely come to revisit the topic.
Let’s start with the most basic question: Big picture, how does a nuclear power plant generate electricity?
The tongue-in-cheek answer that is thrown around by people in the industry is this: “Hot rock make steam make turbine go roundy-roundy.”
Let’s break that down into a little bit more detail.
You’re probably aware that friction between two things creates heat, like when your brakes get hot because two surfaces are rubbing together. For the brakes on your car, there is an energy conversion process going on. The energy of the motion of your car (kinetic energy) is being turned into heat energy via friction. So, your car stops, but your brakes get hot (and wear away part of your brake pads every time you stop).
Something similar happens inside a nuclear reactor. Every atom in a reactor core that fissions breaks up into chunks, and each of these chunks is sent flying for a very short distance by the little fission blast. These chunks are slowed down by interaction with other matter in the reactor, and that interaction converts the motion energy of the chunk into heat. Since there are a LOT of these tiny interactions going on, it creates a lot of heat overall. Therefore, we have our hot rock.
What happens when you throw water onto a hot rock, like in a sauna? Most of it flashes to steam. If you contain that steam within an enclosed container, it will build pressure. Something similar happens in a nuclear power plant: Our hot rock is cooled by passing another substance over it (usually water, but other things work, too, but that’s beyond the scope of this post). When that water heats up inside it’s container, it builds pressure. Actually, a LOT of pressure.
If you’ve ever seen a windmill operate, then this next part will make obvious sense. Just as a windmill’s blades turn when wind runs through it, the blades of a turbine are constructed so that when high pressure steam is passed over them, it forces the turbine to turn. Since we’re talking about really high steam pressure, we’re also talking about spinning our turbine really fast.
The other end of that turbine shaft is what’s connected to the electric generator. The speed of the generator has to be regulated in order to maintain the proper output voltage and frequency for transmission to your home, which is done via steam regulators and controlling the rate of the nuclear reaction to produce no more steam than is really necessary.
It should be noted that many of the components of a nuclear power plant are almost identical to any other power plant. Almost all power plants rely on a steam cycle system (often referred to as the “secondary system”), and the steam system components could literally be moved from one plant to another, hooked up, and be up in running. What makes each plant unique is what makes the steam. You can boil water with many heat sources: burning coal, burning natural gas, burning oil, burning methane from biofuels, etc. A nuclear reactor is just another means of creating heat to boil water, but with no greenhouse emissions (yes, there are obviously other issues — we’ll get into those in future posts).
I hope this was useful to somebody out there on the Interwebs. I’ll add to this series over time, delving into different aspects of the primary plant, including everybody’s favorite issue, that of radioactive waste. For the really geeky, I’ll get into reactor physics, stuff like neutron capture cross sections, the neutron lifecycle, fission fragment ratios, reactor poisons, and one of my favorite subjects – reactor startup delays due to decay product buildup (I always thought it kind of funny that operating our reactors created something that prevented us from starting our reactors once we shut them down…yeah, I’m a nerd).
Until my next post, be great, be happy!
~Jassen Bowman