February 2017
Geiger Readings for Feb 21, 2016
Latitude 47.704656 Longitude -122.318745
Ambient office = 118 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 118 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 121 nanosieverts per hour
Nuclear Reactors 260 - New Process For Extracting Uranium From Seawater
Although currently uranium is mined from a variety of ore deposits worldwide, it is also possible to extract uranium from seawater. It is estimated that there are over four and a half billion tons of uranium in the water of the world's oceans. If it could be economically extracted, it could supply fifteen terawatts generated by conventional reactors for over five thousand years.
Geiger Readings for Feb 20, 2016
Latitude 47.704656 Longitude -122.318745
Ambient office = 120 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 146 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 165 nanosieverts per hour
Geiger Readings for Feb 19, 2016
Ambient office = 129 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 95 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 105 nanosieverts per hour
Geiger Readings for Feb 18, 2016
Latitude 47.704656 Longitude -122.318745
Ambient office = 154 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 83 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 91 nanosieverts per hour
Nuclear Reactors 259 - New System For Automatically Finding Cracks In Nuclear Reactor Components
As nuclear power plants age, they are subjected to "cracking, fatigue, embrittlement of metal components, wear, erosion, corrosion and oxidation." Embrittlement is a is the formation of cracks in the steel components over time as they are bombarded by neutrons. This creates tiny holes inside the crystal matrix of the steel. These tiny holes combine to form bigger and bigger holes that eventually become visible cracks. It is a major problem at nuclear power plants.
Geiger Readings for Feb 17, 2016
Latitude 47.704656 Longitude -122.318745
Ambient office = 78 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 146 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 180 nanosieverts per hour
Radioactive Waste 218 - Research In Robotic Systems For Cleaning Up The Sellafield Site In The United Kingdom
Sellafield is a nuclear fuel reprocessing and nuclear decommissioning site, is northwest of London on the Irish Sea. A great deal of the development and manufacture of U.K. nuclear weapons took place there from the 1950s on. Hundreds of tons of radioactive waste were stored in huge cooling pools and ignored as the facilities deteriorated.
Geiger Readings for Feb 16, 2016
Latitude 47.704656 Longitude -122.318745
Ambient office = 88 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 149 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 133 nanosieverts per hour
Radioactive Waste 217 - U.S. District Court OKs Transportation Of Toxic Liquid Radioactive Waste From Canada To U.S. For Reprocessingc
Last August, I wrote a post about plans by the U.S. Department of Energy to ship nuclear waste by truck twelve hundred miles from Canada's Chalk River Laboratory near Ottawa to Savannah River in Georgia. The U.S.
Geiger Readings for Feb 15, 2016
Latitude 47.704656 Longitude -122.318745
Ambient office = 58 nanosieverts per hour
Ambient outside = 135 nanosieverts per hour
Soil exposed to rain water = 129 nanosieverts per hour
Nuclear Reactors 258 - Low Powered KiloPower Nuclear Reactors Being Designed For Space Missions
I have mentioned thermionic power generators that use plutonium-238 to provide power for space probes in past posts. Recently there have been some problems with obtaining sufficient Pu-238 for NASA deep space missions. Nuclear propulsion systems for large spacecraft have also been proposed for decades. With the recent expansion of private space industry, interest in nuclear propulsion has increased.