Ambient office  = 117 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 128 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 124 nanosieverts per hour

Red bell pepper from Central Market = 106 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 100 nanosieverts per hour

Filtered water = 89 nanosieverts per hour

    One of the most popular designs for a fusion reactor is the donut-shaped tokamak. A major problem with tokamaks is ensuring that the plasma that they contain has no impurities that would reduce the efficiency of the fusion reactions. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have discovered that sprinkling a powder into the plasma could assist in utilizing the super-hot  gas inside a tokamak fusion reactor to product heat that generates electricity without creating long-lived nuclear waste or releasing greenhouse gases.
     Fusion is the process that generates the radiation from stars. Light elements in a plasma are fused together to produce heavier elements and a huge amount of energy. The energy released to fuse hydrogen to helium is the greatest that fusion can produce. Every fusion process that moves up the periodic table produces less and less energy until iron is produced. After that, energy is required to produce fusion. Scientists hope that it will be possible to reproduce fusion in reactors on Earth. If this can be done, it would provide abundant power for human civilization without the problems of other forms of energy production.
    Robert Lunsford is a PPPL physicist and the lead author of the report on the fusion experiment which was published in the journal Nuclear Fusion. The report says, “The main goal of the experiment was to see if we could lay down a layer of boron using a powder injector. So far, the experiment appears to have been successful.”
    The boron prevents the element tungsten for leaching out of the walls of the tokamak reactor. Such leaching results in contamination of the plasma which, in turn, results in cooling. This makes the plasma fusion reactions much less efficient. A layer of boron is applied to the surfaces of the tokamak that face the plasma. This process is known as “boronization.” The plasma must be kept at as high a temperature as possible. It should be at least ten times as hot as the surface of the sun. This will maximize the fusion reactions and generate the maximum amount of heat to be converted into electricity.
     Currently, the way that boronization is carried out is through the use of diborane which is a boron gas. Lunsford said, “Diborane gas is explosive, so everybody has to leave the building housing the tokamak during the process. On the other hand, if you could just drop some boron powder into the plasma, that would be a lot easier to manage. While diborane gas is explosive and toxic, boron powder is inert. This new technique would be less intrusive and definitely less dangerous.”
     Another advantage of the use of boron powder instead of boron gas is that while the use of boron gas requires that the tokomak be turned off to apply it, boron powder can be used while the tokamak is running. If fusion power can be provided by a tokomak, then such reactors will have to run for long uninterrupted periods to be a reliable source of energy. Being able to apply boron without turning off the tokamak will be a major improvement. Lunsford said, “This is one way to get to a steady-state fusion machine. You can add more boron without having to completely shut down the machine.”
    There are other advantages in using what they refer to a boron powder “dropper”. One of these is that it is an easy way to create low-density fusion plasmas. This is useful because low density permits instabilities in the plasma to be easily suppressed by magnetic pulses. This is a simple way to improve plasma reactions. Physicists can use boron powder to create low-density plasmas while the tokamak is running instead of being forced to wait for a gas boronization to be carried out.
    Future research by Lunsford’s team will determine where exactly the boron goes after it is introduced into the plasma. Current theories suggest the boron powder goes to the top and bottom of the plasma chamber in the tokamak. This is what the plasma in a tokamak does. Lunsford says, “… it would be useful to have that hypothesis backed up by modeling, so we know the exact locations within the tokamak that are getting the boron layers.”

Ambient office  = 108 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 133 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 129 nanosieverts per hour

Red bell pepper from Central Market = 121 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 84 nanosieverts per hour

Filtered water = 63 nanosieverts per hour

Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
    The new Ring of Five report claims that the facilities at Mayak released two hundred and fifty terabecquerels (which is a measure of radioactivity) of ruthernium-106 into the atmosphere. The Kyshtym disaster mentioned above released approximately two thousand and seven hundred terabecquerels of ruthenium-106. The Chenobyl nuclear accident in Ukraine in 1986 is considered to be the worst nuclear accident in the history of the world. It is estimated that five million three hundred thousand terabecquerels of ruthenium-106 were released. This estimate comes from a study conducted in 2013.
    In order to trace the origins of the 2017 radiation plume over Europe, the researchers took over a thousand measurements of the wind over Europe in the fall of 2017. They took into account the altitude and direction of the wind and weather changes that may have affected to path of the wind. Their research indicated that the radioactive plume started in the Southern Ural mountains and was driven toward southwestern Russia. The plume traveled to Romania on the 29th of September and then divided into two streams.
    The main part of the divided plume headed to central Europe where it hit a rainstorm in Bulgaria. Samples of plants and soil from Bulgaria contained elevated levels of ruthenium-106. Following its encounter with the Bulgarian rainstorm, the main stream moved north towards Scandinavia and then turned south to Italy where it arrived on the 2nd of October. Italian scientists notified the Ring of Five about elevated ruthenium-106 levels in Milan on that date. Steinhauser said that this accident is the “single greatest release from nuclear-fuel reprocessing that has ever happened.”
    Russian officials said in late 2017 that the radiation plume over Europe did not come from the Mayak facility in spite of the fact that there were elevated levels of ruthenium-106 over southwestern Russia at the time. Russia has made no response to either of the Ring of Five reports. Steinhauser said, “We should not forget that Mayak is a military facility — and, of course, the Russian Federation is very reluctant when it comes to talking about military facilities. I presume this would not be much different for other superpower nations.”
    The scientists who have studied the radiation plume say that the level of radiation was not an immediate threat to public health. In 2018, the French Institute for Radiological Protection and Nuclear Safety officially stated that the raised levels of ruthenium-106 in 2017 did not pose a danger to human health or the environment. However, as is often the case with the release of radioactive materials into the environment, the long term consequences of exposure to radiation are difficult to anticipate.
    Steinhauser is also concerns about whether or not the population around the Mayak facility inhaled any ruthenium-106 into their lungs. He suggested that it might be a good idea to monitor food for radiation that may have leaked into the soil and water around Mayak. He said, “We would like to get some more in-depth information on what actually happened. There’s a good chance that we’ll catch every single accident — but, in the present case, surprise was on our side.”

Ambient office  = 126 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 102 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 102 nanosieverts per hour

Tomato from Central Market = 102 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 91 nanosieverts per hour

Filtered water = 71 nanosieverts per hour

Part 1 of 2 Parts
       There is a group of nuclear scientists known as the “Ring of Five” who have been monitoring the atmosphere over Europe for elevated levels of radiation. They have been carrying out this task since the mid-1980s. The name “Ring of Five” comes from the fact that originally the group was composed scientists from five countries including Sweden, Germany, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Currently there are scientists from twenty-two countries participating in the monitoring. They monitor radioactive contamination of the air over Europe twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty five days a year.
     This group discovered that in late 2017, the atmosphere over Europe showed elevated levels of ruthenium-106, a radioactive isotope of the element ruthenium. This isotope is often produced in the reprocessing of nuclear fuel. I blogged about this in 2017. At the time, there was a lot of debate about the origins of the plume of ruthenium-106 but no definite answers.
     Georg Steinhauser is a professor at the Institute of Radioecology and Radiation Protection of the University of Hanover in Germany. He is a member of the Ring of Five group. He said, “We did not have any anticipation that there might be some radioactivity in the air. We were just measuring air filters as we do on a weekly basis, 52 times a year, and suddenly there was an unexpected result.”
    For two years there have been arguments over where the plume of radiation came from. Many analysts claimed that it originated in southwest Russia, but the Russian government repeatedly denied it. In a report issued in July of this year, the Ring of Five say that the radiation plume of ruthenium-106 was released by an undisclosed nuclear accident at the Mayak nuclear facility in Russia.
    Mayak was a center of Soviet nuclear weapons development and nuclear fuel reprocessing in the closed city of Ozyorsk. Ozyorsk/Mayak was a secret installation that was not on any maps of the Chelyabinsk Oblast (province).  Lake Karachy is located near the Mayak facility. So much nuclear waste was dumped into that lake that if you stood on the shore for an hour, the radiation that you absorbed would kill you.
     There was a horrible nuclear accident that caused an explosion in at the Mayak faciliity in 1957. This was considered to be the third worst nuclear accident in history. The accident spread radioactive particles over an area of twenty thousand square miles where two hundred and seventy thousand people lived. Over ten thousand people in nearby villages were forced to evacuate their homes. Whole villages were abandoned and removed from maps. Since Ozyorsk is not on the map, the disaster was named after the biggest town nearby that was on the map.
     Russia authorities have never admitted that any nuclear accidents occurred at the Mayak facility in 2017. They have not responded to the July report from the Right of Five. Last month, the Ring of Five delivered a second report that provides more evidence that a serious accident took place at Mayak in 2017. They have even nailed down a specific date for the accident. Most of the ruthenium-106 was released on the 26th of September 2017.
Please read Part 2
Mayak area:

Ambient office  = 126 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Blueberry from Central Market = 95 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Filtered water = 60 nanosieverts per hour