Ambient office = 81 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 74 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 73 nanosieverts per hour

Zuccinni from Central Market = 108 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 70 nanosieverts per hour

     An Australian-led international research team, including a core group of Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization (ANSTO) scientists has found that doping a promising material provides a simple, effective method capable of extracting uranium from seawater.
     The research, published in Energy Advances, could help in designing new materials that are highly selective for uranium, efficient, and cost effective. Uranium is a highly valued mineral used as a fuel for nuclear reactors around the globe.
     Dr. Jessica Veliscek Carolan is a lead scientist who supervised co-author honors student Hayden Ou of UNSW with Dr. Nicolas Bedford of UNSW. He said, “There’s a lot of uranium in the oceans, more than a thousand times more than what is found in the ground, but it’s really diluted, so it’s very difficult to extract. The main challenge is that other substances in seawater, salt and minerals, such as iron and calcium, are present in much higher amounts than uranium.”
     First author of the report Mohammed Zubair receive a grant for the Australian Institute of Nuclear Science and Engineering (AINSE) to support his research at ANSTO.
     Layered double hydroxides are materials that have attracted interest for their ability to remove metals. They are fairly easy to make and can be modified to improve the way they work. These layers have positive and negative charges so they can be tailored to captures specific substances such as uranium. Lanthanide dopants, neodymium, europium and terbium were among the materials tested.
      Adding neodymium to layered double hydroxides (LDHs) enhanced their ability to selectively capture uranium from seawater, a highly challenging process that scientists have been working on for a long time.
     Synthesized materials were characterized using a variety of techniques. These include scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) at ANSTO’s microscopy facility by Dr. Daniel Oldfield and at UNSW by Yuwei Yang.
     When neodymium was added to LDHs (MgAINd), these materials bonded with uranium over ten other more abundant elements found in real seawater. A crucial finding of the tests was that the dopant, neodymium, changes the way that uranium binds to the LDHs.
     The research team also used X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) and Soft X-ray spectroscopy at ANSTO’s Australian Synchrotron. They sought to clarify the octahedral coordination environment, oxidation state and adsorption mechanism, respectively.
     X-ray measurements showed that under real seawater conditions, the extraction of uranium occurred through a process where uranium atoms formed complexes on the surface of the LDHs by replacing nitrate ions in the LDH layers with uranyl carbonate anions from the seawater. By adding neodymium and other lanthanide elements to the LDH structure, the chemical bonding between uranium and oxygen in the LDH became more iconic. The improved ionic bonding made these materials much better at selective binding to uranium via interactions with ionic surfaces.
     The authors pointed out that the study demonstrated a way to adjust how well a material can capture uranium which could lead to creating new materials that are even superior at separating uranium from other substances. The materials tested were not just useful for taking uranium from seawater but also had the potential to clear up uranium from radioactive wastewater near nuclear power plants. Dr. Carolan said, “There are additional benefits in that these materials are simple and inexpensive to make, making them a cost-effective choice for large-scale uranium extraction.”

Ambient office = 86 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 122 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 122 nanosieverts per hour

White onion from Central Market = 180 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 75 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 67 nanosieverts per hour

Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
     Ian Chapman is the CEO of the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority. He said that there had been an ageing workforce in the U.K. ten years ago. However, a training push over the past decade meant that more than half the workforce was now under forty. He added that steps had been taken to ensure the experience and knowledge built up over the past decades at JET would not be lost when it switches to its decommissioning phase at the end of the year.
    Andrew Bowie is the U.K. Nuclear Minister. He outlined details of the U.K.’s Fusion Futures Program (FFP). He said that the FFP would see seven hundred ninety-three million dollars spent over the next five years on a package of measures. These measures will include the creation of two thousand two hundred training places, a new fuel cycle testing facility and funding to develop infrastructure for private fusion companies. UKAEA’s Culham campus will be included. He said, “We have a golden opportunity to be at the cutting-edge of fusion and lead the way in its commercialization as the ultimate clean energy source.”
      There was much discussion of collaboration being key in the future. Chapman was asked about the U.K. government’s decision not to continue as part of the ITER project. He said that the U.K. was still involved in some work that predated the Brexit-related end of new contracts. He added that the U.K. and ITER had a “lot to offer” and both hoped to continue to collaborate and hoped for success “as soon as possible”.
      Barabaschi said that ITER itself continued to work on the project’s revised timeline. He noted that the new timeline was expected to be agreed upon and announced in mid-2024. The original timeline was agreed upon in 2016. It called for first plasma in 2025 but that it is now set to be substantially delayed. He added that the timeline update would “not be good news but we will go ahead, and we will succeed, I’m very sure about that”.
     The Eurofusion consortium of fusion laboratories around Europe ran experiments at JET in 2021 designed to explore extreme conditions expected at ITER and future fusion plants such as reaching a temperature of one hundred and fifty million degrees million Celsius. Costanza Maggi is a UKAEA fellow and former JET Task Force Leader. He said, “One of our most eye-catching results is the first direct observation of the fusion fuel keeping itself hot through alpha heating. This is the process where high-energy helium ions (alpha particles) coming out of the fusion reaction transfer their heat to the surrounding fuel mix to keep the fusion process going. Studying this process under realistic conditions is crucial to developing fusion power plant.”
     Eurofusion also said that the experiments “confirmed predictions from advanced computer models for heat transport inside the plasma, which are crucial to extrapolate results from current experimental setups to larger future machines like ITER and the demonstration fusion power plant DEMO”.

Ambient office = 108 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 106 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 111 nanosieverts per hour

Watermelon from Central Market = 75 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 70 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 63 nanosieverts per hour

Part 1 of 2 Parts
     The 29th International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Fusion Energy Conference was held from the 16th to the 21st of October 2023. The first edition of World Fusion Outlook as well as their plans to form a World Fusion Energy Group will be unveiled at the conference. In addition, updates on progress across the nuclear fusion industry and new investment from the U.K. host were also shared.
     The event was held in the U.K. for the first time since 1984. It was opened by IAEA Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi. He began the event by wishing a happy 40th anniversary to the soon-to-be closed Joint European Torus. He said, “the first tritium experiment in Europe, breaker of scientific records, producer of generations of accomplished scientists and engineers, and a true magnet for international collaboration”.
     Grossi outlined some of the breakthroughs and achievements by fusion experts over the two years since the previous conference was held. He added that current momentum and enthusiasm made it “crucial moment in the development of the field” and that fusion was moving “out of the laboratories and experimental centers”. He went on to say that credible pathways were needed to achieve the ambition of bringing fusion energy to the world economy.
     The IAEA plans to create the World Fusion Energy Group by bringing together the “next leg of the fusion energy journey will get us from experiment to demonstration to commercial fusion energy production”. Before their first meeting next year, he said that the IAEA  would “shortly invite fusion experts to work with the IAEA to outline Fusion Key Elements such as fusion-related definitions, characteristics and criteria for fusion energy to help develop common understanding among stakeholders essential for global deployment”.
     During the opening session of the six-day conference in London, the first edition of the World Fusion Outlook was published and distributed to the attendees. The IAEA said that they intend it to be a regular publication providing “authoritative information and updates on fusion energy” and to become “a global reference for energy R&D, technology development and prospective deployment of fusion as a source of unlimited low carbon energy”.
     Grossi called nuclear fusion energy the “grand engineering endeavor of the 21st Century”. He added that even if nuclear fusion does not play a big role in meeting the world’s climate goals by 2050, “the world will continue after 2050 and it will need clean energy on a massive scale beyond that date” and “while we may have different views on how exactly the global energy landscape will look in the coming years, we all see a place for fusion”.
    Pietro Barabaschi is the director general of the multinational International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project in France. One of the issues he raised was ensuring there was a sufficient, and skilled, workforce for fusion development. The conference attendees were told that there was a need to recruit people who had retired, because of skills and knowledge they had.
Please read Part 2 next

Ambient office = 103 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 114 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 111 nanosieverts per hour

Vine ripened tomato from Central Market = 96 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 74 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 59 nanosieverts per hour