Ambient office = 108 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 81 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 79 nanosieverts per hour

Red bell pe=pper from Central Market = 74 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 108 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 97 nanosieverts per hour

     A lot of new technology comes from university research programs that spin off discoveries to private companies for commercialization. One major example would be NuScale which was founded in 2007 based on research at Oregon State University that started in 2002. NuScale was founded to develop, construct and sell small modular reactors (SMRs). In 2011, NuScale sold a majority stake in their company to a Texas energy services company named Fluor Corporation for thirty million dollars.
     NuScale has raised more than one billion dollars in private and government funding since 2011. It will still need billions of dollars more to construct its first power plant. Fluor has stated that it is seeking ways to raise some of the needed funding by selling part of the stake that it purchased from NuScale.
      Guggenheim Partners (GP) is the NuScale financial advisor. GP told a nuclear power conference on Thursday that their client has decided to go public by seeking a deal with a publicly traded investment fund which is known as a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC). This was reported in the investment publication S&P Global. It is not clear whether the funding from a SPAC deal would satisfy NuScale’s funding needs. It may be necessary seek additional capital in other ways. NuScale has declined to comment on the report in S&P Global.
      SPACs are publicly traded investment funds. They were created to merge with privately held companies as a mechanism to help move them to the public market. They have become a popular way for businesses to begin trading on Wall Street without the expense and extensive regulatory process associated with a conventional IPO.
     Diane Hughes is the NuScale’s communications vice president. She said, “As we have previously stated, NuScale is in the process of evaluating strategic options to raise additional capital and accelerate the commercialization of NuScale’s groundbreaking small modular reactor technology. We have no update at this time.”
     NuScale has named its modular design VOYGR this month. It has been engineered to give utilities the option of building a small, relatively inexpensive plant or to scale up with several modules to construct a larger facility. NuScale states that its design enables plants to shut down on their own if they lose external power in a disaster. The company says that their reactors are safer than conventional designs.
     NuScale employs four hundred and fifty people which includes twenty-three at their Portland headquarters and nearly three hundred in Corvallis. Many of these employees are working remotely during the Covid pandemic.
     Climate change has stimulated more interest in nuclear power recently. Nuclear power does generate radioactive waste but does not emit carbon during operations. However, a great deal of carbon is generated by construction of power plants; mining, refining, and transporting of uranium; and storing toxic and radioactive waste.
     Utilities around the globe have shown interest in NuScale’s technology. NuScale received design approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last year. NuScale requires other levels of federal approval before it can be constructed.

Ambient office = 137 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 154 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 151 nanosieverts per hour

English cucumber from Central Market = 91 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 126 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 111 nanosieverts per hour

Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
     It turns out that the conditions necessary to trigger nuclear fusion are an extreme challenge for human science and technology. Fusion works by combining light element nuclei into heavier element nuclei. When two hydrogen atoms are smashed together hard enough, they fuse into helium. The new atom that is formed by the collision has less mass than the sum of its parts. The balance of the mass is converted to energy via the E=MC2 mass-energy equivalence.
     The above description of the fusion process has been simplified. The atoms actually require a multi-step reaction to achieve fusion. Nuclear fusion produces net energy only at extreme temperatures and pressures. The temperatures required are on the order of hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius. This is much hotter than the core of our Sun and too hot for any known terrestrial material to withstand.
     In order to get around this problem, researchers are using extremely powerful magnetic fields to contain the hot plasma and prevent the plasma from coming into contact with the walls of the fusion reactor. This requires a huge amount of energy.
     Stars are able to accomplish fusion because they are so massive, and their gravitational fields exert the pressure required. The gravity of the Sun is thirty times the gravity on the surface of the Earth.
     Every fusion experiment to date has been energy negative. This means that they have all consumed more energy than they have generated. So, they are useless as electricity generators. Getting the initial fusion reaction to trigger is not difficult. The problem is to keep it going to generate positive energy. Building commercial fusion reactors will require some very sophisticated feats of engineering which are not yet understood. Researchers are confident that they are close to constructing a nuclear fusion reactor that will produce more energy than it consumers.
     The Saint-Paul-les-Durance, France-based International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) currently under construction is the largest fusion reactor in the world that is dedicated to developing commercially viable fusion. ITER is funded by six nations, including U.S., Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, and India. The ITER team plans to construct the world’s largest tokamak fusion device. This is a donut-shaped container that will produce five hundred megawatts of thermal fusion energy. The estimated cost of ITER will be about twenty four billion dollars with a delivery date estimated at 2035. The giant machine will weigh in at an impressive twenty-three thousand tons and will occupy a building about two hundred feet high.  
      One of the important advancements that are encouraging is the development of a new superconducting material which is basically a steel tape coated with yttrium-barium-copper oxide, or YBCO. This new material allows researchers to construct smaller and more powerful magnets. These new magnets will require less energy to trigger the fusion reaction.
     The European Union’s joint project to construct ITER will require eighteen niobium-tin superconducting magnets also called toroidal field coils to contain the one hundred and fifty million degrees Celsius plasma. The magnets will generate a powerful magnetic field equal to about twelve tesla or a million times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field. Europe will construct ten of the toroidal field coils. Japan will manufacture nine.
     It will be another decade before a full-scale demonstration power plant will be built using the lessons learned from ITER. The ITER site construction is about eighty percent complete.

Ambient office = 112 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 97 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 95 nanosieverts per hour

Blueberry from Central Market = 78 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 93 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Part 1 of 2 Parts
     I have been posting a lot about nuclear fusion lately. Fusion has the potential of being a game changer for energy generation. Fusion research has been conducted since the 1950s. Although it has been a running joke for decades that nuclear fusion power generation is always forty years in the future, that prediction has been dropping and some companies are suggesting that they may have a prototype fusion reactor within ten years.
      Nuclear fusion reactors could provide all the cheap, clean energy needed to power the planet for thousands of years. With this great promise, why is it taking so long to develop commercial nuclear fusion plants? The technology necessary for nuclear fusion is extremely difficult to create, far more difficult than was expected. Currently, many startup companies are pouring time and money into the development of commercial fusion.
     None of these startups has excited investors as much as Commonwealth Fusion Systems, based in Massachusetts. They have recently acquired almost two billion dollars in the biggest private investment for nuclear fusion to date. This money came from a variety of big-name investors, including Microsoft Corp. co-founder Bill Gates, George Soros via his Soros Fund Management LLC and venture capitalist John Doerr.
     Just last month, on the 5th of November, Helion Energy of Redmond, Washington announced that it had raised five hundred million dollars in its latest fundraising round. This is the second largest-ever fundraising round for a private fusion company. Helion has the chance to beat Commonwealth Fusion Systems because its latest round of funding includes an additional one billion seven hundred million dollars which is contingent on reaching certain performance goals. Canada’s General Fusion announced this week that it closed a one hundred and thirty million fundraising round that was oversubscribed. This was revealed by Christofer Mowry who is the CEO of the company. General Fusion intends to launch a bigger fundraising effort in 2022.
      The latest wave of cash provided to fusion startups has already exceeded the one billion nine hundred million dollars that had previously been announced. This is according to data gathered by the Fusion Industry Association and the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority. Mowry said that this was a sign that the fusion industry was maturing.
     Various fusion companies are pursuing different designs for fusion reactors. Most of them are focusing on generating fusion processes in a hot plasma. In September, Commonwealth Fusion successfully tested the most powerful fusion magnet on Earth to hold and compress the plasma.
     Commonwealth Fusion Systems is collaborating with MIT to construct their fusion reactor. The team has a plan for a new fusion experiment that they call Sparc. This reactor is about 1/65th of the volume of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) being constructed in France. The experimental Sparc reactor will generate about one hundred megawatts of heat energy in pulses of about ten second. These bursts are sufficient to power a small city. The researchers anticipate that the output will be twice the power used to heat the plasma. This will overcome the biggest technical hurdle which is deriving positive net energy from fusion. The Sparc team has a very ambition target to have the reactor running in about fifteen years.
Please read Part 2 next