Ambient office = 88 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 133 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 125 nanosieverts per hour

Blueberry from Central Market = 73 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 116 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 98 nanosieverts per hour

Dover sole = 108 nanosieverts per hour

Part 2 of 2 Parts – (Please read Part 1 first)
     While fuel particles are much cooler when the reach the divertor, they still retain enough energy to knock atoms loose from the material of the divertor when they impact. Previously, JET’s divertor had a wall made of graphite. However, graphite absorbs and traps too many of the fuel particles for practical use.
          About 2011, engineers at JET upgraded their divertor and inner containment vessel to tungsten. Tungsten was selected because it has the highest melting point of any metal. The inner vessel wall of the tokamak was changed to beryllium. Beryllium has excellent thermal and mechanical properties for a fusion reactor. It absorbs less fuel than graphite but can still survive high temperatures.
     The energy JET produced made headlines. However, equally important is the use of the new wall materials. JET is a successful proof of concept for how to construct the next generation of fusion reactors.
     The JET tokamak is the largest and most advanced nuclear fusion reactor currently operating. The next generation of reactors is already under construction. The biggest project is the ITER experiment which is scheduled to begin operations in 2027. ITER is the Latin word for “the way”. It is under construction in France and is funded and directed by an international organization of that includes the U.S. government.
     ITER is going to utilize many of the material advances that the JET showed to be viable. While it does share some features of the JET, there are also some differences. First of all, ITER is huge. The fusion chamber is thirty-seven feet tall and sixty three feet in diameter. This is more than eight times larger than the JET. ITER will also utilize superconducting magnets able to produce stronger magnetic fields for longer periods of time compared to the ordinary magnets used in the JET. ITER is expected to surpass the performance of the JET in terms of energy output and how long the reaction will run.
     ITER is also expected to do something central to the idea of a commercial nuclear fusion powerplant. This is the production of more power than required to operate the reactor. Computer models predict that ITER will generate about five hundred megawatts of power continuously for four hundred seconds while consuming only fifty megawatts of energy. This means that the reactor will be able to produce ten times as much power as it consumes. This is a huge improvement over the JET which required about three times as much energy than it produced for its breakthrough fifty-nine megajoule record.
     The JET’s recent record has shown that years of research in plasma physics and materials sciences have paid off. They have brought scientists to the doorstep of harnessing fusion for power generation. ITER will provide a huge lead forward towards the ultimate goal of industrial scale nuclear fusion power plants.

Ambient office = 83 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 117 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 116 nanosieverts per hour

Avocado from Central Market = 92 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 88 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 79 nanosieverts per hour

Part 1 of 2 Parts
     Scientists at the Culham Centre Fusion for Fusion Energy laboratory in England have broken the record for the amount of energy produced during a controlled, sustained fusion reaction. The Joint European Torus (JET) in England produced fifty-nine megajoules of energy over five seconds. Some media outlets have called the experiment a “breakthrough” and it has caused a lot of excitements among physicists.
     The JET experiment demonstrates a remarkable advancement in understanding the physics of nuclear fusion. It also shows that the new materials used to construct the inner walls of the fusion reactor worked as the scientists intended.
     Nuclear fusion is a merging of two atomic nuclei into a single compound nucleus. In this process, a great deal of energy is released. A fusion power plant would capture the energy in the form of heat and use it to generate electricity. Our Sun and the stars are powered by nuclear fusion.
      There are several different ways to create reactors that can safely control the fusion process on Earth. In the approach taken for the JET, powerful magnetic fields are used to confine atoms until they reach a high enough temperature for them to fuse. The fuel used in many experimental fusion reactors consists of two different isotopes of hydrogen. They are called deuterium which has a neutron in the nucleus in addition to the proton and tritium which has two neutrons in the nucleus in addition to the proton.
      In order for a fusion reaction to be successful, the fuel atoms must become so hot that electrons are expelled from the atom. The result is a plasma which is a collection of positive ions and electrons. The plasma is heated until it reaches temperature of over two hundred million degrees Fahrenheit.
      To control fusion on Earth, one of the first and most popular reactor designs is called a tokamak which uses magnetic fields to confine the plasma. Magnetic field lines wrapping around the inside of the donut behave like train tracks that the ions and electron follow. The injection of energy into the plasma heats it. When adequate temperatures are reached, the fuel particles are accelerated to such high speeds that when they collide, they fuse. The energy that is released is primarily in the form of fast neutrons.
      During the fusion process, fuel particles can gradually drift away from the hot, dense core and eventually collide with the inner wall of the fusion containment vessel. In order to prevent the degradation of the wall due to these collisions, reactors are constructed so that they channel the wayward particles towards a heavily armored chamber called the divertor. This pumps out the diverted particles. It also removed excess heat to protect the tokamak.
      A major limitation of past tokamaks has been the fact that divertors cannot survive the constant bombardment of the particles for more than a few seconds. To construct a tokamak that will be able to produce continuous power, engineers need to build a tokamak containment vessel that will be able to survive for years at the extreme temperatures and pressures necessary for fusion.
Please read Part 2

Ambient office = 64 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 103 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 105 nanosieverts per hour

Tomato from Central Market = 122 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 93 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 85 nanosieverts per hour

     X-energy is the inventor of the Xe-100 high temperature gas cooled small modular reactor (SMR). They announced on April 4th that their wholly owned subsidiary, TRISO-X LLC, has selected the Horizon Center Industrial Park in Oak Ridge to site their TF3 plant which will initially produce eight tons of fuel per year. This is enough to provide fuel for twelve Xe-100s. The commercial facility’s cross cutting design will enable the manufacture of fuel for any number of advanced or small nuclear reactors based on Tristructural isotropic (TRISO) fuel. Construction is expected to begin this year with a start up as soon as 2025.
     TRISO fuel particles consist of a “kernel” of uranium oxycarbide (or uranium oxide) surrounded by layers of carbon and silicon carbide. This provides containment for fission projects and is stable up to very high temperatures. Fuel for X-energy’s Xe-100 SMR consists of spherical pebbles which are each embedded with eighteen thousand TRISO particles. Each fuel pebble is about two and a half inches in diameter.
     TF3 will be the first US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) Category II-licensed TRISO-based fuel fabrication facility. It will utilize uranium enriched less to less than twenty percent uranium-235 to manufacture nuclear fuel products for a variety of advanced and SMRs. It will also make specialty fuels for nuclear space projects.
     In October 2020, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) selected X-energy as one of two recipients to receive funding under its Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program (ARDP) for the construction of a demonstration plant that can be operatioinal in seven years.
     Under the project, X-energy is to deliver a commercial four-unit power plant based on the Xe-100. In addition, they are to provide a commercial-scale TRISO fuel fabrication facility. In April 2021, Energy Northwest, Grant County Public Utility District and X-energy formed the Tri-Energy Partnership for the purpose of constructing a plant based on the Xe-100 design at Energy Northwest’s existing Columbia nuclear site in Washington state.
     Pete Pappano is the President of TRISO-X. He said, “The Department of Energy calls TRISO the most robust nuclear fuel on Earth. TRISO is a technology that’s been developed and improved over 60 years. Our facility will bring this game-changing fuel to market, beginning with a proprietary spherical fuel pebble for X-energy’s Xe-100 reactor and its utility partner Grant County Public Utility District, in Washington state.”
     TR3 will also be used to continue to support government funded projects. These include mobile reactors for the military or nuclear space projects. TRISO-X is already operating two facilities at Oak Ridge. The first is the TRISO-X Pilot Facility, located inside the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The second is the TRISO-X Research and Development Center in the Centrus Technology Manufacturing Center. TF3 is expected to generate more than four hundred new jobs in the Oak Ridge area and attract in the neighborhood of three hundred million dollars of investments.
     TRISO-X submitted its license application to the NRC on April 6th. This application is the first of its kind for a facility dedicated exclusively to handling and processing uranium of such enrichment. The license application took about three years to write. It costs almost twenty million dollars and the NRC’s review process is expected to take from two to three years. If the application is approved, TF3 will become the first 10 CFR 70 Category II licensed fuel facility in the U.S.
     The NRC review and TRISO-X’s interaction with the NRC over this period are part of X-energy’s cooperative agreement with ARDP. Andrew Griffith is the U.S. acting assistant secretary for Nuclear Energy. He said that the licensing milestone is a “critical step” towards achieving the program’s goals.