Ambient office = 109 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 72 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 74 nanosieverts per hour

White onion from Central Market = 67 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 58 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 51 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office = 103 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 126 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 123 nanosieverts per hour

Broccoli from Central Market = 99 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 101 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 87 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 85 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 85 nanosieverts per hour

Avocado from Central Market = 92 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 84 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 74 nanosieverts per hour

Dover sole – Caught in USA = 109 nanosieverts per hour

     One problem with inspecting nuclear power plants is the risk of radiation exposure for the workers. Robots and drones have been developed to allow inspection without the need for human beings to go into dangerous areas. Now a company called Flyability has launched the Elios 2 RAD which is an indoor drone that contains a radiation sensor. This new drone was specifically designed for the purpose of inspecting nuclear power plants.
     Patrick Thévoz is the CEO of Flyability. He said, “The Elios 2 RAD represents the first chapter in our efforts to create indoor drones targeted specifically for each of our key verticals, accelerating our mission to use robots instead of people for dangerous indoor inspection jobs. The Elios 2 RAD has the potential to significantly reduce the need for inspectors to be exposed to harmful radiation or to the hazards of confined space entry for the purposes of conducting routine inspections.”
     Nuclear power stations have a protocol for maintaining low radiation exposure. This protocol is referred to as the As Low As Reasonably Achievable (ALARA) requirements. The Elios RAD 2 is designed to help staff in their mission to reduce radiation exposure as much as possible. This is accomplished by allowing the Elios RAD 2 to substitute for human personnel where possible to obtain visual and radiation data. It also provides high-quality data for planning interventions that do require exposure so that such exposure can be limited as much as possible.
     The Elios RAD 2 is equipped with a Geiger-Muller detector and can detect radiation while being flown by the Flyability’s piloting app. After the drone makes an inspection flight, the Flyability’s Inspector 3.0 software can be used to map the radiation along the flight path. It can show the exact location of dangerous radiation levels inside a nuclear facility. Operators can also play back the inspection flight with Inspector 3.0 utilizing it to display dose rate measurements synchronously over the video footage. Flyability currently has a strong presence in nuclear facilities around the world where its Elios 2 has been successfully tested up to eight hundred R/H.
     Nuclear inspectors have reported that use of the Elios 2 has saved them over a hundred thousand dollars in a single inspection flight by reducing required downtimes and avoiding the need for the construction of scaffolding and other expensive temporary structures. Inspectors say that these results are repeatable and a regular part of the new workflows the Elios 2 enables.
    Alexandre Meldem is the VP of Sales at Flyability Inc. He said, “Over 80% of U.S. nuclear operators already use Flyability’s indoor drones for their visual inspections. Now we can expand that support by allowing engineers to collect actionable, high quality dose data. Helping nuclear inspectors collect this data remotely means that less people will be exposed to the potential harm of radiation.”
     Last year, Flyability released footage of a flight taken with its Elios 2 drone at the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine. The goal of that mission was to collect visual data inside the ruins of Reactor 5 which was never activated. They wanted to confirm that no nuclear fuel rods were present. Now, with the new Elios 2 RAD, it will be possible to return to Chernobyl to record the amount of radiation present in the whole site.

Ambient office = 124 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 119 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 119 nanosieverts per hour

English cucumber from Central Market = 71 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 98 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 89 nanosieverts per hour

Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
           Short explains, “Our approach is based on a theory that everyone agrees on — that defects have energy.” However, other nuclear researchers have told Shore that the amount of energy stored in those defects would be too small to measure. But this criticism was taken as a challenge to make measurements at the microjoule level at the very limits of their equipment.
     Short is convinced that his team’s new standard will become “universally useful, but it will take years of testing on many, many materials followed by more years of convincing people using the classic method: Repeat, repeat, repeat, making sure that each time you get the same result. It’s the unglamorous side of science, but that’s the side that really matters.”
     Short’s work on radiation damage measurement has led him and his team into collaboration with the NSE proliferation expert Scott Kemp, a specialist in nuclear security. Students supervised by Kemp and Short have devised methods for determining how much fissionable materials has passed through a uranium enrichment facility by analyzing the materials exposed to these radioactive materials. Short says, “I never thought my preliminary work on corrosion experiments as an undergraduate would lead to this.”
    Short is also interested in microreactors which are reactors that generate from a few kilowatts to 20 megawatts. This contrasts with big commercial fission reactors which can generate more than a gigawatt. Short insists that flexibility in the size of future power plants is critical to the economic viability of nuclear power “because nobody wants to pay $10 billion for a reactor now, and I don’t blame them.”
     Short says that proposed microreactors “pose new material challenges that I want to solve. It comes down to cramming more material into a smaller volume, and we don’t have a lot of knowledge about how materials perform at such high densities.” He is currently conducting experiments at the Idaho National Laboratory. The experiments irradiate possible microreactor materials to find out how they change using a laser technique called transient grating spectroscopy. His team at MIT has had a big role in advancing this technology.
     Short has ambitious goals for the next 20 years. He said, “I’d like to be one of those who came up with a way to verify the Iran nuclear deal and thereby helped clamp down on nuclear proliferation worldwide,” he says. “I’d like to choose the materials for our first power-generating nuclear fusion reactors. And I’d like to have influenced perhaps 50 to 100 former students who chose to stay in science because they truly enjoy it. I see my job as creating scientists, not science, though science is, of course, a convenient byproduct.”
      Supporters of small modular reactors and microreactors claim that these advanced nuclear reactors will be important in providing low-carbon electricity in the future. However, as with any new nuclear technology intended for commercial application, exhaustive research is necessary to verify that proposed designs will function as predicted. In some cases, the effects of radiation on proposed materials will not be known until they have been in use for years. This means that the technology will not be proven until years after its implementation. This may be too late to aid in mitigation of climate change.