Ambient office = 142 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 106 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 100 nanosieverts per hour

Tomato from Central Market = 86 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 88 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 67 nanosieverts per hour

 

 

 

Part 1 of 2 Parts
     Michael Short grew up in Boston’s North Shore and attended weekend programs that were taught by MIT graduate students while he was still in high college. Early in his academic career, he was told that one of the keys to nuclear power generation was to find materials, especially metals, that could withstand the corrosive effects of radiation and destructive chemicals found in nuclear reactors. This statement motivated him to work towards two BS degrees.
     He entered MIT in the fall of 2001. He spent four years as an undergraduate including research he carried out at the Uhlig Corrosion Laboratory. After graduating in 2005 with two BSs, one in Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) and a second in materials science and engineering he worked half time at the Uhlig lab under the supervision of Ronald Ballinger, a professor in both NSE and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He began graduate studies with Ballinger as his advisor, earning a master’s and a PhD in nuclear science and engineering in 2010. Short joined the faculty at the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering in 2013.      Last year, he was promoted to the status of tenured associate professor.
     Corrosion in nuclear reactors is a very rich subject. Short said, “The traditional view is to expose metals to various things and see what happens — ‘cook and look,’ as it’s called. A lot of folks view it that way, but it’s actually much more complex. In fact, some members of our own faculty don’t want to touch corrosion because it’s too complicated, too dirty. But that’s what I like about it.”
      In 2020, Short, his student Weiyue Zhou, and other colleagues published news of a surprising discover in the journal Nature Communications. In the report, Short says, “Most people think radiation is bad and makes everything worse, but that’s not always the case.” His team found that under a specific set of conditions a nickel-chromium alloy performs better when it is irradiated while experiencing corrosion in a molten salt mixture. He said that their finding is relevant “because these are the conditions under which people are hoping to run the next generation of nuclear reactors.” Leading candidates for next generation alternative to today’s popular water-cooled reactors are molten salt and liquid metals such as sodium and lead. Short and his team are working on experiments involving the irradiation of metal alloys immersed in liquid lead.
      Concurrently, Short has been pursuing another multiyear project aimed at devising a new standard to serve as “a measurable unit of radiation damage.” Short and his team are about to publish their first big paper on this topic. Short has discovered that it is not possible to reduce radiation damage to a single number which people have tried to do in the past. Their new standard relates the density of defects (the number of radiation-induced defects or unintentional changes to the lattice structure) per unit volume for a given material.
Please read Part 2 next

Ambient office = 105 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 139 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 140 nanosieverts per hour

Asparagus from Central Market = 96 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 74 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 60 nanosieverts per hour

     I have posted about Helion Energy in the past. Helion is a company located in the Seattle, WA area. They are researching nuclear fusion. Recently they sent out a press release that said that they were breaking ground on a new facility intended to be a critical center for testing and research into practical nuclear fusion for energy generation. They say that they hope to lay the groundwork for the development of a commercially viable nuclear fusion power plant.
     There is no guarantee that Helion or one of the other companies or institutions involved in fusion research will be able to achieve stable nuclear fusion that can be scaled up for commercially viable fusion power generation. If commercial fusion can be developed, it will radically transform our world.
     There are a variety of different possible routes to nuclear fusion and many companies have spung up to explore them. The challenge of commercial nuclear fusion is so complex and difficult that it may turn out to be impossible. The researchers are trying to duplicate the extreme temperatures and pressures in the center of the Sun. The conditions there are necessary to cause lighter elements to fuse into larger elements and release huge amounts of energy. One of the benefits of nuclear fusion is that it does not release any carbon dioxide as it operates. The most popular designs for fusion reactors today are donut-shaped reactors called tokamaks. There is also a twisted donut design called a stellarator that is being studied.
     Helion is researching fusion power technology with its own patented plasma accelerator. This device consumes helium-3 and deuterium fuels. These gases are heated to extreme temperatures in order to create a plasma. Then the plasma is magnetically confined into what the company refers to as a field reversed configuration (FRC). Two of these FRCs are generated on either side of the device. Finally, magnets are used to slam the two FRCs together at the speed of a million miles per hour. This generates an extremely energetic collision.
     Powerful magnets further compress the FRCs and the reaction is subjected to greater heat until it reaches one hundred and eighty million degrees Fahrenheit. This forces the helium-3 and deuterium to fuse, creating an expanding cloud of plasma that forces the magnetic field outwards, inducing a current that is harvested by the device to generate clean, carbon-free electricity. As Helion pursues a commercially viable model of their device, they have passed a few critical milestones since the company was founded in 2013. It has successfully demonstrated the ability to recover energy from its fusion system with ninety five percent efficiency, generating a self-sustaining production cycle with helium-3 fuel. More recently, Helion has achieved plasma temperatures of one hundred and eighty million degrees Fahrenheit with the sixth prototype of their device which they call Trenta.
     The ultimate goal of fusion research is to create a system that generates more energy than is needed to operate it. This will be one of the primary objectives at the new facility being built in Everett, Washington. As many as one hundred and fifty new jobs will be created. David Kirtley is the CEO and Founder of Helion Energy. He said, “At this facility, Helion will close in on its goal of breaking the fusion barrier and pushing the world towards the end of the fossil fuel era.”

Ambient office = 98 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 144 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 148 nanosieverts per hour

New potato from Central Market = 124 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 85 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 94 nanosieverts per hour

     Research in nuclear fusion depends on understanding super-heated plasmas. A new system of classifying magnetized plasma has led to the discovery of ten unknown topological phases. A better understanding of these phases and the transitions between them could assist physicists in the development of practical commercial fusion reactors. The transitions between these new phases support waves at the intersection of plasma surfaces.
     These exotic excitations could expand the potential practical uses of magnetized plasmas. Yichen Fu is a physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). He said, “These findings could lead to possible applications of these exotic excitations in space and laboratory plasmas. The next step is to explore what these excitations could do and how they might be utilized.”
      Recent research has begun to focus on the topological properties of plasma which means studying the shapes of the waves inside the plasma. The topological phases in cold magnetized plasma and transitions between them have not been thoroughly explored. This research is important because it will help scientists understand how plasma interacts with itself.
     Fu and his colleague, PPPL physicist Hong Qin, sought to describe mathematically the topological phases of a cold plasma in a uniform magnetic field. They discovered ten different novel plasma phases separated by edge modes. These modes are the boundary between two topological different regions within the plasma. Numerical studies have verified the findings of the pair of physicists.
     Qin said, “The discovery of the 10 phases in plasma marks a primary development in plasma physics. The first and foremost step in any scientific endeavor is to classify the objects under investigation. Any new classification scheme will lead to improvement in our theoretical understanding and subsequent advances in technology.”
     The paper from Fu and Qin does not speculate about what those advances might be. However, there are some interesting possibilities. Plasma is often referred to as the fourth state of matter. It is a gas in which electrons have been stripped from the atoms. This forms an ionized material. Plasmas are abundant in space. It is the state of matter that is found in stars and is a key to potential plasma technology.
      Deep in their cores, stars fuse nuclei to create heavier elements. This process generates a vast amount of energy. Researchers have been working on the creation of plasma fusion on Earth. Supporters of this research claim that fusion reactors could provide clean and cheap energy.
      Creating fusion on Earth has proven to be extremely difficult. Scientists need to be able to maintain a stable plasma as temperatures hotter than the Sun for long enough to generate and extract energy. There are many technological challenges and researchers are still far from their goal of commercial fusion reactors. A better understanding of the behavior of plasmas can bring that goal closer.
     Fu said, “The most important progress in the paper is looking at plasma based on its topological properties and identifying its topological phases. Based on these phases we identify the necessary and sufficient condition[s] for the excitations of these localized waves. As for how this progress can be applied to facilitate fusion energy research, we have to find out.”