Ambient office = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 122 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 123 nanosieverts per hour

Avocado from Central Market = 104 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 93 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 87 nanosieverts per hour

Dover sole – Caught in USA = 95 nanosieverts per hour

     The U.S. Administration is putting out mixed signals with respect to the modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The “skinny budget” of the U.S. President states that it will maintain “a strong, credible nuclear deterrent for the security of the Nation and U.S. allies.” On the other hand, his interim National Security Strategy Guidance claims “We will take steps to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy while ensuring our strategic deterrent remains safe, secure, and effective.”
      Those steps may include cutting the nuclear modernization budget. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Leonor Tomero recently stressed that “some plans are very expensive.” However, reducing the nuclear modernization budget is incompatible with maintaining a “strong, credible nuclear deterrent.” Cuts to modernization programs would likely weaken deterrence in the face of increasing nuclear threats.
      The idea that the U.S. can maintain a strong deterrent while cutting the nuclear modernization budget flies in the face of repeated warnings such as those expressed by both Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten and Commander of U.S. Strategic Command Adm. Charles Richard, that nuclear modernization is already “late-to-need.”
     After many years of putting off the recapitalization of nuclear weapons, the U.S. has no choice but to provide the necessary funding or face delays in key delivery schedules. Cost savings based on engineering or manufacturing efficiencies would be welcome. Making reductions that would delay or harm programs for the sake of saving money would ignore the current reality.
      Last year, the former Pentagon acquisition chief Ellen Lord testified that even minor cuts to the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) would result in schedule delays for the replacement for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). With late-to-need delays, the U.S. could be stuck with Cold War capabilities whose deterrence value decreases as they age.
     The current Minuteman III missiles are fifty years old and are increasingly vulnerable to cyberattack. Admiral Richard said, “Just to pace the cyber threat alone, GBSD is a necessary step forward.” If U.S. adversaries think that they can defeat our four hundred ICBM with a cyberattack, it may become an attractive strategy. U.S. adversaries continue to expand their nuclear forces so it would not be a good idea to reduce the role of nuclear weapons in the current situation.
      Russia is expected to expand its unconstrained stockpile of tactical nuclear weapons which already outnumbers the U.S. inventory of such weapons by ten to one. It is also building entirely new nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, China is expected to at least double its nuclear stockpile which will make it a peer nuclear competitor with the U.S. by the end of the decade.
     Never before has the U.S. had to face two peer adversaries and deter them differently at the same time. If anything, the U.S. should be working hard to improve nuclear deterrence rather than trying to cut down nuclear modernization as much as possible without impacting national security.
     Critics like to quote that nuclear modernization will cost four hundred billion dollars. This is a lot of money, but it will be spread out over thirty years. It is misleading to talk about the life-cycle costs of thirty years when one-to five-year budgets are being discusses.
     President Biden says that he is committed to both addressing growing global threats and maintaining a strong nuclear deterrent, but the needs of the budget will speak louder. A budget that does not fully support modernization while nuclear threats are growing would be considered irresponsible by many.

Ambient office = 119 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 119 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 115 nanosieverts per hour

Tomato from Central Market = 62 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 77 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 71 nanosieverts per hour

Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
     In the face of these enormously complex challenges with respect to developing commercial nuclear fusion , there have been great advances in the development of new materials to meet these challenges. One of the most important breakthroughs has been the development of high temperatures superconducting magnets which are being employed in a number of different fusion research projects. They are able to maintain superconduction below the boiling point of liquid nitrogen which is widely available. This is around minus three hundred- and twenty-degrees Fahrenheit. While this is extremely cold, it is much warmer than the temperatures required by older super conducting magnets.
     Inside a tokamak, these superconducting magnets are only a few yards away from the high temperatures of the plasma. This creates a huge temperature gradient. These new magnets have the ability to generate much stronger magnetic fields than those generated by the old generation of superconducting magnets. This helps to significantly reduce the size of a fusion reactor. It is hoped that they will speed up the development of commercial fusion power reactors.
      There are some existing materials that have been designed to deal with the challenges of holding up under the conditions inside a tokamak. The most promising materials at the moment are called “reduced activation steels.” They have a different composition than traditional steels in which levels of activation from neutron damage are reduced. Tungsten is also being explored for use in tokamaks.
      Sometimes, somethings that is initially seen to be a a problem can actually turn out to be beneficial. This is the case with fusion research. One example of this is referred to as tungsten fuzz. The term fuzz in this context is a nanostructure that forms when tungsten is exposed to helium plasma during fusion research. At first, it was feared that this would cause erosion of the reactor vessel walls but now there is research being conducted into the possible use of tungsten fuzz for non-fusion research such as utilizing tungsten fuzz to assist in solar water splitting into hydrogen and oxygen.
     However, no material is perfect and there are remaining issues in the development of materials for fusion reactors. These include the manufacture of reduced activation materials at a large scale. The use of tungsten is problematical because it is intrinsically brittle. There needs to be improvement and refinement of existing materials.
     Despite the decades of research and the billions of dollars expended on fusion research there is still a lot of critical work that needs to be done. One major issue is the fact that it has been necessary to depend on proxy experiments to recreate the conditions that will be found inside a functional fusion reactor. Often very small data sets must be combined during this research. Detailed modeling work assists in the extrapolation of probably material performance. It would be much better to be able to conduct tests inside an actual tokamak at expected temperatures and pressures.
     The COVID-19 pandemic has had a major negative impact on materials research because it has made it more difficult to carry out real life experiments. It is very important that we continue to develop and utilized advanced models in the prediction of materials performance. This can be combined with advances in machine learning which will identify key experiments that are needed to identify the best materials for the job in future fusion reactors.
     The manufacture of new materials has previously been done in small batches. This produces only enough material to conduct experiments. In the future, there will be more projects in fusion research on experimental fusion reactors or prototype fusion reactors.
      Due to this situation, research is now approaching the point where there will need to be consideration of industrialization and development of supply chains for the components required for commercial nuclear fusion reactors. The development of robust large scale supply chains with be a great challenge.

Ambient office = 110 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 97 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 93 nanosieverts per hour

English cucumber from Central Market = 103 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 122 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 108 nanosieverts per hour

Part 1 of 2 Parts
     I have been posting a lot about nuclear fusion lately. We know that nuclear fusion is a common process because it is what makes all the stars shine. The enormous gravitational pressure inside the sun forces the nuclei of light atoms such as hydrogen so close together at extreme temperatures that the nuclei to fuse into the nuclei of heavier elements. In the process, huge amounts of energy are released.
     There is a great deal of effort being put into the development and construction of nuclear fusion reactors which could produce enough energy to power our whole civilization. They would generate virtually zero carbon dioxide, operate very safely and not produce the high levels of dangerous radioactive waste that are produced by the operation of nuclear fission power reactors.
     Decades of fusion research have demonstrated that reproducing nuclear fusion on Earth in a nuclear reactor is an extremely difficult task. Enormous temperatures and pressures have to be generated to match the conditions inside a star. One of the major current problems is that we do not have materials that are able to cope with these extreme conditions even if we can reproduce them.
     There are many different paths to the design and development of nuclear fusion power reactors that are being explored in laboratories around the globe. One of the most common types with a donut-shaped reaction vessel is called a tokamak. Inside a tokamak, the fuels used for fusion are the isotopes of hydrogen known as deuterium and tritium in the form of a gas which is converted to a plasma of charged particles by the high temperatures and pressures. Very powerful magnetic fields can be used to trap and hold the plasma because the particles are electrically charged. These magnetics fields are used to herd the charged nuclei of the plasma into a ring-shape inside the reaction vessel.
     Under the proper conditions of high temperature and pressure, the hydrogen nuclei are fused together to create helium, neutrons and great energy. The temperature required is around one hundred and eighty thousand degrees Fahrenheit. This is ten times hotter than the center of our Sun. It is necessary to maintain the higher temperature because the Sun has a much higher density of particles.
      Although magnetic fields are able to contain most of the plasma, the reactor vessel still has to be able to withstand enormous temperatures. In the ITER tokamak being built in France which is supposed to be operational by 2035, the hottest part of the physical reactor is supposed to reach temperatures in excess of twenty-four hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
     In such a reactor, the plasma is occasionally able to escape the magnetic trap in the middle of the donut-shaped reactor vessel and reach the physical walls of the reactor. This can result in erosion of the walls, particles being implanted into the walls of the vessel and changes to the properties of the materials making up the walls of the vessel.
      In addition to the extreme temperatures inside the tokamak, it is also necessary to consider the by-products of the fusion of deuterium and tritium such as extremely high energy neutrons. Neutrons are neutral atomic particles so they cannot be affected by the magnetic confinement so they impact the walls of the reactor vessel and cause damage to the materials of the walls.
Please read Part 2 next

Ambient office = 123 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 110 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 112 nanosieverts per hour

Yukon Gold potato from Central Market = 122 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 105 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 87 nanosieverts per hour