Ambient office  = 105 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 100 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 102 nanosieverts per hour

Crimini mushroom from Central Market = 128 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 102 nanosieverts per hour

Filtered water = 83 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office  =  108 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 94 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 94 nanosieverts per hour

Cauliflower from Central Market = 142 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 101 nanosieverts per hour

Filtered water = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office  =  78 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 93 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 96 nanosieverts per hour

Red bell pepper from Central Market = 126 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 99 nanosieverts per hour

Filtered water = 74 nanosieverts per hour

Dover sole – Caught in USA = 100 nanosieverts per hour

        Recently I blogged about a fire on a Russian experimental submersible that killed fourteen Russian sailors. The Russians delayed announcing the fire and deaths for days and there are still a lot of unanswered questions about exactly what happened. The Soviet Union before its collapse and the Russian government after the collapse have always been sloppy with the handling of nuclear materials and closed mouth about accidents, especially related to nuclear weapons. Now another strange occurrence in Russia appears to be following the same pattern.
        On August 8th of this year, five people were killed and three sustained severe burns following the explosion of a rocket engine on an arctic navel test range at Nyonoksa in Russia. The state nuclear company, Rosatom, confirmed that the explosion had taken place. Rosatom said that the explosion happened during tests of a new liquid propellant rocket engine. The announcement from Rosatom said that they had been working on the “isotope power source” for the propulsion system.
       The Nyonoksa test site has carried out tests for just able every missile system used by the Russian navy. This includes sea-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles, Cruise missiles and anti-aircraft missiles.
       Authorities in Severodvinsk which is about thirty miles east of Nyonoksa reported on a website that just after the blast, the radiation levels were much higher than normal for about forty minutes after which they returned to normal. The radiation level jumped to two microsieverts per hour and then fell back to a tenth of a microsievert which is the normal background level. Authorities said that the higher level was not a threat to the public. The online post reporting on the radiation spike was removed from the website the next day and the Russian government said that national security was involved.
       People living in Severodvinsk and nearby Archangelsk rushed out and bought up all the available stocks of medical iodine to counteract possible threats from the radiation. Emergency responders who evacuated the burn victims from the test site wore chemical and nuclear protection suits.
       Nuclear experts in the U.S. are now saying that they think that the explosion and radiation release may have happened during the test of a nuclear-powered cruise missile. The President of Russia bragged about this missile last year. They call their nuclear cruise missile the 9M730 Buresvestnik. The NATO alliance refers to it as the SSC-X-9 Skyfall.
       Two different U.S. nuclear experts stated that the claimed test of a liquid propellant rocked engine would not have caused a spike in radiation.  An adjunct senior fellow with the Federation of American Scientists said, “Liquid fuel missile engines exploding do not give off radiation, and we know that the Russians are working on some kind of nuclear propulsion for a cruise missile.”
       A senior U.S. administration official would not confirm or deny that the explosion was caused by the testing of a nuclear cruise missile but he was highly skeptical of the Russian explanation for the explosion and radiation spike. He said, “We continue to monitor the events in the Russian far north but Moscow’s assurances that ‘everything is normal’ ring hollow to us. This reminds us of a string of incidents dating back to Chernobyl that call into question whether the Kremlin prioritizes the welfare of the Russian people above maintaining its own grip on power and its control over weak corruption streams.”
        Satellite photos and other intelligence indicate that the Russians dismantled a nuclear cruise missile test facility in Novaya Zemlya and moved the components to Nyonoksa where it was reassembled. The Serebryanka, a Russian ship that is used to recover nuclear propulsion units from the sea floor, was anchored off the coast near Nyonoksa at the time of the explosion. A nautical exclusion zone was established a month before the explosion and only the Serebryanka was inside that zone.
      The U.S. considered the idea of a nuclear power cruise missile in the 1950s and ultimately rejected the concept because such a missile would spew radioactive materials along its entire flight path posing a threat to the nation which launched it as well as the intended target.

Ambient office  =  97 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 104 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 107 nanosieverts per hour

Blueberry from Central Market = 138 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 98 nanosieverts per hour

Filtered water = 85 nanosieverts per hour

      I have posted a number of essays about research into nuclear fusion. If the reaction that powers the Sun and stars could be harnessed, it would provide abundant energy. The popular donut shaped tokamaks have serious problems confining the super-heated plasma to the center of the cavity.Super powerful magnets are necessary to create a container of magnetic fields. If the plasma breaks confinement and touches the walls of the cavity, it can quench the fusion reaction and cause damage to the walls. So it is very important to be able to correct any errors in the shape of the confining magnetic fields.
       Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) led a team of researchers drawn from the PPPL and, Sandia National Laboratory, General Atomics and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The team found clear evidence of error fields in the first ten week test run of the National Spherical Torus Experiment—Upgrade (NSTX-U). The NSTX-U is considered to be the “flagship” fusion device at the laboratory. The exhaustive detection method used by the researchers could provide important information about such error detection in future fusion devices such as the ITER which is a huge international fusion research reactor currently being constructed in France.
       At the PPPL, the researchers have integrated experimental data, detailed measurements of the positions of the confining magnets and computer models of plasma response in an effort to pin down the source of the error fields in the NSTX-U. Their analysis revealed that there were many small error fields. This is thought to be an unavoidable result of the impossibility of making a perfectly symmetrical tokamak. In most cases, these small error fields can be easily corrected. However, there was one find in their study. If the magnetic coils that run down the center of the tokamak are slightly out of alignment, this can produce fields that wrap around the inside of the donut shaped tokamak plasma cavity.
       It turned out that this misalignment was exactly what the researchers were looking for. Nate Ferraro is the first author of the research report in the journal Nuclear Fusion. He said, “What we found was a small misalignment of the center-stack coils with the casing that encloses them.” The slight misalignment caused errors that resonated with the plasma and resulted in changes in the behavior of the plasma. One of the effects was what was referred to as a “braking and locking effect.” This kept the edge of the plasma from rotating. It also increased local heating on components that faced the plasma inside the tokamak.
       The PPPL researchers discovered the misalignment after the tokamak had been shut down for repair due to the failure of one of the coils. The researchers are working on creating new tighter tolerance requirements for the NSTX-U as it is being reconstructed. The alignment of the center stack of coils and the casing around the coils must be more precise. It is hoped that the tighter tolerances will reduce the deviation from optimal alignment of the two components to less than two one-hundredths of an inch.
       The authors of the research report hope that the new alignment will prevent localized heating and reduce the magnetic braking and locking. These improvements would improve the stability of the plasma. Ferraro said, “Every tokamak is concerned about error fields. What we are trying to do is optimize the NSTX-U.” 
       Amitava Bhattacharjee is the head of the PPPL Theory Department. He said that “This is an excellent example of the NSTX-U-Theory Partnership program that has been beneficial for both the NSTX-U and Theory Departments at PPPL, and which continues even when NSTX-U is in recovery.” The DOE Office of Science provided funding for this work. Members of the research team included scientists from PPPL, Sandia National Laboratory, General Atomics and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.