Ambient office  =  73 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 139 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 138 nanosieverts per hour

Avocado from Central Market = 89 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 111 nanosieverts per hour

Filtered water = 96 nanosieverts per hour

Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
      PAX believes that this entanglement of the private sector and nuclear arsenals may offer leverage in reducing nuclear profiteering. The five biggest current contractors for nuclear weapons work are all U.S. based multinational corporations. Huntington Ingalls Industries ($29.9 billion), Lockheed Martin ($25.2 billion), Honeywell International ($16.5 billion), General Dynamics ($5.8 billion), and Jacobs Engineering ($5.3 billion).
       The PAX report also identifies defense contractors with major nuclear contracts that are based outside of the U.S. Airbus operates out of the Netherlands. They currently produce nuclear armed missiles for France. A British based company called Serco has a twenty-five year contract with the U.K. to manage and operate the U.K. Atomic Weapons Establishment. A company in Hyderabad, India helped with the development of two of India’s nuclear armed missiles.
      There are some strange and questionable contracts currently running in the nuclear weapons sector. For example, Boeing has a contract to develop what is being called “a Flight Termination Receiver.” This device is supposed to permit the inflight destruction of a nuclear missiles after a mistake launch or error in navigation. Some analysts fear that this could change U.S. nuclear policy in a dangerous way. Currently, if missiles are launched, there is no way to recall or destroy them.
       There have been several false alarms in the past decades that could have resulted in a nuclear war but one of the probable reasons that the U.S. and the Soviets did not launch missiles is because it would have been irrevocable. If U.S. presidents had a way to stop a nuclear strike in progress, they might be more inclined to risk it for a possible false alarm. The problem here is that if the destroy option was not totally successful and even one U.S. missile hit the source of the false alarm, an all-out nuclear war might be the result.
       PAX is a member of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). ICAN won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017. ICAN was deeply involved in promoting the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). This U.N. treaty was adopted in 2017 and is now open for U.N. member states to ratify.
       ICAN has embarked on a subtle strategy to achieve their goal. Instead of starting out trying to convince the nine countries with nuclear weapons to abandon them, they are starting out by trying to convince the non-nuclear nations to ratify the treaty. This will mean that ratifying nations will not be able to possess nuclear weapons. It also means that non-nuclear nations will not permit nuclear weapons or their components from being manufactured within their borders. They will also be prohibited from allowing nuclear weapons to travel through or over their territory.
       The idea is to create a tightening noose around the nations with nuclear weapons. ICAN hopes that the public support for ICAN in country by country will ultimately create a social taboo about nuclear weapons which will put pressure on corporations and governments to turn away from nuclear weapons. This has worked for chemical weapons, biological weapons, land mines and cluster bombs. Eventually complete global compliance with the bans on all these weapons may come about.
       ICAN’s work has already resulted in two huge European pension funds pulling their investments out of the nuclear weapons industry. The movement is spreading to the U.S. with pension funds here considering dumping their stocks in defense contractors. Susi Snyder is the principle author of the PAX report. She said that “If Lockheed Martin can stop making cluster bombs because they’re losing investors across Europe. We know corporations can be moved. … It takes a long time with businesses, but you can do it faster than with governments.”

Ambient office  =  77 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 149 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 149 nanosieverts per hour

Pineapple from Central Market = 121 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 121 nanosieverts per hour

Filtered water = 115 nanosieverts per hour

Part 1 of 2 Parts
              The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS) publishes a picture of a clockface that shows their estimate of how close we are to midnight which represents global nuclear war. The minute hand has moved back and forth over the years, but it now stands at two minutes to midnight. This means that as far as the BAS is concerned, we are closer to global nuclear war than we have ever been in the history of nuclear weapons.
       In the past few years, Russia has been threatening its neighbors with overflights of nuclear bombers and penetration of costal waters by nuclear armed submarines. They have been bragging about all the great new undetectable and unstoppable nuclear weapons they are developing. Other countries who have nuclear weapons have been considering expansions of their arsenals and changes to their policy on the use of nuclear weapons. Some countries without nuclear weapons have been working to develop or acquire them.
       There has been much said and written about nuclear weapons, disarmament treaties, danger of accidental war, terrorists attempts to gain nuclear weapons, etc. One subject that does not get enough attention is the fact that companies are making billions of dollars designing and constructing these horrible weapons of destruction,
              PAX is a Dutch based peach organization which recently published a report on just how profitable it can be for multinational corporations involved in the nuclear weapons industry. Their report also contains some advice on how the world can remove some of the profit motive for the construction of nuclear weapons.
        According to the PAX report, they were able to identify a total of one hundred and sixteen billion dollars-worth of contracts between governments and private contractors who are designing, building and maintaining nuclear arsenals. Actually, there may be much more money in such contracts than that because the nine countries with nuclear arsenals tend not to share a lot of details about their nuclear arsenals and nuclear weapon expenditures.
       With this amount of money available for nuclear weapons work, it is no surprise that many defense contractors have the incentive to pressure governments to expand their nuclear arsenals. At a recent conference of investors, a managing director of Cowen Inc, an investment bank asked the CEO of Raytheon, one of the companies in the PAX report, whether the recent exit of the U.S. from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) with Russia meant that the next U.S. defense budget would hold big contracts for Raytheon. It appears that Raytheon is already benefitting from our withdrawal from the INF because in a few months of our exit from the treaty, Raytheon was awarded over five hundred million dollars in new contracts.
       In the past few years, corporate lobbyists have convinced the U.S. government to commit to a “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. This effort began under the Obama administration and continues under the Trump administration. The estimate for this modernization is one trillion two hundred million dollars over the next thirty years. Modernization sounds fairly innocuous, but defense analysts say that some of the anticipated work will make U.S. nuclear warhead delivery much more accurate and deadly. This will, of course, result in Russia spending more money to keep up with us.
Please read Part 2

Ambient office  =  93 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 126 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 126 nanosieverts per hour

Carrot from Central Market = 46 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 79 nanosieverts per hour

Filtered water = 64 nanosieverts per hour

       Nuclear power generates about twenty percent of the electricity in the U.S. from a fleet of ninety-eight nuclear power reactors at sixty-one nuclear power plants. Unlike all other forms of power generation in use, there is a public fear of nuclear reactors and materials. Fear of nuclear war, fear of the stealth health effects of nuclear radiation, and fear of major nuclear accidents all contribute to this public concern. There is no argument that there are significant dangers to the use of nuclear power. The only question is what the probability of such things and what the cost would be if they occured.
       Parth Vaishnav is a Carnegie Mellon University Department of Engineering and Public Policy Assistant Research Professor and Ahmed Abdulla is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy. Vaishnav and Abdulla have conducted a study which has led them to conclude that the U.S. public would be more interested and supportive of nuclear power generation if this fear were not present. Their study was aimed at quantifying the level of this fear in a paper published in the Energy Policy journal.
       The pair of researchers requested that a sample of twelve hundred respondents each create a power generation portfolio that would significantly cut carbon dioxide emissions.  Half of the sample group were given a set of labels that included gas, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, etc. The other half of the sample group was shown the degree of environmental and accidental risk that each energy source posed. All of the sample group were given the number of deaths that resulted from the worst accident for each of the energy sources.
The team said in their paper, “Despite decades of analysis focused on public attitudes about nuclear power, there remains a gulf in understanding the difference between the technology’s statistical risks and the dread it evokes. Experts often emphasize statistical risk levels — for example, the often-cited claim that radiation releases from the Fukushima nuclear accident didn’t kill anyone — with the hope that better public awareness will yield greater political support for the technology.”
       The team concluded that efforts to make nuclear technology safer and efforts to communicate that improvement to the U.S. public alone would not be sufficient to persuade more citizens to support the use of more nuclear power. The part of the sample group that were only given the labels for the energy sources consistently chose less nuclear power than the part of the sample group which was shown the risks associated with each energy source.
       The researchers said, “Our results suggest that dread about nuclear power leads respondents to choose 40% less nuclear generation in 2050 than they would have chosen in the absence of this dread.” The research team hopes that their research will help predict whether the U.S. public could be convinced to support more nuclear power if this pervasive fear could be reduced.
      I have been saying for years that there are two factors that will ultimately kill nuclear power as a major source of energy in the future. One of those is the increasing cost which will scare off investors and government officials. The other factor is the fear that is the subject of the study mentioned above. Whether warranted or not, one more major nuclear accident anywhere in the world will sharply increase the fear the U.S. public holds for nuclear power and reduce their support for more nuclear power reactors.

Ambient office  =  124 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 109 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 108 nanosieverts per hour

Beefsteak tomato from Central Market = 70 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 89 nanosieverts per hour

Filtered water = 72 nanosieverts per hour