Part 1 of 2 Parts
       The U.K. has eight nuclear power reactors. They provide about twenty percent of the electricity for the country. Seven of these plants utilize what is referred to an advanced gas reactor (AGR) design. The oldest of these reactors was built forty-three years ago and the youngest was built 30 years ago. They were intended to have a lifespan of about thirty-five years.
         Two of the reactors had to be closed temporarily in January which resulted in a twelve percent drop in nuclear powers contribution to the national grid. There have been multiple outages recently due to either safety checks or engineering work that ran over its allotted schedule. When nuclear power plants have to reduce their output or be shut down temporarily, the carbon emissions of the nation rise because the shortfall is usually made up be firing up dormant fossil fuel power plants.
         EDF is a French utility company which is primarily owned by the French government. It is the owner of the U.K. fleet of nuclear power reactors. As the reactors reached the intended end of their operational life, EDF applied to the U.K. regulators for and received new licenses to extend the reactors lives into the 2020s. Now there are fears that aging and deteriorating U.K. nuclear infrastructure may reduce reactor output or even require that some U.K reactors be shuttered and decommissioned before their revised licenses run out.
          Iain Staffell is a lecturer in sustainable energy at Imperial College. He recently compiled information on the output of the nations nuclear power reactors. He said, “Just as Toshiba and Hitachi have pulled out of building new reactors, we have one third of the existing nuclear capacity unavailable either for maintenance or because their maximum power has been reduced as they get older. Many of our reactors were built in the late 70s, and like your typical 40-year-old they aren’t in peak physical condition anymore.”
       Reactor 3 is an AGR at the Hunterson B nuclear power station on the west coast of Scotland. It was taken offline last March because more cracks than were anticipated were found in the graphite in the core of the reactor. The graphite acts as a moderator to slow down neutrons but years of bombardment by neutrons has altered the structure of the graphite.
       EDF had originally said that Reactor 3 would be back online by November of 2018 but now they believe that they will have it working by the end of April 2019. The other reactor at Hunterson is scheduled to be back online by the end of March 2019. EDF will only be able to restart the two reactors at Hunterson if their safety report is approved by the U.K. nuclear regulatory agency.
      EDF just announced this week that it was changing the schedule for the reopening of its Dungeness nuclear power plant in Kent from February to April. The closure was due to maintenance of the pipes that carry steam from its broiler. EDF hopes that Dungeness will be back on line before the Hinkely B reactor in Somerset will have to be taken offline for inspection of the graphite in its core. If more cracks that expected are found, that would mean that it will have to be offline longer than scheduled.
Please read Part 2

Ambient office  =  97 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 164 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 166 nanosieverts per hour

Cauliflower from Central Market = 45 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 116 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 97 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office  =  97 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 164 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 166 nanosieverts per hour

Orange bell pepper from Central Market = 45 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 116 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 97 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office  =  97 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 164 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 166 nanosieverts per hour

Red bell pepper from Central Market = 45 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 116 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 97 nanosieverts per hour

Dover sole – Caught in USA = 117 nanosieverts per hour

        The Laboratory for Laser Energetics (LLE) at the University of Rochester is the biggest university-based U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) program in the nation. The OMEGA laser is located at the LLE. It is the most powerful laser at any academic institution in the U.S. The LLE is one of leading research laboratory in the U.S. exploring the laser direct-drive approach to generating energy from nuclear fusion.
        In this approach, spherical deuterium-tritium pellets of fuel are bombarded with sixty laser beams which hit the surface of the pellets from all directions at once. Under the intense heat of the laser beams, the pellets implode and turn into a plasma. If they can concentrate enough heat and pressure at the exact center of the implosion, a thermonuclear burn wave will travel outward in all directions in the plasma. This would produce energy from nuclear fusion far in excess of the energy used to drive the lasers. Much more powerful lasers than OMEGA would be needed to achieve this goal.
       One of the biggest problems with advancing nuclear fusion research is the lack of models which could predict accurately which specifications for target shape and laser pulse shape would yield the best results. The LLE has been able to triple the yield of their fusion experiments by utilizing the latest data science techniques to make use of previously collected data and earlier computer simulations.
       The Rochester team is made up of Varchas Gopalaswamy and Dhrumir Patel, PhD students and their supervisor Riccardo Betti, chief scientist and Robert L. McCrory Professor at LLE. The team applied sophisticated analytical techniques to data gathered from one hundred previous fusion experiments with the OMEGA laser.
         Gopalaswamy said, “We were inspired from advances in machine learning and data science over the last decade.”  Betti said “This approach bridges the gap between experiments and simulations to improve the predictive capability of the computer programs used in the design of experiments.” The results of their research allowed the team to optimize the specifications for the exact shape and size of the fuel pellets and the temporal shape of the laser pulse to best trigger fusion.
       The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has lasers that are about seventy times as powerful as the OMEGA laser. If the models developed by the Rochester team can be extrapolated for these more powerful lasers, the result should be about one thousand times as many fusion reactions per test run. A modest improvement in target compression on the OMERA laser system should be enough to approach breakeven conditions at the level of power available to the NIF laser systems. This extrapolation of modeling is not a simple thing. Betti said, “Extrapolating the results from OMEGA to NIF is a tricky business. It is not just a size and energy issue. There are also qualitative differences that need to be assessed.”
       Parallel to the work at Rochester, scientists at the NIF are working to see if the results from Rochester can be applied successfully at the NIF. Unlike the direct drive fusion approach at Rochester, at the NIF they use an indirect drive approach. The fuel pellet is enclosed in a metal can called a hohlraum. Lasers are fired into both ends of the can along the axis to heat the hohlraum and its contents. X-rays are generated in the hohlraum which causes the fuel pellet to explode and produce fusion reactions in the plasma. This approach has been making progress towards breakeven.

Ambient office  =  97 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 164 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 166 nanosieverts per hour

Pinapple from Central Market = 45 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 116 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 97 nanosieverts per hour