Ambient office  = 100 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 154 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 154 nanosieverts per hour

Yukon Gold potato from Central Market = 66 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 71 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 66 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office  = 88 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 128 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 131 nanosieverts per hour

Broccoli from Central Market = 95 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 72 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 65 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office  = 93 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 167 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 171 nanosieverts per hour

Leek from Central Market = 83 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 79 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 72 nanosieverts per hour

Dover sole – Caught in USA = 100 nanosieverts per hour

         The European Power Reactor (EPR) is a third-generation pressurized water reactor design. It was mainly developed by Framatome, a French company that was part of Areva, EDF, a French utility and Siemens in Germany.
         Construction was begun by Areva in 2005 on the first EPR called Olkiluoto 3 in Finland. It was supposed to go into operation in 2010. The Olkiluoto 3 has taken about three times as long to construct as originally estimated. The original estimate of about three and a half billion dollars has also tripled. The Olkiluoto 3 project has suffered from legal battles over compensation claims.
        Areva’s second EPR project is being built at the Flamanville Nuclear Power Plant in France and is referred to as Flamanville 3. Construction of that EPR began in 2007 and it was supposed to be completed in 2012 at an estimated cost of three billion eight hundred million dollars. It is still being built and the estimated cost has swelled to twelve billion six hundred million dollars.
       It is still not clear exactly when these two EPR projects will be completed and put into operation. A recent report on these two projects said that it was possible the both could begin delivering power to the grid by the end of 2019.
         Officially, Olkiluoto 3 is scheduled to begin delivering full power in January of 2020. Fuel will be loaded into the reactor in June of 2019 and it will be connected to the grid in October at which point it will be considered to be in operation.
        The Flamanville 3 reactor is almost completed but will probably not come online in 2019. Fuel will be loaded in the fall of 2019 but power will not start flowing before 2020. In July of this year, many of the welds of the Flamanville 3 reactor were found to be substandard and had to be redone. It will be connected to the grid in first quarter of 2020 with commercial power production scheduled for the second quarter.
        After signing contracts for Olkiluoto 3 and Flamanville 3, Areva sold two EPRs to China for installation at a nuclear power plant in Taishan, Guangdong. There were problems during the construction with both of the Chinese reactors but Taishan 1 began sending electricity to the grid in June of 2018. It started commercial operation in December of 2018. Taishan 2 is scheduled to be operational this year.
       All of the problems with schedule delays and cost overruns have caused analysts to question the integrity and viability of the EPR design. Attempts have been made to sell EPRs to the U.K., India and Saudi Arabia. More EPRs will probably have to be constructed in France to improve the reputation of the EPR.
       Edward Kee is with the Nuclear Economics Consulting Group in Washington, D.C. He said that prospects for more EPR sales are “uncertain, at best”. He went on to say, “The EPR appears to be difficult to build and may not be an attractive technology compared with other offerings. The French government seems to have little interest in or capacity to enter into the broader government-to-government and project funding arrangements that Russian and Chinese nuclear vendors are offering.”

Ambient office  = 66 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 100 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 100 nanosieverts per hour

Beefsteak tomato from Central Market = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 129 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 122 nanosieverts per hour

        One of the major problems with achieving commercial nuclear fusion is the fact that when magnetic confinement is used to squeeze a plasma, instabilities can develop which interfere with the production of fusion. This is a problem is universal in all tokamaks which are donut-shaped experimental fusion reactors. The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) of the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) is working on a way to control the worst of these plasma instabilities.
       The PPPL is working on what are called “tearing modes.” These are instabilities in plasma that create magnetic islands. These islands are like bubbles in a fluid. They can grow and cause disruptions that halt the fusion reaction and can actually damage the tokamaks where they occur.
       Fusion researchers in the 1980s discovered that they could inject radio-frequency (RF) waves to cause a current that would stabilize tearing modes and reduce the chance of fusion disrupting events. This is referred to as “RF current drive.” They did not know then was that small changes in the temperature of the plasma could enhance the stabilization of the plasma beyond a specific threshold of power. The PPPL is exploiting this process to improve the stability of plasmas.
       Tiny fluctuations in temperature influences the intensity of the current and how much of that current enters the magnetic islands. The interaction of the fluctuations and the amount of energy that winds up in the magnetic bubbles interact in a complex non-linear fashion.  The interaction between the fluctuations and the energy deposited in the islands can stabilize the plasma. This stabilization is less sensitive to misalignments of the injection current. The result of this process is called “RF current condensation” which refers to the increase in RF energy inside the magnetic islands that keeps the islands from growing and disrupting the plasma reaction.
       Allan Reiman is a theoretical physicist at PPPL and lead author of the paper reporting their work. He said, “The power deposition is greatly increased. When the power deposition in the island exceeds a threshold level, there is a jump in the temperature that greatly strengthens the stabilizing effect. This allows the stabilization of larger islands than previously thought possible.”
       Nat Fisch is associate director for academic affairs at PPPL and coauthor of the report. He published a paper in the 1970s which revealed how RF waves could be used to drive currents into tokamak plasmas. Reiman published a paper in 1983 that predicted that RF current drive could be utilized to stabilize tearing modes. He said, “The use of RF current drive for stabilization of tearing modes was perhaps even more crucial to the tokamak program than using these currents to confine the plasma. Hence Reiman’s 1983 paper essentially launched experimental campaigns on tokamaks worldwide to stabilize tearing modes. Significantly, in addition to predicting the stabilization of tearing modes by RF, the 1983 paper also pointed out the importance of the temperature perturbation in magnetic islands.”
        He went on to say, “We basically went back 35 years to carry that thought just a bit further by exploring the fascinating physics and larger implications of positive feedback. It turned out that these implications might now be very important to the tokamak program today.”