Ambient office  = 97 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 115 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 122 nanosieverts per hour

Red potato from Central Market = 112 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 120 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 115 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office  = 97 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 115 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 122 nanosieverts per hour

Celery from Central Market = 112 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 120 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 115 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office  = 97 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 115 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 122 nanosieverts per hour

White onion from Central Market = 112 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 120 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 115 nanosieverts per hour

Dover sole – Caught in USA = 84 nanosieverts per hour

       Penn State University has just received an eight hundred thousand dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to research new methods for removing rare-earth fission products from molten salt baths which are used to electro-refine and reduce nuclear wastes during the recycling of uranium. The grant will be used to study the efficient recovery of rare-earth elements using liquid metals.
       Hojong Kim is an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Penn State. He will be leading the Penn State research team. Kim said, “The electrorefining process is designed to separate the usable fraction of uranium metal, about 95 percent of the material, from the used nuclear fuel, using a salt bath. However, in this process, rare-earth fission products are dissolved into the salt, accumulate over time, and must be removed to reuse the salt bath and minimize the generation of additional nuclear waste.”
       The current techniques for removing rare-earth elements are not very efficient because the rare-earths have multivalent states and high chemical reactivity. Neodymium is the most common rare-earth element. Currently less than half the neodymium fission product can be recovered during the uranium recycling process. The Penn State team has demonstrated that liquid bismuth metal can be used to recover as much as ninety percent of the neodymium fission product. Kim will research the recovery of three common rare-earth elements which are found in spent nuclear fuel. These three rare-earth elements are neodymium, gadolinium and samarium.
       The Penn State team is researching a technique that makes use of the strong interactions between these elements and certain liquid metals for easier and more efficient recovery. Kim and his team were able to use this method to recover alkaline-earth fission products which had been consider impractical to remove from a molten salt bath. Kim said, “There is a fundamental problem as to why the recovery efficiency for rare-earth elements is so poor, so we proposed a new hypothesis and approach based on liquid metals to enhance the efficiency. In our preliminary work, we observed great gains in recovery efficiency using our approach.”
       The DoE grant is for a three-year project at Penn State dedicated to improving recovery efficiency and control of chemical selectivity to reduce the volume of nuclear waste. It is expected that this research will also contribute to our understanding of the electrochemical and thermodynamic properties of rare-earth elements.
       Kim’s research group will focus on the experimental investigation and validation of the thermodynamic properties of rare-earth alloys. Zi-Kui Liu is a distinguished professor of materials science and engineering at Penn State. He and his team will work on high-throughput computational modeling of complex, multi-component alloy systems. It is hoped that this will help accelerate the development of efficient rare-earth recovery methods.
      James Willit works at Argonne National Laboratory. He will assess the feasibility of using Kim’s technique in a simulated process environment. Kim’s team will support Willit’s work. Kim said, “I envision that the materials cycle needs to be closed so that the bulk of the used materials are recycled and only a small fraction reaches landfills for minimal impact on our environment. That’s what drives my research.”

Ambient office  = 97 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 115 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 122 nanosieverts per hour

Snap pea from Central Market = 112 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 120 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 115 nanosieverts per hour

       The Chinese are committed to a new fleet of nuclear fission reactors. They are also putting money into a variety of other energy sources including nuclear fusion. Their Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) began operations in 2006 at the Hefei Institutes of Physical Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CASHIPS). It is classified as an “open test facility” for carrying out steady-state operations and other research related to the ITEM project being developed in France. Both Chinese and scientists from other countries are able to the EAST.
       EAST us a tokamak reactor. It contains a metal torus or donut shaped chamber. Air is pumped out until the torus contains what is called a “hard” vacuum. Hydrogen atoms are injected into the torus and heat by a variety of different methods. The resulting plasma is compressed with very strong superconducting magnets. The super-heated plasma is so hot and dense that it is similar to conditions found in the Sun.  Some of the hydrogen atom fuse together, releasing huge amounts of energy. The ultimate goal of fusion research is to create a reator that is self-sustaining. This means that more energy is generated by the reactor than is fed into the reactor to create nuclear fusion.
       It has just been announced that EAST has produced record temperatures and densitites for about ten second. Four different methods of heating the hydrogen plasma were used to generate core temperatures of one hundred million degrees Celsius which is six times hotter than the interior of the sun. The ions and electrons in the plasma were oscillated by a process called lower hybrid heating. A static magnetic field and a high-frequency field were applied which is referred to as electron cyclotron wave heating. A cyclotron was used to accelerate the ions in the plasma. This process is called ion cyclotron resonance. And, finally, neutral particles were accelerated and injected into the plasmas for what is known as neutral beam ion heating.
       The purpose of this experiment was to study how to maintain plasma stability and equibrium, how to confine it and moving it through the tokamak, and to find out exactly how the energetic particles interact with the physical wall of the torus. EAST has also been used to demonstrate how to utilize radio frequency wave-dominant heating. Maintaining high levels of plasma confinement with a high degree of purity is a research goal. EAST researchers also study magnetohydrodynamic stability as well as how to expel exhaust heat with a water-cooled tungsten divertor.
     EAST is being used to study methods for maintaining electron tempoeratures of over one hundred million degrees over long periods of time. It is dedicated to aiding in the development of advanced tokamak reactors such as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) being built in France, the Chinese Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR), and the proposed DEMO (DEMOnstration Power Station).
       While the recent breakthroughs with the EAST tokamak are impressive, much work remains to be done to achieve commercial nuclear fusion. In addition to the tokamak approach, there are at least a dozen different companies and teams working on alternative approaches to fusion.