Ambient office  = 88 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 69 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 66 nanosieverts per hour

Beefsteak tomato from Central Market = 71 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 139 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 125 nanosieverts per hour

       I have blogged about the Russian floating nuclear reactor that is being deployed to the Artic to aid oil exploration. Now it appears that the idea of a floating nuclear reactor is becoming more popular.
       Construction of a nuclear reactor onsite becomes problematic if the site is in a remote area with harsh weather conditions. If you use a floating reactor in such locations, it can be built in a convenient shipyard near a major port and then moved to the location where it will be used. Ocean water can be used to cool the reactor. When the reactor is no longer needed, it can be moved to a new location. Of course, there are questions about safety.
      China has announced that it intends to build about twenty floating nuclear reactors. The first such reactor should be ready for service in 2019. Indonesia is very interested in floating nuclear reactgors because there are many small islands in Indonesia which could benefit from a floating electricity generator.
      ThorCon USA Inc. is a private company located in Stevenson, Washington.  It is developing the ThorCon small modular reactor based on a design from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The ThorCon reactor is a molten liquid salt reactor designed to be carried on a barge. They use the same steam conversion system for electricity generation as a five-hundred megawatt supercritical coal plant but without most of the infrastructure required by the coal plant. Ultimately, the ThorCon reactor will generate electricity at about one third the cost of the supercritical coal plant.
       The floating ThorCon nuclear plant is called a nuclear island. It requires about one-sixth as much steel and about one-fourth as much concrete upstream from the steam turbine as a coal plant. A one-gigawatt ThorCon nuclear island requires less than four hundred tons of superalloys and other exotic materials. On the nuclear side, it uses about half the steel and about one fifty the concrete of a land based small modular reactor. Because the ThorCon reactor operates at ambient atmospheric pressure, the concrete used to construct it does not have to be reinforced. Reinforced concrete construction is impossible to automate, its requirements drive the critical path, it cannot be used in block construction and, ultimately, encloses the reactor in a solid structure that makes it very hard to repair and replace. The ThorCon reactor can be constructed entirely in bargable blocks in a shipyard assembly line.
       It is estimated that the ThorCon nuclear island should be able to produce electricity for under five hundred dollars per kilowatt. This would translate into about seven cents per kilowatt hour for consumers. A big well-equipped shipyard should be able to produce one hundred one gigawatt ThorCon nuclear islands a year.
       A one gigawatt ThorCon nuclear island needs about seven thousand pounds of twenty percent Low Enriched Uranium fuel to start. From then on, twenty-four pounds of this fuel must be added every day. Every eight years, the fuel must be changed out completely. One hundred and sixty tons of fuel will be sent to a recycling facility every eight years when the fuel is changed. About twenty four percent of the spent fuel will be uranium with the rest being thorium, If the only processing is boiling off the molten salt and no recovery is carried out, only seventy cubic feet of nuclear waste is produced.
       The ThorCon nuclear reactor could be a game changer for energy production along the world’s coastlines.

Ambient office  = 102 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 153 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 147 nanosieverts per hour

Peach from Central Market = 108 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 120 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 109 nanosieverts per hour

       The Russians have been rattling their nuclear saber for years. Their nuclear bombers have invaded other countries airspace and their nuclear submarines have invaded other countries territorial waters. They have moved nuclear missiles into border provinces to threaten neighbors. Putin has publicly threatened to use tactical nukes if Russia is losing a conventional war against NATO.
       Recently, Putin has been bragging about the amazing new nuclear weapons delivery systems the Russians are developing. They have announced a new missile with twenty-four independently tagetable warheads that could overwhelm any anti-missile system in the world, a hypersonic cruise missile that can be launched from a plane, an underwater stealth drone that could sail undetected right into the harbor of an enemy and detonate a nuclear bomb. They also announced this March that they are working on a cruise missile with a nuclear engine that would be able to fly for days without the need for fuel and reach anywhere in the world.
       The U.S. once worked on a missile with a nuclear engine but decided that it was not really a good idea. The missile would spew radiation as it traveled because there would be no shielding. That would mean that if it were launched from a location on the maker’s territory, it would irradiate the countryside on its way to the enemy. The project was abandoned.
        The Russians have been working on their new nuclear-powered missile design since the year 2000 but only announced it in March of this year. The new missile is believed to use a gasoline-powered engine for takeoff before switching to a nuclear-powered one for flight.
      Reports from the U.S. intelligence community have stated that four tests of the new Russian nuclear power missiles between November and February all crashed. The longest test lasted about two minutes. The missile crashed after flying just twenty-two miles. The shortest test flew for five miles before crashing. Apparently, the nuclear engine failed to ignite during the tests. It has been reported that senior Russian officials demanded that the tests be carried out over the objects of the engineers that the missile was not ready for testing.
       Now it appears that they cannot find the wreckage of one of the new missiles that they launched on a test flight in November. The missile went down in the Barent Sea north of Russia and Norway which the Soviet Union used as a dumping ground for nuclear waste and contaminated equipment and ships for decades. There have been times in the past when the Russians warned the Norwegians that there was a danger that Norwegian fishing zones were being contaminated by Russian underwater nuclear dumps.
       The Russians have launched a recovery mission for their nuclear power missile. Three ships will be involved including one equipped to handle radioactive materials. The U.S. intelligence report that revealed the Russian recovery mission did not mention any threat to the environment or public health.
      A spokesman for the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists released a statement that said, “It goes without saying that if you fire a missile with a nuclear engine or energy source, that nuclear material will end up wherever that missile ends up. If this missile was lost at sea and recovered in full, then you might hypothetically be able to do it without pollution, I would have my doubts about that because it’s a very forceful impact when the missile crashes. I would suspect you would have leaks from it.”

Ambient office  = 93 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 130 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 125 nanosieverts per hour

Pinapple from Central Market = 130 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 143 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 136 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office  = 63 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 135 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 136 nanosieverts per hour

Organic carrot from Central Market = 94 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 103 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 97 nanosieverts per hour