Ambient office  = 103 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 101 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 103 nanosieverts per hour

Carrot from Central Market = 70 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 93 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 84 nanosieverts per hour

       Beta batteries (also known as betavoltaic cells) use energy from a radioactive source that emits electrons (also known as beta particles). The radioactive hydrogen isotope tritium is often used as the beta source. Most nuclear power sources use radioactivity to generate heat which is then used to generate electricity. This can be either thermoelectric which utilizes a thermocouple to generate electricity from a temperature differential or thermoionic in which heat induces a flow of charge carriers from a surface. Beta batteries do not use heat to generate electricity. Instead, when electrons from radioactive decay move through a semiconductor material, they leave  ionizations trail which produces electron-hole pairs which produce usable energy.
        The first beta batteries were created over sixty years ago. Because early semiconductor materials were not very efficient for use in beta batteries, high energy, expensive and dangerous radioactive isotopes were used which limited their commercial potential. During the 1970s, some cardiac pace makers employed promethium in a beta battery called the Betacel which was the first commercial beta battery. These batteries were later replaced by cheaper lithium batteries. Eventually better semiconductors were developed and relatively low energy, cheap and safer tritium came into use for beta batteries.
       Beta radiation can be easily blocked by a few millimeters of shielding. This means that a properly constructed beta battery will not emit dangerous radiation. Beta cells depend on radioactive materials which produce less and less energy as they age. This means that a beta battery has to be designed to produce a minimum of useful power over its lifespan as power generation falls.
        The main use for beta batteries is in remote locations and long-term use. They are popular power sources for space probes that cannot be serviced and usually need to have a more than a decade of reliable power. Recently it has been proposed that beta batteries could be used to trickle-charge conventional batteries in consumer devices such as cell phones and laptop computers.
       In 2016, it was proposed that carbon-14 be extracted from nuclear waste and encapsulated in diamond for use in a beta battery. In 2018, a Russian team created a design for a beta battery that would utilize nickel-64 enclosed between ten micro layers of diamond. The prototype has a a power output of about one microwatt with a power density of ten microwatts per cubit centimeter. The half life of the nickel-63 is about a hundred years.
        A team of Russian researchers from the National University of Science and Technology, the Institute of Microelectronics Technology and High Purity Materials of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Kurchatov Institute National Research Center have announced a breakthrough in anticipating the properties of different designs for beta batteries.
        Up until now, the development of beta batteries has had to proceeded by trial and error. The Russian researchers have developed a computer program that can optimized the structure and behavior of proposed beta batteries. This will make it much simpler and cheaper to improve the design of new beta batteries

Ambient office  = 115 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 97 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 101 nanosieverts per hour

Carrot from Central Market = 73 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 114 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 104 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office  = 114 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 100 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 102 nanosieverts per hour

Carrot from Central Market = 68 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 119 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 114 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office  = 97 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 111 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 111 nanosieverts per hour

Orange bell pepper from Central Market = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 76 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 66 nanosieverts per hour

Dover sole – Caught in USA = 109 nanosieverts per hour

       Westinghouse Electric Company LLC was created in 1998 from the nuclear power division of the original Westinghouse Electric Corporation. It provides nuclear products and services to utilities around the globe. These services and products include nuclear fuel, service and maintenance, instrumentation, control and design of nuclear power plants.
       In 1999, the owners of WEC sold the new company to British Nuclear Fuels Limited. In 2006, WEC was sold to Toshiba, a Japanese company. In 2015, Toshiba ran into financial difficulties and in 2017, Westinghouse filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. IN 2018, Toshiba announced that it was selling WEC to Brookfield Business Partners.
        Westinghouse opened a nuclear fuel fabrication plant in Columbia, South Carolina in 1969. Through the changes of name and ownership, Westinghouse continued to operate the plant. Today it employs about a thousand people.
        An attempt has been made to build a facility at the Westinghouse Columbia site for the manufacture of Mixed Oxide fuel, a combination of uranium and plutonium for use as reactor fuel. The plutonium would come from purified stocks of plutonium originally intended for nuclear weapons. There have be political and public opinion battles over the MOX facility which been started and halted several times and is only partially complete.
      In 2011, there was a leak in an underground contaminated water line under the concrete floor slab of the Solvent Extraction Area at the WEC fuel fabrication facility. Uranium escaped from the plant and contaminated ground water. In one area, the contamination exceeded the levels allowed for drinking water. There was little effort to notify the public and nothing was done to clean up the leaked materials. WEC does not know the amount or spread of the radioactive materials.
       There is known to be contaminated soil under one of the buildings on the site and WEC has announced that it will not be cleaned up until after the site is shut down and the building torn down. WEC has applied for a forty-year license to continue operations at the site. If the license is granted, WEC will not deal with the contaminated soil from the 2011 leak until 2058 at the soonest. It is possible that during that forty-year extension, the contamination in the soil could leak out and further contaminate drinking water in the shallow aquifer under the Columbia fabrication facility.
       Last month, there was another leak at the WEC Columbia facility. Uranium contaminated water leaked through a three-inch crack in the floor of the nuclear fuel fabrication facility. Below the facility, levels of radioactive contamination were a thousand times above the normal levels found in soil. There are concerns that the contamination could spread to drinking water supplies.
       There was a public hearing where groups and individuals attacked Westinghouse not just for the recent leak but for a history of polluting groundwater around the WEC Columbia site. The public was upset about the possibility that if WEC would get the forty year extension license, they would make no move to cleanup the contamination from the recent leak until the site was shut down in forty years. This is just another example of the corporate lack of responsibility that I have blogged about many times.