Ambient office  = 128 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 105 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 94 nanosieverts per hour

Blueberry from Central Market = 89 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 65 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 62 nanosieverts per hour

Dover sole – Caught in USA = 104 nanosieverts per hour

       Seawater contains many dissolved minerals other than salt including sulfates, magnesium, potassium, bromide, fluoride, gold, and uranium. There is only about three parts per billion of uranium. This amounts to about three micrograms per liter. While that is a very small amount, the world oceans are so big that they contain about four billion tons. That amounts to five hundred times more uranium than all the know deposits of uranium on land. If it could be extracted cheaply and efficiently, it could be a valuable source of uranium.
      Uranium in seawater exists in what is called pseudo-equilibrium. This means that as long as the amount of uranium dissolved in seawater remains at it current level, no more uranium will be dissolved from the rocks of the seabed. So if large scale uranium extraction was practiced and the concentration of uranium fell, more uranium would be leached out of the rocks. In a strange way, it is a “renewable” energy source. It is estimated that ultimately, a hundred trillion tons of uranium could be extracted from the world’s oceans. This could supply the energy needs of the human race for millennia or until a better energy resource was discovered or developed.
       It is not easy to extract uranium for seawater. The Japanese Atomic Energy Institute developed an expensive technique that utilized polymer mats to draw the uranium out of solution. The U.S. Oak Ridge National Laboratory found a better method. They doped polymers with the chemical amidoxime and then irradiated the combination. This was cheaper than the Japanese system.
        The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and LCW Supercritical Technologies recently took ordinary acrylic yarn and made it into a material that would absorb uranium in seawater. The researchers determined that if they used waste acrylic fibers, this method of extracting uranium could be cost-competitive with land mining of uranium.
        The PNNL/LCW researchers started by placing acrylic yarn in a tank and circulating seawater over the yarn. The yarn chemically bonded the uranium to a molecule which was then processed to produce uranium oxide or yellow cake. The process is easily reversible which means that it is easy to release the uranium from the yarn which can then be used again.
        One of the PNNL researchers said, “For each test, we put about 2 lb (1 kg) of the fiber into the tank for about one month and pumped the seawater through quickly, to mimic conditions in the open ocean. LCW then extracted the uranium from the adsorbent and, from these first three tests, we got about five grams — about what a nickel weighs. It might not sound like much, but it can really add up.” This same process of extraction could also be used to clean up toxic heavy metals in rivers, streams and wetlands.
      LCW intends to license the new technique. They are collaborating with PNNL on finding funding to launch large scale tests in the Gulf of Mexico. Warmer water makes the process more efficient. The waters of the Gulf may increase the yield of uranium two or three times over the laboratory results.
      China and Japan are currently exploring uranium extraction techniques. The China National Nuclear Corporation’s Beijing Research Institute of Chemical Engineering and Metallurgy signed an agreement with Saudi Arabia’s King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology in 2017 to collaborate in research on extracting uranium from seawater, with Saudi and Chinese researchers to conduct a two-year investigation.

Ambient office  = 72 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 110 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 119 nanosieverts per hour

Yellow bell pepper from Central Market = 72 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 72 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 59 nanosieverts per hour

Part 2 of 2 Parts (Please read Part 1 first)
       In 2016, ninety prominent American scientists sent a letter to President Obama. They urged the president to remove the four hundred and fifty U.S. land based nuclear missiles from this immediate launch status. As far as we know, Russia is the only other nuclear armed country in the world that keeps a significant number of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger launch status.
        In 2016, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a report on the dangers of having all these nuclear weapons ready to launch in minutes. They say that the risk of false alarms and accidents far overshadow any benefit of hair-trigger launch status. “The danger is that a system detects an incoming attack and it’s not real, but the president makes the wrong decision and inadvertently starts a nuclear war.”
       The U.S. has almost accidentally launch nuclear missiles before. In November of 1979, the U.S. computers that monitor our remote sensing network reported that a major Soviet attack was underway. The U.S. military proceeded to prepare for a counter attack with nuclear bombers and ICBMs. However, within ten minutes, it was discovered that the alert was a false alarm. A technician at the computer center had accidentally loaded a tape intended for drills for nuclear attack training.
        In 2010, the control center at Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming lost contact with its fifty ICBMS that were on hair-trigger status. For over an hour, the technicians were not certain if the missiles with nuclear warheads would accidentally be launched. The operators regained their connection to the missiles. Eventually, the loss of connection was attributed to malfunction of a circuit board in one of the computers.
       In January of this year, a state employee in Hawaii accidentally sent out an emergency alert that a missile was headed for Hawaii. Fortunately, Hawaiian technicians quickly realized that the alert was a false alarm and they canceled it. If they had not acted quickly, the U.S. might have launched missiles.
        Each land based nuclear missile currently on hair-trigger alert has a simple on-off switch for use during maintenance. Critics of the current hair-trigger status say that all of the missiles could be switched off. It would be easy to switch them on in the event of a real attack but in the meantime, the risk of false alarms and accidental launched would be substantially reduced.
       The most compelling argument against maintaining a nuclear arsenal on hair-trigger status that is its use would be suicide. It has been estimated that the detonation of only a few nuclear warheads would cause widespread death and destruction. The detonation of a hundred or more nuclear warheads would probably cause a nuclear winter and billions would starve. So discussion of tossing around a thousand or more nuclear warheads would mean the certain destruction of our global civilization and perhaps the extinction of the human race. This is madness.

Ambient office  = 115 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 86 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 79 nanosieverts per hour

Garlc bulb from Central Market = 58 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 74 nanosieverts per hour

Part 1 of 2 Parts
       I grew up under the threat of nuclear war during the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it was hoped that there would be a “peace dividend” in the form of reduced spending on expensive nuclear weapons systems. Unfortunately, the “peace dividend” never arrived. In the past few years, there has been an increase in tensions between the U.S. and Russia which inherited the Soviet nuclear arsenal. The Trump Administration wants to spend a trillion dollars over the next ten years to “modernize” our nuclear arsenal. Both Russia and China have announced similar plans for increased spending on nuclear weapons systems.
       Since the Cold War ended with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, it is estimated that the U.S. has about nine hundred nuclear weapons on alert for immediate launch in the event of evidence of an attack by another nuclear power. This is known as “hair-trigger” launch status. The U.S. president has the power to order launch of hundreds of U.S. nuclear weapons in minutes.
        The U.S. has land-based missiles in silos in five states at remote locations. Then there are the U.S. nuclear submarines that are sailing around in the world oceans with dozens of more nuclear missiles in them. The U.S. also has about forty special missiles that are called interceptors that are kept on hair-trigger alert. It is projected that three or four of these missiles could possibly destroy an incoming missile from an enemy. Tests of these interceptors have been less than encouraging considering that a nuclear attack against the U.S. could consist of over a thousand incoming warheads.
       The U.S. has infrared sensors and sensor laden satellites in orbit which can detect the trail of hot gas that is released by a missile flying through the atmosphere. It is estimated that it should take about twenty-five minutes for a missile launched by Russia to reach the U.S. Sensors could detect the missile in a matter of minutes. There are automated systems that monitor the data from the missile-detecting sensors in order to determine whether or not there is actually a missile headed for the U.S. If such a warning is received, the U.S. president has about ten minutes to decide if he or she wants to retaliate with our own missile launch.
       Originally, the hair-trigger launch status was intended to discourage the Soviet Union from thinking that it could successfully destroy the U.S. with a first nuclear strike while suffering little damage in return. Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the U.S. nuclear arsenal has also been used to threaten and intimidate other countries that either have nuclear weapons or are interested in acquiring them.
        Supporters of the hair trigger launch status of U.S. missiles claim that Russia or another enemy would have to use hundreds of their missiles to destroy U.S. missile silos and this would reduce the number of missiles that they could aim at U.S. cities. Other supporters point out that missiles bases are important for the local economy of nearby towns and that removing missiles from hair-trigger alerts could impact the economies of those towns.
Please read Part 2