Ambient office  = 112 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 91 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 90 nanosieverts per hour

Orange bell pepper from Central Market = 77 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 119 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 102 nanosieverts per hour

       I have written about nuclear power plant plants plans in specific African countries. Often there are critics of such plans because many countries just don’t have the demand and the infrastructure that would make nuclear power a reasonable investment.
       There are fifty-four different countries in Africa. The only currently operating nuclear power plant on the whole continent is the Koeberg plant in South Africa which produces 1.8 gigawatts of electricity. Rosatom, the state owned nuclear plant construction firm, claims to have signed nuclear power memorandum of understanding with Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria, Sudan, Uganda and Zambia.
       Most countries in Africa are experiencing severe shortages of electricity. The majority of African nations would need to double their generating capacity in order to meet the needs of their citizens and businesses. Kenya, Sudan and Zambia are dependent on hydroelectric power for their electricity. In order to double their generating capacity, a 2.4 gigawatt nuclear plant would be required for each. Nigeria depends on natural gas to generate electricity and it would take a 4.8 gigawatt nuclear power plant to double their electrical supply.
       South Africa recently decided against building more nuclear power reactors on the grounds that it would be too expensive. Since many African nations are very poor, how would they finance the construction of nuclear power plants? Bangladesh has finalized a deal with Rosatom for a nuclear project. Rosatom is loaning Bangladesh $12.65 billion. This loan will only cover the estimated cost of construction.  When interest accrual, possible cost overruns, operations and decommissioning are added to the cost, the estimated total cost would be around $30 billion. In negotiations with Egypt, Rosatom is offering a loan of $25 billion. As in the Bangladesh project, this is only enough for the initial estimated cost of construction.
       The interest rate for these two loans is about three percent. The loan is set up so that repayments only start in ten to thirteen years after the loan papers are signed. After payments start, they will continue for twenty-two to twenty eight years.
       Countries who sign up for loans for Russian reactor construction pay very little in the beginning which makes the deal attractive to government officials, especially those who may profit from the deals by commissions or bribes. However, when the repayment start, the country’s finances and power customers will be subjected to a huge debt that most African countries will never be able to pay. Over the life of the project, the three percent interest could increase the cost of the project by as much as forty percent.
       Every nuclear reactor project in the U.S. since the era of nuclear power began has run over budget and behind schedule. Countries who have contracted for Rosatom power plants could easily wind up having to pay back a higher than expected debt while not being able to recoup money from the sale of electricity.
      In light of the fact that Russia has shown itself to be willing to exert political and economic influence over countries that owe it money, it is likely that if an African country which found itself deep in debt to Russia, Russia could wind up exerting disproportionate influence over that country’s international affairs.
       Zambia is considering a Russian nuclear power plant similar in output to the Bangladesh plant. The ultimate cost of the plant is expected to be at least $30 billion. Zambia has a total annual budget of just over $7 billion. It is obvious that Zambia cannot afford such a plant.
       Given that nuclear power will be too expensive for most African nations, it would be much better for them to pursue energy sources such as wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal.

Ambient office  = 86 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 91 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 93 nanosieverts per hour

Beefsteak tomato from Central Market = 80 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 87 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 79 nanosieverts per hour

       Of all the schemes proposed for the disposal of radioactive wastes such as the spent fuel from nuclear power reactors, I think the best suggestion so far is to drill a deep hole, insert the waste and fill in the hole. A new company is exploring this idea.
       Deep Isolation is a start-up company based in Berkley, California. The company was started to adapt new drilling technologies to make the permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel cheaper and safer than other approaches that have been proposed.
       Although deep drilling for nuclear disposal has been researched for years, DI intends to take advantage of recently developed deep drilling techniques used for fracking to create two-mile-long horizontal tunnels a mile underground for storing spent nuclear fuel rods. Other deep drilling proposals for storing spent nuclear fuel were based on drilling vertical holes up to five miles deep.
       Following the cancellation of the geological repository under Yucca Mountain in Nevada in 2009, the President’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future considered several alternate proposals for the permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel including the idea of deep drilling holes to hold the waste. They recommended that disposal options should be tailored to the waste and the need. One of the important suggestions that the Commission made was that all the major stakeholders in and around a proposed site should consent to the storage of spent nuclear fuel in their area.
       A great deal of research and development has gone into the drilling of deep holes for the purpose of fracking to release oil and gas in shale formations. Drill rigs have been developed that can drill horizontal “stringers” or shafts off in different direction from the primary hole. The horizontal shafts can extend from miles.
      The DI process will be simple and based on existing drilling techniques. A shaft will be drilled a mile or more into the Earth and then the spent nuclear fuel rods will be inserted into the hole. After the fuel has been place in the shaft, the rest of the shaft is filled with crushed rock, asphalt and concrete. After the surface has been landscaped, there will be no sign that anything is buried there. It would take millions of years of geological processes to bring up anything buried miles underground.
      While earlier proposals were based on drilling vertical holes to hold the waste, the DI proposal is based on horizontal shafts which are actually cheaper and easier to drill. The proposed shafts will be able to accept spent nuclear fuel assemblies that are a foot in diameter and fourteen feet long. It should be possible to drill one of the disposal shafts in a couple of weeks at most.
       One major benefit of drilling deep holes for spent nuclear fuel disposal is that fact that it does not matter where they are located in the U.S. With billions of tons of rock above any such storage shafts, the type overlying rock formation don’t matter. The buried waste will be well below the water table in porous rock. Climate and human activities will have no effect on the buried waste. This means that spent nuclear fuel can be disposed of near the site of nuclear reactors no matter where they are.
       The U.S. has approximately eighty thousand tons of spent nuclear fuel which would not require a large number of holes to dispose of. Three hundred DI shafts would be able to hold all the spent fuel that currently exists in the U.S. The oil and gas industry has already drilled over fifty thousand fracking wells in the U.S. so it would be easy to drill three hundred disposal shafts.
       The biggest impediment to the DI proposal is the fact that current federal law prohibits the Department of Energy from employing any privately-developed geological disposal system. In order for DI to proceed, the rules and regulations for the permanent geological disposal of spent nuclear fuel will have to be changed.

Ambient office  = 115 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 94 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 95 nanosieverts per hour

Orange bell pepper from Central Market = 143 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 136 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 115 nanosieverts per hour

       Whistler waves are very low frequency electromagnetic waves that are generated by lightning. They are found in the ionosphere between fifty and six hundred miles above the surface of the Earth. Whistler waves are in the frequency range of one thousand cycles per second to thirty thousand cycles per second. Their maximum amplitude is usually between three thousand cycles per second to five thousand cycles per second.
       The frequencies of whistler waves are about the same frequencies as human hearing. If whistler waves are converted to audio, they make a whistling sound, hence the name whistler waves. They are produced when lightning bolts generate an impulse that travels between the norther hemisphere and the southern hemisphere along the Earth’s magnetic field lines. They change in frequency as they travel which is responsible for the whistle effect.
       Inside the nuclear fusion reactors called tokamaks, electric fields cause electrons to move faster and faster through the confined plasma. Usually when objects such as electrons move through a gas or a liquid, they are slowed by drag forces in the material that they are traveling through. However, in the case of a plasma, drag forces decrease with increasing velocity. This results in electron accelerating to near the speed of light. These relativistic electrons can escape the magnetic confinement and damage the container holding the plasma.
       Scientists have developed several methods for dealing with these relativistic electrons. Artificial intelligence systems have been used to monitor and adjust the density of the plasma to keep electrons from going too fast. Another solution is to inject a pellet of frozen neon into the plasma to increase the density of the plasma and slow down the electrons.
      It was recently discovered that whistler waves were being generated by relativistic electrons in the tokamak at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility (NFF) in San Diego. Plasmas have many modes of vibration. An electron traveling at just the right speed can cause the plasma to vibrate in one of its modes. This results in the generation of a whistler wave.
       The researchers at the NFF are studying the generation of whistler waves in plasmas in the hopes of understanding exactly how the whistler waves are produced. If they can reverse engineer the process, they might be able to use antennas to artificially generate whistler waves between the walls of the tokamak and the plasma in the tokomak.
       These artificial whistler waves should be able to slow down the relativistic electrons, so they do not damage the walls of the containment vessel. The researchers will need to find out exactly what frequencies and wavelengths would be most efficient in inhibiting runaway electrons and then develop the hardware necessary to produce those frequencies and wavelengths inside the tokomak.
      Work on nuclear fusion has been accelerating and there are at least six companies in the U.S. alone working on small commercial nuclear fusion generators. The donut shaped tokamak discussed in this article is only one of the hardware configurations being explored for nuclear fusion reactors. It is hoped that at least one of these companies will be able to produce a commercial fusion reactor for the energy market within the next ten years.