Ambient office  = 148 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 103 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 98 nanosieverts per hour

Pineapple from Central Market = 121 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 100 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 88 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office  = 135 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 103 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 99 nanosieverts per hour

Avocado from Central Market = 121 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 107 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 99 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient office  = 67 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 89 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 89 nanosieverts per hour

Pineapple from Central Market = 98 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 148 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 140 nanosieverts per hour

Dover sole – Caught in USA = 96 nanosieverts per hour

The U.S. is planning on spending a trillion dollars over the next ten years on upgrading the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Part of this project will be the construction on new nuclear warheads. The plutonium cores of warhead are called “pits”. The Pentagon expects to be producing eighty pits a year by 2030. In the past twenty-five years, the U.S. has only produced thirty pits.
      In the next few days, the U.S. Department of Energy will select one of two possible sites to manufacture the plutonium pits. The two sites are the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. However, there are serious concerns for both potential sites about the safety of their operations. There are charges that employees at both sites were sloppy in the handling of nuclear materials and/or failed to monitor safety issues aggressively.
       The Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico is the place where plutonium pits have been manufactured in the past. In the month of March alone, errors in the handling of plutonium by LANL workers caused three work stoppages. Workers confused the words “staging” and “storage” twice in recent weeks which resulted in plutonium being placed in containers and areas which were prohibited and unsafe. These mistakes follow three years during which work at LANL was halted because they were unable to meet safety standards for handling plutonium. They have resumed most such work since the three-year hiatus which began in 2013 and ended in 2016.
       The Savannah River Site has produced materials for nuclear warheads since the Fifties. In January of 2015, the stirring mechanism for a tank of plutonium solution failed. Flakes of plutonium sank to the bottom of the tank and began to interact with each other. If there had been enough to form a critical mass, a chain reaction would have taken place that would have killed everyone in the room and released radioactive materials into the environment.
      Since the incident with the plutonium tank, operations at the SRS have been overseen by the National Nuclear Security Administration. A recent report from senior DoE engineers and physicists concluded that while there had been some improvement at the SRS from the NNSA oversight, there were still problems that needed to be fixed. During a week-long inspection in the month of January, were still “alarmingly inattentive to safety and were not adequately heeding the advice of their safety experts.”   
      The principal assistant deputy secretary of defense of the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration’s stated that nuclear rivals of the U.S. are taking notice of our problems in the production of nuclear warheads. He said, “I’m sure they’re watching that. It’s not lost on anyone that there are nations out there that produce more pits than we do, including the North Koreans. That’s one of the reasons why we need to get moving in terms of our capability.”
       During the Cold War, nuclear armed nations paid little attention to safety and the environment when they were working on nuclear weapons. There has been some improvement in the past twenty years since the fall of the Soviet Union, but it appears that there are still significant problems at U.S. nuclear weapons manufacturing sites.

Ambient office  = 73 nanosieverts per hour

Ambient outside = 89 nanosieverts per hour

Soil exposed to rain water = 87 nanosieverts per hour

Beefsteak tomato from Central Market = 74 nanosieverts per hour

Tap water = 108 nanosieverts per hour

Filter water = 100 nanosieverts per hour

       The Pentagon is planning on spending a trillion dollars over the next decade on a new generation of nuclear bombers, submarines and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Together, these are known as the nuclear triad. Recently, at an event on Capitol Hill, Lt. Gen. Jack Weinstein, Air Force deputy chief of staff for strategic deterrence and nuclear integration, said, “But the triad is more than a triad. The triad also means space capability. We need the capability of early warning satellites to know what is going on. We need an unblinking eye to find out what is going on. That unblinking eye is provided by space. We need the capability of military communications, secure military communications satellites, EMP [radiation] hardened communications.”
       The U.S. president is connected to military forces by a classified communication network known as NC3 which stands for nuclear command, control and communications. Weinstein said that while NC3 has not traditionally been considered as part of the triad, nonetheless it is vital to the U.S. nuclear defense. Weinstein went on to say, “I can talk all day about the importance of NC3. The president has to communicate with forces. We need command posts that can take over those missions. Then you need the processes and procedures so that crew members know that a message is authentic and valid. That is foundational to this nuclear force.”
       The Trump administration has pointed out that NC3 is a system that needs to be modernized. They have suggested that NC3 needs a change in governance structure. Currently, the program is managed by Air Force Global Strike Command. Protecting satellites and signals from being jammed has become very important because China and Russia are working on techniques and technologies to disrupt and disable U.S. space assets. The Joint Staff review of NC3 was scheduled to be presented to Secretary of Defense James Mattis yesterday.
       NC3 consists of waring satellites and radars; communications satellites, aircraft, and ground stations; fixed and mobile command posts; and the control centers for nuclear systems. The Nuclear Posture Review stated that many of these systems employ antiquated technology that has not been upgraded in almost three decades. The future architecture of the system needs to be designed.
       When the nuclear triad systems are modernized, it is important that they be able to connect to classified Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellites that can be used for conventional and nuclear military missions. The Air Force is working on modernizing communications and early warning satellites. Integration with NC3 is critical. 
      The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the cost of modernizing NC3 could be as much as fifty-eight billion dollars over ten years. This project is very important because the Pentagon will be putting the next generation of the nuclear triad into operation in ten years and these new systems will not be compatible with the antiquated NC3 system which was designed in the Sixties.
      The land-based leg of the nuclear triad is referred to as the ground-based strategic deterrence. The future version of this leg will be a network of four hundred missile silos that need redundant and assured communications. The current land leg of the triad communicates over thirty thousand miles of buried copper wire that connects the three Air Force bases that host the Minuteman 3 nuclear silos. It is reliable but low bandwidth.
       Weinstein said, “Everyone in the U.S. Air Force needs to understand the value of the nuclear force, just like everyone in the U.S. Air Force needs to understand the value of the space force. … Strategic deterrence in the 21st century is more than just nuclear. It’s space, cyber and conventional.”