In August, LPPFusion was contacted by the Middlesex County Hazardous Materials Unit. An anonymous complaint had asserted that we were not making adequate safety precautions for our upcoming tests with pB11 fuel and in particular would be releasing dangerous amounts of radioactive materials to the environment. We don’t know for certain who made this anonymous complaint, but the (false) assertions were also made by Josh Brimdyr of Saybrook Fusion in emails to LPPFusion investors. So maybe we can guess who the anonymous complainant might be.
Mr. Carlos Morales of the Haz Mat unit immediately checked with colleagues and learned that municipal and county safety authorities have known of LPPFusion’s work since we set up our lab in Middlesex back in 2009 and were fine with our safety procedures. He also contacted us. To prepare for our work with pB11, which will produce a very short-lived radioactive isotope, carbon-11, Mr. Morales took several background radiation readings around the outside of our laboratory.
Oddly enough, he found radiation levels from 4 to 7 microrems per hour, which is three to five times less than the average background of 20 microrems per hour in Middlesex Borough. When he later took readings inside our experimental room, the value was even lower, 3 microrems per hour. So it seems that in the 14 years our lab has been operating, it has contributed negative radioactivity to the environment!
Since negative radioactivity does not actually exist (kind of like dark energy), we assume the low levels of background are just due to natural variations in the soil beneath the lab. Most background radiation at sea level comes from radon gas released by the decay of small amounts of uranium scattered in the soil.
Mr. Morales explained to the LPPFusion team that strong variations in the background readings in Middlesex Borough are connected to radioactive waste still remaining from the Manhattan Project during WWII. As we learned when we first set up the lab, Middlesex was the site of a uranium refinery during the war years and was heavily contaminated. An unsuccessful effort by the Federal government to clean up the waste in the 1960’s was followed by a more successful one in the 1990’s. However, Mr. Morales told us during his inspection that even that later clean up left radioactive waste at levels deeper than about six feet, some of it within a few hundred yards of our lab. But, fortunately, our location was not one of those initially contaminated.
In any case the LPPFusion research team will be working closely with Mr. Morales and other state and local safety authorities to ensure that our operations with pB11 are totally safe. This should be easy to do, as the main reaction produces no radioactive material at all, and the side reaction that produces carbon -11 occur at about 1/500th the rate of the main reaction. Since carbon -11 has a half-life of only 20 minutes, we have prepared careful procedures to keep the material isolated until it decays to background overnight.
