Site status
All web and mail services are currently NORMAL.
Nature
There has been an increasing frequency of destructive earthquakes in the Mediterranean area. Climate is NORMAL (Pleistocene interglacial baseline). Solar weather is behaving in ways that requires close monitoring; there have been strong CMEs that were close calls; they missed Earth, but would have been nasty had they hit us straight on.
Geopolitical status
Tensions between great powers are high. The global economy is in a compromised state. Banking system is in early stages of collapse. NATO and RF are currently in a state of proxy war in Ukraine. USA is signalling possible war with China in the near future. Diplomatic, economic and cultural connections between great powers are disrupted. There have been increasing signs of totalitarian mindset in the Western states: the state is implementing heavy surveillance, the press is tightly controlled, the social media is heavily censored and monitored, and instruments for restricting individual freedoms have been put in place. The danger of nuclear war is HIGH, and I’m starting to publish radiation measurements.
The West is increasingly crossing Russian red lines, encouraged by Russian non-escalatory policy, which will eventually produce extreme escalation. At the moment, the lines crossed are hitting Russia proper, long-range rocket weapons and depleted uranium shells. NATO is obviously creating a situation where they are a participant in the conflict and a legitimate target.
Americans apparently moved Dutch gold reserves into an American military base. Interesting how they are desperate to get a hold of it, when they try to convince the rest of us that it’s a relic of barbaric times and we should hold paper assets that “produce interest”. 🙂
Radiological status
“The destruction of depleted uranium shells in Ukraine has produced a radioactive cloud which has been blown toward Western Europe”, the secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolay Patrushev, has claimed. The UK has supplied this type of munition to Ukraine to be fired from British-made Challenger tanks. … Unconfirmed reports have circulated in Ukraine regarding the target of a Russian strike last Saturday, which Moscow said destroyed an ammunitions depot in the city of Khmelnitsky. According to the claims, the military facility was used to store British-provided depleted uranium shells. It has been suggested that the material may have been turned into dust by powerful explosions at the depot. (RT)
I don’t see any danger outside the affected area, and the event is significant only as the first documented case of radiological contamination in the Ukraine war.
Measurements
Background radiation level, measured in my home using Radiascan 701A:
Official radiation monitoring site: https://remap.jrc.ec.europa.eu/
Subjective evaluation of the measurements: NORMAL. Nothing is going on at the moment.
1 milisievert is 1000 microsieverts. Basically, the baseline is a tenth of a microsievert per hour. Milisievert is the order of magnitude for annual exposure to background radiation. 1 Sievert is 1000 milisieverts. The rule of the thumb is that if radiation is measured in microsieverts/h, you’re fine. If it’s measured in milisieverts/h, you need to worry and reduce exposure the best you can. If it’s measured in Sieverts/h, you’re fucked, but you need to understand that this is a function of time. If it’s 1Sv/h, and you’re exposed for ten seconds, this means you received a dose of 1/360 Sv, which is around 2.7 mSv, which is an annual dose of background radiation. If you stay in the “hot” area for hours, you die.
The radiation dosimeter is connected to a NUC on my LAN via USB, the software is capturing the screen periodically and pushing it to the web server every 15 min. It was previously connected to my desktop workstation, but that one uses cca. 200W of power, and the NUC uses cca. 20W, so this is more energy efficient and I can leave it on permanently. You might need to perform a hard-reload of the page (<ctrl>-F5 in Windows) to display the most recent reading.