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.
Economy
There’s an extreme discrepancy between the extreme amount of naked shorting of the “paper” metals, and the high institutional demand for physical metal; basically, the central banks are buying gold but they don’t want you to know that it’s the place to be. As Wranglerstar would say, “act accordingly”. The world is being separated into two groups: the one that is migrating towards a new, commodity-based currency and a real economy, and the West which is doubling-down on insanity. There is a huge number of zombie companies in the West – basically, they are dead but they fumble along because nobody told them yet. The prices of everything are up and this is increasingly pressuring the poor. The American government is doing everything to prop-up the broken system and hide the symptoms of outright collapse for as long as possible. The danger of economic collapse and global fiat currency collapse is HIGH.
Radiological status
NORMAL. Readings are consistently elevated by 10% since 11. Aug. late afternoon, which probably means that some ammo depot containing depleted Uranium or something in Ukraine has been hit, but it hasn’t been publicised.
The amount is low enough to be attributable to natural sources as well, but I don’t think so. (It started alternating to baseline around 9:30 12. Aug., eventually subsided by morning 13 Aug) This behaviour is consistent with a low-density cloud of weakly radioactive particles travelling across the area and eventually dispersing or moving away.
Update 18. Aug: the measured values are up again, at 0.11 µSv/h.
Update 29. Aug: the measurements went down to 0.10 µSv/h after strong local rain, which lends credence to my hypothesis that the cause are the atmospheric particles of low-radioactive matter. Since the increase in radioactivity seemed to persist for so long, my guess is that the most likely cause is the persistent use of depleted uranium shells in Ukraine; the alternative interpretation is destruction of radioactive devices in explosions – smoke detectors and the like. I don’t have a spectrometer that would tell me the exact eV values of the detected photons, which would help me identify the exact isotopes in question. Regardless, the measured increase is so low, it’s merely informative. I don’t recommend taking any actions. (the measured values kept fluctuating between baseline and +10% in the following weeks)
Update 19.Sep: the Russian MOD reports having struck a large Ukrainian warehouse with depleted uranium ammo. According to prior experience, it should reach us within days. I expect it to be a slight increase over natural background, but it’s a worrying trend that is almost certain to get worse as war escalates.
Measurements
Current 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.