A lot has been made recently of a plan by the European Union to assess fees on airlines landing in EU airports for the carbon dioxide emitted by those aircraft.   Many countries outside the EU are not taking kindly to the proposal.   The US is one of them, but Russia, China and a few other Asian countries have gone even further in calling for an end to proposals of carbon fees on airlines. Officially the fees took effect on January first, though not all EU countries are expected to begin enforcing them right away.

Via the BBC:

Countries rally against EU carbon tax on airlines
Delegates from 26 countries opposed to a new EU carbon tax on airlines are meeting in Moscow to consider possible retaliation, amid fears of a trade war.

China, India, Russia and the US are among the countries opposed to the EU fee, which took effect on 1 January.

Critics say the EU has no right to impose taxes on flights to or from destinations outside Europe.

But in December the European Court of Justice ruled that the EU tax on CO2 pollution from aircraft was legal.

The Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) creates permits for carbon emissions. Airlines that exceed their allowances will have to buy extra permits, as an incentive to airlines to pollute less.

“Nobody has fought harder than the European Union over the years to get a global deal”

The number of permits is reduced over time, so that the total CO2 output from airlines in European airspace falls.

The EU’s Commissioner for Climate Action, Connie Hedegaard, said the opponents should work with the EU to create a global scheme to cut aviation pollution.

“Nobody would be happier than the EU if we could get such a global deal,” she told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: This is just a bad idea. If you’ve concerned about pollution and especially greenhouse gasses, don’t go after aviation. It’s the smallest, highest hanging of the fruit you can pick from. Well under 1% of human generated greenhouse gases come from aviation and yet that relatively small percentage comes with enormous benefits to mankind.

(more…)

What if I told you that a material existed with the following properties?

• It is highly radioactive.  Because it is a very high energy alpha emitter, it is very radiotoxic.  It also produces a long decay chain of daughters that emit high energy gamma and beta particles.
• It has a half-life of over one thousand years, making it difficult to dispose of and requiring long term storage considerations.   Despite the relatively long half-life, it is still short enough to make it highly radiotoxic, especially because of the nature of the radiation it emits directly and through its daughters.
• It emits enough gamma radiation that a pure sample of the material can kill tissue on contact, after only exposure of a few minutes.
• The gamma radiation emitted by the material and its daughters is sufficient that if you sat next to a few dozen grams of the material, you could easily end up with acute radiation sickness in a matter of hours.   In less than a day it could kill you.
• A pure sample emits enough radiation to create significant amounts of heat.  The total decay heat is more than 100 watts per gram.
• It is chemically reactive, it forms compounds which readily dissolve in fresh and salt water.  It may be mobile in the environment, but it also may cling to materials, making decontamination of areas difficult.
• It has a high biological uptake in most of its chemical forms.
• It may be persistent in the body and has a tendency to be incorporated into bones, replacing calcium.  In such cases, it will not clear the body and has been associated with leukemia and bone cancer.

Such a substance does, in fact, exist:  radium-226.   Gram per gram it’s more toxic than plutonium-239, the isotope most common in spent fuel.   It’s a highly energetic particle emitter that does not decay to a stable isotope but rather to a long chain of other radioactive substances.   First it decays to radon-222, then to polonium-218, astatine-218, radon-218, lead-214, bismuth-214, polonium-214, thallium-210, lead-210, polonium-210 and finally lead-206, which is stable.   For this reason, a chemically pure sample will actually increase in radioactivity until it reached equilibrium with its daughter products.   Despite the relatively long half-life, it produces a great deal of radiation because for every decay of radium-226, there are decays of all the other daughters all the way down the line.  Some of these emit high energy gamma rays.   Radon poses some additional challenges.  Because it is a gas, it may not remain in place and can result in the area around a radium-226 sample accumulating potentially dangerous concentrations of radon.  The radon gas can also disperse, contaminating the area with further decay products.

Despite these dangers, radium-226 was once far more valuable than gold.  For the first half of the 20th century, radium and its decay products were the most widely used radioisotope source for any purpose that required radioactive materials.   It was used for cancer treatment, in the form of radium needles, external sources and devices that collected radon for use in irradiating tissue.  Radium was commonly used in any circumstance where calibration sources were required, with many earth geiger counters coming with a radium-based test source.   It was used in ion and moisture gauges, cold cathode vacuum tubes and combined with beryllium to produce small neutron sources.  Radium was well known for its use in radiolumonescent paints.  The paint was commonly used for clock and watch faces, allowing them to glow brightly without first having to be exposed to light.   Larger concentrations were used for aircraft instrument dials, illuminated markers and cords.  It was realized that the heat from radium could be used as a means of powering boilers or other thermal engines, but was far too expensive to ever be used in this capacity.   It also was experimented with in early “nuclear battery” designs.

Radium-226 exists in small concentrations in uranium ore.  To recover a single gram of the material, several tons of uranium ore must be processed.   Still, because the material had so many uses and was so valuable, large operations existed all over the world to produce it.   In the 1920’s, a gram of radium could cost as much as $120,000, (about 1.3 million USD in modern terms)  though the price later fell to $75,000 due to more efficient production techniques.  Radium needles could contain up to .1 grams of radium, making them worth more than ten thousand dollars.    Because of this, radium was also used as an investment commodity.  Radium needles and other radium sources were kept in bank vaults in the same way gold, silver and platinum might be kept.

Of course, radium is also pretty dangerous for the reasons mentioned above.  Its chemical properties make it prone to contaminating areas and easily absorbed into the body, where it is distributed into bones and teeth, making it an especially persistent and damaging substance.   It produces a great deal of alpha, beta and gamma radiation, which is not desirable for most situations.  Its half life is inconveniently long for applications where disposal after a period of time is expected and the production of radon can be a danger and complicate its use.  For radiolumonescent items, gamma radiation is not desirable and the energy of the alpha particles emitted by radium has a tendency to degrade the phosphorescent compounds in the paint over time.  Radium was blamed for a number of deaths and illnesses, most notably in the “radium girls,” who worked in clock factories, painting the hands and numbers of clocks with radium paint.  Some were encouraged to lick their brushes to sharpen them, resulting in ingestion of large quantities of radium.

(more…)

The other day I was thumbing through an old USA Today newspaper. I don’t usually read USA Today and if I did, I wouldn’t usually read an old one, but I was in a waiting room. There was one thing that really caught my eye and put into perspective how poor the government can be at prioritizing spending.

Here it is:

In 2011, the government will spend about $502.5 million on research for Alzheimer’s and related dementias. About $450 million of that will come from the National Institutes of Health. By comparison, NIH is expected to spend $521 million on complementary alternative medicine and $823 million on obesity.

Lets first get some context here. Alzheimers is a debilitating condition that affects more than 26 million people, mostly those over 65, although it can occur much earlier. It’s a progressive degeneration of brain tissue. Once it begins, it will only get worse. Early symptoms include difficulty with memory, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. As time goes on, it slowly eats away at all mental function, leaving the sufferer, at first confused then increasingly incapable of doing anything. In highly progressed cases, the individual is really just not “there.” They can’t talk, can’t feed themselves, can’t recognize family and don’t know their own name. It’s really more of a slow death than anything else, although sufferers can live for years before dying, usually from an infection or some other secondary cause.

The implications of the disease are quite bad for society. The US alone spends over one hundred billion dollars a year caring for Alzheimers patients, many of whom need constant intensive care. There are ethical issues too, because it is difficult to draw the line at where a person is no longer capable of making their own decisions.   When first diagnosed, many sufferers have enough mental capacity to understand the horrible implications of what is happening to them.  It tears families apart and puts enormous burdens on care givers.  Long term care in nursing homes is extremely expensive and those who have no relatives or other means to pay for such care may end up in public institutions, which are becoming increasingly burdened by Alzheimers patients.  The problem will only grow as the population ages.

There are no known treatments for Alzheimers.   There are medications that do reduce the symptoms slightly, but none that will truly slow the progression.   There’s no known way to prevent it from happening and the cause remains elusive, although it is known to be at least partially genetic.  There may be other factors.  Some studies have found that the occurrence of Alzheimers may relate to everything from alcohol to exercise levels, but the relationship is small and does not account for most cases.

The thing about Alzheimers that is striking is that, based on everything we know, it *should* be possible to prevent it from happening.   Plaques form in the brain, but it’s not clear if this is the cause or the result of the destruction of brain tissue.   Brain cells die, toxins accumulate and the disease progresses.   Something is happening in the brain, some biochemical reaction is either occurring when it should not or is not occurring when it should.  It does not occur in everyone.  There should be a way to introduce a drug or chemical that will either suppress the destructive process or restart the renewing process that has stopped.  Having a better understanding of the genes that are involved can help a lot.  If that can be determined, then it might be possible to suppress those genetic effects.   First, the exact mechanism must be determined and understood, and there’s no reason to think that can’t be done.

Alternative medicine is nothing more than treatments and preparations that have already been tested or evaluated by science and rejected.  Most alternative therapies have no basis in science, have no plausible mechanism of action and have absolutely zero evidence of effectiveness.   As a general rule, they have all been extensively tested already.

If the government is to fund scientific studies, shouldn’t it spend more on the ones that actually have the potential to make an important difference than the ones that are just rehashing things that are already known to not work and are not even scientifically plausible?    That seems rather obvious to me.  Tell me I’m not alone on this.

Recently US presidential candidate Newt Gingirch has been getting a lot of flack, especially from skeptics, because of a statement he made stamens implying that the US could and should establish a permanent lunar colony and do so by the end of his presidential term.  That means there would be about eight years from start to finish.

Crazy?

Well, whatever you think of Gingrich, I have no problem with this idea.  Hell, I’d love to see the country run with it.

Lets consider the precedent.  In 1961 the United States couldn’t send a man to orbit (embarrassingly, kinda like now).  By 1962 we had sent a man into orbit for a brief period of time and were still a couple years away from actually having spacecraft do precision manuvers, dock or stay aloft for more than a couple of days.   In 1968, a spacecraft with three men orbited the moon and in 1969, two men landed on the moon.

Sure, today the US government takes decades to make a decidedly non-revolutionary space capsule, but it was not always that way nor does it need to be.

(more…)

Jessica Ainscough is a model and fashion writer turned “wellness warrior.” She’s an Australian media personality who, in 2008, was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer that is slow growing but extremely prone to spreading and which doctors recommended be treated by amputating an arm, where the tumor was located.  It’s understandable that someone would want to avoid such radical and disfiguring surgery, but for this type of cancer, such extreme measures provide the best long term prognosis.   Ainscough elected to have intensive local chemotherapy instead, which eventually did eliminate all detectable cancer.   Sadly, it recurred about a year later, as this type of cancer often does.  At that point, her doctors advised her that amputation was the best option for treatment.

The story might have ended there and been the sad tale of a young lady who lost an arm to cancer.   However, due to her poor choices, the story is much much sadder.   Ms. Ainscough decided to decline further treatment.  She instead opted for an organic diet, coffee enemas and various detoxification rituals.   She believes she is “healing” her cancer and that this is an example of her taking responsibility and doing the right thing.

Ms. Ainscough looks pretty good and, according to her, she feels pretty good.   That’s actually not too surprising.  The cancer has invaded her soft tissues and is growing and spreading, but, at least from the sound of it, it has not become debilitating just yet.   The sad thing is Ms. Ainscough seems to be very confident she is getting better because she lacks the most basic understanding of what the condition is and how it needs to be treated.   It’s certainly true that surgery, chemotherapy and radiation are damaging, but that’s because they have to be.  Cancer cannot be “healed.”  It must be killed.  Cancerous cells are damaged cells of ones own body, which grow out of control, due to a breakdown in the function of the mechanisms that control cellular growth.   Cancer is a problem inherent to animal cell biology, it can happen in anyone, for any number of reasons, but usually with no single attributable cause, and when it does, the only way it can be cured is by destroying the cancerous cells.

Ms. Ainscough’s complete lack of even the most basic understanding of how cancer is treated is apparent in some of her statements, such as this one:

Drugs do not cure cancer. They just don’t. Every now and then, chemotherapy and radiation treatments may put a patient into “remission”, but this is not truly healing. This is certainly not a cure. Why? Because cancer is so much more than the tumour it shows up as. The tumours are merely the symptoms. And when you just target the symptom without dealing with the root cause, the disease is going to keep showing up. You can chase the disease around your body with surgery and radiation, and you can douse it with toxic chemicals, but this is not an effective long-term solution. This is why you here so often of people whose “cancer came back”. They didn’t do the work to truly reverse their disease. Cancer is nothing more than your body telling you that something has got to give. It is the result of a breakdown in your body’s defenses after it has endured years of abuse in the form of a toxic diet, toxic mind and toxic environment.

No. That’s not it at all. The tumors are the problem. The tumors are composed of the cancerous cells that are the root of the problem and the reason it often comes back is that it’s so damn hard to get every one of those cells, especially when they start spreading to different areas of the body.   While cancer can be the result of carcinogenic chemicals, it can also be caused by heredity or by the random degradation of genetic material that happens as a result of cellular respiration.

Let me be blunt about the sad truth here.  Jess Ainscough is going to die.   I don’t mean in fifty years either.   The cancer she has now is going to kill her.   It’s too late for her to have a good prognosis, and if she continues without treatment, then the already poor odds are going to get worse.   She may feel okay for the time being, but she will die.  Her only hope is spontaneous remission, which in this kind of cancer is all but unheard of.

I should note that I am not a doctor and I do not have access to Ms. Ainscough’s complete medical information.  However, what I do know is that she claims to have been diagnosed with epithelioid sarcoma.   If this is indeed true (and if it’s a lie then she’s downright evil), and if she is not receiving treatment by surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, then the cancer can be expected to be fatal.   This has been confirmed by experts I have consulted before writing this.  As one put it “Not treating epithelioid sarcoma is suicidal.”

The thing that really bothers me, however, is that she is working very hard to put out the message that her non-treatment is working and is the best course of action.  She’s been embraced by the media and this idiocy could easily kill others who buy into it.

Via Dolly:

(more…)

So you’ve come to believe that aircraft are spraying dangerous substances above your heads and you want to get rid of them?   So, how about using some vinegar?

Um…

Well… it is a weak acid so it could possibly react with chemicals that are either alkaline in nature or are just prone to breaking down in acid.  But those “chemicals” are rather high up in altitude, and aside from that obvious problem, one might think that if the chemicals were potent enough to be dangerous even after drifting down and surviving the harsh conditions of the upper atmosphere than vinegar probably would not do much.

Really, do I need to explain the flaws in the logic here?

Apparently so.

There are actually a lot more videos about this on Youtube. I did not have time to look at them all, so some may be even more lame.

Recently came across an especially irritating editorial in the Washington Times and decided I really could not let the contentions stand.

Here it is, by Dariusz Leszczynski:

Helsinki/Finland, January 11, 2012-Epidemiological studies are given the most weight in evaluation of human health effects. Therefore, when researchers started their effort to find out whether cell phone radiation causes brain cancer, epidemiology was given the most of attention – and the most funding.

Well… yes, since Epidemology is the study of health events, disease patterns, health statistics and disease rates and their relation to factors like environment, lifestyle and other causes, it would seem to be the field of study that would apply to such a question.

It’s as straight forward as determining that geology is the appropriate field of science to look to when trying to determine the characteristics of a rock.

However, and please let me play “devils advocate”,

Only if I can play with science advocate.

is the epidemiology overrated?

No.

There, are we done?

(more…)

I have to admit, this really does not amount to much of a story, since it’s unlikely to change anyone’s mind, but god I love watching something like this…

Interesting that she brought up the “M or J” thing.   I mean, how can you mistake an M for a J, which one is it?  And why do spirits always provide things one letter at a time?    The funny thing is that it actually would apply to me to a huge extent.  My deceased paternal grandfather was named Joseph Joyce.  My grandmother is Mary Joyce.  I have an uncle whose name is also Joe Joyce, I have an aunt named Mary Anne, a cousin named Megan and my brother’s name is James.  It might be more of a stretch (although that never stopped a psychic from claiming success), but my sister’s middle name is Marie and my paternal Grandmother’s maiden name was Moriarty.   I have many J and M names in my relations, although names starting with either one of those letters are extremely common.

I love how she says she didn’t know the age of the anchor woman’s daughter and therefore couldn’t know if she had a boyfriend.   The whole damn point of being a psychic is you’re supposed to know stuff without being given all the information necessary to figure it out.   If you know a person’s daughter is seventeen, for example, it’s not a long shot to guess she either has a boyfriend or has some kind of romantic interests.   If she’s six, you can probably guess she does not.    It’s so ridiculous to think a real “psychic” would need to be primed with the information to know this.

The best part is the other news anchor who actually takes her to task, pointing out that she didn’t guess the name of the woman’s daughter but only guessed J or an M for someone relating to the woman.   It’s very common for a psychic to claim success for something they didn’t get outright but were lead to.  It’s also rare to get a news personality who will take them to task for this.  I wonder why she wants to do his reading off camera?

Stories like this really just grind my gears, because the way it is portrayed in the media is simply false.   If you read any of the reports about the recent extension of a moratorium on mining (uranium mining included) in the Grand Canyon area, you’d think that the big bad uranium mining industry was hell bent on destroying one of the world’s natural wonders and was only stopped by the Obama Administration from doing so.

Via the Mail and Guardian:

Obama rescues the Grand Canyon

Barack Obama took a big step towards preserving one of the world’s natural wonders on Monday, banning uranium mining on 400 000 hectares of land around the Grand Canyon.

The move, announced by the interior secretary, Ken Salazar, at a film screening in Washington DC, bans new mining claims around the canyon for the next 20 years. The area is rich in uranium deposits.

“A withdrawal is the right approach for this priceless American landscape,” Salazar said. “People from all over the country and around the world come to visit the Grand Canyon. Numerous American Indian tribes regard this magnificent icon as a sacred place and millions of people in the Colorado river basin depend on the river.”

Environmental groups said the move, which was opposed by the mining industry and some Republicans, would secure the American president’s environmental legacy.

The measure does not affect about 3 200 existing mining claims around the canyon, however. The administration said there would be continued development of 11 uranium mines.

Conservation groups said Obama had shown political courage in going ahead with the ban in the face of opposition. “Despite significant pressure, the president did not settle for a halfway measure,” said Jane Danowitz of the Pew Environment Group. In the final years of the George Bush presidency, when uranium prices were rising worldwide, mining companies filed thousands of claims in northern Arizona on lands near the Grand Canyon.

They also proposed reopening old mines adjacent to the canyon.

Salazar ordered a temporary halt to claims in 2009 after Obama came to office. Government officials proposed the 20-year ban in October last year, after an environmental review calling for the preservation of an “iconic landscape”.

(more…)

Okay, I admit it.  I’ve been at work in a circumstance where I should have been writing code or responding to e-mails and I may have hit up Facebook or Google News.  Sometimes I had a half-assed excuse to it, like that the weather was bad and I needed to know if there were any impending weather emergencies that might force the business to close early.  I might also say justify my Facebook surfing as “exploring the possibilities of social marketing.”   The fact of the matter is that I was slacking a little from time to time.   Who amongst us hasn’t?

But uh oh… it seems nuclear plant operators may have surfed the net

Via CNN:

NRC: Nuclear technicians surfed web on the job

Nine technicians responsible for monitoring operations at a Louisiana nuclear power plant spent on-duty time surfing the Internet — visiting websites that included news, sports, fishing and retirement information — jeopardizing the safety of the plant, federal regulators say.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission disclosed the web-surfing activities Monday in a letter that proposes a $140,000 fine against the River Bend nuclear power station, 24 miles northwest of Baton Rouge.

No pornography sites were accessed, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said. And importantly, the NRC said, the computer use did not present an avenue for hackers to gain access to reactor control systems, a modern-day fear at industrial plants.

But the NRC said the web-surfing control room operators were directly responsible for monitoring the reactor and other plant systems, and that their actions violated plant procedures requiring operators to remain attentive and focused on their work.

According to an NRC investigation, nine operators “deliberately violated” the safety procedures by surfing the web between January and April of 2010. Three of the nine did so with such frequency and duration that they are being issued “severity level three enforcement violations.” (Severity level one represents the greatest significant violation and severity level four is the lowest.) The remaining six operators will receive severity level four violations.

The operators were not named by the NRC.

An NRC spokesman said the proposed fine for web surfing is the only such action for web surfing in memory, and may be the only such action in the history of the agency.

In a notice to Entergy Operations Inc., operators of the River Bend Station, the NRC said that it appears that operators “remained attentive to reactor operations, indications, and alarms” while surfing the Internet.

“However, because most of the operators involved knew and understood” the prohibitions on Internet access, they exhibited “deliberate misconduct” and engaged in “hundreds of instances” of accessing the Internet from the “at-the-controls” area of the control room.

Score one for ridiculously reporting.

No, there was never a safety risk. While I don’t know exactly what the operators were assigned to do or how the systems operated here, all indications are that they were simply passing some time by surfing the net when they didn’t have any need to directly interact with the controls. Nuclear reactors certainly do not require continuous second by second human input nor do they need to have a reactor operator spending hours blankly staring at the dials that usually don’t change. Granted, all indicators are checked frequently, as they should be, but that was never interrupted.

It seems that in this case the operators were doing something many of us have: using company computers with internet access for personal surfing. Companies don’t like this, of course, because it tends to encourage employees to spend their time non-productively. If not for the internet, the operators might be more prone to doing something more useful for the company during the time they spend babysitting the control room. It’s like anything else, where the operator is primarily there for contingencies or if problems arise.

Still, this really just isn’t a news story. The workers never left their posts and they were ready to respond to any incident. That’s the important thing. I guess in the future they’ll have to go back to old fashioned paper crossword puzzles and magazines.