Although the winter for much of North America has been mild this season, in Alaska it has been extremely harsh.  While those who live in the more remote parts of Alaska are used to dealing with the extremes of nature, this year they are facing the prospect of being cut off from vital supplies of fuel due to the extent of ocean icing and the harsh weather that has made even airlifting of fuel problematic.   This is not the first time these settlements have faced these kind of fuel problems, and it’s not likely to be the last.   In the past, there have been close calls and times when distant Alaskans have been left without fuel for periods of time.  Yet each time this happens, there is always the possibility that remote villages will suffer or even lose lives.

Remote areas of Alaska are off the wider electrical grid and are far from natural gas pipelines or railways to deliver coal.   Heat may be provided, at least in part, by wood burning stoves that can use local fuel, although wood supplies may also be limited.   However, by far the most important source of energy is oil.   Diesel oil is the only way for these communities to generate electricity and provides most of the heat.   Petroleum also powers local transportation and powers the vital systems of the communities, either directly or by generating electricity.   Communications, drinking water wells, sanitary systems, heat and lighting all require energy provided by oil.

These communities use a lot of oil, and although they may have large storage tanks, the energy density of petroleum means that they can’t go very long without replenishment.   Getting the supplies to these communities is never a sure thing.   When it does arrive it’s expensive and it’s rapidly becoming more expensive as petroleum prices go up.  Due to both the costs of oil as a commodity and the difficulty in delivering it, the final cost can be upwards of ten US dollars a gallon when it is delivered.

Via NPR:

Ultra-Harsh Alaska Winter Prompts Fuel Shortages

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Living in Alaska’s outer reaches is challenging enough, given the isolation and weather extremes, but at least three remote communities also have experienced weather-related late deliveries of fuel so crucial to their survival during an especially bitter winter.

The iced-in town of Nome and the northwest Inupiat Eskimo villages of Noatak and Kobuk faced fuel shortages that illustrate the vulnerability of relying solely on deliveries by sea or air, potentially subjecting communities to the mercy of the elements. The villages, which just received their fuel, are especially vulnerable, unable to afford more additional storage tanks for gasoline and heating oil, which can run as high as $10 a gallon.

Compounding a problem with no easy answers, temperatures dipping as low as minus 60 over the past few weeks means air deliveries are delayed at the same time people are consuming more fuel more quickly. Some people in both villages also use wood-burning stoves for supplemental heat, but diesel is the critical commodity.

“It’s been pretty tough,” Noatak resident Robbie Kirk said of life in the community of 500, which finally received a fuel delivery on Tuesday, three days after the village store ran out of heating oil. “We usually have a nice reserve of fuel. Now we’re just playing catch-up.”

Nome missed its pre-winter delivery of fuel by barge when a huge storm swept western Alaska. In a high-profile journey, a Coast Guard icebreaker is cutting path in thick sea ice for a Russian tanker delivering 1.3 million gallons of fuel to the community of 3,500.

Without a fuel delivery, Nome would likely run out of certain petroleum products before the end of winter and a barge delivery becomes possible in late spring.

Until recently, the situation was much more dire for the smaller communities of Noatak and Kobuk, located farther north above the Arctic Circle, where relentless extreme cold prevented fuel deliveries by plane until this week, residents say.

Before the new supply of fuel arrived in Noatak, the village store borrowed some heating oil from the village water and sewer plant, said store manager Connie Walton. But filling the store’s two 23,000-gallon tanks has diverted any potential crisis.

“We’re good for another month and a half,” Walton said.

Residents in Kobuk also were highly relieved by an air shipment of heating oil that arrived Wednesday in the village of 150 people about 175 miles to the east. It’s been too cold for people to use their snowmobiles much, so gasoline isn’t as much of a concern, said City Clerk Sophia Ward. Running low on the diesel used to warm homes was another matter.

“I’m glad that it came in today,” Ward said Wednesday. “It’ll keep our elders warm.”

In Noatak, residents once had fuel shipped by barge on the Noatak River, but that has long been impossible since the river shifted and became shallow there.

Two years ago, residents began tapping into another source of fuel, thanks to the Red Dog zinc mine 40 miles to the northeast. The mine in 2009 began a program to sell gasoline and diesel to Noatak and another close neighbor, the village of Kivalina. The fuel is sold at cost, said mine spokesman Wayne Hall.

“This is strictly for what we can do to help out our closest community members,” he said. “Energy and heating costs are one of the biggest costs to families in this region.”

The program lets individuals buy fuel on Saturdays every three weeks at a staging area about 23 miles from the village. This winter, they can buy gas in 55-gallon drums calculated at $4.89 a gallon. Villagers also bring their own drums to fill with diesel fuel at $4.35 a gallon.

The latest Red Dog fuel day for Noatak took place on the day the village store ran out of diesel. So villagers formed a convoy of about 30 snowmobiles and freight sleds, and headed out in weather marked by temperatures of 47 below and, for the first 10 miles, dense fog, said Kirk, who regularly takes advantage of the sales.

“It basically cuts my heating fuel in half,” he said. “It’s pretty critical for me.”

The state also helps lower the soaring cost of electricity in Alaska’s rural areas, spending almost $32 million in fiscal year 2011 through its Power Cost Equalization program, which subsidizes residential electric rates and the power bills of community buildings. Power in most villages is diesel-generated.

With so many scattered settlements of a few hundred or less, the logistics of keeping them all supplied is daunting. The very fact that oil would be brought in by air should drive home just how difficult and expensive an operation this is. Even when the system works and fuel and electricity are available, it’s always extremely expensive. The cost may be offset by subsidies, but that only shifts the burden to the government and tax payers. Ultimately, there’s no getting around the fact that getting hundreds of thousands of gallons of diesel to remote settlements is a costly undertaking.

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When spacecraft are sent to explore the inner solar system, solar cells are usually the choice to provide power.  However, when venturing out past the orbit of mars, the intensity of sunlight available makes it increasingly difficult to obtain sufficient amounts of power.  Past Jupiter, it’s virtually impossible to power a space probe with solar cells as they would need to be enormous to gather enough sunlight.   Even within the inner solar system, where sunlight is reasonably intense, solar cells provide limited energy for probes that explore the surface of planets, such as the mars exploration rovers.   Sunlight is also problematic for places like the earth’s moon, where spacecraft would sit in complete darkness for days.

The solution to this problem has been the radioisotope thermal generator.   An RTG is a simple device, consisting of a strong particle-emitting isotope that produces heat and a thermoelectric generator which converts that heat into electricity.   The heat can also be used to keep vital components of the probe warm.  Unlike nuclear reactors, radioisotope thermal generators are extremely simple, have no minimum critical mass, produce little gamma and almost no neutron emissions, which could blind scientific instruments, and therefore require little or no shielding.  Modern RTG’s can provide hundreds of watts of reliable electrical power for years on end in a small, durable package.

The choice of isotope for space missions has always been, and continues to be plutonium-238. Plutonium-238 is a powerful alpha emitter which produces enormous amounts of heat energy.  Plutonium-238 produces only a small amount of low energy gamma emissions, making it easy to shield.  It’s easily prepared into ceramic oxide pellets that are chemically stable and have good thermal transfer.   With an 88 year half-life, plutonium-238 is short lived enough to be a good energy producer yet long lived enough to allow for missions of many decades.

All radioisotope thermal generators used for deep space missions have used plutonium-238.   RTG’s were also used to power the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Packages left by astronauts on the moon.    The RTG used for the Mars Science Laboratory provides 110 watts of electricity and uses about 4.5 kilograms of plutonium-238.  Larger RTG’s have been built for deep space probes, which provide up to 300 watts of power and use 7.8 kilograms of plutonium-238.  Some spacecraft have used multiple RTG’s, for example, Cassini was equipped with three RTG’s which provided a total of 900 watts of power to the spacecraft.

There are other isotopes that can also be used to provide power for RTG’s, but none are as desirable as Pu-238.   Strontium-90, a high energy beta emitter, which can be extracted from spent fuel, also produced significant amounts of heat, but would require substantially more shielding and produces less power per gram of material.  Isotopes of Curium have been studied as well, but also provide much less power and require greater shielding.  Americium-241 has also been considered, but at least four times as much material would be needed to produce the same amount of power, and greater shielding would also be required. Still, Am-241 is regarded as being the second most well suited fuel for RTG use.

Worldwide production of Am-241 is only a few kilograms per year, with US production capacity standing at only 500 to 750 milligrams annually.   Most of this material is already used to fill demand for smoke detectors and moisture gauges.  In order for the US to have a viable chance of using Am-241 as an RTG fuel, production would have to be ramped up significantly.

At one time, plutonium-238 was relatively cheap and easily available.  The United States had large stocks of the material and used it for numerous space missions.  Yet since the early 1990’s, that has not been the case.  Since then, only Russia has had the capacity to produce plutonium-238 and the price has skyrocketed.   US missions have been entirely dependent on plutonium-238 purchased from Russia at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars.  Yet now even this limited supply is threatened, as Russia has begun to signal that it will no longer be able to provide the quantities of Pu-238 that the US (or potentially other nations) would require for continued space exploration.

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The item shown bellow is a tritium-containing radiolumonescent key chain.  It’s basically a small glass vial containing radioactive tritium gas and coated with a phosphorescent compound and placed in a clear plastic case.   Tritium is a weak beta emitter with a half life of 12.3 years.  Because the beta particles are very low in energy, they are entirely blocked by the glass and are not detectable on the surface of the key chain.  The beta particles ionize the phosphorescent compound and produce a steady glow, most often in green (the brightest and most visible color) but also available in other colors.  Because of the 12.3 year half life of tritium, these key chains can be used for several years before there’s any noticeable reduction in brightness.

They’re really great little items and the perfect gift for just about any occasion.   For one thing, they’re an interesting conversation piece and a very good example of a practical application of radioactivity.   They demonstrate that you can indeed keep something radioactive in our pocket and be quite safe and they’re very eye-catching.

They also have quite a bit of practical value.  Finding your keys in the dark is very easy with one of these key chains.  In fact, it’s so easy that if you happen to misplace your keys, the easiest way to find them is to turn off the lights.  When entering your home or starting your car in complete darkness, the glowing key chain provides just enough light to easily select the correct key and use it without fumbling.   If you happen to drop the keys on the dark floor of your car, you can find them very quickly and without effort.   You can even see the glow of the keys if they are under a seat or somehow otherwise obscured from direct view.  You can get different colors and use them to mark different key chains, making it very easy to grab the correct one, even in complete darkness.

I’ve had these key chains before (and broken a couple by mistake).  I can attest to just how useful they are.   There’s also no other way of getting this same value without using radioactive material.  An electrically illuminated key chain could not provide such continuous periods of glow without the batteries quickly running out.   Standard phosphorescent glowing items are limited to a few hours of illumination and must be exposed to light first in order to glow, making them useless for something like a key chain, which is often kept in one’s pocket.

There’s only one problem with these amazing little glowing key chains:  nobody in the US sells them, at least not directly.   Technically, these are not approved for sale or ownership in the United States, although I’ve never heard of anyone getting in trouble for owning one.  Many people do own them and talk about them openly online and elsewhere.  It might just be one of those things that hasn’t shown up on the radar of a bureaucrat who was asinine enough to bother to do something about it.

Still, there are stories about their thugs stopping sales of these key chains on sites like eBay.  It seems that these days most of those sold on eBay are coming from sellers who are not located within the United States.  Exactly how much trouble you could potentially get in for these remains unclear, but it appears to be a case of selective enforcement.  (So if you have one, don’t ever leave the federal government looking for an excuse to call you a terrorist.)

Yet while the government may tolerate people owning them, you can’t buy them from any major retailer.   They can be purchased on the “grey market,” imported in relatively small batches or sold over the internet.  They can be bought from foreign retailers, like those in the UK, who will generally ship to the US without problem.   The best place to buy them, however, tends to be eBay, where numerous sellers will sell to US customers.

That, however, was not good enough for me.  I know a great product when I see one and these things are inexpensive, extremely useful and very easy to sell.  I had bought one and people were constantly asking me about it and where to get one.   I wanted to sell these, and not just by keeping it on the down-low, selling them on auction websites or to friends.  I wanted to really sell them, importing them wholesale and selling them openly and in quantity.

I also didn’t want even the slight potential to have the NRC knocking at my door, which does occasionally happen when someone tries to sell them in the US.   One would think that the government has better things to do, but of course, they don’t.

I thought it would be easy to do.  After all, these things are very readily available in other countries, and by “other countries,” I don’t mean just Russia, Zimbabwe and Cuba.  They can be bought in the UK.  They are brought into the US all the time.  They’re also perfectly safe.   Of course, I assumed wrong, but this was a few years ago, long before I had gained a full understanding of the bureaucracy that is the NRC.

I e-mailed, called and faxed the NRC several times about this matter.  I cannot even begin to explain how difficult they were.   First, nobody at the agency seemed to understand what I wanted to do or what the devices were for.  They told me that if I wanted to start the process of getting a consumer product containing radioactive material approved, I could get some paperwork to start the ball rolling, but it would be several thousand dollars just to begin and would take more than a year.  I told them I believed the items qualified as being license-exempt, since other items of comparable function and contents, such as illuminated watches are.   They didn’t seem to understand what I was getting at.

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When nuclear fission was first discovered in the laboratory, in 1938, it was seen as a relatively strange reaction, resulting from humans taking a sample of the heaviest known element and shooting artificially-generated neutrons at it until some of the atoms absorbed a neutron and split.   While the experiment provided enormous insight into the nature of atoms and helped provide early confirmation of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, by demonstrating the release of energy from an observable change in atomic mass, it was regarded as something that occurred in the laboratory.

Fission was recognized as a potential energy source after the possibility of a fission chain reaction was realized.  A chain reaction occurs when neutrons produced by nuclear fission strike other fissile nuclei, releasing more energy in a self-sustaining reaction.   In 1942, an experiment at the University of Chicago proved that nuclear fission could indeed produce such a chain reaction.   The first artificial fission reactor was created by piling large amounts of uranium together with ultra-pure graphite blocks.  The graphite slowed neutrons, making them easier to absorb by the uranium nuclei, resulting in the fission chain reaction.  In 1945, the first artificial fission chain reaction to occur without the aid of a moderator when the first nuclear weapon detonated in the Trinity test.  The Trinity device used plutonium as the fissile material, an element produced in nuclear reactors at the Hanford site.   Plutonium is too short-lived to be found in large quantities in nature.  Another bomb, fueled by uranium was the result of years of painstaking isotope separation, which increased the amount of fissile uranium-235 available to far beyond what is found in natural uranium samples.

For many years, it was believed that such fission reactions were always limited to these artificial circumstances.   Nuclear fission, it was thought, was the result of painstaking efforts by mankind to gather up the necessary materials, enrich beyond their natural concentrations and either bring them together rapidly in large quantities or place them in the special conditions inside a reactor, where neutron moderators make it possible to sustain nuclear fission.

In 1940, Russian scientists observed the phenomena of spontaneous fission, where heavy elements like uranium split on their own without the need for a neutron to cause the event.  It was also known that uranium atoms could split as the result of a neutron generated by cosmic rays.   However, such events are uncommon and produce little energy.   They are distinct from the chain reactions that had only been observed in human-created nuclear reactors.

All this changed in 1972, when an unusual discrepancy in the concentration of uranium-235 from a mine in Gabon Africa was detected.  Chemical analysis of a unique uranium deposit  indicated that the formation had sustained a fission chain reaction at one time.   The possibility of a natural nuclear reactor of this type had been suggested as early as 1956, but the Gabon discovery was the first time that such an event was confirmed to have happened.  Further investigation of the site identified at least sixteen regions of the deposit where the concentration of uranium and lighter elements clearly indicated that significant amounts of nuclear fission had occurred.

The reactor at Gabon operated about 1.7 billion years ago, producing chain reactions for at least hundreds of thousands of years.   It was remarkably similar to modern, artificial nuclear reactors.   Fission occurred when water seeped into cracks and pores in the deposits of extremely high grade uranium ore.   The water acted as a moderator, causing the chain reaction.   In modern times, water can only be used as a moderator in reactors where the uranium has been slightly enriched to contain more uranium-235 than found in nature, but because uranium-235 has a half-life of about seven hundred million years, there was a great deal more when the Gabon reactor was critical.

Exactly how long the Gabon reactor was critical or how much energy was released is not known.   Scientists have estimated that it probably generated about 100 kW of power and likely operated intermittently due to the buildup of neutron poisons and variations in the water levels in the rock.   It also generated some amount of plutonium-239 and other heavy isotopes, which would have added to the available fissile fuel.

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The following article ran on the front page of the New York Times just a few days ago. I’m hoping very much that this might actually start to get people questioning the wisdom of spending huge amounts of money on energy sources that can’t and won’t deliver. This is especially true in the current economic climate. The US government can’t afford to waste money and as many suffer without jobs, the issue of “corporate welfare” and handouts that benefit the rich while doing little for society as a whole has become a major issue.

Yet these subsidies and mandates are exactly the kind that create the worst social inequalities. Those rich enough to invest in the government-backed and subsidized businesses are given a golden opportunity to make more money with less risk than could ever be had in a fair market. At the same time, the general public pays for it through higher electric rates and taxes. Despite the claims that these programs exist to create jobs, the higher cost of energy that results hurts industry and ultimately can cost jobs. The enterprises that take advantage of these subsidies are incapable of ever being self-sustaining and could not survive without these direct and very expensive incentives by the government.

Via the New York Times:

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It’s an age old question:  What’s better for the environment?  Smaller and less prone to consuming fuel or large and more sophisticated and controlled.  Many seem to think that smaller is inherently better and advocate everything from smaller power plants to smaller farms, and in both cases, more of them.

An obvious area of debate is transportation, especially in terms of cars versus motorcycles.   There’s no doubt that motorcycles are smaller, with smaller engines and less dead weight being hauled around to carry a single passenger.   They use less fuel than cars.

So are they better for the environment?   The Mythbusters take on this question in an episode that will be airing some time in the upcoming season.

Via the LA Times:

‘MythBusters’ asks: Are motorcycles greener than cars?
A trend is afoot, according to “MythBusters” television host Adam Savage: “People are trading in their cars and driving motorcycles instead because they believe that’s the more environmentally friendly choice,” Savage said in Wednesday’s season opener of the popular Discovery Channel show. “The logic is because motorcycles are generally more fuel-efficient than cars, they burn less gas and thus they must be better for the environment.”

The question is: Are they really? As the MythBusters have done with each of the show’s previous seven seasons, Savage and his co-host Jamie Hyneman set out to test the theory.

Selecting three motorcycles and three cars that represented popular models from the ’80s, ’90s and ’00s, they put the six vehicles through a 30-minute, 20-mile course. Seventy-five percent was freeway driving; the other 25 percent was in the city. Savage drove the three cars. Hyneman trailed him at speed on each of the three bikes. None of the vehicles’ makes and models were disclosed.

All of the vehicles were equipped with portable emissions-measuring systems that took exhaust gases from a probe in the tailpipe and engine information from the engine control unit. The devices determined the vehicles’ fuel economy and emissions profiles while the vehicles were running on the real-world course in California’s Alameda County earlier this year.

The upshot? Motorcycles were indeed more fuel-efficient than cars and emitted less of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, but they emitted far more smog-forming hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen, as well as the toxic air pollutant carbon monoxide. For the most recent model year vehicles tested — from the ’00s — the motorcycle used 28% less fuel than the comparable decade car and emitted 30% fewer carbon dioxide emissions, but it emitted 416% more hydrocarbons, 3,220% more oxides of nitrogen and 8,065% more carbon monoxide.

The MythBusters’ conclusion: “At best, it’s a wash. Motorcycles are just as bad for the environment as cars,” Savage said on the show. “At worst, they’re far worse.”
…
In the 2011 American Lung Assn. State of the Air report, eight of the top 10 cities for ozone pollution were in California. Los Angeles ranked first.

Despite the MythBusters’ findings, emissions are only part of the story of a vehicle’s true greenness. According to the Motorcycle Industry Council, motorcycle manufacturing requires thousands fewer pounds of raw materials than automobiles. They require less fossil fuel, so they require less energy to pull that fossil fuel out of the ground. They use fewer chemicals and oils than cars. And motorcycles produced today are 90% cleaner in California than they were 30 years ago.

Note to MythBusters: How about a cradle-to-grave life cycle assessment for cars and motorcycles for the Season 9 opener?

It’s definitely a complicated issue, especially when one considers the issue of the actual resources that go into one of these vehicles, what impact they may have in terms of displacing other vehicles and how they are driven. Given the differences in driving habits and engine types and efficiency, it’s very difficult to make a one-to-one comparison between motorcycles and automobiles.

Motorcycles are certainly smaller and have a lot less metal in them. However, motorcycles don’t generally age gracefully, especially if they are driven often and therefore may need more frequent replacement. Additionally, many of those who own a motorcycle feel the need to also own a car, since cars have greater utility and can be used when the weather precludes the use of a motorcycle, so owning a motorcycle does not really displace the resources that go into a car.

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Much to do has been made of the fact that the majority of nuclear plants in the United States are scheduled to operate beyond the initial operating period that was estimated when they were first constructed. This all seems to have started when the Associated Press “broke” the story, despite the fact that it had never actually been a secret at all. None the less, many followed reporting how plants were being stretched far beyond the expectations of what their designers had intended, exposing the public to untold risks as they rust and fall apart.

Of course, this is not really the case. The plants have undergone numerous upgrades and refits over the years and continue to be upgraded and inspected to maintain high levels of safety. New procedures and new systems retrofitted to older reactors have improved their efficiency and safety beyond what it was originally. Of course, even with improvements, the older Generation II reactors still are not as good as new Generation III+ designs, but none the less, they are perfectly safe and reliable sources of power.

The primary reason why the designs have outlasted what was assumed to be their design life comes down to economics. While it has become cheaper and easier to extend the life of reactors, it has also become much more difficult to build new ones. The original designers might have presumed that after twenty or thirty years, their designs would have been so far surpassed that new power plants would have made them obsolete and redundant.

Unfortunately, they had not counted on just how difficult it has become to build a new reactor.  Just getting the permits to build a new nuclear reactor can take upwards of a decade, and a combination of political lobbying, lawsuits and other tactics by special interest groups meets a potential reactor operator at every step of the way, possibly even derailing plans completely before construction is completed but after billions have been spent.   There exists no other facility whose construction will be opposed by so many with so much effort at so many levels.   Paperwork costs alone can top the hundreds of millions, and final costs for construction have skyrocketed since the 1970’s.

Thus we have what we have and their life is extended to the maximum possible since replacements remain so difficult and expensive to built.

This does not mean that they are unsafe.  In fact, there are many examples of technology lasting far longer than its designers had anticipated.

Reasons why something may outlast its original design life:

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Via the Courthouse News Service:

Plant Must Disclose Data to Fight Cancer Lawsuit

CHICAGO (CN) – The parents of a girl who developed brain cancer can access over a decade of data on an Exelon power plant they claim discharged harmful radiation, a federal judge ruled, but the energy giant can withhold certain other information.
Joseph and Cynthia Sauer say their daughter, Sarah, was diagnosed with a medulloblastoma, a highly malignant brain tumor, roughly three years after the family moved to Grundy County, where Exelon operates the Dresden Generating Station and Unitech Services Group has a nuclear facility.
They claim that radioactive discharges from the plants traveled through the groundwater, causing Sarah’s cancer.
After receiving the Sauers’ lawsuit, Exelon and Unitech said Sarah’s diagnosis should frame the discovery period, which it proposed to run between 1996 and 2004, two years before and three years after.
The Sauers countered with a motion to access Exelon’s historical data going back to the early 1990s, which they said their expert witness need to determine the impact of the facility on Sarah, since radioactive materials persist for long periods of time in groundwater.
The plaintiffs also moved to compel Exelon to produce documents related to three similar lawsuits filed in 2006.
Meanwhile, Unitech filed a motion to compel the plaintiffs to provide specific facts underlying their claims against Unitech and to provide a damages disclosure statement.
The court partially granted the Sauers’ motion against Exelon, but also directed them to clarify and substantiate their claims against Unitech.
Exelon’s objections to the requested time frame are premature, U.S. Magistrate Judge Nan Nolan found. “Given plaintiffs’ expert’s statement that contamination from the Dresden facility can persist for long periods of time, releases dating back to the early 1990s could be relevant to Plaintiffs’ claims or could lead to the discovery of admissible evidence,” she wrote.

It’s impossible not to feel sympathy for someone like Sarah Sauer. She’s a completely innocent child who did nothing wrong and is faced with a life or death battle with cancer. It must be terrifying for her and her family. I’m sure all readers wish her nothing but the best in beating this cancer and going on to live a long, happy life.

But it was not caused by Dresden Generating Station. It’s impossible to say what caused a given incident of cancer, of course, but in this case, the circumstances are such that the probability of this case of cancer being related to the nearby nuclear plant is so astronomically low that I’m willing to just say that it’s not related.

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It seems every time there is any development in nuclear technology, the media immediately starts equating it with weapons and assumes that it will be used for such. Not only that, but it also seems that the prevailing belief is that the only way to keep the world safe is to assure the United States does not engage in the new technology, because, if we don’t, well then obviously nobody else will, right?

Via the New York Times:

Scientists have long sought easier ways to make the costly material known as enriched uranium — the fuel of nuclear reactors and bombs, now produced only in giant industrial plants.

One idea, a half-century old, has been to do it with nothing more substantial than lasers and their rays of concentrated light. This futuristic approach has always proved too expensive and difficult for anything but laboratory experimentation.

Until now.

In a little-known effort, General Electric has successfully tested laser enrichment for two years and is seeking federal permission to build a $1 billion plant that would make reactor fuel by the ton.

That might be good news for the nuclear industry. But critics fear that if the work succeeds and the secret gets out, rogue states and terrorists could make bomb fuel in much smaller plants that are difficult to detect.

Iran has already succeeded with laser enrichment in the lab, and nuclear experts worry that G.E.’s accomplishment might inspire Tehran to build a plant easily hidden from the world’s eyes.

Backers of the laser plan call those fears unwarranted and praise the technology as a windfall for a world increasingly leery of fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases.

But critics want a detailed risk assessment. Recently, they petitioned Washington for a formal evaluation of whether the laser initiative could backfire and speed the global spread of nuclear arms.

“We’re on the verge of a new route to the bomb,” said Frank N. von Hippel, a nuclear physicist who advised President Bill Clinton and now teaches at Princeton. “We should have learned enough by now to do an assessment before we let this kind of thing out.”

New varieties of enrichment are considered potentially dangerous because they can simplify the hardest part of building a bomb — obtaining the fuel.

General Electric, an atomic pioneer and one of the world’s largest companies, says its initial success began in July 2009 at a facility just north of Wilmington, N.C., that is jointly owned with Hitachi. It is impossible to independently verify that claim because the federal government has classified the laser technology as top secret. But G.E. officials say that the achievement is genuine and that they are accelerating plans for a larger complex at the Wilmington site.

“We are currently optimizing the design,” Christopher J. Monetta, president of Global Laser Enrichment, a subsidiary of G.E. and Hitachi, said in an interview.

The company foresees “substantial demand for nuclear fuel,” he added, while conceding that global jitters from the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan “do create some uncertainty.” G.E. made those reactors.

Donald M. Kerr, a former director of the Los Alamos weapons lab who was recently briefed on G.E.’s advance, said in an interview that it looked like a breakthrough after decades of exaggerated claims.

Laser enrichment, he said, has gone from “an oversold, overpromised set of technologies” to what “appears to be close to a real industrial process.”

…

The plan was to exploit the extraordinary purity of laser light to selectively excite uranium’s rare form. In theory, the resulting agitation would ease identification of the precious isotope and aid its extraction.

At least 20 countries and many companies raced to investigate the idea. Scientists built hundreds of lasers.

Ray E. Kidder, a laser pioneer at the Livermore nuclear arms lab, estimated that the overall number of scientists involved globally ran to several thousand.

“It was a big deal,” he said in an interview. “If you could enrich with lasers, you could cut the cost by a factor of 10.”

The fervor cooled by the 1990s as laser separation turned out to be extremely hard to make economically feasible.

Not everyone gave up. Twenty miles southwest of Sydney, in a wooded region, Horst Struve and Michael Goldsworthy kept tinkering with the idea at a government institute. Finally, around 1994, the two men judged that they had a major advance.

The inventors called their idea Silex, for separation of isotopes by laser excitation. “Our approach is completely different,” Dr. Goldsworthy, a physicist, told a Parliamentary hearing.

….

In May 2006, G.E. bought the rights to Silex. Andrew C. White, the president of the company’s nuclear business, hailed the technology as “game-changing.”

Mr. Monetta of Global Laser Enrichment, the G.E.-Hitachi subsidiary, said the envisioned plant would enrich enough uranium annually to fuel up to 60 large reactors. In theory, that could power more than 42 million homes — about a third of all housing units in the United States.

The laser advance, he added, will promote energy security “since it is a domestic source.”

In late 2009, as G.E. experimented with its trial laser, supporters of arms control wrote Congress and the regulatory commission. The technology, they warned, posed a danger of quickening the spread of nuclear weapons because of the likely difficulty of detecting clandestine plants.

Experts called for a federal review of the risks. In early 2010, the commission resisted.

Late last year, the American Physical Society — the nation’s largest group of physicists, with headquarters in Washington — submitted a formal petition to the commission for a rule change that would compel such risk assessments as a condition of licensing.

“The issue is too big” to leave to the federal status quo, Francis Slakey, a physicist at Georgetown University and the society official who drafted the petition, said in an interview. He added that Mr. Obama or Congress might eventually have to get involved.

This year, thousands of citizens, supporters of arms control, nuclear experts and members of Congress wrote the commission to back the society’s effort. Many of them cited well-known failures in safeguarding secrets and detecting atomic plants.

But the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry group in Washington, objected. It said new precautions were unnecessary because of voluntary plans for “additional measures” to safeguard secrets.

A commission spokesman said the petition would be considered next year. In theory, the risk-assessment plan, if adopted, could slow or stop the granting of a commercial license for the proposed laser plant or could result in design improvements.

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I find it absolutely stunning that there are groups today who use violence and blatant disregard for the law in an attempt to stop technological advancements.   It’s an almost religious fury that labels certain fields of science and technology as evil and so dangerous that they must be stopped by any means necessary.  It’s as if they are cursed or embodied with black magic and for those who are so fearful, no action to stop them is too extreme.

It ranges from weedwackering the genetically engineered crops they fear so deeply to sending bombs to terrorize, injure  or kill.

Via the Miami Herald:

Mexico: Anti-technology group sent college bomb

MEXICO CITY — An anti-technology group calling itself “Individuals Tending to Savagery” was responsible for a package bomb that injured two university professors just outside Mexico City, a prosecutor said Tuesday.

The explosion at the Monterrey Technological Institute’s campus in the State of Mexico on the outskirts of the capital Monday injured two professors, one of whom was involved in robotics research. Neither suffered life-threatening injuries.

Mexico State Attorney General Alfredo Castillo said at a news conference that the group’s involvement was identified from a partially destroyed note found at the scene.

Castillo said the group opposes experiments with nanotechnology and has staged attacks on academics before.

“The ITS is a movement that, in accordance with its ideals, opposes any development of neo- or nanotechnology anywhere in the world, and they are linked to attacks in several different countries of Europe, including Spain and France,” Castillo said.

He confirmed that the package had been disguised with labels from a well-known express package service, but did not say which one.

A manifesto signed by the group and posted on a radical website said: “We have no remorse, our aim was precisely for the guards to deliver the package to the intended professor,” who it identified as Oscar Camacho.

…

The ITS statement said Camacho’s “police impluses” to inspect the package triggered the detonator, adding that “there is no doubt that curiosity killed the human.”

The statement said nanotechnology and other technologies damage nature and native species and contribute to natural disasters.

It appears that the group in question is a kind of anti-industrialization movement with similar beliefs to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. Essentially, such groups believe that mankind is best left in a primitive tribal state, living off the land in a hunter-gatherer or subsistence lifestyle. While such societies do tend to result in very low life expectancy and high infant, maternal and childhood mentality, this is not necessarily seen as being negative by members of such movements, as humanity is usually seen as being a problem in and of itself, one which is best kept in check through such attrition. The philosophy also takes a page from Amory Lovins, seeing low technology and primitive, tribal lifestyles as somehow being more honorable or honest than modern technological societies.

Of course, this philosophy does have a major problem: given the choice, humans will generally tend to prefer a safer, easier lifestyle and given the option for leisure or comfort will take it. Not only this, but humans tend to be inventive and will develop new ways of doing things, including tools and technologies and refine and improve those technologies. Even if you took all technology away from human kind, we’d start to invent it again. Hence, the use of violence and intimidation to try to stop this from happening.

Such groups tend to be especially fearful and intolerant of any technology that they see as especially unnatural or which ignorance has bread fear over.

Sound familiar?

Nanotechnology is an especially exciting area of science which also has a number of anti-technology and green groups scared. It combines aspects of chemistry, materials sciences and computer and mechanical engineering. It may also include aspects of biology and atomic physics.

Basically, nanotechnology is the use of atoms and molecules to construct nanoscopic structures capable of acting as machines or of presenting useful physical properties by virtue of their structure. The push to nano-scale structures came in part from the desire of computer chip designers to push technology to creating the smallest possible functional electrical circuits. It also grew out of the availability of technologies like the scanning-tunneling electron microscope.

Of course, such concepts are not entirely new either. Chemists and materials scientists have long understood the importance of molecular structure in determining the properties of a material. Nanoscopic “machines” already exist in nature in the form of proteins and enzymes. The semiconductor industry has also long used molecule-level engineering to produce special materials for use in electronics.

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