A Helium Shortage?

original article:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.08/helium.html

There are two kinds of stable helium. You know the first one: It puts lift in birthday balloons, Thanksgiving Day parades, the Goodyear blimp.

The other kind, an isotope called helium-3, may not be as familiar. It's a naturally occurring, but very rare, variant of helium that is missing a neutron. Helium-3 is the fuel for a form of nuclear fusion that, in theory, could provide us with a clean, virtually infinite power source.

Gerald Kulcinski, director of the University of Wisconsin's Fusion Technology Institute, is already halfway there. Kulcinski is in charge of an "inertial electrostatic confinement device," an experimental low-power reactor that has successfully performed continuous deuterium-helium-3 fusion - a process that produces less waste than the standard deuterium-tritium fusion reaction.

The next step, pure helium-3 fusion (3He-3He) is a long way off, but it's worth the effort, says Kulcinski. "You'd have a little residual radioactivity when the reactor was running, but none when you turned it off. It would be a nuclear power source without the nuclear waste."

If we ever achieve it, helium-3 fusion will be the premier rocket fuel for centuries to come. The same lightness that floats CargoLifter's CL160 will allow helium to provide more power per unit of mass than anything else available. With it, rockets "could get to Mars in a weekend, instead of seven or eight months," says Marshall Savage, an amateur futurist and the author of The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps.

The problem? We may run out of helium - and therefore helium-3 - before the fusion technology is even developed.

Nearly all of the world's helium supply is found within a 250-mile radius of Amarillo, Texas (the Helium Capital of the World). A byproduct of billions of years of decay, helium is distilled from natural gas that has accumulated in the presence of radioactive uranium and thorium deposits. If it's not extracted during the natural gas refining process, helium simply soars off when the gas is burned, unrecoverable.

The federal government first identified helium as a strategic resource in the 1920s; in 1960 Uncle Sam began socking it away in earnest. Thirty-two billion cubic feet of the gas are bunkered underground in Cliffside, a field of porous rock near Amarillo. But now the government is getting out of the helium business, and it's selling the stockpile to all comers.

Industrial buyers use the gas primarily for arc welding (helium creates an inert atmosphere around the flame) and leak detection (hydrogen has a smaller atom, but it usually forms a diatomic molecule, H2). NASA uses it to pressurize space shuttle fuel tanks: The Kennedy Space Center alone uses more than 75 million cubic feet annually. Liquid helium, which has the lowest melting point of any element (-452 degrees Fahrenheit), cools infrared detectors, nuclear reactors, wind tunnels, and the superconductive magnets in MRI equipment. At our current rate of consumption, Cliffside will likely be empty in 10 to 25 years, and the Earth will be virtually helium-free by the end of the 21st century.

"For the scientific community, that's a tragedy," says Dave Cornelius, a Department of Interior chemist at Cliffside. "It would be a shame to squander it," agrees Kulcinski.

For helium-3's true believers - the ones who think the isotope's fusion power will take us to the edge of our solar system and beyond - talk of the coming shortage is overblown: There's a huge, untapped supply right in our own backyard.

"The moon is the El Dorado of helium-3," says Savage, and he's right: Every star, including our sun, emits helium constantly. Implanted in the lunar soil by the solar wind, the all-important gas can be found on the moon by the bucketful.

Associate professor Tim Swindle and his colleagues at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory at the University of Arizona have already begun prospecting. Swindle has mapped likely helium-3 deposits on the moon by charting the parts of the lunar landscape most exposed to solar wind against the locations of mineral deposits that best trap the element.

But, says Swindle, when we really want a lot - when we're rocketing to the Red Planet and back for Labor Day weekend - the best place to gas up won't be the moon: "The really big source of it is way out." In our quest for helium-3, we'll travel to Uranus and Neptune, whose helium-rich atmospheres are very similar in chemical composition to the sun's. If futurists like Swindle and Savage are right, the gas will be our reason for traveling to our solar system's farthest reaches - and our means of getting there.

-Emily Jenkins

Note: The Darth Vader balloon is filled with hot air, not Helium.

Laser Advances in Nuclear Fuel

original article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/science/earth/21laser.html?scp=1&sq=lasers&st=cse

snippets:

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....

For now, the big uncertainty centers on whether federal regulators will grant the planned complex a commercial license. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is weighing that issue and has promised G.E. to make a decision by next year.

The Obama administration has taken no public stance on plans for the Wilmington plant. But President Obama has a record of supporting nuclear power as well as aggressive efforts to curtail the bomb’s spread. The question is whether those goals now conflict.

The aim of enrichment is to extract the rare form of uranium from the ore that miners routinely dig out of the ground. The process is a little like picking through multicolored candies to find the blue ones.

The scarce isotope, known as uranium 235, amounts to just 0.7 percent of mined uranium. Yet it is treasured because it splits easily in two in bursts of atomic energy. If concentrations are raised (or enriched) to about 4 percent, the material can fuel nuclear reactors; to 90 percent, atom bombs.

Enrichment is so difficult that successful production is quite valuable. A pound of reactor fuel costs more than $1,000 — less expensive than gold but more than silver.

The Laser Race

The first laser flashed to life in 1960. Soon after, scientists talked excitedly about using the innovation to shrink the size of enrichment plants, making them far cheaper to build and run.

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.

An old black-and-white photograph of the sensitive technology — perhaps the only image of its kind in existence publicly — shows an array of pipes and low cabinets about the size of a small truck.

‘Game Changing’ Technique

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....

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.

A POSITIVE ASSESSMENT

G.E., seizing the initiative, did an assessment of its own. It hired Dr. Kerr, the former director of Los Alamos and a former senior federal intelligence official, to lead the evaluation. He and two other former government officials concluded that the laser secrets had a low chance of leaking and that a clandestine laser plant stood a high chance of being detected.

“It’s a major industrial facility,” Dr. Kerr said of the planned Wilmington complex in an interview. “Our observation was this was not something that would sit in a garage or be easily hidden.”

Mr. Monetta added that the technical complexity and “significant size” of the laser plant were major barriers to its covert adoption abroad.

Global Laser Enrichment plans to build its complex on more than 100 acres at the Wilmington industrial park, with the main building covering nearly 14 acres. That, like Iran’s main enrichment plant, is roughly half the size of the Pentagon.

But critics say a clandestine bomb maker would need only a tiny fraction of that vast industrial ability — and thus could build a much smaller laser, perhaps like the modest apparatus in the old photograph. Each year, they note, the enrichment powers of the Wilmington plant would be great enough to produce fuel for more than 1,000 nuclear weapons.

When experts cite possible harm from the commercialization of laser enrichment, they often point to Iran. The danger, they say, lies not only in pilfered secrets, but also in the public revelation that a half-century of laser failure seems to be ending.

Their concern goes to the nature of invention. The demonstration of a new technology often begets a burst of emulation because the advance opens a new window on what is possible.

Arms controllers fear that laser enrichment is now poised for that kind of activity. News of its feasibility could spur wide reinvestigation.

Dr. Slakey of the American Physical Society noted that the State Department a dozen years ago warned that the success of Silex could “renew interest” in laser enrichment for good or ill — to light cities or destroy them.

That moment, he said, now seems close at hand.

Astronomical!

original article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/24/opinion/global/24iht-june24-ihtmag-das-32.html?src=recg

An international team of astronomers recently presented compelling evidence that our galaxy is teeming with lonely Jupiter-sized planets adrift between stars. Alone in the void, unattached to any parent sun, these cosmic orphans appear to fill the heavens in vast numbers. Extrapolating from what they observed, Takahiro Sumi, an astrophysicist at Osaka University, and his colleagues reported in the journal Nature that there could be as many as 400 billion of these lonely wanderers in our Milky Way galaxy alone....

As if on cue, NASA then announced that its Kepler spacecraft, two years into a three-and-a-half year mission to find Earth-size planets around nearby stars, had found a totally unexpected profusion of candidates. Of the 1,235 suspected planets spotted so far, moreover, about a third were in multiplanet solar systems like ours. Judging from these discoveries, it would appear that planets out there are as numerous as grains of sand. Twenty-five years ago, when I was a student in high school, only nine planets were known, all in our solar system. We learned their names and sequence from the sun, from the fleet-footed Mercury to icy Pluto. We learned of the runaway greenhouse effect that had stoked Venus to blistering temperatures and read about the giant storm that is Jupiter’s red spot, and we gazed at pictures of the rings of Saturn that the Voyager spacecraft had sent back....

It may come as a surprise that it was only in 1995 that a planet beyond our solar system was first sighted. The discovery by the Swiss astronomers Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz was confirmed soon after by an independent team in the United States. I was a graduate student then and remember the great excitement this stirred among astronomers. Like Kant, many had believed that the processes that gave rise to our solar system were not unique, and that there were other planets in the universe. Now, observations had finally caught up with belief.

Finding “exoplanets” (for extrasolar planet, as planets outside our solar system are now referred to) is no easy matter. Planets emit no light of their own, and only reflect the light of their stars. Given the interstellar distances involved, even the stars nearest to us appear only as pinpoints, so it’s a technological challenge to identify a planet thousands of times dimmer.

Mayor and Queloz met the challenge by using a spectrograph at the Haute-Provence Observatory in southeastern France to observe the rhythmic wobble of a sun-like star known as 51 Pegasi, a wobble created by the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet. This “radial velocity” technique has been used since to find many planets, but its reliance on spotting the wobble of a star tends to pick out larger planets close to their parent star — like the Jupiter-sized one Mayor and Queloz reported — which most scientists think could not be capable of supporting life.

There are ways to detect smaller planets, and the Kepler spacecraft launched on March 7, 2009, was specifically designed, according to NASA, “to survey a portion of our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover dozens of Earth-size planets in or near the habitable zone and determine how many of the billions of stars in our galaxy have such planets.” Kepler continuously monitors 145,000 stars in the Milky Way for the brief dimming of light that would indicate a “planetary transit” — a planet crossing the face of the star....

The team that discovered the wandering orphan planets, led by Takahiro Sumi and including David Bennett from the University of Notre Dame, used an even more arcane technique — gravitational microlensing — to spot these otherwise totally invisible bodies. Based on Einstein’s premise that gravity bends light, the technique can see dark objects in the sky by measuring the light they bend from stars behind them. The astrophysicists thus saw 10 drifters, and estimated that there may be one or two of them for each of the approximately 200 billion stars in the Milky Way.

That’s a quantum leap from the nine I knew in high school (reduced to eight after Pluto was demoted to a “dwarf planet” in 2006 by the International Astronomical Union), and even from the 500 or so exoplanets confirmed as of early this year. And if Jupiter-size planets, which are easier to spot, are numbered in the billions, surely there must be many Earth-size planets out there, spinning around their stars at just the right distance to support life? It is time to rewrite the texts.

You may wonder at this point why something so Earth shattering as the discovery of innumerable planets has not caused more excitement in the broad public....

The confirmation that planets are a dime a dozen is really the culmination of the scientific revolution first started by Copernicus and Galileo and Kepler more than four centuries ago, a revolution in which our home planet lost its special place at the center of the universe. The prevailing cosmology before Copernicus — codified by the astronomer Claudius Ptolemy in the first century A.D. and, though dead wrong, accepted for the next 1,500 years — held that the Sun, Moon and planets (the six known ones) all revolved around Mother Earth, under a canopy of stars. It was a rational and well organized universe, in which the Roman Catholic Church could point with authority to heaven above and hell below.

Then Nicolaus Copernicus, a timid Polish canon, put forward an alternate, heliocentric system in which the Sun replaced Earth at the center. In 1543, just before he died, Copernicus finally summoned the courage to publish his treatise, De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (“On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres”), which would inspire Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler to pursue the studies that became modern astronomy. In an age when science was inextricably linked to religion, the Catholic Church did not surrender lightly its geocentric universe. To challenge it was “false and contrary to Scripture,” Galileo was told by the Inquisition, and even though he disowned his ideas, he spent his last years under house arrest. (In 2000, Pope John Paul II formally apologized for Galileo’s trial).

But there was no turning back. Within a few decades, Isaac Newton confirmed Kepler’s ideas on planetary motion and described the natural laws that have shaped our view of the cosmos ever since. Once the Earth had been displaced from the center of the universe, it was only a matter of time before the Sun was reduced to a garden variety star in a remote spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy; the Milky Way itself to one of a hundred billion galaxies; and our planet to a speck of cosmic dust.

The Gas Is Greener

original article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/08/opinion/08bryce.html?hpwhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

snippets:

IN April, Gov. Jerry Brown made headlines by signing into law an ambitious mandate that requires California to obtain one-third of its electricity from renewable energy sources like sunlight and wind by 2020.

But there’s the rub: while energy sources like sunlight and wind are free and naturally replenished, converting them into large quantities of electricity requires vast amounts of natural resources — most notably, land.

Consider California’s new mandate. The state’s peak electricity demand is about 52,000 megawatts. Meeting the one-third target will require about 17,000 megawatts of renewable energy capacity. Let’s assume that California will get half of that capacity from solar and half from wind. Most of its large-scale solar electricity production will presumably come from projects like the $2 billion Ivanpah solar plant, which is now under construction in the Mojave Desert in southern California. When completed, Ivanpah, which aims to provide 370 megawatts of solar generation capacity, will cover 3,600 acres — about five and a half square miles.

The math is simple: to have 8,500 megawatts of solar capacity, California would need at least 23 projects the size of Ivanpah, covering about 129 square miles, an area more than five times as large as Manhattan.

Wind energy projects require even more land. The Roscoe wind farm in Texas, which has a capacity of 781.5 megawatts, covers about 154 square miles. Again, the math is straightforward: to have 8,500 megawatts of wind generation capacity, California would likely need to set aside an area equivalent to more than 70 Manhattans. Apart from the impact on the environment itself, few if any people could live on the land because of the noise (and the infrasound, which is inaudible to most humans but potentially harmful) produced by the turbines.

Unfortunately, energy sprawl is only one of the ways that renewable energy makes heavy demands on natural resources.

Consider the massive quantities of steel required for wind projects. The production and transportation of steel are both expensive and energy-intensive, and installing a single wind turbine requires about 200 tons of it. Many turbines have capacities of 3 or 4 megawatts, so you can assume that each megawatt of wind capacity requires roughly 50 tons of steel. By contrast, a typical natural gas turbine can produce nearly 43 megawatts while weighing only 9 tons. Thus, each megawatt of capacity requires less than a quarter of a ton of steel.

Such profligate use of resources is the antithesis of the environmental ideal. Nearly four decades ago, the economist E. F. Schumacher distilled the essence of environmental protection down to three words: “Small is beautiful.” In the rush to do something — anything — to deal with the intractable problem of greenhouse gas emissions, environmental groups and policy makers have determined that renewable energy is the answer. But in doing so they’ve tossed Schumacher’s dictum into the ditch.

Data Center Infographic (Opportunities For Efficiency Improvements)

Original Article:

http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/16/data-center-infographic-opportunities-for-efficiency-improvements

CDC Says Lemon Eucalyptus As Effective As DEET

original articles:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/05/cdc-confirms-lemon-eucalyptus-oil-as-effective-as-deet.php?campaign=daily_nl

http://mattermore.org/2011/05/02/cdc-says-lemon-eucalyptus-as-effective-as-deet

snippets:

In two recent scientific publications, when oil of lemon eucalyptus was tested against mosquitoes found in the US it provided protection similar to repellents with low concentrations of DEET

Dr. Mohammed Abou-Donia of Duke University studied lab animals' performance of neuro-behavioural tasks requiring muscle co-ordination. He found that lab animals exposed to the equivalent of average human doses of DEET performed far worse than untreated animals.

Children with DEET toxicity reported lethargy, headaches, tremors, involuntary movements, seizures, and convulsions though the amount that led to this toxicity was unreported, according to the CDC.

Another plus, lemon eucalyptus doesn’t have the oily feel and unpleasant smell of DEET products. Look for products that contain the active ingredient p-Menthane-3,8-diol, such as Cutter Lemon Eucalyptus Pump 4oz, $7.95 which can repel mosquitoes and ticks for up to 6 hours.

Drumbeat of Nuclear Fallout Fear Doesn’t Resound With Experts

Original Article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/03/sciencehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif/03radiation.html?src=recg

Snippets:

The nuclear disaster in Japan has sent waves of radiation and dread around the globe, prompting so many people to buy radiation detectors and potassium iodide to fend off thyroid cancer that supplies quickly sold out.

The fear is unwarranted, experts say. People in Japan near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant may have reason to worry about the consequences of radiation leaks, scientists say, and some reactor workers, in particular, may suffer illness. But outside of Japan, the increase is tiny, compared with numerous other sources of radiation, past and present.

In the world’s oceans, thousands of decomposing drums of radioactive waste pose bigger dangers than the relatively small amounts of radioactive water released from the Fukushima Daiichi plant. And natural radiation from rocks, cosmic rays and other aspects of the environment, experts say, represents the biggest factor of all — far bigger than all the man-made emissions, including the current increase from the crippled Japanese reactors.

Dr. Dale Dewar, executive director of Physicians for Global Survival, a group that advocates the abolition of nuclear arms, said the accident meant future generations would live in a world with higher levels of background radiation.

During the cold war, for example, more than 500 detonations pumped the global atmosphere full of deadly radioactive materials, some of which are still emitting radiation.

Figures from the United Nations put the total bomb radiation from decades of atmospheric testing at almost 70 billion curies. By contrast, the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant released about 100 million curies of the most dangerous materials.

As for Fukushima Daiichi, Japanese officials said on April 12 that the reactor complex had released about 10 million curies. In 1979, the reactor accident at Three Mile Island released about 50 curies into the environment.

Additionally, many experts say, the threat to the Japanese people is probably low because — unlike the radioactive fallout from the cold war and the Chernobyl accident — most of the radiation is believed to have blown out to sea on the prevailing winds.

The ocean has received many radiological blows over the decades. From 1946 to 1994, when the practice was banned, governments around the globe dumped many thousands of drums of radioactive waste into the abyss, as well as reactors and derelict submarines.

Scientists estimate the dumping in total involved about four million curies of radioactive materials, with the Soviet Union doing a vast majority of the disposal. Decay has lowered the level of that radiological threat over the decades, even as the rotting of drums and barrels has raised the risk of environmental contamination.

At a nuclear dump site near the Farallon Islands off San Francisco, surveys have revealed many fractured drums and evidence that some radioactive materials have spread to sea life. The Environmental Protection Agency found that sponges bore “readily measurable” amounts of plutonium 239 and plutonium 240 — types of man-made radioactive materials that seldom exist in nature. The former has a half-life of 24,360 years, and the latter 6,560 years.