WhirledView

Science Selections

by Cheryl Rofer

Science magazine frequently has good stuff in it, but it’s available on the internet by subscription only. So I pull pages out of the dead-tree version to make posts from. Sometimes Science's Eureakalert has short versions on line. Here are a few recent goodies.

The Lusi mud volcano on Indonesia’s Java Island is still going strong, despite the various attempts to stop it. (Last WhirledView post here.) Geologists disagree as to where the mud is coming from and what caused the volcano. Indonesian courts have ruled the volcano a natural disaster, absolving the drilling company Lapindo Brantas of responsibility. The mud has covered 750 hectares and has destroyed the homes of 30,000 people. (13 June)

Since I last googled that subject, a couple of new articles on the mud volcano have shown up. The photo is from Reuters, via The Guardian. You can see the scale of it from the trucks and earthmovers that are building the dams. Time Magazine reports here. Lots of satellite images from the National University of Singapore here.

Imagery from the LANDSAT satellites is being made available free on the internet. The data are of the whole world, in multiple spectral ranges. All newly acquired data will be made available, and the archives are being opened up during the rest of this year. This will be invaluable for following all sorts of changes over time: vegetation cover, city growth, bodies of water, probably Lusi as well. NASA LANDSAT site, USGS LANDSAT site (23 May)

Who’s got the biggest carbon footprint in America? If you guessed those car-crazy Californians, you’re wrong. The biggest carbon emissions per capita are all in the eastern part of the country. This report, from Brookings, tells why. And it makes some policy suggestions to lessen our carbon dioxide emissions. (13 June)

Deserts may be taking up some of that carbon dioxide. Measurements in western China and Nevada suggest that desert soils account for some of the good luck we’ve had so far, with more carbon dioxide disappearing than scientists have expected. It’s not clear whether the carbon dioxide is going into the soil itself or living communities that form crusts on the surface. I’ll suggest that in just a couple of years, watering some of the soils in my yard has produced some underground cementation. But I can’t say whether that’s calcium carbonate, let alone whether it’s from the air or it’s being dissolved and reprecipitated. But it’s the kind of thing you might see if moistened alkaline desert soils are taking up carbon dioxide. (13 June)

Our Nuclear Future

by CKR

John McCain wants to build 45 nuclear plants by 2030. Barack Obama says nuclear is worth considering. Even James Lovelock, associated with the Gaia hypothesis that says the earth is one big living organism, says we need nuclear power.

Public perception of nuclear power has been unfavorable since some time after I got inspired by the idea of power too cheap to meter. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl had something to do with that, but anything that is associated with mushroom clouds and an element named for the god of the underworld via the outermost planet is going to face an uphill battle.

Several people have been urging me to write something in response to McCain’s proposal. The more I’ve thought about what to write, the more it has all seemed one big ball of wax, with strings and fuel rods embedded. So I can pull at whatever string or fuel rod and see what comes out.

Jane Harman provides a place to start (thanks, J.!). The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is obsolete. That’s a lousy place to start, actually, but let’s consider that an editor at the Wall Street Journal provided that headline, which is consistent with the rightwing allergy to treaties, and move on to what Harman actually says.

The NPT guarantees the nuclear fuel cycle to its signatories, which are all the countries of the world but four, and those four developed the nuclear fuel cycle anyway. Having the nuclear fuel cycle allows a country to build nuclear weapons with the addition of only a few bells and whistles.

So we need to internationalize the fuel cycle, with heavy safeguards by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

A more promising approach might be to create an international consortium of fuel centers that provide enrichment and reprocessing of nuclear fuel, and end-to-end oversight of nuclear resources. Driven by market demand, private companies could operate facilities with IAEA oversight, and participating states would agree not to engage in independent enriching and reprocessing. Material would be purchased from the international market, thereby creating supply assurance for nations who fear being denied fuel.

I can quibble with Harman’s exact wording, but overall she’s got it right.

A private company is building a uranium enrichment facility in Eunice, New Mexico. This could be a place to start internationalizing the fuel cycle. We’ve got to do more than just talk about it. Another private facility in one country, supplying that country’s needs alone, is business as usual. And if we’re serious about both proliferation and increasing energy sources, we’ve got to start now.

McCain, of course, is for business as usual. Harman doesn’t mention Eunice or Mohamed ElBaradei’s call for internationalizing the fuel cycle, which came before President Bush’s call for the GNEP, which she mentions and gets wrong. What is wrong with GNEP is not that Bush is “as a research and development initiative,” but rather that he put this US-centric initiative out as a competitor to ElBaradei’s initiative. And, yes, all us Amurricans know that our country is totally reliable and fair, but others might just have a different viewpoint.

That’s just one point relating to McCain’s 45 nuclear plants by 2030. Other questions abound. What about the waste? (I do think that Yucca Mountain is the answer to that one, but it’s the first question others come up with.) What about reactor safety? Is uranium available for fuel? Could a company break ground by 2030 if they applied today, given the permitting process? Will anyone want a reactor in their neighborhood? Does the construction capacity exist, or can it be developed, to build these plants?

And you can probably think of others. To be continued.

Meanwhile, on Mars

by Cheryl Rofer

That white stuff that the Phoenix's shovel dug into has disappeared. A few days ago, the scientists thought it might be sand or something else that would have indicated long-ago water, like the sand deposits around my house. But the fact that it has disappeared means that it was probably ice.

And here's the untold story of the first Earthling to set foot on Mars.

The Numbers, Please

by Cheryl Rofer

The $4 per gallon number has gotten people’s attention, but there’s more to petroleum than that. President Bush now wants to drill in lots of places that have been put aside within the United States, but that is a very long-range solution, if it’s a solution at all.

And one may wonder how much US influence on the Iraqi Oil Ministry has led to this. Certainly Iraq would like to take advantage of record oil prices, but more oil on the market would tend to lower those prices.

I’ve been wondering about a number of claims about petroleum prices. The only way to begin to resolve my questions is to look at some numbers, which I haven’t seen done anywhere in the media. Not surprising for a bunch that thinks water can be a fuel.

It’s not clear to me that any of the claims can really be verified. There are too many possible variables, and too much uncertainty in all of them. Qualitatively, I suspect that there is a war-fear premium on petroleum as long as Bush and Cheney are in office, which may amount to 25% of the current price. Speculation seems to be part of it too, but it is an easy excuse for the oil producers to use. And there does seem to be an increasing demand.

To start, I’d just like to get a sense of what the numbers are and how the various nations stack up. To that end, I’ve collected some of the numbers in a spreadsheet (Download petroleum_2008.xls), for those of you who want to look at or play with them. What I’ve collected is not exhaustive, and it may be somewhat incorrect, for various reasons. I don’t want to get into arguments just now about the accuracy of the data in detail. That comes later, if at all.

Never Fails

by Cheryl Rofer

Every time the price of gas goes up, someone brings out a car that is claimed to run on water.

Here's the latest, from Japan (video).

"It all sounds too good to be true," gushes the Reuters reporter.

She's got that right.

The explanation is

The key to that system, it seems, is its membrane electrode assembly (or MEA), which contains a material that's capable of breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen through a chemical reaction. Not surprisingly, the company isn't getting much more specific than that, with it only saying that it's adopted a "well-known process to produce hydrogen from water to the MEA."

The reason that hydrocarbon fuels can produce energy is that they produce water and carbon dioxide. Water is always, outside of unusual circumstances, the product of a reaction. Its energetics, that energy that is given up when hydrocarbons are burned, makes it that way. Or you can look at as a property of water: you have to add energy to change it to anything else.

It takes energy to get hydrogen and oxygen from water, more energy than the hydrogen and oxygen will produce by being recombined. Period. No catalyst or MEA system can change that.

So these reports are nonsense. And not even particularly original nonsense. Too bad the reporters don't know that.

Thanks to JLK and Kat for the links.

Of Tomatoes and Governments

by Cheryl Rofer

The FDA and other federal and state agencies are trying to figure out how the salmonella got into the tomatoes. The salmonella strain seems to be distinctive, so that should help the detective work.

I'm wondering if the salmonella is in or on the tomatoes. If it's in, that's a real problem that tomato growers and processors will need to address in the future.

The bigger problem, of course, is how these things keep happening. Big farming, big processing of produce leads to this sort of thing, but that is what government agencies are for. Of course, if the main object of government is to reduce taxes, then of course you have to cut services. But the kindly free enterprise system will of course step in and regulate those who sell tainted tomatoes. All of the tomato producers may have to let their crop rot in the field, but the malefactors will be hurt too.

Meanwhile, the South Korean government nearly fell yesterday because they wanted to open their market to beef from the US. That same FDA system that gave us salmonella in our tomatoes is the problem here, too. Less regulation of beef entering the marketplace, some YouTubes of falling cattle that will become hamburger, and that's not so appetizing to customers.

The South Korean government has other problems, too, but it seems as though all these reverberations of that free and unregulated market in tainted food suggest that there might be a better way to do it.

Rotifer Love

by Cheryl Rofer

I was delighted to see that the New York Times published an article today on some of my favorite animals, the bdelloid rotifers.

But no pictures! So I will correct that omission here.

I first met rotifers when I was in high school. I had a new microscope and needed something to do with it. I learned somewhere that if you put leaves in a jar of water and keep it warm for a few days, all sorts of fascinating microscopic animals and plants will develop. So I got leaves from a couple of places in the yard, put them in jars of water, put the jars on beams in our warm cellar, and there they were!

Little guys with mixmasters on their heads. There were others, too, with spiral stems, and lovely algae with boxy cells. But it was those little mixmaster guys that fascinated me. I drew pictures of them and submitted a notebook for extra credit in my biology course. I loved to irritate my biology teacher by calling attention to his incorrect Latin plurals, so I figured extra credit would put him in a position where it would be harder for him to cut my grade down for my being annoying.

But I couldn't find who those little mixmaster guys were for a few years. I loved it that their name was so similar to mine, while describing those mixmasters. I should explain that the mixmasters were actually two sets of cilia, which move in such a way to set up currents that draw still smaller animals into the rotifer's mouth.

Olivia Judson observes that the bdelloid rotifers, the kind I cultivated, have lived without sex for 85 million years. Instead, they appropriate pieces of other organisms' genome: bacteria, fungi, plants. It's turning out that it's easier for organisms to swap genes than we thought, and not only within their species or even kingdoms. Rotifers are animals, but they pick up genes from those three other kingdoms.

That kind of gene-swapping has been condemned by opponents of human manipulation of genes as unnatural. But rotifers do it. Bacteria do it. The fact that humans do it in a less random way does not make it wrong.

We need to be careful of what we're doing in genetic manipulation. But the rotifers tell us it's not unnatural.

I've included two photos of rotifers that look very much like the ones I became intrigued with. The first is from here, the second from here. As always, click on the photos for enlargements. That second link has lots more photos. Here are a few more.

Fresh Water Rotifers

Introduction to Rotifers

Al Kibar: Orienting the Destruction Sequence

by CKR

Reactor Photos
Overhead Photos

Once again, the photos are from Moon of Alabama, and you can enlarge them by clicking on them. [4/27/08: All photos included.]

This gets more, er, interesting, since I don't have Paul's nice software, and I'm hardly an expert on Photoshop.

What I have tried to do here is to orient all the photos of the Box in the same direction. That is the first necessary step before anyone can make any sense of them. I invite readers to try their hand at further interpretation.

I am keying on a few features in particular. We can see two of them in the 6:31 remaining time photo (all times given will be remaining times, as MoA has designated them that way): the bluff just to the east of the box, which I will maintain at the top of the photos. The right-hand corner shows the area of what has been labeled the pipeline from the pumping station on the Euphrates. In this photo, we see only the curved cleared area around the edge of a bluff that leads into the pipeline.

The 4:36 photo appears to be the same one in a slightly different orientation. Note the shapes of the shadows and the small shapes to the right of the Box.

The first photo of the bombed Box (4:34) is presented upside down relative to these first two in the CIA video. It shows the third feature that I am keying on, the bunker-like structure that throws a rectangular shadow in the lower right-hand corner of this photo. It can be identified in the first two photos by a small triangular shadow at its lower left-hand edge.

The next photo of the bombed Box (2:54) is also upside down and skewed. [This needs to be tilted about 45 degrees clockwise to fit the first two.]

Al Kibar: The Reactor Photos

by CKR

Overhead Photos
Orienting the Destruction Sequence

The alleged Syrian nuclear reactor photo is split-screened with the Yongbyon reactor for comparison in the CIA video. (Again, photos courtesy of Moon of Alabama. Also again, click on the photos to enlarge.)

Let's count those fuel element channels. They're easier to see in the full-width photo.

For the alleged Syrian nuclear reactor, counting from the left-hand side, the rows contain 4, 6, 8, possibly 8 (one seems to be obscured by a cloth), a row that might be 3 control rod channels, two more rows of 8, then 6 and 4. For the Yongbyon reactor, counting from the right, the rows contain 5, 7, 9, four rows of eleven, then presumably, although they're out of the photo, 9, 7, 5.

That's a pretty big difference for a reactor. It means that the fuel in the fuel elements will have to be configured differently. And the Yongbyon reactor doesn't have that odd 3-channel row down the middle.

If we're not particular about numbers or configuration of fuel element channels, then lots of reactors look like this from the top. Here's the closest match I found, the ship's reactor from the Russian icebreaker Lepse:

That even has four fuel element channels in the outer row.

This one is fancier, apparently from the British Generation IV Very High Temperature Reactor, so I guess we can't blame the University of Manchester.

And, finally, I guess it's not modeled on the Krasnoyarsk-26 reactor, because we see squares instead of circles. Although it's not clear if those square things are tiles over the top of the reactor or the top of the reactor itself.

Al Kibar: The Overhead Photos

by CKR

Update: Analysis of reactor photos here. Orienting of photos from the destruction sequence here.

I won’t say I’m an expert in interpreting overhead photos, but a decade or so ago, I needed to find some trash burial pits at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The story was that they contained explosive. That was improbable on the face of it, if you knew how explosives engineers think, but that’s another long story…

So how do you find where stuff was buried several decades earlier, and the vegetation has pretty much returned to normal?

I had a bright young man, Paul Pope, working for me. Let’s take all the data, he said, and overlay it. Let’s use infrared photography to detect differences in surface temperature that might come from water pooling in those pits or from large buried metal objects, like bomb casings, that were supposed to be buried there too. Let’s take the historical aerial photos and everything else we can get and overlay them all. Visual photos that seemed to show partial vegetation patterns. Multispectral imaging from helpful friends in Nevada who wanted to try out their planeful of stuff. Satellite photos if we could get them.

To do that, of course, all the photos would have to be at the same scale and taken from the same angle, preferably directly overhead. Some of the historical photos, in particular, had been taken at quite oblique angles of the area we wanted to look at, from low-flying planes.

Paul programmed a geometric transformation that would revise those oblique photos. The pixel information was stretched or compressed to represent the areas as they would look from overhead.

All the data together pretty well delineated the disposal pits. They did seem to have some big pieces of metal in them, and places where water may have been pooling. I suspect they haven’t been dug up, so we don’t have ground truth yet. But the overlaid data clarified and reinforced what was vague in each individual photo.

That was twelve years ago. Google has applied something like Paul’s transformations to give a realistic look to their “fly-throughs” on Google Earth. When they introduced that feature, one look at the shadows told me that they were just transforming the overheads. Fun, but no more information than in the overheads.

If Google can do that, then it is hard to believe that NSA and CIA haven’t improved on Paul’s work.

Photos of Al Kibar