Abstract
A waste of space?
We get asked a lot of questions at the Bulletin, some frivolous, some easy, some provocative, and a few head-scratchers. Lately, the mailbag has been heavy with space-related queries. Here are two, with answers:
A reader in Wisconsin frets, as do we all, about the best way to dispose of high-level nuclear waste from power reactors.
“The only safe place for that waste is on the surface of the sun,” our reader writes. “How much would it cost to drop it on the sun? Wouldn't it be a whole lot cheaper and safer than all the other proposals?”
Well, yes, the sun would be a dandy place to put high-level nuclear waste. It's large enough and hot enough that it could accommodate all the high-level nuclear waste this planet could send its way without so much as a solar burp.
Unhappily, though, you can't just “drop” something onto the sun. You'd have to fire the stuff into space with enough energy to escape the Earth's gravity. And that means propelling your bucket-o'-waste to 25,000 miles per hour or more. Then you'd have to slow it down so that it would actually fall into the sun rather than go into an orbit around it— something that is not as easy as you might think. There are other problems. The first is that rockets, although generally reliable, may blow up from time to time. The U.S. Scientific Advisory Board noted in 1995, in a deadpan sort of way, that a “space launch is more akin to a science experiment than to a routine takeoff.” In August 1998, a Titan IV exploded, and in May 1999, a Delta III failed “catastrophically,” which is what scientists say when they mean that hundreds of millions of dollars of hardware have been converted to a pile of metal shards.
Rocket failures are bad enough when they destroy expensive and sophisticated satellites. But if we're talking about scattering a few tons of high-level nuclear waste into the atmosphere, either at the launch pad or in the stratosphere, we've moved into the major leagues of global environmental disaster.
Still, it is technically possible to make containers that would almost surely survive a rocket explosion or even a fiery reentry, should the pay-load happen to make it into space but then fall back. But those containers wouldn't be cheap.
In the early 1980s, a few people were seriously talking about sending separated plutonium into space so that it would not be available for weapons. In 1982, nasa calculated that to do so would cost about $200,000 a kilogram.
That $200,000 figure was for plutonium, not for high-level waste, so it's not an exact comparison. On the other hand, high-level waste would probably cost more—it's more radioactive than plutonium, so it would require heavy shielding to keep the rocket's electronics from being fried. Still, let's give nuclear waste the benefit of the doubt and assume that the cost figures for plutonium and high-level waste would be roughly the same.
There are a thousand kilograms in a metric ton, so even the nasa figure would take us to something like $200 million a ton—$368 million a ton in today's dollars. And U.S. power reactors have so far produced more than 30,000 metric tons of high-level waste, which would come in at about $11 trillion. Another 50,000 metric tons of high-level waste are likely to be produced before the last American reactor shuts down in the 2030s— assuming that no more are built. That gives us a total pricetag for our sun-shots of somewhere around $25 trillion. (People who favor disposal in deep underground repositories are sure to point out that you can dig a pretty deep hole for $25 trillion.)
Then there's another cost. Putting that much high-level waste into space would more than overwhelm U.S. “space-lift” capacity, which is just enough to get the current and projected crop of military, intelligence, scientific, and commercial satellites into orbit. The country would have to spend many tens of billions of dollars more building new spacelift facilities.
In the end, shooting high-level waste into space adds up to serious money—far more than any other waste-disposal option on the table. And can you imagine what the outcry would be if the United States chose to start rocketing high-level nuclear wastes into space, which many people regard as a global “commons”—the sacred heritage of all humankind? Overnight, the United States would become the ultimate “rogue” nation.
And speaking of space as the ultimate commons, a second reader asks: What would happen to the chemical, biological, or nuclear materials that would be released if President Bush's proposed missile defense program actually works and destroys incoming warheads?
Not to worry, says one of our favorite experts on missile defense. If all went well, the warhead and kinetic-kill vehicle would collide with such force that tremendous heat energy would be generated, vaporizing everything.
Of course, he adds, in a real life-or-death situation, the kinetic-kill vehicle is not likely to hit its target. That's because a country sophisticated enough to send missiles toward the United States would also be able to defeat the U.S. system with a variety of relatively simple countermeasures, including decoys.
Maybe, he suggests, that's what you should be losing sleep over.
In short supply?
Montgomery burns—or at least one impersonator of that cranky, penny-pinching owner of a nuclear power plant on The Simpsons—is bubbling over with excitement these days. Inspired by the Bush administration's call for more nuclear power, Monty and his colleagues in the nuclear industry envision a new crop of nuclear power plants sprouting up around the country within the next decade or so.
At a recent demonstration in Los Angeles organized by Calpirg, a California public interest group, a would-be Monty gushed: “It looks like I'm getting my money's worth from Bush and this Vice President Dick Cheney fellow…. Soon every Johnny Lunchpail and Suzie Sixpack will be plugged into my nuclear power reactors.”
But apart from all the anti-nuclear activists' complaints, there is another problem with Monty's dream: The U.S. supply of nuclear engineers is running so low, say some, that there may not even be enough trained workers to operate current reactors.
According to Akira Tokuhiro, a nuclear engineering professor at the University of Missouri-Rolla, “The United States is currently about 300 nuclear engineers short of what it needs” (Earth Vision.net, July 13). Last year, he says, only 130 bachelor's degrees in nuclear engineering were awarded.
Making matters worse, college nuclear engineering programs have been disappearing at a rate of about one a year for the past two decades. With only 20 departments remaining, many wonder where the next generation of nuclear engineers are going to train.
William Magwood, director of the Energy Department's Office of Nuclear Energy, Science, and Technology, said in the June 28 New York Times: “If we do build new nuclear power plants, we're going to need people who understand the technology and can operate the plants safely, and the places that train those people are beginning to disappear. It's very depressing.”
“Montgomery Burns” at an anti-nuclear power demonstration in California.
In May, Cornell University shuttered the Ivy League's last remaining research reactor after failing to secure sufficient economic support from the government. The reactor closure—which drew the ire of students, professors, and Energy Department officials—was only the latest blow to the country's nuclear research infrastructure. The number of research reactors has dwindled from a high of 64 in the 1960s to only 28.
That number could soon go even lower. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Michigan have threatened to close their reactors if the government doesn't fork over more money.
In early May, after the Bush administration proposed slashing its nuclear research budget from $47 million to $27 million, university administrators were outraged. John C. Lee, chairman of the University of Michigan's engineering department, said that the cuts would force the school to decommission its reactor within three years. “This is difficult for me to understand,” Lee told the Associated Press (May 15). “It is troubling to us, obviously.” Since then, the Energy Department has promised to increase funding for Michigan's reactor from $100,000 to $250,000 (New York Times, June 28).
Some observers, however, think a lot of the talk about a future nuclear engineering shortage is alarmist. John Gilligan, an associate dean in the College of Engineering at North Carolina State University, concedes that there are increasingly fewer programs and fewer students. But that wouldn't translate into a shortage unless the Bush energy plan were put into effect immediately— an impossibility. “It will be more than a decade before any new reactors could go on line,” says Gilligan. “There is plenty of time to train new people. But we should probably begin now.”
Nor is Gilligan overly concerned about threats from some universities to close their research rectors. “Those might just be crocodile tears,” he told me. Although he is not familiar with all the specifics about the University of Michigan and MIT programs, he says that both schools should have plenty of resources to keep their reactors running. But the current climate of crisis makes it easy to ask for more money. Still, he says, if several other schools started asking for more money to keep their reactors open, it could present a serious problem for the Energy Department.
According to Gilligan, part of the problem is that over the past several years there has been a shift in emphasis away from reactor design and safety to health physics and waste disposal. If new reactors are eventually built, he says, the emphasis will undoubtedly shift back.
Then there's the huge number of foreign students who come to the United States to study nuclear engineering. If a large percentage of nuclear engineering students are foreign, I asked Gilligan, does that further cut into the number of engineers available to U.S. power plants? No, he says, for two reasons: First, the majority of foreign students come to study graduate-level courses, and the nuclear utilities generally only need students with bachelor's degrees (the national labs, by contrast, require post-graduate-level training). And second, many are Chinese students who—in Gilligan's experience, at least—seem to want to stay in the United States after graduating.
There are already signs of renewed interest in nuclear engineering— perhaps as a result of all the talk about a nuclear power revival. Purdue University, for example, expects to double its freshman class next year to some 160 students (AS-cribe Newswire, May 29).
A study by the National Society of Professional Engineers points to another reason students may be attracted to nuclear engineering—good pay. According to its latest income and salary survey, nuclear engineers rank third among all engineers in salary, pulling in on average nearly $103,000 per year. Only forensic and petroleum engineers earn more.
Holy UAVs, Batman
Whoever heard of a bat that isn't blind? If designers at a California-based aerospace engineering company called AeroVi-ronment are on the mark, flying, bat-like robots capable of downlinking live color video images will be the next big thing in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).
The 8-inch-long device, dubbed the “Microbat,” uses a pair of flapping, ultra-light wings to stay aloft, and may someday be used for military surveillance, law enforcement, civilian rescue efforts, and space exploration, says Matt Keennon, manager of AeroVironment's UAV projects.
“Say a sguad of marines is outside of a village and they need to figure out who's there and what's there—a fairly common scenario—and they don't want to put one of their own men in harm's way,” hypothesized Keennon. “The value of this aircraft is that you can just fly it over the town and find these things out in 20 minutes.”
The Microbat is launched pneumatically from its carrying case, which is about the size of a cigar box. Once airborne, it's guided by remote control, but Keennon says that future models of the Microbat will be capable of flying autonomously.
To combine the Micro-bat's navigation and propulsion systems, designers had to miniaturize everything that goes into a reconnaissance plane, including a two-way digital modem, a gyroscope, an electric motor, and a propeller. Then it needed to be eguipped with a video camera the size of a sugar cube.
Such customized instruments will keep the Micro-bat's price tag in the thousands. For a device that can be used only once, and which can fly for only a mile, that is a pretty penny—unless, of course, you're the U.S. military.
“For the army, the price only has to get down to the thousands, even for a single use,” says Keennon. “But as far as police forces using the Microbat for, say, border patrol, it becomes more difficult to justify the cost.”
As for the possibility of shooting down an airborne Microbat, Keennon says there's no chance. “It flies very high and is only twice the size of a bird. It won't show up on radar and can't be seen or heard.”
Eugene Ford is editor of the University of Chicago Maroon and a Bulletin intern.
In Brief
Back to the drawing board?
Even as B-2 bomber supporters urged the new administration to buy more $2 billion-a-copy aircraft, the Roke Manor Research Laboratory in Britain announced its invention of a new detection system that uses ordinary mobile telephone technology to track B-2s and F-117 fighters—“stealth” planes that are difficult to detect using conventional radar (Daily Telegraph, June 11). It seems that tracking mobile telephone calls as they bounce between base stations produces a screen of radiation. But a plane disrupts those signals, creating a pattern that can be spotted as it flies past. And, as Peter Lloyd, head of the laboratory's sensor department, points out: “It's almost impossible to disable a mobile phone network without bombing an entire country.”
I see London, I see France
In its May 29 Update, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (nist) proudly announced that it had developed a detection system that can scan a crowd of people, peer through their clothing, and identify any guns, knives, or other dangerous objects they may have concealed about their persons. Nist describes the system, which can be mounted on a vehicle, as “a significantly more powerful detection tool than conventional passive imaging systems.” Nist adds that, with the addition of a digital camera, it could be used to “undress” the unlucky recipient of its attentions from as far as 50 feet away. On May 3 nist researcher Erich Grossman told United Press International reporter Kelly Hearn that the system is also better than airport walk-through detection systems because “we don't require a cooperative subject.”
Luckier than we knew
Recently declassified Royal Air Force papers indicate that in 1958, Britain's 500-kiloton bomb, code-named “Violet Club,” was rushed into service “so that Britain could match Russian and American claims of having a nuclear weapon with a megaton capability” (Daily Telegraph, June 21). Raf experts protested the weapon, however, arguing that the bombs, which had to be stored in two separate parts, were so badly designed and contained so much radioactive material that they were likely to go critical while being armed. A Ministry of Defence spokesman confirmed that “Violet Club was never fully cleared by the raf.”
Not another fair-weather fighter
Nathan Kopeika of Ben-Gurion University told a conference in Florida that the U.S. Airborne Laser (abl) project may be foiled by tiny dust particles (New Scientist, April 28). The particles, known as aerosols, can easily scatter a laser beam, rendering it too weak to destroy the incoming missile it is expected to be aimed at. Kopeika says that if abl project managers think their methods for dealing with optical turbulence will cure the problem, they are wrong. He recommends studying the weather to determine at what season and where in the atmosphere dust particles are likely to be least dense.
But of course
The Defense Department's inspector general—its internal auditing agency charged with rooting out fraud—has admitted destroying audit documents and substituting fakes (Salon.com, June 6). As part of a routine program in which one government agency's inspector general checks the work of another, Internal Revenue Service auditors read the Defense Department's phony documents and found “no problems.” But they changed their minds as soon as it was revealed that Pentagon auditors had replaced papers that they thought would fail to get a passing grade. A report sent to Iowa Republican Charles Grassley, the outgoing chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, revealed that the Pentagon spent 983 man-hours and $63,000 creating the fakes.
Good neighbor policy?
Canadians have been debating their possible participation in U.S. missile defense plans, and some have suggested that perhaps Canada could put the kibosh on the system by refusing to cooperate. But an official Canadian military analysis, revealed in the May 2 Ottawa Citizen, suggests that the United States would have no problem going it alone. The military suggested that Canadians would be involved only to the extent that missiles would be shot down over their country, with nothing to prevent debris from raining down on them. Chris Sands, a U.S. analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, rubbed it in, telling the newspaper: “Canada might want to request extra funding for hardhats, but there's not much else that can be done about it.”
Substitute subs
It's been more than three months since the Bush administration promised to arm Taiwan with diesel submarines, a pledge made without checking to see if the United States actually had any (Los Angeles Times, July 15). No U.S. manufacturer builds diesel subs, so the administration has been trying to find another source. But neither of the two major producers, the Netherlands or Germany, is willing to send subs to Taiwan. Larry Wortzel of the Heritage Foundation predicts that getting the promised subs to Taiwan “is going to involve some sleight of hand.”
The sexiest geek alive
In the final rounds of June's Sexiest Geek Alive competition, pageant judges asked contestants how many computers they had at home. Most claimed one or two—but Ellen Sper-tus responded that she didn't know. From her bread machine to her electric car, there were just too many processors to keep track of.
The judges were obviously impressed with Spertus's geekitude and crowned her this year's Sexiest Geek Alive. Spertus beat out more than 10,000 contestants for the honor, most of whom were eliminated online by a series of math, science, and, of course, Star Trek guestions.
For the final competition Spertus wore a black corset, adorned with a circuit board pattern, and a slide rule—a family heirloom, no less—strapped to her thigh. For the talent competition, the 32-year-old computer science professor first taught the audience to count in binary on their fingers. But the clincher may have been her video that showed dozens of her students, and her students' students, displaying their own projects. Because she had “reproduced” so many geeks, she said, she was surely the sexiest geek alive.
Other highlights from the talent round included one finalist performing a dramatic reading of Coleridge's “Kubla Khan” in the voice of Jedi Master Yoda, and another publicly confessing his long-time crush on ice skater Dorothy Hamill.
As the reigning sexiest geek, Spertus's prizes include a trip for two to the Caribbean—courtesy of Geekcruises—and a new computer operating system.
“Sexiest geek” Ellen Spertus.
Potential contestants can find information about next year's competition at www.sexiestgeekalive.com.
Joel Maguen
Joel Maguen is a student at Yale and a Bulletin intern.
EU knocks Echelon, wants own super spy
The European Union has now published its draft report on Echelon, the secret snooping partnership between the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Although Echelon's listening stations can intercept billions of private satellite communications daily, the eu concluded that its capabilities are far more limited than previously thought. But Echelon's ears are still too big for the EU's comfort: The draft encouraged all its citizens and firms to encrypt their e-mails to better ensure privacy. At the same time, however, the eu was considering a few proposals of its own that, if put into effect, would go far to deny its citizens' privacy rights.
Recommendations being discussed by the eu would require Internet service providers, mobile phone companies, and other telecom firms to record and archive their customers' communications for at least one year. Law enforcement agencies would then have access to e-mails, faxes, phone calls, and web logs for criminal investigations. While such measures might help combat cybercrime, they are setting off alarm bells for civil liberties groups.
Echelon's Waihopai intercept site in New Zealand.
“Authoritarian and totalitarian states would be condemned for violating human rights and civil liberties if they initiated such practices,” Tony Bunyan, editor of Statewatch, a privacy watchdog group, told the BBC.
Even the chairman of the eu's own Data Protection Working Party, Stefan Rodota, is against the proposals. Keeping tabs on private communications, said Rodota, would “undermine the fundamental rights to privacy, data protection, freedom of expression, liberty, and presumption of innocence.” If it engaged in such behavior, he asked, could the eu “still claim to be a democratic society?”
Tokai “downwinders” speak out
Two years ago, on September 30, 1999, three workers were preparing uranium fuel in the jco facility in Tokaimura, Japan. In an effort to speed the process, they mixed together a dangerously large amount of material, precipitating a nuclear chain reaction that was not brought under control for some 20 hours. (Two of the workers died; the other has not fully recovered.)
Meanwhile, outside the walls of the plant, homeowners and their families, their ordinary daily lives interrupted, were at a loss as to what to do. A number of people lived very close to the jco fuel processing building—there were nearly 500 homes within two-thirds of a mile, and 40 of these homes were less than a fifth of a mile away.
When Japan's Nuclear Safety Commission's investigation of the accident was released in December 1999, however, it was silent on the subject of the event's effects on the neighbors. So the Citizens' Nuclear Information Center, a private organization, decided to carry out an independent survey of local residents' symptoms and attitudes.
Canvassers surveyed 946 people from 2,683 households within the immediate area—including at least one person from every household situated within a third of a mile. An average of 35 interviewers visited residents door to door each day over a four-day period in early 2000.
Although there was no clear evidence that anyone outside the plant will suffer long-term harm as a result of the accident, residents naturally felt uncertain.
A number of survey respondents reported that they were simply bewildered on the day of the accident. Many local residents had not realized that they lived near a fuel processing plant. “I had no idea what was going on. I did not know what jco was, where it was, nor what I had to do at that moment,” one interviewee explained.
Nor did they get the information they needed. As another said, “The accident occurred right in front of my eyes at a distance only within a couple of hundred meters, but when I called the village office in the evening on whether to evacuate, they only gave a vague answer that I probably did not need to evacuate by that time—since it wouldn't really make a difference.” Neighbors living in Naka, another nearby small town, had an additional problem: Television reports focused exclusively on Tokai, and their own municipal government was unresponsive.
A number of respondents reported an array of physical symptoms. Many said that on the day of the accident they experienced headache, bodily weakness, abnormal smell, nausea, and palpitations. Six respondents said they had a metallic taste in their mouths, a symptom commonly thought to be an effect of exposure to radiation.
Many of these symptoms, could, of course, be the result of anxiety. But concern was heightened because the government changed its estimates of neutron doses several times.
More than half of those polled said they were worried about possible long-term effects, as well as if there could be another accident. More troubling still, many feared that their children would be labeled hibakusha (radiation victims like the atomic bomb survivors): “I am worried that even if there were no physical damage, my children will be discriminated against in the future just because they lived near the jco plant at the time of the accident and will not be able to get married.” As evidence of discrimination, residents said friends no longer came to visit and that they had received “dubious looks” when they told people they came from Tokai.
Surprisingly, those polled did not regard the company that owned the plant where the accident occurred as the main culprit. Ninety percent pointed the finger of blame at the government, and especially at the Science and
Technology Agency (which later changed its name). Sixty-five percent rated the agency's response to the accident as “poor” or “terrible.”
Despite their anguish, residents expected the nuclear facilities in Tokai to continue operating. But the accident had changed their views about nuclear power. Two-thirds opposed the building of any more nuclear power reactors in Japan, and most thought that where power plants and nuclear-related facilities were sited should be determined by public referenda.
In its conclusions, the committee formed by the Citizens' Nuclear Safety Commission to carry out the survey called for the government to review its nuclear energy policy and the current state of nuclear power in Japan.
