Cocktail Party Physics

science, politics, and getting it wrong

One surefire way to panic the heck out of people is to mention nuclear bombs and radical Islam in the same sentence. I dunno about you, but I kinda had a mini-freakout when I read about the amount of enriched uranium the United Nations says that Iran has at its disposal for bomb making. It was hard not to, with the alarming headlines: the LA Times said "IRAN HAS ENOUGH FUEL FOR A NUCLEAR BOMB, REPORT SAYS"; the New York Times was a little more low-key: "IRAN HAS MORE ENRICHED URANIUM THAN THOUGHT." Coupled with our mostly ignorant, media-induced fear of all things Muslim, this was a briefly heart-stopping revelation. But as is true of any story told by any human being, it's the framing that counts. Both reports, in their xenophobia, downplayed the fact that the enriched uranium Iran possesses has only been enriched by 4% (reactor grade), while bomb-worthy uranium must be at least 85% enriched. Even Mother Jones' Kevin Drum was rather alarmist about it, though he at least admits the Iranians have decided both to do less reactor-grade enrichment than they could and not to further enrich what they've got. Then there's the brilliant, anonymous, senior UN official who said ''You have enough atoms' to make a nuclear bomb," according to Drum. Atoms? Huh?

So what does that mean, exactly? How much is "enough" weapons-grade uranium? And how much more work would it be for Iran to enrich that reactor-grade uranium to bomb-making level? And how easy would it be to spot it? Cheryl Rofer over at WhirledView has a great post on most of these questions, in an entry appropriately titled "Whoo-hoo! Atoms of Fissionable Material Everywhere!"

That's right: everywhere.

As Rofer says,

Ah yes. And if you live in Boulder, Colorado, or in Connecticut, or New York City, you have enough U-235 under your house (or perhaps block) to amass a nuclear bomb! Or . . . all that sea water lapping up against the California coast has uranium in it too! I have a call in to the IAEA to inspect your homes!

 Not just random atoms, but enough U-235! Whoa!

Several radioactive isotopes of uranium exist in nature, but in very small concentrations (2-4 parts per million), and decay very slowly. Although U-235 is the only naturally fissile (fissionable by low kinetic energy neutrons) isotope, it occurs in such small concentrations that it's not dangerous. In fact, naturally occurring uranium salts (uranium dioxide), which are a vivid yellow, were frequently added in small amounts to glass to give it a characteristic and unique fluorescence sometimes called Vaseline glass. Yes, it's radioactive, but the radioactivity is approximately equivalent to what occurs naturally in the human body. Even a collector's houseful of it isn't dangerous. And it glows beautifully under black light (UV radiation).

U-238 is also fissionable, but it takes higher energy particles to set it off. It's U-235 that's most often used in weapons. There are some high concentration (up to 70% uranium oxide) ore deposits in Canada, but much of the ore that's mined is low-concentration (0.01 to 0.25%). Once the ore is crushed, leached with acid, and precipitated it becomes something called "yellowcake," which contains at least 75% uranium oxides (see picture at left). Further purification involves halides of uranium (a compound with halogen), which are reduced with alkali earths and by thermal decomposition, or through electrolysis in a molten salt solution. What you're left with at this stage is a quite pure chunk of radioactive metal. This is still not enriched uranium. That's a whole other process.

Enrichment begins with uranium hexafluoride, or "hex" as it's known to the nuke people, obtained by taking yellowcake through a multi-step process that starts with dissolving it in nitric acid and involves further steps with ammonia, reduction with hydrogen, the addition of hydrofluoric acid and finally oxidation with fluorine to produce hex. Hex is highly toxic, violently reactive with water, and corrosive to metals, so if it's going to be enriched it's often stored in glass, in a vacuum, as in the picture at right, where you can see the gray-white crystals it forms at room temperature.

From this stage the hex, at least in Iran and much of U.S., goes to a gas centrifuge, or a "cascade" of centrifuges (left). These aren't the table-top kind you see in a chem lab, though the principle is similar. Heated slightly, the crystalline form of hex, still under vacuum, evaporates and the spinning of the centrifuges separates out the heavier molecules of U-238 and the lighter ones of U-235 until you're left with a very dense heavy metal composed of at least 20% (called weapons-usable) but more often at least 85% (wepons-grade) enriched or highly enriched uranium.

The less enriched the uranium, the higher the critical mass, or gross amount, required to sustain a sufficiently powerful chain reaction. For example, you'd need, at minimum, about 110 lbs. (50-52 kg.) of highly enriched (85%) uranium to arm a nuclear weapon. (The LA Times, I'd like to point out, got this number wrong, mixing kilograms with pounds.) You'd need far more than that of 20% enriched, which would make a very (physically) large (even though the payload is small), very crude bomb unless constructed with sophisticated techniques, all of which are classified by experienced bomb-making nations, and most of all, extremely costly. (Remember, it was, in part, the cost of the nuclear arms race that toppled the U.S.S.R.)

According to the UN report, Iran has approximately 2,200 lbs. of low enriched uranium (LEU). It takes approximately 2,200-3,700 lbs. of LEU to make enough Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) for one bomb. Although Iran now has enough LEU for the task, it does not yet have the facilities to do so, a fact the doesn't appear in either story until well down the page. It would take more high-speed centrifuge cascades than are currently online or in the works, not to mention an actual bomb-construction facility. Although Iran has barred UN inspectors from some of its facilities (claiming that none are currently ready to receive nuclear material and thus not subject to inspection), satellite imagery would surely spot any new facilities constructed for bomb-making purposes.

It's hard to say what any individual's intentions are, let alone a whole nation's. But it also doesn't help to scare monger with misleadingly constructed news reports that make it sound as if Iran has plenty of weapons-grade uranium at its disposal. It doesn't; nor does it seem to be interested in producing any. The biggest issue, in other words, is not the uranium Iran has declared, but the uranium the U.N. Security Council doesn't know about—if there is any. Sound familiar? Weapons of Mass Destruction, anyone?  We jumped to disastrous conclusions with Iraq; it would be wise not to do the same thing with Iran.

You can read the 5-page report to the Security Council here. It's worth the time to get the straight story without the media frame.

[Hat-tip to Will Shetterly for drawing my attention to this factual distortion.]

mixed blessings

Surely by now you've heard the tragic tale of the Wal-Mart employee in Valley Stream, Long Island in New York City who was literally trampled to death by crazed shoppers who'd camped out all night for the big post-Thanksgiving Day sale. Poor Jdimytai Damour didn't stand a chance against the marauding hordes who surged through the doors moments after he opened them. He fell. No one noticed as they stomped right over him. Nor did they notice the pregnant woman who was also injured by the jostling crowd (she escaped with minor injuries and her unborn baby survived). Even as paramedics were working madly to save Damour's life, the shoppers kept right on shopping -- in fact, they "became irate" when the Wal-Mart store management announced it was closing the store on account of the man's death. I guess life is cheap when your sole focus is snagging that long-coveted Wii at a low, low price. Just think how much more it will mean to your children knowing that you spilled innocent blood to get it for them.

So "Black Friday" turns out to be a very apt moniker indeed, especially when you count the two men shot at a Los Angeles Toys 'r Us the same day, or this video showing crazed shoppers grappling like mad over what must be the last available X-Boxes on the planet, given their desperation. People, it doesn't have to be this way! It's possible to shop for great deals without behaving like rabid animals. The Spousal Unit and I are in Vegas for Thanksgiving weekend, and there are some awesome sales here, too. I managed to purchase a very nice Cavalli off-the-shoulder sheath dress and black clutch purse for 40% off without getting into a catfight over it, or killing anyone who got in my way. Shopping shouldn't be an extreme sport.

The ugly news was in such sharp contrast to the generous, welcoming atmosphere of the dinner we attended on Thanksgiving itself, hosted by a lovely woman who has made an annual tradition of opening her home to an extended family of "holiday orphans": LA residents who (for many reasons) don't spend the holiday with family of their own. Everyone brings a specialty dish for the feast, and after dinner, folks go around the table -- or tables, in this case, set end to end, since we numbered 32 -- saying what they were most thankful for. The two people seated to my immediate right were both cancer survivors; they were thankful to be alive. You'd never find them beating the crap out of another shopper for the last X-Box. There's nothing like a brush with death to bring what's really important into the proper perspective.

I occasionally write about cancer treatments from time to time; there's so much cutting-edge research going on, so many different approaches to treatment. We're literally throwing everything but the kitchen sink at the problem, and while we might not have discovered a miraculous "cure," survival rates are the best they've ever been -- and I had the dinner companions to prove it. (Joanne, the Spousal Unit's co-blogger at Cosmic Variance, also survived a bout with breast cancer -- and a minor melanoma for good measure -- this past year. Go, Joanne!) There are new surgical techniques, better chemotherapy drugs, a controversial new CyberKnife to treat prostate cancer, ongoing research into using nanoparticles to literally burn away tumors without harming surrounding healthy tissue, post-surgical x-ray radiation -- and, increasingly, proton therapy. 

Most people know -- should they stop to think about it -- that x-rays are a form of ionizing radiation: they are of sufficient energy to damage and destroy cells -- specifically, it damages DNA and other genetic material, thereby interrupting vital cell functions -- which is why exposure even for medical/dental purposes is carefully controlled and kept to a minimum. X-rays can target cancer cells and prevent the out-of-control growth that invariably leads to death when untreated.

Proton therapy works on similar principles. Physicist Robert R. Wilson first suggested in 1946 that the energetic protons produced at the Harvard Cyclotron Laboratory (HCL) might be an effective cancer treatment, and in fact the very first such treatments were performed at particle accelerators originally built for physics research: Berkeley Radiation Laboratory in 1954, and Uppsala in Sweden in 1951. HCL and Massachusetts General Hospital provided proton therapy to nearly 10,000 patients between 1961 and 2002, when the old cyclotron was finally shut down. Proton therapy continues at the hospital, however, this time via the Francis H. Burr Proton Therapy Center.

So proton therapy has been around for about 50 years, and yet it remains an uncommon treatment for cancer, generally reserved for the most complicated cancers, such as tumors in the head, eyes, or neck that have not yet spread to distant areas of the body -- locations where collateral damage to surrounding tissue could have serious consequences. To date, fewer than 20,000 Americans have been treated with proton therapy, and there are five operating treatment centers in the US (Boston; Loma Linda, CA; Bloomington, IN; Houston, TX; and Jacksonville, FL). There are 25 proton therapy centers operating worldwide, having treated some 40,000 patients to date.

But that uncommonality might be changing, according to MassGen's Jay Flanz, who was among the featured speakers at the Industrial Physics Forum I attended in Boston in October. (Yes, I am only now getting around to blogging about it. I've been busy with this little thing called the Science and Entertainment Exchange -- which now has its own Facebook page, by the way, so become a fan today!) Several new centers are in the advanced planning stage, slated to come online between 2010 and 2012.

Why the sudden demand for what is actually a pretty old technology? Well, proton therapy offers some very real benefits over conventional x-ray radiation therapy: very few side effects, and carefully targeted radiation with almost no damage to surrounding healthy tissue. In conventional x-ray therapy, the x-rays travel through the body and deliver radiation to all the tissues along the way to the actual tumor -- hence the side effects. To cut down on the damage to healthy tissue, doctors usually limit the dose delivered to the tumor. But proton beams actually deposit almost all their energy to the tumor itself, with very little damage to surrounding tissue -- so the side effects are minimal. That's why it's been used so successfully to treat ocular (eye) cancers, brain tumors, spinal tumors, and so forth, now expanding to treat some prostate and breast cancers as well.

That said, proton therapy has its downsides too, namely, size and cost. It takes a 222-ton particle accelerator housed in a football-field-sized building with walls up to 18 feet thick in order to shield the outside world from harmful radiation. Such facilities come with a very high price tag: more than $100 million, sometimes as much as $200 million. Some researchers have argued that the benefits to be gained aren't significant enough to justify the cost of these large facilities. Proton therapy is vital for treating certain rare tumors that conventional x-ray therapy can't effectively treat, they say, but it only matches the success of x-ray therapy for other cancers -- yet it costs twice as much.

Granted, there is a certain cache to having the hot new medical technology on hand. An article in the New York Times a year ago made reference to "an arms race mentality" among medical centers eager to add proton therapy facilities. It cited experts who feel the growing popularity of proton therapy "reflects the best and worst of the nation's market-based health care system, which tends to pursue the latest, most expensive treatments -- without much evidence of improved health -- even as soaring costs add to the nation's economic burden." The same article compares proton therapy to MRI machines, now "accepted staples of medical practice, [but] there is still concern about their overuse and the impact on medical spending."

Now, I'm sympathetic to the high cost of quality health care -- as a freelancer, I spent a huge fraction of my career without health insurance, so I know how steep those costs can be -- and I would not advocate pointless tests or treatment. That said, I think almost no side effects with no diminishment of effectiveness in killing tumors is a substantial benefit of proton therapy, and worth the risk of abuse by unscrupulous sorts who would overprice medicine just to turn a profit. Who needs the nausea, vomiting, diarrhea ad weakened immune system? I challenge anyone to find a prostate cancer patient thrilled about the very real prospect of becoming impotent as a side effect of conventional radiation treatment. And children are especially sensitive to the side effects of radiation; who would begrudge a child with cancer a kinder, gentler alternative? In much the same way, the use of MRI can detect breast cancer earlier than conventional mammograms or self-exams, and early detection means better chances of successful treatment and long-term survival. Just ask Joanne at Cosmic Variance. I bet she thinks the MRI that caught her breast cancer was worth every extra penny.

Flanz argued in favor of expanding the availability of proton therapy, citing not just the lack of side effects but also a lowering of the costs associated with the construction -- in part because where once the equipment had to be fabricated piece by piece, commercial companies now exist that can build new facilities from the ground up. Even better news: the size of the machines is decreasing as well. Last year scientists at the UC-Davis Cancer Center announced that they had licensed the technology for the first compact proton therapy system to TomoTherapy, Inc. in Madison, Wisconsin.

Basically, the Livermore scientists figured out how to accelerate protons to high energies with a light-weight insulator-based structure that doesn't require heavy (and pricey!) magnets to bend and steer the beams. The system also has the ability to vary the energy, intensity, and "spot" size of the proton beam. It produces radiation in rapid pulses so that only small "spots" of radiation are delivered throughout the tumor, for highly precise destruction and (again) minimal damage to surrounding healthy tissue.

The technology actually came out of defense-related research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for nuclear stockpile stewardship purposes, and it means proton therapy can realistically be cut down to size in both scale and price (costing one-fifth as much as a full-scale machine, around $20 million), thereby putting the technology within the reach of any major cancer center. TomoTherapy plans to develop and test the first clinical prototype at the UC-Davis Cancer Center, and then move to bring the machines to market if that initial clinical testing proves successful.

Proton therapy might have its naysayers, and some of their objections might, indeed, be valid. But for the patients who ultimately benefit, it bestows the gift of continued life -- and who can put a price tag on that? It's way better than snagging the last Wii on sale at Wal-Mart.

free range physics

Many of us take our public libraries for granted. It wasn't always the case. When I was a kid, the highlight of my week was when I'd accompany my mother to the local public library to check out a new selection of books. And when I was an impoverished student and young adult, the local library was the only way I could afford new reading material. But with financial stability came the wherewithal to actually buy books again, and libraries play a far lesser role in my life than in years past. Perhaps that could change, however. I have the good fortune to live just three blocks away from the Central Public Library in downtown Los Angeles: a lovely building with Schroedinger's equation carved into one of the stones gracing the steps outside, so really, how could I not be a fan? But it also has an active outreach program (volunteer tutoring) and regularly hosts taped "conversations" between authors in the Mark Taper Auditorium, free to the public as part of the ALOUD program.

I had the privilege of participating in one such "conversation" last week, hosting an evening with Richard Reeves, who just published A Force of Nature: The Frontier Genius of Ernest B. Rutherford. I was a bit outclassed, frankly: I'm a lowly science writer with a couple of pop culture physics books under my belt, whereas Reeves is former chief political correspondent for the New York Times with a list of honors and awards as long as my arm. His many books include a trilogy on modern American presidents: biographies of Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan. Some might find it surprising to see Reeves turn his hand, then, to the biography of a venerable physicist, but it's less so if you know something of his background. He came of age during the Sputnik era, and graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey with a degree in mechanical engineering. So Reeves is no stranger to science.

That shows up immediately in his new book, which opens with a fascinating account of a recreation of Rutherford's pivotal scattering experiment in 1908. Reeves managed the feat with the help of a group of modern-day physicists at his alma mater, and I can't think of a better way to start such a book. After all, in a sense, this is well-traveled ground. While hardly a household name today (except in New Zealand, where he practically deified), Rutherford was once as famous as Albert Einstein, with the press reporting breathlessly on his latest research accomplishments. It helped that his research was literally earth-shattering: first he proved that the atom was not indivisible, then he won the race to "split" the atom, against teams with much bigger machinery and funds. Somewhere along the way he also won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on nuclear half-lives/radioactive decay. (There is more than a little irony in this, since Rutherford is also the person who famously observed, "All science is either physics or stamp collecting.")

Anyway, the scattering experiment is noteworthy because Rutherford noticed, a few years earlier, that a narrow beam of alpha particles became a bit "fuzzy" after passing through a sheet of mica -- a puzzling little anomaly, hardly worth noting, unless one happened to be a great physicist. "Rutherford was a great one for mulling over aberrations, anything out of the ordinary," Reeves writes. "That is where the secrets were, in the margins." So like all great scientists, Rutherford persisted. He set his assistant, Hans Geiger (inventor of the Geiger counter), the task of measuring the relative numbers of alpha particles according to scattering angle, and an undergraduate student, Ernest Marsden, got the thankless task of analyzing all the data to see if any alpha particles were reflected from metals. The answer turned out to be yes: in fact, some alpha rays were  scattered directly backwards from a thin film of gold, almost, said Rutherford, as if one had fired a large naval shell at a piece of tissue paper and it had bounced back. The only explanation of this result is that almost the entire mass of the atom is concentrated into a nucleus a thousand times smaller than the atom itself.

Fast forward not quite 100 years later, to November 5, 2005, when Reeves found himself  in a darkened laboratory in New Jersey, trying to get his eyes to adjust to the darkness so that when he looked through a microscope into the vacuum chamber he and his cohorts had constructed, he would see the telltale "scintillations": sparks of light, the result of alpha rays striking a phosphorescent wall after passing through a bit of gold foil.

It wasn't easy recreating the experiment. While vacuum technology had come a long way since Rutherford's time, it was also quite a bit more difficult to get hold of radioactive materials. Rutherford thought nothing of tossing bits of radium into his coat pocket, or depositing them into his desk drawer. (Apparently it cost $100,000 to decontaminate the famed physicist's desk before it was deemed safe for display. Yet Rutherford never showed any signs of radiation sickness in his lifetime.) Reeves' team had to use a distant descendant of radium, Americium-241, a significantly weaker source. Compare: the radon-222 used by Rutherford in his 1908  experiment produced 30 billion alpha particles per second, while the amercium-241 used by Reeves' team produced around 370 million particles per second. But they succeeded! Maybe they didn't recreate the experiment 100%, but they managed a solid 90%.

Based on the portrait that emerges in A Force of Nature, I suspect Rutherford would have approved of Reeves' willingness to roll up his sleeves and get his hands dirty with the real work of physics: cutting, sawing, soldering, and so forth. What I liked most about Reeves' biography is how it brought Rutherford the man to light: not just the scientist. He was quite the character, frankly. One of 12 children born to a New Zealand wheelwright/engineer (and later flax miller) and his schoolteacher wife, Rutherford showed early academic promise and eventually won a grant to study at the famed Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in England. The lab's head, J.J. Thomson, took the promising young New Zealander under his wing and directed him away from his early research into radio waves and wireless transmission, into the nascent field of atomic physics.

It meant diverting the young man away from a path that would have made him extremely wealthy; Guglielmo Marconi eventually won the wireless race, and died a very rich man.  But Rutherford was an idealist at heart, and he followed his curiosity to investigate the nature of the most fundamental building blocks of nature instead: the structure of the atom. His scattering experiment proved once and for all that the atomic nucleus was not indivisible, and his model of the atom -- a tiny nucleus made of positively charged protons and neutral neutrons, around which orbited negatively charged electrons -- quickly supplanted Thomson's working "plum pudding" model. (You can build your own atom here.)

Rutherford was the last of the great "tabletop" experimentalists. Nowadays we have massive accelerators to smash particles into even tinier bits and pieces, at ever higher energies, but many of Rutherford's apparatus were no bigger than the proverbial bread box, and used such mundane items as string and sealing wax. All those years roughing it on New Zealand farms made Rutherford both thrifty and creative when it came to experimental materials. Reeves relates one anecdote of a young scientist under Rutherford who needed a bit of metal tube for an experiment; Rutherford had the young man saw off a piece of the handlebar of an old bike in the lab he'd kept around just in case the parts were needed.

Rutherford's early years at Cambridge were marred a bit by the snobbish elitism of some of his colleagues. After all, he was the first graduate student there who did not actually attend Cambridge as an undergraduate. He was also a bit rough around the edges: big, loud, boisterous, with a strong New Zealand accent. He was often mistaken for an Australian farmer, rather than one of the world's most prominent scientific minds. But he proved his mettle, again and again, and he judged people on their merits in turn. That included women and minorities: he admired and respected Marie Curie, for instance, and while he expressed surprise upon meeting Lise Meitner and finding she was a woman, the fact of her gender did not diminish her scientific achievements in his eyes. Nor was Rutherford especially political. Alas, he had the misfortune to live through the onset of two world wars, losing more than one promising young scientist to the trenches. With the ascension of Hitler and the ousting of Jewish scientists in the 1930s, Rutherford pulled every string he could manage to find places for his former Jewish colleagues. So he was simultaneously a man of his era, and rather enlightened for that day. Some 13 of his former students went on to win Nobel Prizes of their own, so he left an indelible mark on physics beyond the narrow confines of his own research.

One of the more surprising aspects of Reeves' biography is the figure of Rutherford's wife, Mary, a strict religious woman with a sharp tongue who did not hesitate to cut her husband down to size; nor did she mellow with age. She seems to have been the antithesis of her boisterous, gregarious husband. The couple had one daughter, Eileen, who died giving birth to her fourth child. Reeves is not the first to speculate that Rutherford's fond, paternal attitude towards the "boys" in his lab might be indicative of his longing for the son he never had. Lady Rutherford also managed to squelch many of the details surrounding Rutherford's death in 1937 for many years. Rutherford fell while trimming a tree in the yard, and apparently she tried a homeopathic "healing touch" attempt at a cure before calling in a doctor -- at which point it was too late. The great man succumbed to the ignominy of a partially strangulated umbilical hernia, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. His estate: around 7000 pounds, pretty much the amount he'd received for his Nobel Prize. But his place in physics history is rich, indeed.

There's a lot more color and detailed anecdotes in the actual book, which I encourage folks to read on their own. As we were winding things up after last week's conversation, Reeves expressed his surprise and gratitude at the number of people willing to trek to downtown LA on a weeknight to hear about a not-so-well-known (in this country) physicist. I was surprised, too, although I suspect many of the folks who came were there because of Reeves himself -- a writer of no small stature. My favorite moment of the evening occurred when someone asked him if there were similarities between his past presidential biographies and this most recent scientific one. While conceding that Rutherford shared a larger-than-life persona and gift for inspiring others with Presidents Kennedy and Reagan, Reeves said bluntly, "Presidents are pygmies" in comparison to the great men of science -- not meant in any way to disparage the achievements of political leaders, mind you, merely to put those things in true perspective.

genie in a bottle

One of Val Kilmer's less stellar roles was as Simon Templar in 1997's The Saint. Templar is a master thief and master of disguise who takes on assumed names associated with Catholic Saints. (Simon Templar was, apparently, the patron saint of magic.) Eventually, he's hired by a Russian industrialist (always evil characters) to steal a formula for cold fusion from a pretty young female scientist, thereby having access to the secret of heating millions of homes with a few gallons of water. This being Hollywood, he falls in love with her instead, and together they bring limitless energy to the world at large, using nothing but electrodes in a jar of heavy water. Ain't love grand?

The film's scientific premise is right up there with the presentation of sonoluminescence as a powerful energy source in Chain Reaction. The main difference is that sonoluminescence -- while nowhere near the stage of development depicted onscreen -- is nonetheless a well-respected, well-funded field of study, whereas cold fusion has pretty much languished along the edges of the lunatic fringe since its alleged "discovery" almost 20 years ago. It has a handful of supporters among scientists, but the field boasts a far greater number of crackpots who inevitably undermine the rare occasions when a bona fide result is obtained in such experiments. Prevailing opinion is that the vast majority of cold fusion research falls under the rubric of "pathological science": the results are always on the verge of a stunning validation, and whenever said validation fails (again) to materialize, there is always a handy rationale for why it isn't really a definitive failure.

As recently as 2000, TIME magazine listed cold fusion as one of the "worst ideas" of the 20th century. You' might never know that if your introduction to cold fusion was last week's short article in Wired by Mark Anderson, reporting on a recent small convocation of diehard cold fusion advocates. Chances are, you'd come away feeling that these plucky, anti-establishment rebel scientists are thisclose (as close as Kilmer and his co-star in the still shot at right, generating their own form of heat) to achieving a cheap, plentiful supply of energy based on simple high school chemistry -- if only that stodgy, closed-minded, mean scientific establishment would stop making fun of them and provide sufficient funding resources.

It's admittedly a compelling narrative -- everyone loves seeing an underdog prevail -- it just isn't true. The real story of cold fusion is every bit as fascinating and provocative, even tragic in places, but not nearly as black and white. It's less about scientific villainy, and more about all-too-human foibles. That's why there have been several full-length books written on the subject. Like a great deal of science, cold fusion doesn't lend itself to the broad strokes and sound bite syntax of most popular science reporting. That doesn't mean a reporter shouldn't try to temper the latest claims of cold fusion's stubborn proponents with some context gleaned from its checkered history.

I'm sympathetic to the challenge Anderson faced in writing the article, given his space limitations, but he doesn't seem to have done much due diligence about including any skeptical context, or even the obligatory opposing view. Everything he needed is readily available online, including original video footage of the infamous 1989 press conference that started it all, coverage in both the science trade press and mainstream media, and the full reports from the Department of Energy, which conducted official reviews in both 1989 and 2004. A quick online trip to Amazon would have yielded a couple of popular science books offering both pro (Eugene Mallove's Fire From Ice) and con (Gary Taubes' Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times of Cold Fusion) viewpoints. I'm not asking Anderson to include all of that, but can't we have just a little skepticism? Pretty please?

It's all the more distressing coming on the heels of a lengthy 2004 feature in Wired by Charles Platt that painted an even more unflattering portrait of the scientific establishment, describing its resistance to the notion of cold fusion as "a colossal conspiracy of denial," rather than professional scientists merely rejecting something due to lack of convincing empirical evidence. Clearly, Wired has picked the more simplistic, underdog "framing" narrative: cold fusion scientists have been deeply wronged by an overly skeptical entrenched "establishment," and any day now they will be vindicated and save the world with their revolutionary new energy source. Hollywood should love it.

(In fairness, the magazine's cold fusion coverage is still better than Popular Mechanics, which ran a despicable piece of fear-mongering cover story in 2004 claiming that terrorists could use cold fusion to build their own hydrogen bombs. For an example of truly stellar reporting on the topic, see Sharon Weinberger's November 21, 2004, feature for The Washington Post, which is the most balanced and nuanced treatment of the cold fusion controversy I've yet read in the mainstream media outlets.)

Here's a bit of background for readers with only a passing familiarity with the controversy. Way back in 1989, two chemists at the University of Utah named Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann believed they had succeeded in producing nuclear fusion in a jar -- without the need to recreate the temperatures and pressures found in the centers of stars which run on "hot" fusion. We can achieve hot nuclear fusion, but it requires more energy than it gives back, so it's pretty much an energy sinkhole for the time being (although the physicists are working the problem, yes they are!). Anyway, their finding was counter to everything known to date about nuclear fusion, both in theory and experiment.

Generally, when there's a significant breakthrough in science, it's written up in a formal paper containing all the information needed for other scientists to replicate the experiment and test the results -- because reproducibility is one of the most fundamental elements of the scientific method. That paper is submitted to a reputable, peer-reviewed journal, and if enough reviewers give it a thumb's up, the paper is published, and other scientists can critique and/or build upon their work. The system is imperfect -- egos and rivalries can get in the way -- but over the long haul, it has served science well. It's an equally accepted maxim that the more potentially revolutionary the result, the greater the burden of proof: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence in order to be accepted by the scientific community. And cold fusion was a truly extraordinary claim.

Pons and Fleischmann, for whatever reason, ignored the established protocol and jumped right into the public domain, announcing their results in a March 23 press conference -- even as they were applying for patents for what they believed would become a hugely lucrative industry. Those pending patent applications were cited as the reason they couldn't reveal all the details of their experiment or provide appropriate documentation of their results -- which meant their results couldn't be tested and verified by other scientists. Basically, they wanted it both ways: they wanted scientific glory for their work, while hoarding the details in hopes of reaping a fortune in proprietary patent rights.

The Utah press release made the situation worse by indulging in unfortunate hyperbole, hailing the breakthrough as something that would provide "an inexhaustible source of energy." (Scientists are all too familiar with this tendency of academic media departments.) Now, anyone who's covered science as a reporter knows to be wary when such a claim is made: we're all for new and improved energy sources, but inexhaustible? Nature just doesn't work that way; it sounded more like that perennial bugbear, perpetual motion, rather than any kind of serious science. The New York Times was suitably cautious, and initially refused to run the story, but the Wall Street Journal's Jerry Bishop and his editors apparently just saw the dollar signs and published a euphoric front-page article on the breakthrough. Soon other major newspapers followed suit, and it was a media feeding frenzy.

Scientists -- especially physicists -- shared the Times' skepticism, in part because of the manner in which Pons and Fleischmann had made their announcement. "Conventional science requires you to play by certain rules," retired Los Alamos scientist turned underground cold fusion researcher Edmund Storms is quoted in the 2004 Wired feature as saying. "First, thou shalt not announce thy results via a press conference. Second, thou shalt not exaggerate the results. Third, thou shalt tell other scientists precisely what thou did. They broke all of those rules." The world may love a rebel, but the unwritten "rules" of scientific culture are in place for very good reasons -- and if you break them, it's best to have a damned good reason of your own for doing so, or at least killer experimental results with all the requisite documentation in hand for independent verification. Is it any wonder Pons and Fleischmann faced a rather cool reception?

Eventually they published a full-length (over 50 pages!) paper with all of the necessary details, but it was rushed, sloppy, and contained at least one egregious error concerning their analysis of the gamma ray spectra. This did not help strengthen their already shaky case. Still, they might have been grudgingly forgiven their poor scientific manners and initial awkward missteps if their work had been verified. Scientists love a good underdog story as much as anybody, and there's numerous examples in history of lone scientists  with poor social skills laboring against the doubts of colleagues and dire financial straits to prove their pet theory. (And they win! Yay for science!)

The problem was, hundreds of researchers all over the world scurried to reproduce the experiments, and invariably failed. Sure, there were a couple of glimmers of hope here and there: teams at Texas A&M and the Georgia Institute of Technology excitedly reported results of excess heat and neutron production, respectively, in April, but withdrew those results almost immediately, citing "lack of evidence." By the end of 1989, a panel of experts had conducted a Department of Energy review of the matter, and concluded there was no basis for the claims. As far as mainstream science was concerned, that was the final nail in cold fusion's coffin.

But like a lot of pseudoscience -- to which it is frequently compared -- cold fusion refuses to die. It's tough not to admire the steely resolve of cold fusion advocates, who have faced derision, suffered in their careers, and labored to build their own scientific enterprise from scratch: their own meetings, their own journals, their own community. (Then again, there's a whiff of, "Fine! If we can't play in the big sandbox, we'll just go make our own!") Alas, those are ideal conditions for crackpots to flourish, so they've got some strange bedfellows, but they've also got a handful of otherwise respectable scientists conducting their own experiments in cold fusion. Pons and Fleischmann reportedly had a bitter falling out and parted ways in 1995. Fleischmann is still collaborating on cold fusion research in the UK, but Pons has become something of a recluse. The new dynamic duo of cold fusion is SRI International chemist Michael McKubre and MIT physicist Peter Hagelstein.

Gradually, the "serious" researchers started presenting papers at meetings other than their own, including those of the American Physical Society. Those researchers chipped away at the tarnished reputation of their chosen field, publishing peer-reviewed papers now and then on purported evidence of "low-energy nuclear reactions." Eventually, the DOE decided, in fairness, to take another look at the accumulated evidence over the last 15 years and re-evaluate the cold fusion controversy. This time, they relented just a little: they still didn't find the evidence sufficiently convincing to launch a federally-funded research program. The panel split on the issue of whether subsequent experiments had validated the occasional production of "excess heat," citing poor experimental design, documentation, background control, etc., as muddying their determinations. (Out of 18 members, 12 found no conclusive evidence, five found the evidence somewhat convincing, and only one was completely convinced.) But they felt that funding agencies should consider funding proposed projects on a case-by-case basis, provided those proposals "meet accepted scientific standards and undergo the rigors of peer review."

See? I told you it was a complicated story. That's why I'd normally be sympathetic to Wired's Anderson, faced with the task of conveying the salient points in a short news article. (There's no excuse for Pratt's fawning 2004 feature; is there anyone more zealous than a former skeptic turned convert?)  Your average reporter doesn't have time to do exhaustive research on such a short news article, and frankly, your average reader doesn't want to wade through all the gory technical details. Nonetheless, Anderson could have tracked down at least one skeptical, yet fair-minded, source, to show he had some rudimentary grasp of the complexity of the situation.  Here's a few specific sentences that are badly in need of context:

"Presenters at the MIT event estimated that 3000 published studies from scientists around the world have contributed to the growing canon of evidence...."

I find Anderson's use of the word "canon" here interesting; it implies that something is established beyond question, which cold fusion most certainly is not. More to the point, this is a misleading statement, since very few of those 3000 papers were published in peer-reviewed journals. Certainly some of them were, but this fact should be noted, even just in passing. And don't just take my word for it. Per WaPo's Weinberger, "[T]he most credible cold fusion advocates concede that the vast majority of those papers are of poor quality." She even cites a supporter who calls the collection of papers "toxic waste." That's hardly a resounding endorsement; it certainly wouldn't qualify as a "canon."

"Verification of these controversial results is not the problem -- many labs around the world have reproduced parts of the results many times."

Again, this is misleading. It's true that over the past two decades, there have been reports of what appear to be excess bursts of energy in various experiments. But even Hagelstein admits to continued experimental inconsistency; some "results" have never been reproduced. Cold fusion's claims of verification are based on a bizarre kind of statistical rationale: sure, most of the results are negative, but they have now amassed such a statistically significant sampling of instances of claimed excess heat that at least some of those results must be valid, and any lack of the effect is due to flawed experiments. The WaPo article cites esteemed nuclear physicist Richard Garwin as a source for its dismissal of that tortured argument: "It's absurd to claim that experiments that seem to support cold fusion are valid, while those that don't are flawed." There are a few more mainstream scientists around these days who are willing to concede there might be something of marginal interest going on, but most remain unconvinced that it's bona fide cold fusion. And hardly anyone holds out any hope of it ever becoming a viable energy source.

"Compared to the warehouses worth of billion-dollar gadgetry needed to run 'hot fusion,' cold fusion research is cheap to fund. And yet cash is the primary limiting factor holding the research back."

It's disingenuous to dismiss cold fusion's difficulties as nothing more than a funding problem. Its biggest problem is the lack of reproducibility, even in the experiments of the most respected members of the cold fusion community. McKubre, for instance, admits to Weinberger that out of 50,000 hours of experiments, only 50 recorded instances have occurred that "unmistakably" produced excess heat. That's just not good enough. Science must maintain its integrity -- if only to counter the inevitable human frailties of its practitioners -- and that means we can't lower the bar of standards for reproducibility just because palladium is a "quixotic" metal, riddled with unpredictable, unevenly distributed impurities. Seriously, that's one of the main excuses given by cold fusion advocates as to why they get such inconsistent results. Materials issues are a bitch, experimentally, it's true, but cold fusion is not the only field faced with overcoming those challenges, so why should its experimental inconsistencies be excused on those grounds? 

As for that "excess heat," it's nothing to get excited about just yet, since it's a very small amount indeed. Anderson quotes cold fusionist Mitchell Swartz as saying the question now is not whether the experiments can generate excess heat, "It's can we can get a kilowatt? Can we get a small car moving on this stuff?" Heck, if they could just boil some water, that would be a tremendous accomplishment. The late Scottish physicist Douglas Morrison was one of the rare skeptical attendees of the annual cold fusion conferences until his death inn 2001. Each year, he would listen to the extravagant claims, then stand and make a simple request: "Please can I have a cup of tea?" It was a bit cheeky of him, but he made his point: cold fusion talks a good game, yet even the simplest applied energy task remains well beyond its reach.

And what of the implied vast scientific conspiracy to squelch further research and kill the field entirely (perhaps to ensure that the major investments in hot fusion research don't become obsolete)? The "evidence" for that is mostly  anecdotal hearsay -- i.e., not true evidence at all. Science undeniably has its politics, its bitter rivalries, petty jealousies, and its turf wars. There's some hefty egos involved, and feelings tend to run a bit high on both sides of the controversy. Scientists aren't always very polite in their disagreements, either. On the whole, though, cooler heads ultimately prevail in the public sphere, however much heated rhetoric is flung around in private.

I've personally heard physicists dismiss Hagelstein as an embarrassment to MIT. (Hagelstein has countered by describing the mainstream scientific community as a closed-minded "mafia," that only publishes the work of the official "family" of scientists.) Caltech physicist Steven Koonin famously denounced Pons and Fleischmann as "delusional" at an APS April meeting, and Princeton physicist Will Happer has described them as "incompetent boobs." Happer also objected strenuously to Robert Jahn's controversial PEAR project in psychic research, solely on scientific grounds. Yet he has repeatedly stated, on the record, that however much he disagreed with Jahn's science, he supported his right to conduct that research. I'll indulge in a bit of conjecture here myself: I suspect that despite Happer's harsh disdain for the scientific caliber of Pons and Fleischmann, and his skepticism of the validity of the field in general, he would still support the right of cold fusion scientists to conduct their research. (He just doesn't think the government needs to pay for it.)

The ever-irascible Bob Park, author of Voodoo Science and editor of the weekly electronic newsletter, What's New, has been one of the fiercest of cold fusion's often-vitriolic critics. Yet he has corresponded with many cold fusion scientists over the years, and welcomed the second DOE review. He still thinks it's most likely a bunch of bad science, but conceded to the WaPo, "Maybe there is... some funny reaction going on.... If there is, it may solve some puzzles, but it won't be important." Also quoted is Hagelstein's MIT colleague, Milly Dresselhaus: "I think scientists should be open-minded. Historically, many things get overturned with time." She stops short of recommending federal funding, however, especially in these cash-strapped times: "When you feel poor, you don't invest in long shots. This is kind of a long shot."

Cold fusion has had its day in court, so to speak, not once, but twice, and some skeptical scientists have been willing to listen to a few of the more reputable claims. Garwin was a member of the 1989 DOE review panel, and subsequently visited McKubre's lab at SRI in 1993. Far from dismissing the work outright, he praised the lab for its "serious and competent work," and found no huge blunder in the experimental setups. (That's something that sets McKubre's work apart from the vast majority of cold fusion experiments, which caused Garwin to gripe to the WaPo, "People who can't do a good sophomore experiment are suddenly free to suggest that the discrepancies in their results come from unexplained, basic, earth-shaking, heat-producing phenomena.") But he did identify any number of possible problems with the setup, as well as some measurement errors, concluding bluntly, "Did not support any finding of 'excess heat.'"

In short, individual scientists might have indulged in harsh derision about cold fusion over the years, and promising young physicists like Hagelstein have indeed paid a professional price for their choice of research. (Note that it was Hagelstein's choice.) That doesn't amount to a cabal-like conspiracy n the part of the scientific establishment -- a notion that provides the linchpin of an emerging "cold fusion mythology" being fostered by -- among other things -- unquestioning articles in popular science magazines, and it has little basis in reality. The scientific community as a whole has not unfairly dismissed the claims: it simply remains unconvinced by the erratic evidence that has been presented to it. Should cold fusion advocates one day beat the odds and provide truly reproducible, compelling evidence for low-energy nuclear reactions, the stodgy old scientific establishment might grumble a bit, but ultimately it will accept those findings and alter its theories accordingly. Because that's what the scientific method is all about.

Perhaps the most telling anecdote comes at the end of the WaPo article, where McKubre cites the multiple pop culture references to cold fusion as evidence that cold fusion is losing its stigma as a suspect pseudoscience. In fictional worlds, he insists, cold fusion is a fact. "It's a fantasy fact. That's nearly as good as reality." Here's a free media-savvy tip for scientists: That's the kind of  inane statement you never want to make on the record to a reporter, particularly when you're being grilled about a controversial subject like cold fusion. In this case, it serves no purpose other than to lend credence to Park's assertion earlier in the article that cold fusion's advocates want to believe the world is a certain way, when there simply isn't sufficient evidence to support what they so dearly want to believe.

I like science fiction and fantasy as much as the next person, and I'll be the first to trumpet the fact that real world science feeds off sci-fi to design new technologies and gain inspiration, before inspiring sci-fi authors with new fundamental breakthroughs that spark their creativity in turn. It's the perfect symbiotic relationship. But that's a far cry from claiming that because something is "real" in a cartoon universe, it's only a matter of time before real-world scientists make similar breakthroughs.  While writing The Physics of the Buffyverse, I concluded that the most basic mechanism in that fictional world was an infinite supply of extra "mystical energy" that allowed for phenomena that would be impossible in our universe. But I didn't extrapolate that observation to conclude that someday we, too, would have access to a similar energy source and scientists just needed to identify it and figure out how to tap into it. Because the Buffyverse is a fantasy world, and we don't live in a fantasy world. Quod erat demonstratum, or, more colloquially: Duh, squared.

what you can't see can hurt you

Back when I was living in NYC's East Village, I headed down Second Avenue on my way home one day, and came upon an amazing sight: the earth had opened and literally swallowed a couple of cars, the tailgates of which were sticking up vertically out of the enormous pothole that had formed in the middle of the asphalt. Second Avenue was closed for almost an entire week to repair the damage. Apparently that portion of the avenue had been unstable for some time, a ticking time bomb just waiting for the right moment to collapse.

I was reminded of that incident yesterday when news broke of a huge steam pipe explosion beneath a street near Grand Central Terminal. This was no minor "exploding manhole cover" (a problem that plagued residents of DC's tony Georgetown neighborhood in 2001/2002). The force of the explosion sent a gigantic "scalding jet of brownish steam toward the sky," according to a report in the New York Times, killing one person and injuring more than 30 others. The steam was accompanied by all kinds of debris: mostly mud and chunks of pavement, hitting the windows of skyscrapers before falling to earth like a very hard rain. (You can see the raw footage here.) The force of the explosion was sufficient to flip over a red tow truck; it landed right smack in the center of the crater. 

Terrorism was the first thought to spring to mind for many, but it was really just due to very old pipes (from 1924) under extreme pressure, exacerbated by the introduction of cold water, which caused the pipe to rupture. There have been more than a dozen similar incidents over the last couple of decades, the biggest rocking Gramercy Park in 1989.

A bit of fascinating New York history emerged in the local media coverage. More than one person describing the appeal of the Big Apple has mentioned that New York's streets seem to vibrate with energy -- turns out that is literally correct! The steam pipes are there because steam was once used to power elevators in Manhattan buildings, beginning around 1882. But the demand for steam power decreased sharply with the rising availability of electricity. Today, it's used to spin turbines that generate electricity for Con Edison's plants, after which the steam is piped to large office buildings (among them the Empire State Building), where it provides heating and (by adding compressors) air conditioning. Millions of pounds of steam are pumped beneath the city every hour.

The CEO of Con Edison, Kevin Burke, theorized that recent rainstorms would have surrounded the pipes with cold water, resulting in condensation inside the steam pipe. That's very bad for these old pipes, since steam responds to even slight changes in its environment with a corresponding change in pressure -- ergo, the explosion. (The slang term, apparently, is "water hammer.") And there's 105 more miles of old steam pipes pumping away beneath Manhattan's mean streets, buried close enough together that trouble in one sector could damage a neighboring one. New Yorkers can't see it, but there's big trouble brewing beneath their bustling little feet.

Of course, the explosion and accompanying debris, and related injuries, aren't the only problem. The city's infrastructure is very old; certain materials considered unsafe today were in common usage in the 1920s -- materials like asbestos, a known human carcinogen. The explosion that ripped apart the pavement may have also ripped up the asbestos insulation and dispersed it into the air. Con Ed has been diligently testing the air and the debris for traces of asbestos. Ask a health official and he or she will tell you that no exposure is really safe, but the cancers related to asbestos are usually the result of sustained exposure (over the course of many years) in industrial settings. Just to be on the safe side, those in the vicinity of the blast were urged to wash and have their clothes carefully cleaned.

Still, if we're talking dangerous carcinogens, nothing beats ionizing radiation, especially gamma rays. Just two days before the NYC blast, the north coast of Japan was hit by a powerful undersea earthquake measuring 6.8 on the Richter scale. Nine people died, over 900 were injured, houses were crushed, highways buckled, and collapsed a few bridges along the coast -- all this damage in a supposedly rural area. Far scarier was the report that a "small amount" of radioactive waste had leaked into the Sea of Japan from the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant -- one of the world's largest such facilities. The plant owners, not surprisingly, insisted the leak wasn't a health risk, despite the fact that it wasn't publicly reported for several hours. According to the Los Angeles Times, "Japan's nuclear industry, which operates 55 plants atop some of the earth's most volatile tectonic plates, has a history of covering up accidents."

While I'm a big believer in investing in alternative energy sources, I'll go on record saying that I'm not nuclear power's #1 fan. It's nothing personal; some of my best friends are nuclear physicists. Nor am I hysterical about it; the word "nuclear" does not automatically fill me with fear and dread, because I've learned enough science over the years to understand the realities of the risks involved. Radiation might be invisible to the naked human eye, but there's no reason to freak out over getting an MRI, for example. (Jen-Luc hears that one reason it's called Magnetic Resonance Imaging, despite being based on nuclear magnetic resonance, is that nobody wanted the word "nuclear" to be mentioned.) And I'm a huge fan of nuclear medicine, which has saved far more lives over the years than radiation exposure has killed, I'd wager.

So why am I not a fan of nuclear power plants, despite their potential for reducing our dependence on oil and other fossil fuels? For starters, I just don't buy the argument that it's a "clean" energy source, because the process of creating nuclear energy also creates radioactive waste, which must be stored for decades upon decades in some supposedly safe underground location. That just doesn't meet my criteria for a truly clean energy source. Sorry. A small amount of nuclear power is fine, but our energy needs are enormous, and growing every day. Switch entirely to nuclear and we'd all be drowning in nuclear waste.

But my real concerns are best illustrated by what just happened in Japan: the very real risk of accidents or leaks that release highly dangerous ionizing radiation into the environment, contaminating land, water, and food sources for decades to come. Everyone still remembers the infamous Three Mile Island accident in 1979, and more recently, the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 in the Ukraine, the latter still considered the worst accident in the history of nuclear power.  According to the new "nuclear event rating scale" released by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA),  Chernobyl is a 7 -- the highest rating on the scale. Three Mile Island rated a 5. We're still dealing with all the fallout -- real and metaphorical -- from the widespread Chernobyl contamination, even 20+ years later. 

In fact, we're still dealing with the effects of the Trinity Test back in 1945. At the 52nd annual meeting of the Health Physics Society  (HPS) last week in Portland, Oregon, health physicist Tom Widner presented the first preliminary reports of total radiation dose to nearby residents . There really hasn't been a public accounting of that aspect of the Trinity Test, even though the local populace spent years breathing contaminated air and drinking contaminated water. It's an  ongoing study, due for completion in 2009, but those preliminary results were telling: at nearby ranches 19 miles from Ground Zero, the exposure rates were around 15  Roentgen per hour (as measured just over three hours after detonation). Most non-scientists aren't familiar with that scale, but it's a good 10,000 times greater than radiation limit that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission currently recommends (less than two millirem per hour). Widner's take as director of the study: "If officials had known what is now known about the long-term effects of radiation exposure, such as cancer, they would have much more likely ordered local evacuations, even though publicity was seen as a serious threat to the secrecy of the mission. (Jen-Luc Piquant thinks Widner is being a bit idealistic; she doesn't put it past our government to have simply decided those residents were expendable for the greater good of the nation.)

Granted, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were statistical anomalies -- albeit very costly ones, in terms of human life and health. And yes, safety precautions are in place.  They were in place at Kashiwazaki Kariwa, although a review of those safety procedures is now pending. What scares me is the element of human error, and the accompanying dishonesty as managers struggle to hide the fact that they made a serious mistake. And equipment has to constantly be updated; not all plants are as conscientious in that regard. Here's more from the LA Times article, describing the damage to the plant from the earthquake, and the subsequent radiation leakage:

"... [A] fire broke out in an electrical transformer, spewing black soot into the sky for two hours before being brought control. Built in 1985 under now-outdated earthquake protection guidelines, the plant's seven reactors give it more production capacity than any other reactor in the world.... Company officials said four of the seven reactors were operating, or about to operate, when the earthquake hit, and that seismic activity detectors worked properly and shut down the plant as required. But the power station lacked the proper equipment to extinguish the chemical fire and had to await outside help. After initially denying any radioactive leaks occurred, company officials acknowledged several hours later that a small amount of coolant containing radioactive content had spilled from one reactor."

Now, supposedly, the amount of radioactive material that escaped was "minuscule," but those nameless plant officials seriously damaged their credibility by initially lying about the leak. We're talking about a serious potential human health risk, here -- there's no place for lying just to salvage the plant's reputation. (Jen-Luc Piquant can't believe Japan authorized construction of over 50 nuclear plants over "volatile tectonic plates" in the first place.)

Japan isn't the only culprit whose laxity could be placing the world at risk. The July 14 issue of New Scientist featured a short interview with Najmedin Meshkati, an expert in nuclear safety at the University of Southern California, who has serious concerns that Iran's large nuclear plants in Bushehr and elsewhere are equally vulnerable to accidents. Given Iran's strategic location, here's what Meshkati had to say about the spread of radioactive fallout from a major nuclear accident there: "If it happens in Bushehr... and the containment dome can't stop the fallout from traveling, the whole of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Dubai, and the rest of the Gulf will be downwind. If it happens at one of the uranium enrichment plants, the local population centers will be at the mercy of wind direction, as with the accident at Japan's enrichment plant in Tokaimura in 1999."

Even so, I might be persuaded to consider nuclear power to be  an acceptable tradeoff of risk vs benefit, were it not for the whole waste disposal issue -- and the fact that those radioactive "orphan sources" have a way of ending up in the wrong hands. That's right, there a global black market for radioactive wastes, and the radioactive isotopes used by various industries (including medicine). That was another highlight of the recent HPS meeting. Carolyn Jean MacKenzie of the IAEA's Division of Radiation, Transport, and Waste Safety flew in from her home base in Vienna, Austria, to discuss that agency's new process for conducting country-specific "search and secure strategies" for the recovery of orphan radioactive sources.

I admit, when I first read the abstract, it seemed a bit dry and boring. Procedural stuff is hardly pulse-pounding material. (Measures to be incorporated include "administrative paper searches, bankruptcy records, and keeping tabs on industries known to use radioactive materials." Yawn). But I dug a little deeper into the issue, and into MacKenzie's background, and found that the new process is based on lessons learned from more than 20 missions to search and secure orphan sources. Most recently, MacKenzie was in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, where as many as 300 radioactive sources have been recovered since the mid-1990s, thanks to the sharp economic decline in that region since the fall of the Soviet Union. In 2006, she was part of a team that located a powerful source of cesium-137 -- a radioactive isotope used by industry to check materials for flaws -- in a pile of dirt in an abandoned factory. They found a second source in a box of nuts and bolts in a private home. The family had been sleeping in the next room for years. (The BBC did an interesting segment on the mission; you can see the clip here.)

The situation is just as bad in Tajikstan, whose government is commendably intent on securing its 10 deserted sites, many of which are located near towns and villages -- all near Taboshar, which used to be the center of uranium mining and milling. Apparently there's a hill of more than a million tons of process residue just sitting there, unguarded, exposed to erosive elements like wind and rain. People salvage building materials from the site for their homes, and kids play around the big radioactive pile, blissfully unaware of the potential health hazards.

Is it any wonder the IAEA and others are seriously concerned about such material falling into terrorist hands? In 2005 alone, the IAEA tracked 103 confirmed incidents of illicit trafficking of nuclear and radioactive materials -- most of those involved orphan radioactive sources. We care, because such sources are the primary ingredient in dirty bombs (or radiological dispersion device, if you want to get all jargon-y about it).

According to other speakers at the HPS meeting, we are woefully under-prepared for such an attack; the Hurricane Katrina clusterf**k will look competent in comparison, if a 2003 federal training exercise is any indication. In that exercise, which simulated a dirty bomb attack, every single volunteer "victim" died before even reaching a hospital, mostly because fire and rescue personnel didn't really understand the nature of radiation -- or even how to use their radiation instruments -- when they got to the "scene." Better training programs for fire and rescue workers, as well as the National Guard and local health agencies, have since been developed, but the news hardly restores my confidence in our national preparedness. Seems to be an awful lot of windy rhetoric blowing around DC these days, with precious little to back it up when the chips are down.

The message one could easily get from all of the above is "Be afraid. Be very afraid. In fact, you might just want to stay inside for the remainder of your life on earth...preferably in an underground bunker sealed against any kind radiation." (Jen-Luc swears Dick Cheney pretty much lives in one; maybe he knows something we don't.) HPS folks responded to all this with a session on "Fighting Fear with Facts." Doug Van Cleef was among the speakers who addressed this issue. He's an employee of ORTEC, which manufactures radiation detection equipment, and wants us to know that "radioactivity is not synonymous with death." Without downplaying the reality of high-dose exposure (which pretty much is synonymous with death), he noted that dirty bombs have much lower levels and thus there would be less dangerous exposure -- any health effects would likely to be small.

The real risk of dirty bombs lies in the panic that would ensue, said Van Cleef, who seems to think that a dirty bomb would probably cause more deaths from car accidents as folks fled during evacuation than from the actual radiation. With images of Katrina still fresh in everyone's mind, maybe Van Cleef has a point. Maybe not -- I'm less likely than he is to downplay the danger of adverse health effects from radiation exposure in a dirty bomb attack. Nonetheless, I support the idea of fighting radiation fears with radiation facts: educating the public on this topic equips them to (a) not panic as easily, because they can strike that critical balance between over-exaggerating and excessively downplaying the risks involved, and can thereby (b) make better, informed decisions rather than relying on government officials (who as we have seen, are known to lie to protect their own interests) to tell them when sometime is safe or unsafe. A scientifically informed public is a healthy, happy public, as far as I'm concerned.

Besides, there's plenty of other things out there for the public to panic about -- things like the mysterious ingredients in the hugely popular Red Bull Energy Drinks. I'm not a fan myself, but Jen-Luc was a major consumer until she read an article this week in Wired, about what the drink actually contains. It's not the beverage taken as a whole that gives you wings, it's the ingredients: caffeine, to be sure, but also meat sugar (a.k.a., inositol) and, um, bull bile. Yummy! The secret ingredient in bull bile is taurine, a powerful age-defying antioxidant. No wonder Jen-Luc is eternally youthful. She's currently weighing the risks vs. benefits of continuing to drink bull bile and meat sugar on a regular basis -- anything in the name of perpetually youthful skin.

baby, take a (belated) bow

Poor Element 118. It tried to make a grand entrance back in 1999, when researchers from Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory announced the first experimental observation for this rare "superheavy" element, along with its immediate decay product, Element 116. Two years later, the researchers retracted their claim, after they were unable to reproduce those results in subsequent experiments. A re-analysis of the original data uncovered evidence not of Element 118, but of scientific misconduct on the part of Bulgarian physicist Victor Ninov.

Berkeley Lab did what any prestigious scientific institution would do in those circumstances: it launched an investigation. A panel of experts concluded that Ninov was the only person responsible for translating the raw computer data into readable results, and that he'd exploited his position to insert false data into his analysis. Ninov denied the charge, apparently claiming to be the victim of an international scientific conspiracy intent on blaming him for the lab's mistakes. He was summarily fired despite such protestations, and last we heard, he was teaching physics courses and quietly going about his business at the University of the Pacific. Element 118 retreated into the wings to await its cue to step back into the limelight.

That long-awaited cue arrived this week with the publication in Physical Review C of a scientific paper, and an accompanying press release from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announcing that this time, really and truly, Element 118 had indeed made its presence known on the (increasingly crowded) stage of the periodic table. 

Alas, the critical reception was a bit, well, subdued, to say the least. Sure, there were minor mentions in science news feeds, the odd snarky blog post, and the obligatory article in the science section of the New York Times, but by and large -- thanks in large part to its tarnished history -- Element 118 made its debut to polite clapping rather than a standing ovation. (Such a disappointment for any aspiring elemental diva: a walk-on cameo appearance instead of the expected starring role. Jen-Luc Piquant feels its pain, but also points out that "Element 118" isn't the catchiest stage name.) And that's too bad, because it really is kind of cool when you put the discovery into a broader context, particularly for those of us who aren't "physics insiders."

See, our entire observable world is made up of the first 90 or so elements in the periodic table, and most of those were formed in stars. It takes explosive energies on a par with large supernovae to produce the heaviest elements, up to, say, Fermium (Element 100). Elements above that simply don't exist on their own in nature, but nonetheless, scientists have managed to produce them in the laboratory, beginning in the 1940s with neptunium and plutonium (Elements 93 and 94, respectively). They're really unstable, though, decaying almost as quickly as they're born. Still, in the 1960s, a handful of physicists -- led by chemical physicist Glenn Seaborg, among others -- predicted that some elements around the 114 mark would be able to survive much longer, forming what has become known as an "island of stability" in the sea of superheavy unstable elements.

There's a certain amount of scientific debate about how stable particular superheavy elements might be, but everyone pretty much agrees that the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei can only occupy discrete energy levels, just like the electrons that circle those nuclei in well-defined orbitals. They're known as "shells" among physical chemists, and each shell can only contain a certain number of particles. (Protons and neutrons fill separate shells.)  Move up the periodic table, and one finds that the shells fill from the inside outward, going from low to high energies.

There are certain so-called "magic numbers" that appear in the process -- 2, 8, 20, 50, and 82, for example -- in which the outermost shell is tightly packed (filled to capacity), such that any new particle would have to go into a new shell. And some atomic nuclei are "doubly magic": the shells of both the protons and neutrons are filled, rather than one or the other. So the most stable atoms have shells that are all filled to capacity, making them far less likely to decay. For instance, oxygen has 8 protons and 8 neutrons, making it one of the most stable elements, because both protons and neutrons have "magic numbers." Ditto for lead (82 protons and 126 neutrons). And prevailing nuclear theory therefore allows for such a shell structure to create accessible islands of stability.

Enter the current team of researchers hailing both from Livermore and from Dubna, the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Russia. They've been on a bit of a roll the past few years, announcing experimental evidence for Elements 113 and 115, and creating Element 114 in 1998. The latter lasted a total of 34 minutes before the final decay product fissioned, providing conclusive evidence that there really was such a thing as an "island of stability," and verifying the prediction from the 1960s that a likely "peak" of that expected island should be an atom with a doubly magic nucleus of 114 protons and 184 neutrons. They've been looking for further stable isotopes ever since.

This time around, they bombarded a target of californium-249 atoms with a bunch of calcium-48 ions, and over the course of three years, out of the resulting shower of atoms, they found evidence for three -- count 'em! (the researchers did) -- atoms of Element 118 (each with a total atomic mass of 294): one in 2002, and two in 2005. The trio of superheavyweights didn't hang around very long, however: they lasted about one millisecond. Since any meaningful chemical analysis would require at least an hour or so, scientists weren't able to make any definitive direct measurements of its properties. But they know that Element 118 should lie just beneath radon in the periodic table, so it's got to be some kind of noble gas. It's a start, right?

If Element 118 has such a short lifetime, how the hell did the researchers know for sure they'd found it? Pretty much the same way Fermilab's particle physicists can tell if they've produced a top quark in the lab's flagship atom smasher, the Tevatron: by telltale signature decay patterns. Nuclear decay is what happens when an atom's nucleus turns into a different element with a lower number on the periodic table. These decay patterns provide a useful kind of genealogical chart showing the branchings of the elemental family tree. Nuclei of Element 118 decay into Element 116 (itself a new element co-discovered by this particular collaboration), then into Element 114, and finally into Element 112, before it fissions into two daughter particles of roughly the same size.

So the scientists essentially traced the genealogy of those two final daughter particles backwards through time to identify Element 118 as the primary ancestor. It's a painstaking, time-consuming task to analyze all that raw data, made more difficult by the need to be doubly diligent in the wake of the Ninov scandal, so the researchers held off publishing their results until they'd combed through everything so thoroughly, there is a less than one in in ten thousand chance that their findings are due to a statistical fluke. And I'd wager Livermore made damn sure there was an even less chance of falsified data before they agreed to make the announcement.

Not content to rest on their laurels, the Livermore/Dubna collaborators will next search for an expected Element 120 by bombarding a plutonium target with iron isotopes, and so forth until they hit the theoretical limits of the periodic table. And who knows? Maybe they'll get better at producing isotopes that lie within the periodic "island of stability," so they'll stick around long enough for scientists to study their unique properties. In the meantime, let's all at least give a nod of acknowledgment to the belated stage debut of Element 118. It might seem a bit anticlimactic  in light of its checkered history, but it's still a noteworthy achievement.