Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven'

By Mark Kinver
Science and nature reporter, BBC News

The idea that the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant has created a wildlife haven is not scientifically justified, a study says.

Recent studies said rare species had thrived despite raised radiation levels as a result of no human activity.

But scientists who assessed the 1986 disaster's impact on birds said the ecological effects were "considerably greater than previously assumed".

The findings appear in the Royal Society's journal, Biology Letters.

In April 1986, reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded.

After the accident, traces of radioactive deposits were found in nearly every country in the northern hemisphere.

The paper's authors, Anders Moller of University Pierre and Marie Curie, France, and Tim Mousseau from the University of South Carolina, US, said their research did not support the idea that low-level radiation was not affecting animals.

"Recent conclusions from the UN Chernobyl Forum and reports in the popular media concerning the effects of radiation from Chernobyl has left the impression that the exclusion zone is a thriving ecosystem, filled with an increasing number of rare species," they wrote.

Instead, they added: "Species richness, abundance and population density of breeding birds decreased with increasing levels of radiation."

The study, which recorded 1,570 birds from 57 species, found that the number of birds in the most contaminated areas declined by 66% compared with sites that had normal background radiation levels.

It also reported a decline of more than 50% in the range of species as radiation levels increase.

The findings build on a previous study of barn swallows in the affected area, which showed that the number of the birds declined sharply in contaminated areas.

The birds' decline was probably the result of depressed levels of antioxidants after its long migration back to the area, making it more vulnerable to the low-level radiation, the researchers concluded.

"It suggests to us that barn swallows are not alone; there are many other species that appear to be affected in a similar way," Professor Mousseau told BBC News.

"This paper also suggests that birds feeding on insects that are living in the upper surface of the soil, where contaminates are highest, seem to be most likely to be missing or depressed."

He added that they were currently carrying out research to find out whether the decline was a result of the birds eating contaminated insects, or whether it was a result of fewer insects living in affected areas.

"We are also looking for funding to expand the range of ecological studies to include invertebrates, as well as plants and animals."

Radioactive retreat

A recent paper published in the American Scientist magazine suggested that plants and animals were better off in the exclusion zone than specimens outside the 30km radius surrounding the site of the destroyed nuclear reactor.

One of the paper's co-authors, Robert Baker from the Texas Tech University, said that the benefits for wildlife from the lack of human activity outweighed the risks of low-level radiation.

Writing on his university web page, Professor Baker said: "The elimination of human activities such as farming, ranching, hunting and logging are the greatest benefits.

"It can be said that the world's worst nuclear power plant disaster is not as destructive to wildlife populations as are normal human activities."

Professor Mousseau acknowledged Professor Baker's description: "It is true that the Chernobyl region gives the appearance of a thriving ecosystem because of its protection from other human activities.

"However, when you do controlled ecological studies, what we see is a very clear signature of negative effects of contamination on diversity and abundance of organisms.

"We clearly need to be applying scientific method to ecological studies before we can conclude, based on anecdotal observations, that there are no consequences."

Quoted from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6946210.stm:

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Chernobyl 'not a wildlife haven'

Clean Magnesium Energy Cycle Hints at Fossil Fuel Freedom

An experiment being performed at the Hokkaido Toyako G8 summit in Chitose, Japan, aims to prove that the revolutionary Magnesium Energy Cycle could one day free society from dependence on fossil fuels. The demonstration conducted by Tokyo Institute of Technology Professor Takashi Yabe uses water and the common metallic element Magnesium to create pollution-free power.

What's more, solar-powered lasers are used to renew the magnesium fuel with the only waste product being oxygen. Professor Yabe's team at TIT has been steadily testing the technology for several years now, and the pilot plant at Chitose is intended to showcase the environmentally-friendly fuel cycle to an influential audience at the G8 environmental summit.

Magnesium: OPEC's worst nightmare?
The cycle is relatively simple: magnesium powder is mixed with water (H2O) at room temperature, upon which a chemical reaction occurs bonding the magnesium with the oxygen and creating heat energy. What's left is hydrogen, which is collected and burned to produce more heat with water as its byproduct.

The cycle renews itself by applying solar-powered lasers to break the oxidized magnesium back down to metallic magnesium and oxygen. The only energy used is sunlight while the waste products are oxygen, hydrogen and water. As for magnesium , it's hardly rare - the light, shiny metal is the ninth-most common element in the universe, makes up 2 percent of the earth's crust and is the third-most common element dissolved in seawater.

Works like MAGIC! A so-called "MAGIC " (MAGnesium Injection Cycle) engine was constructed in 2006 by Japan's Mitsubishi Corp. using Professor Yabe's ideas, and this engine could be introduced for commercial use in power plants, ships, even cars before the end of this decade!

We wish Professor Yabe and his team the best of luck in perfecting this revolutionary technology. To quote the professor, "Magnesium can save the world!" (via Mainichi News)

This was found at Inventors Spot.

Technorati Tags: Cool, Energy, International, Science

On watch at atomic history

By TOM BERG

THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

HUNTINGTON BEACH - It was 50 years ago this month the two men defied death in the Nevada desert.

One hour before dawn, the young Marines were placed in an open trench, then ordered to kneel and cover their eyes.

Three miles away, what would be the largest atomic device detonated over U.S. soil was about to explode. Test shot Hood was five times greater than the bomb that killed 90,000 people in Hiroshima, Japan. And no one was sure what would happen this close to ground zero.

The blast blew doors off hinges 14 miles away, rattled homes all the way to Santa Ana and was seen by pilots near Hawaii. And that's not all.

“It was the dirtiest test stateside in terms of radiation fallout,” says R.J. Ritter, national commander of the National Association of Atomic Veterans. “And they walked about 2,200 Marines right into ground zero.”

This included the two men in the closest trench. One was Gary King, now 70, of Huntington Beach, a rough-and-tough Marine who still calls the blast “no big deal.” The other was a former Santa Ana Marine, who saw it quite differently. Darel Brower's memoirs, posted online, describe the eerie pre-dawn silence, the panicky Marines, the silvery-white explosion and the trek through 100-degree heat to ground zero with no masks.
When King read this, he tried to e-mail his former platoon mate. It bounced back. Then he tried to phone, but there was no listing.

He knew they'd both survived the blast 50 years ago. He was left to wonder if they'd both survived the fallout.

BOMB PARTIES

In retrospect, the audacity of 1957's Operation Plumbbob was stunning: a series of 29 aboveground atomic explosions witnessed at close range by 18,000 men testing their ability to fight on a nuclear battlefield.

Planes flew through radioactive clouds. Marines marched through radioactive sand. Paratroopers jumped through radioactive skies. Assaults were launched. Objectives taken. The military measured blast effects on pigs, dogs, rabbits, mannequins, tanks, trucks and the psyches of men witnessing unparalleled power.

Sixty-five miles south, Las Vegas was measuring how to cash in on the mushroom-cloud spectacle with “dawn bomb parties” on hotel rooftops.

Knowledge of radiation was still in its infancy.

“At the time, we were all very cavalier about it,” says King, whose specialty was atomic, biological and chemical warfare. “Nobody really talked about radiation too much. It wasn't a big thing. From the military standpoint, an A-bomb was nothing more than a high-explosive bomb.”

Both King and Brower had to monitor radiation at three detonations: Priscilla, Diablo and Hood. Their observations could not be any more different.

“People ask, ‘Weren't you scared?' ” King says. “The answer is no. We were macho. It was just another assignment.”

Marines climbed out of trenches after each blast and smoked, he says. Or ate. Or napped.

“Most ignored the devices,” he says.

Brower was positioned several miles from the blast, facing away so as not to go blind. He describes the 37-kiloton Priscilla test this way:

“I'm not sure anyone was breathing, as it surely could have been heard,” he wrote. “When the count went from 10 to zero, everything lost its color, including the olive, drab truck parked in front of us. It all turned brilliant silver-white. The air around us was alive with the sizzling and crackling of electrical charges. My neck, which was the only thing exposed to the light, felt as if someone was holding a blowtorch to it.”

A few days later, both men were brought to the trenches for Diablo. It would prove stranger than Priscilla.

Countdown to nothing

Before you're sent to the bottom of a 6-foot-deep trench, three miles from an atomic explosion, you get a warning to close your eyes tight and place an arm in front of them. If they open, you may go blind. You are also warned that if you lift a finger in the air, it will be scorched.

So when the loudspeakers count down – 3, 2, 1, 0 … – and nothing explodes, what should you do?

“No one dared move,” wrote Brower. “For close to 20 minutes we held those positions.”

Legs went numb. Expletives were shouted. Men feared crawling out of the trenches, but Diablo was a dud. Eventually, they were ordered up and trucked away. For King and Brower, that left only the granddaddy of atmospheric tests, the 74-kiloton Hood.

About it they would later agree on something. With eyes clenched tight, kneeling at the bottom of a trench, they both saw the same thing at detonation – the bones in their arms.

21 Cancers

We'll never know what Marine Maj. Charles Broudy saw in the trenches when Hood exploded. Or what he breathed when he marched – like King and Brower – to ground zero. He died of lymphoma in 1977.

We do know that the Veterans Administration denied him benefits, saying he couldn't prove he was there. And that his widow later showed he received more than 5,000 times the 13-millirad dose the government said his film badge read.

Broudy's widow Pat Broudy, 83, of Dana Point, fought an 11-year battle to help win benefits for atomic veterans, who now can claim relief for 21 kinds of cancers.

For many, however, it's too little, too late.

“Most of our guys are old,” she says. “And they don't have the fight or will or knowledge to confront our government agencies anymore.”

The number of living atomic veterans is hard to place. But the National Association of Atomic Veterans estimates that more than 900,000 men and women took part in about 1,000 nuclear tests from 1945 to 1992. And more than 140,000 may have suffered cancer or other illnesses as a result.

So far King is not among them.

“I have prostate cancer, but it's not attributed to that,” says the still macho Marine. “It's because I'm 70 years old. All men get it.”

Which leaves us wondering about his old battalion-mate Darel Brower, whose memoirs prompted King to reflect on the nuclear war games they played 50 years ago. What about him?

Godlike and demonic

Darel Brower, it turns out, is 76 and living in Jacksonville, N.C.

“For an old duff, I'm in good shape,” he says, suffering only heartburn and a slight heart arrhythmia.

The blasts remain vivid in his mind: The greens and blues, the beautiful hues glowing around the fireball, once he could look up, were both godlike and demonic.

That is the lesson he took from those long-ago tests.

“We are definitely part of something deeper,” he says, as if he were still in that trench. “And we are very fragile.”

 

This was found at The Orange County Register.

Technorati Tags: Energy, History, Lame, Sad, Scary, Science

Methane Rocket Engine Successfully Tested

Engineers have successfully tested a rocket powered by methane--the first of its kind for spaceflight. Future generations of the new engine could use Mars, Jupiter, Saturn's moon Titan and other planets and moons as celestial refueling stations, allowing for lighter spacecraft and easier lift-offs from Earth.

A dramatic video shows the rocket's blue flames streaking into the desert, blowing up clouds of dust and sand.

Built by XCOR Aerospace, the test rocket packs 7,500 pounds of thrust--just a fraction of the space shuttle's solid rocket boosters at 3,300,000 pounds of thrust each--but its designers are just getting started. The Mojave Desert test will provide testing grounds for the design of a much-larger, space-faring rocket.

Today's space rockets use liquid oxygen and hydrogen or solid fuels, which are hard to collect, tricky to store and very expensive. Methane, however, need not be stored at -253 degree Celsius temperatures as hydrogen must be. It's also denser than hydrogen, making more out of limited space in fuel containers.

Methane has another bonus: "You don't have to put on a HAZMAT suit to handle it like fuels used on many space vehicles, said Terri Tramel, NASA's project manager for the rocket.

Collecting methane on other planets and moons would be tricky, but not impossible. Robotic probes could gather the stuff from Saturn's moon Titan, which harbors lakes and rivers of liquid methane. Although Mars has much less methane, it could be produced by heating carbon dioxide and hydrogen together.

One caveat to methane is that it's difficult to ignite, unlike highly reactive oxygen and hydrogen. But rocket engineers are hopeful. "Methane has so many advantages," Tramel said. "The question is, why haven't we done this before?"

This was found at Space.com

The CFL mercury nightmare

Steven Milloy
Financial Post


Saturday, April 28, 2007


How much money does it take to screw in a compact fluorescent light bulb? About US$4.28 for the bulb and labour -- unless you break the bulb. Then you, like Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, could be looking at a cost of about US$2,004.28, which doesn't include the costs of frayed nerves and risks to health.

Sound crazy? Perhaps no more than the stampede to ban the incandescent light bulb in favour of compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs).

According to an April 12 article in The Ellsworth American, Bridges had the misfortune of breaking a CFL during installation in her daughter's bedroom: It dropped and shattered on the carpeted floor.

Aware that CFLs contain potentially hazardous substances, Bridges called her local Home Depot for advice. The store told her that the CFL contained mercury and that she should call the Poison Control hotline, which in turn directed her to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.

The DEP sent a specialist to Bridges' house to test for mercury contamination. The specialist found mercury levels in the bedroom in excess of six times the state's "safe" level for mercury contamination of 300 billionths of a gram per cubic meter. The DEP specialist recommended that Bridges call an environmental cleanup firm, which reportedly gave her a "low-ball" estimate of US$2,000 to clean up the room. The room then was sealed off with plastic and Bridges began "gathering finances" to pay for the US$2,000 cleaning. Reportedly, her insurance company wouldn't cover the cleanup costs because mercury is a pollutant.

Given that the replacement of incandescent bulbs with CFLs in the average U.S. household is touted as saving as much as US$180 annually in energy costs -- and assuming that Bridges doesn't break any more CFLs -- it will take her more than 11 years to recoup the cleanup costs in the form of energy savings.

The potentially hazardous CFL is being pushed by companies such as Wal-Mart, which wants to sell 100 million CFLs at five times the cost of incandescent bulbs during 2007, and, surprisingly, environmentalists.

It's quite odd that environmentalists have embraced the CFL, which cannot now and will not in the foreseeable future be made without mercury. Given that there are about five billion light bulb sockets in North American households, we're looking at the possibility of creating billions of hazardous waste sites such as the Bridges' bedroom.

Usually, environmentalists want hazardous materials out of, not in, our homes. These are the same people who go berserk at the thought of mercury being emitted from power plants and the presence of mercury in seafood. Environmentalists have whipped up so much fear of mercury among the public that many local governments have even launched mercury thermometer exchange programs.

As the activist group Environmental Defense urges us to buy CFLs, it defines mercury on a separate part of its Web site as a "highly toxic heavy metal that can cause brain damage and learning disabilities in fetuses and children" and as "one of the most poisonous forms of pollution."

Greenpeace also recommends CFLs while simultaneously bemoaning contamination caused by a mercury-thermometer factory in India. But where are mercury-containing CFLs made? Not in the United States, under strict environmental regulation. CFLs are made in India and China, where environmental standards are virtually non-existent.

And let's not forget about the regulatory nightmare in the U.S. known as the Superfund law, the EPA regulatory program best known for requiring expensive but often needless cleanup of toxic waste sites, along with endless litigation over such cleanups.

We'll eventually be disposing billions and billions of CFL mercury bombs. Much of the mercury from discarded and/or broken CFLs is bound to make its way into the environment and give rise to Superfund liability, which in the past has needlessly disrupted many lives, cost tens of billions of dollars and sent many businesses into bankruptcy.

As each CFL contains five milligrams of mercury, at the Maine "safety" standard of 300 nanograms per cubic meter, it would take 16,667 cubic meters of soil to "safely" contain all the mercury in a single CFL. While CFL vendors and environmentalists tout the energy cost savings of CFLs, they conveniently omit the personal and societal costs of CFL disposal.

Not only are CFLs much more expensive than incandescent bulbs and emit light that many regard as inferior to incandescent bulbs, they pose a nightmare if they break and require special disposal procedures. Yet governments (egged on by environmentalists and the Wal-Marts of the world) are imposing on us such higher costs, denial of lighting choice, disposal hassles and breakage risks in the name of saving a few dollars every year on the electric bill? - Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and CSRWatch.com. He is a junk-science expert and advocate of free enterprise, and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

This was found at Canada.com

Michigan teen creates nuclear fusion

ROCHESTER HILLS, Mich., Nov. 19 (UPI) --
An ambitious teenager in Rochester Hills, Mich., is ranked as the 18th amateur in the world to create nuclear fusion -- combining atoms to create energy.
The Detroit Free Press reported that 17-year-old Thiago Olson set up a machine in his parents' garage and has been working exhaustively for more than two years. His machine creates nuclear fusion on a small scale.
Nuclear fusion is "kind of like the holy grail of physics," Olson told the Free Press.
Olson's machine consists of a vacuum that sucks air out, and then deuterium -- a form of hydrogen -- is injected into the vacuum. He then charges electricity into the vacuum, causing the atoms in the center to be attracted to one another, creating nuclear fusion.
Olson -- who wants to work for the federal government, as his grandfather did -- is an otherwise typical teen, the newspaper said. He is on the track team at Stoney Creek High School and plans to go to college.