COLLEGE STATION -- As their football squads prepare to meet for the first time in Southeastern Conference history Saturday (Oct. 20) at Kyle Field, Texas A&M University and Louisiana State University are teaming up to study collisions of another variety -- the nuclear kind -- on one of the world's biggest stages for nuclear astrophysics, Japan's RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science.
While Johnny "Football" Manziel undoubtedly will have many Saturday moments in the sun, Texas A&M and LSU physicists are looking to that same sun and its fellow stars as both the architects and inhabitants of our universe in an effort to better understand nuclear reactions and the resulting energy that makes life on Earth possible.
"When you have a nuclear reaction, you have a tremendous amount of energy released," said Robert E. Tribble, distinguished professor of physics at Texas A&M and director of the Cyclotron Institute. "Solar energy is a product of a nuclear reaction. We're trying to find out exactly how the elements were formed and, in the process, how the energy that makes life on Earth possible was created."
Tribble and LSU physics professor Jeffrey C. Blackmon are co-principal investigators in a United States Department of Energy-funded international collaboration that is exploring the outer limits of nuclear reactions along with colleagues at two additional U.S. universities (Texas A&M University-Commerce and Washington University in St. Louis) and in five other countries (IFIN-HH Bucharest, Romania; Universite de Caen, France; INFN, Sezione di Pisa, Italy; Oxford University, United Kingdom; Kyushu University, Japan).
Tribble notes that a critical early part of the study is a series of experiments using rare isotope beams (RIBs) at the newly commissioned Radioactive Isotope Beam Factory (RIBF) at RIKEN, widely recognized as the most powerful radioactive beam facility in the world. Tribble says researchers there are doing cutting-edge experiments with nuclei that only live fractions of a second -- rare, infinitesimal windows in which to gain valuable insight into energy‘s essence and answers.
"These experiments will provide important information about rates of nuclear reactions that occur in stellar explosions," Tribble added. "Some of the reactions that happen in stars happen in nuclei at the edge of stability within the shortest possible time span during which we can access them. Stars are just big balls of particles that are undergoing nuclear reactions. The reactions in our sun, which is a relatively small star, provide heat and light to us on Earth. It's important to understand these reactions in order to understand the very basis of life as we know it."
The collaboration will focus on both proton- and neutron-breakup reactions at intermediate energies, with the goal of using the resulting data to better understand single-particle properties and to determine reaction rates in larger stellar explosions, such as supernovaes and X-ray bursts. By understanding how nuclear reactions work at a base level from both single-nucleon removal and recapture standpoints, Tribble says they can extend that knowledge to predict likely patterns of atomic behavior in more complex situations and at stellar energies for nuclei far from stability, whether in the cosmos or here on Earth.
"We don't know what the chain of reactions is within stars, but we can figure out what the probability of certain reactions is," Tribble said. "For this study, we are focusing on p-gamma and n-gamma reaction rates, which are important in calculating how stars are born."
Tribble's individual research group within the Cyclotron Institute is helping to develop the necessary equipment for the collaboration's experimental program -- specifically, a large silicon detector array that will incorporate both existing state-of-the-art technology and generate cost-effective extensions of that technology to enable silicon detector readout. Meanwhile, Blackmon's LSU group is working with the Texas A&M and Washington University groups to incorporate front-end electronics into a working portable data acquisition (DAQ) system that will allow user-friendly inspection and analysis and ultimately easy integration between laboratories. Blackmon's team will be in charge of maintaining this software and providing the integration and linkages between the current software and the proposed systems at both Texas A&M and RIKEN.
"We also plan to implement the hardware so that it can be inspected via an Internet interface from anywhere in the world," Tribble said. "This requires a merger of two technologies already in use by Washington University. Such a system can have all eyes on a problem in short order and should probably be considered a requirement of the new century."
With Japanese funding now secured for a very large new spectrometer, SAMURAI, to be built at RIKEN, Tribble says the time is right to begin developing a detector system that can be used in conjunction with SAMURAI to carry out a broad range of reaction and breakup studies at RIKEN energies -- a program that eclipses the initial suite of experiments proposed by the collaboration in its original letter of intent to RIKEN in January 2008.
"The technology that we will develop will have broad application at many existing nuclear physics laboratories using stable or rare isotope beams, in addition to future RIB facilities," Tribble said. "And the training of students and postdoctoral research associates will be important contributions to the future workforce in this field."
To learn more about the project, overall scope of work or partners involved in the $800,000 Department of Energy award, which runs through 2014, visit http://cyclotron.tamu.edu.
SIOUX FALLS, S.D.
(AP) — Scientists hoping to detect dark matter deep in a former South
Dakota gold mine have taken the last major step before flipping the
switch on their delicate experiment and say they may be ready to begin collecting data as early as February.
What's
regarded as the world's most sensitive dark matter detector was lowered
earlier this month into a 70,000-gallon water tank nearly a mile
beneath the earth's surface, shrouding it in enough insulation to
hopefully isolate dark matter from the cosmic radiation that makes it impossible to detect above ground.
And
if all goes as planned, the data that begins flowing could answer
age-old questions about the universe and its origins, scientists said
Monday.
"We might well uncover something fantastic," said Harry Nelson, a professor of physics at University of California, Santa Barbara
and a principal investigator on the Large Underground Xenon experiment.
"One thing about our field is that it's kind of brutal in that we know
it's expensive and we work hard to only do experiments that are really
important."
This one hasn't
been cheap, at about $10 million, but like the discovery of the Higgs
boson — dubbed the "God particle" by some — earlier this year in Switzerland, the detection of dark matter would be a seismic occurrence in the scientific community.
Scientists
know dark matter exists by its gravitational pull but, unlike regular
matter and antimatter, it's so far been undetectable. Regular matter
accounts for about 4 percent of the universe's mass, and dark matter
makes up about 25 percent. The rest is dark energy, which is also a
mystery.
The search in South
Dakota began in 2003 after the Homestake Gold Mine in the Black Hills'
Lead, S.D., shuttered for good. Scientists called dibs on the site, and
in July, after years of fundraising and planning, the LUX detector moved into the Sanford Underground Research Facility,
4,850 feet below the earth's surface. It took two days to ease the
phone booth-sized detector down the once-filthy shaft and walkways that
originally opened for mining in 1876 during the Black Hills Gold Rush.
There,
the device was further insulated from cosmic radiation by being
submerged in water that's run through reverse osmosis filters to
deionize and clean it.
"The construction phase is winding down,
and now we're starting the commissioning phase, meaning we start to
operate the systems underground," said Jeremy Mock, a graduate student
at the University of California, Davis who has worked on the LUX
experiment for five years.
Carefully submerging the delicate
detector into its final home — a water-filled vat that's 20 feet tall
and 25 feet in diameter — took more than two months, Mock said.
Scientists
are currently working to finish the plumbing needed to keep the xenon
as clean as possible. The xenon, in both liquid and gas form, will fill
the detector and be continuously circulated through a purifier that
works much like a dialysis machine, pulling the substance out to remove
impurities before pushing it back into the detector.
Keeping the
water and xenon pristine will help remove what Nelson called "fake
sources" — or stuff that scientists have seen before, such as radiation,
that could serve as false alarms in their efforts to detect dark
matter.
Nelson likens the experiment to Sherlock Holmes' approach to discovering the unknown by eliminating the known.
Once
the data start to flow, it'll take a month or two before the detector
is sensitive enough to claim the "most-sensitive" title, Nelson said.
After that, the scientists involved hope to start seeing what they covet most: something they've never seen before.
If you ever thought CERN would be a fun place to work you’d only be
half right: The scientists who work there might be awesome, but the
nuclear research center makes the perfect setting for a zombie
apocalypse.
Forthcoming feature film Decay
is set entirely at the Large Hadron Collider, with the massive lab
serving as backdrop for a dire scenario in which zombies have been
created by exposure to the recently discovered Higgs boson (so much for that whole “God Particle” thing). The concept evolved in 2010 after writer/director Luke Thompson,
a Ph.D. physics student at the University of Manchester, was exploring
the maintenance tunnels of the European Organization for Nuclear
Research along with fellow student Hugo Day.
“The dark, creepy atmosphere got us thinking it would be a great
location for a horror film,” Thompson said in an e-mail to Wired.
As with George A. Romero’s 1968 zombie classic Night of the Living Dead, which was filmed mostly in rural Pennsylvania and used inexpensive props to keep production costs low, Decay’s ghoulish tale came to life thanks to the DIY spirit of indie filmmakers determined to make a movie on the cheap.
Clara Nellist, another Ph.D. student at Manchester, had also
envisioned CERN as a great location for a zombie film. But there was a
problem: Nellist, who would become the movie’s assistant director and
associate producer, and Thompson had never made films before. Neither
had future “fight choreographer” and props guy Day.
Undaunted by their lack of experience, they borrowed digital SLR
cameras, recruited 17 other people for their project, made a bunch of
fake blood, dumpster-dived for props and invested about $3,225 of their
own money in Decay. The movie, which took two years to complete, is slated to be released before the end of November as a free download.
In addition to the awesomeness that is physics students at CERN
making a zombie movie and giving it away, the film might also prove
educational.
“The theme and location also gave us a great chance to do some satirical
commentary on various aspects of people’s perceptions of science.”
— Luke Thompson
“I don’t want to spoil the film, but we realized the theme and
location also gave us a great chance to do some satirical commentary on
various aspects of people’s perceptions of science,” Thompson said. “So
there are some hidden depths to the film too, beyond us just having
fun!”
That said, Decay does look like a hell of a lot of fun. Set
in the underground tunnels of the Geneva research center, the flick
follows what happens to a small group of students after a malfunction at
the particle accelerator causes its maintenance crew to become
zombified and hunt them down.
Will they live? Will they get eaten? Will they blind the walking dead
with science and become heroes to physicists everywhere? Everyone will
be able to find out in a few weeks.
The movie was filmed only in areas that are accessible to anyone
working at CERN, and even though officials there didn’t endorse the
project, Thompson said he got permission to release Decay. In a
statement to Wired, the research center stressed that the movie wasn’t
filmed in the sensitive LHC tunnels, but added, “The story is amusing
and pure fiction, but shows how pure science can stimulate creativity.”
Having a chance to make a cool movie at an outstanding research facility was one of the reasons the filmmakers decided to make Decay available for free and remixable through a Creative Commons license.
“We’ve been given a great and rare opportunity to have fun and make
something awesome, so making money was never the point,” Thompson said.
“We’re hugely proud of what we’ve achieved — the fact is that it’s a
no-budget indie and there’s no reason to expect we’d sell more than a
few hundred copies. So we’d rather our two years of work was seen by
more people by releasing it for free.”
SOUTH BEND, Ind. —
Scientists at the University of Notre Dame and elsewhere have begun
using a new $4 million nuclear accelerator to study the origin of
elements and the chemical evolution of the universe.
Physics professor Michael Wiescher said the
accelerator's primary use is to study astrophysics. It will be used by
scientists at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics, a
collaboration among Notre Dame, Michigan State University, the
University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. But the
accelerator also can be employed for other purposes, such as testing the
effects of radiation on spacecraft, helping to determine the age of
archaeological finds and testing artificial joints for wear and tear.
"So there are a lot of applications," Wiescher said Thursday.
One of the primary uses of the accelerator is to try to
simulate the reactions that take place in stars by shooting a charged
particle into a gas, which causes a nuclear reaction and forms different
elements that power the sun, Wiescher said.
"Those are basically the same nuclear reactions that
build up and form new elements and generate the energy and power the
sun," he said.
By measuring those changes and comparing it to studies
done by astronomers, scientists can understand the origins of stars, he
said.
The accelerator is the first funded by the National
Science Foundation at a university in nearly a quarter century. The
university, which spent $4 million on the building that houses the
30-foot high accelerator, dedicated the device during a ceremony
Thursday.
H. Frederick Dylla, executive director and chief
executive officer of the American Institute of Physics, said the new
accelerator at Notre Dame is significant because maintaining a strong
base of research facilities, especially at research universities, is
essential for the nation's economic health and security.
He said the 5 million-volt accelerator at Notre Dame
can't conduct the kind of cutting-edge research done at the very large
national and international accelerator facilities, such as the Fermi
National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., but is essential in
expanding knowledge of basic nuclear physics.
"This energy range continues to provide clues on the
formation of elements within stars, and overlaps the range needed for
some of the most important applications to materials science nuclear
medicine and forensics," Dylla said.
The first nuclear accelerator at the University of
Notre Dame was constructed in 1936 and was the third built in the United
States and the fifth in the world, Wiescher said. The second one at
Notre Dame was finished in 1942 and was involved in the top-secret
Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, he said. There have been
several more generations since then.
The university also will continue to use an older
accelerator that is more powerful but produces a less intense beam for
other experiments, Wiescher said.
He said the accelerators are used by more than 20 countries from around the world.
Stuart Jay Freedman, a nuclear physicist with Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at
Berkeley, and a world-renowned investigator of fundamental physical
laws, died suddenly on November 9 while attending a scientific
conference in Santa Fe, NM. He was 68.
“Stuart was a truly remarkable scientist, with extraordinarily
diverse interests, and still very much at the height of his powers,”
says James Symons, Director of Berkeley Lab’s Nuclear Science Division.
“It is somehow fitting that he spent his last few days with close
friends, actively engaged in discussing new ways to make fundamental
measurements requiring deep insight and ingenuity. We have lost a great
physicist, but I can’t imagine that he would have wanted to leave us in
any other way.”
Freedman’s friend and long-time associate, Berkeley Lab physicist
Robert Cahn, recalls that “Stuart started as a particle theorist but
became an extraordinarily versatile and creative experimentalist, with a
reputation for getting the right answer, often when others didn’t.”
These qualities were already evident when Freedman, while still a
graduate student at UC Berkeley in 1972, used the radioactive decay of
calcium atoms to rule out “local hidden variable” theories. This was the
first persuasive experimental demonstration that there is no escaping
the non-deterministic nature of quantum mechanics. He went on to exclude
a number of other possible excursions from standard physics, including
the existence of naked quarks, faster-than-light particles, and very
light Higgs bosons. He also shot down surprising but widely heralded
results that seemed to point to very heavy neutrinos, supposedly having
a mass of 17 kiloelectron volts (17 keV) – about 100,000 times heavier
than current expectations.
“He loved people with crazy ideas, if only for a good argument, and
he was a source of brilliant ideas himself,” says Berkeley Lab’s Brian
Fujikawa, who worked closely with Freedman since 1984 and helped him
perform the decisive 17-keV experiment. “Stuart used a spectrometer that
eliminated likely sources of error, and on top of that he created a
small ‘fake’ signal by mixing carbon-14 into the sulfur-35 source whose
decays we were measuring. Since we could detect that fake in the data,
if there had been a real signal in the beta spectrum at 17 keV we would
have seen it.”
Some searches were less conclusive, however. Leading theorist Roberto
Peccei of the University of California at Los Angeles, whose work with
Helen Quinn led to the proposal of particles called axions, recalls
writing an early paper with Freedman in 1978, when both were at
Stanford. “It was called, appropriately, ‘Do axions exist?’ We are,
incidentally, still asking the same question today.” Peccei confirms
that Freedman “was not afraid to go against orthodoxy. In fact, he
relished this role! The world has lost a wonderful physicist, but his
impact on our field will remain.”
Freedman joined Argonne National Laboratory in 1982 and later became a
professor in the University of Chicago’s Fermi Institute, where, says
UChicago cosmologist Michael Turner, “he provided a crucial link between
Argonne and the university.” During a time when Turner and others were
establishing the connections between cosmology and particle physics,
nuclear physics, and astrophysics, “Stuart provided the key connection
to weak-interaction physics with his important experiments on the
properties of neutrons and neutrinos.”
Freedman established the parameters of the weak interaction in the
coupling of weak currents to the neutron. Because these measurements are
essential to understanding nuclear fusion, Cahn says, “They make it
possible for us to determine the temperature at the center of the sun.”
Says Turner, “Stuart was not only a brilliant experimentalist but a
wise person who gave sage advice gently, often using his wonderfully wry
sense of humor. We will sorely miss Stuart’s scientific contributions,
his friendship, and wise counsel.”
In 1991 Freedman and his wife, Joyce, who had led the sponsored
research office at UChicago, moved to Berkeley, joining Berkeley Lab and
UC Berkeley while maintaining his affiliation with Argonne and Chicago.
His fame for neutrino work grew, notably following the 2003
confirmation from the KamLAND experiment in Japan that different
neutrinos have different tiny masses and oscillate from one “flavor” to
another. KamLAND benefited from detector technology and signal
processing contributed by U.S. participation, inaugurated and led by
Freedman.
“The KamLAND oscillations result was one of Stuart’s proudest
accomplishments,” says Jason Detwiler, an assistant professor at the
University of Washington who met Freedman during the construction of
KamLAND and subsequently worked with him at Berkeley Lab for many years.
While the SNO experiment in Canada had established that neutrinos
change flavor while traveling from the sun to Earth, “KamLAND was
designed to capture antineutrinos produce by nuclear reactors, and it
was Stuart’s kind of experiment – a laboratory-style experiment in which
both the source and the detector were controlled. The upshot was that
KamLAND produced the first clean signature of actual oscillations.”
Detwiler characterizes Freedman’s experimental style as “like a Grand
Master in chess, always thinking many steps ahead. He always had the
clearest view of the science and the experiment’s essential rationale.”
Spencer Klein, Deputy Director of the Nuclear Science Division, says,
“Stuart was a driving force in our division, in the physics department
on campus, and in the international neutrino community.” Besides
neutrino oscillations, Freedman’s contributions to neutrino science
include KamLAND’s detection of “geoneutrinos” originating from
radioactive decays inside the Earth, and his role as U.S. spokesperson
and U.S. construction project manager of the CUORE experiment at the
Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy, a search for the
as-yet-undetected process of neutrinoless double-beta decay, which if
found would indicate that neutrinos are their own antiparticles.
Freedman contributed widely to the nuclear science community,
including co-chairing the recent National Academy of Science’s decadal
survey, Nuclear Physics: Exploring the Heart of Matter; co-chairing the National Research Council report, Scientific Opportunities with a Rare-Isotope Facility in the United States; and co-chairing the American Physical Society’s magisterial neutrino study, The Neutrino Matrix.
At the time of his death, he was the leader of the Weak Interaction
Group based in the Nuclear Science Division, a wide-ranging program
bringing together international collaborations like KamLAND and CUORE
and smaller-scale experiments like the optical trapping of short-lived
radioactive isotopes at the 88-Inch Cyclotron, to examine the weak
interaction between electrons and neutrinos and the quarks that
constitute protons and neutrons.
“Somehow, Stuart just kept growing as a scientist,” says Gerald
Garvey of Los Alamos, an experimental nuclear physicist and expert in
science policy whose collaborations with Freedman began over 30 years
ago. “Most of us start slowing down after 50, but Stuart continued to
get stronger and stronger.”
Freedman was born in Los Angeles on January 13, 1944 and received his
education at UC Berkeley, graduating with a B.S. in Engineering Physics
in 1965, an M.S. in Physics in 1967, and a Ph.D. in Physics in 1972.
His teaching career took him from Princeton, to Stanford, and then in
1982 to Argonne and the University of Chicago. In 1991 he assumed joint
appointments as Faculty Senior Scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Nuclear
Science Division and Professor in UC Berkeley’s Department of Physics.
In 1999 Freedman was named to the Luis W. Alvarez Memorial Chair in
Experimental Physics at UC Berkeley. His numerous awards and honors
include election to the National Academy of Science in 2001, election to
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and named a Fellow of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, both in 2006, and
the 2007 Tom W. Bonner Prize for Nuclear Physics from the American
Physical Society.
Freedman, a resident of Berkeley, is survived by his wife, Joyce; his
son, Paul, and daughter-in-law, Emily; his sister, Ina Jo Scheid;
nephew Jason Sturman; and two grandchildren.
Almost 200 lbs of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) left Uzbekistan in the 50th shipment of the dangerous nuclear fuel under a threat reduction agreement between the U.S. and Russia.
The
National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said on Nov. 1 it had
successfully removed of 72.8 kilograms (160 lbs) of spent HEU fuel from
the Institute of Nuclear Physics (INP) in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, a former
territory of the Soviet Union. The HEU will be stored in a specialized
location in Russia.
HEU can be used to make nuclear weapons and
the U.S. has been working to reduce and protect vulnerable nuclear and
radiological material located at civilian sites worldwide.
The
Nov. 1 shipment is the 50th under NNSA’s Global Threat Reduction
Initiative (GTRI) cooperative program with Russia to return
Russian-origin HEU. Since the program began 10 years ago, NNSA said it
and its Russian counterparts have cooperated to successfully return more
than 1,900 kilogramsl or over 4,000 lbs of Russian-origin HEU to
Russia -- enough material to stock 75 nuclear weapons, said NNSA. The
agency said the program has completely removed all Russian-origin HEU
from six countries.
The HEU in the 50th shipment was
securely transported by air to a specialized facility in Russia, said
NNSA. The complex operation was the culmination of a multi-year effort
between the NNSA, Uzbekistan, numerous Russian partners including the
nuclear regulator and the Russian Federation’s Nuclear Energy State
Corporation (ROSATOM), and the International Atomic Energy Agency, said
NNSA.
“In the wrong hands this material could be used to make a
nuclear weapon,” said NNSA Administrator Thomas D’Agostino. “This
shipment and our ongoing partnership with Russia demonstrate the
positive effect our efforts have on the global effort to secure,
consolidate and minimize the use of highly enriched uranium across the
globe.”
NNSA said its GTRI program and Uzbekistan’s INP share a
long history of cooperation on nuclear and radiological security issues.
This is the seventh shipment of HEU from INP since 2006 and marks the
complete clean-out of all HEU from the facility, said NNSA. GTRI also
worked with INP to convert its research reactor from HEU to low enriched
uranium (LEU) use, and to secure radiological sources that could be
used for a dirty bomb, it said.
Azerbaijan, Baku, Nov. 13 /Trend S.Isayev, T. Jafarov/
Iran will soon start building a facility for producing nuclear fusion, ISNA reported.
In nuclear physics, nuclear fusion is a nuclear reaction in which two or
more atomic nuclei join together, or "fuse", to form a single heavier
nucleus.
Depty Head of National Science and Technology Center for Macro Projects
of Iranian presidential administration Qholamhuseyn Rahimi said that
this is an ambitious project that has been decided to be divided into
several phases.
"Thus far, we have had meetings with Iran's Atomic Energy Organization,
and it has been decided to make sure this project is re-defined, and
divided into phases," Rahimi noted.
In 2011, Iran became became one of the six countries developing a
nuclear fusion device which operates by method of inertial electrostatic
confinement. Development of this nuclear fusion producing device has
been started in March 2010 in Iran.
Rahimi noted that the first phase of the project had some $8 million
scheduled to be allocated for it in 2009, and thus far half of that sum
has been transferred for the project's needs.
Rahimi also noted that a certain sum of money should be allocated from
the government's budget to help the project move ahead faster, and with
consistancy.
Datuk Dr Looi Hoong Wah, a respected Malaysian nuclear
physicist and consultant physician, has defended the beleaguered
rare earths processing plant of Australian rare earths miner
Lynas Corp. in Kuantan, saying the allegations being spread by
its opponents are fabricated lies that bear relations to the
country's upcoming general election.
"The substance they bring in is just nothing but rare earth
oil containing a tiny bit of weak radioactive thorium 232," Dr
Looi, who has 40 years of interest in nuclear medicine and
particle physics, was quoted by Bernama.
From Malaysia Kini: Lynas plant unsafe Down Under, but okay here YOURSAY 'Why does the country of origin choose to send rare earth to Kuantan and accept only the finished products minus the waste?'
Bystander: Dr
Looi Hoong Wah, please convince us as to why the Australian government
chose to send the rare earth all the way to Kuantan to have it
processed, only to send back the finished products to its country minus
the waste?
Cheap labour? I doubt it. The transportation and all
the stringent handling costs will more than outrun the cheaper labour
costs here.
You may be a doctor, but I expect you to have a little common sense when it comes to economics.
Sabahan:
Dr Looi, your knowledge appears to be puzzling. If the half-life is 14
billion years, it is very dangerous, because the effects of the
radiation remains strong for millions of years and thus will cause
mutation.
On the other hand, if the half-life is short, the
effects wear off quickly. Chernobyl remains deserted and will remain so
for many years.
If you think, long half-life is good, may I suggest, you go and live near a destroyed nuclear plant.
Stop114A: Doctor, you pointed out that you put thorium in your hand and still lived. How about putting it under your pillow from now on?
Is the radiation from the sun safe? Yet thousands of Australians die from skin cancer each year.
That
is the reason Lynas is here. The rare earth refinery waste is
radioactive, which won't kill immediately but it will one day, when you
least expect it.
You gave the ridiculous example of burning a
house down in 14 billion years, why should Kuantan people be subject to
something like that? Is it okay if we start burning down your house now,
bit by bit starting from your chair?
We don't owe Lynas anything
and this has nothing to do with politics. Poor Dr Looi, who put you in
such position to say what you said. You met a nuclear physicist 40 years
ago and now you think you are a nuclear expert.
Excuse me, I think there is a big difference between a physician and a physicist.
Nadja: So this ‘Dr Know-all' is actually saying that the Australian authorities are not so clever.
Why does he only pop up now at election time? Why did he not long ago
advise the Australian government that they do not understand nuclear
physics and are all wrong?
Maybe they would be happy to learn
that the waste is not dangerous and there is no need to ban it from
being sent back and dumped in Australia.
Noni: Knowledge 40 years ago can be so outdated that it might not be relevant today.
Thorium
emits alpha particles. You can hold it in your hand without any ill
effects because alpha particles do not penetrate human skin. But it is
dangerous when inhaled, as a human's internal organs has no defence
against internal irradiation.
Also, there's the risk of
bioaccumulation, i.e. breathe the contaminated air day in day out, or
any dust that might drop around the vicinity and get airborne again
after agitation by the wind, traffic, etc.
Thorium does not produce electrons. Thorium emits alpha particles, not electricity. This fellow is talking nonsense.
If
longer half-life is a non-issue, then scientists won't have a headache
with plutonium and uranium, etc - their half-life runs into billions of
years as well.
Conclusion, this so-called doc is spreading disinformation.
Free And Fair Election:
Dr Looi, I don't need to be a rocket scientist to tell you that any
kind of thorium 232 exposed over a long term period is bad for health,
otherwise countries like Indonesia and New Zealand which are closer to
Australia, would be the first to open their doors to Lynas. Care to
explain why?
Righteous: So all the Australians
who are concerned about the raw material being shipped past their front
doors and the possible radioactive dust that could spread are all wrong
too?
Why is the government in Australia taking measures to protect their people and not Malaysia?
Soo Jin Hou:
According to Atomic Energy Licensing Board's standard, the radioactive
threshold for potassium-40 is 100 Bq/g whereas it is 1 Bq/g for
thorium-232. This implies that potassium-40 is 100 times less hazardous
than thorium-232.
That's why bananas and potassium chloride salt
are classified as non-radioactive as opposed to Lynas' waste, despite
the former having equivalent radioactivity.
Jiminy Qrikert:
Dr Looi, why speak up only now? If you are so sure of what you claim
and can substantiate your claims with proof and references, why did you
not come forward earlier, especially in the early stages of the debate.
In
any case, whatever your contentions, it is better for Malaysia to be
nuclear-free. If it takes Malaysians to keep Lynas out as the first
step, then so be it.
Sometimes, all it takes a simple logic -
Australia is more progressive than we are and they don't want such a
plant there. They don't even want the ore to pass through their towns.
If they don't want it, we don't want it. Simple.
Germany
is now shutting down their nuclear plants and they are a
precision-driven society. We can't even maintain good roads in
comparison.
So, if Germany no longer wants nuclear plants, then we don't want them here, too.
The above is a selection of comments posted by Malaysiakini subscribers.
X-ray gun. This string of
magnets at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s Linac Coherent
Light Source controls a fast beam of electrons that generates an intense
x-ray beam. A theoretical proposal shows how individual x-ray photons
from such a source could be stored for 100 nanoseconds or more and then
be released at a later time with their quantum properties preserved.
In the field of photonics, researchers dream of performing all manner
of electronics operations with photons instead of electrons, but so far
they have only used visible and infrared light. Building on an earlier
experiment that showed how x rays could be briefly stored in nuclear
excitations, a team writing in Physical Review Letters
now proposes a technique that would store a single x-ray photon and
allow it to be released on demand with its quantum properties unchanged.
The work is a first step toward x-ray photonic systems, which could
exploit the shorter wavelengths of x rays to pack more active elements
into a given space.
In 1996, a team led by Yuri Shvyd’ko, then at the
University of Hamburg, Germany, succeeded in delaying the decay of an
excited nuclear state of iron-57 with an energy of 14.4
kilo-electron-volts (keV) [1].
The team fired a short pulse from a polarized beam of 14.4-keV x rays
at an iron-57 target in the presence of a magnetic field perpendicular
to the beam. The field splits the nuclear ground state into two levels
with slightly different energies and splits the excited state into four
levels. The geometry of the experiment allowed a transition from each
ground state only to a specific upper state, so that just two of the
four excited levels were populated. The resulting nuclear excitation was
a quantum combination (superposition) of these two states, and because
of their different magnetic properties, it turns out that the
probability for the nucleus to decay back to the ground state oscillates
in time.
A few nanoseconds after the excitation, the team turned
on a second magnetic field, perpendicular to the first. By changing the
orientation of the magnetic field, this second field, in effect, mixed
up the identity of the upper states, so that the excitation was spread
among all four of them. Shvyd’ko and his colleagues showed that this
procedure, when done at the right time in the oscillation cycle of the
excitation, transformed it into a state that could not easily decay.
Turning off the second field allowed the nucleus to decay and emit an
x-ray photon.
In this experiment, the photons that emerged after being
“stored” had the same energy as the original photons, but other quantum
properties were not preserved. To overcome that deficiency, and to allow
single-photon manipulation, Adriana Pálffy and her colleagues at the
Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany, suggest
a variation on the technique. As before, they use polarized x-ray
photons to excite iron-57 nuclei immersed in a magnetic field. By
adjusting the intensity of the beam and the concentration of iron-57
atoms, it can be arranged that most of the time, just a single nuclear
excitation will be created by the x-ray pulse.
Instead of adding a second field, the team proposes
turning off the first altogether at a specific moment in the oscillation
of the excited state, about 10 nanoseconds after the x-ray pulse. The
team’s calculations show that the excitation would then be “frozen” in a
quantum state that does not allow decay by the usual route. Reapplying
the magnetic field after an arbitrary time would allow the excitation to
decay and emit a photon identical in all of its quantum
properties—energy, polarization, and phase—to the photon that created
the excitation. It should be possible to store an x-ray photon for 100
nanoseconds or more with its full quantum properties intact, according
to Pálffy.
The new proposal also offers a bonus: if the magnetic
field is reapplied with opposite polarity, the phase of the emitted
photon is exactly reversed. Although this is a modest capability
compared to what can be done with visible photons, Pálffy and her
colleagues argue that their proposed technique is a first step toward
photonics systems operating at much shorter wavelengths.
Gennady Smirnov of the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow says
that the proposed storage method certainly preserves polarization and
phase, but he has some doubts about its practicality, particularly in
the need to switch a magnetic field off and on so quickly. But Norman
Sherman, of the National Research Council of Canada in Ottawa, says the
proposed method “opens the door to coherent quantum optics for x rays,”
which might be used for future quantum computers.
–David Lindley
David Lindley is a freelance writer in Alexandria, Virginia, and author of Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr and the Struggle for the Soul of Science (Doubleday, 2007).
Almost 200 lbs of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) left Uzbekistan in the 50th shipment of the dangerous nuclear fuel under a threat reduction agreement between the U.S. and Russia.
The
National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) said on Nov. 1 it had
successfully removed of 72.8 kilograms (160 lbs) of spent HEU fuel from
the Institute of Nuclear Physics (INP) in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, a former
territory of the Soviet Union. The HEU will be stored in a specialized
location in Russia.
HEU can be used to make nuclear weapons and
the U.S. has been working to reduce and protect vulnerable nuclear and
radiological material located at civilian sites worldwide.
The
Nov. 1 shipment is the 50th under NNSA’s Global Threat Reduction
Initiative (GTRI) cooperative program with Russia to return
Russian-origin HEU. Since the program began 10 years ago, NNSA said it
and its Russian counterparts have cooperated to successfully return more
than 1,900 kilogramsl or over 4,000 lbs of Russian-origin HEU to
Russia -- enough material to stock 75 nuclear weapons, said NNSA. The
agency said the program has completely removed all Russian-origin HEU
from six countries.
The HEU in the 50th shipment was
securely transported by air to a specialized facility in Russia, said
NNSA. The complex operation was the culmination of a multi-year effort
between the NNSA, Uzbekistan, numerous Russian partners including the
nuclear regulator and the Russian Federation’s Nuclear Energy State
Corporation (ROSATOM), and the International Atomic Energy Agency, said
NNSA.
“In the wrong hands this material could be used to make a
nuclear weapon,” said NNSA Administrator Thomas D’Agostino. “This
shipment and our ongoing partnership with Russia demonstrate the
positive effect our efforts have on the global effort to secure,
consolidate and minimize the use of highly enriched uranium across the
globe.”
NNSA said its GTRI program and Uzbekistan’s INP share a
long history of cooperation on nuclear and radiological security issues.
This is the seventh shipment of HEU from INP since 2006 and marks the
complete clean-out of all HEU from the facility, said NNSA. GTRI also
worked with INP to convert its research reactor from HEU to low enriched
uranium (LEU) use, and to secure radiological sources that could be
used for a dirty bomb, it said.
Days after receiving a passing grade in a simulated emergency exercise,
the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant near South Haven was shut down on
Sunday.
A steam leak on a drain valve was detected at 11:15 a.m. Sunday and the
plant initiated shutdown at 12:30 p.m., according to a Nuclear
Regulatory Commission document. The event was classified as a
non-emergency incident.
“The steam leak could not be isolated or repaired while the plant was
in service, so operators removed the plant from service so repairs could
be made,” Mark Savage, spokesman for the plant, said this morning
Repair work begins today.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Federal Emergency
Management Agency gave a passing review following a drill last week at
the facility, according to the Associated Press. During the two-day
drill, plant officials had to react to a simulated release of radiation.
Agencies from Michigan and Indiana also took part in the drill.
New Orleans-based Entergy Corp. has said the drill was part of usual
emergency exercises held at the plant in Van Buren County’s Covert
Township.
Earlier in October, area emergency crews, volunteers and state
officials from the Michigan Department of Agriculture, Michigan Humane
Society and state Department of Environmental Quality checked the
readiness of decontamination equipment at Fennville High School, a
designated center for 2,000 evacuees. The drill included how to
decontaminate animals that people might bring with them to the site.
The exercise was part of continuing readiness training overseen by
Allegan County Emergency Management that started in September when
emergency officials practiced how to coordinate police, fire and health
services from a command center in Allegan.
The plant was listed as one of the four lowest-rated power plants in
the nation by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Several public meetings
with plant officials and the NRC have addressed the safety concerns.
Parts of Allegan County in Casco Township are within a 10-mile-radius
Emergency Planning Zone — the prime area where people could be effected
by a radiation leak from the plant and evacuations would be mostly
likely in an emergency.
The rest of the county, as well as Holland and Ottawa County, are in a
50-mile secondary emergency zone where people could receive indirect
exposure to radiation through contaminated food and water if there was a
radiation leak.
COLLEGE STATION -- As their football squads prepare to meet for the
first time in Southeastern Conference history Saturday (Oct. 20) at Kyle
Field, Texas A&M University and Louisiana State University
are teaming up to study collisions of another variety -- the nuclear
kind -- on one of the world's biggest stages for nuclear astrophysics,
Japan's RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-Based Science.
While
Johnny "Football" Manziel undoubtedly will have many Saturday moments
in the sun, Texas A&M and LSU physicists are looking to that same
sun and its fellow stars as both the architects and inhabitants of our
universe in an effort to better understand nuclear reactions and the
resulting energy that makes life on Earth possible.
"When you have a nuclear reaction, you have a tremendous amount of energy released," said Robert E. Tribble, distinguished professor of physics at Texas A&M and director of the Cyclotron Institute.
"Solar energy is a product of a nuclear reaction. We're trying to find
out exactly how the elements were formed and, in the process, how the
energy that makes life on Earth possible was created."
Tribble and LSU physics professor Jeffrey C. Blackmon are co-principal investigators in a United States Department of Energy-funded
international collaboration that is exploring the outer limits of
nuclear reactions along with colleagues at two additional U.S.
universities (Texas A&M University-Commerce and Washington University in St. Louis)
and in five other countries (IFIN-HH Bucharest, Romania; Universite de
Caen, France; INFN, Sezione di Pisa, Italy; Oxford University, United
Kingdom; Kyushu University, Japan).
Tribble notes that a
critical early part of the study is a series of experiments using rare
isotope beams (RIBs) at the newly commissioned Radioactive Isotope Beam Factory (RIBF)
at RIKEN, widely recognized as the most powerful radioactive beam
facility in the world. Tribble says researchers there are doing
cutting-edge experiments with nuclei that only live fractions of a
second -- rare, infinitesimal windows in which to gain valuable insight
into energy‘s essence and answers.
"These experiments will
provide important information about rates of nuclear reactions that
occur in stellar explosions," Tribble added. "Some of the reactions that
happen in stars happen in nuclei at the edge of stability within the
shortest possible time span during which we can access them. Stars are
just big balls of particles that are undergoing nuclear reactions. The
reactions in our sun, which is a relatively small star, provide heat and
light to us on Earth. It's important to understand these reactions in
order to understand the very basis of life as we know it."
The
collaboration will focus on both proton- and neutron-breakup reactions
at intermediate energies, with the goal of using the resulting data to
better understand single-particle properties and to determine reaction
rates in larger stellar explosions, such as supernovaes and X-ray
bursts. By understanding how nuclear reactions work at a base level from
both single-nucleon removal and recapture standpoints, Tribble says
they can extend that knowledge to predict likely patterns of atomic
behavior in more complex situations and at stellar energies for nuclei
far from stability, whether in the cosmos or here on Earth.
"We
don't know what the chain of reactions is within stars, but we can
figure out what the probability of certain reactions is," Tribble said.
"For this study, we are focusing on p-gamma and n-gamma reaction rates,
which are important in calculating how stars are born."
Tribble's
individual research group within the Cyclotron Institute is helping to
develop the necessary equipment for the collaboration's experimental
program -- specifically, a large silicon detector array that will
incorporate both existing state-of-the-art technology and generate
cost-effective extensions of that technology to enable silicon detector
readout. Meanwhile, Blackmon's LSU group is working with the Texas
A&M and Washington University groups to incorporate front-end
electronics into a working portable data acquisition (DAQ) system that
will allow user-friendly inspection and analysis and ultimately easy
integration between laboratories. Blackmon's team will be in charge of
maintaining this software and providing the integration and linkages
between the current software and the proposed systems at both Texas
A&M and RIKEN.
"We also plan to implement the hardware
so that it can be inspected via an Internet interface from anywhere in
the world," Tribble said. "This requires a merger of two technologies
already in use by Washington University. Such a system can have all eyes
on a problem in short order and should probably be considered a
requirement of the new century."
With Japanese funding now secured for a very large new spectrometer, SAMURAI,
to be built at RIKEN, Tribble says the time is right to begin
developing a detector system that can be used in conjunction with
SAMURAI to carry out a broad range of reaction and breakup studies at
RIKEN energies -- a program that eclipses the initial suite of
experiments proposed by the collaboration in its original letter of
intent to RIKEN in January 2008.
"The technology that we
will develop will have broad application at many existing nuclear
physics laboratories using stable or rare isotope beams, in addition to
future RIB facilities," Tribble said. "And the training of students and
postdoctoral research associates will be important contributions to the
future workforce in this field."
To learn more about the
project, overall scope of work or partners involved in the $800,000
Department of Energy award, which runs through 2014, visit http://cyclotron.tamu.edu.
# # # # # # # # # # About Research at Texas A&M University:
As one of the world's premier research institutions, Texas A&M is a
leader in making significant contributions to the storehouse of
knowledge in many fields, including rigorous scientific and
technological disciplines. Research conducted at Texas A&M
represents an annual investment of more than $700 million; the
university ranks 20th among all U.S. universities and third nationally
for universities without a medical school, according to the National
Science Foundation. Research at Texas A&M creates new knowledge that
provides basic, fundamental and applied contributions resulting in many
cases in economic benefits to the state, nation and world. To learn
more, visit http://vpr.tamu.edu.
Bystander: Dr
Looi Hoong Wah, please convince us as to why the Australian government
chose to send the rare earth all the way to Kuantan to have it
processed, only to send back the finished products to its country minus
the waste?