Hitching a ride on a nuclear physicist's podcast

From SteelScience:  Hitching a ride on a nuclear physicist's podcast

“I'm not saying Boots are the Mafia... Nivea for Men are,” Matt Gunther, nuclear physics PhD student, laughed as he aired his frustrations on the price of suntan lotion. In one of many strident opinions, he compares the skin protection industry to “how the Mafia would do captive business... if you don’t buy it you’re going to get cancer.”

We had somehow gone off on a tangent, but from his response to overpriced sun products, he is clearly a passionate guy.

I went to meet Matt on a rainy afternoon in Manchester to learn about his popular podcast “Hitchhiker's Guide to Nuclear”, where he and his co-host, Matt Gill, dispel the myths, update the  news, and generally chat, in an hour long frenzy of all things nuclear.

Matt is on the Nuclear FiRST PhD, a joint doctoral training centre between The University of Sheffield and The University of Manchester.

He is part of the University of Manchester’s Nuclear Society who aim to “educate and inform the public as to how nuclear energy, as well as radiation and other related issues, affect us all”.

The 25 year old is a far cry from the stereotypical physicists portrayed in popular culture. He is not socially awkward, not afraid of the opposite sex, and not chained to his lab; starved of sunlight for the sake of research.

Although he does admit to enjoying a good science joke and I do catch a sneaky glimpse of a Marvel superhero postcard, stuck to the side of his computer, he’s definitely no Sheldon Cooper or Leonard Hofstadter.
iTunes following

Their monthly podcast began back in March, and for a small project that started out in Matt’s basement flat, it has gathered quite a following.

Each new episode receives about 1,500-2,000 hits, and they have around 200 unique subscribers on iTunes.

“I want to say it was by complete design,” he tells me when I ask him where the idea stemmed from. “But it wasn’t.”

In actual fact, it was started through irritation. “There was a news piece about nuclear on BBC news, it really got under my skin. I was fed up of people from the nuclear industry, as well as journalists, being very dry about the issue.
“The problem is that nuclear is such a divisive subject, you will always get extremists on both side, but they will never admit that, and then the journalists will be just as extreme.”

He tells me that he thinks the route of the misunderstandings surrounding nuclear energy , is because it is painted as such an uninteresting and dangerous topic, and it needs to be communicated in a better way.

“I suppose we wanted to do something where we got people engaged with nuclear as a subject, and to do that, we had to one, talk about new and media, and two, make it entertaining.”

The success of the venture has been born from people in the industry picking up on it, and tweeting and blogging about them.

Ironically, they have found that wherever nuclear is least popular is where they are most popular, gathering a following from Japan, Germany and the USA.

Having a listen through their back catalogue of podcasts, they have clearly gone from strength to strength, and I am thoroughly engrossed in their fascinating, thought-provoking, and often quite amusing window into the world of nuclear.
Episode guide

Each episode discusses a different issue, so far covering: radiation, weapons, Fukushima, and the economy.

The show usually includes guest speakers who join the hosts in debate and chatter with interjections of radiation and nuclear themed music separating each section.

They have also taken to the streets interviewing the public and finding out their thoughts and their misconceptions about nuclear.

“We asked the public what’s the first thing that comes into your head when you hear the word radiation? Nine time out of ten it was bomb, death or danger, that sort of thing, we then gave them some other examples, and they were quite surprised about where radiation can actually come from.”

The latest episodes talks about ‘The Nuclear Waste Problem’ and what the UK are planning to do with it, as well as relaying the bizarre story about the nuclear submarine commander who tried to end his affair by faking his own death, amongst other topics.

As nuclear energy has been moving ever more into the limelight over the last new month, ‘Hitchhiker's guide to Nuclear” is bound see ever increasing popularity.

Matt is modest about the endeavour, and hopes it colours the industry in a more interesting, and relatable way than current media: “We have been very fortunate with how it’s blossomed, people have said its good, and hopefully we are doing something good for the industry.”

 

Physics labs face fiscal fireworks

From USA Today:  Physics labs face fiscal fireworks

Atom smashers drill down into the recesses of the innermost regions of reality. But fiscal reality is that they cost money, and some may be casualties of the federal budget fight.

The recipe for an atom smasher requires physicists, their machines, atoms and money. And money, it turns out, is the hardest part of the ingredient list to solve.
As Congress squabbles over millionaires' tax rates this weekend, a quieter collision is playing out in one part of the U.S. scientific enterprise, three U.S. labs that look at the humblest element of the universe, the atom.
On Jan. 7, a Department of Energy advisory panel headed by Texas A&M physicist Robert Tribble will weigh in on the future of three facilities that right now are the reason the USA leads the world in nuclear physics research. Nuclear physicists seek to understand how the innards of atoms, such as protons and neutrons, interact with each other. The field is essential to nuclear power and nuclear weapons, as well as our basic understanding of nature.
Science fans likely know these labs from discoveries that re-created matter unseen since the Big Bang, or that probed the proton, the positively charged physics particles packed into the center of atoms. One lab shocked physicists in 2009 with the discovery that these goobers aren't perfectly round.
"Just as we are poised to reap the bounty of a tremendous investment in nuclear physics in research and technology, we are looking at shuttering facilities, which seems tremendously wasteful, in addition to the loss of U.S. leadership in this vital area of science," says Steven Vigdor of Brookhaven National Laboratory, which hosts one of the threatened labs, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The others are the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLab) in Newport News, Va., and Michigan State University's planned Facility for Rare Isotope Beams, a $615 million lab, which has already received $153 million from the Energy Department and $31 million from the university.
Now, the Tribble committee faces "projected constrained budgets," with federal budget cutbacks ahead, as the Energy Department and National Science Foundation put it in an organizational letter, meaning it essentially could decide the fate of the labs. The labs' futures were first mapped out in 2007 before the economic crash, along with the rest of the U.S. nuclear physics effort. That effort is largely funded by the Energy Department to the tune of about $550 million a year. (To put that in perspective, that is about one-tenth of the cost of one of 12 nuclear-armed SSBN-X subs that the Defense Department now has on its shopping list, despite the Cold War ending two decades ago.)
You may be surprised to learn there are any big U.S. atom smashers left at all, with Europe's CERN lab and its Large Hadron Collider (LHC) getting all the attention this year for its detection of a Higgs boson (better known as the "God particle" to the dismay of physicists). Once upon a time, U.S. leadership in high-energy physics was assured, too, before it was overtaken by CERN, but in 1993, President Clinton killed the gigantic atom smasher in Texas that almost undoubtedly would have found the "God particle" about a decade ago, if it had been built (it was partly the victim of another fight over the budget deficit).
As the Tribble committee heard at a September fact-gathering meeting, the U.S. labs are building on the findings at CERN. For example, RHIC smashes together the centers of gold atoms at nearly the speed of light to create "quark-gluon" plasma, a super-heated fluid of the sub-atomic particles normally hidden inside atoms, which represents how things looked in the billionths of a second after the universe started. RHIC and the other lab will sweep up behind the LHC's higher-energy Higgs boson results, plumbing interesting areas of nuclear physics suggested by its findings as well as exploring many still-mysterious facets of atomic behavior.
The shortfall in funding facing all three labs, and the rest of U.S. nuclear physics, is about $100 million total in 2013. (The overall shortfall adds up to about $900 million over five years from 2014 to 2018.) So far, it looks like one of the three labs won't be funded, Vigdor says. If the fiscal cliff "sequestration" of federal funds goes through next year, the Energy Department faces a 7.7% cut in funds, and perhaps two labs will be shut down. "That will likely end U.S. leadership in this area, which we have enjoyed since World War II," Vigdor says. Other nations, such as China and India, are making plans to expand such research, even as the U.S. cuts back. "Our leadership is being drained to other countries," he says.
Of course, things are tough all over. A White House report in September said that sequestration would trigger $417 million in cuts at NASA, $2.5 billion for the National Institutes of Health and $7.5 billion in Defense Department research. "Please do not turn away from your commitment to the scientific research our country so vitally needs," read a Dec. 18 letter from 21 Nobel Prize-winners to President Obama, decrying the planned NIH cuts. The letter noted that every dollar invested in research tends to pay off many times over, a finding that economists have made for decades. Atom smashers, as one example, have played a role in the development of lasers, the World Wide Web and nuclear medicine, which uses radioactive isotopes as medical tracing devices in diagnoses and surgeries.
One irony of the cuts coming to science is that the 2007 build-up of nuclear physics came as a result of congressional concern over a National Academy of Sciences report, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm." The report trumpeted fears of the lost U.S. leadership in science and a resultant economic decline. So, the "Long-Range Plan" for U.S. nuclear science, just as in many other areas of research, made promises that look empty now with Washington's focus turned to cutting budgets.
"Everyone can understand the U.S. budget situation and the reality of the deficit," says Vigdor, who is retiring this week. "But all this is just a symptom of the poor budget planning of the U.S. government that has been going on for a long time." If lab bosses knew cuts were coming, Vigdor says, they could have planned things better, instead of facing the boom-and-bust spending that characterizes congressional decision-making.
The good news for the committee contemplating the future of U.S. atom smashers is that they are to submit two plans, one for flat funding (effectively a cut due to inflation) and one for slight growth in the budget for nuclear physics (effectively a flat line in funding for the same reason). By Jan. 7, when their report comes due, the fight over the fiscal cliff may have resolved enough to tell us which path the nation ends up following for the future of U.S. nuclear physics, and the rest of the scientific enterprise.
.

 

 

 

Mercury News Interview: Shan Nair, nuclear physicist who now helps companies expand overseas

From MercuryNews.com:  Mercury News Interview: Shan Nair, nuclear physicist who now helps companies expand overseas After earning a doctorate in nuclear physics from Oxford, Shan Nair wrote 50 research papers on the subject and became so well regarded in his profession the European Commission picked him as one of the experts it sent to assess the damage from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster in Ukraine.

But while working at a British energy agency where he supervised a group of accountants, he got the idea to co-found his own accounting company focused on international trade with his wife, Vyoma. Beginning small in 1994, Sunnyvale-based Nair & Co. now employees 640 people, boasts operations in more than 60 nations and generated $40 million in revenue in its most recent fiscal year -- a 25 percent increase from the year before.

In an interview edited for length and clarity, the 61-year-old Nair discussed the help he provides companies seeking to explore foreign markets and why he believes he can grow his business tenfold in coming years.

Q: What prompted you to move from Britain and set up Nair's headquarters here?

A: A lot of technology companies at the time were coming to the U.K. from the U.S. like babes in the woods with no guidance and support, which they needed. And Silicon Valley is a very open culture. Nobody here cares where you come form or how you speak English. If you have a proposition and you can show you can deliver on that, people are going to listen.

Q: What sort of issues do your clients face when they expand overseas?

A: When these companies set up abroad they are usually doing it with limited financial resources. So it's a question of balancing the risks and costs. For example, say you have a software engineer in Sweden that you want to put on the payroll. The Swedish authorities could argue over time that because some of the engineer's intellectual property has been developed there, Sweden should get some of the licensing revenue. Setting up a subsidiary will eliminate this risk, because all IP generated by the subsidiary will belong to the U.S. But it will cost about $20,000 to set up and another $15,000 to $16,000 a year to maintain it, which you might not want to do for one guy.

Q: How do you keep track of the laws in so many countries?

A: I've learned the hard way, by figuring it all out and then advising clients. So it's in my head, it's in my DNA now. Also, we have a 30-person department in India that basically populates a knowledge base on an intranet that's got all of this kind of material -- changes in tax regulations in Brazil, implications for clients, all of that written in there.

Q: Do you help any foreign Dr. Shan Nair, co-founder of Nair & Co., is shown in Sunnyvale on Dec. 10, 2012. Nair is an expert in international expansion, a highly sought after speaker on globalization and a contributing author for various publications. Since founding Nair & Co. in 1994, he has helped grow the company from a small U.K.-based professional services firm to a global enterprise with offices in the U.K., India, China, U.S., Japan and Singapore. (Dan Honda/Staff) companies that want to do business in the U.S.?

A: We have been traditionally U.S.-outbound focused. But we have a small and growing client base of foreign companies setting up operations in multiple countries, including the U.S. I would say last year, of all the new clients we got, 93 percent were U.S.-outbound.

Q: How do you see your company evolving?

A: I think the company is in a very exciting position, actually, and I don't think I've got rose-tinted spectacles. In any one country, there is a law firm, there's an accounting firm, there's a payroll company that can do what we do. But there are very few that are multicountry and there are very few that do it as a one-stop shop. In our case you can have a conversation about an issue in Japan, an issue in Denmark and an issue in Brazil in one call. We may make some very well-targeted acquisitions of companies offering synergistic services, but primarily I see us growing organically. I think it could easily get us to a size of about $350 million or $400 million, 10 times our current size.

Q: Have you seen a growing number of U.S. companies setting up foreign operations? A: Yes. Companies are going abroad at an earlier stage, I think partly for cost reasons to develop their technology in cheaper markets. Allied with that, because the U.S. market has been rather depressed, in order to achieve sales targets, they've got to sell in foreign markets. So the effect of the recession actually has been to increase our business. That's why our growth was 25 percent last year when most companies were having a hard time.

Q: What do you most like and dislike about your job?

A: I really like the positive development of the company from day one. And the variety. No two clients have the same problem. Also, the clients we have want to do everything right; they don't want to break any rules. What I don't like are dealing with HR problems, I don't have a lot of time for moaners and whiners. And my reaction usually is to fire them.

Shan Nair Position: Co-founder and former CEO of Nair & Co.
Age: 61
Birthplace: Cairo, Egypt
Residence: Santa Clara and Naples, Fla
Education: Doctorate in nuclear physics from Oxford
Previous jobs: Personal assistant to a board member with the United Kingdom company National Power; commercial head of nuclear decommissioning with National Power; research scientist with the Central Electricity Generating Board in the U.K. Family: He and his wife, Vyoma, have a daughter, Aditi.

Five facts about Shan Nair
1. The child of a diplomat, he has lived in 13 countries and for a time fancied a career in the army. 2. He likes driving fast cars on race tracks and recalls once "hitting a wall of tires at 130 miles an hour," noting, "there were tires going everywhere."
3. A key life-changing experience was making the leap from salaried nuclear physicist to high-risk entrepreneur.
4. He and his wife set up a free lunch program for more than 1,000 poor children in India.
5. He and his wife have helped rescue abused bears and elephants in India.

New posting schedule

Now that I've got this new full-time job, I'll be posting in this blog twice a week - on Monday's and Wednesdays.

So the next post for this blog will be on Monday.

Thanks for your patience.

Posts resume this Wednesday

I'm a freelance writer and I am way behind on a job I have to do, so I won't be posting here until Wednesday..

Thanks for your patience!

Angry Birds to star in particle physics board game

From SciTech Gaming:  Angry Birds to star in particle physics board game

After teaching gamers that physics can be fun, the Angry Birds may soon be doing the same thing for —yowza!— quantum physics.

 

Rovio Entertainment and CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, are developing “fun learning experiences” to engage children with science, TechCrunch reported.

 

“Modern physics has been around for 100 years, but it’s still a mystery to many people. Working together with Rovio, we can teach kids quantum physics by making it fun and easy to understand,” TechCrunch quoted CERN’s Head of Education, Rolf Landua, as saying.

 

Landua spoke about the collaboration at the Frankfurt Book Fair where the Rovio launch took place.

 

He added this is "a great fit for both sides, combining physics and Angry Birds in a fun way."

Fun from CERN
 

"Rovio has a great platform, with a broad reach and highly engaged fans, which makes this collaboration very promising. With Rovio and Angry Birds Playground, we get a great channel to communicate what CERN does,” he added.

 

Peter Vesterbacka, Rovio Mighty Eagle and CMO, added that with Playground products, "kids can have fun and learn more about physics than they would’ve in the ‘old-fashioned’ style of learning.”

 

TechCrunch quoted Rovio as saying the collaboration will involve co-producing learning support materials with CERN, initially including books and a board game.

 

"More products will be added later, the company said," TechCrunch said.

 

New initiative

 

TechCrunch said this is part of Rovio's new initiative to use the power of Angry Birds as a brand to be a learning aid.

 

Rovio already started a learning program called "Angry Birds Playground" for children aged 3 to 8, based on the Finnish National Curriculum for kindergarten. — TJD, GMA News

 

Viewpoint: Heavy into Stability

From Physics.com:  Viewpoint: Heavy into Stability

In 1940, the first synthetic element heavier than uranium—neptunium-239—was produced by bombarding uranium with neutrons. Since then, nuclear scientists have ventured into the search for new heavy elements, expanding the frontiers of the physical world. The creation of elements with atomic number beyond that of uranium is challenging, as the half-life of elements decreases with increasing atomic number. However, nuclear theories have predicted that a so-called “island of stability” exists for certain superheavy elements of the nuclide chart, which should have half-lives ranging from minutes to many years.
The search for this island of stability has led to the creation of elements with up to 118 protons. The last element to be discovered was 117 [1] (see 9 April, 2010 Viewpoint), filling in the final gap on the list of observed elements up to element 118. Now, writing in Physical Review Letters, Yuri Oganessian at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), Russia, and colleagues report on a second production campaign for element 117 [2], which verifies their initial findings and provides a new comprehensive characterization of the decay chains of two isotopes of the 117 element. Their results confirm that we are indeed approaching the shores of the island of stability.
The stability of nuclides is a function of proton ($Z$) and neutron ($N$) number, as illustrated in Fig. 1. A connected region (“continent”) of stable elements is found for lighter elements, ending at the lead–bismuth “cape.” All elements with an atomic number exceeding 82 (lead) are unstable, with decreasing half-life for higher atomic numbers. However, a first region of relative stability appears around the isotopes of thorium and uranium ($Z$ equal to 90 and 92, respectively) whose lifetimes are comparable with the age of the universe. Elements with atomic number greater than that of uranium (transuranium elements) have only been produced in laboratory experiments (see the historical review in Ref. [3]). The progress in this field is impressive: 26 new, manmade heavy elements have been synthesized within 60 years. Some of these elements (up to californium) can be produced in macroscopic quantities in nuclear reactors, using neutron capture processes to form heavier elements from actinides.
Elements beyond uranium should become more and more unstable as they get heavier, as Coulomb repulsion starts to be stronger than the strong force that holds the nucleus together. But in the late sixties, Glenn T. Seaborg postulated the existence of a relatively stable region of superheavy elements, an island of stability. This idea is based on the nuclear shell model, which describes the atomic nucleus as made of shells, similar to the well-known electronic shell model for atoms. Nuclear theorists, including myself [4, 5], predicted that the stability of nuclei with so-called closed proton and neutron shells should counteract the repelling Coulomb forces. In isotopes with so-called “magic” proton and neutron numbers, neutrons and protons completely fill the energy levels of a given shell in the nucleus. Those particular isotopes will have a longer lifetime than nearby ones. According to theory, this second island of stability should be located around proton number $114$ or $120$ and neutron number $184$. Reaching this island of stability would open new horizons in nuclear physics and technology, enabling the production of superheavy nuclides in macroscopic quantities and with sufficiently long half-life to carry out actual experiments. This would allow us to test our understanding of nuclear matter and to possibly exploit such long-lived elements for applications in medicine or chemistry.
Substantial progress in the synthesis of superheavy nuclei was achieved at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Germany, where the elements with $Z=108$ to $112$ have been synthesized for the first time in fusion reactions of heavy projectiles (from iron to zinc) with lead and bismuth targets [6]. Unfortunately, in these projectile–target combinations only the proton-rich isotopes of superheavy elements with very short half-lives can be produced, as they lie outside the island of nuclear stability. Within the last ten years, researchers at JINR have successfully synthesized six new heavy elements with $Z=113$–$118$ by following a different approach: instead of a heavy projectile, a high-intensity beam of lighter atoms (calcium-48) is aimed at heavy actinide targets made of uranium or transuranium elements. The use of neutron richer calcium-48 allows the synthesis of nuclides with neutron number closer to that needed for stability.
Up until 2010, there was a gap between elements 116 and 118. The obstacle towards the production of element 117 was that the appropriate target material, berkelium-249 (${}^{249}\text{Bk}$) with 97 protons, has a short half-life of only 330 days. In 2009, several milligrams of ${}^{249}\text{Bk}$ were produced at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the US—enough to prepare a target and to perform the first experiment for the synthesis of element 117 at JINR [1]. In early March of 2012, a new portion of ${}^{249}\text{Bk}$, $12\text{mg}$, was shipped again from Oak Ridge to JINR, where physicists started the second production campaign for the synthesis of element 117.
The results of this campaign, reported in the paper by Oganessian et al. [2], confirm that a reliable method for the production of 117 exists. The authors can now state with confidence that two isotopes of this element, ${}^{293}117$ and ${}^{294}117$, have been synthesized and provide a comprehensive characterization of their decay properties. Two decay chains of ${}^{294}117$ and five decay chains of ${}^{293}117$ were detected. Oganessian et al. also observe a concomitant decay chain of element 118. This occurs because, at the time of the experiment, part of the ${}^{249}\text{Bk}$ target material had already decayed into californium-249, which can generate element 118 in a fusion reaction with calcium-48. The measured lifetimes of the 117 isotopes and other elements along its decay chain are long, lying in the millisecond-to-second range. This is consistent with shell-model predictions, confirming that these elements are indeed located at the southwest shores of the island of stability. The consistent results emerging from the two productions campaigns at JINR may get the authors close to laying claim on naming the new element.
What are the prospects of reaching deeper into the center of the island of stability? Although fairly long lived, the isotopes of superheavy elements produced in the experiments with calcium-48 are still neutron deficient: each isotope needs six to eight more neutrons to lie within the island. This occurs because heavier stable atoms must have a larger neutron/proton ratio that lighter atoms. Thus creating a heavy atom by fusion of two lighter ones inevitably leads to an atom that has too few neutrons and too many protons to be stable. One would then deduce that there is no way to the island of stability. However, pathways towards the center of the island of stability may exist. Recent theoretical studies carried out in my research group suggest that superheavy nuclei located at the top left side of the island of stability, formed in ordinary fusion reactions, could get rid of excess protons via ${\beta }^{+}$ decay [7]. Other alternatives to get to the right neutron number might exploit neutron capture, rather than fusion: such techniques would require the exposure of heavy elements, such as uranium, to very high neutron fluxes. Theory shows that this could be achieved in hypothetical small-scale underground nuclear explosions [8] or by using pulsed nuclear reactors of the next generation, if their neutron fluence per pulse is increased by about three orders of magnitude.
While the island of stability is now more firmly in sight, the jury is still out on what navigation plan will turn out to be successful.

References

1. Yu.Ts. Oganessian et al., “Synthesis of a New Element with Atomic Number Z=117,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 142502 (2010).
2. Y. T. Oganessian et al., “Production and Decay of the Heaviest Nuclei 293,294 117 and 294 118,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 162501 (2012).
3. G. T. Seaborg and W. D. Loveland, The Elements Beyond Uranium (John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1990)[Amazon][WorldCat].
4. S. G. Nilsson, S. G. Thompson, and C. F. Tsang, “Stability of Superheavy Nuclei and Their Possible Occurrence in Nature,” Phys. Lett. 28B, 458 (1969).
5. U. Mosel and W. Greiner, “On the Stability of Superheavy Nuclei Against Fission,” Z. Phys. A 222, 261 (1969); Also in the Proposal for the Establishment of GSI: Frankfurt-Darmstadt-Marburg (1967).
6. S. Hofmann and G. Munzenberg, “The Discovery of the Heaviest Elements,” Rev. Mod. Phys. 72, 733 (2000).
7. V. I. Zagrebaev, A. V. Karpov, and W. Greiner, “Possibilities for Synthesis of New Isotopes of Superheavy Elements in Fusion Reactions,” Phys. Rev. C 85, 014608 (2012).
8. V. I. Zagrebaev, A. V. Karpov, I. N. Mishustin, and W. Greiner, “Production of Heavy and Superheavy Neutron-Rich Nuclei in Neutron Capture Processes,” Phys. Rev. C 84, 044617 (2011).