Why is no one talking about safe nuclear power?

Wednesday, 27 April 2011

By Julian Cribb This article was first published in the Canberra Times. In the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the most extraordinary thing is the lack of public discussion and the disturbing policy silence - here and worldwide - over safe nuclear energy. Yes, it does exist. There is a type of nuclear reactor which cannot melt down or blow up, and does not produce intractable waste, or supply the nuclear weapons cycle. It's called a thorium reactor or sometimes, a molten salt reactor - and it is a promising approach to providing clean, reliable electricity wherever it is needed. It is safe from earthquake, tsunami, volcano, landslide, flood, act of war, act of terrorism, or operator error. None of the situations at Fukushima, Chernobyl or Three Mile Island could render a thorium reactor dangerous. Furthermore thorium reactors are cheap to run, far more efficient at producing electricity, easier and quicker to build and don't produce weapons grade material. The first thorium reactor was built in 1954, a larger one ran at Oak Ridge in the United States from 1964-69, and a commercial-scale plant in the 1980s - so we are not talking about radical new technology here. Molten salt reactors have been well understood by nuclear engineers for two generations. They use thorium as their primary fuel source, an element four times more abundant in the Earth's crust than uranium, and in which Australia, in particular, is richly-endowed. Large quantities of thorium are currently being thrown away worldwide as a waste by-product of sand mining for rare earths, making it very cheap as a fuel source. Unlike Fukushima, these reactors don't rely on large volumes of cooling water which may be cut off by natural disaster, error or sabotage. They have a passive (molten salt) cooling system which cools naturally if the reactor shuts down. There is no steam pressure, so the reactor cannot explode like Chernobyl did or vent radioactivity like Fukushima. The salts are not soluble and are easily contained, away from the public and environment. This design makes thorium reactors inherently safe, whereas the world's 442 uraniumreactors are inherently risky (although the industry insists the risks are very low). They produce a tenth the waste of conventional uranium reactors, and it is much less dirty, only having to be stored for three centuries or so, instead of tens of thousands of years. Furthermore, they do not produce plutonium and it is much more difficult and dangerous to make weapons from their fuel than from uranium reactors. An attractive feature is that thorium reactors are ''scalable'', meaning they can be made small enough to power an aeroplane or large enough to power a city, and mass produced for almost any situation. Above all, they produce no more carbon emissions than are required to build them or extract their thorium fuel. They are, in other words, a major potential source of green electricity. According to researcher Benjamin Sovacool, there have been 99 accidents in the world's nuclear power plants from 1952-2009. Of these, 19 have taken human life or caused over $100million in property damage. Such statistics suggest than mishaps with uranium power plants are unavoidable, even though they are comparatively rare. (And, it must be added, far fewer people die from nuclear accidents than die from gas-fired, hydroelectric or coal-fired power generation.) But why have most people never heard of thorium reactors? Why is there not active public discussion of their pros and cons compared with uranium, solar, coal, wind, gas and so on? Why is the public, and the media especially, apparently in ignorance of the existence of a cheap, reliable, clean and far less risky source of energy? Above all - apart from one current trial of a 200MW unit by Japan, Russia and the US - why is almost nobody seeking to commercialise this proven source of clean energy? The situation appears to hold a strong analogy with the stubborn refusal of the world's oil and motor vehicle industries for more than 70 years to consider any alternative to the petrol engine, until quite recently. Industries which have invested vast sums in commercialising or supplying a particular technology are always wary of alternatives that could spell its demise and will invest heavily in the lobbying and public relations necessary to ensure the competitor remains off the public agenda. It is one of the greatest of historical ironies that the world became hooked on the uranium cycle as a source of electrical power because those sorts of reactors were originally the best way to make weapons materials, back in the '50s and '60s. Electricity was merely a by-product. Today, the need is for clean power rather than weapons, and Fukushima is a plain warning that it is high time to migrate to a safer technology. Whether or not it ever adopts nuclear electricity, Australia will continue to be a prominent player as a source of fuel to the rest of the world - be it uranium or thorium. So why this country is not doing leading-edge research and development for the rapid commercialisation of safe nuclear technology is beyond explanation. There is good money to be made both in extracting thorium and in exporting reactors (we bought our most recent one from Argentina). As a science writer, I do not argue the case for thorium energy over any other source, but it must now be seriously considered as an option in our future energy mix. Geoscience Australia estimates Australia has 485,000 tonnes of thorium, nearly a quarter of the total estimated world reserves. Currently they are worthless but there is a strong argument to invest some of our current coal and iron ore prosperity in developing a new safe, clean energy source for our own and humanity's future. Julian Cribb is a Canberra science writer.

Developed digestion proves people more microbe than man

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Medical anatomical model

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• Audio: Developed digestion proves people more microbe than man

Last time, I talked about the strange case of a woman who was dying from a nasty infection in her bowel, how after eight months she had lost 27 kilograms of weight and was confined to a wheelchair because of her weakness.

She was also having to wear nappies, because of her continual diarrhoea, and was just weeks away from dying. And then I discussed how a transfusion of faeces from her husband had magically 'reset' the microbes in her gut, and how she came back from the almost-dead.

So what are these mysterious microbes in the gut? (Now I did discuss this first about two years ago, but a lot has happened since then, so this is the update.)

The first thing to realise is that your body is made of cells. Ten per cent are human, but 90 per cent are microbes. In fact, if an alien looked at you, they would see you as being just a carrier for the other life forms that make up 90 per cent of the cells in your body.

We are never alone, from when we are born, to after we die when they help recycle us.

Yep, it's true! We humans are mostly made from other life forms. We are a super-organism, a blending of us and them. (Please note: I am talking about the numbers of cells, not their mass or weight.)

Only about 10 per cent of the cells in your body came from that single fertilised egg that was made when your mother and father loved each other very much in a very special way.

These add up to about 1–10 trillion cells. The other 90 per cent of the cells in your body (10–100 trillion) belong to other living creatures, mostly microbes.

The vast majority of these other living creatures are single-celled beasties, such as bacteria, living in your gut. In total, these microbes, and their little friends, weigh about 1.5 kilograms.

The reason that they weigh so little, even though there are so many of them, is that these microbial cells are much smaller than human cells.

The result is that each of us is a strange microbe-human hybrid. Yes, we are more microbe than man! (Or, because they mostly live in our gut, you can say that we are 10 per cent human and 90 per cent poo.)

We have a fair and reasonable relationship with them.

Every single time that we eat, they eat. They grab, store and redistribute energy from the food we put in front of them. They use this energy to maintain and repair themselves. They reproduce, and they communicate with each other.

But in return, they do stuff for us. They make vitamins for us, such as vitamin K, thiamine, pyroxidine. They protect us against nasty microbes. They help the immune system, associated with the lining of our gut, grow and mature.

In fact, they help our gut grow. They help the cells that line our gut grow and proliferate, and turn into different types of cells.

They also help make the tiny capillaries that line the outside of the gut and pick up the fats, proteins and carbohydrates from what we eat. Without them, our gut would be a tiny shrivelled version of its healthier robust microbe-laden self.

Microbes also break down carbohydrates that we cannot digest, and extract energy from them for us. For example, we humans have about 98 enzymes that break down carbohydrates.

But the bacteria in our gut have over 240 enzymes to turn carbohydrates into energy. These extra microbe enzymes can break down sugars that our human enzymes cannot.

Some of the energy goes to the microbes, but the rest goes to us. In fact, if it wasn't for the single-celled creatures in our gut, we'd all be a lot thinner.

In one study, mice were delivered by Caesarean section in sterile conditions, so they had no bacteria living in their gut.

The mice were then raised in sterile environments, and fed only sterile food. Compared to their regular, germ-laden siblings (who were fed the same food), these germ-free mice ate 29 per cent more and yet, were very skinny, carrying 42 per cent less fat.

And then, when their mice guts were colonised with the single-celled creatures of their regular siblings, they simultaneously ate less and got fatter.

So now that you have a bit of an understanding of these microbes that make up 90 per cent of the cells in your body, I'll stop, and next time, I'll tell you the story of an animal whose gut doesn't match its diet. Yep, the giant panda!

How We'll Power The U.S. In 2035

The current energy landscape is rife with contradictions: gas prices are shooting up, renewables are being implemented at a seemingly rapid pace, natural gas is being simultaneously demonized and hailed as an energy savior, and electric cars are finally starting to roll off production lines. Fortunately, your tax dollars fund a government agency devoted to making sense of energy. The U.S. Energy Information Administration explains the gritty details of our energy future in its Annual Energy Outlook 2011, which has tracked our projected energy use all the way to 2035. Don't have the time to slog through its myriad charts and tables? We do. Read on for our abbreviated look at the report's most important findings.



Energy Imports
In the future, we will rely less and less on oil giants like Saudi Arabia to feed our oil addiction. The EIA assumes that oil prices balloon to $135 per barrel and the real GDP grows 2.7% annually through 2035. In that case, energy imports will drop to 17% of total use in 2035 from 25% in 2009. This is thanks to increased biofuel use, headache-inducing prices at the pump (making people drive less), and better vehicle fuel-economy standards. We will still use more fossil fuels overall than we do today, but a larger portion of it will come from increased domestic production of natural gas.
Shale Gas
Pretty much anyone concerned about climate change or water contamination doesn't think natural gas fracked from shale is a reasonable solution. But hey, our massive appetite for energy has to be satiated somehow, and bad consequences have never stopped us before. According to the EIA, shale gas production will grow nearly fourfold from 2009 to 2035 to 12.2 trillion cubic feet.
Coal
Another blow to clean energy advocates: energy generation from coal will increase by 25% from 2009 to 2035, mostly because of increased use of existing capacity. Reading between the lines, that means the EIA doesn't expect much in the way of new clean coal plants--not that we expected much from clean coal, either. But get this: if energy companies and regulators decide that they aren't concerned about greenhouse gas regulations (like those from the EPA), 48 gigawatts of new generating capacity for coal-fired plants could be built by 2035, compared to the 26 gigawatts projected in the regular scenario. That's a lot of coal.



Renewable Energy
Finally, some good news. Renewable energy is projected to grow from 8% of total energy use in 2009 to 13% in 2035. Wind power will almost double its share of total current generation, and geothermal resources will triple in generation capacity. Solar resources will account for 5% of all nonhydroelectric renewable energy generation, up from 2% in 2009. Still, this projection sort of puts a damper on all those "we could power the world with renewables" fantasies. Time to find that perpetual motion machine.
Carbon Emissions
CO2 emissions are expected to grow slowly through 2035 because of minor economic growth, more reliance on renewable energy,
efficiency improvements, slow growth in electricity demand (because of the recession), and increased natural gas use (though a recent study claims that natural gas is more carbon-intensive than coal). Assuming all of these factors play out exactly as the EIA's projection indicates, CO2 emissions will increase from 5,996 million metric tons in 2005 to 6,311 million metric tons in 2035.
It's entirely possible that the scenarios described above never come to pass; renewable energy may account for so much of our energy use that treehuggers everywhere weep with joy, or coal could end up even more dominant than it already is. The EIA actually has 57 different scenarios--this is just the the scenario where current laws and regulations remain unchanged. Since we've been on this path forever, the idea we'll suddenly deviate from it makes those other scenarios seem unlikely at best, but if you want, you can play with different options here.
[Photo by Buzz Hoffman]


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The Really Smart Phone - Researchers are harvesting a wealth ... (Robert Lee Hotz/Wall Street Journal)

The Really Smart Phone

Researchers are harvesting a wealth of intimate detail from our cellphone data, uncovering the hidden patterns of our social lives, travels, risk of disease—even our political views.

By ROBERT LEE HOTZ

Photo-illustration by Adam Magyar

'Phones can know,' says an MIT researcher. 'People can get this god's-eye view of human behavior.'

Apple and Google may be intensifying privacy concerns by tracking where and when people use their mobile phones—but the true future of consumer surveillance is taking shape inside the cellphones at a weather-stained apartment complex in Cambridge, Mass.

For almost two years, Alex Pentland at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has tracked 60 families living in campus quarters via sensors and software on their smartphones—recording their movements, relationships, moods, health, calling habits and spending. In this wealth of intimate detail, he is finding patterns of human behavior that could reveal how millions of people interact at home, work and play.

Through these and other cellphone research projects, scientists are able to pinpoint "influencers," the people most likely to make others change their minds. The data can predict with uncanny accuracy where people are likely to be at any given time in the future. Cellphone companies are already using these techniques to predict—based on a customer's social circle of friends—which people are most likely to defect to other carriers.

A wave of ambitious social-network experiments is underway in the U.S. and Europe to track our movements, probe our relationships and, ultimately, affect the individual choices we all make. WSJ's Robert Lee Hotz reports.

The data can reveal subtle symptoms of mental illness, foretell movements in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and chart the spread of political ideas as they move through a community much like a contagious virus, research shows. In Belgium, researchers say, cellphone data exposed a cultural split that is driving a historic political crisis there.

And back at MIT, scientists who tracked student cellphones during the latest presidential election were able to deduce that two people were talking about politics, even though the researchers didn't know the content of the conversation. By analyzing changes in movement and communication patterns, researchers could also detect flu symptoms before the students themselves realized they were getting sick.

"Phones can know," said Dr. Pentland, director of MIT's Human Dynamics Laboratory, who helped pioneer the research. "People can get this god's-eye view of human behavior."

So far, these studies only scratch the surface of human complexity. Researchers are already exploring ways that the information gleaned from mobile phones can improve public health, urban planning and marketing. At the same time, researchers believe their findings hint at basic rules of human interaction, and that poses new challenges to notions of privacy.

"We have always thought of individuals as being unpredictable," said Johan Bollen, an expert in complex networks at Indiana University. "These regularities [in behavior] allow systems to learn much more about us as individuals than we would care for."

Today, almost three-quarters of the world's people carry a wireless phone. That activity generates immense commercial databases that reveal the ways we arrange ourselves into networks of power, money, love and trust. The patterns allow researchers to see past our individual differences to forms of behavior that shape us in common.

As a tool for field research, the cellphone is unique. Unlike a conventional land-line telephone, a mobile phone usually is used by only one person, and it stays with that person everywhere, throughout the day. Phone companies routinely track a handset's location (in part to connect it to the nearest cellphone tower) along with the timing and duration of phone calls and the user's billing address.

Typically, the handset logs calling data, messaging activity, search requests and online activities. Many smartphones also come equipped with sensors to record movements, sense its proximity to other people with phones, detect light levels, and take pictures or video. It usually also has a compass, a gyroscope and an accelerometer to sense rotation and direction.

What They Know

A Wall Street Journal investigation into the world of digital privacy.

• The Web's New Gold Mine: Your Secrets
• Sites Feed Personal Details To New Tracking Industry
• On Web's Cutting Edge, Anonymity in Name Only

Advances in statistics, psychology and the science of social networks are giving researchers the tools to find patterns of human dynamics too subtle to detect by other means. At Northeastern University in Boston, network physicists discovered just how predictable people could be by studying the travel routines of 100,000 European mobile-phone users.

After analyzing more than 16 million records of call date, time and position, the researchers determined that, taken together, people's movements appeared to follow a mathematical pattern. The scientists said that, with enough information about past movements, they could forecast someone's future whereabouts with 93.6% accuracy.

The pattern held true whether people stayed close to home or traveled widely, and wasn't affected by the phone user's age or gender.

"For us, people look like little particles that move in space and that occasionally communicate with each other," said Northeastern physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, who led the experiment. "We have turned society into a laboratory where behavior can be objectively followed."

Only recently have academics had the opportunity to study commercial cellphone data. Until recently, most cellphone providers saw little value in mining their own data for social relationships, researchers say. That's now changing, although privacy laws restrict how the companies can share their records.

Several cellphone companies in Europe and Africa lately have donated large blocks of calling records for research use, with people's names and personal details stripped out.

"For the scientific purpose, we don't care who the people are," said medical sociologist Nicholas Christakis at Harvard University, who is using phone data to study how diseases, behavior and ideas spread through social networks, and how companies can use these webs of relationships to influence drug marketing and health-care decisions.

His work focuses on "social contagion"—the idea that our relationships with people around us, which are readily mapped through cellphone usage, shape our behavior in sometimes unexpected ways. By his calculation, for instance, obesity is contagious. So is loneliness.

Even though the cellphone databases are described as anonymous, they can contain revealing personal details when paired with other data. A recent lawsuit in Germany offered a rare glimpse of routine phone tracking. Malte Spitz, a Green party politician, sued Deutsche Telekom to see his own records as part of an effort by Mr. Spitz to highlight privacy issues.

In a six-month period, the phone company had recorded Mr. Spitz's location more than 35,000 times, according to data Mr. Spitz released in March. By combining the phone data with public records, the news site Zeit Online reconstructed his daily travels for months.

Read More

• Our Social Networks, Ourselves
• Google Defends Way It Gets Phone Data
• Avoiding Mobile Trackers

In recent days, Apple Inc. triggered privacy alarms with the news that its iPhones automatically keep a database of the phone's location stretching back for months. On Friday, The Wall Street Journal reported that both Apple and Google Inc. (maker of the Android phone operating system) go further than that and in fact collect location information from their smartphones. A test of one Android phone showed that it recorded location data every few seconds and transmitted it back to Google several times an hour.

Google and Apple have said the data transmitted by their phones is anonymous and users can turn off location sharing.

"We can quantify human movement on a scale that wasn't possible before," said Nathan Eagle, a research fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico who works with 220 mobile-phone companies in 80 countries. "I don't think anyone has a handle on all the ramifications." His largest single research data set encompasses 500 million people in Latin America, Africa and Europe.

Among other things, Mr. Eagle has used the data to determine how slums can be a catalyst for a city's economic vitality. In short, slums provide more opportunities for entrepreneurial activity than previously thought. Slums "are economic springboards," he said.

Cellphone providers are openly exploring other possibilities. By mining their calling records for social relationships among customers, several European telephone companies discovered that people were five times more likely to switch carriers if a friend had already switched, said Mr. Eagle, who works with the firms. The companies now selectively target people for special advertising based on friendships with people who dropped the service.

At AT&T, a research team led by Ramon Caceres recently amassed millions of anonymous call records from hundreds of thousands of mobile-phone subscribers in New York and Los Angeles to compare commuting habits in the two metropolitan areas.

Dr. Caceres, a lead scientist at AT&T Labs in Florham Park, N.J., wanted to gauge the potential for energy conservation and urban planning. "If we can prove the worth of this work, you can think of doing it for all the world's billions of phones," he said.

Thousands of smartphone applications, or "apps," already take advantage of a user's location data to forecast traffic congestion, rate restaurants, share experiences and pictures, or localize radio channels. Atlanta-based AirSage Inc. routinely tracks the movements of millions of cellphones to generate live traffic reports in 127 U.S. cities, processing billions of anonymous data points about location every day.

View Full Image

M. Scott Brauer for The Wall Street Journal

Alex Pentland, director of MIT's Human Dynamics Laboratory, above. Using location data, he said, 'I can say a lot about the music you like...your financial risks.'

What Phones Know

• One study found that the U.K.'s happiest time is 8 p.m. Saturday; its unhappiest day is Tuesday.
• European phone companies discovered their customers were five times more likely to switch carriers if friends had switched, allowing the companies to target their ads.
• Another study was able to determine that two people were talking about politics—without the researchers hearing the call

As more people access the Internet through their phones, the digital universe of personal detail funneled through these handsets is expanding rapidly, and so are ways researchers can use the information to gauge behavior. Dr. Bollen and his colleagues, for example, found that the millions of Twitter messages sent via mobile phones and computers every day captured swings in national mood that presaged changes in the Dow Jones index up to six days in advance with 87.6% accuracy.

The researchers analyzed the emotional content of words used in 9.7 million of the terse 140-character text messages posted by 2.7 million tweeters between March and December 2008. As Twitter goes, so goes the stock market, the scientists found.

"It is not just about observing what is happening; it is about shaping what is happening," said Dr. Bollen. "The patterns are allowing us to learn how to better manipulate trends, opinions and mass psychology."

Some scientists are taking advantage of the smartphone's expanding capabilities to design Android and iPhone apps, which they give away, to gather personal data. In this way, environmental economist George MacKerron at the London School of Economics recruited 40,000 volunteers through an iPhone app he designed, called Mappiness, to measure emotions in the U.K.

At random moments every day, his iPhone app prompts the users to report their moods, activities, and surroundings. The phone also automatically relays the GPS coordinates of the user's location and rates nearby noise levels by using the unit's microphone. It asks permission to photograph the locale.

By early April, volunteers had filed over two million mood reports and 200,000 photographs.

Publicly, Mr. MacKerron uses their data to chart the hour-by-hour happiness level of London and other U.K. cities on his website. By his measure, the U.K.'s happiest time is 8 p.m. Saturday; its unhappiest day is Tuesday.

Perhaps less surprisingly, people are happiest when they are making love and most miserable when sick in bed. The most despondent place in the U.K. is an hour or so west of London, in a town called Slough.

On a more scholarly level, Mr. MacKerron is collecting the information to study the relationship between moods, communities and the places people spend time. To that end, Mr. MacKerron expects to link the information to weather reports, online mapping systems and demographics databases.

Several marketing companies have contacted him to learn whether his cellphone software could help them find out how people feel when they are, for instance, near advertising billboards or listening to commercial radio, he said.

Mr. MacKerron said he's tempted—but has promised his users that their personal information will be used only for scholarly research. "There is a phenomenal amount of data we can collect with very little effort," he said.

Some university researchers have begun trolling anonymous billing records encompassing entire countries. When mathematician Vincent Blondel studied the location and billing data from one billion cellphone calls in Belgium, he found himself documenting a divide that has threatened his country's ability to govern itself.

Split by linguistic differences between a Flemish-speaking north and a French-speaking south, voters in Belgium set a world record this year, by being unable to agree on a formal government since holding elections last June. Belgium's political deadlock broke a record previously held by Iraq.

The calling patterns from 600 towns revealed that the two groups almost never talked to each other, even when they were neighbors.

This social impasse, as reflected in relationships documented by calling records, "had an impact on the political life and the discussions about forming a government," said Dr. Blondel at the Catholic University of Louvain near Brussels, who led the research effort.

The MIT smartphone experiment is designed to delve as deeply as possible into daily life. For his work, Dr. Pentland gave volunteers free Android smartphones equipped with software that automatically logged their activities and their proximity to other people. The participants also filed reports on their health, weight, eating habits, opinions, purchases and other personal information, so the researchers could match the phone data to relationships and behavior.

The current work builds on his earlier experiments, beginning in 2004, conducted in an MIT dormitory that explored how relationships influence behavior, health, eating habits and political views. Dr. Pentland and his colleagues used smartphones equipped with research software and sensors to track face-to-face encounters among 78 college students in a dorm during the final three months of the 2008 presidential election.

Every six minutes, each student's phone scanned for any other phone within 10 feet, as a way to identify face-to-face meetings. Among other things, each phone also reported its location and compiled an anonymous log of calls and text messages every 20 minutes. All told, the researchers compiled 320,000 hours of data about the students' behavior and relationships, buttressed by detailed surveys.

"Just by watching where you spend time, I can say a lot about the music you like, the car you drive, your financial risk, your risk for diabetes. If you add financial data, you get an even greater insight," said Dr. Pentland. "We are trying to understand the molecules of behavior in this really complete way."

Almost a third of the students changed their political opinions during the three months. Their changing political ideas were related to face-to-face contact with project participants of differing views, rather than to friends or traditional campaign advertising, the analysis showed.

"We can measure their daily exposure to political opinions," said project scientist Anmol Madan at MIT's Media Lab. "Maybe one day, you would be able to download a phone app to measure how much Republican or Democratic exposure you are getting and, depending on what side you're on, give you a warning."

As a reward when the experiment was done, the students were allowed to keep the smartphones used to monitor them.

Write to Robert Lee Hotz at sciencejournal@wsj.com