Babeled

By now I’m sure we have all heard the election year colloquialisms: energy independence, climate change, renewable energy, drill here drill now, environmental stewardship, etc.

One campaign promise from one candidate leaps out at me as a sure fire way to accomplish or negate all of these.  That is the pledge made by John McCain to build 45 nuclear power plants over the next 20 years.

Now, as both a Republican and a young nuclear professional I am obviously in favor of this pledge.  But all my feelings aside, I can honestly say that this is the one pledge that actually has the potential to accomplish all of those popular colloquialisms at once.

The new Economic Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR) from General Electric has the capacity to produce 1,500 Megawatts of electricity.  Multiply this capacity by the 45 plants McCain proposes and we are looking at 67,500 Megawatts of new generating capacity in the US!

Contrary to what interveners will tell you, nuclear power is safe. Even the worst nuclear accident in United States history at Three Mile Island did not result in one single human death!  This statistic coupled with the advances in safety technology incorporated in the ESBWR makes nuclear one of the safest means of power generation available.

Also consider the fact that nuclear power is a zero-carbon energy supply.  Regardless of your stance on global warming, there can be no doubt that zero-carbon is the preferable means of generation.  Couple this with the magnitude of electrical generation that nuclear has the capacity for and you quite simply have both energy independence and environmental stewardship all in one package.

It is widely believed that Hydrogen Fuel Cells hold the key to transportation energy.  The biggest hurdle to this of course is where do we get Hydrogen?  With electricity prices so high, electrolysis from water (H₂O) is not practical and hence removing the Hydrogen from Natural Gas (C₂H₅) is the only alternative.  The down side to this of course is your byproduct from natural gas is CO₂ instead of just the pure O₂ that electrolysis produces.  Nuclear generated electricity would be cheap enough to allow electrolysis to produce enough hydrogen to power the nation’s vehicles.  Not only that, but the only byproducts would be the O₂ produced by the process and the steam (H₂O) from the car’s exhaust.  Yet another CO₂ reduction!

But what about that growing mountain of highly radioactive, long lived nuclear waste?

Mr. McCain has also pledged to both open the Yucca Mountain repository and pursue spent fuel recycling. Currently, spent nuclear fuel is stored at the plant that produced the waste.  The Yucca Mountain Repository is a multi billion-dollar project that has been long-delayed by political maneuvering and is yet to open.

Spent fuel recycling will not only provide additional energy to the cycle without further mining, but it will also reduce the burden placed on Yucca Mountain by slowing the rate at which the waste is produced.

The media has referred to Barack Obama as “lukewarm on nuclear.”  Sadly, this is a fallacy.  By refusing to open Yucca Mountain, refusing to allow spent fuel recycling, and failing to support new plant construction Mr. Obama is, by definition, anti-nuclear.  With Obama’s lack of support for each of the three issues that would allow nuclear to fulfill the nations energy demands his policy might better be described as “ice cold on nuclear.”  Obama cannot come out publicly and say this of course, for fear of exposing his inability to go against radical leftists.

Energy is at the core of nearly every major issue today.  The economy, national security, the environment: all are contingent upon meeting our growing energy demands.  Nuclear can meet those needs if our government would only allow it.

John McCain will allow it.  Barack Obama will not.  Consider this in November.

~Man Overboard

Everyone (I hope) visits the dentist regularly for check-ups and cleanings.  It is pretty much the same scenario every time.  You go in, the hygienist sticks the saliva ejector into your mouth and goes to town scraping and spraying and asking you questions you are incapable of answering.

As she works your mouth fills uncomfortably with saliva, until she finally backs out and tells you to close your mouth around the saliva ejector (also known as Mr. Thirsty) for relief.  Like magic all the liquid disappears from your mouth.  Then she goes back in for more scraping and poking.

What is wrong with this picture?

Recently updated CDC guidelines recommend that patients should never be told to close their lips around the saliva ejector or (and this is even worse) be told to suck on it like a straw.  If your hygienist ever tells you to do this, say, “NO!” and then tell her what I am about to tell you.

All of the ejectors are connected to the same waterline system.  Closing your mouth around the saliva ejector creates an environment of low pressure inside your mouth that could lead to back wash.  From someone else’s mouth in the next room.  And that person might have cooties.

Remember this is a recent update, and your hygienist may have gone to school twenty years ago.  But times change and Mr. Thirsty is not always your friend.  Be polite but firm and exercise your rights as a patient to refuse any procedure.  Although there are no documented cases of illness or disease transmission in this manner, it is always better to be safe than sorry when cooties are concerned.

NASA’s plan to put astronauts back on the moon by 2020 hinges on their ability to develop a launch vehicle with the capability to deliver the Orion crew exploration vehicle and enough payload capacity to make NASA’s vision for a permanent moon base a reality.  This past Wednesday, September 10, the Ares I launch vehicle passed a critical design review marking an important milestone in the development of the rocket.

The Ares I launch vehicle is a two-stage rocket topped by the Orion crew capsule, capable of carrying four to six astronauts.  The first-stage booster is a five-segment, reusable solid rocket motor derived from the space shuttle.  This first stage engine takes the vehicle into low earth orbit at which point the first stage booster separates and the second-stage J-2X engine ignites taking the crew capsule into circular orbit.

It is anticipated that the Ares I will be taking astronauts and small payloads to the International Space Station no later than the year 2015.  From there, it is on to the moon in 2020.  With a payload capacity of 25 tons, the Ares I may also be used to ‘park’ supplies in orbit for other space vehicles to retrieve and take on to the moon.

The Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle has been described as, “Apollo on steroids,” by NASA’s Michael Griffin.  It is projected to be one and a half times as wide as Apollo with double the passenger volume.  This means that Ares I has to have enough muscle to break the Earth’s gravity and get it into orbit. While there are many more reviews to go involving more than a thousand scientists and engineers, Ares I appears to have a bright future and may bring the promise of progress into a new era of space exploration.

Ares I rocket collage image courtesy of Flickr user nasa1fan published under the CC license.

Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle image courtesy of Flickr user Lockheed Martin published under the CC license.

The global community is ablaze with anticipation, curiosity, skepticism and in some circles fear. Last minute preparations are being made for Wednesday’s landmark firing of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The next great leap in particle physics is upon us and the whole world is watching.

In two days time the culmination of decades of preparation, planning and research will commence when scientists bombard two protons at 99.9999% the speed of light.  If conditions permit, the LHC, the largest and most sophisticated particle accelerator in the world will replicate the conditions experienced one trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. What this will yield is pure conjecture but the excitement is palpable.

Hope runs deep in the scientific community that data will be observed revealing physical anomalies that could have only taken place in the unfathomably infantile Universe.  Miniature black holes, unobserved dimensions, perhaps even the cornerstone of the Standard Model of Physics, the elusive Higgs boson, better known as the “God Particle” will be revealed.  Among other revelations, physicists hold hope that the data collected will demonstrate how particles obtained mass in the earliest vestiges of the Universe.

Perhaps more striking then the immediate scientific impact, is the subtle notion that science is more intrigued by what it cannot expect.  There is no certainty of the outcome of such an experiment.  Nor is there certainty of its safety.  There are some very smart people who question the necessity of such an experiment citing the oft chance of apocalyptic doom.  While this may be easy to scoff at, the idea of creating black holes and big bangs is hardly trivial - especially when there is an inherent uncertainty involved. Nevertheless, we should must push forward.

Science has become so powerful, so great, that we can play curious creator with the fundamental building blocks that architect universes.  The notion of such power and intrigue leaves no doubt why we push the envelope into the unknown.  We search for the answer, the very essence of creation - our creation.

Strangely enough, particle physicists and the scientific community as a whole stood eagerly at this very precipice some fourteen billion years ago, wondering what kind of particles they just might see. History too, you see, is governed by the very laws of physics and always has a way of repeating itself.

I recently stumbled upon a website which offers an astrological horoscope for Barack Obama.

Thats right! For a limited time you, yes you, can peer into the future and know exactly whats going to happen to Barack! Sounds exciting doesn’t it!? Well, maybe, but the only problem is that it doesn’t seem to predict anything except that Barack was born to share his vision with the world. No offense, but isn’t that what we all do every day in our own unique ways - just rarely in front of a television camera?

In this example, as in so many others we can remember, Astrology clearly reveals it’s Achilles Heel: vague generalization. This of course is the weakness of all occult arts which claim to predict the future. Even secular attempts to predict the future course of world or personal events are usually way off the mark due to our tendency to wish for a particular future rather than observe the actual trends and patterns that surround us. Oh, and of course then there’s SLOTs - that just throws a big monkey wrench into prediction.

So we are left to wonder why, with fluff as its foundation, astrology has managed to survive for millennia? It has seen the rise and fall of the greatest empires. It has outlived various forms of social organization. It is found in a vast diversity of cultures which on the surface appear as though opposites. What then is the appeal of this mysterious craft? Is there truth to astrology, or has it survived on the wishful thinking of the collective imagination?

During my search for some truth I came across an interesting article which explained the scientific foundations of astrology. The author reveals that due to all things being connected there should be no confusion as to why the movement of Saturn is keeping you unemployed, and why the movement of Jupiter is controlling your spending habits. Ok. Well if that didn’t satisfy your need for logic, then learning that the interference between planets’ electromagnetic radiation creates all known psychological phenomenon should help. You see, gravity and electricity are related and so are all things, and all things live in the universe, and yeah.

Well, needless to say, these explanations left me as confused and in doubt as I was when I started. As a last resort, I decided to get a free horoscope done by Astro, the site where I found Obama’s report. To it’s credit the site provides a wealth of free information to satisfy one’s curiosity, as well as a few interpretations that felt accurate. However, the more the interpretations felt dead-on, the more annoyed I became by my lack of understanding of how astrology could possibly work.

To anyone out there who genuinely believes in Astrology, I hereby challenge you to enlighten this Doubting Babeler. Is there anybody out there?

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