Fukushima: Is Nuclear Power Safe?

A friend of mine from Italy came for dinner the other night. I hadn’t seen her in a while and over the course of dinner she filled me in on old friends and relations – who’s well, who’s ageing, who’s had a baby – the usual stuff. But then she mentioned her own health and mentioned a thyroid problem, adding that her mother too (now in her mid eighties) had also had thyroid problems. She’d gone to a doctor on Elba, the island off the west coast of Italy. “The doctor told me that it’s very common. It’s all because of Chernobyl.” She then added that the doctor had told her that in the local cemetery that since the 1980′s everyone had been dying of cancer.

Needless to say, I expressed mild surprise. She insisted that Elba had been hit by massive fallout and that was the reason, adding that other parts of Italy had seen similar things.

The exchange really brought home to me the significance of Jim Al-Khalili’s recent Horizon programme “Fukushima: Is Nuclear Power Safe?” in which he tried to lay out the pros and cons of nuclear power, trying hard, as a theoretical nuclear physicist to appear as open and as unbiased as possible. It is a difficult challenge, because if you work in a field called ‘nuclear’ you are probably going to be dismissed as biased in the first place.

Horizon’s approach was to start the programme as close to the site of the Fukushima accident as possible, to describe how the accident had occurred and drawing on some excellent footage recorded by a member of the international investigation team that visited the site a few months ago. Eery and disturbing it show people in full NBC suits and breathing apparatus surveying the site, intercut with helicopter shots of the steaming pile (excuse pun) of post-accident debris. It is nightmarish stuff, that has a powerful emotive impact.

Jim unpicked how nuclear power stations work – reducing them schematically to a large kettle and explaining very simply how fission works and the origin of the daughter products. He then proceeded to explain how the accident had come about, pointing out the failure of the diesel pumps that provided water cooling and the subsequent reaction of the zirconium fuel rods with the water to produce hydrogens. And then the huge bangs. Chemical bangs, of course, but that led to the scattering of the radioactivity. Much was made of how the design was flawed – the reactors are themselves 40 years old and we have learned much about how and why things can go wrong in the intervening years.

But the concern of the programme was not so much on the power station itself as on its human impact. In a particularly moving section, Jim provides a camera to a young man evacuated from his home when he returns to collect a few belongings. Touchingly, the man and his wife water a few plants that have miraculously have survived – not the radiation of course – just plain old neglect in a village that has had to be abandoned. The sadness of the villagers is palpable and their sense of rage at the unfairness of it all. And Jim’s gentle questioning brings this out very movingly – would that “real” journalists would sometimes have the same delicate and empathetic touch.

The scene then shifted to Chernobyl, the most notorious accident of all. Here the camera followed a woman in her late 40′s returning to her flat for the first time in the 20-odd years since the accident. She is almost inarticulate in her pain, repeating the words “strakh” (fear) and “uzhas” (horror) over and over and whimpering about how death stalks her every move. It is heart-breaking stuff and yet she appears in a normal state of physical health. A psychologist who, as a child was exposed to the radiation from the accident, and who now works specifically with other victims points out that the vast majority of medical problems in the region are ones of mental health; the fear of radiation taking its toll on the population.

This is borne out by the statistics -while some 3-4,000 childhood cases of thyroid cancer were diagnosed in the years after the accident, in part a consequence of the slowness of the authorities to issue iodine tablets to the population, only seven of these patients died. A more than 99% survival rate. It is a stunning conclusion, and that can be verified by looking at the reports from UNSCEAR and from the Chernobyl Forum. The mental health consequences have been very severe and compounded by the huge political and economic changes in the Ukraine and Byelorussia over the same time period.

So there is a paradox – that few of the catastrophic predictions made at the time of the accident have come to pass. Yet the legacy, for local people and further afield in Europe remains one of fear and suspicion, hence the immediate, knee-jerk referendum in Italy, for example, to abandon all nuclear projects, while in Germany Angela Merkel brought forward the date for decommissioning of existing stations.

The real question, as Jim points out, is where are we going to get electricity from as we attempt to deal with climate change. To reject nuclear out of hand, even as a stopgap technology, leaves mighty few alternatives. And to do so without considering the evidence fully is profoundly troubling.

The programme then traced the history of the nuclear industry, showing how uranium and plutonium-based technology were chosen, essentially because they fitted into the American military-industrial complex. The alternative thorium option, that would have used a more abundant and less easily weaponizable element,  was cut short arbitrarily decades ago leaving us with what we have today.

What the programme did not really look into was the issue of waste. At the ILL research reactor in Grenoble they showed a process by which radioactive waste could be converted into isotopes more benign and short-lived that would not require storage on the kind of geological timescales that make everyone nervous. But there was little sense of whether this kind of process really could be scaled up. Could one really deal with all the waste coming out of the world’s nuclear kettles.

And for all that, one is left with lingering doubts. My father, who was Secretary of UNSCEAR for almost two decades, voted against nuclear power in the Italian referendum. He argues that nuclear power will always be a problem because of the culture of secrecy that surrounds it, and the difficulty of getting full and proper disclosure from an industry terrified of doing the least thing wrong.

It is a spectacular example of the difficulties and dilemmas of policy-making, of balancing short term and long term risks, of balancing the known knowns, the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns across different timescales. And always buffeted by the media and the blogosphere.

It was a beautiful and brave programme, that combined the small human stories with the much large issue of how we power our future. Nuclear power offers so much and could solve so many problems. And yet, as Jim made clear, there is no thing as a free lunch.

As to me, would I be happy if a reactor were built a couple of miles down the road? I’d like to say, categorically yes. But I know that I’d want a of detailed questions answered before I signed on the dotted line.

Bradford and the Cabaret of the Elements

Tomorrow evening is the Cabaret of the Elements in Bradford at the British Association meeting. it should be a crazy evening with Jonny Berliner, Vivienne Parry, Marty Jopson, Graeme Jones, Jem Stansfield, Matt Parker, Dallas Campbell, Liz Bonnin, Timandra Harkness, and more (I think). With Quentin Cooper in the Chair with the inevitable puns. He is pretty sure it won’t be boron.

I’ve got a short slot on phosphorus somewhere in the middle and then will attempt to link 30 elements (yup – demos for at least 20 of them, one of which that has only ever been performed once ever ever and that no one will be able to see) in the Finale; which is supposed to be 15 minutes long. There’s no way…….

The afternoon will be spent filling the crate with stuff with bubble wrap and other things.

Herbert McLeod and his gauge

When I first started writing the Classic Kit column I knew that the McLeod gauge was something that needed writing about. I mentioned it in passing in an earlier column on Sprengel but at the time I couldn’t find out much about McLeod’s career, not could I find a portrait of the man.

The gauge itself is a very cunning device for measuring low pressures (or high vacuums, if you prefer). From the moment that Geissler and Töpler had made their piston pumps, and then Sprengel had come up with the more “automated” mercury dropping pump, there was a real need to find out how low the pressure was; especially since there was growing excitement about the strange glows that appeared when electric currents were passed through rarefied gases – such as in the Geissler or Plücker tubes (lots of nice pics and stories here) that became such desirable curiosities for fashionable gentlemen with a recreational interest in science.

An ordinary manometer, however, can only be read to a precision of plus or minus a millimeter or so. Add in a travelling microscope (they used to be called “cathetometers”) equipped with a Vernier scale and you might be able to squeeze a significant figure or more. But that just wasn’t good enough.

Herbert McLeod solved the problem. He did so simply by using Boyle’s Law

pV = constant

and combining it with the Geissler/Töpler mercury piston method. To measure the pressure you simply raised a mercury reservoir to isolate a slug of residual gas of fixed volume, and then raising it further compressed it into a fine capillary. The capillary could be calibrated in units of pressure and McLeod gauges could be used to measure pressures down to 10-5 mmHg.

[A Vacustat set to read - note the reservoir on the right and the two columns - the capillary with the trapped gas is on the left.

And it’s one of those pieces of kit that we still use on and off. Sure, as everyone moaned, it won’t read continously, but it’s reliable provided your system is dry and you’re not working with condensible gases – i.e. those that don’t obey Boyle’s Law.  In its most familiar incarnation – The Vacustat – that was introduced, I believe by Edwards some time in the ’50′s (correct me if I’m wrong)  you can still find them scattered round research labs. I failed to get a photo in time for the actual column but here is one I found connected to a vacuum system. You rotate it around a pivot on the back and mercury pours from the reservoir trapping the gas in the capillary.

The peculiar thing about Herbert McLeod is that it’s remarkably hard to find out what he did. He published a bit. But not much. He also spent a lot of time helping the politician Lord Salisbury (who would later become Prime Minister) to set up a lab at his country home, Hatfield House. Together they seem to have done lots of experiments in electricity and magnetism, electrochemistry, vacuum, and whatever caught their fancy.

Anyway, you can read his story over at the RSC’s latest Classic Kit page.

Farewell to shadow projection?

One of the many books I haven’t read to the end is Plato’s Republic. But I did get to the part where he speaks of Socrates’ image of everyday reality being nothing more than the shadows on the wall of a cave projected by the flickering fire. The role of the philosopher is to be able to see beyond the shadows to the true reality that causes them.

I like shadows. And I love projection. And as I grow older and more fogeyish I find that it is ever harder to use shadows as a tool for capturing the imagination of an audience, whether it be students in a lecture, or out in the wider world. What I’m talking about is the gradual demise of the overhead projector, a mainstay of teaching and lecturing for over half a century.

I gave a talk a few weeks ago at the Science Museum as part of one of their “Lates”, which they devoted to Chemistry, in honour of the IYC. I’d offered them my “How the Zebra got its Stripes” talk and a couple of weeks before, sent them both my risk assessment and a list of requirements – on the list was “overhead projector – dataprojector/video camera NOT suitable”.

When I got to the venue, Pete Wothers was on before me, giving an entertaining talk on where chemical names come from. But there was no OHP. When Pete’s lecture ended I started asking the staff, and they expressed surprise at the request. Eventually the disappeared off leaving me to set up. After about 15 mins a group of helpers came back empty handed. One of them said to me “But there IS an OHP – look over here”, showing me an overhead document camera. When I demurred and said it was not what I’d asked for he said “But it’s exactly the same”. I got pretty stroppy at the this point and eventually I was told that they’d found a couple but that there was “no guarantee that they would work”……

Of course it did work and the talk went off quite well – as usual, from my point of view, it could have been better, but it went down well with the audience.

But the OHP thing was annoying, and it’s not just the Science Museum.

At UCL, OHPs were withdrawn last year by our Estates Management team because they are expensive to maintain (the film is pricey and the bulbs are getting hard to get). They also find that fewer lecturers use them and so they vanished from most lecture theatres. In extremis,  Francisco Diego in Physics and I won the concession that OHPs would be left in a few key lecture theatres.

And I gave a talk for Wired last year (for which, come to think of it, I never got paid – oh well) where my use of an OHP was met with gales of laughter until they saw the demo (“oh, how retro” someone sneered), and then, to my satisfaction, they went very quiet indeed when they saw the demo.

So why am I so enamoured of OHPs? It’s not just being an old dog, incapable of doing new tricks (pace, Seasick Steve). It’s because OHPs are the last link to shadow projection, the brilliant technique perfected in the Victorian period to magnify and display all manner of delicate phenomena. If you are a fan of soap bubbles you will have read Charles Vernon Boys’ classic “Soap Bubbles: Their colours and the Forces which Mould Them” (the Dover Edition is now out of print!) in which most of the demonstrations are projected onto a screen using a carbon arc and a collimator lens. [And of course there is E. J. Hartung's wonderful "Screen Projection of Scientific Experiments", a small volume I found by accident in a bookshop in Rochester (of all places) almost 20 years ago,  filled with cunning systems for throwing images of microscope slides and test tubes onto a screen - get it if you can.]

Today almost no one uses those techniques – the last person I saw doing it was the wonderful Cyril Eisenberg (an intellectual descendant, if you will, of C V Boys and author of “The Science of Soap Films and Soap Bubbles“) who uses (is he still giving lectures?) a point light source to project the interference fringes in soap films, as well as the shadows cast by the films suspended in metal frames. It is spectacular in part because it is so beautiful, but also because it is so direct.

A demonstration of optical rotatory dispersion using a sugar solution and an OHP.

With an OHP you can also do fantastic, stark, high contrast shadow projection directly, with a device that has next to no learning curve. You switch it on and you’re there. Try showing soap films to a large audience using a webcam or document camera and you’ll find it a struggle. You have to get the lighting just right, ensure you have the proper background, and even then the results will be inferior. What is more, even if you can see the film the colours are processed first by the camera and then by the computer. They just won’t be right. One of the most spectacular demos you can do is to show optical rotatory dispersion on an OHP – the colours that emerge are magical – and they just haven’t got that delicacy using a doc cam.

What is more, videocameras have a refresh rate, as does that of the projector. Fast oscillatory phenomena like the mercury beating heart suffer from weird stroboscopic phenomena that obscure what’s going on. On an OHP they look spectacular precisely because there is no intermediary.

And what of the classic sunset light scattering demo? An OHP is exquisitely set up to let you do it in a beaker or glass. What was that? You think I should use a slide projector and a fish tank……. when did you last see one of those?

Yup. I’m having a mid-life crisis, a Victor Meldrew moment, if you will. But I see little evidence that the talks, classes, and lectures we give are actually any better these days with the tens of thousands of pounds that we are spending on ever fancier projection and recording technology than the great talks that were given before Powerpoint and YouTube. Videos and animations are fine. But you know what? I want to see it live. I want to see it for real. And I want you to see it too. And with the ever-present risk that it might all go wrong. And not because of some idiotic network failure. Show me the shadows!

Verse and worse……

In response to a column in Chemistry World in which David Jones talked about chemical verse, I pointed out an Elizabethan sonnet published by Howard Maskill, an organic chemist then of Stirling University, that has long stuck in my mind. CW published the letter, but for some reason truncated the sonnet to the first four lines. So, for the record, here is the full thing, from Nature 1981, 294, 606.

To trans, trans – tricyclo[7,3,1,O^5,13]-tridecane

Shall I compare thee to a single form
of cyclohexane locked with bulky group?
Or should it be with that bicyclic norm
Whose ethane bridge 1,5 doth bridge the hoop?

Thy undistorted, perfect trans-fused rings
By force field calculation hold no strain;
No rapid rates which angle bending brings
As in bicyclo[3.2.1]octane.

To help thy ground state conformation needs
To free an equatorial tosylate,
Then ring flip from an all chair form precedes
Reaction from a boat transition state.

And then departs the leaving group when trans
Coplanar hydrogens, the rate enhance.

The actual poem was illustrated with diagrams so to do Maskill justice here is an image.

There are several other ludicrous chemical rhymes out there, one of which is this month’s Classic Kit. I’ll post those later when I get a moment.

And the water flows on…..

Through the autumn and winter I wrote several times about our Department’s water use and our attempts to get a handle on where the water was going and then to find ways to stem the flow.  As I haven’t written about this for time, it’s time to post an update. The impressive thing is that water use is down by about a third. The plot below may not look like it, because it’s hard to see the slopes. But you can see our Christmas experiment shutdown as well as the impact of the combination of Easter and the Royal Wedding that led to a substantial drop in consumption.The gaps in the plot are a reflection of the fact that we still don’t have an automated way of monitoring the water so someone has to read the meter each day.

Total water consumption in our Department over the past year - note how consumption dropped at the time of the Royal Wedding.

 Although it may not look like much, the reduction is really quite substantial and this is clearly visible in the average daily consumption (averaged each week).

Daily consumption in our department. Still huge, but down by one third.

This has been achieved simply by throttling back the on/off valves on our diffusion pumps. Not subtle but surprisingly effective.

What we really need are needle valves and flow meters. And that is what we have been trying to convince the authorities to buy for us. The problem is that they cost money. Money is tight and so no one is prepared to release the cash. But meanwhile water, and therefore cash, is haemorrhaging out through our pipes.  It has taken us almost six months of to-ing and fro-ing to finally get these ordered and then only when we argued that they will probably pay for themselves in a matter of months.

Anyway, they’re ordered – assuming there is no further hitch we can start installing them in the next few weeks. And then we’ll see what happens. I expect another dramatic drop.

But of course, the water is just a side show. Our electricity consumption remains enormous and there is no movement on replacing diffusion pumps with turbos, or thinking about altering how our fumehoods work to cut their consumption. This is just the beginning.

Spooklights – Things That Go Flash in the Dark

I’ve been sorely reprimanded by Alom Shaha and Declan Fleming for not posting anything about this. So for the record here it is. They’re right. I should have written about this earliers.

Tomorrow evening – Friday 24 July – as part of the UCL Science Centre’s lecture series, I am giving a new talk called “Spooklights – Things that Go Flash in the Dark” in the Chemistry Department at UCL.

	Are you afraid of the dark? Can you cope with a total blackout? And can you cope with seeing strange things in the darkness? What if you don’t? Are they even real? Should you be afraid? Dr Andrea Sella will explore the strange lights you might see on a dark night and explore the edge of what we know and what we don’t. If the moon is in the right phase, we might even see a UFO…… or an earthquake.

And the obvious question arises, what the hell am I doing giving a new talk after the end of the academic year, when the last science festival of the spring has finished.

The answer is that this project is part of a Radio 4 commission – I put in a bid last year with the Science Unit’s Fiona Roberts  to put together a programme about strange lights. To my astonishment we were successful. The premise was to look into will o’the wisp, but also to think about where strange lights occur and whether we understand them. And key to the programme was the idea of doing part of it live at Cheltenham.

Anyone who has been to CSF knows that that would be a non-starter. The problem is that you need total blackout – and I mean total – for some of the things I’m going to try. And a marquee in summer just won’t do it. So our Auditorium is the next best thing, a place where, for years my colleague Steve Price and I have struggled to ensure that the Powers That Be didn’t “upgrade” the theatre by adding lots of cuddly emergency lighting. It remains black as pitch, thank goodness.

And that means that we’ll be able to explore tribo and sonoluminescence. We’ll try to blow luminous smoke rings and hunt for the elusive barometric light. Along the way we’ll ask the question of where static electricity comes from, whether earthquake lights are real, and try to record the spectrum of an indoor aurora.

One of the things I hope to do is to recapture the darkness for chemistry and physics. It’s not just astronomers who bewail the brightness of the night. I don’t suppose that George Stokes would have discovered fluorescence in the labs we have today – the new lighting that’s been installed in the past six months is blinding. And we have no switches any more because everything is being “managed” using motion sensors. Try hunting for pinholes on a vacline using a Tesla coil when you’re blinking in the glare of dozens of low energy fluorescents.

It’s all been a bit seat of the pants partly because I was on the rebound from Cheltenham, but also because I’ve been contributing to filming of a couple of BBC projects – one about food and one about ice.  The result is that it’s not all fully tested or finalized. And it’s not all gone smoothly either. Earlier today, while showing one of the demos to my friend and colleague Steve Price, a glass tube loaded with concentrated sulfuric acid snapped spraying acid onto the wall and floor. The fact that we were in the only really dark place I could find – a cleaner’s cupboard on the first floor – just added to the excitement (leaving aside my own mortification). So I spent a couple of hours demonstrating what a crap glassblower I am as I built myself three more tubes – with heavy wall tubing – that I will fill in the morning.

It’s going to be fun. It’s going to be new. It’s going to be different. And the producer Roland Pease (who took over when Fiona was spirited away for another project) will be on hand to record the shambles…..