Friday, April 29, 2005
1. ENERGY: MAYBE THIS IS THE WAY THE SYSTEM IS SUPPOSED TO WORK.
Last night President Bush began his press conference talking about high gasoline prices. "First," he said, "we must become better conservers of energy." Terrific! The price at the pump is doing the job. The President even called for a nuclear energy policy. And earlier in the week, he called for incentives to encourage the switch from SUVs to hybrids. The Cheney solution was always to drill more wells. Bush also said in the press conference that we must develop "new energy sources, such as hydrogen, ethanol or biodiesel." Three years ago we were told that the way to reduce dependence on foreign oil is with Freedom Car (WN 18 Jan 02). Alas, hydrogen is a fuel, but it's not an energy source. Freedom Car won't happen in your lifetime http://www.sc.doe.gov/bes/hydrogen.pdf. But the biodiesel idea is interesting. Biodiesel fuel can be made from animal fat. Linking it to a liposuction facility would alleviate two serious national problems at the same time.
2. CLIMATE CHANGE: ENERGY-BALANCE FINDING IS THE "SMOKING GUN."
A week ago, an important editorial in Science by Donald Kennedy called attention to NASA's recent decision to delay or cancel planned Earth science missions and terminate orbiting spacecraft to feed the pointless Moon/Mars mission. A report in this week's Science shows how just short sighted that is. An international monitoring effort, Argo, has deployed 1,800 instrumented floats in oceans around the world since 2000. A NASA team led by James Hansen collected data from the floats and precisely determined ocean levels from satellite observations. They found that Earth is absorbing more energy than it's radiating back into space, an imbalance large enough to raise temperatures 1 F this century, even if greenhouse gas emissions are capped tomorrow. "There can no longer be genuine doubt that human-made gases are the dominant cause of observed warming," Hansen said. "This energy imbalance is the 'smoking gun' that we have been looking for."
3. TRANSITION: PHILIP MORRISON, A MAN OF CONSCIENCE, DIES AT 89.
Sent to the island of Tinian to help assemble the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, he toured the city a month later and spent the rest of his life campaigning against nuclear weapons.
4. TABLE-TOP FUSION: SMALL NEUTRON GENERATOR IS FAR FROM RECORD.
Newspapers around the country reported the amazing result that a UCLA team had demonstrated fusion of deuterium to form helium in a table-top device. They were, of course, scooped - by Ernest Rutherford, 71 years ago. Fusion is easy. A self-sustaining reaction is not. The unique feature of the UCLA device is to get the accelerating voltage from a pyroelectric crystal, which makes it quite compact. Unfortunately for civilization, there are thousands of fusion devices in the world not much bigger than a walnut. They are in every nuclear weapon to produce a pulse of neutrons at just the right time.
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