Friday, May 18, 2012
At a nuclear safety summit in March, President Obama, unaware that a nearby
microphone was live, told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would
have more flexibility in missile defense negotiations after the 2012
elections. The United States currently maintains an arsenal of 5,113
nuclear warheads, down from a peak of 31,225 in 1967, but its still vastly
beyond any conceivable need, expensive to maintain and a target for
diversion by terrorists. Nevertheless, determined to sabotage any Obama
initiative, House Republicans voted yesterday to block nuclear stockpile
reduction.
Last week the Chicago Tribune published a riveting four-part
series, "Playing With Fire," about the widespread use of toxic flame-
retardant chemicals. It's not like it's a trade-off, where fire safety
comes at the cost of increased chemical pollution; so-called "fire
retardants" do nothing to suppress the inferno when foam upholstery is
ignited. Liberal senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) was so outraged by the Tribune
expos that he demanded to know why the Consumer Product Safety Commission
had not implemented the furniture-flammability rules it proposed in 2008.
Although I've been kept informed by my friend Arlene Blum, a UC Berkeley
chemist who is the Executive Director of the Green Science Policy
Institute, I confess that this is the first time Ive mentioned the flame
retardant scandal in WN. In my defense, there is more bad science than I
can cover, but from now on I will include the fire retardant scandal.
Physicists, it must be acknowledged, have a certain reverence for "helium,"
the second element in the periodic table, without which the 20th century
revolution in physics would never have taken place. There is no substitute
and the supply is nonrenewable. Helium exists on Earth today only as a
product of radioactive decay of heavy nuclei in the crust of our nascent
planet. It accumulated in the same underground geologic formations that
trap natural gas (methane). At a maximum concentration of 2.7%, natural-gas
wells represent the only practical large-scale source of helium. North
America has more helium than any other region of the world, but is also by
far the biggest consumer. When it's gone, it will be gone forever unless
we succeed in generating power by deuterium fusion. In that case helium may
again be abundant, but that day is a long way off. In 1925 a Federal
Helium Reserve was created in Amarillo, TX as a strategic supply of gas for
airships. By the 1950s helium had become essential to electronics
development but huge amounts were being squandered by NASA on low priority
tasks such as purging the fuel tanks of shuttle rockets. However, most
members of Congress remain unaware of its use for anything other than
inflating party balloons. Over the objections of the American Physical
Society, which urged an increase in the helium reserve, the 1996 Helium
Preservation Act ordered the Interior Department to liquidate the Federal
Helium Reserve by 2015. What then?
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