Deceased--John R. Huizenga

John R. Huizenga
April 21st, 1921 to January 25th, 2014

"John R. Huizenga, Physicist at Fore of Nuclear Era, Dies at 92"

by

William J. Broad

January 29th, 2014

The New York Times

John R. Huizenga, a physicist who helped build the world’s first atom bomb, solve dozens of atomic riddles and debunk claims that scientists in Utah had achieved nuclear fusion in a jar of water, died on Saturday in San Diego. He was 92.

The cause was heart failure, his family said.

Dr. Huizenga (pronounced HIGHS-ing-a) was present at the main junctures of the early nuclear era and helped push back many frontiers of nuclear physics. He also took on diplomatic missions and prominent roles in settling scientific disputes.

Early on, Dr. Huizenga was part of the scientific team that discovered Elements 99 and 100 in the periodic table — known, respectively, as einsteinium, after Albert Einstein, and fermium, after Enrico Fermi, the Italian Nobel laureate who helped lead the atom bomb project at the University of Chicago.

After World War II, Dr. Huizenga attended famous lectures given in Chicago by Dr. Fermi and soon began a half-century of atomic sleuthing.

“John Huizenga conducted research at the forefront of nuclear physics and contributed a host of exceptional insights,” said Wolf-Udo Schröder, a professor of chemistry and physics at the University of Rochester and a protégé of Dr. Huizenga’s. The discoveries stimulated “vigorous research,” he added, and remain central to the field.

John Robert Huizenga was born in Fulton, Ill., on the Mississippi River, on April 21, 1921. His father was a farmer, and until high school John learned his lessons in a one-room schoolhouse.

He graduated in early 1944 from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., where a teacher got him hooked on chemistry. He entered graduate school in physical chemistry at the University of Illinois and was soon drafted into the Manhattan Project to build the atom bomb.

The recruiters, he recalled in a memoir for the American Institute of Physics, a federation of physical science societies, “convinced me of the importance” of using his scientific training “in an exciting and militarily important secret project.”

In Oak Ridge, Tenn., he supervised teams analyzing the purity of enriched uranium coming out of sprawling production lines. Robert S. Norris, a nuclear historian, said the purified uranium fueled the weapon that leveled Hiroshima in August 1945.

After the war, Dr. Huizenga received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois and took a job in nuclear chemistry at the Argonne National Laboratory, which was then on the University of Chicago campus. It was there that he met Dr. Fermi. His research focused on uncovering the secrets of atomic interactions, especially with the subatomic particles known as neutrons.

His first big moment came soon after the government detonated the world’s first hydrogen bomb in the Pacific in 1952. The bomb vaporized an atoll. In sifting through the radioactive debris, Dr. Huizenga and his Argonne peers, as well as teams in Berkeley, Calif., and Los Alamos, N.M., found that two new elements — highly radioactive and unknown in nature — had formed when uranium atoms in the nuclear blast captured speeding neutrons.

The discoveries, of einsteinium and fermium, were initially kept secret for security reasons, then unveiled in 1955, not long after the scientists they had been named after had died.

In 1966, Dr. Huizenga received the government’s Lawrence Award for outstanding accomplishments in illuminating the intricacies of nuclear fission, the fracturing of atoms into pieces. That same year, he accompanied the first American scientific delegation to be sent to the Soviet Union.

He accepted a professorship at the University of Rochester in 1967 and stayed there for the rest of his career. His 1973 textbook, “Nuclear Fission,” written with Robert Vandenbosch, remains a standard in the field. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1976.

Dr. Huizenga lectured in China after its opening to the West. After one visit, in 1979, the nation’s leader, Deng Xiaoping, sent his youngest son, Deng Zhifang, to study in Dr. Huizenga’s department at the University of Rochester.

In 1989, Dr. Huizenga was appointed co-chairman of a Department of Energy panel that investigated and debunked the highly publicized “cold fusion” claims of two University of Utah chemists, who said they had achieved nuclear fusion at room temperature in a jar of water. If their claims had been true, the discovery would have flooded the world with energy cheap enough to supplant all rivals.

Dr. Huizenga lectured widely on the topic and in 1992 published “Cold Fusion: The Scientific Fiasco of the Century.” On the claim’s 10th anniversary, in 1999, as true believers around the globe kept looking for glimmers of hope that cold fusion could be realized, he accused them of chasing a ghost.

“It’s as dead as ever,” Dr. Huizenga told The New York Times in an interview. “It’s quite unbelievable that the thing has gone on for 10 years.”

Dr. Huizenga’s wife of 54 years, Dolly, died in 1999. He is survived by four children, Linda, Jann, Robert and Joel; two sisters, Gertrude Drew and Kathryn Disselkoen; and three grandchildren.

Dr. Huizenga summarized his career in a memoir, “Five Decades of Research in Nuclear Science” (2009). The book provided much detail on the half-lives of radioactive elements, but it also provided evidence, he wrote in its concluding pages, of “a life well lived.”


Is "Cold Fusion" possible? poll

LENR or "Cold Fusion"--same charlatan

Cold Fusion...it's back!

Deceased--Martin Fleischmann

"Cold Fusion" is alive in Columbia, Missouri

Rusi Taleyarkhan--falsified research?

Essay #1...nuclear energy as a metaphor for power in science fiction

Astounding Science Fiction

February 1947

The following is the first installment of nine selected informative, thoughtful, and well-written essays regarding science, science fiction, technology, and literature from Science Fiction Studies .

"Nuclear Energy: Science Fiction's Metaphor of Power"

by

Albert I. Berger

July 1979

Science Fiction Studies

The SF dictum that stories ought to be postulated on scientific concepts extrapolated from the existing data has not always been an easy standard for the genre's writers to maintain. Amazing Stories, the first pulp magazine to segregate science fiction stories under one cover, was also publisher Hugo Gernsback's editorial forum for just that dictum. Yet, while beginning publication in 1926, twenty-one years after Albert Einstein promulgated his Special Theory of Relativity, the magazine and the genre it promoted occasionally found 20th century physics to be something of an embarrassment during the years when physicists were "storming the fortress of the atom."1

A central feature of this embarrassment was the "Universal speed limit," ascertained by the physicists Lorentz and FitzGerald: particles cannot travel at, or exceed, the speed of light.2 The same science promising the fulfillment of so many fantasies of power and prosperity seemingly demolished an equal number focused on interstellar travel. But since Gernsback's idea of "scientifiction" was an extrapolation of existing scientific knowledge to the presumably more advanced technologies of the future, his writers learned to finesse the problem by creating ways to evade the speed limit. The typical pattern was set by "The Skylark of Space," in November, 1928, when Edward Elmer Smith, a foods chemist and fledgling writer, directed his attention to Einstein's equation E=mc2. Despite the enormity of the explosion resulting from the total conversion of mass to energy, such forces cannot propel particles faster than light. However, despite this limit on the extrapolation from Einstein's work, the sheer size of the forces nuclear power was expected to place at human disposal became a metaphor for the nearly magical fashion in which heroic scientists could overcome the inconvenient laws of nature and get spaceborne cowboys out to the endless frontier of intergalactic space.

As a metaphor, atomic energy filled SF magazines long before the Manhattan Project demonstrated the actual powers released by the split nucleus. Atomic power plants were propelling men from star to star as well as revolutionizing life on Earth. It was the central component of the belief that technological innovation was the principal revolutionary force in the world. Once nuclear energy gave promise of actually fulfilling dreams of unlimited power, boundless social changes could be envisioned. Eventually, this metaphor, enriched by an awareness of the new, real research into the nucleus which characterized physics in the 1930's, was combined with the demand for better and more realistic stories which marked the genre as a whole and Astounding Science Fiction (ASF) in particular.

Although John W. Campbell, who became Astounding's editor in 1937 and remained editor until his death in 1971, had originally made extensive use of the atomic metaphor in a series of adventure stories written in the early thirties, he soon adapted it to his more thoughtful pieces, self-consciously historical and cosmological stories written under the pseudonym of Don A. Stuart. For example, developing the notion — common enough in the genre — that the Solar System is no more than an atom in some incomprehensibly larger universe, itself populated by intelligent beings, Campbell suggests a much less common thought: that the nuclear experiments of such larger beings might threaten Earth with destruction. The total nature of the catastrophe on Earth, and the total and rapid salvation following the hero's discovery of atomic power, emphasize its importance and dual nature. Campbell had been trained as a physicist at MIT and Duke University. Yet even for him nuclear energy was more than a powerful technological tool. It also could be the crucial factor defining the relationship between humanity and the universe around it.3

This duality continued to mark the role atomic energy played in science fiction as Campbell's efforts as Astounding's editor began to discipline a new group of writers. Some of these were veterans of the pulps: A.E. Van Vogt's roots were in the work of Max Brand, not H.G. Wells or Jules Verne.4 Others, like Isaac Asimov, were not yet out of their teens when they began writing to Campbell's taste. But, more through common assumptions than the powerful influence of Campbell's editing, both groups developed the central characteristics and limitations of the atomic metaphor.

"Slan" (ASF, September-December 1940), for example, van Vogt's first novel-length serial, combines nuclear energy, telepathy, space flight, and the persecution of racial minorities as elements in a complex narrative. As he flees from an angry society patterned after Nazi Germany, young Jommy Cross, a telepathic mutant, is searching both for allies in the political struggle against the persecution of the slans and for clues to his own parentage. The key to both quests is an invention of his dead father's, an atomic power device found hidden in a secret laboratory. He develops the device into a propulsion system for a spaceship which he intends to use as a weapon to overthrow the government — a motif by then quite traditional in the genre. However, even with the device — this only link with a father he never knew — Cross is only projected deeper into the complexities of an increasingly convoluted political situation which defies forceful solution. Persecuted on the surface of society, the slans actually control the government and are working towards eventual popular acceptance of their superiority and rule. "Slan" is an adventure story, developing its complex themes only inadvertently and superficially, but within its narrow limits it marks the larger uses to which van Vogt could, and would, put the metaphor of technological power in such stories as the "Weapon Shops" cycle and The World of A.5 Political and social problems exist, but the physical power developed through a nearly magical technology is, increasingly, the central means by which the varied elements of a situation can be understood.

Other writers, less inclined to adventure than van Vogt, were developing the atomic metaphor as a symbol of cultural unity. In the series of short stories which would later be collected into the Foundation trilogy, Isaac Asimov deliberately uses miniature atomic industrial devices in place of weapons to illustrate the superior skills of his envisioned political system. "This is dangerous, but so is a buzz saw," one trader remarks as he demonstrates the atomic tools with which one remnant of the defunct Galactic Empire will be integrated into the rising Foundation's economic sphere of control. Under other circumstances, the Foundation controls several planets by convincing their inhabitants that nuclear energy is a beneficial magic dependent upon scientifically trained "priests" whose curses and interdictions draw great effect by withholding power from sinners who oppose the Foundation's rule. As undemocratic as this seems, both instances juxtapose the Foundation’s relatively democratic capitalism with the feudal dregs of the fallen Empire. But both instances reveal that Asimov finds technology the most useful index for understanding societies. Despite his marginal membership in the Futurians, a left-leaning group of fans whose political activities got six of their number barred from the First World Science Fiction Convention in 1939, Asimov makes possession of one particular innovation, nuclear power, rather than economic organization or social institutions, the key to his definition of civilization and progress.6

Although the principal function of the Manhattan Project was the construction of an atomic bomb, Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi had first built a nuclear reactor at the University of Chicago to prove that a sustained chain reaction was possible. Similarly, it was in several stories involving nuclear reactors rather than bombs that SF first combined its at least passing knowledge of actual nuclear physics with the best of the new attempts at realistic extrapolation that Campbell had promoted. Three of the most prominent stories deal with reactors within the framework of an industrial structure characterized by cutthroat competition, political corruption, and charges of the dangers attendant upon competing technologies. None recognized the growing involvement of government money and university scientists in research, and, as in the Asimov stories, all foresaw technology promoting drastic changes in material and political conditions. All three minimized the ability political, social, or economic institutions had to shape human life; and the distaste for such institutions was muted only by a conviction of their ultimate impotence.

In particular, "Lobby," by Clifford Simak (ASF, April 1944), dwells on the competition between conventional power companies and the prospective developers of atomic power. Although it anticipates the development of nuclear-generated electricity under the auspices of private enterprise, the story is clearly unsympathetic to businessmen. Not only are established corporations portrayed as corrupt and violent in their campaign to discredit nuclear developers, but those developers themselves are chided by the hero, in the name of a fledgling world government, for allowing the game of defeating the "power gang" to obscure the true goal of providing cheap power to the world. In the end, the technological power of nuclear energy would force a reorganization of political and economic power, taking it out of the hands of both business and politics:

... another hundred years and government by demagoguery will be done. Little men with talent for grabbing votes will have given way to men who make a profession of good government. Men who are trained for government just as doctors are trained for medicine or attorneys are trained for law. Men of science will govern, running the world scientifically in the interest of the stockholders — the little people of the world.

It was clear that the rule of such men would be a repudiation of business' commercial concerns, although, as in "Lobby," maverick businessmen bucking the system were heroes often enough. But such businessmen were most often portrayed as primarily tough-minded technicians, as in Robert Heinlein's early stories. An Annapolis graduate trained in the non-commercial professionalism of the Navy, Heinlein had only brief business experience. From the first, his capable and cynical heroes represented the engineer's critique of the boardroom, a protest against the subordination of ingenuity and craftsmanship to a safe rate of return. It was even possible for him to envision a situation in whlch a nuclear reactor explosion might threaten to destroy all life on Earth while the corporation controlling the reactor balks at any protective measures until faced with a smear campaign backed up by the President, himself convinced by zealous scientists. The protective measures themselves — exporting the dangerous reactor into orbit — are made possible by two technicians' independent, spare-time research. Together with "Lobby" and Lester del Rey's "Nerves" (ASF, September 1942), Heinlein's "Blowups Happen" (ASF, September 1940), illustrates the hopes invested in the salaried but nonetheless independent and idealistic engineers whose initiative is separate from company policy or the pursuit of profit.

That initiative itself is always a personal one, rooted in the history of Edison's and Ford's inventive tinkering despite the constant involvement of theoretical scientists, research teams, and large sums of money. Missing is an appreciation of the size and organization which had come to established science, partly through the concepts of mass production and the research laboratory pioneered by Edison and Ford themselves and partly through the sprawling, international, theoretical study of the atom which culminated in the Manhattan Project. Few stories gave much attention to the kind of industrialized science and time-clock punching characteristic of modern research particularly the wartime research establishments where many SF writers, including Heinlein himself, were later to work:

. . . mechanics to keep equipment in condition, electrical and chemical and other kinds of engineers. Foremen who ride bikes to get from one part of a floor to another to check operations. Fitters and men who bring in uranium to feed the apparatus. Girls out of college supervising girls out of high school who stand in front of a dial watching to see if a needle jumps from zero to ten. Ph.D.'s who turn Knobs.7

Such organizations (as much as the profit motive underlying Business), alienated SF writers from large corporations and the government. Simak, in "Lobby," even went so far as to make practical atomic power an industrial secret which one inventor had and from which others were "a million miles off base." Acutely aware of the competition among established corporations and newcomers for control of technological innovations, few writers indicated an awareness of the changing structure of business or the uneasy relationship between business and government brought about as a result of the Depression by the New Deal. Nor were the implications of the Tennessee Valley Authority considered — which indicates that these men who were willing to make educated speculations on the future of technology were neither aware of nor prepared for the directions being taken by contemporary industrial innovations. This was true even when, as in the case of the TVA, technology was transforming the social structure of a region previously devoid of its benefits; or where, as in Heinlein's case, their interests were explicitly political.

Later stories emphasizing the peaceful uses of atomic energy were overshadowed by two stories dealing with its military uses. Easily the more substantial of the two was Heinlein's "Solution Unsatisfactory" (written under the pseudonym of Anson MacDonald): a story revealing his disdain for politicians' abilities to deal with technological change and his intense distrust of every government in the world, including the United States, under the wrong management. The lesser of the two, Cleve Cartmill's "Deadline'" a routine melodrama, entered SF lore because Cartmill’s incidental description of an atomic bomb was close enough to the design under development at Los Alamos to earn both Cartmill and Campbell visits from intelligence officers after the story appeared in Astounding's October 1944 issue.8

In retrospect, it seems ironic that intelligence officers would single out Cartmill's story for attention, as it represents perhaps the worst kind of SF — an ordinary commando yarn transposed into an interplanetary and superficially scientific milieu. The scientific realism which earned its author and publisher security interviews is forced into the background, allowing the story to proceed with such scenes as a fight between otherwise human beings with prehensile tails, Cartmill's only concession to his story's interplanetary setting and far more common in Astounding's competitors.

But the real importance of this tendency to see nuclear power as a metaphor for an unlimited human technological capability is seen in the genre's self-conscious, serious work, rather than in the light adventures. Campbell, in his November, 1945 editorial (the first off the press after the public announcement of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), reinforced the metaphorical view of atomic energy in two ways. While tipping his hat toward the fledgling United Nations as a stopgap, the editor pronounced a death sentence on the civilization that had existed before the July 16, 1945 "Trinity" test firing of the first atomic bombs. It was, he wrote, "the death of a cultural pattern based on a balance of military power controlled exclusively by big and wealthy nations" (ASF, November 1945). But if this real manifestation of the technological metaphor was enough to alter the world's cultural and political patterns, another, as yet unrealized, might be powerful enough to save the status quo. The creation of the bomb, in Campbell's opinion, might lead to the construction of another device common in the genre, a "force field," capable of withstanding a nuclear blast. With the balance of offensive and defensive technology restored, there might be no need for massive cultural changes.

With Hiroshima seemingly providing such powerful validation for both science fiction's anticipation of nuclear energy and for the metaphorical use to which the genre put the technology, there was a certain sense of pride in many of the letters flowing over Campbell's desk into the magazine's "Brass Tacks" correspondence column. Urging Campbell to reprint the seemingly prophetic pre-war stories along with the Smyth Report (the official Army history of the Manhattan Project) and articles on the peaceful uses of atomic energy, fans justified their much-maligned hobby as "an education of a public for a future which is now, as it always has been, amazing to consider." With letters from even Los Alamos (home of the laboratory which built the original bombs) complimenting Campbell on his editorial policy, the self-congratulations extended into the network of amateur, fan-published newsletters which had existed since the thirties.9 Forrest J. Ackerman, among the most prominent of active fans, used his "fanzine" Glom to reprint an article by W. Bradford Shank, a physicist and member of the Federation of Atomic Scientists, who credited science fiction writers:

not . . . because their fevered imaginings have pointed the way for research, but because they have sold a substantial bloc of the American people the idea that scientists can do almost anything.... Writers and cartoonists with much less knowledge but a better sense of the inherent accelerating tendency of technological progress . . . presented atomic power in all sorts of applications.10

Eventually, this backslapping led Chandler Davis, a fan as well as an occasional and thoughtful writer for Campbell, to note that many fans were thinking far more about the justification that the atomic bomb gave science fiction than they were about the implications of the weapon itself. "The fact that your life is in danger," he wrote in his mimeographed Blitherings, "seems to interest you less than the fact that Anson MacDonald predicted your life would be in danger'' (Spring, 1946).11

The story to which Davis was referring is Heinlein's "Solution Unsatisfactory" (ASF, May 1941), an excellent example of both the power and limitations of the technological metaphor. As weapons, the atomic devices in Astounding's "realistic" stories strengthen the image of nuclear energy as an "ultimate power" against which there can be no defense. By breaking the traditional military cycle between offensive power and defensive strength, Heinlein creates a situation of maximum terror, which he uses, years before Hiroshima, to support his contention that a major revolution in international relations would be necessary should atomic power ever be used as a weapon (and incidentally placing Campbell's later comment on the end of balance-of-power politics in a most ominous light). By conjuring up a vision of a "death dust" (which Manhattan Project engineers had actually rejected as impractical), Heinlein removes every sort of protection or succour from the victims of atomic bombing. Even food and water supplies, he imagines, would be hopelessly contaminated. Moreover he clearly points out that an ultimate weapon would also, by definition, be universal: its secrets would be available to all industrial nations, and they all would be vulnerable to its destructive capabilities.

This was a point made more widely, but with little public impact, by the various scientists' movements hoping to influence American policy once the atomic bomb became a reality. Once it is even suspected that a particular scientific process is possible, anyone with sufficient creativity and physical resources can undertake it, regardless of any security procedures invoked.12 Cartmill, the adventure writer, could invest his hopes in a commando team. Heinlein, whose intentions were to demonstrate the extended implications of scientific developments, assumes that the power of such a destructive development would force a political revolution, in this case a worldwide American military dictatorship. Perceiving technology solely as power, Heinlein concluded that the only alternative to destruction was political power equal to the force of the bomb: a revolution led by tough-minded individuals as ruthless and unstoppable as the rules of physics, even if, as in the case of the dictator in "Solution Unsatisfactory," they dislike and regret what they are forced to do.

NOTES

1. Robert Jungk, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, transl. from the German by James Cleugh (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1958), p. 51.

2. Martin Gardner, The Relativity Explosion (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), p. 29.

3. Don A. Stuart (pseudonym for John W. Campbell), "Atomic Power," Astounding Stories, Dec.1934. See also Campbell's "When the Atoms Failed," Amazing Stories, Jan. 1930, and "The Mightiest Machine," Astounding Stories, Dec. 1934 - Apr. 1935.

4. Personal interview with A.E. van Vogt, June 9, 1973.

5. A.E. van Vogt, "The Seesaw," ASF, July 1941; "The Weapon Shops, ibid., Dec. 1942; "The Weapon Makers," ibid., Feb. - Apr.1943; "The World of A," ibid., Aug. -Oct.1945.

6. Isaac Asimov, Foundation (New York: Avon Books, 1951), III:ó-7: 107-116, V:8:162-164, V:13:180, after initial publication as "Bridle and Saddle" and "The Big and the Little" in ASF, June 1942 and Aug. 1944. See also Sam Moskowitz, Seekers of Tomorrow (New York, 1967), p. 254, and Damon Knight, The Futurians (New York, 1977), pp. 38-39. Charles Elkins undertakes an extensive critical exploration of Asimov's conception of historical change in "Asimov's Foundation Novels: Historical Materialism Distorted into Cyclical Psychohistory," SFS, 8 (1976).

7. Robert A. Heinlein, "Lifeline," ASF, Aug. 1939; "Let There Be Light," Super Science Stories, May 1940 (under the pseudonym of Lyle Monroe); "Blowups Happen," Sept. 1940. See also Moskowitz, Seekers, pp. 194-195 and Lester del Rey, "Nerves," ASF, Sept. 1942. The description of the giant plants at Oak Ridge, part of the Manhattan Project, is from Daniel Lang, Early Tales of the Atomic Age (Garden City, NY, 1948), p. 36. The use of a time clock at a military research station is from Isaac Asimov's account of his tenure at the Naval Air Experimental Station, Philadelphia in The Early Asimov (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1972), p. 397. Asimov joined Heinlein and L. Sprague DeCamp in substituting military discipline at the Philadelphia establishment for Campbell's.

8. John W. Campbell, "Science Fiction and the Opinion of the Universe," Saturday Review, May 12,1956.

9. James Bourne, J.M.B. Churchill, and an anonymous letter (from a self identified Los Alamos worker) to ASF, Dec. 1945, pp. 170-176; William Lawrence, ibid., Apr. 1946, p. l 78.

10. W. Bradford Shank, "Need Shown for Scientific Not Fictional Prophecy," Glom, No. 4, Apr. 1946. after initial publication in the Los Angeles Daily News, Apr. 5, 1946.

11. Davis' magazine was published under the aegis of the Fantasy Amateur Press Association (FAPA), which circulated copies of member publications to approximately 65 people, each obligated to contribute to each mailing. For a description of FAPA and the fan community generally, see Harry Warner, All Our Yesterdays (Chicago, 1965).

12. Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists' Movement in America, 1945-47 (Chicago, 1965) and The Atomic Age, Morton Grodzins and Eugene Rabinowitch, eds. (New York, 1963). The latter is a collection of articles from The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Chu: Coal and nuclear energy

Retired

Big Brutus

Mineral, Kansas

More on Stephen Chu and pressure from Republicans demanding that "...Mr. Chu be a more forceful advocate for nuclear energy."

"Chu Softens Views on Coal, Nuclear Power"

by

Stephen Power

January 14th, 2009

The Wall Street Journal

WASHINGTON -- Physicist Steven Chu, President-elect Barack Obama's choice to run the Department of Energy, softened previously critical comments about coal and nuclear power, and distanced himself from earlier statements that U.S. gas taxes should be higher.

Testifying before a Senate panel considering his nomination, Mr. Chu warned of "dramatic, disruptive changes to our climate system in the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren" if the U.S. and other nations don't speed up efforts to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Making vehicles and buildings more efficient -- rather than increasing access to oil on federal land -- is the best step for reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil, he said. "I do not underestimate the difficulty of meeting these challenges, but I remain optimistic," Mr. Chu said.

Mr. Obama has pledged to cut U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions 80% from 1990 levels by 2050, through new legislation. He also seeks to double over three years the amount of wind, solar and geothermal generating capacity, currently around 25,000 megawatts -- steps that have aroused skepticism and resistance from some industries.

In a speech Tuesday in Washington, the CEO of ConocoPhillips, James Mulva, called for being "realistic about the cost of green energy," and suggested policy makers were in danger of "inadvertently creating unattainable public expectations."

Lawmakers who attended the hearing of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources praised Mr. Chu's credentials, which include a Nobel Prize. Lawmakers pressed Mr. Chu with competing demands, and he responded by toning down or qualifying statements made when he was running the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Republicans demanded Mr. Chu be a more forceful advocate for nuclear energy. Mr. Chu promised to accelerate the disbursal of loan guarantees that his agency is authorized to give to companies seeking to build nuclear reactors. In response to Democrats' unease about the expansion of nuclear plants, Mr. Chu said his agency needed to develop a better plan for waste disposal than the Yucca Mountain depository in Nevada.

Lawmakers from states with big coal-mining interests challenged Mr. Chu on his stance toward coal, which generates half of U.S. electric power. Mr. Chu two years ago referred to the expansion of coal-fired power plants as "my worst nightmare." On Tuesday, he offered Senators a more upbeat assessment of coal's future, calling it a "great national resource." He said he was optimistic his agency could help develop technology capable of capturing and safely storing the greenhouse-gas emissions from coal plants, and indicated he would oppose a "hard moratorium" on the construction of coal plants that lack such technology, as some Democrats advocate.

Ian Talley contributed to this article.


President-Elect Obama's science team

Steven Chu--Secretary of Energy

Steven Chu's slight change

Thorium for reactors?

Shippingport nuclear power plant

The first large-scale nuclear powerplant in the world began operating in Shippingport, Pennsylvania, on December 2, 1957--exactly 15 years after Enrico Fermi demonstrated the first sustained nuclear reaction. The Duquesne Light Company of Pittsburgh built and operated the Shippingport plant on a site it owned on the Ohio River. The company also contributed to the cost of developing the government-owned reactor. Three years later, the Shippingport plant began supplying electricity to the Pittsburgh area. The Shippingport nuclear powerplant was retired in 1982. Congress assigned the decontamination and decommissioning of this commercial reactor to DOE. This was the first complete decontamination and decommissioning of a reactor in the United States. The reactor vessel was shipped to a low-level waste disposal facility at the Hanford Site in Richland, Washington. The reactor site was cleaned and released for unrestricted use in November 1987. Government officials proclaimed the seven-acre site is suitable for picnicking or for a children's playground.

Fission is fission whether one uses uranium or thorium. Okay, it reduces the production of plutonium for weapons but still produces waste. It is a short term solution for a long term problem. Hold back on fission reactors and invest in fusion research.

"Some Nuclear Energy Backers Say Uranium Alternative Could be a Magic Bullet"

by

Kent Garber

October 14th, 2008

U.S. News & World Report

In the midst of renewed global interest in nuclear energy, a long-overlooked nuclear fuel, thorium, is being re-examined as a potential solution to some of the industry's most daunting problems, including disposal of waste.

Widely available in the sandy beaches of India, Australia, and the United States, among other places, thorium is a naturally occurring, slightly radioactive element that is being heralded by advocates as a safer alternative to uranium that could help limit the production of nuclear waste and prevent nuclear technology from being used for weapons rather than energy.

Though many nuclear scientists have known about thorium's potential for decades—it was briefly used in the 1970s at the first U.S. commercial reactor in Shippingport, Pa.—it never caught on commercially. Today, however, with nearly three dozen nuclear reactors under construction worldwide and plans for at least two dozen more, world leaders are facing mounting pressure to make sure that the nuclear industry's expansion takes place as safely and cleanly as possible.

Could thorium be the solution? Some politicians and businesses hope so. Earlier this month, Nevada Sen. Harry Reid and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch introduced a bill that would set aside $250 million for research and development of thorium fuels.

Abroad, interest in thorium is even greater. The Indian government publicly has said that it wants to promote new nuclear plants running on thorium to help meet its soaring energy needs. Russia, France, the United Arab Emirates, and many others also have expressed interest.

Proponents say thorium has multiple advantages over uranium fuel. Because it is consumed more slowly in nuclear reactions than uranium, it has the potential to cut the volume of nuclear waste produced in half. Unlike a uranium reaction, a thorium fuel reaction doesn't produce weapons-usable plutonium, which would allay concerns about developing countries pursuing nuclear weapons under the pretext of nuclear energy. And proponents also say that thorium fuel could be used in new and existing reactors without companies having to make major changes to their reactor designs or fork out money for retrofits.

The dilemma of nuclear waste disposal, a longtime political lightning rod, is part of the reason no new nuclear plant has been approved for construction in the United States in some 30 years. The federal government's decades-old plan to build a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, Nev., remains stuck in limbo, and many observers speculate that the repository will never get built. Thorium would not eliminate the problem but, at least in theory, could reduce the amount of waste that would need disposal.

At the moment, thorium isn't quite ready for commercial use. The research is not yet complete, and approval of thorium fuel by the U.S. government still remains at least several years off. But some surprising international partnerships already are yielding promising developments.

One leading company, Virginia-based Thorium Power, has been working with researchers in Russia since the early 1990s to commercialize thorium (with the blessing of the U.S. government, of course). For the past five years, Thorium Power has been testing its fuel design in a research reactor at Moscow's Kurchatov Institute. Having completed that phase, the company will spend the next six months examining the results, says Thorium Power's CEO, Seth Grae. Over the next few years, it plans to test the fuel in a commercial reactor and, finally, seek approval from the Russian government to market the technology. "A few years ago I would have ticked off several risk factors that are now behind us," Grae said. "This is now at a very advanced stage."

According to the World Nuclear Association, however, there are some technical and financial hurdles that need to be resolved. There is a small concern, for instance, that the type of uranium that is formed in the reaction, if it were to be isolated, could still be used to make weapons.

From IOP...physicsworld...

"Fusion challenges and solutions"

Nuclear energy--not an option

An Op Ed opinion by Derrick Z. Jackson of The Boston Globe raises once again the problems of nuclear energy plans: Cost and waste. But yet, both candidates throw the concept into the fray of alternative energy sources. Is such a notion ridding piggyback and cloaked along with more popular choices such as regional oil supplies and improved coal burning technology and even wind, geothermal, and solar sources? When patriotic and national emotions are whipped up, nuclear reactors are a stapled amendment to the list. I seriously doubt that either candidate has a clue to the enormous costs involved and the safe disposal of nuclear waste. In the Sciencedebate 2008 questionnaire Barack Obama wrote his answer regarding the energy issue..."A new generation of nuclear electric technologies that address cost, safety, waste disposal, and proliferation risks." That is a costly, tall plan. [John McCain has yet to respond.]

"Chasing nuclear energy windmills"

by

Derrick Z. Jackson

September 6th, 2008

The Boston Globe

THE REPUBLICAN convention was a barren desert of diversity, with the lowest percentage of black delegates in 40 years. Yet this 93 percent white gathering blithely stole from the race riots of the '60s to lustily chant "Drill, baby, drill." Compounding the irony, the first speaker hurling the verbal Molotov cocktail to the crowd was the only African-American the party could dredge up for prime-time, former Maryland lieutenant governor Michael Steele.

The chant continued during confused chuckles by former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and through assertive proclamations of laying more pipelines and building more nuclear plants by vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin. Alaska's governor would drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and opposes protection for polar bears as the ice cap melts. The oil chant rose up one last time when presidential nominee John McCain said, "We will drill new wells offshore and we will drill them now."

Anyone with half a carbon atom in their brain knows it makes no difference that McCain and Palin threw in lame promises to develop wind and solar power. You did not hear, "Blow, baby, blow," or "Let the sun shine in." The looting was on in the Republican ghetto that has told the world for eight years, "Burn, baby, burn."

Most notably, McCain wants 45 new nuclear power plants by 2030. Put aside the obvious fact that no one wants nuclear waste in their backyard. The currently planned national dump in Nevada, Yucca Mountain, is nowhere close to opening because of opposition led by Senate majority leader Harry Reid.

Whatever energy relief could come from nuclear generation, the cost is a mushroom cloud. The Department of Energy recently announced that the estimated cost of dealing with the waste of existing nuclear power plants has risen in the last seven years from a prior guess of $57.5 billion to $96.2 billion. In trying to put his best face on this recalculation, Ward Sproat, the department's civilian nuclear waste director, said, "It's not all taxpayer money." He said 80 percent of the cost will come from nuclear ratepayers. "I would argue pretty strenuously the cost of doing nothing is a lot higher."

Asked whether a surge in new plants would require a new repository, Sproat said, "If there's a major nuclear renaissance with a very large number - you know, a large number of new plants in the future, the second repository may - and I'm underlining the word 'may' - be needed."

The cost of plants is even more of a plume, for both taxpayers and ratepayers. Last week for example, Progress Energy Florida announced a proposed rate increase of 31 percent, in part to pay for two new nuclear reactors, which will cost an estimated $17 billion. The Orlando Sentinel reported that the nuclear project is "an enormous investment likely to bring annual rate hikes for nearly a decade." Florida Power & Light followed up this week with a proposed 7 percent increase, also in part because of expansion and construction of nuclear plants.

The Wall Street Journal has reported that the estimated cost of nuclear reactors has doubled, tripled, or quadrupled in recent years to an average ranging between $5 billion to $12 billion per plant. It quoted an official of Moody's Investors Service as saying such costs "have blown by our highest estimate." According to the Chicago Tribune, Moody's likens the underestimating of nuclear plant costs by utilities to pricing a house without the appliances, furnishings, and landscaping.

The only way to furnish this empty house is through massive taxpayer subsidies. The once-moribund US nuclear industry has been reenergized from $13 billion in federal subsidies and $20.5 billion in loan guarantees in recent years. But the industry wanted $50 billion in guarantees. That ought to be a sign of the risk, let alone the waste. America's ghettos never recovered from "Burn, baby, burn." Between "Drill, baby drill" and "Nuke, baby nuke," earth faces a riot on resources from which the planet may never recover.


Obama responds to science questions