Wellcome Elements – Gold Silver Copper and Tin

It’s 2012 and Hugh Aldersey-Williams and I have been co-curating another unique one night only event at the Wellcome Collection, Euston Road London on Friday 22 June 2012 from 7 – 11 pm.

If the last two metals don’t immediately ring a bell for you, then you need to know that copper and tin make bronze, the alloy of gamelans, guitar strings, church bells, gongs and singing bowls. And we make no apologies for ignoring the upcoming O******s completely.

This is to be an exploration of the science and cultural relevance of these four elements drawing on music, alchemy, mining, casting, transmutation and electrification. We have some fantastic people lined up for the night.

• Marina Warner and Vaiyu Naidu will be telling myths and stories
• Jonny Berliner will be singing song of alchemy and deception using phosphor bronze guitar strings.
• Archimedes himself will be coming up from Southampton disguised as Martin Coath to weigh crowns.
• Marcos Martinon-Torres will transmute elements before your very eyes with the help of UCL students and postdocs.
• Stain glass with the Purple of Cassius and other colloids (courtesy of Andres Tretiakov)  and gaze at the nanoparticles particles  with Szigmondy’s Ultramicroscope (courtesy of Davinder Bhachu)
• Join Ayub Hanif and the UCL Debating Society as they thrash out the pros and cons of mining for tin and copper.
• Cast pewter and see tin pest with Martin Conreen and Zoe Laughlin of the UCL Institute of Making (with help from UCL students)
• Watch Daniel Sennert prove to you that atoms exist!
• Work, shape, and mash up silver with silversmith David Clarke
• Explore animal, vegetable, and mineral electricity and smelt copper indoors with UCL students. What could possibly go wrong?
• Make silver photograms with astounding photographer Crispin Hughes.
• Bling or tat? Assay your jewellery using X-ray fluorescence in the Medicine Man gallery with historical metallurgy student Ruth Fillery-Travis and UCL students.
• Learn about metals in the Classical World with broadcaster Professor Edith Hall.
• Make silver wire with medieval jewellery specialist Jamie Hall.
• Let Andrew Szydlo take you on a dangerous tour of the these four elements
• Let the Bronzo-Dog-Doo-Dah band and their amazingly heavy bronze saxophones serenade you (thanks to Howarths of London)

If you can get through half of that and manage a drink in between you’ll be doing well.

Videos should be online at the Wellcome Collection shortly.

‘Tis the season to spell Turing!

Last year, my seven year old son got interested in the idea of codes. He heard about Alan Turing and we went to the Turing Museum at Bletchley where he read the story of the capture of an Enigma machine from a U-boat in the North Atlantic. A few days later we realized that the sailor hero of that story was still alive and living only a couple of miles from my in-laws. My son met the old man, Cammander David Balme, and had an extraordinary meeting with the history he was learning in school. It did mean that all of us read and thought about Turing quite a bit, especially as I’ve been giving a talk about chemical oscillations and waves that has slowly turned into a Turing-related talk.

So a few months ago I dropped my fellow columnist at Chemistry World, Philip Ball, a note asking whether we shouldn’t push for the magazine to do something about Turing for his centenary. Philip Broadwith, our editor, agreed and so onto the bandwagon we jumped. And with good reason as Turing is responsible for an awful lot in modern chemistry. The rise of computational chemistry is just unstoppable and the most striking indicator of how important it has become is the fact that a preliminary estimate here at UCL is that the running (and cooling) of the supercomputers here at UCL used by the materials and crystal modelling people here now use about as much electricity as the experimental people do (excluding fumehoods and ventilation). It’s a remarkable statistic which in itself is a  tribute to Turing’s prescience when he wrote about universal machines.

But Turing is also remembered, occasionally, for his paper on morphogenesis which proposed a chemical model for biological pattern formation. If you’re near Manchester then MOSI is running an exhibition called Alan Turing and Life’s Enigma that I will try to get to some time in the next few months. Turing seems to provided a key, testable proposal that really got a lot of people thinking – the idea was that cells produce signaling molecules called morphogens that act as activators or inhibitors which by diffusing through the cells of a dividing embryo in essence programme cells to diversify in particular ways.  But interestingly, there are very few verified examples of morphogens out there and some remain sceptical of Turing’s proposal, however clever and beautiful it is. Mark Miodownik and Buzz Baum, for example, here at UCL have a different hypothesis that is based on a cell-cell contact through filaments and that draws on parallels with the annealing processes in metals and materials. The end result, however, are Turing patterns.

Which is the back story to this month’s Classic Kit: Turing’s Machine.

Philip’s article is in the same issue.

Hot Hot News – Capitalism is a Scam

The Financial Times and the Stock Exchange have long been the gold standard in economic data, underpinning the belief that capitalism and free enterprise are the optimum route to personal and national enrichment. Over the years a whole industry has grown up around this project, an army of well-dressed and even better-paid experts and pundits who have been chanting the mantra of capitalism: “Invest with us and riches will be yours”. For the first time, I can reveal to you the Truth. You have been conned. It’s not true. Take at look at this Data taken from the Most Respected Source the London Stock Exchange.

Data clearly showing that the value of the FTSE All Share index has fallen between 2007 and 2012. It can only mean that Capitalism is Dead and that any gains are illusory.

What is clear is that there has been NO GROWTH or wealth creation over the past FIVE years. You have fallen victim to an economic myth promulgated by deluded fools like Keynes, Hayek, Friedman and their ilk. Meanwhile the bankers and their allies, the politicians (even some on the Left!), have been making money like weasels throughout this time.

This Key Indicator, provided by the most authoritative source in the UK (that is indisputable, n’est-ce pas?), is clear evidence that Capitalism has totally failed. It is a Religion, a Belief System, promulgated by special interests, and unsupported by Fact.

Arise ye starvelings from your slumbers. Bankers Unite. You have nothing to lose but your blinkers.

“Now the hoax is coming apart faster each day their chance for economic and financial immortality, in the way they were hoping for is gone, there are likely however to be remembered as a bunch of junk economists who made up data and fear stories for a political agenda.”

I am very grateful to The Tory Aardvark for drawing my attention to this astonishing revelation.

It’s the Demand, Stupid!

The kerfuffle in the UK this week about possible disruption to petrol supplies as a result of an industrial dispute involving tanker driver has turned into an astonishing political liability for the coalition government. In part this was because of a remarkably ill-advised comment by a government minister, Francis Maude, suggesting that car owners should keep a little stock of petrol at home, just in case. That a woman should have suffered severe burns after the petrol she was transferring, in her kitchen, caught fire, may have been coincidence but it is a reminder that not all clear and colourless liquids are alike. And that burns units are disagreeable places to have to spend time.

But to me the interesting thing is that here was an over-reaction about an energy issue that didn’t actually happen. And I think there are some very important lessons that need to be learned from this that the government needs to think through very carefully.

To me this sorry little storm is a worrying harbinger of the UK’s very real vulnerability to energy shocks. And as far as I can see, the entire discussion in the major media outlets and from the politicians was about supply and delivery. The issue of demand was seen, presumably, as irrelevant. After all, for forty years there have seldom been more than minor disruptions to supply so no one imagines that something could possibly go wrong, in spite of an increasingly volatile political situation in the Middle East.

The issue comes hard on the heels of an article in the FT two weeks ago “Fears lights will go out as power plants shut” – I won’t link to it as it’s behind the FT’s paywall. The gist of it that several coal-fired electricity plants, 11 GW worth, are due to be closed by 2015. The infamous Kingsnorth plant in Kent, for example, will close in 2013. At the same time, the relative costs of coal and gas mean that gas-fired plants are a lot less profitable than they were before the economic crisis hit, in part due the the disaster that has been the carbon trading market in the UK. In addition, wholesale gas prices for the UK, unlike the US, are linked to the world oil price  – this has soared given the uncertainty in the Middle East.  Add a lack of clarity from the government, which is mulling over changes to the electricity market, and the electricity companies have put many of their plans for power plant construction on hold. As a result of this contraction in supply some are predicting that there will be an energy “crunch” some time in the next ten years.

The extraordinary thing about the article was that there was no mention at all of the possible role of the consumers/customers, whether domestic or industrial, as if the only thing that matters in all of this is electricity generation.

As I’ve noted before, the Energy Saving Trust has been produced a report “The Elephant in the Living Room” about how domestic electricity demand is rising inexorably as we acquire more and more appliances and assume that they should be available on demand round the clock. This process they say is “ruining the green dream”.

It’s not just electricity where a crunch between supply and demand looms. Thames Water, for example, is imploring everyone not to water their garden and to go easy on water use generally, with ads sprouting on bus shelters and press releases being issued to every newspaper and new channel that will listen. The current drought may be great for cyclists but few others are celebrating. But the approach Thames Water is using is to ask consumers to take action in advance of controls being imposed.

The irony is that Thames Water keep writing to me asking me to go “paperless” so that they don’t have to send me the two sheets of paper a year that list my “estimated use” (they say they can’t install a meter in my house) for that period. To have the convenience of going paperless, of course, Thames Water need a huge datacentre dedicated to ensuring I can “keep up to date” at any time of day or night. And that applies to my bank (where it makes more sense), my gas supplier, my electricity supplier, my phone provider, my data provider and so on and so on. Each of these companies, and their competitors, has to maintain a secure datacentre. And the datacentre is just the beginning because Virgin Media or BT (or whoever) need to have servers and routers needed to keep all this going.

Add in home servers and the digital switchover and it’s not surprising that we’re heading towards an energy crunch. And that’s only electricity.

Isn’t it time that someone (i.e. the government) joined the dots between demand, energy poverty, long term strategic planning, and the UK’s increasingly weak energy position by thinking about both sides of the energy conundrum? Moderating demand has to be part of the solution.

UCL Chemistry water flow update – ups and downs

Annoyingly I pressed publish accidentally so an incomplete version may have been posted out to the few subscribers I have – apologies for wasting your time.

Time for an update on the water flow situation in our Department. In case you haven’t read previous posts on this subject, we realized two years ago that our Department was haemorrhaging water at the rate of about 170 m³ (i.e. tonnes) per day. After a major shut down we were able to identify the major water users in the Department: not the expected culprits, the “wet” (i.e. synthetic) chemists, but rather the spectroscopic chemists who use diffusion pumps. The cooling water connexions on the individual pumps were first throttled back, and then fitted with adjustable water flow controllers.

The results are pretty astonishing, as shown by the following two graphs.

Plot of total water consumed by the UCL Chemistry Department from Autumn 2010 to late winter 2012. Notice the remarkable change in slope as water consumption dropped.

The average weekly consumption showing the weekly averages following the initial throttle-back exercise in January 2011 and then the completion of water flow controller installation by Christmas of the same year. Note the drop from 170 to 90 to 45 m3.

The running averages are very striking. Simply throttling back the valves initially took us down from about 170 m³ per day to around 90 m³. Once the flow controllers went online the flow dropped to around 45 m³per day. At a time of significant drought in the South East of England that can’t be a bad thing and it’s astonishing that in previous times of drought that no one ever asked any questions.  From the point of view of the university  the financial saving is very striking – it represents a reduction of around £40,000 per year, equivalent to a staff position.

But it does raise questions. It’s clear that because of the way budgets were separated – water, heating and electricity are top-sliced out of grant overheads and the direct block grant – the Department was blissfully unaware of what was going on as no one ever saw the bill. But at the same time neither did the people running our Estate ever question the volume of water. But why should they? They had no idea of what equipment was in use, had no benchmarks, and the number was in any case probably buried as a line item in a huge total for the whole of the campus.

The whole story highlights the need for accurate data and good communications between  estate managers and academics, and one might imagine that the story would end there. But it doesn’t.

Cooling is a major issue for an active department such as ours. Apart from the fact that more and more airconditioning has been installed in offices, there is a lot of kit that disperses lots of heat – X-ray sources, for example, and of course computers and servers. It was therefore rather disappointing to discover that our estates team have, apparently, already produced a plan for the upgrade of the closed circuit water chillers on the roof of our building that serve some our needs. It is a large contract for a huge facility that will substantially improve on what we have at the moment.

But did they consult? Did they even tell us what they were thinking? Nope. Not a word. What is frustrating is that had there been consultation there could have been a more holistic approach taken that might help to solve some of the major energy-related problems with our building. Given that a large sum of money is available for this job it might have been a cunning idea to discuss with users whether upgrades or improvements to their equipment could be made that might reduce the need for overall cooling, for example. Could some of that money go into replacing diffusion pumps with turbos, thereby mitigating the problem at source? And, it might have been sensible to ask whether there was a way of diverting some of the dispersed heat back into the building in the winter time – after all everyone in our Department and in the estates management knows that when the outside temperature drops below about 10 degrees C, the internal temperature follows it. This winter my office spent about 10 days below  10 ˚C and some of our labs were little warmer.

Surely we can start looking at the big picture and think strategically about energy waste heat? Electricity analysis is on the way. And chemicals inventories too. God, is life going to be dull!Water flow update

The Voice of Kenneth Hickman

One has to marvel at the wonder of the internet. A mere 24 hours after my post about Kenneth Hickman,  Andrew Davidhazy, who worked with  Hickman more than forty years ago, has unearthed and posted to YouTube a 10 minute video of a study of thermal convection in liquids that they made together way back when.

The video is fascinating because, aside from the fact that Hickman himself is briefly visible about 2 minutes in, it provides a detailed description of the Schlieren technique that had been developed in the last century by another one of my Classic Kit heroes, August Töpler, in extraordinary his studies of shock waves.

Classic Kit – Kenneth Charles Devereux Hickman’s Molecular Alembic

A few month ago – in April in fact –  I wrote a spoof Classic Kit column about a legendary piece of kit, the Pardy Apparatus, a short path distillation device for air sensitive materials that was invented by Richard Pardy, a graduate student in Malcolm Green’s group at Oxford. It provided an opportunity for me to write something utterly ridiculous that was tempered only by the length constraints of article. The portrait was taken from an old Departmental group photo here at UCL, much to the bemusement of some of my colleagues. The diagram,  which I had hoped to scan from Pardy’s D. Phil. thesis turned out not to exist. So I simply scrawled something on a paper napkin and scanned that.  The biography of Pardy was a wild fantasy, and I am grateful to him for being such a good sport. But then, many years ago, when I met him at a party he had said that he had always dreamt of having a piece of kit named after him.

To my delight,s everal people were taken in, including a very eminent Professor here in the UK. A couple wrote in complaining that they had used similar devices long before Pardy and felt that this should be noted. Spoof article aside, they were totally correct. Short path distillation devices, also known as molecular stills, have a long and noble history, probably longer than most people imagine.

Historians have spent at least one hundred years trying to establish when alcohol was first distilled. One of the most readable and comprehensive sources is Joseph Needham’s magisterial (there is no other word) series “Science and Civilization in China”. I was incredibly fortunate last year when the widow of one of our alumni invited me to pick out books from her late husband’s collection of several thousand (!!) books. To my astonishment there were about 15 volumes of Needham there which have provided endless hours of browsing, plus innumerable references to the primary literature.

A quick and dirty scan of a mongolian still from Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China v. 5 pt. 4

It was from Needham’s five volume section on “Spagyrical Discovery” (alchemy to you and me) that I learned of the mongolian still, the way in which the horse-riders of Asia produced their hooch. The construction is very simple – the mash/beer is placed in a bowl over the fire. A second bowl is paced on a shelf above the first. And the entire assembly is enclosed by a hood which includes a third bowl, filled with cold water that acts as a condenser. The distillate drips down into the middle bowl. Needham then goes on to describe still design over the next 1500 years in loving detail more or less ending with Hickman’s still. This, Needham remarks, is a rediscovery of an ancient design.

The name, I already knew, as I had once used something like it as an undergraduate but I needed to know more. It proved easy to find his publications and patents – he was prolific throughout his career. There were also numerous references to the impact that he had made in his years at Kodak, where with the invention of his still he single-handedly made possible a whole new industry, by demonstrating that he could distil Vitamin A in excellent yield from cod liver oil.

But nowhere could I find a photograph of him or any information about his family. I feared for a while that I might be stuck in a dead end. But then I found a webpage written by Andrew Davidhazy which mentioned that Hickman had taken him on as a young apprentice to film and photograph solvent stills. I wrote to Andy and got an almost instant reply. He had spent quite a bit of time making high speed films of boiling solvents with Hickman and had fond memories of Hickman, who, he said, had been an important formative influence in his life.

Three images from a high speed camera sequence showing a boule of isopropanol breaking inside a specially designed flask of solvent. Courtesy of Andrew Davidhazy. Hickman and Davidhazy's review of the work appeared in Industrial and Engineering Chemistry, 1967. DOI: 10.1021/ie50694a008 (behind paywall)

Kenneth Hickman (l) and Andy Davidhazy (r) with the high speed camera, a photo taken in 1967.

David also sent me a couple of pictures of himself with Hickman and mentioned that he was still in touch with Hickman’s son Bryan. To my delight not only did Bryan then send me photos of his father but he also scanned three chapters of memoirs which tell the story of his university and early Kodak years. They are a complete delight and give a real insight into what an amusing raconteur Hickman must have been, but also a real sense of his manic energy and bouts of depression.

Bryan has very kindly let me post the three files below. I found them laugh out loud funny, and I hope that some of you, after reading this month’s Classic Kit column, will spend a little time leafing through these stories. They will take you back to a bygone age. For those of you who are chemists, there is plenty of chemical insanity, in these cautious times, to savour. Enjoy.

Hickman goes to College 1

Hickman goes to College 2

Hickman to America

Energy Poverty – An opportunity, surely?

I’ve hesitated for some time to post this but a couple of comments on the site have prompted me to let it into the open.

The British press has been full of self-righteous anger about energy prices.  And last weekend Prince Philip added his view that wind turbines are “completely useless”. Alongside them, government politicians have piled in, heaping opprobrium on the energy companies – EDF, nPower etc. – accusing them of price-gouging and of manipulation. “Hard-pressed families” have been made to suffer by these rapacious companies and more and more families are falling into “energy poverty”, when more than 10% of household income is spent on domestic gas and electricity. Indeed, an examination of the Crown’s accounts show that even the Queen is on the brink of falling into the camp of those in “energy poverty”.

Rather predictably the usual commentators like Christopher Booker have leapt onto the bandwagon accusing the Energy minister Chris Huhne of feckless disregard of his duty, and being in cahoots with the climate alarmists. Huhne, apparently, “fails to see the light”.

What is rather tragic is that here are a series of clear price signals – the market –  giving us good warning of where the UK’s best interest lies in the long term.  Yet the fact that they have a direct impact on individuals – particularly emotive groups like the elderly and low-income families – means  that the newspapers and pretty well every politician in the House is using this issue to seek short term advantage rather than trying to find long-term solutions.

As always no one is standing back and asking strategic questions about the UK’s future. No one seems to be asking where the energy the UK consumes is coming from and what the long-term issues might be. The answer isn’t exactly a profound revelation.  EU data suggest that oil and gas contribute about 73% of the UK’s primary energy needs. Crucially, the UK became a net energy importer in 2004 and production from the North Sea continues to fall. What we see is a steady increase in imports. So long as these come from Norway, whose interests are largely aligned with ours, there’s not so much of problem (other than making the UK rather vulnerable to fluctuations in currency exchange rates). But as with the rest of Europe we are ever more dependent on Russia to supply us with gas. Relations with Putin – now resurgent after forcing his puppet Medvedev aside – have been pretty patchy over the years, and we have seen how Russia has had little hesitation in cutting off countries in the middle of winter. It would be incredibly foolish for the UK to put itself in such a vulnerable position, espcially at a time when budgetary constraints are rapidly diminishing the UK’s influence abroad.

While there is no doubt that prices have risen in the past couple of years, the UK’s Office for National Statistics  has some rather intriguing data about energy use tucked away in its recent Factsheet on Domestic Energy Consumption: that UK energy per unit of income has dropped by about 50% since 1970.  In Britain we have enjoyed almost 40 years during which energy prices dropped as a proportion of our income. This isn’t much of a surprise – when I first visited the UK in the late 1970’s I remember people talking proudly about their new central heating – “gas fired”, they would add in restrained tones. But mostly I remember being cold, and there were coin-operated gas and electricity meters in our bedsit. We’ve come a long way since then. So if people are falling into energy poverty that is in part because our energy use has risen, though wat is interesting is that data from DECC/ONS shows that over 30 years our incomes have risen faster – we work about half as long per kWh as we did in 1970.

You may argue that I sound like Marie Antoinette suggesting that the poor just get on with it and buy expensive renewable brioches. I’m not. Quite the opposite. I am very worried that were energy prices to spike at a time of real economic hardship, the consequences for social stability could be very serious. And having grown up, just like the politicians, over half a century of extraordinarily low energy prices and general stability, it’s hard to imagine things going pear-shaped. Surely not here?

But the price of oil and gas is unlikely to drop very far in the medium term and there are Cassandras out there suggesting that instability in the Middle East – especially Iran – could cause prices per barrel to reach $200 a barrel. Are we ready for such a scenario? What proportion of the UK would end up in energy poverty then?

My point is that energy prices are an opportunity. They are telling us that if we value our independence and freedom of action we need to act decisively now. It is an issue like the pensions, easy to kick into the long grass, but that is going to stay with us, ticking away inexorably. Even if, like Delingpole and Booker, you think climate change is a sham, energy security is not. It’s very real. And energy prices are critical to social stability and cohesion.

To me the foundation stone of any long term energy policy has got to be efficiency and conservation – making sure that we don’t just disperse energy away without maximizing our return on the money we pay for it. And the only way to incentivise people to do this is to provide them with crucial domestic data so that they know just where their energy is going. Secondly, this has to be accompanied by pricing that reflects, if not all the externalities (good luck!) but at least aligns prices with our long term interests.

I have argued before that the way domestic energy is priced in essence rewards frivolous use, by having a high initial charge and then a price for higher usages that is about 2/3 lower than that. In other words, there is little incentive to use less electricity and gas. Should we then be surprised to discover that in spite of all the brave talk we should find consumption rising steadily? As the Energy Saving Trust has pointed out recently, we keep buying appliances and gadgets paying no attention to their long term energy costs. And the reason is that running costs are low enough that we don’t think about them. That doesn’t apply to cars, however, where, at least in Europe, miles per gallon are an important part of purchasing decisions.

The problem is that energy is quite different from other goods like pins, T-shirts and yogurt. Energy has got to be treated differently and pricing policy has to reflect this.  If we want to protect the poor from energy poverty then one way is to shift pricing is to reduce the cost of electricity to a low level for the first 2000 kWh, say – that’s almost two thirds of the annual domestic electricity consumption – and then raise it in a series of progressive bands beyond that. Similar considerations should apply to gas. The aim would be to make the change largely revenue neutral for the energy supply companies, and effectively neutral for low users. High users, however, would see a significant change and be incentivized to reduce their consumption. Thus gas and electricity would become like petrol where the more you use the more you pay, with no discount (unless you spend more than £60 at a nameless supermarket).

It can be argued that this means there is a cross-subsidy, since at these levels, the basic administrative cost of installation and delivery would not be covered. But since when is cross-subsidy taboo? Insurance policies are precisely that – we all pay into the fund and the unlucky few end up dipping into it. Is that cross-subsidy? Or should be just leave it all to the market and leave the elderly, the sick, and the burgled to the mercy of fate?

At the same time, not only should George Osborne not impose the 3p tax on petrol that he is wavering over, but he should reinstate the fuel escalator that was shamefully removed by Gordon Brown as his popularity waned. Yup. Prices should ratchet upwards. It would be wildly unpopular. But a small marginal tax could be used  to help fix the deficit – ironically, the UK government’s primary deficit is much worse than Italy’s, even though the national debt, at some 70% of GDP, is only two thirds that of the Italian.

In the end, price is the only thing that will determine our choices. What the popular press and some politicians want to do is to ignore the big externalities, and ignoring the fact that not taking energy policy seriously is going to significantly affect our freedoms in the medium term, either thorugh climate change or through social and political instability. The whole point of the Stern Review was to suggest that we should act now because it will be cheaper, in the same way as we should start saving for a pension as early as we can. To continue to ignore the issue will cost us dear.

Van de Graaff

It’s that time of the month when the new Classic Kit is out – this time the Van de Graaff Generator. Van de Graaff. Not Van der Graaf – that’s the rock band of blessed memory.

It’s not exactly standard chemical equipment but it’s so familiar that I figured it would be fun to do, especially as my electrochemist colleague Daren Caruana has borrowed one from physics that looks gorgeous but won’t work.

But the other reason I wanted to write about it is that I wanted to flag up the fact that electrostatics remain rather poorly understood. How on earth do you get a shock from a door knob when you walk across the carpet on a dry day. And why do powders in my dry box go so totally mad that they fly off the spatula.

The convention explanation is that it’s all to with electrons hopping but that’s always made me nervous. Surely if we keep ripping electrons out of my staticky polyester jumper eventually it’ll start falling apart. And I have a couple for over a decade with no sign of damage. I’ve talked about it a bit with Katherine Holt and Daren, both are in the electrons camp. But I find George Whitesides’ resurrection of the 1930’s theory that electrostatics is about the dissociation of water bound to surfaces,  to be very appealing. Out in the literature there have been a whole series of experiments, pro and con, that are a beautiful object lesson in how science operates. Each group has its own idea and tries to gather evidence. And the beauty is that for once it’s a scientific ding dong that doesn’t (yet) have political ramifications, so you don’t get rabid ideologists muddying the waters.

Anyway, the piece is here, and a few related demos will be on show on Spooklights night next week.

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.