Category Archives: Soapbox

War and peace

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The recent negotiations with Iran have brought nuclear weapons back into the forefront of the public’s consciousness, if they ever left it.  This leads to some misplaced sentiments about nuclear energy due to the closely linked history and science of nuclear technology for war and peace.  There is no doubt that nuclear bombs are terrible weapons of mass destruction but so are certain chemical agents and yet there is not the same level of public and political angst about building chemical plants as there is over nuclear power stations.  The civil chemical and nuclear industries are both strictly regulated but the chemical industry has had some horrific accidents, such as at Bhopal, India in 1984 where 8000 people were killed when a pesticide plant leaked toxic gas, or more recently in the US when a fertilizer plant in West, Texas exploded killing 15 people and levelling hundreds of homes.  These incidents are not well-known outside of the engineering industry whereas by contrast the nuclear industry has had a small number of very well-publicized accidents that have killed very few people, or no one in the case of the recent accident at Fukushima.

People will argue that I am ignoring the long-term effects of exposure to radiation so it is appropriate to examine the evidence.  The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed an estimated 130,000 people, mainly due to the blast rather than radiation, while a long-term study of survivors within 10 kilometres of the explosions has found increased incidents of cancer arising from radiation exposure.  Following the Chernobyl accident in 1986, 240,000 workers were exposed to radiation levels higher than 100 millisieverts and 28 died from acute radiation sickness (ARS) that year.  The World Health Organisation estimates that about 4000 of these workers will die from cancer as a consequence of their radiation exposure about another 9000 amongst the exposed population in Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine.  These are large numbers but represent only about a 1% of the total number of cancer deaths in these populations from other causes, for instance smoking caused about 294,000 deaths in the roughly the same twenty years in Belarus.

It’s time we decoupled the use of nuclear technology in war and peace.  We don’t handicap other technologies used in war and peace with the same indistinguishable associations.  We use fossil fuels to power tanks, jet-fighters and warships and then burn so much of it for peaceful purposes that 1.2 million people died prematurely last year from the pollution it generated [see my post entitled ‘Year of Air: 2013’ on 20th November, 2013].

Sources:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/december/3/newsid_2698000/2698709.stm

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/01/obama-chemical-plants_n_3688272.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/august/6/newsid_3602000/3602189.stm

http://www.rerf.jp/glossary_e/lss.htm

Little, M., 2009, Cancer and non-cancer effects in Japanese atomic bomb survivors, Journal of Radiological Protection, 29(2A):A43-59. http://iopscience.iop.org/0952-4746/29/2A/S04;jsessionid=7838AA7D498065F13C23094F1D01DBBA.c3

Cardis. E., et al., 2006, Concer consequences of the Chernobyl accident: 20 years on, Journal of Radiological Protection, 26:127-140. http://iopscience.iop.org/0952-4746/26/2/001/pdf/0952-4746_26_2_001.pdf

http://www.ctsu.ox.ac.uk/research/mega-studies/mortality-from-smoking-in-developed-countries-1950-2010/mortality-from-smoking-in-developed-countries-1950-2010/view

 

 

Productive cheating?

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I cut out a Dilbert cartoon from the New York Times a few weeks ago that I found amusing and shared it with my new Head of School.  Dilbert informs his boss that he will be taking advantage of the new unlimited vacation policy by being away for 200 days in the coming year but will still double his productivity.  His boss replies that there is no way to measure productivity for engineers.

Of course, bosses are very interested in measuring productivity and marketing executives like to brag about the productivity or efficiency of whatever it is they are selling.  Engineers know that it is easy to cheat on measures of productivity and efficiency, for instance, by carefully drawing the boundaries of the system to exclude some inputs or some wasteful outputs [see my post on ‘Drawing Boundaries’ on December 19th, 2012 ].  So claims of productivity or efficiency that sound too good to be true probably aren’t what they seem.

Also in the New York Times [on October 15th, 2013] Mark Bittman discussed the productivity of the two food production systems found in the world, i.e. industrial agriculture and one based on small landholders, what the ETC group refers to as peasant food webs.  He reports that the industrial food chain uses 70% of agricultural resources to provide 30% of the world’s food while peasant farming produces the remaining 70% with 30% of the resources.  The issue is not that industrial agriculture’s claims for productivity in terms of yields per acre are wrong but that the industry measures the wrong quantity.  Efficiency is defined as desired output divided by required input [see my post entitled ‘National efficiency‘ on May 29th, 2013].  In this case the required output is people fed not crop yield and a huge percentage of the yield from industrial agriculture never makes to people’s mouths [see my post entitled ‘Food waste’ on January 23rd, 2013].

Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/15/opinion/how-to-feed-the-world.html?ref=markbittman&_r=0

http://www.etcgroup.org/content/poster-who-will-feed-us-industrial-food-chain-or-peasant-food-webs

Year of Air: 2013

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I mentioned some time ago (Noise Transfer on 3rd April, 2013) that we are privileged to have magnificent views of the river and hills beyond from our city centre house.  From the back bedroom window you can just about see the sea and we are certainly aware of it in most days due to the almost constant sea breeze (or gale).  So despite living in a city centre we are not amongst the 95 percent of EU city dwellers who are exposed to fine particles levels that exceed WHO guidelines.  However, the EU levels are well below those in Beijing that are 300 times the guidelines and probably comparable to those in London during the Great Smog of 1952 that caused cows to choke to death and contributed to the death of about 3000 people.  London has come a long way in the intervening 60 years with current levels of fine particles at about half the WHO guideline, which is 25 micrograms per cubic metre, whereas Beijing has recorded levels of 400. it has been estimated that 13,000 people die prematurely in the UK due to combustion related pollution compared to 1.2 million in China

In my post entitled ‘Extraordinary Technical Intelligence’ on 10th April, 2013 I wrote about the process of urbanisation and industrialisation that has been seen repeatedly across the world.  The progress of this process in a region can also be measured in the levels and type of pollution being generated.  The West has been where China is now, and where India and Africa are likely to go next.  Air pollution on this scale effects the neighbours of the polluter so we have an incentive to help alleviate the problem.  We should also feel a moral obligation because much of the pollution is associated with factories producing goods that we buy and probably don’t repair or recycle at the end their useful life [see ‘Old is Beautiful’ posted on May 1st, 2013] .  If we drew the system boundaries more appropriately then the pollution generated during the manufacture of these goods is as much our responsibility as the manufacturer’s [see my post on 19th December, 2012 about ‘Drawing Boundaries’].

This is the Year of Air, maybe it should have been called the Year of Clean Air to make it absolutely clear what it is all about, i.e. giving everyone on the planet the chance to live and breathe clean air!

BTW, a fine particle is one of diameter less than 2.5 microns or 1/30th diameter of one of your hairs.  One my PhD students is working on tracking nano-particles about a hundred times smaller as they interact with biological structures such as human cells, but that’s another story [see last week’s post].

Sources:

‘Under a Cloud’ by Pilita Clark in the Financial Times, July 13/14, 2013 [ http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/83ef4b78-eae5-11e2-9fcc-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2cgRhFXMs ].

Yim SHL and Barrett SRH. Public Health Impacts of Combustion Emissions in the United Kingdom. Environmental Science and Technology, 2012, 46 (8), pp 4291–4296.

‘Air Pollution Linked to 1.2 Million Premature Deaths in China’ by Edward Wong in the New York Times on April 1, 2013 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/world/asia/air-pollution-linked-to-1-2-million-deaths-in-china.html?_r=0

Silva, R.A., et al., 2013, Global premature mortality due to anthropogenic outdoor air pollution and the contribution of past climate change, Environmental Research Letters, 8:034005. http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/3/034005/pdf/1748-9326_8_3_034005.pdf

Clean fossil fuel?

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The amount of energy stored in methane hydrate could be twice that of all other fossil fuel reserves based on data from the US Geological Survey, the New Scientist reported on 31st August, 2013 in an article entitled ‘Buried Treasure’.  At this point, most of you are probably wondering what methane hydrate is and where it is stored.  Microbes on the seabed eating organic matter produce methane molecules that at high pressure and low temperature combine with the water to form a hydrate, which is white crystal.  Large deposits of methane hydrate deposits are believed to lie along continental margins, mostly in ocean sediments.

Natural gas and shale gas (‘Fracking’ on August 28th, 2013) are also methane, which releases less carbon dioxide when it is burned than coal or gas and hence is regarded as cleaner.  However, methane hydrate deposits might have an additional advantage because some research has shown that the methane molecule trapped in the hydrate crystal can be replaced by a carbon dioxide one.  So we might be able to extract methane and simultaneously store carbon dioxide.  Sounds too good to be true and the second law of thermodynamics will ensure that there is a price to be paid somewhere and somehow (see post entitled ‘Sonic Screwdriver’ on April 17th, 2013 for more the 2nd law).

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21929320.800-frozen-fuel-the-giant-methane-bonanza.html

https://www.llnl.gov/str/Durham.html

http://www.jogmec.go.jp/english/oil/technology_015.html?recommend=1