Belgium Joins the Nuclear de-Renaissance

The move away from nuclear power in Europe is becoming a stampede.  According to Reuters, the Belgians are now on the bandwagon, with plans for shutting down the country’s last reactors in 2025.  The news comes as no surprise, as the anti-nukers in Belgium have had the upper hand for some time.  However, the agreement reached by the country’s political parties has been made ”conditional” on whether the energy deficit can be made up by renewable sources.  Since Belgium currently gets about 55 percent of its power from nuclear, the chances of that appear slim.  It’ s more likely that baseload power deficits will be made up with coal and gas plants that emit tons of carbon and, in the case of coal, represent a greater radioactive hazard than nuclear because of the uranium and thorium they spew into the atmosphere.  No matter.  Since Fukushima global warming hysteria is passé and anti-nuclear hysteria is back in fashion again for the professional saviors of the world.

It will be interesting to see how all this turns out in the long run.  In the short term it will certainly be a boon to China and India.  They will continue to expand their nuclear capacity and their lead in advanced nuclear technology, with a windfall of cheaper fuel thanks to Western anti-nuclear activism.  By the time the Europeans come back to the real world and finally realize that renewables aren’t going to cover all their energy needs, they will likely be forced to fall back on increasingly expensive and heavily polluting fossil fuels.  Germany is already building significant new coal-fired capacity.

Of course, we may be dealt a wild card if one of the longshot schemes for taming fusion on the cheap actually works.  The odds look long at the moment, though.  We’re hearing nothing but a stoney silence from the National Ignition Facility, which bodes ill for what seems to be the world’s last best hope to perfect inertial confinement fusion.  Things don’t look much better at ITER, the flagship facility for magnetic fusion, the other mainstream approach.  There are no plans to even fuel the facility before 2028.

Of Ingroups, Outgroups, and Global Climate Change

As I pointed out in my last post, “The outgroup have ye always with you.” Of all the very good reasons for mankind to give up the cobbling together of new moral systems once and for all, it’s probably the best. It’s more likely you’ll find a unicorn browsing in your back yard than one of the pathologically pious among us suffused with the milk of human kindness. One typically finds them in their “ground state,” frothing at the the mouth with virtuous indignation over the latest sins of their preferred outgroup.

So it is with Eugene Robinson, one of their number who happens to pen an occasional column in the Washington Post. He recently delivered himself of some observations concerning the phenomenon of global warming. As anyone who hasn’t been asleep for the last decade will be aware, no branch of the sciences has been more afflicted of late by the attentions of the professionally righteous than climatology. Robinson gives us a good example of how the neat separation of climate scientists into good guys and bad guys works in practice.

Hero of his piece is one Richard Muller, a physicist at the University of California at Berkeley who, we learn, once dismissed “climate alarmism” as “shoddy science.” Not to worry. Though once lost, he is now found, and though once blind, he now sees. It turns out the scales fell from his eyes after he “launched his own comprehensive study (referred to as the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature, or BEST, study, ed.) to set the record straight,” and discovered that, lo and behold, “Global warming is real.” Well, perhaps it is and perhaps it isn’t. I happen to believe that the arguments as to why it should be real are plausible enough, but that’s beside the point as far as this post is concerned.

What is to the point is Robinson’s reaction to all this. For him, Muller’s study isn’t just another batch of data points relating to a very complex scientific issue. For him, global warming is an absolute and incontrovertable certainty, because it represents the “good.” Muller’s study is, therefore, not just a scientific study, but a victory in the eternal battle of good versus evil. In Robinson’s own words,

For the clueless or cynical diehards who deny global warming, it’s getting awfully cold out there.

Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann and the rest of the neo-Luddites who are turning the GOP into the anti-science party should pay attention.

But Muller’s plain-spoken admonition that “you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer,” has reduced many deniers to incoherent grumbling or stunned silence.

and so on. As it happens, not all of the “skeptics” have been reduced to incoherent grumbling or stunned silence. Take, for example, Judith Curry, a distinguished climate researcher and Chair of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. She was actually a member of Muller’s team, and so is presumably familiar with the copious data Robinson was so enthused about. However, in an interview for the Daily Mail, Curry accuses Muller of “trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has stopped.” She also says that, “Prof. Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis,” and goes so far as to compare the affair to “Climategate.” This is strong stuff, but Prof. Curry has the goods. She notes that, in carefully sifting through, as Robinson informs us, “1.6 billion records,” Muller somehow failed to mention that, according to BEST’s own data, “there has been no significant increase in world temperatures since the end of the 90′s.” The following two graphs from the website of the Global Warming Policy Foundation summarize that data:

Source: Global Warming Policy Foundation

It would seem that the good Prof. Muller, who had much to say about the first graph, complete with “hockey stick,” somehow forgot to mention the data in the second. In fact, as Prof. Curry put it, “…in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected sceptics’ arguments were now taking them much more seriously.”

The Daily Mail article contains much else in the way of less than pleased reactions by a number of other climatologists at what was apparently a premature release of the BEST data before the peer review process was complete. Of course, all this fits very ill with the lurid picture of good triumphing over evil painted for us by Mr. Robinson. Predictably, while he was apparently observant enough to turn up any number of “grumbling and stunned” warming deniers, when it came to Prof. Curry and her equally chagrined colleagues, he didn’t notice a thing.

It should come as no surprise. Mr. Curry is merely acting as one might expect of a member of a species endowed with certain innate behavioral characteristics. Some of those traits give rise to what is commonly referred to as moral behavior, and none of us are free of their emotional grip. That’s why Hollywood still makes movies about good guys and bad guys. It is our subjective nature to perceive sublime good, but the yin of sublime good cannot exist without the yang of despicable evil. Every ingroup implies an outgroup. There is little we can do to change our nature, and we would probably be unwise to try given our current intellectual endowments. We can, however, while accepting it for what it is, seek to find ways of channeling its expression in ways less destructive than we have experienced in the past. At the very least we need to understand it and develop an awareness of how it affects our behavior. The results of failing to do so in the past have been destructive enough, and have certainly made a hash of the science of climatology. The results of failing to do so in the future are unlikely to be any more encouraging.

The Great Heisenberg Uncertainty

Few of the great scientific principles have been more abused than that of the famous German physicist, Werner Heisenberg.  Known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, it states that no pair of certain physical quantities, such as position and momentum, can both be known at the same time with a precision greater than a certain very small number.  It was one of the great discoveries in quantum mechanics in the 1920′s, a decade studded with such discoveries that resulted in the development of modern quantum theory.  Among other things, the modern theory states in mathematical terms the implications of the wave nature of both matter and energy.  That mathematics can be used to derive Heisenberg’s famous principle. 

Unfortunately, because many things in life are uncertain, the principle has been abundantly misapplied to a whole range of uncertainties to which it has no relevance whatsoever, just as the Theory of Relativity has been misapplied to a whole host of things that happen to be relative to each other in one way or another.  Some of the misapplications and misconceptions are more subtle than others.  I recently ran across an interesting one in a book entitled Swarm Intelligence, by James Kennedy and Russell Eberhart, the former a social psychologist and the latter an expert in evolutionary computation.  The book argues that “intelligent human cognition derives from the interactions of individuals in a social world and that the sociocognitive view can be effectively applied to computationally intelligent systems.”  I actually bought it to try programming a few of the computational examples contained therein, but found that it was a much a statement of ideology as of computational theory, larded with all the usual illusions to all the usual suspects among the philosophers who are currently fashionable in works of that genre.   Among other things there is a discussion on page 11 of whether such a thing as “true randomness” exists, or whether, on the contrary, in the words of the authors, “The basis of observed randomness is our incomplete knowledge of the world.  A seemingly random set of events may have a perfectly good explanation; that is, it may be perfectly compressible.” 

As you may have gathered, all this eventually relates to the question of free will, and whether the universe is truly random or “stochastic” at some level, or, on the contrary, purely deterministic.  I will not presume to answer that fascinating question here.  However, the authors appear to be of the opinion that the latter is the case.  What caught my eye was one of the arguments they used to support that point of view.  Allow me to quote them at length:

For most of the 20th century it was thought that “true” randomness existed at the subatomic level. Results from double-slit experiments and numerous thought experiments had convinced quantum physicists that subatomic entities such as photons should be conceptualized both as particles and waves. In their wave form, such objects were thought to occupy a state that was truly stochastic, a probability distribution, and their position and momentum were not fixed until they were observed. In one of the classic scientific debates of 20th-century physics, Niels Bohr argued that a particles’s state was truly, unkowably random, while Einstein argued vigorously that this must be impossible: “God does not play dice.” Until very recently, Bohr was considered the winner of the dispute, and quantum events were considered to be perhaps the only example of true stochasticity in the universe. But in 1998, physicists Duerr, Nonn, and Rempe disproved Bohr’s theorizing, which had been based on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The real source of quantum “randomness” is now believed to be the interactions or “entanglements” of particles, whose behavior is in fact deterministic.”

In fact, the paper referred to, entitled “Origin of quantum-mechanical complementarity probed by a ‘which-way’ experiment in an atom interferometer,” is an elegant piece of work, but in no way, shape or form does it demonstrate that the “real source of quantum randomness is the interactions of “entanglements” of particles, whose behavior is in fact deterministic.”  It can be found in its entirety here. The math and scientific notation are a little dense, but if you simply trust the authors of the paper on those matters, and just look at the discussion and conclusions at the end, you should be able to see without too much difficulty that it in no way has the significance that Kennedy and Eberhart assign to it.  They seem to think that it somehow represents a refutation of the Heisenberg principle.  In fact, the authors of the paper explicitly state the contrary. 

Their paper is one of the many that have sought to shed light on the famous experiment in which interference patterns are formed by particles passing through a double slit, even when single particles are passed through one at a time, defeating any attempt to explain the phenomenon based on classical (non-quantum) physics.  The question they attempt to answer is not whether the Heisenberg principle is itself valid or not, but merely whether the principle must be invoked to explain the fact that “measuring” which one of the slits each particle passes through causes the loss of the interference pattern, or, on the contrary, some other mechanism can enforce the change.  It turns out that, in fact, the Heisenberg principle is not necessary.  Which of the ”slits” (in this case the experiment is done with standing light waves rather than physical slits) each particle passes through can be measured by much more subtle means that have orders of magnitude less effect on particle momentum than would be necessary to justify invoking it.  In other words, what the authors are really saying is, not that the Heisenberg principle is wrong, or has been superceded by some new “deterministic” theory, but merely that it is not true that it must be invoked to explain “complementarity,” or the ability of quantum mechanical entities to behave as either particles or waves.

All this is very intriguing.  One wonders to what extent this meme that the experiment in question “proves” that we live in a deterministic universe is making the rounds among people who don’t actually understand its implications one way or the other.  It would hardly be the first time that authors have been cited as authorities for ideas that never appeared in their work.  To what extent do the authors of the paper realize they’ve become “famous” in this way?

And what of the great questions of free will, and whether we live in a deterministic or stochastic universe?  The world is full of people who are cocksure they know the answer.  They just don’t agree on what it is.  Alas, I fear we are not at the point at which we can really say one way or the other.  Before that can happen, it will be necessary for us to figure out the fundamental nature of all this stuff around us, and why it all exists to begin with.  We are yet far from having that knowledge, a fact that makes life that much more exciting.  There are still great new worlds for us to discover out there.

Werner Heisenberg

What is “Real Science?”

In our ideology drenched times, it’s the same thing as “good science:”  anything that happens to agree with your ideological narrative. 

Powerline just served up a typical example relating to that über-politicized topic, global warming. According to the “good scientists” at Powerline, global warming theories are all wrong because they are currently experiencing snow and cold weather in Great Britain. Quoting from the article:

It’s fun to ridicule the warmists because they are so often wrong, but their errors are in fact significant: a scientific theory that implies predictions that turn out to be wrong, is false. A principal feature of climate hysteria is its proponents’ unwillingness to be judged by the standards that govern real science.

I know of not a single reputable climate scientist who would claim their theories “imply the prediction” that localized incidences of cold weather on the planet will no longer occur. In view of the solid evidence that, overall, the planet has, indeed, been warming over the past decade, I would like to know on what evidence Powerline is basing the claim that “warmists” are “so often wrong.” It’s rather cold in the DC area today, too. Does that also “disprove” global warming?

It’s not hard to find the same phenomenon on the other side of the ideological spectrum. There we often hear the claim that theories that significant global warming will occur over, say, the next century have been “proved.” This is “good science” in the same sense as Powerline’s claims about the cold weather in Britain. In the first place, the computational models on which such claims are based are just that; models. Even the best computational models are approximations.  Computational models of climate are far from the best.  Ideally, they would need to account for billions of degrees of freedom just to model the atmosphere alone, not to mention the coupling of the atmosphere with the oceans, etc.  No computer on earth, either now or in the foreseeable future, is capable of solving such a problem without severe simplifying assumptions.  The mathematical error bars on those assumptions have never been rigorously proved.  Throw in the fact that the data is noisy and often corrupt or nonexistent, and the best models are themselves probabilistic and not deterministic, and the claim that they “prove” anything is absurd.

“Proved” is much too strong a term, but I would buy the claim that significant long term global warming is probable.  Given the fact that this is the only planet we have to live on at the moment, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me that we should be rocking the boat.  I doubt that “science” will offer any solutions, though.  The hardening of ideological dogmas on both sides won’t allow it.  Whatever decisions are finally made, they are far more likely to be based on politics than science.

More Thorium Silliness

Thorium is a promising candidate as a future source of energy.  I just wonder what it is about the stuff that inspires so many people to write nonsense about it.  It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in physics to spot the mistakes.  Most of them should be obvious to anyone who’s taken the trouble to read a high school science book.  Another piece of misinformation has just turned up at the website of Popular Mechanics, dubiously titled The Truth about Thorium and Nuclear Power.

The byline claims that, “Thorium has nearly 200 times the energy content of uranium,” a statement I will assume reflects the ignorance of the writer rather than any outright attempt to deceive. She cites physicist Carlo Rubbia as the source, but if he ever said anything of the sort, he was making some very “special” assumptions about the energy conversion process that she didn’t quite understand. I assume it must have had something to do with his insanely dangerous subcritical reactor scheme, in which case the necessary assumptions to get a factor of 200 would have necessarily been very “special” indeed. Thorium cannot sustain the nuclear chain reaction needed to produce energy on its own. It must first be transmuted to an isotope of uranium with the atomic weight of 233 (U233) by absorbing a neutron. Strictly speaking, then, the above statement is nonsense, because the “energy content” of thorium actually comes from a form of uranium, U233, which can sustain a chain reaction on its own. However, let’s be charitable and compare natural thorium and natural uranium as both come out of the ground when mined. 

As I’ve already pointed out, thorium cannot be directly used in a nuclear reactor on its own.  Natural uranium actually can.  It consists mostly of an isotope of uranium with an atomic weight of 238 (U238), but also a bit over 0.7% of a lighter isotope with an atomic weight of 235 (U235).  U238, like thorium, is unable to support a nuclear chain reaction on its own, but U235, like U233, can.  Technically speaking, what that means is that, when the nucleus of an atom of U233 or U235 absorbs a neutron, enough energy is released to cause the nucleus to split, or fission.  When U238 or natural thorium (Th232) absorbs a neutron, energy is also released, but not enough to cause fission.  Instead, they become U239 and Th233, which eventually decay to produce U233 and plutonium 239 (Pu239) respectively. 

Let’s try to compare apples and apples, and assume that enough neutrons are around to convert all the Th232 to U233, and all the U238 to Pu239.  In that case we are left with a lump of pure U233 derived from the natural thorium and a mixture of about 99.3% Pu239 and 0.7% U235 from the natural uranium.  In the first case, the fission of each atom of U233 will release, on average, 200.1 million electron volts (MeV) of energy that can potentially be converted to heat in a nuclear reactor.  In the second, each atom of U235 will release, on average, 202.5 Mev, and each atom of Pu239 211.5 Mev of energy.  In other words, the potential energy release from natural thorium is actually about equal to that of natural uranium. 

Unfortunately, the “factor of 200″ isn’t the only glaring mistake in the paper.  The author repeats the familiar yarn about how uranium was chosen over thorium for power production because it produced plutonium needed for nuclear weapons as a byproduct.  In fact, uranium would have been the obvious choice even if weapons production had not been a factor.  As pointed out earlier, natural uranium can sustain a chain reaction in a reactor on its own, and thorium can’t.  Natural uranium can be enriched in U235 to make more efficient and smaller reactors.  Thorium can’t be ”enriched” in that way at all.  Thorium breeders produce U232, a highly radioactive and dangerous isotope, which can’t be conveniently separated from U233, complicating the thorium fuel cycle.  Finally, the plutonium that comes out of nuclear reactors designed for power production, known as “reactor grade” plutonium, contains significant quantities of heavier isotopes of plutonium in addition to Pu239, making it unsuitable for weapons production.

Apparently the author gleaned some further disinformation for  Seth Grae, CEO of Lightbridge, a Virginia-based company promoting thorium power.  He supposedly told her that U233 produced in thorium breeders “fissions almost instantaneously.”  In fact, the probability that it will fission is entirely comparable to that of U235 or Pu239, and it will not fission any more “instantaneously” than other isotopes.  Why Grae felt compelled to feed her this fable is beyond me, as “instantaneous” fission isn’t necessary to prevent diversion of U233 as a weapons material.  Unlike plutonium, it can be “denatured” by mixing it with U238, from which it cannot be chemically separated.

It’s a mystery to me why so much nonsense is persistently associated with discussions of thorium, a potential source of energy that has a lot going for it.  It has several very significant advantages over the alternative uranium/plutonium breeder technology, such as not producing significant quantities of plutonium and other heavy actinides, less danger that materials produced in the fuel cycle will be diverted for weapons purposes if the technology is done right, and the ability to operate in a more easily controlled “thermal” neutron environment.  I can only suggest that people who write popular science articles about nuclear energy take the time to educate themselves about the subject.  Tried and true old textbooks like Introduction to Nuclear Engineering and Introduction to Nuclear Reactor Theory by John Lamarsh have been around for years, don’t require an advanced math background, and should be readable by any intelligent person with a high school education.

“Avatar” in Real Life: The BBC’s Uranium Fear Mongering

I give the movie Avatar two thumbs up. It was spectacular in 3-D, and had an entertaining plot featuring noble good guys (native Na’vi, stewards of the environment dedicated to serving the life spirit of their home, the moon Pandora) and evil bad guys (minions of a greedy corporation bent on interstellar vandalism in the search for the precious mineral, unobtainium.) As fiction, it’s great, but if this article about uranium mining in Arizona is any indication, one of the BBC’s reporters saw the movie one too many times. It’s more a reflection of the prevailing ideological narrative at the “objective” BBC than of the real world.

The article, entitled “’Uranium Rush’ Prompts Grand Canyon Fears,” with the signature BBC quotation marks around “Uranium Rush,” is about the possible resumption of uranium mining in Arizona. It would have been more appropriate to put the quotation marks around “Grand Canyon.” According to the article, which appears beneath a lovely picture of the canyon itself,

The Grand Canyon region in the US state of Arizona holds one of the nation’s largest concentrations of high grade uranium, the fuel for nuclear power.

In fact, there is no imminent threat that mining for uranium or any other mineral will occur within the Grand Canyon watershed, because, as the BBC article fails to mention, the entire area was removed from mineral entry by the Arizona Wilderness Act of 1984.  In fact, over 55.6% of the total area of the State of Arizona is already withdrawn from mineral exploration and mining.
The article continues,

The US government is currently weighing the costs and benefits of mining, with Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva proposing a ban on mining near the Grand Canyon.

Again, the Beeb is playing fast and loose with the truth. The key word here is “near.” At issue is mining in the Arizona strip near the northern border of the state. The “evil corporation” is the Denison Mines Corporation of Canada, operator of the Arizona 1 mine about 45 miles southwest of the city of Fredonia. You can see exactly what is meant by “near” by starting at this satellite view of the mine location and zooming out until you see the canyon to the south. The “Na’vi” are the Native Americans in the region. According to the article,

…Native American populations living near uranium mines fear exploration could contaminate their drinking water.

Unsurprisingly, the article fails to mention any credible basis for this fear. In fact, as noted in this report, the uranium deposits in the area are in breccia pipes a few hundred feet below the surface and generally about 1,000 feet above the local aquifer. The deposits and the aquifer are separated by the impermeable Supai formation. Hence there is little chance of the water being contaminated. There is little danger of runoff, because the region is in a desert, and the mining property is contained in a lined pond.

The article continues,

On a recent trip into the mine, none of the miners wore masks, and their hands and face were caked with uranium ore. “It washes off,” miner Cody Behuden, 28, told the BBC while licking his ore-caked lips.
Vice-president of US operations Harold Roberts said the miners were under no danger from ingesting uranium.

The implication here, of course, is that there really is a danger from ingesting uranium, and the “evil corporation” doesn’t care. In fact, there is credible evidence that uranium miners can suffer a high incidence of lung cancer from inhaling radon gas. There is very little that demonstrates a correlation between “ingesting” the ore and cancer or any other illness. I am certainly willing to believe that conditions in the mine are dangerous if any credible evidence to that effect is forthcoming. If the BBC has something more convincing than innuendo to make the case, let’s see it. The article continues,

Dr Lee Grier, a biologist at University of California at Riverside, said exposure to uranium can be harmful, and the Navajo Native American reservation nearby is still is grappling with contamination from previous uranium mining and milling done by other companies. Those companies now no longer exist.
“The danger with long term exposure is that people breathe it, ingest it or it seeps through the skin,” he said. “These particles start bombarding tissues and cause wild uncontrolled cell growth like cancer.”

In fact, the local Indians are under no danger of contamination, because the ore will be removed and taken out of state to be milled. However, let’s assume the “evil corporation” ignores our environmental laws and allows some uranium to escape into the environment in Utah where the milling operations will actually take place. What would the radioactive hazard be compared to the alternative? In the US, the alternative is coal, and the radioactive hazard of burning it, without even taking the risk of global warming and cancer causing particulates into account, is vastly greater than the risk of mining uranium. Every year a typical coal plant releases several tons of uranium and thorium, which are natural contaminants of coal, into the atmosphere in the form of particulates, highly dangerous because they are breathed in, coming directly into contact with sensitive lung tissue. Special scrubbers can be used to remove some of this, but in that case the captured ash will be radioactive, just like the uranium mill tailings, and will represent a comparable hazard. Are we to prefer solar or wind energy? They come with their own environmental hazards, such as heavy metal contamination and destruction of the fragile desert environments that would be ideal locations for them. They also don’t work if the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. How are we to make up the slack when they are off line?

The article continues:

The waste from the milling process is 80% more radioactive than yellow cake and has a half-life of 4.7 billion years. Thousands of tonnes of waste are buried in containers lined with 60mm (2.4in) of plastic.

Here, the author simply has no clue what she is talking about. 80% more radioactive than yellow cake? But isn’t yellow cake a uranium compound, and isn’t the ore radioactive to begin with because of the presence of a fraction of one percent of uranium? Yellow cake is more than half pure uranium by weight, and most of the uranium will have been extracted from the waste. How, then, could it conceivably be 80% more radioactive than yellow cake? Presumably by 4.7 billion years she means the half life of uranium 238, which is actually somewhat less than that, but if she’s talking about uranium, how could it be 80% more radioactive than uranium? The sentence is incomprehensible as it stands.

Of course, there is always a “theoretical risk” of anything one could name, and, sure enough,

“Theoretically uranium could get into the water supply,” said Andrea Alpine, senior adviser on the USGS uranium project.

It’s not only “theoretical,” but a fact that natural uranium gets into our food and water regardless, and we each ingest a microgram or two of the stuff every day. What the article fails to describe is a credible explanation of how significant amounts of uranium over and above this natural average would contaminate anyone’s water supply from the Denison mine, and what the risk of such a thing happening really is. The article continues,

When uranium comes into contact with oxygen it becomes soluble in water, which increases the chance of contamination. Radioactive dust can also be blown away by the wind or washed away by rain. This is what Carletta Tilousi of the Havasupai Indian tribe fears most. The Havasupai live on the bottom of the Grand Canyon and derive water from the rim.

What the author means by this is anybody’s guess. Uranium mined in Arizona usually comes in the form of U3O8, an oxide of uranium which has a very low solubility in water, and does not become more soluble on exposure to air. Possibly she’s talking about leaching operations, in which uranium compounds can be made more soluble by introducing oxygen into the leaching liquid. It really makes very little difference. Anti-nuclear ideologues often emphasize the solubility of uranium if it’s a question of telling scary stories about ground water contamination, but can make it insoluble with a wave of their magic wands if they prefer scary stories that require it to stay in place, as in contamination of small geographic locations or organs in the body. Once again, of course, the mine is not in the Grand Canyon watershed. We are not enlightened about why the Havasupai should, nevertheless, be afraid of water washing over the rim.

The article concludes with a perfect “Avatar” ending,

“Mining companies are pursuing uranium for their own profit,” she said. “But the only benefit that we are going to get is a source of contamination. We are concerned about the future of our children, that’s why we fight this.”

Apparently the Beeb is no longer worried that the future of our children is threatened by the emission of greenhouse gases that happen not to come from nuclear plants. I will await with interest their explanation of why they have become global warming deniers.

Stephen Hawking’s Issues with God

According to Reuters, theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking has deigned to inform the rest of us that it’s OK to be an infidel because, according to the most up-to-date physics models of the universe, God isn’t necessary:

In “The Grand Design,” co-authored with U.S. physicist Leonard Mlodinow, Hawking says a new series of theories made a creator of the universe redundant, according to the Times newspaper which published extracts on Thursday.

“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist,” Hawking writes.

Hawking’s latest won’t be released until tomorrow, and I hesitate to commence panning him until I’ve read it, but this story smacks of a well-managed publicity stunt. In the first place, it’s a virtual carbon copy of the great urban myth about the exchange between the great French mathematician, Laplace, and Napoleon (hattip Wiki):

Laplace went in state to Napoleon to accept a copy of his work, and the following account of the interview is well authenticated, and so characteristic of all the parties concerned that I quote it in full. Someone had told Napoleon that the book contained no mention of the name of God; Napoleon, who was fond of putting embarrassing questions, received it with the remark, ‘M. Laplace, they tell me you have written this large book on the system of the universe, and have never even mentioned its Creator.’ Laplace, who, though the most supple of politicians, was as stiff as a martyr on every point of his philosophy, drew himself up and answered bluntly, ‘Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.’ (“I had no need of that hypothesis.”) Napoleon, greatly amused, told this reply to Lagrange, who exclaimed, ‘Ah! c’est une belle hypothèse; ça explique beaucoup de choses.’ (“Ah, it is a fine hypothesis; it explains many things.”)

Well, it’s not really that well authenticated, but it still captures the substance of Laplace’s thought on the subject accurately enough.  In the second place, if that’s really all Hawking’s got, he was beaten to the punch by the brilliant Frenchman Jean Meslier in his Testament by more than 250 years:

Is it not more natural and more intelligible to deduce all which exists, from the bosom of matter, whose existence is demonstrated by all our senses, whose effects we feel at every moment, which we see act, move, communicate, motion, and constantly bring living things into existence, than to attribute the formation of things to an unknown force, to a spiritual being, who cannot draw from his ground that which he has not himself, and who, by the spiritual essence claimed for him, is incapable of making anything, and putting anything in motion.

Indeed, all of the best arguments of the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris, appear in Meslier’s work, along with much else besides.  As an infidel myself, I fail to see what, if anything, Hawking is contributing to the discussion, assuming he’s being quoted accurately.  After all, how do physical laws prove anything?  Laws can have no disembodied existence of their own, floating around in nothingness.  If they don’t apply to any real thing, then they cease to exist themselves.  If they do apply to something real, it still begs the question, why do the real thing(s) exist to begin with?  We’re still left to wonder, “How did all this stuff get here?”

Earthlike Worlds…

The Kepler Mission has now identified more than 700 suspected new planets, some of them earthlike, in interstellar space.  As Insty would say, “faster please.” We should be searching for life forms on earth that are most likely to survive on these worlds and working on the technology to get them there as quickly as possible. At first these will be limited to single celled or simple multi-celled species that are small enough to accelerate to the speeds necessary for interstellar travel. While we’re doing that, we can work on the nano-technology required to self-assemble human nurseries on alien worlds capable of nurturing single human cells through birth to adulthood. The energy cost of sending fully developed human beings is prohibitive, and probably impossible at the moment. However, the technology required to send single living cells is within our grasp.

Every other challenge we face and all the great political, religious, and ideological issues that have captured our imaginations and whipped us into self-destructive frenzies since the dawn of human existence pale in significance compared to the ultimate challenge of carrying life into interstellar space.  Unless we meet the challenge, all our pompous babbling about morality and ethics will be as meaningless as the life of a soap bubble.  There can be nothing more immoral than failing to survive.

Darwin’s “Origin of Species”: A Book Review in 1860

Charles Darwin

I like to read old periodicals. They may have their own spin, but it has the virtue of being different from the all-too-familiar spin of today. Reading them also gives you a certain smug sense of superiority, because you know how things turned out. Many of them are well written and entertaining, and the authors are much more likely to tell you things you don’t already know than today’s lot. Occasionally, you run across some remarkable stuff.

For example, a couple of days ago I was reading through a volume of the Edinburgh Review for 1859 and 1860. The Edinburgh was one of the two great British literary, scientific, and political reviews of the first half of the 19th century, representing the Whig point of view along with its alter ego, the Tory Quarterly Review. The volume in question had interesting pieces on the state of the British navy (Britain was heading towards catastrophe), memoirs of George IV (you remember him, don’t you), and a comparison of the burden British and American taxation (we got off lightly but had the unfair advantage of no national debt). Then I ran into something that really caught my eye; a book review of Darwin’s “Origin of Species,” written for the April, 1860 issue, and appearing less than half a year after the book was published in November, 1859.

The review was obviously written by someone with expertise in the subject.  He was familiar with the developments and major players in the field.  Did he wonder at the revolutionary implications of the new theory?  No.  Did he applaud Darwin for the immense array of facts and personal observations he cited in support of natural selection?  No.  Did he congratulate the author on his elegant solution of problem that had puzzled generations of scientists for centuries?  Again, no.  He panned the book.

Here are some examples of the anonymous reviewer’s take on what we now know as one of the most remarkable and significant theories of all times.

…several, and perhaps the majority, of our younger naturalists have been seduced into the acceptance of the homoeopathic of the transmutative hypothesis now presented to them by Mr. Darwin, under the phrase of “natural selection.”

and, after citing a few passages in the book,

These are the most important original observations, recorded in the volume of 1859: they are, in our estimation, its real gems, – few indeed and far apart, and leaving determination of the origin of species very nearly where the author found it. (!)

Is it to be endured that every observer who points out a case to which transmutation (Darwin’s theory), under whatever term disguised, is inapplicable, is to be set down by the refuted theorist as a believer in a mode of manufacturing a species, which he never did believe in, and which may be inconceivable?

The reviewer “refutes” Darwin’s theory by pointing out that the simplest possible life forms are still on the planet, and thus could not have been the primordial life form suggested in his theory, e.g.,

…if its nature (the primordial life form) is not to be left wholly to the unregulated fancies of dreamy speculation – we should say that the form and comdition of life which are common, at one period of existence to every known kind and grade of organism, would be the only conceivable form and condition of the one primorial being from which “Natural Selection” infers that all the organisms which have ever lived on this earth have descended. Now the form in question is the nucleated cell.

Of course, we now know that these “simple,” one-celled, nucleated life forms are incredibly complex, and poor candidates indeed for a “primordial life form.”  No matter, the reviewer proclaims that, because this “simplest possible life form,” than which only “the unregulated fancies of dreamy speculation” could come up with a simpler, has not only not evolved into something more complex, but is indeed one of the dominant life forms on the planet, Darwin must be mistaken:

But do the facts of actual organic nature square with the Darwinian hypothesis? Are all the recognised organic forms of the present date, so differentiated, so complex, so superior to conceivable primordial simplicity of form and structure, as to testify to the effects of Natural Selection continuously operating through untold time? Unquestionably not. The most numerous living beings now on the globe are precisely those which offer such a simplicity of form and structure , as best agrees, and we take leave to affirm can only agree, with that ideal prototype from which, by any hypothesis of natural law, the series of vegetable and animal life might have diverged.

In a word, while it is clear from the review that the author is what passed for an expert in the field in those days, he was utterly lacking in imagination.  He couldn’t conceive of anything “simpler” than the single-celled life forms described by the microscopists of his day. 

On the strength of his non-argument, the reviewer trimphantly concludes,

Such are the signs of defective information which contribute, almost at each chapter, to check our confidence in the teachings and advocacy of the hypothesis of “Natural Selection.”

Noting the argument that, after all, changes in species had been observed in the fossil record, even in his day, the reviewer grasps at another straw;

But here lies the fallacy: it merely proves that species are changed, it gives us no evidence as to the mode of change; transmutation, gradual or abrupt, is in this case, mere assumption.

I suspect the learned author would have changed his tune had he been able to peruse Gregor Mendel’s famous paper.  Not unexpectedly, given his own apparent knowledge of previous work in the field, the author takes umbrage at the fact that Darwin hasn’t devoted enough attention to competing theories.  One such author, whose work is frequently cited as “refuting” Darwin in the article, is Richard Owen, a famous biologist and palaeontologist of the time.  For example,

We are aware that Professor Owen and others, who have more especially studied the recently discovered astounding phenomena of generation summed up under the terms Parthenogenesis and Alternation of Generations, have pronounced against those phenomena having, as yet, helped us “to penetrate the mystery of the origin of different species of animals,” and have affirmed, at least so far as observation has yet extended, that “the cycle of changes is definitely closed…”

Now, in those days, it was the fashion for the writers of reviews to remain anonymous.  Of course, it is hardly to be expected that Darwin’s biographers would have failed to notice a piece as significant as the one addressed here.  In fact, they did not fail to notice it, and, in the fullness of time, they managed to identify the anonymous author.  It was none other than Professor Owen himself!  It appears the learned professor was not at all pleased by being upstaged by an upstart like Darwin, and conceived a life-long hatred for him.

Darwin was lucky.  His theory was too compelling to be dismissed with a wave of the hand by stalwarts of the scientific establishment like Owen.  However, he represents a phenomena that has hardly disappeared in our own day.  An interesting manifestation thereof closer to our own time was the furious reaction of the prevailing experts to the announcement of cold fusion.  In that case, the result was different.  Intriguing hints of some as yet unknown nuclear process were reported from all over the world – but the experiments weren’t repeatable.  The old guard won.  Or at least they won for the time being.  Experiments continue beneath the radar of “those who know better” in the field, and new intriguing hints continue to turn up.  It may well be the cold fusion crowd has been chasing a chimera all these years.  On the other hand, there’s a finite chance that the last word has still not been spoken on the legacy of Pons and Fleischman.

I suppose the moral of the story is that it’s a good idea to keep an open mind.  Occasionally it turns out that the upstarts were right all along.

Update: Anne Sasso has some interesting thoughts on the reaction of the scientific establishment to game-changing new insights and theories at the Science Magazine website.

You should Decide to Read this Book: “How We Decide,” by Jonah Lehrer

I find some of the books that are being published these days mind-boggling. “How We Decide,” by Jonah Lehrer, is one of them. Perhaps it’s not really the book that’s mind-boggling, fascinating as it is. What’s really astounding is the public reception it’s received. Consider, for example, its review in the New York Times. It’s positive, even enthusiastic, cites a few interesting tidbits from the book, and then closes with some suggestions about questions Lehrer might take up in future works. The astounding thing is that there is no allusion whatsoever to matters of political correctness, no suggestion that the author is a minion of fascism, no dark hints that his conclusions border on racism, and no tut-tutting about his general lack of moral uprightness.

All this is mind-boggling because it attests to a sea change in public attitudes, to a transformational change in the way certain seemingly obvious truths are received. Changes like that don’t happen over years. It takes decades, and I suspect you have to be around for decades yourself to notice them. Underlying every anecdote, every example, and every assertion in the book is the tacit assumption that our behavior, outside of such fundamental traits as hunger and sexual desire, is not just an artifact of our environment, a reflection of our culture, imprinted on minds of almost unlimited malleability. Rather, its underlying theme is that much of our behavior is conditioned by innate characteristics hard-wired in the circuitry of our brains. Forty or fifty years ago, many books with a similar theme were published by the likes of Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and Robert Ardrey. Inevitably, whenever a new one turned up, secular religious fanatics of the Marxist and related schools began frothing at the mouth. Their authors were demonized and denounced as perpetrators of every sort of evil and immorality. Any suggestion that certain aspects of human nature were innate posed a threat to their plans to create an earthly paradise for us, and then “re-educate” us to like it. In a word, it threatened the whole concept of the “New Soviet Man.” They became just as furious as any fundamentalist Christian at the suggestion that the earth is more than 7,000 years old. Richard Dawkins has done a particularly able job of dissecting one of the literary artifacts of this school of thought, “Not in our Genes,” by R. Lewontin, et. al., demonstrating his virtuosity at dissecting secular as well as traditional religions.

Secular religions have certain disadvantages not shared by the more traditional, “spiritual” varieties. For example, they promise heaven in this life instead of the next, and so are subject to fact-checking. The history of the Soviet Union is a case in point. They are also more vulnerable to demonstrable scientific facts, because they cannot point to a superhuman authority with the power to veto common sense, and they typically claim to be “scientific” themselves. All of these have contributed to the sea change in attitudes I refer to, but I suspect the great scientific advances of recent years in neuroscience and evolutionary psychology have played the most decisive role. Many of those advances have been enabled by sophisticated scanning devices, with which we can now peer deep into the brain and watch its workings in real time down to the molecular level. Lehrer cites many examples in his book. The facts are there, in the form of repeatable experiments. Lehrer cites the evidence, treating the innate in human behavior, not as a heresy, but as a commonplace, obvious on the face of it. I can but wonder at how rapidly the transformation has taken place.

“How We Decide” is a pleasure to read, and it will surely make you think. I found the chapter on “The Moral Mind” particularly interesting. Among other things, it demonstrates the absurdity of the misperception, shared by so many otherwise highly intelligent people from ancient to modern times, that we will not act morally unless we have some rational reason for doing so, such as the dictates of a God, or the systems of philosophers. As Lehrer puts it,

Religious believers assume that God invented the moral code. It was given to Moses on Mount Sinai, a list of imperatives inscribed in stone. (As Dostoyevsky put it, “If there is no God, then we are lost in a moral chaos. Everything is permitted.”) But this cultural narrative gets the causality backward. Moral emotions existed long before Moses.

Lehrer also cites some of the many great thinkers who have, throughout our history, drawn attention to the remarkable similarities in our moral behavior that transcend culture, and came to the common conclusion that there was something innate about morality. For example, quoting from the book,

Although (Adam) Smith is best known for his economic treatise “The Wealth of Nations,” he was most proud of “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” his sprawling investigation into the psychology of morality. Like his friend David Hume, Smith was convinced that our moral decisions were shaped by our emotional instincts. People were good for essentially irrational reasons.

What Smith and Hume couldn’t know was how morality is innate, or why. Now, as Lehrer shows us, we are finally beginning to find out.

Do yourself a favor and read the book.