Category: Science

New discoveries, the scientific method, and all matters relating to the scientific study of the physical world

Neil Salkus

I was sad to learn today that Neil Salkus – a chemistry teacher of mine in high school – recently died from liver cancer. He was certainly one of my most memorable teachers, with a great depth of knowledge and an even more notable ability to engage with his students and sustain their interest. He also had a remarkable memory for past students, and evidently stayed in touch with a good number of them after graduation.

One echo of his instructional method that endures is the way he described the Avogadro constant as six-point-ought-two-times-ten-to-the-twenty-three: an archaic phrasing which people used as shorthand to refer to his chemistry classes.

Sea-based nuclear power stations

Sea-based nuclear power stations would offer some advantages over the terrestrial sort:

For one thing, they could take advantage of two mature and well-understood technologies: light-water nuclear reactors and the construction of offshore platforms… The structures would be built in shipyards using tried-and-tested techniques and then towed several miles out to sea and moored to the sea floor…

Offshore reactors would help overcome the increasing difficulty of finding sites for new nuclear power stations. They need lots of water, so ideally should be sited beside an ocean, lake or river. Unfortunately, those are just the places where people want to live, so any such plans are likely to be fiercely opposed by locals.

Another benefit of being offshore is that the reactor could use the sea as an “infinite heat sink”… The core of the reactor, lying below the surface, could be cooled passively without relying on pumps driven by electricity, which could fail…

At the end of its service life, a floating nuclear power station could be towed to a specially equipped yard where it could be more easily dismantled and decommissioned. This is what happens to nuclear-powered ships.

The article mentions the Akademik Lomonosov, a Russian ship-based nuclear power system with an output of 70 megawatts. It uses the same kind of reactors that power the Taymyr-class icebreakers. Unfortunately, several such stations are intended to provide power for offshore oil and gas development.

The earliest floating nuclear power station went critical in 1967, inside the hull of a Liberty ship. It provided 10 megawatts to the Panama Canal Zone from 1968 to 1975.

Open thread: thorium-fueled nuclear reactors

Whenever the many problems with nuclear power are raised, there are people who suggest that everything could be fixed with a substantial technical change: moving to generation IV reactors, for instance, or the ever-elusive fusion possibility.

Another common suggestion is that using thorium for reactor fuel could limit concerns about proliferation, as well as (modest) concerns about uranium availability.

I have read a lot of contradictory things on the subject of thorium, so it seems useful to have a thread tracking information on the issue.

First Kerbal Space Program Mun return vehicle

The category ‘Geek stuff‘ doesn’t begin to cover this one. At the same time, I am grateful when ‘Bombs and rockets‘ isn’t about killing real people.

I used to take breaks from academic work by playing Starcraft II, but I haven’t loaded that game once since I got the demo and eventually the full version of Kerbal Space Program (KSP). It’s unambiguously one of my favourite games of all time. Nonetheless, there are several steep learning curves. Each stage of your development in KSP roughly approximates an area of knowledge necessary for real rocket science: maneuvering, orbital mechanics, rocket design, the understanding that a lot of your astronauts will die because of your mistakes (especially if you tinker with spaceplanes).

The full version of the game doesn’t come with a craft that has a decent chance of landing on the Mun and returning safely to Kerbin. I have modified the Kerbal X to be able to do this with amateur piloting skills.

This craft relies on a couple of plugins: MechJeb (fly to the Mun, land, and return home without using it at all for major geek points) and Kerbal Joint Reinforcement (your rocket may shake apart and explode without it).

Here it is: Modified Kerbal X with more fuel and engines and extras to help you land on the Mun (version IV)

Automation and the jobs of the future

A recent article in The Economist discussed the likely impacts of technological development on jobs, with an emphasis on which jobs are especially vulnerable to being replaced with hardware or software automation.

The article included a chart listing some of the jobs projected to be most and least vulnerable, respectively:

Probability that computerization will lead to job losses within the next two decades, 2013

Some bad news for both people working for telemarketing firms and everyone with a telephone is that the telemarketers of the future are expected to be robots.

More disruptive, in terms of people’s career planning, is the set of presently white collar jobs potentially at risk to automation: accountants and auditors, technical writers, and real estate agents are all identified as being at risk. Pharmacists can probably be added to that list.

For now, dentists, athletic trainers, and clergy remain safe from being replaced by software or robots.

Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada

Yesterday, a friend and I visited Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada, a new privately-run aquarium located beside the CN Tower in Toronto. I have uploaded some of the photos already, with more to come.

It’s certainly a spectacle, both in terms of the species on display and the layout of the facility. A big portion consists of tunnels of plexiglass through large underwater habitats, allowing visitors to see many species arrayed around them at once.

I am, however, left somewhat divided about how to feel about the place. Their website says that they have a “Comprehensive Environmental Purchasing Policy”, but it remains the case that the facility is an artificial hotspot of biodiversity, drawn together from around the world and presented for the entertainment and education of paying guests.

I’m open to the argument that people need to see nature and biodiversity in order to value them, and the aquarium does make some allusions to the harm humanity is doing to the global ocean through over-fishing, pollution, and climate change. It’s plausible that some aquarium guests will come away from the experience with a greater appreciation for marine biodiversity, and perhaps a greater willingness to play a role in protecting it.

At the same time, there is a degree to which the aquarium is nature in a box for the privileged. The habitats are full of artificial coral and kelp, and ecological themes are mentioned more than emphasized in the surrounding documentation. The “[p]olicy banning staff use of plastic water bottles on site” seems inadequate compared with the main environmental impacts of the facility, both in terms of the acquisition of so many species – some explicitly labelled as endangered – and in terms of the huge power and water usage the facility clearly requires.

The aquarium was full of beauty and biological novelty and I was grateful to go. I would encourage others to do so as well, though it is probably worth thinking about what such places imply for the human relationship with the rest of nature, as well as the contrast between the energy and expense we are willing to devote to showcasing the diversity of life, at the same time as our large-scale choices are rapidly causing that diversity to diminish in the wild.

Toronto350.org winter 2014 TGM

Tomorrow, Toronto350.org will elect its fifth executive at the termly general meeting.

The group is also likely to create its first formal committees: with divestment committees focused respectively on building student engagement and interacting with the school administration, and an institutional innovation committee focused on how the group should grow and develop its governance structure.

It’s necessary for us to create a structure that shares out work more effectively and deals with some other governance issues, but we don’t want to get stuck in a trap of spending too much of our time and our energy on internal matters, neglecting the campaigns that are the purpose of the organization.

Open thread: drilling for oil and gas in the arctic

Unfortunately, the climate-change-induced melting of the north polar icecap is making it easier to drill for oil and gas in the arctic. Large amounts of fossil fuels are expected to be found in the region, adding to the world’s already dangerously large supplies.

The enthusiasm of companies and governments to exploit unconventional sources of fossil fuels is starkly at odds with the reality that we can only control climate change if we choose not to exploit such reserves – while rapidly scaling back production of conventional oil, gas, and coal.

Open thread: marine protected areas

I have written a number of times before about the unsustainable nature of global fisheries and the sorts of policies that might help combat that.

Marine protected areas have an important role to play in that effort. They constitute sanctuaries in which fish are protected from the hugely destructive fishing technology that is now deployed. Their more extensive establishment could play an important role in maintaining the viability of many important species.