The US Space Shuttle system has been retired and the next-generation launch system will not be flight-ready for years. The Russian Soyuz has been grounded because of today’s failure during the launch of the Progress M-12M. The Chinese Shenzhou has had only 3 manned flights with the next one not scheduled until 2012.

It’s been 50 years (18,396 days) since Gagarin’s flight.

Eventually I began to stir. She came back into the bedroom and opened the curtains, letting the sunlight flood in.

The sunlight was warm on my skin.

And I began to think about how incredible that was. The Sun is 150 million kilometres away. Only the most inconceivably small amount of photons that the Sun produces reached across that distance to alight upon my drowsy form.

Because I like numbers, here’s the deal. My arm is about 70 square centimetres, or 0.07 metres square. The total area of a sphere is  That means that the area of the sphere of solar radiation at the distance of Earth’s orbit is 4 x π x 149,598,000 kilometres x 149,598,000 kilometres. That’s 2.8 x 10^17 square kilometres or 2.8 x 10^23 square metres. My arm was therefore receiving 0.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,024,89 percent (2.489 x 10^-23 %) of the photons that the Sun is producing, and even that infinitesimal amount was enough to warm my arm and wake me from my slumber.

Firstly, the Chernobyl experiment was only supposed to cover the 75 seconds from SCRAM to the point when the generators would have been supplying full power for cooling. Secondly, the 1986 disaster was actually the fourth time the experiment had been attempted – it had failed the previous three times. Which would lead one to conclude that it is not possible to bridge the loss of power by using residual steam pressure to continue to spin the turbines.

Next, the design of the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors had flaws that would have defeated my suggestions. During the massive quake, the active reactors were SCRAMed. The diesel generators were brought online and were functional until the tsunami hit. The facility had 5.7 metre seawalls and the tsunami was estimated to be 13-15 metres high. This flooded many of the buildings. The older reactor buildings had their generators in the basement of the reactor building. The newer reactors at least provided external generators that were stationed up a hill. But all of the electrical switching components were still in the basement. As were the turbines. Even if steam had been available for the turbines, the turbines would still have been lost when the tsunami hit nearly an hour after the quake.

Finally, my suggestion would not have helped at Reactor 4, which was already shut down and could not supply any energy. The spent fuel pool next to the core contained 1,331 fuel rods. Alternative methods were used to cool the spent fuel in the pool.

It is remarkable that only 20 years separated the two events, and that so little has changed in the most recent 30 years. In that short initial span of time, space technology advanced at an incredible pace.

Yuri Garagin flew one orbit of the earth on April 12, 1961 (Vostok-1). So little was known about space at the time that the controls of his capsule were locked to prevent him from operating them – it was thought that zero-G would induce madness.

About three weeks later, Alan Shepard became the first American in space, although with a sub-orbital, 486 km flight (Mercury-Redstone 3 aka Freedom 7). Less than three weeks later, US President John F. Kennedy publicly set the goal to putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade. It was an incredible challenge. The US had less than 16 minutes of manned space flight experience at the time of the speech.

Mercury 12B (boilerplate spacecraft)

The American manned space programs moved at a breakneck pace. The Mercury program completed 2 years later. There was a 2-year gap before the first Gemini flights, which saw the first American two-man crews, the first American space walk, the first spacecraft rendezvous and docking, and much longer flights (Gemini VII was 13 days, 18 hours). The Gemini program wrapped up at the end of 1966, making way for the Apollo program.

The first manned Apollo flight, Apollo 7, was 2 years after the end of the Gemini program. Part of the reason for the gap was the deadly cabin fire on Apollo 1 in January 1967, which was being tested for a possible first flight in February. The fire and investigation, combined with program challenges for the Apollo CSM and LM landers, led to the delay. Boldly, the Apollo 8 mission actually reached moon orbit – a daring objective for only the second manned flight of the program.

With the goal of a manned landing on and returning from the moon accomplished on July 16, 1969, winning the moon-landing race against the Soviets, the funding for Apollo was drawn down. It was only 8 years and 3 months from Gagarin’s flight to the touchdown of Apollo 11 in the Sea of Tranquility on the moon.

Apollo 14 Command Module

The final flight to the moon was Apollo 17 at the end of 1972. Some of the Apollo equipment was used for the Skylab space station, manned for 171 days in 1973 and 1974, followed by the mid-decade Apollo-Soyuz flight. From that point, there were no manned American space flights until STS-1 on April 12, 1981.

The early designs of the Space Shuttle systems date back even before the moon landing. President Nixon approved the program in 1971. It took 10 years to build and test the first two Shuttles – Enterprise, which was only used for approach and landing tests from a converted Boeing 747, and Columbia which was a fully functional orbiter. It looks less time to move from the first manned suborbital space flight to landing on the moon.

STS-132 Atlantis

Since the start of the Shuttle era, I feel the US manned space program has stagnated. For 30 years, the US has entirely depended on the shuttle for all manned flights. Again, that’s three times longer than it took to go from Yuri’s flight to landing on the moon. I feel that the US should have been spending more on trying out new technologies.

While I am fully supportive of the International Space Station, and feel that it should be the springboard for any future above-low-orbit manned missions, it hasn’t really pushed forward the manned program. It has provided a workspace for research of course, but it’s not about manned flight really. It’s about a zero-G research facility. It’s also not the first space station – it’s been done before.

Without producing any new vehicles for the past 30 years, it would be like the aviation industry stopping creating new planes with the Boeing 707, or if computer science stopped once IBM created the System/360.

In the future, I would like to see the US exploring new ways and new vehicles for its manned program. Allowing private space companies to provide services is an interesting direction but I am concerned that NASA would be without any space program, should these private companies (who are doing it for a profit) either fail or decide that it is not financially viable for them to continue. Then what will NASA do? It seems directionless at the moment.

I have some strong opinions and I’m working on an essay about the future of NASA.

First, the UN declares a no-fly zone over Libya. With the opposition forces pushed back from the outskirts of Tripoli to their main area of control in Benghazi, it almost seems too late. They had almost completed the overthrow of their dictator ruler and soon lost momentum within sight of their goal.

Then CBC reported that special forces have already been in Libya. I didn’t know that. What the hell are special forces doing in a foreign country like that? That doesn’t seem right, even if Qaddafi is a complete nut case. I’m so conflicted – the people of Libya deserve freedom, but I would hesitate to engage another country militarily, especially after the stellar jobs the Western powers have done in Iraq, Pakistan, Lebanon, Cambodia, Iran, Yemen and Somalia, just to name a few.

And just minutes ago, CNN announced that Libya is calling for a cease-fire, which would be a good sign if true.

In Japan, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has announced that the problems at Fukushima are now a Level 5 nuclear incident on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. This is equal to the Three Mile Island incident.

In Yemen, 45 people were massacred while protesting against the government.

And for some good news, you have to leave the planet. For the first time in history, a space probe has entered the orbit of Mercury. Surprisingly, probes have already been in orbit around Venus, the Earth and Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, but not Mercury. The surface of Mercury was only 40-45% mapped before the MESSENGER probe was launched. We know far more about Saturn, which is 14 times further away (0.6 AU vs 8.5 AU).

Earthquake and Tsunami damage-Dai Ichi Power Plant, Japan

Firstly, the on-going heroic effort to contain or reduce the damage at the plant is incredible. Unlike Chernobyl, where the disaster was complete in just seconds (a massive explosion) and the rest of the effort was to contain the damage already inflicted, the cascading disaster at Fukushima is about trying to stop further damage. In my mind, it is more like Apollo 13, where one issue was resolved just in time for a new issue to arise. At Fukushima, the loss of power, then the loss of backup power led to overheating, which required steam releases, which caused hydrogen explosions, which damaged the other cooling apparatus for other parts of the plant, which was impacted by an oil fire, and so forth. The three reactors that were operating at the time of the earthquake are possibly damaged, but to what extent no one seems to know for certain. Now the cooling pools that I mentioned yesterday are overheating. In one report, the pool has boiled dry, a very bad situation.

There is so much conflicting information about what is really happening there. In that respect, I have to say it is eerily similar to the lack of good information during the early days of the Chernobyl disaster. Timely information about Chernobyl was not freely available as that event happened near the end of the cold war and the communist control of the country did not allow a free press.

Secondly, I am surprised at how many people have offered their own definitive opinion on the issue, which is often formed without little hard data.

MIT professor Dr Josef Oehmen posted a blog message entitled “Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors” (which has since been modified). He made the claim that “there was and will *not* be any significant release of radioactivity from the damaged Japanese reactors.“ It was a stunning act of hubris considering the lack of reliable, available information. It turns out that he is not a nuclear specialist, but rather a risk management specialist. In my opinion, no one can predict what new fault will occur. Predicting that nothing more will happen when there is not enough information at present seems like a poor risk assessment technique to me.

Others in the US and Europe have also chimed in on their opinions. France’s ASN nuclear safety authority said that the incident should be classified as Level 6 on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES). Some have speculated that the situation is both worse and better than is being reported. It seems few are being honest that they do not have enough information.

Lewis Page at The Register posted today that “Still No Cause for Alarm” where he claimed that “there remain no grounds for anyone to fear for their health.” The New Scientist published, “Why Fukushima Daiichi won’t be another Chernobyl” while Scientific American published “Fukushima Will Be [a] Wasteland” which has the statement “This is going to be like Chernobyl.”

On CBC Radio this morning, during the 9:00am hourly news, the newsreader claimed that 5 workers at Fukushima had died, at least one of them from radiation. I believe that was a mistake by CBC or the reader.

In Japan, reports over the past few days indicate that radiation levels are up to 400 or 800 times higher than the legal limit, depending on the day and source of the report. Helicopters were being used to dump water on the plant, but had to stop because the radiation levels were too high. Some airline passengers arriving from Japan have been found with low levels of radiation.

According to Salon.com: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko is saying the cooling pool is completely dry, without giving any details on how he came to this conclusion. Tokyo Electric Power, which owns and runs the plant, is saying it is not empty. The difference in opinions is itself newsworthy.

There is unexplained white smoke coming from one of the reactor buildings. There was an explained “loud noise” at the plant. How can anyone truly feel they can predict that everything will be fine (Dr Oehman, Lewis Page) if all the current facts are not even available?

I just don’t understand how there can be so many opinions when there are just not enough facts.

Fukushima-1 nuclear power plant

I continue to follow the events at the nuclear power plants hit by the 2011 Sendai earthquake and tsunami.

I had one of those d’oh moments. Whereas yesterday I was confused by the continuing issue with cooling a subcritical reactor, today I realized I should have known this all along. D’oh.

The heat currently being generated in the subcritical reactors is from decay heat. It’s not from the primary nuclear reaction that is used to generate heat and power. But rather it is because of the products of the nuclear power generation.

The fission of the uranium (and in some cases plutonium) is the process of the large unstable atomic nucleus splitting into two lighter nuclei and releasing neutrons (which then can continue the reaction by causing other uranium nuclei to split) and energy (following the famous E=mc^2 mass-energy equivalence equation).

The smaller nuclei produced by fission are often also radioactive. Meaning they also decay by fission over time. The description of how frequently the smaller fission products themselves decay is measured by the half-life of the isotope. The description of the chain of radioactive decays is called the decay chain. For nuclear fuel, this decay chain ends with the stable lead nucleus.

The heat being generated in the subcritical core is simply the natural process of the fission products decaying down to a stable nuclei. This natural fission also produces heat. Over time, the heat produced will decrease, at a rate defined by the half-lives of all of the products and sub-products.

Carso Fuel pool

The d’oh moment was when I realized that that is why the used fuel rods are always kept in a cooling pool next to the reactor. Otherwise, if there was not ongoing heat from the spent fuel, the used fuel rods could just be left in a secure warehouse. I knew about the cooling pools, but never connected it to the heat from the decay chain.

The horrific Sendai quake and tsunami in Japan is stunning. There is so much video available of the event – certainly one of the most recorded natural disaster I can remember.

Today, the focus is on the Fukushima I Nuclear Power Plant, a complex with six BWR (boiling water reactor) reactors. Just minutes ago, BBC was reporting that the cooling for reactor #3 has completely failed.

I’ve been very confused by what’s happening at the plant over the last 36 hours. The confusion is because I did not understand some of the nuances in reactor design.

I knew from previous reports and from general knowledge that the reactors would have been SCRAMed immediately during the earthquake. That would lower the control rods into the reactor core, thus stopping the chain reaction. The rods control the amount of neutrons that are moving around the core. The rods are there to prevent the self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, and thus lower the amount of power and heat generated.

So the problems at the plant were confusing. If the rods had been lowered, why was cooling still a problem?

Searching the web and wikipedia, I discovered that even if the reactor is shutdown (“subcritical”), there is still residual heat in the core that must be cooled. This is the cause of the problems in Fukushima. Although the chain reaction has stopped, there is still some spontaneous fission occurring, plus the heat that was in the core at the time of the SCRAM.

Something else bothers me about the first day of the crisis. On Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that “We just had our Air Force assets in Japan transport some really important coolant to one of the nuclear reactors.” She used the past-tense instead of future tense, meaning that it had already been done. The Reuters report about her statement was posted only 10h 19m after the quake; the White House web page does not have a timestamp. A video of her remarks is here: http://www.state.gov/video/?videoid=822710919001.

So far, I have not seen anyone in the press ask further questions about this. I have lots of questions.

1. What coolant was sent? Japan uses light water, which is basically normal water. It is different from heavy water used in other reactors; heavy water is where all of the hydrogen in the water molecules have an extra neutron to form deuterium. Is that what was sent?

2. Where did this coolant come from? Was it just sitting around on hand? Next to an air base?

3. How was it transported? In thousands of Evian bottles? What sort of container or containers? How much was delivered to the nuclear plant(s)?

4. How did the Air Force deliver the coolant? Was it a plane or a helicopter? The Secretary specifically said “so Air Force planes were able to deliver that”. If it was delivered by plane, then where did the planes land? Are there airstrips next to the nuclear plants? If the plants were hit by the tsunami, then any airstrip nearby would have also been hit and most likely useable. It is possible that it was a CV-22B Osprey, which can land vertically, but the Air Force only has 12 of them, none of them in Japan as far as I can tell. The Air Force also has two types of helicopters in inventory – the UH-1N Huey/Iroquois and the HH-60 Pave Hawk search and rescue helicopters. The HH-60 can sling about 8,000 pounds, and the UH-1 can sling about 5,000 pounds. That doesn’t seem like a lot of coolant capacity per helicopter, if that was actually the delivery mechanism. Another possibility is that Clinton said Air Force, but meant Marines, as they do have more inventory of helicopters and Osprey. I suppose to a politician, all planes are Air Force planes.

As I said, what Clinton said just seemed odd, although I cannot specifically tell what are the actual facts. Strangely, the Air Force web site makes no mention of this activity all. I would think that if they were involved in an important mission like trying to save a reactor, it would be all over the Air Force news web page.

Moonfire by Norman Mailer

I just finished reading the book “MoonFire: The Epic Journey of Apollo 11” by Norman Mailer. It’s a beautiful book published by Taschen. Taschen publishes some of the best photo books in the world.

This was the first Norman Mailer book I’ve read. I’ve been very tempted to read some of his other books, such as “The Naked and the Dead“, but I lack the time. I’m already about a dozen books and a dozen magazines behind.

This book, “Moonfire”, was originally serialized in Life magazine under the title “Of a Fire on the Moon”. It tells the story of the Apollo 11 mission from the point of view of a reporter named “Aquarius” (also the name of the Apollo 13 LM, used as a lifeboat after the explosion). The writing is quite poetic, although a little less technical than I was hoping for (as an aerospace nerd).

When I first saw the book at Chapters Indigo I looked up the book on the Taschen web site.

That’s where I discovered the most expensive book in the world.

When I was a teenager, my mother owned a bookstore in New Minas called “Between Covers”. I worked there some evenings and weekends until my first years of university. Once, a dentists’ wife ordered the complete The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for her husband. It was 12 volumes and cost a few thousand dollars (in 1988; now on Amazon.ca: $10,251 Cdn). That was pretty damn expensive. I has also never heard of a dictionary that required more than one volume before. When the full set arrived, it stood multiple feet high.

However, Taschen has trumped the OED with limited editions of the “Moonfire” book.

My copy was less than $30, which is a good price for such a large book.

More expensive than the basic edition is the Cdn $1,360 edition that includes a framed print of Buzz Aldrin on the moon – the iconic photo of the Apollo program. There are only 1957 copies of this edition available. It weighs 12 kilograms, four times heavier than the edition I have.

Not available on Chapters or Amazon are the 12 “Lunar Rock” editions. These include an actual piece of moon rock. Since NASA is not going to give up any of its extremely valuable collection, and there have been no private lunar return missions yet, how did Taschen manage to do this? They used lunar meteorites. When large meteors impact the moon (not slowed by any atmosphere), some of the molten rock debris from the impact will actually have enough energy to escape the lunar gravity well. The debris, now solidified rock, will most frequently get pulled into the Earth’s gravity well. If the lunar impact debris survives the passage through our atmosphere, it can be collected on the ground as a meteorite.

The 12 editions each includes a lunar meteorite. Each edition is priced by the size of the meteorite. The smallest one was discovered in Algeria and it weighs 1.40 grams, 20% less than a Canadian dime. This edition was priced at €60,000 (Cdn $81,000).

The top of the line edition includes a 348 gram (1/3 of a kilogram) meteorite found in Morocco. It costs a jaw-dropping €480,000 (Cdn $648,000)!!!

I could buy a huge house and a Lamborghini for that. All for the cost of a book and a rock.

But I really became upset when the second interviewee came on. She was Sue Thompson of the Canadian Association for Astrological Education in Toronto. She has been learning about astrology for about 30 years and is earning her diploma in astrology education from the aforementioned Association.

I can understand that Sue was nervous – you could hear it in her voice. I know that feeling – I was on CBC television during the 1997 federal debate. I was nervous as hell too.

But what she said was simply incorrect.

Sue started by saying that astrology was a science.

Bullshit.

Science discredited astrology 600 years ago, with the dawning of the scientific method.

She said that “Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Kepler, Galileo, Copernicus [were astrologers].” Well, Sir Isaac Newton also believed in alchemy, so perhaps it’s possible he was wrong about astrology too. It has been proven that Einstein did not approve of astrology – a famous quote was actually made up by Canadian Astrologer Werner Hirsig in 1951 (and the quote was removed from later editions of his book). Copernicus only studied astrology because it was a required course in the 14th century medicine and never practiced it. Galileo and Kepler were, like Newton, leading thinkers of their time, but they lived within a society that was only slowly emerging from the Dark Ages of dragons, witches, ignorance and superstition.

Sue said that the positions of the planets could be used to determine medical information or financial information. Again, complete nonsense. The moon cannot predict if I will get cancer. Mars cannot tell if I will pay less taxes in 2021.

I have a few other thoughts on this subject:

1. Astrology has been used for thousands of years. Sure. That is not a valid argument for the continuing belief. Other beliefs from thousands of years ago include Zeus, dragons, the Earth-centric (geocentrism) universe,  and the four humors. Just like astrology, there is no scientific basis to these ancient beliefs and they have been swept away. No one believes them anymore. So this is hardly a good reason to continue to believe in astrology. You should no more put your faith in astrology than you should in the fountain of youth.

2. Astrology is the description of how the planets influence humans here on Earth. This is based on the location of various celestial objects. Let’s examine this more closely. For all of recorded history, there were only five known planets (excluding the Earth), as they were the only ones visible to the human eye: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. During that time, astrologers would have created their astrology charts based on that knowledge. But what happened when Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were discovered in 1781, 1846 and 1930 respectively? Wouldn’t that invalidate all the previous thousands of years of astrological writings? What about the recent demotion of Pluto to a dwarf planet, and the discovery of many other dwarf planets? Wouldn’t that cause all the astrological horoscopes to be rewritten again, and invalidate all the changes that were made since 1930?

3. Actually Sue said that astrologers can “determine how [the planets] affected all living things on earth: animal, plants, humans.” Really? So sunflowers, algae, platypus and penguins can have horoscopes? How do you determine the time of birth for a amoeba?

4. Sue said “the moon is important for determining one’s personality, as are all the other planets.” How does this ‘influence’ work? So, based on the location of planets and other celestial bodies at the time of your birth, astrologers are supposed to be able to tell your basic drives or impulses and are tied to the human psyche. Supposedly, they can tell your personality and predict the future. What is the method of this influence that the distant planets have on a personality? It can’t be gravity – the gravity of Saturn is certainly not enough to influence the neural pathways in the brain of any individual. It can’t be light or electrons – otherwise it wouldn’t work if you were born in a cave underground. It can’t be neutrinos, which could penetrate a cave, but do not originate from planets (only stars). The strong nuclear force only operates on distances of 10^-15 metres (atomic scale). The weak nuclear force only operates on distances of 10^-18 metres – 1000 times smaller than the strong force. Those are the four known forces and many of their particles. There are no other ways of transferring energy or information.

The fact is that there simply is no way for celestial bodies to influence the human psyche or predict the future.

I was disappointed that the CBC interviewer did not ask these more pointed questions about Sue’s claims.