WHAT'S NEW Friday, April 29, 2005

WHAT'S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday, 29 Apr 05   Washington, DC

1. ENERGY: MAYBE THIS IS THE WAY THE SYSTEM IS SUPPOSED TO WORK. 
Last night President Bush began his press conference talking
about high gasoline prices.  "First," he said, "we must become
better conservers of energy."  Terrific!  The price at the pump
is doing the job.  The President even called for a nuclear energy
policy.  And earlier in the week, he called for incentives to
encourage the switch from SUVs to hybrids.  The Cheney solution
was always to drill more wells.  Bush also said in the press
conference that we must develop "new energy sources, such as
hydrogen, ethanol or biodiesel."  Three years ago we were told
that the way to reduce dependence on foreign oil is with Freedom
Car http://www.aps.org/WN/WN02/wn011802.cfm#1.  Alas, hydrogen is
a fuel, but it's not an energy source.  Freedom Car won't happen
in your lifetime  http://www.sc.doe.gov/bes/hydrogen.pdf .  But
the biodiesel idea is interesting.  Biodiesel fuel can be made
from animal fat.  Linking it to a liposuction facility would
alleviate two serious national problems at the same time.

2. CLIMATE CHANGE: ENERGY-BALANCE FINDING IS THE "SMOKING GUN." 
A week ago, an important editorial in Science by Donald Kennedy
called attention to NASA's recent decision to delay or cancel
planned Earth science missions and terminate orbiting spacecraft
to feed the pointless Moon/Mars mission.  A report in this week's
Science shows how just short sighted that is.  An international
monitoring effort, Argo, has deployed 1,800 instrumented floats
in oceans around the world since 2000.  A NASA team led by James
Hansen collected data from the floats and precisely determined
ocean levels from satellite observations.  They found that Earth
is absorbing more energy than it's radiating back into space, an 
imbalance large enough to raise temperatures 1 F this century,
even if greenhouse gas emissions are capped tomorrow. "There can
no longer be genuine doubt that human-made gases are the dominant
cause of observed warming," Hansen said.  "This energy imbalance
is the 'smoking gun' that we have been looking for." 

3. TRANSITION: PHILIP MORRISON, A MAN OF CONSCIENCE, DIES AT 89. 
Sent to the island of Tinian to help assemble the bomb that was
dropped on Hiroshima, he toured the city a month later and spent
the rest of his life campaigning against nuclear weapons.    

4. TABLE-TOP FUSION: SMALL NEUTRON GENERATOR IS FAR FROM RECORD.
Newspapers around the country reported the amazing result that a
UCLA team had demonstrated fusion of deuterium to form helium in
a table-top device.  They were, of course, scooped   by Ernest
Rutherford, 71 years ago.  Fusion is easy.  A self-sustaining
reaction is not.  The unique feature of the UCLA device is to get
the accelerating voltage from a pyroelectric crystal, which makes
it quite compact.  Unfortunately for civilization, there are
thousands of fusion devices in the world not much bigger than a
walnut.  They are in every nuclear weapon to produce a pulse of
neutrons at just the right time.


THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.  
Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the
University of Maryland, but they should be.
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