Ahead of the curve

I remember how stunned I was when I was in high school and found out that all energy release -- from striking a match to setting off a nuclear bomb -- goes back to Einstein's famous equation, that energy is equal to mass times the speed of light squared.

It all hinges on the fact that the Law of Conservation of Mass isn't quite right.  If I set a piece of paper on fire inside a sealed box, the oft-quoted line in middle school textbooks -- that if I'd weighed the paper and the air in the box beforehand and then reweighed the ash and the air in the box afterward, they'd have identical masses -- isn't true.  The fact is, the box would weigh less after the paper had burned completely.

The reason is that some (a very tiny amount, but some) of the mass of the paper would have been converted to energy according to Einstein's equivalency, and that's where the heat and light of the fire came from.  Thus, the box and its contents would have less mass than they started with.

The mind-boggling truth is that when you burn a fossil fuel -- oil, coal, or natural gas -- you are re-releasing energy from the Sun that was stored in the tissues of plants in the form of a little bit of extra mass during the Carboniferous Period, three-hundred-odd million years ago.

So to fix the problem with the "Law," we have to account for the shifting back and forth between matter and energy.  If you change it to a conservation law of the total -- that the sum of the mass and energy stays constant in a closed system -- it's spot-on.  (In fact, this is the First Law of Thermodynamics.)

How much energy you can get out of anything depends, then, only on one thing; how much of its mass you can turn into energy.  This is the basis of (amongst many other things) what happens in a nuclear power plant.  As folks like Henri Becquerel, Marie Skłodowska Curie, Pierre Curie, and others showed in the early twentieth century, the atoms of an element can be turned into the atoms of a different element -- the dream of the alchemists -- and the amount of energy required or released by that process is described by something called the binding energy curve.

This graph shows a number of interesting things.  First, the higher on the graph an atom is, the more stable it is.  Second, when you're going from one atom type to another, if you've moved upward on the graph, that transition releases energy; if you've moved downward, the transition requires energy.  Third, how big a jump you've made is a measure of the amount of energy you release or consume in the transition.  (Theoretically; as you'll see, doing this in the real world, and making practical use of the process, is another matter entirely.)

Note, for example, going from uranium (at the far right end of the graph) to any of the other mid-weight elements uranium breaks down into when it undergoes nuclear fission.  What those are, specifically, isn't that important; they all lie on the flattish part of the curve between iron (Fe, the most stable element) and uranium.  Going from uranium to any of those is an upward movement on the graph, and thus releases energy.  Seems like it must not be much, right?  Well, that "small" release is what generates the energy from a nuclear power plant -- and from bombs of the type that destroyed Hiroshima.

Now check out the other end of the graph -- the elements for which fusion is the energy-releasing transformation.

Go, for example from hydrogen-1 (the very bottom left corner of the graph) to helium-4 (at the peak, right around 7 MeV), and compare the size of that leap with the one from uranium to any of its fission products.  This transition -- hydrogen-1 to helium-4 -- is the one that powers the Sun, and is what scientists would like to get going in a fusion reactor.

See why?  I could sit down and calculate the per-transition difference in the energy release between fission and fusion, but it's huge.  Fusion releases more energy by orders of magnitude.  Also, the fuel for fusion, hydrogen, is by far the most abundant element in the Solar System; it's kind of everywhere.  Not only that, the waste product -- helium -- is completely harmless and inert, by comparison to fission waste, which remains deadly for centuries.

That's why the scientists want so desperately to get fusion going as a viable energy source.

The problem, as I noted earlier, is practicality.  The fusion reactions in the Sun are kept going because the heat and pressure in the core are sufficient for hydrogen nuclei to overcome their mutual electrostatic repulsion, crushing them together and triggering a chain reaction that leads to helium-4 (and releasing a crapload of energy in the process).  Maintaining those conditions in the lab has turned out to be extraordinarily difficult; it's always consumed (far) more energy to trigger nuclear fusion than came out of it, and the reactions are self-limiting, collapsing in a split-second.  It's what's given rise to the sardonic quip, "Practical nuclear fusion is fifty years in the future... and always will be."

Well -- it seems like "fifty years in the future" may have just gotten one step closer.

It was just announced that for the first time ever, scientists at the amusingly-named National Ignition Facility of Livermore, California have created a nuclear fusion reaction that produced more energy than it consumed.  This proof-of-concept is, of course, only the first step, but it demonstrates that practical nuclear fusion might not be the pipe dream it has seemed since its discovery almost a century ago.

"This is a monumental breakthrough," said Gilbert Collins of the University of Rochester in New York, a physicist who has collaborated in other NIF projects but was not involved the current research.  "With this achievement, the landscape has changed...  comparable to the invention of the transistor or the Wright brothers’ first flight.  We now have a laboratory system that we can use as a compass for how to make progress very rapidly."

So keep your eyes on the news.  A common pattern in science is that once someone shows something is possible, the advances take off like a rocket.  Imagine how it would change the world if we could, once and for all, ditch our dependence on fossil fuels and dangerous nuclear fission technology, and power the planet using an energy source that runs on a ridiculously abundant fuel and produces a completely harmless waste product.

That dream may have just gotten one step closer.

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Ignoring Vesuvius

I'm sure I have my fair share of cognitive biases, but I have understood from a tender age that the universe is under no particular obligation to operate in such a way as to conform to my desires.

This is why the tendency of many politicians to claim that climate change isn't happening because it doesn't fit with their jurisdiction's economic goals strikes me as bizarre.  I can understand being dismayed to find out that fossil fuel use is screwing with the climate.  I can understand the no-win situation communities are in when their entire economic base depends on coal, oil, or gas.  I can even understand why an elected official would be reluctant to bring such bad news to his or her constituency.

What I cannot understand is what is to be gained by pretending that because it's bad news, it doesn't exist.

[image courtesy of NASA/NOAA]

This is a point that apparently has slipped right past policymakers in West Virginia, who voted last Friday to block new public school science standards because they require teaching the causes, effects, and predicted outcomes of anthropogenic climate change.

In a statement to the Charleston Gazette-Mail that should go down in the Annals of Bullshit, Delegate Jim Butler said, "In an energy-producing state, it’s a concern to me that we are teaching our kids potentially that we are doing immoral things here in order to make a living in our state."

I just have one question for you, Mr. Butler: why do you think that the universe gives a rat's ass about whether you live in an "energy-producing state?"  Neither hard data nor the laws of science (nor, for that matter, standards of ethics and morality) are obliged to conform to your state's economic needs.  But then Butler went on to add, "We need to make sure our science standards are actually teaching science and not pushing a political agenda."

I suppose that refusing to teach public-school students what the scientists are actually saying, because you live in an "energy-producing state," doesn't constitute "a political agenda."

Delegate Frank Deem, however, concurred with his colleague. "There’s nothing that upsets me more than the idea that it’s a proven fact that climate change is man made," he said.

Because apparently, science is only valid if it doesn't make Delegate Frank Deem upset.

The bill now goes to the West Virginia Senate, which evidently also believes that research should be ignored if it hurts Deem's and Butler's feelings.  The Senate Chair of the Education Committee, Dave Sypolt, said, "As it stands right now, I have no problems with it at all.  I’m going to work it and send it right through."

Look, I know that in a state like West Virginia, where the economy has long been based on coal production, the scientific findings are seriously bad news.  And it is entirely unclear what solutions could be found that won't leave whole communities without jobs or sources of income.  But what they're doing right now is tantamount to a guy in Pompeii in August of the year 79 C. E. saying, "Okay, yeah, I see that the volcano is smoking.  But you know, that could mean anything.  The scientists don't all agree that Mount Vesuvius is going to erupt.  We've been living here for decades and nothing has happened but some minor earthquakes and plumes of steam.  The idea of moving everyone just because of a possible threat is really upsetting to me.  Anyone who says so must have a political agenda to destroy Pompeii's economy."

And outside, the crazy weather continues.  Maryland has been repeatedly clobbered by snowstorms, while hundreds of miles north in upstate New York we basically had no winter -- we had a couple of quick cold spells, but I went running in shorts and a tank top several times in January.  The Arctic sea ice has never been this low at this time of year since measurements were first taken. Globally,  2015 was the hottest year on record, breaking the previous record that was set in 2014, which broke the previous record set in 2013, and so on and so forth.

As James Burke puts it, "You don't need a Ph.D."  But I shouldn't mention that, because it will probably would wound Delegate Frank Deem's feelings again.

So the bottom line is: the science is sound, whether or not you choose to teach public school students about it.  We can discuss what measures can and/or should be taken to mitigate the effects of climate change.  In order to be effective, such measures would have an undeniable human cost, and would undoubtedly cause economic havoc in many places.  But what is also certain is that sitting on our hands is going to cause havoc, too -- havoc of a much more devastating, global, and permanent kind than anything the West Virginia legislature can conceive.