Eideard

Tresa VanWinkle struggled to hold back tears as she glanced at family photos perched on her desk among the clutter of her downtown office. “I look at what has happened to members of my family, and I wonder if we are the children of the bomb,” said VanWinkle, 53, director of the Alamogordo-based Cancer Awareness, Prevalence, Prevention and Early Detection center…

“The bomb” was the 19-kiloton plutonium device nicknamed “The Gadget,” detonated just before dawn July 16, 1945, on the northwest end of what is now the White Sands Missile Range. The explosion, the product of the Manhattan Project, was the first-ever detonation of an atomic device and is considered the dawn of the nuclear age.

Now, more than six decades after the United States launched what some consider, in essence, a surprise nuclear attack on the citizens of south-central New Mexico, many feel they have been abandoned by their government and left to deal on their own with three generations of radiation-induced illnesses and deaths…

In the past 15 years, VanWinkle said, 14 members of her and her husband’s family, including two of her sisters, have been diagnosed with a variety of cancers; eight of them, including her sisters, have died…

A recently formed group known as the Tularosa Downwinders Consortium is attempting to raise awareness of the increase in cancer and autoimmune diseases in four counties adjacent to the Trinity Site (Otero, Lincoln, Sierra and Socorro) — up to nine times higher than nationwide figures — and to push for inclusion of the Trinity downwinders in the federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act of 1990…

The compensation act, initiated in great part by former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, father of U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., offered mea culpas and monetary compensation to uranium miners and residents of Nevada and other Western states who were downwind from above-ground atomic-weapons testing in the 1950s and early ’60s.

The legislation, administered through the Justice Department, authorizes lump-sum compensation payments and sometimes medical coverage to individuals in three categories who contracted any of 27 types of cancer or other radiation-related diseases…

Despite numerous amendments and expansion of the coverage over the years, the Trinity downwinders have never been included in the legislation.

RTFA. None of this is a surprise to folks in my neck of the prairie.

Some of what folks face is the American tradition of denial in the face of responsibility. Doesn’t matter which disaster we confront, Americans are always supposed to be the Good Guys – our government even more so. It’s easy to refuse compensation if you convince yourself nothing happened, nothing’s wrong in the first place.

Scientists…suggest that the ribbon of enhanced emissions of energetic neutral atoms, discovered last year by the NASA Small Explorer satellite IBEX, could be explained by a geometric effect coming up because of the approach of the Sun to the boundary between the Local Cloud of interstellar gas and another cloud of a very hot gas called the Local Bubble. If this hypothesis is correct, IBEX is catching matter from a hot neighboring interstellar cloud, which the Sun might enter in a hundred years.

First full-sky maps of the emissions of energetic neutral atoms (ENA), obtained last year by IBEX, showed a surprising arc-like feature called the Ribbon. This astonishing discovery was later announced by NASA as one of the most important findings in space exploration made in 2009….In a paper recently published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, a Polish-US team of scientists…offers a different explanation. “We observe the Ribbon,” says Professor Stan Grzedzielski “because the Sun is approaching a boundary between our Local Cloud of interstellar gas and another cloud of a very hot and turbulent gas…”

The team of Polish and US scientists suggests that the Ribbon ENA are born by electrical charge exchange between the atoms which “evaporate” from the Local Interstellar Cloud into the nearby Local Bubble of a very hot and fully ionized gas. The Local Bubble is probably a remnant of a series of supernova explosions that occurred a few million years ago and thus is not only very hot (at least million degree Kelvin), but also turbulent. The protons in the Local Bubble nearby to the boundary with the Local Cloud snatch electrons from the neutral atoms and run away in all directions, some of them reaching IBEX…

The model developed by the Polish-US team suggests that the boundary between the Local Cloud and the Local Bubble might be not within a few light years from the Sun, as it was believed earlier, but within just a thousand of astronomical units, a thousand-fold closer. This might mean that the Solar System could enter the million-degree Local Bubble cloud as early as the next century.

“Nothing unusual, the Sun frequently traverses various clouds of interstellar gas during its galactic journey,” comments Grzedzielski. Such clouds are of very low density, much lower than the best vacuum obtained in Earth labs. Once in, the heliosphere will reform and may shrink a little, the level of cosmic radiation entering the magnetosphere may rise a bit, but nothing more. “Perhaps future generations will have to learn how to better harden their space hardware against stronger radiation,” suggests Grzedzielski.

Phew! Had me worried for a minute.

Although it might be fun to forward this to some of the Armageddon types. Revelations and all that.

A lightning researcher at the University of Bath has discovered that during thunderstorms, giant natural particle accelerators can form 40 km above the surface of the Earth…

When particularly intense lightning discharges in thunderstorms coincide with high-energy particles coming in from space (cosmic rays), nature provides the right conditions to form a giant particle accelerator above the thunderclouds…

These are energetic events and for the blink of an eye, the power of the electron beam can be as large as the power of a small nuclear power plant…

The zone above thunderstorms has been a suspected natural particle accelerator since the Scottish physicist and Nobel Prize winner Charles Thomson Rees Wilson speculated about lightning discharges above these storms in 1925.

In the next few years five different planned space missions (the TARANIS, ASIM, CHIBIS, IBUKI and FIREFLY satellites) will be able to measure the energetic particle beams directly.

Dr Martin Fullekrug comments: “It’s intriguing to see that nature creates particle accelerators just a few miles above our heads. Once these new missions study them in more detail from space we should get a far better idea of how they actually work. They provide a fascinating example of the interaction between the Earth and the wider Universe.”

Recently watched a documentary on this phenomenon – minus this latest analysis and understanding – on one of the HD documentary channels. Some superb aerial photography.

As natural as these occurrences are – we should be able to get some nutballs going out of their minds on the likelihood of a spontaneous black hole emerging from a thunderstorm and gobbling up the Earth. Or at least Hull.

The best-known product of LANL

No one knows for sure what is buried in the Manhattan Project-era dump here. At the very least, there is probably a truck down there that was contaminated in 1945 at the Trinity test site, where the world’s first nuclear explosion seared the sky and melted the desert sand 200 miles south of here during World War II.

But now a team of workers is using $212 million in federal stimulus money to clean up the 65-year-old, six-acre dump, which was used by the scientists who built the world’s first atomic bomb. They are approaching the job like an archeological dig — only with even greater care, since some of the things they unearth are likely to be radioactive, while others may be explosive.

The dump has become part of the $6 billion stimulus program to clean up the toxic legacy of the arms race, which is one of the biggest sources of direct federal contracts in the $787 billion stimulus act. More than $1.9 billion is being spent at the Hanford site in Washington, the home of the nuclear reactor that made the plutonium for the atomic bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. Another $1.6 billion is being spent cleaning up a Savannah River site, in South Carolina.

After the stimulus bill passed, some Republicans questioned the wisdom of devoting so much money to nuclear cleanups, noting that the Department of Energy’s environmental management program had been bedeviled by cost overruns in the past…

Work that was delayed, diverted, disputed by conservative beancounters for decades. There is nothing more frustrating than political hacks who lament disbursing funds for the clean-up of their pet weapons – more than the life and safety of ordinary citizens affected by radioactive detritus.

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Federal agents seized computers, papers, books and electronic equipment from the home of a former Los Alamos National Laboratory nuclear scientist, who last year sought to work on a fusion project with Venezuela but believes the U.S. government is wrongly targeting him as a spy.

P. Leonardo Mascheroni told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his home that four FBI agents searched his home for 13 hours. The agents, he said, led him to believe they were investigating him for espionage.

“I am not a spy,” Mascheroni said. “If I were a spy, a long time ago I would have gone away from the United States with all my knowledge. Instead, I stay in my house all the time and am working all the time and presenting all the time to Congress. Is that what a spy does?”

FBI spokesman Darrin Jones confirmed the agency is pursuing an “ongoing investigation” in Los Alamos, but declined further comment Wednesday. No charges have been filed against Mascheroni.

Meanwhile, Mascheroni’s wife, Marjorie, a technical writer at the lab, was placed on administrative leave while the lab conducts an internal investigation, according to the lab.

P. Leonardo Mascheroni joined the Northern New Mexico lab in 1979, and worked in its X Division, which designs nuclear weapons, until 1987. He was laid off in 1988.

Lab spokeswoman Lisa Rosendorf said he lost his job during layoffs that were prompted by budget cuts, but his supporters at the time said he was blackballed by the lab.

Mascheroni’s pet project is using a hydrogen-fluoride laser to generate a fusion reaction. He’s followed a dogged path trying to convince US government agencies to get his method a trial.

That’s the sum total, folks.

Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers have discovered a potential chink in the armor of fibers that make the cell walls of certain inedible plant materials so tough. The insight ultimately could lead to a cost-effective and energy-efficient strategy for turning biomass into alternative fuels.

In separate papers published in Biophysical Journal and recently in an issue of Biomacromolecules, Los Alamos researchers identify potential weaknesses among sheets of cellulose molecules comprising lignocellulosic biomass, the inedible fibrous material derived from plant cell walls. The material is a potentially abundant source of sugar that can be used to brew batches of methanol or butanol, which show potential as biofuels…

Working with other researchers, Los Alamos researcher Paul Langan used neutrons to probe the crystalline structure of highly crystalline cellulose, much like an X-ray is used to probe the hidden structures of the body. Langan and his colleagues found that although cellulose generally has a well-ordered network of hydrogen bonds holding it together, the material also displays significant amounts of disorder, creating a different type of hydrogen bond network at certain surfaces. These differences make the molecule potentially vulnerable to an attack by cellulase enzymes.

Moreover, in this month’s Biophysical Journal, Los Alamos researchers Tongye Shen and Gnana Gnanakaran describe a new lattice-based model of crystalline cellulose. The model predicts how hydrogen bonds in cellulose can shift to remain stable under a wide range of temperatures. This plasticity allows the material to swap different types of hydrogen bonds but also constrains the molecules so that they must form bonds in the weaker configuration described by Langan and his colleagues. Most important, Shen and Gnanakaran’s model identifies hydrogen bonds that can be manipulated via temperature differences to potentially make the material more susceptible to attack by enzymes that can crack the fibers into sugars for biofuel production.

“We have been able to identify a chink in the armor of a very tough and worthy adversary—the cellulose fiber,” said Gnanakaran, who leads the theoretical portion of a large, multidisciplinary biofuels project at Los Alamos. “These results are some of the first to come from this team, and eventually could point us toward an economical and viable process for making biofuels from cellulosic biomass,” adds Langan, director of the biofuels project.

Folks down here in Santa Fe County have a friendly, though occasionally adversarial, relationship with the Los Alamos scientists “up on the hill”. We often refer to them somewhat fondly as “coneheads”.

Maybe – just maybe – over the course of Obama’s administration, research that points in the green direction rather than straight to hell will be the rule rather than the exception?