Eideard

 
This was the view at sunset, last night – looking just north of west at Las Conchas fire smoke plume. The wildfire grew from about 1000 acres at sunset to about 6000 acres overnight. 8-12 miles away as the raven flies.

Los Alamos National Labs are closed today as are schools and everything else in Los Alamos County. The communities of Los Alamos and White Rock started voluntary evacuations. Several smaller communities closer to the fire totaling 400 households or so were under mandatory evacuation.

The fire is within a mile of LANL boundaries, this morning – and everyone from Homeland Security to surrounding county fire departments are added to the fire crews. We all remember the fire that destroyed hundreds of home in Los Alamos several years back and hope to stop that being repeated.

Yes – it’s west of us. That ain’t good. Prevailing summer winds vary from south to west. Air quality this morning is abysmal. The smell of smoke woke me during the night. It’s settling into La Cieneguilla Valley pretty thick. I’ll have a better idea after sunrise.

We’re probably safe; but, safe doesn’t mean a whole boatload with wildfires until they’re contained. Even then, with Rocky Mountain winds – any fire can jump containment.

UPDATE: Folks who haven’t lived in the Southwest aren’t used to the numbers describing size out here. We have wildfires bigger than cities in other parts of the country. In the last 6 hours the fire has grown from 6000 to 44000 acres. Two or three dozen woodlands homes are gone. Families got out with the clothes on their back and not much else.

Backfires and burn outs appear to have blocked the fire from the two main population centers, White Rock and Los Alamos. Winds have changed again and are headed into unburned timber towards Jemez Springs. For the moment.

UPDATE 2: Los Alamos is now under a mandatory evacuation. Shifting winds, strong winds – no one’s safety can be guaranteed.

The evacuation order does not include White Rock – though residents are urged NOT to go to White Rock in case that community is added to the evacuation. Los Alamos residents are divided into three groups to aid in an orderly evacuation and the reverse 911 system is in effect making robocalls to residents to let them know when it’s time for their section of the town to evacuate. [2PM MDT, 27 June 2011]

UPDATE 3: Los Alamos is now mostly empty of residents. Streets are patrolled by local cops, state police and the national guard to prevent looting. The fire is now up to 60000 acres.

UPDATE 4: Thursday 30 June, the fire is up over 92,000 acres. The town of Los Alamos looks secure; but, the spread up Santa Clara Canyon has rocketed past anything expected and the Santa Clara Pueblo and the Puye Cliff Dwellings look to be threatened.

UPDATE 5: Monday 4 July – folks are allowed to return home to Los Alamos. The fire is still burning at the northern and southern ends. Now up over 121,000 acres.

Berlin geothermal field, El Salvador, producing 104 MW

Dotted with active volcanoes, Central America is seeking to tap its unique geography to produce green energy and cut dependence on oil imports as demand for electricity outstrips supply. Sitting above shifting tectonic plates in the Pacific basin known to cause earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, the region has huge potential for geothermal power generated by heat stored deep in the earth.

Geothermal power plants, while expensive to build, can provide a long-term, reliable source of electricity and are considered more environmentally friendly than large hydroelectric dams that can alter a country’s topography…

Guatemala, Central America’s biggest country, aims to produces 60 percent of its energy from geothermal and hydroelectric power by 2022.

The government is offering tax breaks on equipment to set up geothermal plants and electricity regulators are requiring distributors buy greater proportions of clean energy.

Some 1,640 feet below the summit of Guatemala’s active Pacaya volcano, which exploded in May, pipes carrying steam and water at 347 degrees Fahrenheit snake across the mountainside to one of two geothermal plants currently operating in the country.

Run by Israeli-owned Ormat Technologies Inc, the plant harnesses energy from water heated by chambers filled with molten rock deep beneath the ground. The company has been operating two plants in Guatemala for three years and wants to expand but is weighing the risks of drilling more costly exploratory wells…

More than a fifth of El Salvador’s energy needs come from two geothermal plants with installed capacity of 160 MW and investigations are being carried out to build a third.

Costa Rica, which has 152 megawatts of capacity in four geothermal plants, is due to bring a fifth plant online in January 2011 and is looking into building two more.

Nicaragua generates 66 MW from geothermal energy and in the next five years plans an increase to 166 MW.

Bravo!

The coneheads up at Los Alamos have participated in geothermal experiments, off and on, over the years. But, generally, the powers-that-be would rather keep the focus on death and destruction. Which is too bad. There’s enough intellectual horsepower there to lead to breakthroughs – no doubt.

LANL’s number one product

More than 60 years after scientists assembled the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, lethal waste is seeping from mountain burial sites and moving toward aquifers, springs and streams that provide water to 250,000 residents of northern New Mexico.

Isolated on a high plateau, the Los Alamos National Laboratory seemed an ideal place to store a bomb factory’s deadly debris. But the heavily fractured mountains haven’t contained the waste, some of which has trickled down hundreds of feet to the edge of the Rio Grande, one of the most important water sources in the Southwest.

So far, the level of contamination in the Rio Grande has not been high enough to raise health concerns. But the monitoring of runoff in canyons that drain into the river has found unsafe concentrations of organic compounds such as perchlorate, an ingredient in rocket propellent, and various radioactive byproducts of nuclear fission.

Laboratory officials insist that the waste doesn’t jeopardize people’s health because even when storm water rushing down a canyon stirs up highly contaminated sediment, it is soon diluted or trapped in canyon bottoms, where it can be excavated and hauled away…

Except that when Lab officials aren’t lying about the dangers, they’re spending time stonewalling programs designed to clean up the waste.

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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.

Security camera photo of Burgess from previous break-in

The burglar killed in a gunfight that also claimed a sheriff’s deputy last week has been identified as the prime suspect in the killing of a young couple in Canada 27 years ago.

However his death leaves unresolved a possible link to the 2004 murder of another young couple, this time in California, leaving the father of one of the victims still waiting for justice.

New Mexico State Police said the Jemez Mountain burglar known for years only as the Cookie Bandit was Joseph Henry Burgess. He’d been wanted since Canadian investigators tied him to the 1972 murders of a young couple camping near Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

“We were quite surprised,” New Mexico State Police Lt. Eric Garcia said. “No one knew.”

Burgess, 62, died early Thursday morning in a shootout with Sgt. Joseph Harris and Deputy Teresa Moriarty in a cabin in La Cueva. Harris was fatally wounded in the femoral artery during the skirmish while Moriarty was not injured.

The two Sandoval County Sheriff’s Department officers had staked out the cabin hoping to capture the mysterious burglar known for breaking into local cabins to get food, clothing and occasionally liquor.

Burgess was identified through his fingerprints. They were in a national database from the 1972 murder case. Investigators said they found his prints on the Leif Carlsson and Ann Durrant’s belongings.

Burgess has been described as religious fanatic who often ended his phrases in, “Amen.” Canadian investigators suspected he may have become outraged because Carlsson and Durrant were sharing a tent but weren’t married.

His name also surfaced in the similar killings of a young couple camped out on a northern California beach in 2004…

Until now many who knew of Burgess thought he was hiding out in Canada or the Pacific Northwest.

Joe Harris never thought of this creep as a cutesy Cookie thief. He always suspected the crook they were tracking, the thief they lay in wait for – was dangerous. He was correct.

I can say that with a smile after all my years of railing against conformity. The question doesn’t have to do with non-conformity, it’s what you refuse to conform to that matters. In this case, it was a fanatic whose religious belief said it was OK to kill people having non-marital sex.

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?

Check every suspicious person!

The Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory is missing 69 computers, including at least a dozen that were stolen last year, a lab spokesman said.

No classified information has been lost, spokesman Kevin Roark said.

The lab was initiating a monthlong inventory to account for every computer, Roark said. The computers were a cybersecurity issue because they may contain personal information like names and addresses, but they did not contain any classified information, he said.

No classified information he’s aware of.

Also missing are three computers that were taken from a scientist’s home in Santa Fe on Jan. 16, and a BlackBerry belonging to another employee was lost “in a sensitive foreign country,” according to the memo and an e-mail from a senior lab manager…

The security administration memo said the “magnitude of exposure and risk to the laboratory is at best unclear as little data on these losses has been collected or pursued given their treatment as property management issues.”

There’s a statement that’s less than useless. Bureaucrats claiming they don’t know what’s wrong, what’s missing – because all they’ve tracked is missing hardware.

Los Alamos spooks have decades of experience at eavesdropping on everyone from ordinary citizens to atomic scientists. They’re instantly attentive to political dissent. That surveillance mentality stops dead at simple inventory control.

Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb.

The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

The US government has licensed the technology to Hyperion, a New Mexico-based company which said last week that it has taken its first firm orders and plans to start mass production within five years. ‘Our goal is to generate electricity for 10 cents a watt anywhere in the world,’ said John Deal, chief executive of Hyperion. ‘They will cost approximately $25 million each. For a community with 10,000 households, that is a very affordable $250 per home.’

Deal claims to have more than 100 firm orders, largely from the oil and electricity industries, but says the company is also targeting developing countries and isolated communities. ‘It’s leapfrog technology,’ he said.

This is a truly worthwhile technology. I haven’t worked inside nuclear power generation since Hector was a pup; but, the problems of safety and cost never had a damned thing to do with tech in the first place. Aside from questions decided by politicians – like not choosing to build breeder reactors in the USA back in the day – the technology never has been a problem. France has proved that better than most.

The crew at Los Alamos know more about this sort of tech than just about anyone on the street. Good to see some of these taxpayer-funded programs making it into something other than death and destruction.