[ISL]

To make an an HN-relevant analogy: The FDA-hobbling of 23andMe pales in comparison to what it's like to work with nuclear regulatory frameworks and societal concerns regarding nuclear science. When I was an undergrad, DOE was willing to pay the university the entire relicensing and operating costs of the on-campus TRIGA. The university declined, knowing that the requisite environmental impact study for relicensing would bring withering community backlash.

(For those who haven't seen one, here's what it looks like when the control rods are blown out of a TRIGA [1]; the reactor runs away momentarily, but then self-moderates when the fuel warms. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orNP1wMmPK4 . The Cherenkov flash is a beautiful blue.)

Nuclear power can provide a safe, well-studied, and effective bridge to solar power. Almost nobody's dabbling in it because there's so much societal opposition. Working on a reactor in an old schoolhouse in a rural area? Someone elsewhere in the county will be willing to speak at every county governmental meeting to shut you down. Their opposition has merit; it's easy to point to Fukushima and Chernobyl as major disasters.

A simple, clear, and publicly-understandable regulatory framework in which both society and innovators can feel comfortable with small-scale nuclear experimentation would go a long way toward driving new startups in the field. Experimenters shouldn't get their hopes up too far: Some forms of radiation are extremely penetrating/hard to shield, and some hazardous isotopes live a long, long time. If you're dabbling in the field, please plan from the beginning to minimize and safely store your waste.

We only get one planet; I'd rather it not be too warm nor contaminated by our litter.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIGA

[coldtea]

>Their opposition has merit; it's easy to point to Fukushima and Chernobyl as major disasters.

The disasters are one thing.

The constant lying from authorities, government and assigned experts was another. They were caught pants down telling lies and misinforming in handling the Fukusima accident.

This breaks trust. And for projects like that, that involve billions of dollars (enough to fuel much payola and greed), it's easy not to have much trust in the good intentions of those building and managing them in the first place.

[judk]

Even our own revered patio11 got caught as a patsy, repeating propaganda about how perfectly organized and careful the Japanese nuclear industry was.

Anyway, overall, whether the dangers are technical or social, they are still dangers.

[sillysaurus2]

Sources, please? I don't disbelieve you; I want to know more. (And precisely what you're referring to.)

[ChuckMcM]

There are several statements that TEPCO made before, during, and after the Fukishima incident that were directly refuted by the IAEA report on the disaster. And I certainly agree that it doesn't help the cause of Nuclear Power use when such things occur. There were also false and misleading statements made by the opponents of Fukishima but I hold them to a lower standard than I do TEPCO.

"Ideally, in a crisis, a government would communicate effectively to its people and the global community. Risks associated with the crisis and ongoing efforts to manage the crisis would be clearly articulated. Efforts would be made to provide factual reassurances to the international community. All of this would be done with timely information provided by recognized authorities in a coordinated fashion. Fundamental to such effective crisis communication would be adherence to a sound, well-researched accident management plan predicated on coordination and support among government entities and the utility (or utilities) involved and on trust among all parties, including the national and global communities.

None of the above happened with the Fukushima Daiichi accident. The reasons why are not entirely clear. Obviously, the Japanese government; safety authorities; and TEPCO, the nuclear utility, had a stake in the conduct and outcome of the accident, and they, for their own benefit at least, needed to provide reliable, timely information to their stakeholders and constituents. In addition, many other organizations across the globe had a stake in the conduct and outcome of the accident, and they too needed solid information to be provided to them so that they themselves could provide meaningful information to their decision makers, stakeholders, and constituents. What was actually executed was unfortunate for all parties involved."

From -- http://fukushima.ans.org/report/societal-context

[y4mi]

this is very well covered. its trivial to search for sources yourself.

as for the lying part: check the timeline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Fukushima_I_nu...

[ewoodrich]

That's over 28 pages. And I haven't found an obvious example in the few pages I've read so far.

Which portions of the article are you referring to?

[nl]

Yeah, that's pretty useless. This is better:

On August 29, 2002, the government of Japan revealed that TEPCO was guilty of false reporting in routine governmental inspection of its nuclear plants and systematic concealment of plant safety incidents.[1]

(Note that date - 2002!)

As for Fukushima, here's a few links about false statements from TEPCO this year alone:

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/0311disaster/fukushima/AJ201302...

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/07/22/national/tepco-n...

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2013/07/31/editorials/ye...

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/08/27/national/tepcos-...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Electric_Power_Company#Sa...

[archgoon]

Can you point to resources to safely and legally begin dabbling? Are you familiar with the process to obtain proper licensing?

How are simple reactors like the Farnsworth Fuser regulated, or why are they exempt? Are non power generating reactors exempt from regulation? How does that get defined? Is it based on maximum emitted radiation?

[ISL]

While I work in the same lab as a bunch of nuclear physicists, my physics expertise is in experimental gravity.

To get the official scoop on such things, I'd start with the NRC: http://www.nrc.gov .

If you're at/near a university, many of them have a radiation safety office as a part of their Environmental Health and Safety department. University radiation safety officers are a great resource for timely details regarding rules in an experimental setting. Even if there's no "nuclear science" underway at a school, if there's a medical school or nuclear chemistry at work, there's probably a radiation safety office.

[sillysaurus2]

Experimental gravity? I went into the wrong field.

What's experimental gravity?

[ISL]

See my reply to s800.

Before you jump ship to precision tests of gravity: graduate students' mean time to graduation in our group is >7-8 years. Our experiments take several years to set up, at least a year to execute, and at least a year to analyze.

When a new idea/theory comes up, we can often test it quickly (or rule it out with existing measurements), but our bread-and-butter work is a direct confrontation with hard experimental problems.

For scale, we can choose to be separately sensitive to both the gravitational signal and the tilt of the ground due to a pickup truck parked outside of our lab.

[gngeal]

Essentially, you're trying to do what the medical research isn't doing: to invalidate the existing papers. :-)

[ISL]

We're trying to figure out what's true.

Perhaps the most important function of precision experimental tests (all of them, not just ours), is to provide very tight constraints for new theories. Any successful new theory of physics must ultimately explain more observed phenomena than existing theory. If experiment is more sensitive than existing theories, it can provide a quick checksum for whether a new theory is correct.

Furthermore, if a precision measurement is able to show that existing theory is not quite correct, it can lead the way to better theories.

In the field of precision gravity, Newton's and Einstein's theories have been perhaps frustratingly correct. At present, nobody knows if/how the "Standard Model" and gravity might connect. They're mathematically incompatible.

With respect to any existing literature, most physicists' position might be approximately summarized as, "Trust, but verify."

[s800]

What is Experimental Gravity? serious. tnx.

[ISL]

We do precision tests of gravity and searches for forces weaker than gravity.

(Front page is dated, see publications tab for more recent work) http://www.npl.washington.edu/eotwash/

The most-important experiment we do is to test the Equivalence Principle [1], the idea that if you drop two things in vacuum, they'll fall at the same rate regardless of what they're made from. Results from our lab have shown that, at 1 part in 10,000,000,000,000 (10^-13), that's apparently true. General Relativity takes the Equivalence Principle as a postulate, and works from there. Many theories of new physics would break the EP at scales of ~10^-15 or so.

My almost-complete thesis research is searching for violations of the gravitational inverse square law at short distances. In short, over distances smaller than the diameter of a hair, nobody knows if gravity acts. It probably does, but you don't know until you check. String theory would suggest that, at short-enough distances, gravity should get unexpectedly stronger. Solutions to the Cosmological Constant problem [2] may suggest that gravity should turn off at distances shorter than the diameter of a hair. Dark Energy/Hubble Constant observations would suggest that gravity might do something interesting at around this same scale.

Our workhorse technology is the venerable torsion balance [4], souped-up with modern experimental readout and data analysis techniques. Our best angle sensors [5] sense a nanoradian's angular displacement in less than a second. For scale, if we shine a laser pointer from Seattle to San Francisco, a nanoradian is equivalent to about a millmeter's displacement of the beamspot on the TransAmerica building.

If you want me to build you an angle sensor or a precision force sensor, I'm interested in hybrid industrial and academic work [6].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_principle

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_energy

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torsion_spring#Torsion_balance

[5] http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.4828

[6] http://www.nanoradian.com

[Intermernet]

Pardon my complete lack of knowledge in this field, but would MEMS (or NEMS) mirror arrays be sensitive / accurate enough to measure the gravitational effect on light at the scales you're talking about?

I'm surprised to read the statement "over distances smaller than the diameter of a hair, nobody knows if gravity acts" as I thought we were accurately measuring all sorts of interactions at or below that scale (10s of microns).

It sounds like a very interesting field to be in!

[ISL]

My apologies for the terse nature of my summary above. We measure the deflection of light bounced from a mirror attached to a test mass hanging from a very fine wire.

That said, the geometry of some of the Texas Instruments DLP MEMS chips has interested some of us for years. The chips are designed to be robust in consumer products, but if they instead designed their mirrors to have very soft springs, we'd be interested in playing with them. Once a year or so, I do a survey of the available MEMS accelerometer chips to see if it's worth building an array from them. They're still a few orders of magnitude away in sensitivity from anything we could put to use.

For the second half of your question: Physicists do indeed measure interactions at scales far smaller than the diameter of a proton. The "trouble" with gravity is that it's so very weak. On a handwavy charge-for-charge basis, gravity is 10^40 (that's 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) times weaker than electromagnetism. For an experiment that's purely sensitive to electromagnetism (atomic spectroscopy) or other comparably strong forces (particle colliders) to see gravity, it's necessary to resolve the other forces incredibly well in order to see a tiny residual effect from gravity.

For our work, achieving sensitivity to gravity at the scale of tens of microns isn't that hard. Proving to you that we're not seeing another force/experimental influence (the flip side of that 10^40) is very hard, and is what I spend almost all of my time trying to do.

Thanks for your interest; it's sharing the stoke about this stuff that keeps us going when it's hard (and, if you're a US citizen, you're paying for it! Thank you!).

[rwmj]

I would really enjoy a blog post/series about what you're doing. I'm sure you think it's ordinary and slightly boring but you'd surprised how many -- even technical -- people have no idea how you can measure gravity over the breadth of a hair, and would be fascinated by it.

[ISL]

I'll definitely think about it. I suspect shipping my thesis will happen first :).

[jrockway]

This is much more interesting than the original article. Thanks for posting.

[pflanze]

I'm not sure what you mean with litter, but isn't nuclear waste storage still an unsolved problem?

[ISL]

It's far from solved, but there are partial solutions, including reprocessing.

My appeal to dabblers was to think through the entire life cycle of an experiment before beginning. If I were to crack open a smoke detector in order to play around with the Americium source, I'd think hard first about whether I actually knew what I was doing, making sure I worked in a clean/orderly environment, that the entire experiment was nicely contained, and that I had a viable plan for how to safely manage the waste I'd created.

Just as with the bathtub ring in "The Cat in the Hat Comes Back" [1], once contamination leaves containment, it can wander everywhere, generating lots of low-level waste. You'd rather not eat or aspirate an alpha-emitter.

Nobody wants an unsafe nuclear experiment in the garage next door; it's irresponsible. It's one thing to hurt yourself, but quite another to harm someone unaware of a risk. It's also irresponsible to dispose of a hot source in your garbage can. That source may no longer be able to hurt you, but it's able to harm everyone who comes into contact with it in the future.

Our lab's standard for whether or not something has been cleaned up: any residual activity is comparable to/indistinguishable from background, and any activated waste has been disposed of with someone licensed to handle it.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_in_the_Hat_Comes_Back

[peterpathname]

here in australia, decades of research and policy development have hit upon a world-class solution to the nuclear waste challenge.

We're building a road in a semi-arid remote location, on the traditional lands of a small, disemowered, remote indigenous community. At the end of the road, we plan to build a shed with a barbed wire fence. In return for this inconvenience, the local community will see employment opportunities (2 security guards) and compensation (scholarships for their children).

this standard of excellence is possible when you have a society that tolerates institutionalised inequity and cultural genocide, and apartheid style laws that target particular races. None of this should surprise, as this is the same spirit in which a large portion of the world's uranium is mined on traditional lands in Australia. http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2013/12/08/calls-ranger-u...

[XorNot]

This is just garbage. It doesn't matter where you want to put our nuclear waste disposal facility, some group will invent a story about how they're being exploited to have what they'll paint as "landfill" being put on their land.

Clearly a much better solution is what we do now, where we store all our low and medium grade nuclear waste in random sheds and basements at universities and hospitals all over the country!

[frenchfred]

not an invention: the people whose land is scheduled to store nuclear waste in australia are subject to laws that target them by race, and deny them basic social services (roads, health, housing, community safety) that others take for granted. the people on whose land uranium is mined (or was until this week's accident!) are subject to a specific federal law that compels them to abide the presence of this dirty industry on land they own.

it must be nice for you to live in this imaginary world where institutionalised racism, racialist legislation and the exploitation of indigenous land owners is 'garbage', but unfortunately for the rest of us, its your story that is mere invention.

(pete- throw away acct cos I'm away from my creds)

[judk]

So you are volunteering your backyard to store the radioactive material? Or you are only volunteering someone else's?

[wazoox]

In France, they simply used low activity nuclear waste for road beds in the countryside, as supposedly nobody stays long enough on these roads to get any harm from it.

Therefore in the center of France, many, many roads are significantly radioactive. Is it dangerous? Is radioactive matter washed away? What happens to workers doing road repairs? What happens to the rivers, crops and cattle downhill from these roads? Nobody knows and (mostly) nobody cares.

[justatdotin]

some 30 years ago, land rights in that region were made conditional on the nuclear ambitions of the time. which is why the locals have had to bear the indignity of a uranium operation on the world heritage listed lands they own. it's called radioactive racism. http://bit.ly/1d73XYz

[moca]

If we want sustainable nuclear energy, the only solution would be fast reactor that can burn nuclear waste. Politically, it is near impossible to find a place to build nuclear waste storage. Nobody know how safe is such a storage. If we can burn nuclear waste, we will have sufficient clean energy for several hundred years. By then, nuclear fusion will be harnessed, and we will have enough energy for next many million years, and they have much less environmental impact.