How Steven Chu Used Gamma Rays to Save the Planet

On May 15, 12:08 pm, Frogwatch <ohara...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On May 15, 10:07 am, Jack Linthicum <jacklinthi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:



On May 14, 9:16 pm, Frogwatch <dboh...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On May 14, 3:33 pm, Jack Linthicum <jacklinthi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Remember Richard Feymann, yeah, I know he was coached, but he broke
through the institutiolized bullshit.

Mission Impossible: Obama Taps Crack Team Of Scientists To Do The Job
BP Can't
Zachary Roth | May 14, 2010, 5:36PM

Scientists tapped by the Obama administration to help fix the Gulf
Coast oil spill. From left to right: Richard Garwin, Tom Hunter,
Alexander Slocum, Jonathan Katz and George Cooper

President Obama's new plan to fix the Gulf oil spill is so crazy it
just might work...

As BP's high-priced industry experts flail, the president has turned
to a rag-tag band of big-think scientific renegades, and sent them on
a mission to somehow MacGyver a way to stop up the leak -- before it's
too late.

OK, maybe that's going a bit far. In fact, the news that Obama and his
energy secretary, StevenChu, have sent a team of leading physicists
and engineers to the Gulf to work with BP offers further evidence of
the administration's essentially technocratic approach to governance,
and its faith in knowledge-based expertise. That might seem like
common sense, but it represents a shift from the Bushies' faith in the
problem-solving power of industry, and its willingness to let science
take a backseat to the concerns of its religious base.

Still, asking one of the key inventors of the hydrogen bomb, along
with an engineer who helped develop techniques for mining on Mars,
counts as out-of-the-box thinking. Here's a quick rundown on the
president's unlikely team:

The Old Hand: Richard Garvin

In 1951, 23-year old Richard Garwin was working at the Los Alomos
nuclear laboratory,
when he was asked by Edward Teller to devise an experiment that would
demonstrate the principle of "radiation implosion." Garwin's detailed
sketch served as the basis for "Mike," an 80-ton device, that was
detonated the following year as the world's first hydrogen bomb. "I
wasn't the inventor," Garwin has said. "I was sort of the architect.."
In 1952, Garwin went to work for IBM -- where he remains a fellow
emeritus -- on the understanding that he could spend a third of his
time working with the federal government on national security issues.
He's a recipient of the national medal of science, and a member of the
JASON, an elite think tank that studies complex scientific problems on
behalf of the U.S. government. In 1991, Garwin convened a symposium of
experts to discus ways to stem oil flows from Kuwait wells, set on
fire by Iraq during the Gulf War. For Garwin, now 82, could this be
his last hurrah?

The Establishment Man: Tom Hunter

Tom Hunter yesterday announced his resignation as the president of
Sandia National Laboratories, an outpost of the U.S. nuclear weapons
complex that conducts high-level research for the National Nuclear
Security Administration. He had been at Sandia since 1967, and served
as president since 2005 -- a job that reportedly paid him $1.7 million
a year. He has a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of
Wisconsin. Hunter said yesterday he had no particular plans for what
he'd be doing in retirement. That may have changed.

The Maverick Genius: Alexander Slocum

Alexander Slocum, a professor of mechanical engineering at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, teaches a world famous design
and manufacturing class that culminates in a remote-controlled robot
competition. He holds more than 60 patents for inventions relating to
biotechnology, robotics and computer science, but his research
interests also include "going faster on my snowboard, staying down
longer SCUBA diving!," according to his website. A colleague told
Bloomberg: "He has a lot of creative ideas. One in 10 are really
brilliant ideas, but nine are dumb. You can't miss that one that is
brilliant." Here's hoping genius strikes in the Gulf.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/05/mission_impossible_...

Do any of these people know ANYTHING about oil drilling?  Obambi has
watched too many crappy sci fi movies.

It should be obvious that none of the people on site know enough to
stop this leak. I have come to the conclusion that they do not want to
plug the leak, they want to recover the oil.

The problem is that these academics are likely to step on the rig and
immediately break a leg falling into the rathole.  Even worse, they
will think the rathole is the well or try to use some drill pipe
knowing how strong it is and then finding that all its strength is in
tension and torsion and not compression.  Maybe they will try to get
drilling mud mixed up with really high weight only to find it doesnt
mix with anything but diesel or that it has no ability to carry
plugging material, etc.  These guys truly know nothing at all about
drilling so I fail to see how they can be of any use at all.  Other
wildcatters ARE the people with knowledge because they have generally
solved every crazy kind of drilling problem because the average
wildcatter does not work for a well funded oil company but is
operating on his own dime.

Please note that BP had no idea that they could use high energy gamma
rays to effectively make an X-ray of the damaged valves. This was from
idea from Dr. Chu. Next time remember why these people have been sent
to solve things. They solve things.

Exclusive: How Steven Chu Used Gamma Rays to Save the Planet

May 13 2010, 4:08 PM ET | Comment
It sounds like something right out of Marvel Comics: Government
scientists suggest firing high-energy gamma rays -- GAMMA RAYS! -- to
diagnose a leaking oil well a mile below the surface of the ocean. But
that's what happened in the Gulf, when Energy Secretary Steven Chu and
his team advised BP to use the gamma ray imaging technology to finally
see the extent of the damage to the underwater blowout preventer, the
safety device that was supposed to seal the oil well.

An eternal fact of Washington is that government gets much more
attention when it performs badly than when it performs well. As an
illustration of the former, recall the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
To illustrate the latter, consider how the media is covering
government right now. By my count at least three major natural
disasters have occurred in recent weeks: the Nashville flooding, the
deadly Oklahoma tornadoes, and the BP oil spill (admittedly not
"natural" but threatening to be a major environmental disaster). Let's
throw in an attempted terrorist attack in Times Square, too. On every
front, government has performed ably--and often better than ably. And
yet it's understating things considerably to say this success has not
been widely recognized.

It should be recognized, though, because when it comes to government
disaster response, the Bush years marked a low point and right now
we're experiencing a high point. For a vivid illustration of this
disparity, look no further than the Gulf. During Katrina, FEMA
director Michael Brown secured his place history as the poster boy for
government incompetence. Now consider Chu, the Nobel Prize Winner who
has been at BP headquarters in Houston with a team of government
scientists trying to figure out how to stop the leak. According to a
government official, BP initially "dismissed" Chu's gamma ray
suggestion, but came back a week later and admitted "Chu's right."

I talked to Chu this afternoon about the government's response to the
disaster. As a mental exercise, try and imagine what these answers
would sound like if "Brownie" or some other top Bush officials were
still overseeing disaster relief in the Gulf.

I understand you just got back from Houston? What were you doing
there?

We went there Tuesday night, we were in Houston in the morning with
BP, then visited for three or four hours with the manufacturers of the
blowout preventers [the equipment that should have stopped the leak].

What advice have you been giving BP advice about gamma-ray imaging?
Can you explain in layman's terms what BP was trying to do and what
exactly you recommended?

Well, I was talking about a week and a half ago to some of the
Department of Energy folks that BP had asked us to send down there.
This was the week before last Sunday. There was a several hour phone
call Sunday where a few of the national lab directors, I, and the
people we had at the site were talking about what we can do to help
BP, and we thought that we could perhaps help them specifically by
imaging the state of the BOP, the blow-out-prevention valve, with high-
energy gamma rays. By using penetrating gamma rays you can see whether
the valves were closed.


The really important part of all this is that through our
conversations with BP, they seem to be very open to having
brainstorming sessions, having us help diagnose what the condition of
the blowout prevention valve is and helping them think through
potential solutions. The president charged me with assembling a small
team of scientists to go down there and that was what we were doing
beginning Tuesday night. The idea was to bring in very smart people
who also have great connections to the larger engineering and
scientific community. The national lab director who's been engaged in
this from the beginning, Tom Hunter, and I and four other scientists
and engineers went down there.

How is it that you know enough about gamma rays and oil spill
technology to be helpful? I wasn't aware that that was an area you'd
worked in before you were secretary?

Oil spills were not something I've worked on, but I do know about
gamma rays.

How?

Because I'm a physicist. And I dabble in many areas of physics. I did
experiments when I was a graduate student on weak interactions, which
are the forces of nuclear decay. And so I kept in my brain certain
nuclear sources and what their energies were and I knew what the
ranges were for how penetrating gamma rays could be. Very high-energy
gamma rays can penetrate several inches of steel.

And that's the challenge at the bottom of the ocean? To penetrate the
steel and see the condition of the equipment?

Yeah. Think of a dental X-ray. You have the source that can penetrate
through material and you expose something on the backside. If you want
to go through not flesh, but steel of a very high density, you need
higher energy, electromagnetic particles--the higher the energy, the
more penetrating it can be without being scattered or absorbed.

What role can the government play in helping stop the spill? I thought
BP was taking the lead on this?

Well, of course they're taking the lead. But there are many branches
of the government that are associated with the spill, its aftermath
and containment, and all those things. DOE's major assets are not in
those areas, but we do know how to image things. We do know about
mechanical things. And so I felt our major assets would be in things
like diagnosing what the BOP would do, and [thinking through the]
steps going forward--how do you decide whether Plan A, B, C, or D
would help? To the extent BP wants it, we can give advice on how to
think through these things. What you're doing in a situation like this
is dealing with probabilities--you don't know the exact state of
something. For example, in the final hours we were saying, "Well, what
if this thing happened?" There's a small probability, but if it does
happen, what do you do? And if this other thing happens what do you
do? You're chasing down answer about what to do should something
unforeseen happen, even though it might be a very small possibility.
You still want to go down those paths. Instead of approaching it as,
"Oops, this happened--now what do we do?"

That type of thinking is more in line with what we do at the Energy
Department, because DOE is part of the nuclear security enterprise of
this country for the last half century, and we have nuclear reactor
expertise as well. So that type of thinking--pushing as hard as you
can to zero-accident tolerance--is something that's been in our DNA
for half a century.

Why are the national laboratories getting involved in helping with the
spill, including a weapons lab? What exactly to they have to offer
that's germane to the problem of an oil disaster?

They have the high-energy gamma ray source! Let me be blunt. They were
the ones who supplied the Cobalt 60 gamma ray source that's being
used. [Update: BP and the national laboratories discussed having the
lab supply the Cobalt 60, but BP ultimately procured it elsewhere].
They have a very talented number of scientists and engineers.

Here's what's happening. After the [Space Shuttle] Challenger
accident, the U.S. government formed a panel of very, very bright
scientists and engineers to come together and figure out what happened
and what could be done in the future to prevent it. Most of the people
on that panel were not aeronautics experts, not rocket experts or NASA
experts. They were very smart people who had a broad range of
knowledge and experience. This is actually what you want: you want a
set of fresh eyes, people who can propose potential out-of-the-box
solutions, who might foresee what might go wrong. If you're an expert
and you're used to certain things done certain ways, that limits your
ability to cast a wider net, and so one of the most important things
that we're doing at the national laboratories is putting together
these scientific teams, many of whom would be considered non-experts.
In times like this, those are many of the people you want. BP and the
oil industry have the lion's share of the experts that are exactly
germane to this. So this is how we think we can best add value.

How long to you expect it will be before the leak is stopped?

That i couldn't say.

Days? Weeks?

Look, let's just say we know more about the blowout preventer, we know
more about its condition, there are things on it that have worked. So
I think there's a path forward. But as everyone knows, it ain't over
till it's over, to quote the great American philosopher of the 20th
century. And meanwhile oil is continuing to spill. So we are very
focused on trying to stop that as quickly as possible. And the
government is also focused on the downstream things to mitigate its
environmental impact.

There was a congressional hearing yesterday about the causes of the
spill. Will we ever know what triggered this disaster?

You know, it's under investigation. Like all other investigations of
accidents, it depends. It's very important to try and do a postmortem
as quickly as possible, because those things are very important
lessons that have to apply going forward.

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/05/exclusive-how-steven-chu-used-gamma-rays-to-save-the-planet/56685/
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