Daily Shaarli
January 13, 2022
The revolutionary discovery of nuclear fission in December 1938 helped launch the Atomic Age, bringing with it a unique need for secrecy regarding the scientific and technical underpinnings of nuclear weapons. This secrecy evolved into a special category of proscribed information, dubbed "Restricted Data," which is still in place today. Historian Alex Wellerstein spent over 10 years researching various aspects of nuclear secrecy, and his first book, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (University of Chicago Press), was released earlier this month.
Wellerstein is a historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, where his research centers on the history of nuclear weapons and nuclear history. (Fun fact: he served as a historical consultant on the short-lived TV series Manhattan.) A self-described "dedicated archive rat," Wellerstein maintains several homemade databases to keep track of all the digitized files he has accumulated over the years from official, private, and personal archives. The bits that don't find their way into academic papers typically end up as items on his blog, Restricted Data, where he also maintains the NUKEMAP, an interactive tool that enables users to model the impact of various types of nuclear weapons on the geographical location of their choice.
The scope of Wellerstein's thought-provoking book spans the scientific origins of the atomic bomb in the late 1930s all the way through the early 21st century. Each chapter chronicles a key shift in how the US approach to nuclear secrecy gradually evolved over the ensuing decades—and how it still shapes our thinking about nuclear weapons and secrecy today. //
Ars Technica: While researching your book, did you learn anything that really surprised you?
Alex Wellerstein: One was the fact that in the US we still have this parallel separate system for nuclear weapons secrets that is different from any other kind of secrecy. "Restricted Data" was a specially created category for nuclear weapons in 1946 because they really just were not sure what to do with this new concept. So we still have a very 1940s-style system. There's a lot of reasons one could imagine for saying, "Maybe we don't need to treat nuclear weapons as a totally parallel system from everything else in the world. Maybe that's not the best way—maybe we're in some ways inflating the value of this information by doing that."
There is an alternative argument, which is that secrets don't control nuclear weapons very well. It seems obvious to most people, and certainly did to me when I started this, that knowledge is power. Nuclear weapons are sort of infinite power, so their knowledge should be infinitely important, right? But the counterargument—and Oppenheimer was one of the first to really put this out there in a strong policy-framed way—is that secrecy is about control of a certain type of information, what philosophers might call "explicit information," stuff you can write down. You can restrict tons of knowledge just by not letting your experts go to another country and show them how to do stuff.
But that is only a small percentage of what it takes to actually make a weapon, specifically a nuclear weapon. As a result, it might not be the thing you want to focus on to control these weapons. You might want to focus on controlling the processes to make the fuel because that turns out to be the necessary thing. I can draw for you a beautiful sketch of how to make a thermonuclear weapon, but it's not going to help if you don't have the fuel—and you don't because we restrict that.
You could get rid of all of the secrecy tomorrow and the world would not measurably become more dangerous, because it’s other things that are actually keeping these weapons from spreading. To me, it's still a pretty radical idea because it not only goes against our intuitions about the bomb, but it also goes against what we tell ourselves about the way in which technology functions. It's not the equation that gives you the technology; it's the overall socio-political, human system that causes it to exist in the first place.
The Dark Ars Scholae Palatinae
ColdWetDog wrote:
But they're not that expensive either. In the grand schema of boats being holes in the water that you dump money into, a couple of modified barges and a general purpose Gulf workboat or two is pretty meh. All depends on how much money there is in boosting payloads a bit further.
And, of course, SpaceX is looking to offshore launches in the future so as not to annoy everyone in a fifty mile circle. That will take some marine capability and having some experience in that field may be useful.
The estimate I saw from someone in the shipbuilding industry was $10 million to build and outfit the barge, $60 thousand per month in berthing fees, and $120 thousand per launch in operating costs, not including insurance. Use one twice per month over ten years, and you're looking at an uninsured cost of around $200,000 per launch. Reduce the cadence to once per month, and it's over $260,000 per launch. For smaller launchers, it might not make economic sense the way it does for Falcon 9.
Edit to add: the $200k per launch is roughly the minimum possible even if launch cadence increases, because the cycle time for barge operations means you'll have to add more barges to consistently get more than 2 landings per month.
President Joe Biden this week told an audience of black students in Atlanta that he was arrested during the civil rights movement, a claim that drew four Pinocchios from a liberal newspaper.
Published 2 days ago
In an opinion piece in the Washington Post (which Steve Hanley already skewered), the author wrote about the recent icy traffic disaster on I-95 in Virginia but imagined a scenario where the only vehicles were EVs. The issue, the writer claimed, was that if everyone had been driving EVs, the mess could have been worse. //
It should be noted that there were a few Tesla owners caught in the traffic jam and in one of the comments to his video, a user noted that a pregnant woman from the Facebook Tesla Divas group shared that she was stuck in her Tesla for 16 hours during the traffic jam. Her battery was at 74% and only dropped to 61% by the time she got home. She simply turned on Camp Mode and slept. //
Other commenters shared how their Teslas fared during the Texas winter storm last year, and a Nissan LEAF owner shared that they were stuck in traffic for 6 hours once and used the seat heater and their electric blanket. They only used 15% percent of the battery and their LEAF was a 2012 model. //
To answer the Washington Post’s question, the Teslas did pretty well during 18 hours of freezing temperatures. He noted that he used solar at home to charge his cars but included the cost of electricity for those who may not have solar at home. //
12 Hour Check-in
The Model Y battery level went from 91% down to 58%. It used 26.5 kWh at 0.16 per kWh, which would cost $4.22.
The Model X battery dropped from 90% to 47% and used 43 kWh at 0.16 per kWh, which would cost $6.88.
LtWiggledworth Ars Praetorian
AUG 26, 2021 8:56 PM
goodolejackburton wrote:
All the smug history reinterpretations that say Germany couldn't have won the war conveniently leave this out. A handful of uranium and a few more scientists on their side, and the world would have been on the other side of the looking glass, a la "The Man in The High Castle."It really was the world war, and far more than the first. Not just in the sense of involving the world, but determining the world. We came very close to what could be legitimately called "the darkest timeline."
There's a miniseries that's worth watching about the Nazi nuclear program, and the successful Allied attempt to undermine it: "The Heavy Water War."
Its one thing to get the scientific understanding to start a reactor, but the Germans were years behind in building the huge industrial base necessary for the bomb. The Manhattan Project should really be understood just as much as an effort to bootstrap an entire industrial sector, as a scientific project. K-25 was the largest building in the world , and used 1% of all the electricity in the US, and that was only one part of the overall effort.
Radiofrequency radiation is relatively low-energy, and it can't break chemical bonds. Like the nearby microwave frequencies, it can heat tissues. But we're not aware of any mechanisms beyond heating by which radiation at these wavelengths can damage human tissue. And there's no evidence at the population level indicating that radiation from these sources poses any sort of risk.
5G is no different. It does transmit on different frequencies in some situations. But these frequencies are generally blocked by things like walls, and they are also low enough energy that they won't cause molecules to break apart. Also, no, 5G does not make you more vulnerable to COVID-19 by weakening your immune system, nor do 5G signals give rise to the virus itself. //
By contrast, the adverse effects of ionizing radiation are well-known and well-documented. Ions are just electrically charged atoms. Cations have more protons than electrons and hence have a positive charge, while anions ("negative ions") have a negative charge because there are more electrons than protons. High-energy rays can knock electrons off of atoms, and the resulting free electrons then collide with other atoms to create even more ions. This can cause unnatural chemical reactions in living cells, breaking apart DNA chains so that the cell either dies or mutates to become cancerous.
That's why many scientists who worked with X-rays in the early days after their discovery lost their hair and developed cancerous tumors. Marie Curie was exposed to radioactive elements through her experiments, and she liked to carry around vials of radium because the glowing tubes looked like "fairy lights" at night. She eventually died of aplastic anemia linked to that radiation.
The ionizing radiation emitted by the quantum pendant and similar products is significantly lower, as the ANVS acknowledges, but prolonged continuous wear could nonetheless be harmful. Back in 2016, Amal Graafstra, who founded the biohacking supply company Dangerous Things, tested a "negative ion" silicon wristband by placing it against a Geiger counter. He discovered the band was emitting more than 2 microsieverts (or 0.000002 sieverts) of radiation every hour.
That's well below the 1-sievert threshold needed to cause radiation sickness, but if one wore the band for 24 hours, it's roughly equivalent to getting five dental X-rays in a single day. Wear it 24 hours a day for a year—as someone who fears 5G exposure might do—and you'll be exposed to 21.9 millisieverts, which is half the maximum permitted exposure for radiation workers in the US. Small wonder that the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has warned of the potential dangers associated with wearing such products over a long period of time.
With clearing skies and moderate winds, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket rideshare mission safely launched into space on Thursday. The first stage then sent its upper stage and a payload with 105 small satellites on its way into low Earth orbit. The Falcon 9 first stage made a smooth landing back near its launch site.
Remarkably, this single Falcon 9 rocket first stage has now launched 550 satellites into orbit, as well as one Cargo Dragon and one Crew Dragon. It has flown, on average, every two months since its first launch. It would seem that rocket re-use is more than a fad. //
niwax Ars Tribunus Militum et Subscriptor
Hispalensis wrote:
Quote:
Upon launch, it will become the third Falcon 9 first stage that SpaceX has flown 10 times.
First reaction: hmm, that's interesting...
Delayed reaction: 10 times? That is insane!
It is funny how our brain quickly accepts the extraordinary as the new normal
This booster has delivered two Dragon capsules to the ISS, first with two astronauts then with 3t of supplies, plus a GEO commsat, 295 LEO commsats, 9 traffic monitoring satellites, 48 earth observation satellites, an in-orbit data transfer demonstration constellation, a space tug with 18 payloads, a synthetic aperture radar and an optical spectrum observatory and 10-15 random other cubesats.
That is before todays launch of some 105 new satellites.
I'll repeat what I said way back on SSO-A: The unbelievable projections of the small sat industry have come true, only to be gobbled up by a workhorse F9 on it's 10th flight.
For decades, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has been home to an unusual artifact from World War II: a small cube of solid uranium metal, measuring about two inches on each side and weighing just under 2.5 kilograms. Lab lore holds that the cube was confiscated from Nazi Germany's failed nuclear reactor experiments in the 1940s, but that has never been experimentally verified.
PNNL scientists are developing new nuclear forensic techniques that should help them confirm the the pedigree of this cube—and others like it—once and for all. Those methods could also eventually be used to track illicit trafficking of nuclear material. PNNL's Jon Schwantes and graduate student Brittany Robertson presented some of their initial findings this week at the fall meeting of the American Chemical Society (a hybrid virtual/in-person event).
University of Maryland physicist Timothy Koeth is among the outsider collaborators in this ongoing research. He has spent over seven years tracking down these rare artifacts of Nazi Germany's nuclear research program, after receiving one as a gift. As of 2019, he and a UMD colleague, Miriam Herbert, had tracked down 10 cubes in the US: one at the Smithsonian, another at Harvard University, a handful in private collections—and of course, the PNNL cube.
What makes these cubes so special is their historical significance. As we reported previously:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/physicists-hunt-uranium-cubes-to-shed-light-on-germanys-failed-nuclear-reactor/
Underpinning the Manhattan Project in the US was the fear that German scientists under Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime would beat the Allies to a nuclear bomb. The Germans had a two-year head-start, but according to Koeth, "fierce competition over finite resources, bitter interpersonal rivalries, and ineffectual scientific management" resulted in significant delays in their progress toward achieving a sustained nuclear reaction. German nuclear scientists were separated into three isolated groups based in Berlin (B), Gottow (G), and Leipzig (L).
Renowned physicist Werner Heisenberg headed up the Berlin group, and as the Allied forces advanced in the winter of 1944, Heisenberg moved his team to a cave under a castle in a small town called Haigerloch—now the site of the Atomkeller Museum. That's where the group built the B-VIII reactor. It resembled an "ominous chandelier," per Koeth, because it was composed of 664 uranium cubes strung together with aircraft cable and then submerged in a tank of heavy water shielded by graphite to prevent radiation exposure.
As the German scientists were racing against time, Manhattan Project lead Lieutenant General Leslie Groves kicked off a covert mission dubbed "Alsos," with the express purpose of gathering information and materials related to Germany's scientific research. When the Allied forces closed in at last, Heisenberg took apart the B-VIII experiment and buried the uranium cubes in a field, ferreting away key documentation in a latrine. (Pity Samuel Goudsmit, the poor physicist who had to dig those out.) Heisenberg himself escaped by bicycle, carrying a few cubes in a backpack.
As Heisenberg himself acknowledged, the German scientists' final experiment failed because the amount of uranium in the cubes was insufficient to trigger a sustained nuclear reaction. But Heisenberg was confident [was he certain?] that "a slight increase in its size would have been sufficient to start off the process of energy production." A model described in a 2009 paper bears that out, showing that the group would only have needed 50 percent more uranium cubes to get the design to work. If it had, our world might look very different today.
The Alsos team purportedly brought the cubes confiscated from Berlin to the United States for use in the uranium processing facility at Oak Ridge. However, Koeth learned that, by April 1945, the US didn't need additional feedstock material. And there is no official record of any cubes entering the country, so most of them have never been accounted for. Ditto for the 400 or so uranium cubes that had been in use by the Gottow group, led by Kurt Diebner.
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The devil went down to Georgia and came back a lame duck.
Joe Biden’s angry speech in the Peach State on Tuesday about so-called “voting rights” was stupid, divisive and full of lies, and it also exposed his impotence. //
Inflation has hit a 40-year high, store shelves are empty, COVID numbers are at record levels with tests in scarce supply, violent crime is surging in blue cities and millions of illegal immigrants are still pouring over the southern border.
Distract the peasants
But all this flailing president can do in the face of cascading, mainly self-inflicted, crises is to gin up a fake political controversy to distract the peasants he imagines are out there hanging on his every word.
The man elected to unite the country coughed, shouted, lied, said “y’all,” and railed obsessively against Donald Trump.
“I’m tired of being quiet!” he yelled. //
On the Senate floor Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell crisply summed up Biden’s “rant.”
“He shouted that if you disagree with him, you’re George Wallace … If you don’t pass the laws he wants, you’re Bull Connor, and if you oppose giving Democrats untrammeled, one-party control of the country, well, you’re Jefferson Davis.”
Top U.S. and British scientists reportedly thought that SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, likely escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, but some were hesitant to let the debate play out in the media because they were concerned about “international harmony.” //
Dr. Francis Collins, the then-director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), replied to Farrar, writing: “I share your view that a swift convening of experts in a confidence-inspiring framework is needed or the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate, doing great potential harm to science and international harmony.”
Another scientist, Dr. Ron Fouchier, a Dutch virologist and Deputy Head of the Erasmus MC Department of Viroscience, responded to Farrar, “Further debate about such accusations would unnecessarily distract top researchers from their active duties and do unnecessary harm to science in general and science in China in particular.” //
David Asher, who led the Trump administration’s investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, told Fox News in May 2021 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) was up to “some very hairy stuff with synthetic biology” and that biostatisticians from the U.S. government calculated that the odds of the coronavirus evolving naturally was one-in-13 billion.