Category Archives: Science Education

The Nanny State. Gaussling’s 5th Epistle to the Bohemians.

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“We live in an age of miracle and wonder” is the refrain from Paul Simon’s album Graceland. All around us and through us are engineered materials devised for their specific physical and chemical properties. Time-released magic bullet drugs that inhibit specific enzymes. Flavorants, colorants, rheology modifiers, and manufactured food substances are engineered and marketed to satisfy our lizard brain’s willingness to shell out cash-for-calories and stimulate our limbic system’s emotive triggers. 

It is nearly impossible to avoid contact with manufactured goods that aren’t modified by chemistry. A century and a half of tinkering with substances at the nanometer scale has given us the ability to optimise the composition and performance of products that make our lives easier and safer.  Microprocessors and Lycra, Hastelloy and Lipitor. The chemical industry has evolved to produce the raw materials and finished goods needed for the performance we have come to expect.

However, history provides a record of the problems associated with the exuberant but uncritical acceptance of this flood of manufactured goods.  From radium poisoning of watch dial painters to chromium VI to asbestos, there is a long list of negligence and environmental insult. The trail blazing of chemical industry leaves behind it a chronicle of tragedy as well as benefits.

The result of the checkered past of industry is a growing (some would say “metastisizing”) intertwined web of state, federal, and international regulatory oversight and requirements. And with it- perhaps as a result of it- has come institutional risk aversion. 

In general way, risk aversion is a type of survival trait and is probably hardwired into our brains. It is hard to blame people for being wary or fearful of risks, especially those they do not understand. But on the other hand, risk aversion is also a type of inertia. It is a fulcrum from which metaphysical rather than physical justifications are leveraged.  

At what point does concern for safety become excessive and how does one go about commenting on it? In a sense, it is similar to being critical of a religion. Similar to interpreting religion, we interpret that safety is important, but we do not often have a clear path mapped out for us through the maze of details and choices.

It is possible for organizations to be dominated by confident voices that are risk averse. Meeting facilitators will piously intone that “safety first” is our policy.  Detailed SOP’s will issue, dragging out the most elementary actions into numerous steps.  There is great merit to SOP’s, but enlightened and proactive management of hazardous operations personel is more important.

Organizations can find themselves spiraling into micromanagement of even the smallest details for fear that a regulatory or liability hammer will fall at any moment. Indeed, if one studies the regulations in detail, it is easy to fall into this habit. Risk aversion isn’t just a personality issue, it is statutory.

Statutory risk aversion is the domain of the Nanny State. The name “Nanny State” refers to the sum total of regulated actions and conditions in our lives as well as the set of penalties.  Though perhaps well intended, the Nanny State seeks to zero out risk, even for the less risk averse.

The Nanny State makes the startup of new chemical technology companies prohibitively expensive.  Nobody advocates the idea that we should be free to pollute and risk the lives of workers and communities.  But even for the most skillful and well intended, there are too many regulatory landmines to dodge: air, water, and waste permits; local zoning; OSHA; EPA (TSCA); fire codes; insurance inspections; MSDS’s in multiple languages; ITAR; and DEA. All have reporting requirements, statutes, and paper trails to maintain.

The plant is the domain of the chemical disaster. The inner offices are the domain of the administrative disaster.  Executives fear being out of regulatory compliance almost as much as an exploding 1000 gallon Pfaudler reactor (alright, I exaggerated … slightly).

In my view, the USA is becoming ossified in Nanny State paralysis in much the same way the EU has.  The combination of technological risk aversion along with the popular sport of outsourcing by our nations corps of MBA wizards only serves to accelerate the de-industrialization of the USA and the EU.

Publishing in Open Access Journals

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In the course of searching chemical topics I keep running into the on-line publication Molecules, A Journal of Synthetic Organic Chemistry and Natural Product Chemistry.  This journal is part of MDPI, Molecular Diversity Preservation International, with an office in Basel, Switzerland.  MDPI is also dedicated to the “deposit and exchange of molecular and biomolecular samples”.

The idea behind this journal is to provide open access. The journal asserts that, with this approach, articles get substantially higher citation numbers. Open access is an alternative to paid subscriptions. In this model, the author pays the publication fee up front for peer reviewed editorial oversight and rapid publication.

This was covered by C&EN in the July 3 of 06 issue. It was stated in the article that Elsevier was planning to offer the same service for authors who wanted free access for a cool US$6,000 per article.  The Public Library of Science has a similar program, but with a more reasonable price structure.

What I find especially exciting about this publication mode is the MolBank service. Have you ever ended up with new compounds or data that was perhaps deserving of disclosure but not part of a body of work that would develop into paper?  Here is a blurb from the website-

Molbank (ISSN 1422-8599, CODEN: MOLBAI) publishes one-compound-per-paper short notes and communications on synthetic compounds and natural products. Solicited timely review articles will also be published. Molbank was published during 1997-2001 as MolBank section of Molecules (ISSN 1420-3049, CODEN: MOLEFW). Since 2002 it is published as a separate and independent journal. Molbank is a free online Open Access Journal. To be added to the subscriber’s mailing list, write your e-mail address into the “Publication Alert” box on the right side, and press the “Subscribe” button. Molbank is indexed and abstracted very rapidly by Chemical Abstracts.

Interestingly, this could be a possible venue for defensive disclosures in intellectual property. Hmmm … 

The question is, will paying-to-publish be cheaper than paying-to-subscribe? And, how will library administration have to change to accommodate this? 

But perhaps the bigger issue may be related to a certain snobismus that exists in regard to publishing. At some point, the rock stars of research (Whitesides, Trost, etc.) need to wave their hands over this mode of publishing and utter something like “verily, it is good” so the rest of the herd will thunder in that direction.

The writer of this blog has vented on this issue several times.  Putting public financed research results into free public access is the fair thing to do and should contribute to innovation and get new technologies into use at lower cost.  Turning over copyright of research papers to private third party groups only adds to the expense and complication to the use of this national treasure.

No doubt this will be vigorously opposed by the publishing establishment. The US$6000 fee charged by Elsevier is absurd and in reality is the beginning of the end of their publically financed milking of the R&D cash cow.

Thorium and Methanol

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As we track down the back side of the petroleum curve, we will see a transition from the alkane/alcohol fueled Otto engine to a greater reliance on electric conveyance. Here is some wishful thinking-  Ethanol as a direct petroleum replacement will collapse under the weight of scrutiny as better cost data becomes available. Eventually, ethanol will be prized foremost as an oxygenate additive replacement for MTBE. 

Methanol and Fischer-Tropsch hydrocarbons from coal and biomass will provide high energy density fuels for the carbon-neutral future as petroleum scarcity drives other technologies into play. The Fischer-Tropsch liquified fuels technology from 20th century pariah states (Nazi Germany and South Africa) will assume a greater role in the post-petroleum age.

Fermentation of starch-derived glucose to ethanol and CO2 is too wasteful in the end to be attactive.  Fermentation of cellulosic material to acetate is more mass efficient. Esterification and reduction of ethyl acetate affords ethanol. One company, ZeaChem, (former coworkers, actually) is already working to bring this technology on stream. It remains to be seen how it will go over. I wish them well.

Electric power for the future will come from many sources. Distant, centralized power plants will channel energy across the grid to home-charged automobiles. Electrons travel fast and quietly over the lonely wire. They do not require fleets of ponderous 18-wheelers to move them around in limited quantities.

I see a future heavily reliant on electrons supplied from nuclear plants. Uranium-235 infrastructure will continue to supply fuel to nuclear plants for a long time. But the low abundance of U-235 (o.7 %) and the ever present proliferation potential of Pu-239 from this fuel cycle raises questions as to the wisdom of building U-235 nuke plants in the third or fourth tier states.

A more obscure nuclear fuel that is more abundant than uranium will see a phase-in as demand on the present nuclear fuel infrastructure exceeds supply.  That fuel is Th-232. Thorium-232 is  generally more abundant that uranium and has the additional benefit that it’s major isotope, Th-232 , is the nuclide of interest. Th-232 is not a fissile nuclide, but is a “fertile” isotope instead. Th-232 absorbs a neutron in a reactor seeded with U-235 or Pu-239 to provide an initial neutron flux to become Th-233, which beta decays to Pa-233 which further beta decays to U-233.  It is U-233 which is the fissile nuclide.  U-233 then participates in the fission chain reaction that generates the heat.

You can’t make a nuclear weapon out of Th-232, though in principle you could make one from U-233. The downside of a U-233 bomb is the high specific activity of this isotope.  U-233 is intensely radioactive and poses extra problems in handling.

The economics of thorium energy is advantageous in many ways to that provided by uranium/plutonium infrastructure. Thorium is abundant in monazite formations- reportedly up to 16 % thorium oxide.  The present problem with the thorium cycle is handling the intensely radioactive U-233 that remains in the spent fuel elements. Separate processing infrastructure will have to be put in place to supply reactors that burn thorium before this fuel can go forward.

An HTGR  Brayton cycle reactor with a helium turbine could provide up to 50 % thermodynamic efficiency.  Combine this reactor design with the potential cost savings of the more abundant Th-232, and you have a technology that is well set to provide power to keep the lights, cable TV, and the internet going into the post-petroleum age.

Check out the blog dedicated to Energy from Thorium. I’m writing about thorium because I think it is an important fuel and it needs to find its way to mainstream thinking.  

TED

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Check out this video of Daniel Dennett talking about dangerous memes. Dennett is a philosopher specializing in the study of conciousness.  In another TED conference, he offers insights on this difficult topic. Our consciousness is not a universal chip set capable of processing all inputs with equal fidelity. In fact, our consciousness has rather serious limitations.

The TED conference videos are extremely rich in insights.  It is worth browsing the site for good talks.

The mechanism of consciousness is fascinating- it is one of the most important of all unresolved problems.  The existence of consciousness means that the universe is self-aware to some extent and is able to do experiments on itself. It also means that the universe is capable of acts that are set into motion by the compulsions of creatures, rather than the direct search for ground state. 

These acts are executed through the agency of physics, but sentient beings have altered the notion of spontaneity.  Life forms are able to counter the natural direction of entropy (locally) by channeling large amounts of energy to achieve improbable ensembles of atoms. With large energy inputs, creatures can move about, reproduce, or send robots to Saturn.

Ok, this is obvious, but it remains a rather curious attribute of the universe. 

Ranium. The only thing missing is U.

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On this magical day 50 years ago, Th’ Gaussling was born into the world.  Yes, I am a 9/11 baby and today is L-Day. Remember your Roman numerals?  Once a perfectly respectable though bland day of the year, 9/11 has become the new Pearl Harbor Day. Everybody remembers where the hell they were 9/11/01.  I turned 44 that day. 

To celebrate this day, we decided to do an unusual thing. We went uranium prospecting.  I borrowed a Geiger Counter and we headed up to the mountains near Idaho Springs.  A few weeks back in a chance encounter with a retired hard rock miner, I learned of an old mine that was allegedly dug with the hope of finding uranium. Looking like a thousand other abandoned mines, this mine has been silent for many years. [Sidebar: This fellow didn’t look like Gabby Hayes, though his chums certainly do. Hardrock mining is a tough business.]

Our miner seemed credible. When asked, he did know about pitchblende and other uranium-bearing ore deposits in the area. He said that there used to be a “big operation over that ridge over there” (pointing east). The miner was very cautious about giving too many details. Most people asked him about gold, so his curiosity about me was piqued when I starting drilling into the particulars of uranium.  Mining is a very secretive business. Gold fever is real but other metals will cause this enchantment as well.

So, we pulled along side the narrow dirt road this morning with sample bags and a GM counter.  This model is a survey meter with a thin metal (aluminum) window protecting the GM tube.  So, we could not pick up alpha’s at all and probably very few beta’s- just gamma’s for the most part.  Given the penetrating ability of gamma radiation, with it’s low ionization aptitude, a large fraction of the gamma’s sail through the tube undetected.

At our home along the Front Range of Colorado, the meter will pick up maybe 8-15 counts of background radiation per minute on average. Cosmic rays, solar radiation, and radiation sources from the rock and soil make up the background rate.

Scrambling over the mine tailings, we found sporadic upticks in the count as the detector approached the pile. Overall the detectable radiation was qualitatively 3-5 times the background rate found at home. The counter (which is calibrated) rarely indicated higher than 0.1 MR/hr.  While the mine tunnel was open, I declined to enter, prefering to work on the tailings pile.

While there is clearly radioactive material in the mine tailings, the sum total of the radioactive species seemed quite low.  Of course, I do not know what the situation is with the alpha emitters.  No individual rock was even remotely hot.  The GM tube near the ground was picking up the sum of all the emissions in the area.

It would seem that the miner was partially right about the mine. They might have been digging for uranium, but it would appear that they did not find much of it, given the lack of development and the apparent lack of significant radioactivity in the tailings. 

Hooray for Libraries!

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Over the past few months I have been trying to accumulate synthetic procedures for simple compounds of several elements. F-block elements whose chemistries are comparatively obscure at best. I have scoured the web with all sorts of search term combinations, looking for content that may be available. Except for links to major publishers wanting to sell me article downloads for $30 to $45 each, that faucet was dry.

SciFinder was surprisingly dry as well.  Journal articles appeared touting some obscure p-chem work or Raman IR study. Interesting work to be sure, but the bibliographies were absent the key words I was looking for. Complicating matters, many of the early SciFinder listings were from Russian or Chinese publications that were in the native language and available through interlibrary photocopying. It was clear that SciFinder would only be of help if I wanted to open up a big vein for a major cash bleed by purchasing articles blindly.

So, I left work early and went to a nearby university library for some swimming in the deeper waters of knowledge. Within 2 hours I found much of the information I was looking for, and through the miracle of browsing, I blundered into a rich vein of information I probably wouldn’t of thought to have asked for.

If you ask for help in a library, you’ll often get the question: “What are you looking for?” It is a fair question. A librarian is there to help patrons find information. But, very often, a seeker of knowledge sets out with a poor idea of exactly what the best questions are. Some are searching for facts while others search for concepts. It is only by culling through a body of knowledge that one can begin to frame questions that make sense. The best questions give the best answers. Perhaps the librarian should ask if the patron actually knows what they want and drill in from there.

The pursuit of knowledge is not like going to the pharmacy and pulling a prepackaged unit off the shelf. The pursuit of knowledge puts you squarely in front of a problem where the actual struggle begins. Learning is about integrating concepts into your consciousness, and that involves struggle.  If you are not willing to struggle with an idea, then you’re not really committed to learn something new.

Too often we go to the library to get answers when instead we should be seeking better questions. I was seeking facts but instead found that my assumptions concerning how certain reactions proceeded was fundamentally in error. I have had to recalibrate my expectations as a result.

Epilog: So, I did my seeking and found some books to check out. At the circulation desk the nice young lady told me that they had no record of me and that I would have to plop down a $75 fee to check books out from the state university library.  Luckily I was able to shut my mouth and walk away to fulminate in private.

Electrons on Mars

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A representative of the Mars Society was interviewed on NPR the other day- Founder Dr. Robert Zubrin- in relation to a conference at UCLA. Zubrin was expounding on the exciting future for mankind on the red planet.

It is the usual space exploration cheerleading stuff that must be done to sustain interest. Visit their website and you’ll see that the Mars Society has been sponsoring some simulated Mars missions in order to accumulate experience and credibility to be at the forefront of an actual mission. They even have an impressive list of scientific advisors.

After hearing some of the ambitious plans to colonize and industrialize Mars, it seems clear that the most important resource colonists on Mars will need is a ready supply of electrons.

Exploiting Martian raw materials will be an energy intensive activity. There will be all kinds of electrical devices to power. Don’t forget backup components, tools, and a collection of spare parts. Maybe a whole module should be dedicated to nuts, bolts, screws, toilet plungers, and duct tape. An orange Home Depot supply craft should follow every mission to Mars. 

Since fuels and oxidizers for combustion will be in short supply, there will be no hydrocarbon powered … anything.  There will be no diesel burning Caterpillars to move dirt.  No calcining lime to make concrete. Prospecting for minerals will consume precious energy as will beneficiation of the ore. The refinement of minerals to afford materials of construction will be deeply energy dependent both in terms of building a processing plant and production itself. 

Once metal ore is found, it must be taken from a deposit, concentrated, and eventually reduced to the metallic form. This is the other requirement for electrons on Mars. Eventually, metal ions must be supplied with electrons from some more abundant supply.  Electrorefining may do the deed from an electrode.  The other obvious source is from electropositive metals or from elemental carbon.

Calcium or magnesium are used to reduce a number of other metals already. Coke has been used in iron refining for a long time. But how would a metal refining operation on Mars obtain these electropositive materials? Hauling calcium or coke from earth? Not likely.

Raw materials for metals refining on arid, alien planets will be a real challenge. Electrons for reduction will almost certainly come from electric power generation. Carbonaceous materials will be in too short of a supply.  Hydrogen will have to be won by electrolytic cracking of precious water.  Consumption of this hydrogen will have to be thought through very carefully, given the previous investment in electrical power to prepare it.

To a very large extent, the colonization of Mars will be an electrically powered adventure. Working electrons on Mars will be the most highly prized resource. Mars Base sounds like a nuclear destination to me.

Laser Light Show

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While scanning a copy of Nuts & Volts, I happened on an ad by Ramsey Electronics. This ad featured several electronics kits, one of which was the Laser Lght Show, # LLS1.  I ordered a kit and assembled the thing in about 6 hours. 

Basically, an optical path is set up wherein a laser beam reflects off of two variable speed motors with mirrors and a speaker with a mirror to provide a sound modulated Lissajous pattern. Lissajous (Wikipedia) patterns are an exercise in signal mixing.  Off-axis sinusoidal waves can be mixed electronically (see link) or optically as with this kit.  The kit has a jack to feed audio to the speaker. I have not had a chance to feed in audio just yet- need to open up a cheapo radio and do some minor surgery.

It is satisfying to build things now and then. This activity stems from to my basic belief that one can never know too much about electronics. And, it’s fun.

Chemical Safety- Taking the Dragon Out for a Walk

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Safety is something that everyone who handles chemical substances must come to grips with. That’s pretty obvious.  It is possible to structure prudent handling practices into policies that control how people come into contact or proximity with chemicals.  While I can’t speak for the rest of the world, in the US and EU virtually all of academia and industry have rules that govern the use of personal protective equipment (PPE) and hazardous material storage. 

As a group, I have known chemists to span the range of chemical aversion from compulsive chemophobia to stuntman fearlessness.  Most chemists are in the middle ground in regard to what toxicological or energetic hazards they’ll unleash at arms length behind the sash.  

But there is risk and there is perceived risk and the difference can be quite large.   Research laboratories are places where we try to achieve understanding about the unknown.  Material hazards may not be readily apparent in advance of an experiment.  We all have our sensibilities about what’s hazardous- call it “intuition” or just “experience”- but in reality most workers need to get an occasional recalibration.  Our perception of a given risk can be spot on, overly conservative, or overly lax. 

Institutions eventually have to put boundaries on the definition of acceptable risk. In innovative industry, companies want employees to try new things. Being overly conservative with risk can lead to time consuming procedural gymnastics that accomplish only delay.  Being overly lax with risk can lead to the loss of life and facilities.  The necessary administrative skill is to encourage safe innovation. 

Researchers have physical hazards to contend with. Managers must dodge administrative hazards that can blow a project out of the water. Reseachers operate within the bounds of physical law. Managers have the fundamental forces of economics, politics, and CYA (cover your a**) in addition to physics. 

In candid moments, R&D chemists may admit that much of research seems to entail the discovery of new failure modes. The broad search of reaction space can lead the researcher into patches of higher risk activity.  It is quite possible to blunder into energetic hazards or unwittingly generate highly toxic moieties that you were heretofore unaware of.  The abstracts from a SciFinder search don’t always offer notification of such hazards, especially if you are making new chemical compounds.

I know more than a few reasonable chemists who work for companies that have attempted to extract all risk of R&D scale incidents.  All experiments have to be planned and approved by some overseeing body.  Any incident involving a fire or spill is subject to an investigation and disciplinary action is meted out based on the in-house definition of negligence. Large publically-owned commodity producers seem to be the most onerous in this regard. (This is my opinion and the reader is free to take exception).

As is not untypical of large irritable mammals, Th’ Gaussling doesn’t automatically welcome visits by the safety goonsquad.  One of my many festering conceits is that I write procedures, I don’t follow them.  Unfortunately, this is a card that you can play once or twice at most.  The best strategy for long term employment is to stay off the safety radar screen. If you have to take the dragon out for a walk, have your route planned and for gawds sake, keep it on the leash.