All That Matters

The visible spectrum of neon and its characteristic emission lines. By Jan Homann via Wikimedia Commons

In 1814 the German physicist Joseph von Fraunhofer observed narrow dark lines in the otherwise continuous spectrum of light emitted by the sun. Hundreds of them. As Gustav Kirchhoff and Robert Bunsen later showed, these lines correspond to the absorption of light by various chemical elements in the sun. Each element has its own unique set of lines that correspond to energetic transition between the electronic states of these atoms. This discovery has laid the foundation to the field of spectroscopy, where the interaction of matter and light is probed.

A study published in Nature Physics this week by Hartmut Abele and colleagues from the University of Vienna in Austria now reports how gravity can be used instead to probe quantum states. And they’re not using atoms either, but neutrons, which are the electrically neutral particles in the atom’s core.

These neutrons are produced in nuclear research reactors, for example at the Institute Laue-Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble, which I visited last year. In fact, the experiment by Abele and colleagues was done at ILL because there ultracold neutrons are available for research – “still the only source of ultracold neutrons for users in the world,” says Peter Geltenbort from the ILL, who took part in the experiments. Continue reading…

The crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plants is a real tragedy. Tens of thousands of people have been evacuated around the plants, many of which continue to live in shelters with little comfort and privacy. And even worse, there are more than 27,000 people that are either dead or declared missing as a consequence of the earthquake and the tsunami.

The stream of media reporting on the status of the Fukushima plants is continuing, although ironically we are now in a situation where although the continuing release of radiation into the plant’s immediate environment is accumulating to radiation levels that are worryingly high, the broader interest on the issue outside of Japan appears to have ebbed away. And that despite the fact that these problems will be with us for months, if not years.

What is still going strong in the media, however, is the debate on the future of nuclear energy. Some see the accident as a sign that we should stop all nuclear power plants – immediately – whereas others such as George Monbiot see the fact that the implications of this accident so far seem geographically limited as a sign to support nuclear power. Unfortunately, this pro/contra nuclear is where the debate stops, and there appears little movement on either side.

It’s about our energy future

What I am missing in this entire debate is the vision for our energy future. That’s because a sustainable energy supply is a complex issue, where broad brush strokes such as pro or contra nuclear unfortunately don’t help. Take the German government’s decision to shut down seven of its oldest nuclear reactors: unlike the shutdown of nuclear reactors in Japan this hasn’t led to power cuts in Germany. So where does the missing energy come from? This power is bought on the international market. So who can offer spare capacities of around seven gigawatts power or more? My guess is that most likely it’s nuclear energy from elsewhere….

But short-term politics and Fukushima-related knee-jerk reactions aside, how do we envision our energy future? Continue reading…