In my community a few days ago, the Inconvenient Truth slideshow was presented by one of Mr. Gore's annointed volunteers. If you want to know how popular it was, all I can say is that the parking lot at the high school where it was presented was full. (How ironic is that?).
Now let me be clear. I hold a very high opinion of Mr. Gore. I wanted him seated in the office for which a majority of Americans have once declared him fit. I think his movie represents an important effort to state what needs stating - the obvious.
With that disclaimer, let me now make some sarcastic remarks. One of the more fun things about the show was the audience discussion that followed. It included the following feature. Everybody talked all about renewable energy and how wonderful solar cells are, even though solar cells have been a spectacular failure at addressing climate change. There was a great deal of discussion of how no one should be allowed to build any more houses like the ones in which the entire audience pretty much lived. There was talk of replacing all the houses with new ones that all had south facing windows.
There were very few references to the content of the slide show itself. Nobody, for instance, mentioned Winston Churchill and Mr. Gore's reference to him.
In the presentation - and if memory serves me well - in the film, Winston Churchill's prescience about the nature of the problem of Hitler is evoked. Obviously the intention is to inspire everyone to avoid complacency and wishful thinking. Some things, according to Churchill as suggested by Gore, need to be addressed, or they will only get worse. Ignoring climate change is as bad as ignoring Hitler, implies Mr. Gore.
Or maybe it's worse.
Some people say Mr. Gore's goal in making An Inconvenient Truth was political. Of course a good politician is one who manages to make you think of Winston Churchill whenever you think of him (or her). I really don't have a problem with that. Though long dead, Mr. Churchill looms in the imagination, ever popular. I certainly hope that the purpose of An Inconvenient Truth was political, since I would vote (again) for Mr. Gore in a New York minute, or a Topeka, Kansas minute, or a Nome, Alaska minute. I think highly of Mr. Gore, even if - not being all that much of a hero worshipper - I am fully aware of his flaws. If however, Mr. Gore is trying to have himself imagined as a potentially great man, I'll go Mr. Gore one better. I am on record on this website mentioning Al Gore and Abraham Lincoln together, trying to trying to get you to consider Abraham Lincoln and Al Gore at the same time.
Sometimes I am so shameless, I embarrass myself.
Both Lincoln, with his "house divided," speech, and Churchill, his "bitter cup" speech are recorded by history as prescient, men who stood as lonely voices stating unpopular truths that flew in the face of overwhelmning public opinion. History records both men as great successes, forgetting that both men were also failures, both men having been left for dead on the political waste heap.
Churchill is recorded as one of history's great polymaths, a literary artist who was worthy of the Nobel Prize in literature; a painter whose works have commanded considerable respect; a powerful, oratorically brilliant politician; a consummate perceptive historian with an expansive sweep; and a diplomat who managed nearly impossible alliances, and an aggressive military strategist who inspired once shattered armies to improbable victories over ruthless savagery.
In was in this last capacity, as a military strategist, Mr. Churchill - albeit indirectly - had an immeasurable effect, and frankly tragic, effect on the development science.
This is little recognized in modern times, but had Mr. Churchill been run over by a lorry in 1933, he would probably be remembered almost entirely for one of the greatest military blunders in British - or for that matter international - military history, the failed campaign at Gallipoli which, like Dunkirk, ended with a spectacular evacuation, but only after inducing 400,000 casualties on both sides. Pretty much the whole thing was Mr. Churchill's idea. It was a disaster.
The tragedy at Gallipoli impacted science in the following: It was at Gallipoli that Henry Moseley's head exploded. Literally. He was shot in the head while talking on the telephone, giving a military order. He was 28 years old.
It happens that had Harry Moseley died earlier, say at the age of 20 rather than at the still young age of 28, it may have well proved impossible to accomplish another act that would impact Mr. Churchill's - and many other careers - the construction and operation of the first large scale nuclear reactor.
Two years before being shot - and let's be clear that Henry Moseley volunteered for being placed in the inane situation that lead to his death, thus proving that even great scientists are not universally smart - he showed that four elements in the periodic table
that were unknown at the time of his death - would prove to exist. Three of those elements - hafnium, promethium, and technetium - would prove important in nuclear technology. The fourth - rhenium - though relatively unimportant in nuclear science, would nevertheless prove an important if esoteric and rare element that has proved to be of significant - albeit not overweening - technological importance in metallurgy and as a catalyst in the petroleum and other industries chemical industries.
The prediction of these elements arose out of a mathematical construct known now as Moseley's law, which was to have a profound effect on the understanding of electronic atomic structure as derived from quantum theory. It was yet another of those integer difference laws that kept cropping up everywhere whenever people talked about atoms. In addition Moseley's law strongly implied the existence of an atomic nucleus containing protons. Thus is what an essential and important link between the work of Bohr and Rutherford, both of whom were awarded the Nobel Prize. It established the concept of atomic number in a quantifiable measurement rather than a weak, somewhat arbitrary empirical concept. It confirmed the mildly confusing relative placement of four elements in the periodic table assigned on their chemical properties - as opposed to their weight, the cobalt/nickel pair and the tellurium/iodine pair.
Mosely showed that there were holes in the periodic table up to element 82 (lead) represented by the missing element 43, element 61, element 72 and element 75.
Within eight years of Moseley's death, the (future) husband and wife team of Ida and Walter Noddack, working with Otto Berg discovered the "new" element 75, and named it "Rhenium," for the Rhine River. They also claimed to have isolated element 43 and published a paper naming it "Masurium," after a disputed region of East Prussia, now part of Poland.
Although the Noddacks claim for Rhenium was accepted by the international scientific community - they had isolated more than one gram of it - their "discovery" of "masurium" was rejected as an error by the scientific community until 1998. It appears that besides the scientific controversy, there was something of a political controversy as well, since many people felt that giving a new element a German name after World War I would be unacceptable.
(Recently, in 1998, the 1925 claims of the Noddacks have been re-evaluated and it has been suggested that they had, in fact, discovered the element as claimed, but the matter remains controversial.)
Irrespective of what the Noddacks saw and didn't see, element 43 would later be discovered unambiguously by Italian Scientists working with Molybdenum that had been bombarded for months by deuterium in the Berkeley cyclotron. The Italians, Emilio Segre and Carlo Perrier, considered naming the new element for Palermo in Italy, but maybe because Segre would soon be a political (and religious) refugee from Italy, they named the new element technetium. This was in consideration of the fact that it was the first totally synthetic element in the periodic table to be discovered. At the time, no visible amount of the element had been prepared, nor was it expected that such quantities would ever be available. The element was known only spectroscopically, in some sense by inference.
Technetium has no stable isotopes. All of the technetium in the world is radioactive. (If in fact the Noddacks discovered technetium, the source of it was from spontaneous fission in uranium ores - no technetium isotopes are sufficiently long lived to have survived since the formation of the earth. In later years, such technetium was, in fact, isolated in very tiny amounts.)
Shortly after the discovery, Segre escaped to the United States -albeit with considerable difficulty. No one invited him. No one asked him to come. At the time his discovery of a new element of the periodic table didn't make him particularly valuable, at least not immediately. One he had escaped was forced to take a fairly low level job at Berkeley. When the Nobel Prize winning inventor of the cyclotron, Ernest Lawrence, learned of Segre's situation, including his inability to quit his job without being deported, he decided that this would be an excellent opportunity cut his pay by two thirds, since there wasn't anything Segre could do about it. It's not like he could quit or otherwise protest. He could either take less money or go back to Italy and deal with being Jewish in a fascist country.
I have no idea whether Lawrence added cleaning the laboratory bathrooms to Segre's job description after learning of his predicament, but I do know that Segre was somewhat bitter about this state of affairs.
So much for the intrinsic nobility of scientists...
Segre's impoverishment did not all that long however. He was within a few years hired as a group leader in the Manhattan Project where he worked on the isolation of the next two synthetic elements, neptunium and plutonium, the latter element being, of course, of significant military and commercial importance. In 1959 Segre, by then a full Berkeley Professor himself, was awarded the Nobel Prize for his contribution to physics.
(Harry Moseley, again, was rewarded for his contribution to science with a bullet in the head - but was never required to experience the humiliation of taking a low level job at Berkeley.)
Segre probably did not actually get to see visible amounts of the element he discovered, technetium, until 1946, when the first weighable quantities were separated from uranium that had been run through a nuclear reactor. Technetium is a fission product, a constituent of so called "nuclear waste." This is why I am writing about it, of course. If you are familiar with my writing, you may recall that in an earlier diary entry On Symmetry: Platonic Solids and Ugly Wastes, Lampblack, Coal and Carbon I snivelled about how, even though nobody really knows what the hell is in dangerous fossil fuel waste, supporters of nuclear energy are required to contemplate in excruciating detail every constituenet of so called "dangerous nuclear waste." This is in spite of the fact that, in contrast to dangerous fossil fuel wastes (and biomass wastes), so called "dangerous nuclear waste" kills nobody, or almost nobody, depending on how you feel about the origins of the stuff that killed Leide das Neves Ferreira, a six year old girl who died in Brazil in 1987.
As I engage this exercise of describing all of the materials found in so called "nuclear waste," I am covering first those which exhibit significant water solubility - and thus can be considered as mobile. I have covered - in four largely redundant if discursive, parts - the case of cesium, which I regard as the most problematic fission product. I have also written two diary entries on other highly soluble radioactive materials found in spent nuclear fuel radioiodine and tritium, the radioactive form of hydrogen.
This is the first in a series to discuss the far more exciting and interesting case of technetium.
Technetium is still being made in cyclotrons for medical purposes - both imaging and treatment - because this is the only way to obtain a short lived isotope, a nuclear isomer of the stuff made in nuclear reactors. After being injected into patients this isomer is transformed to the same stuff found in the reactors. Ultimately the patients piss it away, where it finds its way into septic systems, sewers, water ways and the ocean ultimately. However patient piss is actually a relatively small source of technetium in the reactor. Thus far about 80 MT of the stuff has been created on earth, almost all of it from nuclear operations, both civilian and military.
In a series of subsequent diaries, I will be discussing technetium further.
Before I do, I would like to quote from a monograph on the subject of Technetium that was published 37 years ago. "According to (reference) 1, about 8 grams of technetium are formed per annum, in a nuclear reactor with an output of 285,000 kw. According to (reference) 16, tens kilograms of technetium are formed at the current reacto outputs of about (six million) kw. The annual production of techntium in nuclear reactors will increase continously and it is expected to reach 10 tons in the 1980's.
"Thus as the use of nuclear energy progresses, it will be possible to botain technetium in large amounts. Unfortunately, large amounts of this valuable element are frequently discarded with waste solutions after treatment of the nuclear fuel..."
None of the ideas I advance in these diaries on the subject of "what do we do with the waste?" are particularly original or new.
Ref: Lavrukhina and Pozdnyakov, "The Analytical Chemistry of Tehnetium, Promethium, Astatine and Francinium" Translated by R Kondor, Ann Arbor-Humphrey Science Publishers (1970) pp 7-8. (This is part of a series on the analytical chemistry of the elements prepared by Soviet Scientists in the 1960's. They were translated into English by Isreali Chemists and they are still a pleasure to read and a treasure trove of information.)
Note that the 1960's prediction about how much technetium might produced by the 1980's never was realized. Technetium production never reached 10 tons per year. The world's inventory of technetium is now less than 100 tons total. I will argue that we can only hope that someday it will be much higher than that.
In a subsequent diary, I will talk about the properties of technetium, its value, and what it can offer the human race.
