Wednesday, April 27, 2011

55 U$ per gallon?

Like we in Europe, you in the States experience increasing petrol prices but have you ever heard about a gasoline price of 55 U$ per gallon? The story goes like this:

About two months ago, the German Government decreed in an act of ecological force an increase of the percentage of ethanol in premium (Super) gasoline from 5 to 10%. Immediately a big tug of war started between the Federal Government and those car-loving Germans fearing for the well-being of their Audi, BMW, and Mercedes engines. 

In addition, some Green came up with calculations that alcohol made from corn is less ecological than burning fossil fuel. Above all, food prices would necessarily increase as fertile land is instead used to produce ethanol than cereals. The fact is that in Germany, Super E10 (Eurosuper) presently is a dead article, whereas, as far as I know, Americans don't give a hoot what they fill into their tanks as long as it keeps their robust engines running and is affordable.

Note the price tags at the filling station. Diesel: 7.6 U$ per gallon,
Super E10: 8.4 U$ per gallon and Super (premium gas): 55.4 U$ per gallon.
To promote sales of the biosprit (Would this be called organic gasoline in the States?), oil companies urged the Government to tax Super E10 less than the traditional Super, but the Ministry of Finance turned out to be as pigheaded as the German driver. Now tanks at the filling stations are full of Super E10 while supplies of the classical Super are dwindling. Some pessimists even predicted a shortage of the favorite brew despite gasoline prices constantly climbing and, as usual, soaring before the Easter holidays.

In fact, with the content of its reservoir approaching zero, fearing that the pumps might run dry and be damaged, a filling station in Filderstadt near Stuttgart displayed a price of 9.99 Euros per liter for Super just to block drivers from filling up. However, it happened that one guy refueled 3 and a girl 6 gallons winding up with bills of 100 and 200 Euros, respectively. A gasoline price of 55 U$ per gallon, is this worth an entry into the Guinness book?

I actually don't care. On those rare occasions when I use my car, it is either to go to France or Switzerland, where Super is readily available and sold at a lower price than in Germany.

Note added in proof: In the meantime, Exxon has re-embursed the two persons from Filderstadt.
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Sunday, April 17, 2011

Of High And of Low Beds

The other day I stepped into a furniture store. A salesperson (a man) walked up to me. Following the usual preliminaries, he eyeballed me and firmly stated: You need a high bed. How did the guy know my bed was only 45 cm (18") high?

Although I get older, between going to bed and waking up the following morning so far and until further notice, I still managed to climb out of it.

Nevertheless, when visiting the States two months ago, I savored the high beds of at least 60 cm (24"). They reminded me of those at my grandparents' farm in Westphalia. As a child, I visited them and sat on the beds, my legs were not long enough to touch the ground.

Admire the medieval student struggling with his high bed in the early days of Freiburg's university:


Looking at the picture, I understand the expression to climb into bed because there is even a footstep. In the States, they hung on to the tradition of high beds and the traditions of the medieval university too.

In the early days of Freiburg's university, students (freshmen, no women) had to learn for two years (college years?) the seven free arts in the philosophical faculty. The Greek philosopher Boethius (480-524) divided ancient knowledge into grammar, rhetoric (elocution), dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music. The students graduated in philosophy, obtaining the title of a baccalaureus artium (bachelor). Only then were they allowed to study theology, law, medicine, or continue with philosophy to finish those four faculties with a degree of magister (master).

In a manuscript from the second half of the XII century called Hortos deliciarium (Garden of pleasance), the seven arts are depicted as women. Lady Grammar claims: From me, you can learn what the words, syllables, and letters are.

Complicated stuff not only yesteryear such that the lady typically is shown with birch in her right hand, ready to punish her pupils (naked). One sitting at her feet feigns reading his grammar book. This photo I took on the front porch of Freiburg's Münster, where statues of all seven arts are displayed.

Following a European directive but with lots of resistance, universities in Germany are now obliged to return to their roots in replacing the usual university degrees of diploma or state examination with bachelor's and master's degrees.

Coming back to the height of beds: How is it that contrary to the beds, toilet seats in the States are so low, i.e., much lower than those in Europe? Kohler, was he a dwarf? 

 Well, this is another and completely different story.
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Sunday, April 10, 2011

Was-a-Belle

When I visited Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on Long Island, NY, late in 1983, the US government had just stopped the construction of a 200+200 GeV superconducting proton collider called ISABELLE (the Intersecting Storage Accelerator + "belle") after having already spent 200 Mio U$ on infrastructure and superconducting magnets. Frustrated, my American colleagues renamed the killed project Was-a-belle.

The most beautiful machine: A similar situation happened in Germany when in 1989, the State government of North-Rhein-Westphalia, after having spent 2 Billion Euros, stopped the operation of a pebble bed reactor (Kugelhaufenreaktor) what was then called the most beautiful machine. From today to tomorrow, the high-temperature reactor THTR 300 in Hamm-Uentrop has become a was-a-belle. The main reason for shutting down the is-a-belle machine was the Chernobyl radioactive cloud that had passed over Europe in 1986.

What is it that makes the high-temperature pebble-bed reactor so beautiful? Like any other reactor, the THTR works on nuclear fission, but the primary material burned is Thorium-232, although 20% of Uranium-235 is needed to create a critical assembly sustaining the chain reaction. The moderator is graphite instead of light water, and the coolant is helium gas. 

Elegantly the nuclear fuel is mixed with the neutron-moderating graphite (carbon) formed into spheres the size of a tennis ball. Such an assembly has a negative temperature coefficient, i.e., as the temperature increases, the fissionable material-carbon mixture eventually becomes uncritical, i.e., the THTR has an inherent safety feature.

How the THTR operates: When the THTR runs, thermal neutrons breed Uranium-233 from Thorium-232, where the former is fissioned "online." Instead of uranium, the THTR burns thorium - more abundant on earth than uranium - with only a tiny amount of plutonium produced. The theoretical energy efficiency of boiling water reactors (like those in Fukushima) is 47%; the one for the helium-cooled pebble bed reactor is 71%,  for the beautiful machine did not only generate electricity but also high-temperature heat. This heat was intended to hydrogenate the abundant coal on the Ruhr, producing methane and other hydrocarbons.

During operation, fresh carbon-thorium balls are fed into the reactor vessel from above, while burned-out spheres are taken out from the bottom and reprocessed. Although the THTR produces a small amount of plutonium, the radioactive waste from the burning of thorium due to the shorter half-lives of the fission products is less of a problem than the waste from light-water reactors.

The Rubbiatron: Carlo Rubbia's energy amplifier may allay the concerns of those still worried about the small amount of plutonium produced. In coupling a thorium assembly with a proton accelerator, nuclear fission is sustained by neutrons from spallation reactions. No Uranium-235 is needed, and no plutonium is produced. 

Why is the machine called an energy amplifier? One has to input a certain amount of energy to get the more energy-producing chain reaction going. This also means nuclear fission stops immediately when the accelerator is switched off. Such a proton accelerator could likewise be used to "incinerate" the nuclear waste produced.

When we discussed the Rubbiatron at CERN, one technological issue was insurmountable. As an accelerator operates in a vacuum, there must be a separation (a thin window) between the thorium assembly and the proton machine. Such a metallic membrane will be hit by enormous amounts of radiation and thus be damaged quickly.

Epilogue: With all the present-day nuclear hysteria in Germany, the State government of North Rhein Westfalia suddenly claimed that 2000 of the 675 000 radioactive thorium-graphite balls used in the THTR had gone astray. Luckily, this turned out to be a hoax!

Dr. Printz of the Jülich Research Laboratory proudly presents
one of the"missing" graphite-thorium balls (DPA)
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Saturday, April 9, 2011

Anything Goes

Nothing is impossible: Der Spiegel online used this Toyota slogan: Nichts ist unmöglich as a title of an article referring to newly possible color combinations in German politics. Remember the color coding of our political parties?

Nothing is impossible? Instead, the lyrics of an Ella Fitzgerald song come to my mind:

In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking
Now heaven knows, anything goes.


With the Greens flying high in the sky (like Ol' Blue Eyes with his gal or chick), the other colors become pale or nearly vanish like the yellow-colored Liberals. Following their crushing defeat in the latest State elections, they choose as a first remedy a new party chairman, a doctor by profession, to cure them of anorexia.

At present, all political parties in Germany would like to get a bit of the anti-nuclear bonus the Green Party is profiting from. All in vain; if there were federal elections today, the Christian Democrats (black) would remain the strongest party, but they would be unable to form a government for the Liberals (yellow) would fall below 5% and thus no longer be presented in the Bundestag (parliament). 

And as the Greens will have more votes than the Social Democrats (red), Germany would likely have a green chancellor provided the Reds accept the rôle of a junior coalition partner for the Greens like in the State of Baden-Württemberg.

This may not happen, and with the yellows falling out of parliament, the blacks are looking for a "new" coalition junior partner, and suddenly anything goes. For them, the Greens have become honorable.

However, all this is just a snapshot, for the tide will change once Fukushima doesn't make it to the front page anymore and the Green-Red coalition in Stuttgart is showing symptoms of wear and tear.
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Friday, April 1, 2011

Cold Fusion

The recent electoral success of the Greens will accelerate the phasing out of nuclear power in Germany. The search for new energy sources is being intensified. I should admit that Freiburgs's population is stuck between a rock and a hard place. So far, the opposition against wind energy plants is considerable, with one convincing argument that the rotating blades may kill bats during their night flights. However, this is a trumped-up assertion, for the real reason is that nobody likes the technical asparagus on top of the Black Forest and certainly not in his/her backyard.

I read the other day: Dane County's manure digester ready to provide electricity. This certainly works if only there are enough cows or pigs to deliver the raw material. What does not work is Cold Fusion, a flaw that Dogbert has lately re-invented as an energy source:





TIME, the cover of May 8, 1989
I still remember. In the spring of '89, Carlo Rubbia (later Nobel prize winner and my Director-General) caught me in a hallway at CERN saying: Look what Fleischman and Pons do in the States, and we all are sleeping here. I gulped and later provided him and other teams at CERN with neutron counters so that my Group could hardly fulfill its tasks in radiation protection at the Lab. Yes, even Cold Fusion, if it works, will create radiation!

To make a long story short: The CERN spokesman said that "essentially all" attempts in Western Europe to reproduce the results had failed (Wikipedia). This means that Cold Fusion did not, and I add it will not work.
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