It has come to my attention that a British Politian (Councillor Colin Brewer) has been repeating the same arguments which were used to justify the T4 murder program in Nazi Germany. Rather than use the language of the Nazis and call the killing of a disabled child as a “mercy killing”, I am not going to beat around the bush. I am going to call it what it is, it is the “murder of a child”.

Hitler and the other Nazis spoke of “life unworthy of life” and the vile mistreatment of the disabled resulted in one of the war crimes trials which occurred after world war two. It is important to understand that Nazi war crimes and the death camps were not crimes against the jewish population. In those times vile crimes were committed against other groups whose suffering was the result of equally barbaric crimes.

I see a danger that if too few people see sense and understand the vile gravity of the killing of children by the state (as a means of avoiding the cost of taking care of them) that we could sleepwalk into the depravity which was practised by people such as August Becker and Josef Mengele. The human race needs to take care to avoid a repletion of these horrors which were visited on the human race during the 1930s and 1940s.

It troubles me that a man in 21st century England can think that it is acceptable to kill off the disabled simply to save some money. It has been reported that he has suffered from some strokes, I would like to know if his comments are a result of his strokes or did he hold these views before it happened. If these comments are due to a change in personality due to the strokes then I feel that he is deserving of some pity. The idea of a man with a damaged brain who has become immoral or inhumane as a result is a deeply sad matter, I do not know what they right things is to do with such a person but I hope that such a disabled man would have sympathy for other disabled people.

However if he held these repulsive views before the strokes then I have less sympathy for him, if the latter is the case then I think he should resign and he should be prosecuted for incitement to hatred.

It has come to my attention that mud at the bottom of swimming pools at Fukushima has been found to contain cesium. A film has appeared on another blog which claims to be a reading of the work of a Masakazu Honda. In this film and the text it points out that the mud at the bottom contains lots of cesium while the film suggests that nothing was noted when the water was tested.

This is perfectly reasonable in terms of chemistry, I have been saying since the accident occurred that the cesium will stick to soil minerals. I would say that it is important to consider both the water in the pools and the mud at the bottom. I think that the best thing might be to use a swimming pool vacuum cleaner to suck out the mud. The mud will then have to be sent away as radioactive waste. It may be best to condition the mud with cement (plus put it into plastic drums) before sending it away as these actions will make a release of radioactive muck less likely during transport.

The cement will not bind the cesium, but it will hold the radioactive soil particles in a solid which will not form mobile dust. The best thing may be to put the waste into a waste store. If this is left for 300 years then the cesium will decay away and the drums will be giant paperweights.

Be careful of two groups of people, one lot to watch out for are the professional doomsayers. They seem to be unable or unwilling to find a real and useful job and then they make their money by scaring the wits out of people. They will tell you that the Fukushima accident has extinguished all hope and that there is nothing which we can do to protect ourselves or clean up our environment. The second lot are those who claim that there is absolutely nothing to worry about and that you should ignore the results of the Fukushima accident. My advice is do not trust either of these “friends”, they are false friends who will lead you into different but equally bad places.

I am sure that many people have told you of the green nature of wind power, it is sold to the public as the ultimate green energy production system. It has reached the point at which it seems like nobody is allowed to say anything bad about wind farms, but we need to keep our wits about ourselves.

Many high tech and green gadgets need rare earths (lanthanides), the name is a bit of a misnomer some of the lanthanides are very common in the earth. But some of them are very rare elements, the worst bit is that the rare ones are the more useful ones. For example the red phosphor in a colour TV is traditionally europium doped yttrium oxide or europium doped yttrium oxysulfide. Europium is a rare lanthanide which often forms compounds which emit red light.

Now with many gadgets such as electric cars and windmills people think they are green because they do not release any pollution during use, it is important to understand that a gadget such as an electric car is not a “zero emissions vehicle” it is an “emissions elsewhere vehicle”. One emission type are those which occur during the use of the machine and the others are those associated with the production and final disposal of the object.

If we ignore the emissions during the building of the gadget and its disposal then a nuclear power plant is perfectly green, it emits next to no pollution during use. It is only during the fuel production, building of the plant and the disposal of the fuel that the releases of pollution occur. It is clear that we must consider the whole lifecycle of the parts of the system.

In the case of the lanthanides it is important to understand that the processing of lanthanide ores produces radioactive waste, the problem is that much of the world’s lanthanides are in thorium rich minerals such as the monazite phosphate minerals. As a result when monazite is processed often radioactive waste is produced.

The nasty thing about natural radioactivity in rocks and minerals (harmless or cute sounding) is that it tends to be alpha emitting and often mobile in the form of radon / radium. On the other hand much of the radioactivity in the back end of the nuclear fuel system (scary sounding reactor waste) is short lived beta / gamma emitting fission products and a little alpha emitting waste. Much of this alpha emitting muck is plutonium, while plutonium might sound like a total nightmare it is important to note that it is very immobile in the form of oxide fuel. Firstly it is very insoluble in water and secondly plutonium absorbs very well onto mineral surfaces. To use some non technical language it sticks like glue to mineral surfaces, thus it will not migrate through soil and rocks with ease. Once the plutonium is buried then it will be locked up in the rocks for many thousands of years.

On the other hand radium and radon can move around in water with ease, these elements will not bind so well to mineral surfaces. The waste from lanthanide ore processing is sometimes codenamed TENORM, this means Technologically Enhanced Naturally Occurring Radioactive Material. This TENORM is a major pain in the oil / gas industry and in the ore processing industry.

The best way to reduce the production of this radioactive waste is to recycle lanthanides, by reusing lanthanides instead of mining ore the volume of radioactive waste will be reduced. If you want to support green devices such as hybrid cars and windmills then it is up to you, but I would urge you to lobby for the valuable metals and other materials to be recycled when these products reach the end of their useful lives. If no sensible recycling method exists then a need exists for more research on recycling, one of the things which I am involved with at Chalmers is the Industrial Materials Recycling section. Here we study the recycling of that which can not be currently recycled.

I saw this film recently, it makes some claims that the Fukushima reactor accident is making children sick. I think that this film raises some interesting points.

Appeal concerning the health condition of the Fukushima Children in Ginza, Tokyo ..

There is a problem, if the above average level of radiation in Japan is able to make children ill then why is Ramsar in Iran not famous for ill children ? In this place in one year the background radiation dose is normally more than 100 mSv.

In Japan it has been decided that if the dose rate is greater than 20 mSv that people will be relocated, so the people in Ramsar should be more ill than the general public in Japan near the Fukushima reactor accident site.

One of the people in the film had to go for a CT scan, I would like to know if anyone has considered how this is likely to have involved quite a large X-ray dose. While people get concerned about an exposure from a reactor accident, many people do not seem to be as concerned about medical exposure (due mostly to X-ray radiography). This is something which I can never understand.

Also if the children of Fukushima were being exposed to so much radiation that they feel ill as a result (chronic radiation syndrome ?) then I imagine that their blood counts would be rather abnormal. If for argument’s sake they were so strongly exposed then blood samples from them would show signs of radiation exposure.

For a large dose, I would expect cell counts to be abnormal. At lower doses I would expect a much higher number of chromosomal abnormalities per litre of blood. If someone can bring us this type of evidence then I will believe that the children of Fukushima have been exposed to a lot of radiation, but until I am presented with such evidence I will remain very suspicious of the claims of these radiation related illnesses. The thing is that to induce the non cancer effects which appear shortly after a radiation exposure a very large dose is required, and the dose must be above a threshold. Below the threshold the effects can never be seen.

It is a bit like alcohol, humans and drunkenness. To get a person drunk requires alcohol, the more alcohol you feed them the worse the drunkenness becomes. Below the threshold dose it is impossible to get the effect of drunkenness, for example if 200 people take communion at a church and have a tiny sip of wine then non of them will come out of the church as crazed drunks (Unless they were drunks before the service). I hold the view that as a result of Fukushima that no member of the general public has had a radiation dose which is able to cause one of the deterministic effects which appear shortly after the radiation dose is delivered to a human.

Even after the much worse Chernobyl accident no members of the public were stricken with the deterministic effects of radiation (radiation sickness), so I would suggest that my readers take care when they here of claims from Japan about the radiation making children feel ill. We need to have a respect for the truth, part of a respect for the truth is to resist telling lies or making exaggerations even if you think (or know) that the thing you want to warn people against is very bad. One of my roles at Chalmers has been to help supervise research on serious nuclear accidents, I can tell you that serious nuclear accidents are thankfully rare but they can be horrible even without inventing new effects or exaggerating the effects.

I have chosen to write about americium, I had noticed that no posts entitled americium existed on wordpress. Americium is one of my personal bests in terms of Z (number of protons). The element which the highest Z I have ever seen is plutonium, the highest Z I have been in the same room as is californium while the highest Z I have ever used in an experiment which I did myself is americium.

Americium is a element which can not make up its mind, in some ways it is like a lanthanide. It has a very insoluble fluoride and it extracts with bis-2-ethylhexyl hydrogen phosphate into alkane diluents while on the other hand it thinks it is a transition metal. It is more able to bind to nitrogen donors than a lanthanide and it is isoelectronic with uranium(0).

Uranium(0) complexes of cyclopentadienyl ligands are able to bind to carbon monoxide in a similar way to a transition metal. Thus uranium(o) is like a transition metal.

Also americium(III) is coloured, it is pink in colour while the lanthanides are almost perfectly colourless. The formation of coloured metal cations is very much a transition metal thing. For example copper(II) in water is blue while nickel(II) in water is green. Iron(III) is a funny one, in acidic water it is a pale purple but in water it undergoes hydrolysis to form a dark brown complex.

I may well write some more about americium in the near future.

I have seen predictions which suggest that the americium-241 either released from Chernobyl or formed in the environment as a result of the beta decay of the plutonium-241 released by the accident will become the radionuclide of greatest importance near Chernobyl after the cesium-137 has decayed away.

Fukushima will be a different matter as far less of the americium or plutonium in the fuel was released during the accident.

Recently it has come to my attention that a state senator (Stacey Campfield) in Tennessee has been poking fun at the gun control lobby with a picture of a kitchen autoclave with comments about the assault pressure cooker features which it has. I have never considered the tactical pistol grip on a pressure cooker but the forward carry handle makes it much more easy to move a large saucepan around.

While the NRA and the gun lobby are correct when they say that “guns do not kill people, people kill people”, and some of the antigun lobby are trying to use emotive pictures of evil looking guns to scare people into agreeing with them. I think that the likes of Stacey Campfield have missed a clear and important issue.

Now I want to tell you about a weapon which is cheap, easy to obtain and does not jam. It can be purchased from a good hardware shop without raising any attention, there is a zero second wait on this one, no background check. Soviet made examples of this weapon can be obtained in eastern Europe if you know the right person to ask, I doubt if one of these menacing looking soviet made ones will cost more than about 10 or 20 US$. I am sure that those who like the all American example can get one made in the USA, my one is a Chinese made model in a shocking red and black colour scheme.

It is a pickaxe, I am aware that Karla Faye Tucker in Texas used one to commit a murder. Now before the pro gun lobby get excited or the gun-control lobby suddenly want background checks for garden tools like forks, spades and pickaxes, we need to get something clear.

The pickaxe is a garden tool which is very useful for digging. It has many uses which are unrelated to its use as a means of committing murder. When society decides if we should ban an item we need to consider both the legitimate uses of an item and its misuse potential. I hold the view that for both pressure cookers and pickaxes that the legitimate lawful non violent uses of these items outweigh the threat to society posed by the misuse of these items. Thus we should all oppose a ban on garden forks, pickaxes and entrenching tools (foldable spades).

On the other hand we should regulate where and when we can wander with these items, UK law regulates the carrying of “articles made for causing injury to the person” (Swords etc), “articles adapted for use for causing injury“ (D cells in a rugby sock or a toilet brush sharpened into a point) and normal tools and household objects being carried around for the purposes of violence such as a kitchen knife, hammer or axe hidden inside a coat of a person of a person going into a nightclub “articles intended for use for causing injury to the person“. While it is perfectly lawful and reasonable to keep a pickaxe in the basement, garden shed or in your hand while you are digging in the garden it is not reasonable to sneak around at 3 AM in dark alleys with it or to try to carry it into an ice hockey or football stadium.

While I hope that reasonable minded people will see that the pickaxe and autoclave should not be banned as they are useful tools which overall make a positive contribution to society, we should consider for a moment a new “garden tool” which is not so easy to justify. This is the TEC-9 digging device, the idea of this tool is that it flings metallic mini spades at the ground which break up the earth to make it more easy to dig. For harder surfaces such as concrete walls alternative steel cored minispades could be used, for very thick steel perhaps a depleted uranium minispade could be used together with an adapted tool.

For those of you who do not know the TEC-9 is a nasty example of a pistol, it is a very short barreled 9 mm handgun which will make it less accurate than a traditional pistol where the magazine goes into the handle so it is likely to be worthless for police use or for target pistol sportsmen. This “digging tool” has clear misuse potential and I doubt if many people (even experienced pistol users) would have the skill required to use it to dig holes in the garden. I also worry about the pollution of the garden with lead and copper, I tend to use carbon steel spades, forks and other digging tools. Also this pistol (digging tool) will create an almighty racket which will disturb the whole town while the alternative technology (garden spade) is cheaper, more easy to use and close to silent.

I hope that it is clear to my readers that overall the TEC-9 digging machine (pistol) will have a negative effect on society. We need to be careful to avoid being seduced by the argument that a object has a lawful use when it has a unlawful use which can harm society. In short we need to avoid allowing people to relabel items to try to evade or bypass laws. Sometimes the evasion through relabeling will increase the threat to society.

I have heard of a case of a man who went into a gay bookshop (I am not saying where or who) and asked for amyl nitrite, the people in the shop were rather aghast and told him that they were not allowed by law to sell him this drug of abuse. He was then told to go over the road to the hardware shop and ask for leather cleaner, he went there and asked for leather cleaner. The shop keeper asked him if he really wanted video head cleaner, he then legally bought a bottle of amyl nitrite which was sold as a household product (rather than as a drug).

Now I hold the view that amyl nitrite is a nasty drug, but it is a drug which has some lawful purposes. It has been used for the treatment of some heart conditions and it has been used as an antidote for cyanide. If those who want to sell it as a recreational drug are allowed to relabel it as a household product then it is likely that the general public (those who do not want to sniff “poppers”) are likely to be exposed to this harmful substance. I have nightmare visions of some person on their hands and knees cleaning the insides of their video machine with their heart pounding like a speared crocodile. These were the words of one chemist I know who was once exposed to amyl nitrite.

The stupid thing about this law was that it was a crime to supply the substance for use as a drug of abuse but it was not a crime to supply it for household use. I think that the law should either have not banned it for recreational drug use or it should have banned the sale of the substance to the general public. To my mind the law was a total ass, as much as a law banning the sale of gin to under 18s but permits the sale of ethanol loaded with juniper extracts to school children as a pencil case cleaning agent bearing the warning “Do not mix with Indian tonic water before drinking the resulting mixture”. For those of you for whom the penny has not dropped I have just made a reference to “Gin and Tonic” being drunk by school children.

We also need to avoid some silly hysterics, one student once said to me that a class of drugs should be illegal in Sweden because they can be used to cheat at sport. This is a silly argument for banning a substance from the general public as a whole. For example maybe I could cheat at sports by fixing car suspension springs to my shoes (maybe I could jump higher like Zebedee {from the magic roundabout} do not try this at home you are likely to come to some serious harm !). We could ban car springs to prevent the abomination and horror of bouncing Mark with his spring shoes but this would deeply harm the interests of Sweden. Imagine having cars with no suspension ! We should not ban something just because someone (with a vested interest) holds the view that this substance or thing has a potential (or well known) misuse.

What society needs when it considers bans for guns, chemicals and pressure cookers is reasonable and rational thought rather than a knee jerk reaction from either the “ban it lobby” or the “anything goes lobby”. We need to weigh up the harm which a ban (or lack of ban) will cause and compare it to the positive effects the things might have on society, only then can we make a sensible choice as what to ban and what not to ban.

I suspect that some of my regular readers have noticed that I have not been blogging for a while. The reason why I have stopped blogging for a while is that I am in the process of writing a book. I saw something on UK TV today which is an outrage, it is the idea that the earth is only about 6000 years old.

Now while freedom of thought and speech allows people to hold and express what ever ideas they have, even the outlandish and odd ones ! But the idea that the earth is only 6000 years old is deeply disturbing and clearly wrong !

I heard one of the young earth creationists being told by a geoscientist about radioactive dating of rocks and minerals. The creationist said something to the effect of “how do you know when the clock was zeroed”. I know that in Africa many years ago a natural nuclear reactor operated. Some of the fission products such as Tc-99 have decayed away. This suggests that far more than 6000 years has passed since the reactors were in operation.

I will leave it up to my readers to look up the half life for Tc-99 and work out how long it will take for 90 % of the Tc-99 to decay to Ru-99. Think of it as homework.

I has come to my attention that Mr Assange has just made a statement in London, I am waiting for a chance to see the text of speech.

I would like to point out that Mr Assange (and his wikileaks) is trying to campaign for everything to be dealt with in an open and transparent manner. While the legal process regarding sexual crime is quite rightly not conducted in a totally open manner (The name of the victims are never released into the public domain).

I would say that in the interests of openness and transparency that Mr Assange face his accusers in a real court and interview room rather than in the court of public opinion. I have been advised by my legal advisor that in Sweden the law is such that some interviews must occur in Sweden.

I have been told that a person who is accused of a crime in Sweden needs to attend a meeting with the police and other officials from the state. This meeting is similar in some ways to when a person appears in a UK magistrates court, while I think it is possible for a magistrate to hold a court meeting in a place in the UK such as a hospital ward it is very rare for such a thing to happen. Also I do not think it would be reasonable or legal for a UK magistrate to go to Sweden to interview a person there, in the same way it is not reasonable for the Swedish legal system to try to do something similar in the UK.

I think it would be best for all if Mr Assange was to come to the land of meatballs and Volvos to face the legal system here. If he did not force himself on the two women then.

1. He will get acquitted

2. If he gets the unfair trial he so fears or is packed off to the US, he will score a massive public relations and moral goal against the “USA” which he so fears and wants to show to be so unfair. (I think that Mr Assange not the Swedes or the US are in the wrong)

I hold the view that if he appears in a Swedish court he will get fair and reasonable treatment. If they find him guilty then he will be sent away to a holiday camp (Swedish prison) for some years. If he is acquitted then he will have plenty to write and talk about.

Events over the years have suggested to me that like the curate’s egg that Greenpeace is good in parts but in other parts not so good. I hold the view that their work to protect marine mammals (Whales and Dolphins) has been a good thing, while I think their campaigns on energy, GMOs and chemicals has not been so good,

I saw with interest a blog post in which they were commenting on something which was published in Nuclear Engineering, now I would like to make a few observations.

1. The words of Steve Kidd are understood by me to be making a reference to the problem of a government trying to favour a domestic company over a foreign company. I know many governments want to avoid imports to try to protect their own industry but this is a different problem to the question of “should a country regulate industrial activity for health, safety and environmental reasons”.

I say that a country’s government has a moral duty to regulate industrial activity to make sure that health, safety and environmental standards are kept high. Maybe Justin McKeating needs to write with more care to avoid mixing up different ideas. I suspect that if I was to mix up the Rainbow Warrier with the Exxon Valdez that Justin and the rest of the Greenpeace people would be upset, I could reply that “both are ships, so what is the difference ?” but I think that this would be a lame excuse. But do not worry I know the difference between the two ships and I promise not to mix the two up.

2. The blog ends with the words “Nuclear power is an old technology – its fundamental principles have hardly evolved since the 1950s. It looks like much the same could be said for some of its supporter’s views about nuclear power’s potential “customers”.“

I would like to point out that just because something’s fundamental principles have not changed in fifty years is not a reason to view it as bad. I think that this text is the product of some very odd thinking, I suspect it may be that the Greenpeace’s blogger has made up its mind as to what the answer will be and is now whatever he/she can to get the answer wanted.

The Greenpeace blogger is trying to make the nuclear sector look bad, as freedom of expression exists the person is free to communicate their antinuclear thoughts. But I do take objection at the use of such weak logic to support the persons point of view. I think that the use of poor arguments and bad evidence by the “greens” will harm nature and the environment in the long run.

I would like to point out something, Greenpeace praises wind power but windmills (they work using the same principles as a modern wind turbine) have been around for at least 2000 years. Also many Greenpeace activities involve their fleet of ships, a man named Archimedes worked out many of the principles of  buoyancy, Archimedes did his work about 2000 years ago. So if a device is bad becuase it is based on theroy which has changed little in 50 years, then a device based on a theroy which has changed little in 2000 years is worse.

I think that the fact that a thing is based on a well understood set of principles is a good thing, it will reduce the number of nasty surpises which are possible.

If any Greenpeace supporters or staff read thing and do not like something I have read, feel free to write into me via a comment and we can discuss it like adults.