May 2009 Archives

Last week North Korea claimed to have conducted its second nuclear test, but how big an explosion was it?

Some indications can be found by looking at the first nuclear test the North Koreans conducted in October 2006.

The North Koreans told the Chinese in advance to expect a 4-kiloton yield but the first public estimates were way off. Russia's defense minister Sergey Ivanov claimed that the test was the equivalent of 5–15 kilotons of TNT.

But geologists of the South Korean and French governments, who used better seismic data, rapidly downsized the explosion yield to 0.5–0.8 kilotons. In other words, the explosive device was believed to be a dud and a relative failure compared with other nuclear tests.

This finding was backed up by the office of US Director of National Intelligence who released a statement on 16 October 2006: "Analysis of air samples collected on October 11, 2006 detected radioactive debris which confirms that North Korea conducted an underground nuclear explosion in the vicinity of P'unggye on October 9, 2006. The explosion yield was less than a kiloton."

What type of bomb was the first test?

Siegfried Hecker, the former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, and who had traveled to North Korea to see its nuclear facilities, stated that he thought the underground test was not of a basic implosion device, which is simple to build if you have the nuclear material, but of a more advanced design based on plutonium suitable for delivery on a missile.

The North Koreans are believed to have reprocessed all 8000 fuel rods they removed from International Atomic Energy Agency seals earlier this decade. The rods are estimated to have 25–30 kg of plutonium metal, enough for 3-4 bombs. Since they kicked out the IAEA inspectors, the North Koreans have been creating more plutonium, producing enough for possibly 6 to 12 devices.

Hecker told a Congressional committee that he thought the North Koreans would learn something useful from this first test, despite being unsuccessful.

Estimating the second test
"Earthquakes and nuclear bombs have quite different seismographs," said David Booth of the British Geological Survey to the Guardian's James Sturcke. "Earthquakes happen along fault lines and you get compression waves, known as P–waves, and shear waves from the movement. With a bomb it is mostly just compression waves meaning the seismograph is a lot less complicated." (see left image for the seismic signature of North Korea's second nuclear test)

Martin Kalinowski says—based on what is now known of the first test, and the 4.7–magnitude underground earthquake that was located in northeastern North Korea, about 40 miles northwest of the city of Kimchaek at North Korean's testing facility—this second test most likely has a yield of 4 kilotons.

Andreas Persbo at the Verification, Implementation and Compliance blog thinks it's even smaller, possibly as low as 1.6 kilotons. The Russian conclusions, he says, could be based on not accounting for the shallow water table in the region.

More than 16 seismic stations picked up traces of the explosion, and sent data to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization's International Data Centre in Vienna, Austria. The latest refinement of the data, released earlier today, has narrowed down the location of the explosion.

In the right-hand image, the estimation of the origin of the 2009 event (red) is much more precise than in 2006 (green). The other two ellipses show the first automatic estimation of the 2009 event (blue) and the second (yellow).

Political Impact

Following the Democratic People's Republic of Korea's announcement that it conducted a nuclear test, Peter Shannon, chairman of the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear–Test–Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO), called the nuclear test "a clear challenge to the international community's efforts to advance global nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation."

The Wall Street Journal reported the United Nations Security Council held an emergency meeting shortly after the test and "voiced their strong opposition to and condemnation of the nuclear test," said the current council president, Russian ambassador Vitaly Churkin.

Churkin said in a statement that council members "demand that [North Korea] comply fully with its obligations" not to conduct tests, under a Security Council resolution passed after Pyongyang announced its first test blast in October 2006.

But the biggest political fallout occurred hours earlier today when North Korea apparently helped break a 12-year stalemate on the fissile-material cut-off treaty. "After more than a decade of deadlock the Conference of Disarmament today took the historic decision to restart work," Britain's ambassador to the arms talks, John Duncan, said in a "tweet" on Twitter.

The conference, which will go on until next thursday, is the only multilateral forum on disarmament issues. The following days will see discussions on global nuclear disarmament, reinserting the doctrine of not using nuclear weapons on nonnuclear states, and a revision to the Outer Space Treaty, which bans space-based weapons. North Korea's ambassador Ri Tcheul's influence on these nuclear issues will be closely watched over the coming week.

Paul Guinnessy

A couple of weeks ago Chu announced that $2.4 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act will be used to expand and accelerate the commercial deployment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. Of that, $800 million will be used to expand DOE's Clean Coal Power Initiative, which provides government co-financing for new coal technologies that can help utilities cut sulfur, nitrogen, and mercury pollutants from power plants.

Most of the rest, $1.52 billion, will pay for a two-part competitive solicitation for large-scale CCS from industrial sources, such as cement plants, chemical plants, refineries, and steel and aluminum plants. The second part of that competition will support innovative concepts for beneficial CO2 reuse and CO2 capture from the atmosphere. In addition, two existing industrial and innovative reuse projects, previously selected via competitive solicitations, will be expanded to accelerate scale-up and field testing.

Hydrogen program deflates

For all of the big increases the Obama administration is providing for clean energy R&D, some critics are questioning its decision to slash funding for research and development of hydrogen fuel cells.

In its budget proposal for fiscal year 2010, DOE proposed to cut $101 million, or 59%, for fuel cell R&D, saying it was refocusing on alternative-fuel transportation technologies that could provide a more near-term impact. Some nations, including Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Japan, already have "hydrogen highways" in place where those few hydrogen-fueled cars that exist can fill up their tanks along the way says Scott Doggett of Edmunds.com. Canada has committed to putting the fueling infrastructure in place along a stretch of roadway from Vancouver to Whistler, BC, site of next year's winter Olympics.

David Kramer

Barack Obama has announced his intention to nominate General Charles Bolden to be the next NASA Administrator and Lori Garver to be his deputy. "These talented individuals will help put NASA on course to boldly push the boundaries of science, aeronautics and exploration in the 21st century and ensure the long-term vibrancy of America’s space program," said Obama.

Charles Bolden

Bolden began his service in U.S. Marine Corps in 1968. He flew more than 100 sorties in Vietnam from 1972-73. In 1980, he was selected as an astronaut by NASA, flying two space shuttle missions as pilot and two missions as commander.

Bolden holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis and a M.S. in Systems Management from the University of Southern California.

Following the Challenger accident in 1986, Bolden was named the Chief of the Safety Division at the Johnson Space Center with responsibilities for overseeing the safety efforts in the return-to-flight efforts. He was appointed Assistant Deputy Administrator of NASA headquarters in 1992.

Bolden retired from the United States Marine Corps in 2003 as the Commanding General of the Third Marine Aircraft Wing. He was Senior Vice President at TechTrans International, Inc. from 2003 until 2005. Currently he is the CEO of JackandPanther LLC, a privately-held military and aerospace consulting firm.

Lori Garver

In the mid-1990's Garver served as a Senior Policy Analyst for NASA's Office of Policy and Plans, and Special Assistant to the Administrator eventually rising to Associate Administrator of the Office of Policy and Plans. In this role she oversaw the analysis, development, and integration of NASA policies and long-range plans, the NASA Strategic Management System, and the NASA Advisory Council. Ms. Garver also served as a primary spokesperson for NASA.

Graver was the lead civil space policy advisor for Obama for America, and she helped lead the Agency Review Team for NASA during the Transition.

Currently Garver is the President of Capital Space, LLC, and has served as Senior Advisor for Space at the Avascent Group, a strategy and management consulting firm, based in Washington, D.C.

Paul Guinnessy

Cap and Trade

As a House committee approved legislation that would regulate US emissions of carbon dioxide for the first time ever, the Obama administration moved on several fronts to implement other elements of its clean energy agenda. Following a week of marathon sessions, the House Energy and Commerce Committee approved a 932-page bill that would impose a cap-and-trade system on emissions of greenhouse gases, with the goal of reducing them 17% by 2020 and 83% by 2050. Known as Waxman-Markey after its principal authors, Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Edward Markey (D-MA), the measure passed by a margin of 33-25. The measure still faces hurdles, including from Democrats such as Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-MN) who wants his committee to have a crack at provisions dealing with ethanol before a bill comes before the full House.

CAFE standards

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, President Obama announced new mileage requirements for automakers, raising the corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standard for cars and light trucks to 35.5 miles per gallon in 2016--eight more mpg than the current one, and four years sooner than the far less stringent standard that was enacted just two years ago.

"Ending our dependence on oil, indeed, ending our dependence on fossil fuels, represents perhaps the most difficult challenge that we have ever faced, not as a party, not as a set of separate interests, but as a people," Obama told a Rose Garden audience. After years of fighting increased fuel economy requirements, and with billions of dollars in loans from the Treasury propping up two of the Big Three, executives from foreign and domestic automakers stood behind Obama and applauded as the president announced that the new standard will save 1.8 billion barrels of oil over the lifetime of the vehicles sold in the next five years.

"Just to give you a sense of magnitude, that's more oil than we imported last year from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Libya, and Nigeria combined," Obama said. With the government now having a direct financial interest in the industry, Detroit had no choice but to accept the mileage mandate. The silver lining for automakers was the assurance that they will have a single, nationwide standard to meet, rather than a patchwork that would have resulted from regulations issued by individual states. Acknowledging that the higher standard will increase vehicle prices, Obama said consumers will recover that cost in three years from using less gasoline.

'Smart' grid

Meanwhile, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu announced a sweetening of the administration's program to spur creation of a modern "smart grid" that will be a prerequisite to a major expansion of wind, solar, and other renewable electricity generation. In response to industry input, the Department of Energy is increasing the maximum size for smart grid investment grants 10-fold, to a new level of $200 million, while the maximum grant available for smart grid demonstration projects will also be increased from $40 million to $100 million, Chu said.

Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke, who appeared with Chu, announced the completion of the first set of 16 standards that are needed for the interoperability and security of smart grid components. Locke said that the standards, developed with assistance of NIST, will help to ensure that software and hardware components from different vendors will work together seamlessly and prevent grid disruptions.

David Kramer

In the May issue of Physics Today, Toni Feder and Jermey Matthews wrote about how the recession was affecting the physics community in industry and in academia. The Physics Today web staff helped collect some of this data in an online survey. The results of the survey are posted below. The majority of respondents were based in North America and Europe.

Which sector do you work in?

Impact of the recession

The impacts of the recession as suggested by those individuals that responded "other" in the survey include budget reductions for travel and other expenses; financial incentives to the workforce to retire; four-day workweeks with a 10% salary cut; the scaling back or freezing of proposed expansion plans; a ban on temporary workers; and partial plant shutdowns.

The respondents suggested that, among those laid off, experienced scientists in particular were being let go. In industry, some individuals reported that dividends to shareholders were reduced. Moreover, company perks such as matching 401K investment plans had been cut, with dental and health insurance withdrawn.

Several respondents said that no action had yet been taken in their workplace, but they were expecting cuts in the near future. About 5% said that the recession had not affected them at all.

Hiring impacts

Although many respondents cannot hire new employees, those that do say that they are "trying to rush through applicants to beat an expected hiring freeze" or that they are hiring candidates "cautiously," only with approval from senior management.

Finding the right candidates for positions is still "extremely hard" and the extra hiring steps have led to problems. "We have missed opportunities to hire very qualified people because we could not get approval, or could not get it in time," said one respondent. "Most of our downsizing came from retirements," said another.

Many academics who thought they were on a tenure-track position have been transferred to a yearly contract but hope that their loyalty to remain at their institution will be rewarded when the tenure-hiring freeze is lifted. "In some ways, it's not too bad," said one respondent. "I still have to accept a lower non-tenure-track salary, but there is no committee work I am asked to do, so perhaps it balances out."

On Friday the University of Florida announced the elimination of 150 jobs, including nine faculty positions, in an effort to get its budget under control.

Paul Guinnessy

Along with the funding increase the Department of Energy's Office of Science received, Energy Secretary Steven Chu is gradually putting his own mark on the agency. Among the cutbacks announced by the Obama administration in the 120-page "Terminations, Reductions, and Savings: Budget of the U.S. Government, Fiscal Year 2010", was funding for the politically controversial Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage repository. According to the 2010 budget proposal the DOoE will shut down the facility and continue to store waste at the 103 nuclear power plants while a "'blue-ribbon'" commission studies alternatives, such as developing technologies to "burn" the high-level waste into something less long-lived.

Moreover, the program connected to providing electric utilities loans to pay for licensing new nuclear reactors will end next year, saving $158 million. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is currently processing 26 reactors through the combined operating licensing procedures. The Obama administration argues that this level of interest indicates the subsidies are no longer needed.

The oil and gas industry also loses some tax breaks that from 2011 would be worth $1.47 billion. Costly subsidies "do little to incentivize production or reduce energy prices ... and would cost taxpayers $26 billion over the next decade," the administration says. "Yet these taxes are "only a tiny percentage of annual domestic oil and gas revenues -- about one percent over the coming decade ... [and] any claim that this proposal would have a significant impact on oil and gas production is unfounded."

Paul Guinnessy

Money talks for energy research

Science magazine's Eli Kintisch discusses the impact of the $777 million that the Department of Energy has put toward creating 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers. The centers will support 1100 scientists working in interdisciplinary groups that will research such energy issues as making lighting more efficient, and using photosynthesis to create new fuels derived from solar energy.

The increased public visibility and the money are making it "an easier and easier sell" to attract new researchers to the program, said Energy Secretary Steven Chu to Kintisch. Chu has been pleading to colleagues for many years "not to just write a paper and say this finding applies to energy" but to be willing to tackle a real-world problem.

NASA's Earth science program

For the first time in decades, NASA's Earth science program will receive more money than the planetary program, says New Scientist's Rachel Courtland in an analysis of the proposed NASA budget.

The extra funding will allow the Soil Moisture Active and Passive mission, which measures soil moisture levels globally, and the ICESat-II, which will track changes in ice cover at the poles, to launch a year earlier.

Industry increases lobbying effort to weaken cap-and-trade bill

According to Suzanne Goldenberg in the Guardian, the oil, gas, and coal industry has increased its lobbying budget by 50% in the first three months of the year in order to kill the carbon cap-and-trade emissions scheme. Cap and trade form a key component of the Obama administration's attempts to limit climate change.

More budget news

AIP's Richard Jones reports on the press briefing given by science adviser John Holdren. "We have done better that almost any other constituency," said Holdren. "We have a president who gets it," and who is "walking the walk," despite the US being in a "very bad spell economically . . . [in an] "era of stringency," he added.

Paul Guinnessy

Last week President Obama promised the science community that science was near the top of his agenda, with the stated goal of increasing science funding to 3% of GDP in a mixture of public and private funding (mostly private).
NSFIn the administration's proposed 2010 budget that was released yesterday, the National Science Foundation receives an 8.5% increase to $7.04 billion on top of the stimulus money awarded in February. According to ScienceInsider, some of the new increase will go to expanding climate change research and supercomputing facilities, while $15 million will go toward three-year grant fellowships. Next week NSF will go into more detail over which programs expand, and which will be cut.
DOEScience funding at the Department of Energy increases from $4.8 billion to $4.9 billion, excluding the $1.9 billion in additional stimulus funding that was awarded earlier this year. In a press conference DOE Energy Secretary Steven Chu highlighted in the budget $280 million to be spent on developing eight innovation centers that will each focus on a different type of energy technology, such as solar or carbon dioxide sequestration in a private-public partnership. Funding for the hydrogen-fuel vehicle development program will be cut from $169 million to $68 million. In the budget the Obama administration proposed $17 billion in cuts; these include canceling the refurbishment of the linear accelerator at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center, which was slated to cost $19 million.

The National Nuclear Security Administration’s FY 2010 budget would increase by 8.9 percent to $9.9 billion. Funding for NNSA’s Weapons Activity program would remain flat, while the budgets for Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation and Naval Reactors would see significant increases [FYI report].


NASADespite the fact that NASA still does not have a new administrator, NASA's proposed $18.7 billion budget (a 5% increase over last year) does include extra funding for a flight to the International Space Station for the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. Funding the extra AMS flight has been controversial as NASA's partners had spent $1.5 billion on the instrument before NASA announced it was canceling its launch five years ago. A successful lobbying campaign by project leader and Nobel Prize winner Sam Ting has now managed to get it back on the schedule. In a telephone press conference NASA space operations chief William Gerstenmaier said that the AMS flight is scheduled for 16 September 2010. Although NASA's budget goes up, the science division sees a $26 million decline from the 2009 budget passed by Congress. However, because Congress frequently adds a number of substantial earmarks to the NASA budget, and the Obama adminstiration has stripped nearly all of them out for 2010, the funding decline is not as large as indicated. Moreover, the science division received an extra $400 million in stimulus funding earlier this year. The longer-term projections for the science budget indicate that funding should increase.

"Over those five years [2010-2015], we're seeing an extra $1.2 billion over the budget we had last year. This increase is entirely in the earth science arena," said NASA associate administrator Ed Weiler to reporters yesterday. Weiler is in charge of the science directorate. By 2013, for the first time, the earth science budget would be larger than the planetary budget. [see also FYI: NASA budget request]

Research at other agencies
Funding for research at the Department of Homeland Security increases 4% to $968 million, with most of the increase going toward research in federal labs. At the Environmental Protection Agency, funding increases 6.8% to $842 million, spread more or less evenly over existing programs and upgrading existing facilities. The National Institutes of Health saw a 1.4% increase to $31 billion, excluding $10.4 billion in stimulus funding. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would rise from $4.4 billion to $4.5 billion, while the US Geological Survey would increase 5.2% ($54 million) to $1.1 billion [FYI report]. NIST increases 3.3 percent to $846.1 million.

President Obama woke up the US scientific community with a Monday morning address to the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), where he reaffirmed the support for science that he showed throughout the campaign. In addition to completing the 10-year doubling of federal support for basic research in the physical sciences begun by his predecessor, Obama set forth a goal for the country to spend 3% of its gross domestic product on R&D, compared with the current 2.6% of GDP. That would require substantial increases to both the one-third of R&D supplied by government and the much larger share provided by industry. The president said he will double the nation's research effort to fight cancer, and spend $150 billion over 10 years on expanding renewable energy and improving the nation's energy efficiency. He pledged to expand programs by the US Department of Energy and NSF to improve the teaching of science and mathematics. That would provide the opportunity for thousands of American students to pursue careers in science, engineering, and entrepreneurship related to clean energy, he said.