February 2010 Archives

Editor's Note: Judith Curry from the Georgia Institute of Technology has offered the following essay for publication. The essay has been mildly edited to add hyperlinks to backup or add context to some parts of the essay, and to follow Physics Today's style guide when appropriate. This essay does not reflect the views of Physics Today or the American Institute of Physics, but of the opinion writer.

Judith Curry:

I am trying something new, a blogospheric experiment, if you will. I have been a fairly active participant in the blogosphere since 2006, and recently posted two essays on climategate, one at climateaudit.org and the other at climateprogress.org. Both essays were subsequently picked up by other blogs, and the diversity of opinions expressed at the different blogs was quite interesting. Hence I am distributing this essay to a number of different blogs simultaneously with the hope of demonstrating the collective power of the blogosphere to generate ideas and debate them. I look forward to a stimulating discussion on this important topic.

If the US is going to mount a solid recovery in jobs coming out of its deep recession, much of the fuel will come from people like Valentin Gapontsev, a Russian immigrant with a thick accent, and the company he founded 10 years ago, says Mark Trumbull in the Christian Science Monitor.

IPG Photonics employs nearly 400 people making laser equipment that manufacturers use for drilling, cutting, and welding metal parts—everything from car roofs to jet-engine combustors.

"Our target within 10 years is to triple our business, minimum," says Gapontsev.

Economists see firms like Gapontsev's—young, innovative, hungry—as crucial to job creation. What IPG Photonics does will have to be replicated exponentially across the country in everything from online start-ups to spade-in-the-ground food operations if the US is to put people back to work and raise living standards, argues Trumbull.

As Vice President Joe Biden reemphasized the Obama administration's goal to work toward a nuclear-weapon-free world in a speech at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, the American Physical Society released details of a new report of what technical steps the US and other nuclear weapons states would need to take to downsize their nuclear arsenals.

The report, written by a mixture of physicists and policy analysts who have worked in the nuclear weapons field, was released at the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting held this year in San Diego, California.

"The technologies are at hand to substantially reduce the size of nuclear arsenals; no great inventions are required," said Jay Davis, chair of the report committee and a former director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. "The good news is we can do it, the bad news is it will take a long time."

Setting the table

The report and Biden's speech come at an opportune time as the first half of the year will be dominated by politics and negotiations surrounding nuclear weapons.

Two weeks ago the Department of Defense released the quadrennial defense review and ballistic missile defense review report, which placed an increased reliance on conventional, not nuclear, weapons at the heart of US military strategy. A review of the US nuclear strategy is forthcoming.

Russia and the US are currently in tough negotiations for a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) to reduce the number of nuclear warheads in the two countries. The talks have been going on for sometime, and an agreement is expected in the next few weeks.

In April, the US will also host a nuclear security summit with the aim of securing globally all vulnerable nuclear material within the next four years: Surprisingly, Israel, North Korea, India, and Pakistan are expected to attend, some in an observer capacity.

Moreover, in May, the quintecentennial review of the international nuclear nonproliferation (NPT) treaty occurs in New York City. The NPT is based on the premise that the states with nuclear weapons will work toward getting rid of them, and that the states without will promise not to develop them.

Biden's speech

Biden promised to strengthen the NPT and work toward increasing international safeguards to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorist and nonnuclear states. "It’s easy to recognize the threat posed by nuclear terrorism," he said. "But we must not underestimate how proliferation to a state could destabilize regions critical to our security and prompt neighbors to seek nuclear weapons of their own."

The vice president also pointed out that "tight budgets forced more than 2,000 employees of Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore from their jobs between 2006 and 2008, including highly-skilled scientists and engineers."

The proposed 2011 budget contains $624 million more than Congress approved last year to go toward maintaining and modernizing the nuclear weapons complex, bringing its total budget up to $7 billion.

"The Administration's 2011 budget request also bolsters the case for the eventual ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty," said US Senator Bob Casey (D-PA), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Near Eastern and South and Central Asian Affairs. The Senate failed to ratify the treaty in January 2000 under the Clinton administration. "A full investment in our nuclear weapons infrastructure will mean that the United States can continue to maintain its nuclear weapons infrastructure without testing," he adds. "We haven’t tested a nuclear weapon since 1992 because we now have the technical means to ensure the reliability and safety of our stockpile."

The APS report

Although Biden's speech concentrated on the international and domestic politics of a nuclear-weapon-free-world, the APS report looked more technically on how to do it. The process could take decades, say it's authors.

One of the simplest steps the report recommends is for the US to declassify the number of nuclear weapons it possesses.

The report's authors believe that by making the number public, the US could help to establish a baseline for international efforts to reduce nuclear weapons through treaties and inspection agreements.

"Getting countries to allow inspections will have to be agreed upon by treaty," said Davis. "Every camera brought in, every piece of measurement equipment, the ability to touch and to observe will all have to be negotiated in advance."

The report advocates building new tools—both procedural and technical—for verifying any arms control treaty. Some of which, such as the recommendation to develop better techniques for tracking and detecting hidden nuclear material and its source of origin, the Obama administration is already working on: Last Tuesday the president signed into law the nuclear forensics act to that purpose.

The report's authors also ask the US government to support the development of an international system to determine the amount of nuclear material a country has produced. They also suggest that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission should consider nonproliferation risks as a factor for denying or approving a construction or operating license to currently more than 25 proposals for building new nuclear reactors in the US.

"This report makes a valuable contribution to informing the national debate over whether to reduce further the size of our nuclear arsenal and, if so, to what level," said Albert Carnesale, chancellor emeritus and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"Rather than advocating a particular outcome, the report clearly and objectively elucidates the technical issues associated with downsizing the nuclear stockpile and offers concrete recommendations on how to deal with those issues," Carnesale added.

"Taking the number of nuclear weapons down is both possible and can be done safely from the standpoint of US security," said Davis. "But as the number becomes smaller the risk of unaccounted-for weapons and the potential threats from rogue nations increases."

On 3 February, National Nuclear Security Administration administrator Thomas P. D'Agostino announced the establishment of an international center for verification research in a speech at the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management in Washington. The center will serve as the site for developing technologies and for building confidence between nuclear-armed countries.

"It’s very exciting that this recommendation was acted upon as the report was being released," Davis said.

Paul Guinnessy*

*Audrey Hoffer of Inside Science News Service contributed to this report.

A day after the earthquake hit Haiti on 12 January a small team of scientists have been working on analyzing the earthquake and trying to predict the likelihood of aftershocks.

This team has now been formalized under the United Nations as a long-term joint Haitian national and international taskforce to analyze the earthquake and to provide advice to the local government and public in order to reduce ongoing risks and to help guide the recovery process.

More than 30 scientists and 10 organizations from 5 countries are involved in the taskforce, which is expected to grow under the new mandate.

Their first report, an authoritative analysis of the event and a preliminary forecast of the risk of another earthquake, is expected in mid-February. A second report, assessing how more reliable seismic data can be collected in the region, is expected by 1 April.

Paul Guinnessy

Related links
The Haiti earthquake
Haiti likely to suffer more aftershock tremors
More science from the Haiti earthquake

Arden L. Bement, the director of the National Science Foundation and last surviving political appointee in science left over from the Bush administration, is resigning five months before his term is up in order to lead Purdue University's new Global Policy Research Institute in West Lafayette, Indiana. Bement has been on leave from Purdue since joining the Bush administration in 2001, initially as the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. He starts his new job on 1 June.

Bement was appointed to his six-year term as NSF director by President Bush in November 2004 after serving as acting director for 10 months, when former NSF director Rita Colwell resigned.

Under Bement, NSF has seen its budget increase dramatically, partly due to the near unanimous approval in Congress of the recommendations of the Rise Above the Gathering Storm report, which called for increased investment in science and education.

"With the submission of his 2011 budget, President Obama has underscored again the critical role that the NSF plays in ensuring our Nation's continuing preeminence in science and technology," said John P. Holdren, assistant to the president for science and technology and director, Office of Science and Technology Policy. "I want to thank Dr. Bement for his nearly seven years of distinguished service at NSF's helm and his unwavering commitment to America's research and education enterprise."

Paul Guinnessy

Romania has formally joined CERN as a candidate for accession to membership.

The agreement was signed between Romanian Minister of Education, Research, Youth and Sport, Daniel Petru Funeriu (left in image), and CERN Director General, Rolf Heuer earlier today.

Romania’s pre-membership will cover a five-year period during which the country’s contributions will ramp up to normal member state levels, in parallel with Romania's participation in CERN projects.

At the end of this five-year period the Council will decide on Romania's application for full membership, as the Organization's 21st Member State.

The troubled Constellation program—which involved developing a replacement for the space shuttle as well as new heavy-lift unmanned vehicle, and a craft to take astronauts to the Moon—has been eliminated in the NASA budget.

The White House said that program was late, over budget, and unlikely to meet its deadline of returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020. In fact, even if the White House increased the human spaceflight program substantially it would still take NASA until 2030 to reach the Moon, said White House Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag and White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer in a telephone press conference yesterday. The US could not afford that level of investment they said. So far NASA has spent $9.1 billion on the Constellation program, and it may cost $2.5 billion to cancel it.

Although science did relatively well in the new budget, the Obama administration is currently implementing a three-year freeze on most nondefense discretionary spending.

This spending freeze impacted NASA's 10-year strategic vision which forecasted increases for the agency above inflation until the end of the decade in order to build equipment and vehicles to return to the Moon.

A private hope

Instead of relying on the Constellation program the Obama administration proposes expanding the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program. Designed to help commercial companies develop launch vehicles to supply the International Space Station when the space shuttle retires at the end of the year, COTS will also develop vehicles that could be used for exploration outside of Earth orbit. Under this program, which will cost $6 billion over five years, NASA would rent the spacecraft developed.

The first major test under the COTS program of one of these launch vehicles—a Falcon 9 rocket made by by Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX)—is scheduled provisionally for March.

The trigger for canceling the Constellation program was the Augustine committee report from last fall that said the current human spaceflight program would require an additional $3 billion a year to remain on track.

Bretton Alexander, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, hailed the change calling it "a win-win decision" that would create thousands of high-tech jobs in the US.

A boost for science

NASA's budget will be up slightly, at $18.7 billion, from last year, but the biggest surprise may be increased funds for unmanned robotic space and Earth observation missions.

Orszag said that in addition to research and development, NASA's proposal invests in "advance robotics and other steps that will help to inspire Americans and not just return a man or a woman to the Moon but undertake the longer range research that could succeed in human spaceflight to Mars."

Although Congress is expected to come under intensive lobbying to reverse the administration's proposal, Pfeiffer said the White House is determined to fight special interests attempting to do so.

US Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL), ranking member of the Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee, today issued a statement sharply criticizing the Obama administration's proposal. "Congress cannot and will not sit back and watch the reckless abandonment of sound principles, a proven track record, a steady path to success, and the destruction of our human space flight program," he said.

The opposition wasn't a surprise. "We don't expect that this is going to be easy," Pfeiffer said. "There was a lot of opposition to some of the cuts that we proposed last year. And we had I think a historically very successful rate about 60 percent of the cuts we proposed were actually enacted into the law."

"I think this is a dramatic shift in the way we've gone about particularly human spaceflight over the past almost 50 years," said John M. Logsdon, former director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University to the New York Times.

"It is a somewhat risky proposition," Logsdon said, "but we've been kind of stuck using the technologies we've developed in the '50s and '60s."

A complete summary of the 2011 budget, which includes increases for every science agency, can be found on the White House web site.

Paul Guinnessy