Effects of Tokai Accident

As already written in an earlier story of Femto-Essays, the accident that happened at a nuclear-fuel processing plant in Tokai, Japan, on 30 September 1999 is the worst in recent years. On 4 November 1999, the Science and Technology Agency of the Japanese government announced the estimated exposure dose. During about 20 hours of overcriticality, a person could have been exposed to the dose of 150 mSv at the boundary of the plant, which was about 80 m from the chain-reaction site. An evacuation order had been given to the residents within the distance of 350 m from the site, but the results of estimation indicated that the persons outside the evacuation area might have been exposed to the dose above the annual dose limit of 1 mSv (Asahi-Shimbun).

An article in the "Opinion" column of Nature took up this accident [1]. The author of the editorial writes that the responsibility lies squarely on the shoulders of the government. This is the same opinion as I wrote in the earlier essay. The author says further that the problem of the effectiveness of safety regulation in Japan is not confined to nuclear power, and refers to deficiencies in Japan's regulation of the pharmaceutical industry, commenting on the inability of the Japanese government to set up competent regulatory bodies and the possible continuation of the problem in the future. This is a keen observation similar to the one that might be made by some of Japan's nongovernment parties.

In the concluding paragraph of the editorial, it is written that this is bad news for the world's nuclear industry. The reason given is that despite calls in some circles for its greater use to curb carbon dioxide emissions, the nuclear power generation, expected to expand significantly only in Asia, would meet with more fierce opposition for many years to come. Why does the author (as well as the people of "some circles" mentioned above, possibly) consider that the use of nuclear power should expand only in Asia? The reasons might be: The movement of opposition to nuclear power is weaker in Asia than other areas of the world, and presently the ratio of electricity supplied by nuclear power reactors to the total power generated is rather low in Asia.

In the mother country of Nature, England, electricity supplied by nuclear power reactors in 1998 is 27% of the total power, and no reactors are under construction. This situation falls much behind (or, from the viewpoint of opponents of nuclear power, is much advanced than) that of Japan, where the fractional power of 36% is already generated by nuclear reactors, and two more reactors are under construction [2]. Therefore, people of England also have to make a great effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by some method.

1. "Perils of inadequacies in safety regulation," Nature, Vol. 401, p. 513 (1999).
2. "Table of Reactors" IAEA Press Release, 29 April (1999).

Further Reading

• "Report on the preliminary fact finding mission following the accident at the nuclear fuel processing facility in Tokaimura, Japan," IAEA (1999) 35 pp.

Notes Added Later:

1. I have learnt that England has the advantage of having much natural gas resource in suppressing nuclear power.
2. On 11 December 1999, the Ministry of Science and Technology announced the results of re-evaluation of the doses the persons around the site of the JCO accident might have been exposed. The revised doses were lower by about 40% than the original estimates.
3. Hisashi Ouchi, the worker of JCO who was exposed to the highest dose of radiation, died on 21 Dec 1999, the 83rd day since the accident. The dose he was exposed to was estimated to be from 16 to 20 Sv by the National Institute of Radiological Sciences (Asahi-shimbun, 22 Dec 1999).

Assessment of Producing Mini Black Holes

The construction of a machine for the physics experiment was completed at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) at the beginning of November 1999. The machine is called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC, pronounced "Rick"), and its purpose is to create the stuff that has not existed since the early universe (quark-gluon plasmas). An article on this machine and related physics has been published in the March 1999 issue of Scientific American [1]. Sending letters to the editors of this journal, some readers expressed worries about the possibility of catastrophic results by the production of unknown matter and miniature black holes. Two of the letters were printed in the July 1999 issue together with the reply from the physicist Frank Wilczek of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N. J. His conclusion was that a doomsday scenario was not plausible [2].

A committee of distinguished physicists convened by BNL Director John Marburger gave a more complete answer to this Sci-Fi like problem recently. The speculative disaster scenarios considered were:

• Creation of a black hole that would "eat" ordinary matter.
• Initiation of a transition to a new, more stable universe.
• Formation of a "strangelet" that would convert ordinary matter to a new form.

The committee concluded that there were no credible mechanisms for catastrophic scenarios at RHIC. A summary of the committee report can be viewed at a website [3]. BNL Director Marburger said [4], "Nature has been creating collisions of energies comparable to those at RHIC for billions of years, and there is no evidence of any kind of disaster related to those collisions. RHIC does not take us beyond the limits of natural phenomena. It brings a rare phenomenon into the view of our instruments so we can puzzle out its inner workings."

The fact that a comprehensive assessment has been made of the very speculative "disaster" is to be welcomed. However, we should worry about that the assessment of more probable danger is sometimes incomplete in a certain country.

1. M. Mukerjee, Sci. Amer. 280 (3), 42 (1999).
2. F. Wilczek, Sci. Amer. 281 (1), 5 (1999).
3. Brookhaven Natl. Lab., Committee Report on Speculative "Disaster Scenarios" at RHIC (1999).
4. Brookhaven Natl. Lab. News Release (Oct. 6, 1999).

Energy and Environment

On October 25, 1999, Peter E. Hodgson delivered a lecture entitled "Global Warming, the Energy Crisis and Nuclear Power" at a meeting sponsored by Osaka Nuclear Science Association and held at Osaka Science and Technology Center. I had an honor to be the chairperson of the lecture. Hodgson is Professor of theoretical nuclear physics at University of Oxford, and has been the member of the Atomic Scientists' Association for many years. He has written a number of books on nuclear physics as well as on the relation of nuclear physics and society [1].

He talked about the comparison of possible energy sources of the future by the five criteria of capacity, cost, reliability, safety and environment, quoting the following words of William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and showing numerical data collected as much as possible.

I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.

The possible energy sources considered included coal, oil, gas, wind, solar, hydroelectric, tidal and nuclear power plants. The data presented showed that nuclear power was most promising in every respect. His calm and gentle manner of talking did not weaken his conclusion but strengthened it. The audience consisted mostly of nuclear and radiation scientists. At this time of intensifying mood of public opposition against nuclear power due to the Tokai accident, therefore, Hodgson's lecture must have given encouragement to most of the attendants.

The opponents of nuclear power should also discuss the matter scientifically on the basis of numerical data related to the scope of a wide range, if they wish to stand firmly against proponents. Hodgson writes in his paper [2], on which a large part of his lecture was based, "The onus of demonstrating a better way to combat global warming lies on the opponents of nuclear power."

1. The latest of the latter kind of books is: Peter E. Hodgson, Nuclear Power, Energy and the Environment (Imperial College Press, 1999).
2. P. E. Hodgson, Nuclear Energy, Vol. 38, No. 3, 147 (1999).

Related Site

• H. H. Rogner and A. Khan, "Comparing Energy Options", IAEA Bulletin Vol. 40, No. 1 (1998).

Further Reading Added Later

1. H. Herzog, B. Eliasson and O. Kaarstad, "Capturing Greenhouse Gases," Scientific American Vol. 282, No. 2, pp. 54-61 (2000). The authors review the approach of burning fossil fuels without releasing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by separating them underground or in the deep ocean.
2. W. C. Sailor, D. Bodansky, C. Braun, S. Fetter and B. van der Zwaan, "A Nuclear Solution to Climate Change?" Science, Vol. 288, pp. 1177-1178 (2000).

Femtosecond Spectroscopy and Top Quark

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to Professor Ahmed H. Zewail, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA, for showing that it is possible with rapid laser technique to see how atoms in a molecule move during a chemical reaction.

The Academy's citation [1] says that the Egyptian scientist Zewail won the prize "for his studies of the transition states of chemical reactions using femtosecond spectroscopy." I am glad that "femto" used in the name of my essays has become famous also among nonscientists by Zewail's winning of the prize.

The 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics was won jointly by Professor Gerardus 't Hooft, University of Utrecht, Utrecht, the Netherlands, and Professor Emeritus Martinus J.G. Veltman, Bilthoven, the Netherlands "for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics."

One particular quantity obtained by the calculation method of 't Hooft and Veltman is the mass of the top quark [2] (quarks are the constituents of the proton, the neutron and the like, which were once considered to be elementary particles). This quark was observed directly for the first time in 1995 at the Fermilab in the USA [3], but its mass had been predicted several years earlier. Thus the correctness of their theory was established. It is to be noted that the work related to the existence of the top quark was initiated by the Japanese physicists M. Kobayashi and K. Maskawa [4].

Besides the predictions already confirmed, the Academy's press release [2] mentions also about an as yet unfound particle termed the Higgs particle, which is an important ingredient in the theory 't Hooft and Veltman have developed. The demonstration of this particle is expected to come around 2005 after the completion of an accelerator called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European high-energy physics center CERN.

Veltman is quoted as telling Dutch radio news, "The social benefit of my theory is absolutely nil -- you won't eat any more or less as a result." (CNN website news, 12 Oct, 1999). However, the understanding of one of the deepest levels of nature is very probable to open up new technological possibilities in the future.

A good explanation for the layperson of the work done by 't Hooft and Veltman is found in a book by John Gribbin [5]. See also Physics New Update Nos. 452-1 and 452-2 for this year's Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry [6, 7].

1. Nobel Foundation, "The 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry"
2. Nobel Foundation, "The 1999 Nobel Prize in Physics"
3. T. M. Liss and P. L. Tipton, "The Discovery of the Top Quark" Sci. Amer. (September issue, 1997).
4. G. 't Hooft, "In Search of the Ultimate Building Blocks" (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
5. J. Gribbin, "The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory of Everything" (Little, Brown, 1998).
6. The 1999 Nobel Prize for Physics, Physics News Update No. 452-1 (1999, American Institute of Physics)
7. The 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Physics News Update No. 452-2 (1999, American Institute of Physics)

The Old Man and Superstrings

Superstrings are tiny entities of the size on the order of 10^-33 cm. Not a small number of theoretical physicists suppose that these would be the ultimate building blocks of matter and that the superstring theory would lead to a Theory of Everything. Good introductory books and a website on the superstrings for laypersons are available [1-4].

As early as in 1988, BBC Radio 3 broadcast the program Desperately Seeking Superstrings to review the state of superstring research. The program included interviews with some of the leading proponents and critics of the superstring theory. The transcripts of the interviews were published as a book [5]. In this book we can read Richard Feynman's skeptic opinion on the superstrings. The interview with him was made just before the year of his death.

The interviewers asked if Feynman thought that theoretical physics was degenerating into philosophy because of financial difficulties experimentally to test the unification of nature's laws at the deepest level. Feynman said, "Maybe theoretical physics is degenerating but I don't know into what." Then, he added [5]:

I have noticed when I was younger, that lots of old man in the field couldn't understand new ideas very well ... such as Einstein not being able to take quantum mechanics. I'm an old man now, and these are new ideas, and they look crazy to me, ... So I could entertain future historians by saying I think all this superstring stuff is crazy and is in the wrong direction.

This was not Feynman's joke considering the following fact. One of the earliest developers of superstring theory, John Schwarz, recollects Feynman's advice given to him to discourage him from wasting his productive years on string theory [1], "Whenever we propose any theory, we must be our own severest critic."

I am a "superstring stuff" fan as well as a Feynman fan, and would like to see future historians being pleased to find that Feynman was really wrong about this stuff.

1. M. Kaku and J. Thompson, "Beyond Einstein" (Oxford University Press, 1997; first edition by Bantam Books, 1987).
2. J. Gribbin, "The Search for Superstrings, Symmetry, and the Theory of Everything" (Little, Brown, 1998).
3. B. Greene, "The Elegant Universe" (W. W. Norton, 1999).
4. "The Official String Theory Web Site" (U.S.A.)
5. P. C. W. Davies and J. Brown, ed., "Superstrings" (Cambridge University Press, 1988).

Read essays related to Richard Feynman: "What Do I Care What Mr. Feynman Thinks?"