Steps Forward and Back for the World’s Nukes

My household has no less than three nightlights that give good service to me and mine. Perhaps you have a nightlight or two yourself. And beyond those useful little devices, of course, there are the regular lights that a person may switch on in the middle of a windless night.

Those basic facts highlight the idea that we all have need for electrical power in the grid at times that solar and wind can’t help us. The kind of electricity we need at all times is what utilities call “baseload power.”

We get baseload power from burning coal and natural gas, from running generators at hydroelectric dams – and from nuclear power plants. About one fifth of the total electricity we use in this country comes from nuclear plants.

Recently our Nuclear Regulatory Commission gave the nod to plans to build new nuclear plants. What’s at issue is building two reactors at a site that already has nukes, the Vogtle power plant inGeorgia.

The move got some headlines because it’s the first time in years such a step has been taken here in theU.S.That long drought for the nuclear industry in this country can best be explained in terms of unfortunate turning points in the history of nuclear power both here and abroad.

Our nuclear history got a jolt back in 1979 due to an accident that occurred at the Three Mile Island plant inPennsylvania. Although no one was injured atThree Mile Island, the politics of where and how we generate electricity changed markedly after the incident. The much more seriousChernobyldisaster in the oldSoviet Unionstirred up even greater public fears of all things nuclear.

But the facts of the matter are that we are going to keep our power grid up and running, including on calm, dark nights. We can’t get much more energy out of dams in the West, so we either are going to burn more fossil fuels to meet our electricity needs or we will make room for at least some new nuclear plants.

I recently saw a news piece about a nuclear plant in thePhilippinesthat was built but never used. The Bataan Nuclear Power Plant was finished in 1984. It was planned to be the first operating nuclear facility inSoutheast Asia. Electricity in thePhilippinesis quite high priced, and it was hoped that nuclear power could help make more abundant and cheaper electricity available for a growing Philippine economy.

Uranium to power the plant in thePhilippineswas flown in from our shores. Workers at the plant made progress toward making the facility fully operational. Things looked good to go.

But theChernobyldisaster in 1986 led the authorities in thePhilippinesto freeze progress at the plant. Still, the pro-nuke faction within thePhilippinesremained active, and over time made headway. But about the time that it might have won the day, the mega-earthquake and tsunami hitJapan, leading to the disastrous meltdown at theFukushimapower station. Once again, the cards were played out in a way that led the authorities in thePhilippinesto hold off from making the plant operational.

Although the whole nuclear story in thePhilippinestook place over decades, it now appears to be over. The owners of the plant have turned it into a tourist attraction. The utility in charge says that tours are booked months in advance.  

In the long story of nuclear power around the globe, it seems thePhilippinesare taking a step away from nukes while we are taking a step toward them. Obviously, there’s a lot of politics involved in all such decisions. But when we decide against a power source – whether its nuclear reactors or coal-fired generators – we of necessity are deciding to pursue other options. Because we all want our nightlights to work.

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princetonand Harvard. Follow her on the web at rockdoc.wsu.edu and on Twitter @RockDocWSU. This column is a service of theCollege ofAgricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences atWashingtonStateUniversity.

Powerful Pressures and Special Waters

By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters

It does seem like there’s something magical about artesian wells. Digging down to a level in the Earth from which water then spurts unaided is like a dream come true for some. And, after all, why pay the electric company for power to run a pump if Mother Nature will do all the work herself?

From times immemorial people have thought that water gushing from artesian wells must have different medicinal or even spiritual properties from plain ol’ water in a creek or a typical well. And since artesian water can be “mineral water” with a distinctive taste, that early point of view was easy to hold – the water tasted different, might even be fizzy with bubbles, and rose out of the solid Earth of its own accord. Artesian water must be special stuff, right?

Don’t get me wrong. I like to drink artesian mineral water, but not because it’s artesian. I simply like the unusual taste of various mineral waters – and many commercial mineral waters come from artesian sources.  Still, with a glass of good artesian mineral water in hand, it’s easy for me to reflect on the pressures within the Earth that can make water flow upwards.

One clue about the pressure that normally holds artesian water down is the bubbles found in some artesian wells. The bubbles are in the water in your glass because you have depressurized – lowered the pressure – of the water by opening the bottle. That’s the same thing you do when you pour cola out of a closed container. Bubbles immediately form in the soda-pop because the gasses that were dissolved in the sweetened water at higher pressures come out of solution and make the tiny bubbles – which then float upward to join the atmosphere.

We know of the pressures within the Earth from a couple of different angles beyond artesian waters. One is from the evidence of certain rocks. There are three great classes of rocks, one of which is metamorphic rock like marble and high-grade coal called anthracite or “hard coal.”

Metamorphic rocks are created with other pre-existing materials are exposed to high pressures through long periods of time. For example, limestone that’s shaped by high pressures becomes marble. Normal or “soft coal” that’s exposed to high pressures become anthracite – and that material, if exposed to more heat and pressure can even become graphite (the material in the center of pencils).

Pressure in the Earth surely isn’t anything to sneeze at. That’s perhaps one of the lessons of the oil spill  caused by the Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico a while back. Unlike the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, where oil poured out from a ship, in the Gulf of Mexico the spill came from where we were drilling for oil deep under the seas where it is held at high pressure.

Normally, if all had gone according to plan, the drilling rig searching for oil would have intercepted petroleum and natural gas at high pressure – and been able to control that pressure in several ways. First, Deepwater Horizon was pumping mud at high pressure down the drill hole as it went. That high-pressure mud, in itself, is normally able to hold down the oil and gas the drill bit cuts through. Beyond that, the Blow Out Preventer (or BOP) is meant to cut off flow from the well, either automatically or manually, if that’s needed.

A surge in natural gas concentrations likely contributed to the failure of all the mechanisms meant to hold the gas and petroleum mixture in the Earth. The light-weight natural gas rocketed up the drill hole, hit the drilling rig itself, and created the explosion and fire that took the lives of the 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon.

The Earth’s pressurized zones gives us both blessings and curses – from artesian waters and minerals like graphite to the greatest oil spill in U.S. history. All of those factors come to my mind when, on occasion, I raise a glass of bubbling mineral water with my evening meal.

 

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University. Peters can be reached at epeters@wsu.edu.

Ceaseless Change Dominates our Dynamic Planet

By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters

Nothing about Earth history is static or unchanging. That’s particularly true of climate, and thereon hangs more than one interesting tale including recent news of a scientific advance in understanding how past climate has changed.

It wasn’t too long ago by my standards about the 1830s that naturalists started to seriously think the globe has undergone revolutions in climate. The evidence for that came from Europe, where glacially polished and transported rocks dot the landscape. By going high up into the Alps, men like Louis Agassiz studied glaciers, how they slowly flow downhill, and how they shape the land around them. Then, looking at the rocks and landscapes of Germany, Scotland, and other such places, many naturalists started to become convinced climate had once been radically colder and glaciers had covered essentially all of northern Europe. That was disquieting news for people who had always assumed that climate was an unchanging part of the world.

As the 1800s unfolded further, American geologists got into the act. They mapped out glacial debris in New England, the upper Midwest, and then parts of the mountainous West. One geologist had the wit to reason that when thick glaciers covered much of the land, they must have �locked up� a great deal of water, so sea level must have been lower. Later investigations showed that to be true. The oceans control many aspects of climate but when conditions are cold enough to produce worldwide glaciation, sea level is strongly affected by climate.

It was during the 1800s that scientists clearly recognized how different animal species had been during the last Ice Age. Famous and exotic animals like the wooly mammoth and the saber-tooth tiger roamed the land. There were also many other lesser-known mammals of the time, like a beaver as large as a black bear. There were a few animals we still know today, like the musk ox, but the different climate appears to have been linked to the flourishing of a number of species we simply don’t have around us today.

Early geologists couldn’t see clear reasons for climate to change  becoming bitter during the Ice Age and then warmer during our own epoch. We didn’t doubt the radical evolution of climate change, but at first it just wasn’t clear what could be driving the alterations that clearly had important effects for Earth history. In a step-by-step process science came to recognize two factors that probably control most climate change. One is minor but important variations in Earth’s orbit around the sun. The other is the composition of the atmosphere.

Around 1990 there was a dramatic step forward in climate studies. Using ice cores drilled first in Greenland and then in Antarctica, scientists were able to study snow deposited in annual layers on the ice sheets, going back in time one-by-one like rings of a tree. And thenews from those studies was shocking: the evidence was clear that climate can lurch from warmer to colder times in just one human generation.

Some new research takes up the tale of climate change with reference to what likely caused the extensive ice sheet in Antarctica to form. That enormous repository of ice came into being about 34 million years ago and has been influencing climate ever since.

New evidence from researchers at Yale and Purdue published in Science magazine suggests that a 40 percent drop in carbon dioxide concentrations in the ancient atmosphere was the driving force that led to the formation of the Antarctic ice sheet. In a span of 100,000 years the whole region around the South Pole was transformed.

At this point, science can’t tell us what made the carbon dioxide levels drop. That’s the next question that needs to be investigated. But it’s crystal clear that climate is a dicey business, one from which we should expect change in both specific regions and all over the globe.

We may not like how fragile Earth’s climate looks. But the more we know about even natural climate evolutions, the more it seems clear change is in the cards.

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. Follow her on the web at rockdoc.wsu.eduand on Twitter @RockDocWSU. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.

And a little child shall lead them

Little kids are amenable to learning new habits – generally much more so than those of us who are set in our ways because this isn’t our first rodeo. That’s why it’s sometimes more effective to teach children health science information rather than to do outreach aimed directly at their parents.

That’s part of the background to the Global Soap Project. It’s a project that rests on some simple science long ago worked out by biologists and medical researchers. The basic fact is that many types of infections are spread through contaminated water and dirty hands. Microbes can flourish in such spots, particularly sometimes in places like crowded refugee camps or in poor nations.

The Global Soap Project is a program with two basic components. The first is to collect “gently used” bars of soap from hotels – soap that otherwise would be discarded. The pieces of soap are reprocessed in Georgia and shipped to nations like Haiti and Uganda where poverty is rife and health and sanitation facilities are few.

The second prong of the program is to teach children in developing nations to use the soap to wash their hands before eating and after using the toilet. Children accept the lessons – as trusting little kids the world around do – and if they establish hand-washing as a personal habit it likely influences others in their households at home.

Hand-washing is a simple yet key approach to combatting a lot of water-borne illness – like cholera. For a variety of different reasons, in some places around the world hand washing is just not a pattern of conduct for many people. In many places it’s a difficult habit to establish in part because a bar of soap can cost a day’s wages.

Simple but basic hand washing habits are one of the best ways to combat diseases that flourish where sanitation is poor – conditions that affect a staggering 2.4 billion people according to the World Health Organization.

As I read about the Global Soap Project the other day, I thought about how much I take for granted in my life. A bar of soap beside the bathroom sink, warm water to wash with, anti-bacterial soap in the shower, and so on. When I travel, I also take for granted the little bars of soap the hotel provides me.

According to a news report from CNN, a hotel maid named Fatoma Dia is one person involved collecting scrap soap. She works at a Hilton hotel where she simply tosses little-used bars of soap into a collection bucket as she cleans rooms. Her hotel in total accounts for several hundred pounds of soap collected each month.

The soap redistribution project has included work in Haiti. Especially after the earthquake of January, 2010, many Haitians have been living without what we’d recognize as adequate sanitation facilities, both at home and in refugee camps. Cholera has often dogged the people of Haiti. A total of more than 400,000 cases have been reported since the disease reared its head in October of 2010. Basic hygiene – like washing hands with soap and water – can make all the difference in terms of limiting transmission of disease in crowded places.

CNN reports one project in Haiti that’s been aimed at changing kids’ habits. A Port-au-Prince school teaches its children to wash their hands with soap and water using a jingle with these words: “Good morning, water! Good morning soap! Goodbye microbes!” Obviously some punchiness has been lost in translation, but the simple yet useful idea gets through to me as I sit here in a nation that takes pure water and soap for granted.

I wish Dia and her co-workers the best in collecting soap that would otherwise be thrown out. Sometimes simple things matter the most of all – like giving little kids (and their parents) in the developing world a chance to avoid water-borne diseases.

 

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. Follow her on the web at rockdoc.wsu.edu and on Twitter @RockDocWSU. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.

Hitting below the belt

By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters

If you’ve made a New Year’s resolution to eat right and trim down, be forewarned that medical science shows your brain has it in for you and will actively promote your failure on two different fronts. That’s not good news, of course, but you should know about it so you can strengthen your resolve as best you can.

Here’s the scoop. It’s relatively easy – particularly if you are significantly overweight – to lose a few pounds by reducing the number of calories you consume each day.

The problem is that your initial success will trigger a couple of responses in your body. First, as you lose weight a hormone called leptin – which is produced by your fat cells – will start to drop in concentration. That change tells your brain that your stores of fat are decreasing. The brain responds to that report as if famine is on the way. The body makes changes to conserve its energies, and your metabolism will drop.

Metabolism – the rate at which we burn energy – is a major key to what our weight tends to be. Your metabolism may differ from that of John or Jane. But it also will change compared to what it was before you lost weight. The lower your metabolism, the easier it is to consume more calories than you burn in a day – triggering weight gain.

Here’s how that works in practice. Imagine you weighed 175 pounds for a number of years, but then your weight creeps up to 200 pounds. You go on a diet and successfully get back to 175. Congrats! But your metabolism is likely to now be slower at 175 than it would have been if you’d always weighed in at that one amount. In other words, science has shown you have to eat fewer calories to maintain yourself at 175 pounds than you would have if you had always weighed that amount.

What this means is that, depending on your weight loss, you may face a 300 to 500 calorie “handicap.” To beat that handicap you’ll have to eat that many fewer calories each day to maintain yourself at your new weight compared to someone who had never been overweight.

But the scientific news gets worse.

At your post-diet weight of 175, there’s a double whammy. Simply put, you’ll likely feel plenty hungry after your weight loss. The reason is that some other brain chemicals will be triggered that tell you that you feel peckish. In short, your appetite will be stimulated by the fact that you’ve lost weight. So on the one hand you’ll need fewer calories than someone of your weight who has never dieted, while at the same time you’ll feel hungrier than someone who has always been slim and trim.

What’s a poor person sincerely trying to be faithful to a New Year’s resolution to do?

For one thing, the expert agree it’s pointless to try fad diets like eating only dill pickles. The best chance of success you have it to modify your diet toward eating right in a way you can do for the rest of your natural life. “Dieting” shouldn’t be about short-term weight loss based on serious deprivation – you need to find what works for you that you can sustain over the long term.

Another key to success is exercise – and yet more exercise after that. General medical advice is to get 30 minutes per day of moderate exercise. But to maintain weight loss, you’ll likely have to do better. Many advisors in medical science say a person needs to do an hour of exercise each day to keep off pounds shed through dieting.

Nothing about weight management is easy, and scientists are learning more and more about how and why it’s so difficult to lose weight and keep it off.

But if you’re like me, January is a good time to make some changes – changes you can stick with throughout all the weeks and months of this bright and shiny New Year. Others have done it successfully in the past – so let’s encourage one another to take on the serious but rewarding work of helping our health through diet and exercise.

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. Follow her on the web at rockdoc.wsu.edu and on Twitter @RockDocWSU. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.

Cookie Cutter Science

By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters

One of the best parts of baking for me as a kid was the process of “helping” my mama roll out and cut cookie shapes for the oven. At this age I know that I actually hindered her work and she was just being kind in letting me participate, but at the time I thought I was an aide in the process of transforming a lump of material into a thin sheet of ginger-rich dough that we could cut up into the barnyard animals of which I was so fond – and for which we had many different cutter shapes.

One of the goals in the overall process was to make as many ginger cookies as humanly possible from the first rollout of dough. The second rollout, because it necessarily had more flour worked into it, was considerably tougher and thicker, hence not as highly prized by anyone in the family. Indeed, when we were all done, we stored the first and second roll cookies in separate containers and ate them at different times, so great was our preference for the thinner and more delicate cookie.  

Truly maximizing the number of animals you can cut from a sheet of dough and minimizing the waste bits between the animals is the sort of problem that a skilled mathematician can best address. It’s no easy task and would take more mathematical acumen than I will ever possess. Still, anyone who has done the kitchen work by the seat-of-their-pants can appreciate that some patterns of animals yield a lot more good, first-roll cookies and less waste than do others. (Simple squares and rectangles do the best job of all, capturing 100% of the dough for first-round status, but who wants to eat such simple shapes when much more is possible?)

A second more scientific issue involves how our brains process the shapes of cookie cutters themselves. I read about it recently in The Mad Science Book by Reto Schneider.

Here’s an experiment you can do with simple cookie cutter shapes: a star, a circle, perhaps a simple Christmas tree, and the like. First you need a friend or relation to put them all under a towel for you, so you don’t see the shapes. Next, using your fingers, you should work to identify each cutter by its shape.

If you are like most people, you’ll be quite able to accomplish the task with your fingers. Our brains, in other words, are good at using our moving fingers for such work.

But if your friend presses, say, the star shape into your palm – still under the towel – you will likely be only 50% as good at being able to name the shape of the cutter.

There is quite a paradox in this result.  Moving fingers require the brain to sort through a heck of a lot of information. Pressing the star into the hand is really much more simple. But why can’t the brain recognize the shape better in the simpler manner?

An American researcher named James J. Gibson took up this issue in the 1960s. He recognized that the simple experiment showed something significant. He hypothesized that our brains do better as active explorers of the world around them than as passive receivers of tactile input.

One way he had of testing the idea was to press the star shape into a subject’s hand, then release it, rotate it a bit, and press it in again. The proportion of people who could recognize the star increased when he did this.

In short, the more skin disturbance, the better. Or, to put it another way, the brain does well with different and various input – it doesn’t get swamped or overwhelmed by it.

Gibson’s work led to a revision of the theory of tactile reception. We feel things and recognize them not because our brains need to examine them in the most simple way, but because our brains are remarkably adept.

In short, we are all of us smarter in some respects than researchers before Gibson thought. That – plus this season of homemade cookies – is the good news.

 

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princetonand Harvard. Follow her on the web at rockdoc.wsu.edu and on Twitter @RockDocWSU. This column is a service of theCollege ofAgricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences atWashingtonStateUniversity.

Rats Are Decent Little Souls

By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters

The more we learn about animals, the more complex and interesting is the behavior they exhibit. My faithful mutt-from-the-pound, a dog named Buster Brown, impresses me from time to time with complex behaviors aimed at getting what he wants out of me. Most people who live with animals can tell you a tale or two of diabolical ­– or thoughtful – animal behavior they’ve witnessed.

But even knowing all that, a recent study on lab rats took me by surprise. The research makes it clear that rats empathize with one another and will actively work to help one another.

Here’s the scoop that was recently published in the prestigious journal Science. The work was done by Peggy Mason of theUniversity ofChicago with the help of colleagues.

Imagine two rats in a cage, rats that have lived together and thus know each other. The scientists took one rat and trapped it in a Plexiglas tube. The trapped rat didn’t like that, enough so it would make a sound to signal its distress.

The other rat, the one that wasn’t trapped, would scurry over to the plastic tube, biting it and interacting with the trapped rat through small openings in the tube.

The tube had its complexities. Part of it was a trigger that would open the door to the tube, releasing the trapped rat. At first the free rat came on that trigger only by accident, but it would learn the trick and release the trapped rat quickly after it understood the scheme. (The free rat would do all this only for a trapped friend, so to speak, not for a toy rat in the tube.)

You might think the free rat did all the work involved in freeing its companion because it wanted its playmate for selfish reasons. To test that possibility, the researchers also set up the tube so that it released the trapped rat to another cage. Even under those conditions, the free rat would still work to aid the trapped one – which seems to be pretty altruistic behavior.

Next the scientists researched just how strongly those altruistic feelings were in the free rat. They did that by putting two clear plastic traps in a cage. One held the trapped rat, the other held chocolate chips. (Yup, I guess rats like a nice chocolate high as much as we do.)

The free rat in the cage would work to open both traps. In doing so, it meant the free rat would have to share the chocolate with the formerly trapped rat.

That behavior is awfully impressive. Some humans, after all, might not release a trapped comrade until after they had consumed all of the chocolate to be had (at least if it was the super-dark, good stuff).

But the impressive behavior shown by a rat is just that – a behavior. It’s still impossible to really know what the free rat was feeling or thinking.

“I think it’s extremely unlikely that the rat has the same conscious experience (of decision making) that we do,” Mason said to National Public Radio.

But it’s also awfully clear that rats are social, empathetic, and even self-sacrificing little individuals. That’s a far cry from the image we have of rats that lies behind our calling someone we detest “a rat.”

Scientists will now repeat the same study elsewhere to see if they get the same results and start to expand on the work that’s been done. One point of research may be to test how the free rat in the scenario would respond if the trapped rat were a stranger, not a familiar cage-mate.

It wasn’t so long ago that scientists assumed only primates had complex emotions and were capable of the sorts of behaviors seen in the rat study.McGillUniversity’s Jeffrey Mogil has done studies on mice and is impressed by the recent findings about rats. But he says we shouldn’t be surprised to find complex and empathetic behaviors in animals other than primates.

“Behaviors have to come from somewhere,” he said to National Public Radio. “And so it would be almost absurd to expect not to see some sort of simpler form of human sociabilities in other animals.”

 

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist atPrincetonand Harvard. This column is a service of theCollegeofAgricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences atWashingtonStateUniversity. Peters can be reached at epeters@wsu.edu.

Hot Diggity Dam

By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters

As the long season of darkness sweeps over the country, it’s a natural time to think about lighting – and how dependent we are on electricity during this dim time of year. You can heat your home with several different energy sources, including natural gas, heating oil or wood. But unless you’re living off-the-grid, the lights throughout your abode burn brightly because of electricity from the grid.

Yes, I have a couple of candles, a flashlight and two kerosene lamps in my household. But I don’t use them. Instead, like more than 99 percent of us, I just flip up a switch to turn on electric lights throughout my house.

Of course people use electricity for many other purposes. We run all the equipment in emergency rooms on electricity – and when I’m trying to wake up in the morning I sometimes think it’s almost equally important that we run our coffee makers on electrical current, too. 

It’s commonplace to note that the landscape of energy is changing in this country. But it’s harder to get agreement on where we should get our electricity in the coming years. People disagree about that, and for some good reasons. But no matter what you feel about our various energy options, some basic facts about solar energy are worth review.

We could start by noting that most of the energy we use is ultimately solar in origin.  Fossil fuels, after all, represent solar energy that Mother Nature stored deep in the Earth over whole geological eras.  One down side about fossil fuels is that once we use them, they’re gone.

Engineer Bob Olsen of Washington State University recently explained to me his view that we have quite a wonderful system of “renewable solar” energy in place, especially in the Western parts of the U.S. and around the region of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA).

“That’s the case not because of solar electric panels, but because of the world’s largest solar collector – seawater,” Olsen said.

Because we live on land, we don’t often think too clearly about the seas. But the oceans cover about two thirds of the planet. They absorb a lot of heat energy when light shines on them. Each day they soak up enormous quantities of energy from the sun, warming and evaporating as they do so. It’s evaporation from the seas that fills the sky with clouds. Water in the clouds comes down as rain or snow.

Olsen sees precipitation as the linchpin of renewable solar energy. That’s because the rains flow into major rivers across which we’ve built hydroelectric dams. By running the water behind the dam through turbines, we generate electricity. Electric utilities take that energy and move it from the dams to our kitchens and workplaces.

The dams have several good features. One is that they have the ability to cheaply store a great deal of energy. The vast reservoirs behind each dam are natural storage devices. Solar electric panels on a roof don’t have this feature unless linked to expensive batteries that degrade over time. Simply put, dams can easily produce electricity when the sun isn’t shining, a clear advantage in having them power the grid.

If we ever get a large slice of our electricity from windmills and solar panels, I think there will still be room for the dams. They – like fossil fuel and nuclear plants – are able to produce juice on a still night when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. Because we want large amounts of electricity at our fingertips 24-7, windmills and solar panels cannot be our sole source of electricity.

Another positive attribute of the dams is that they make a lot of electricity without producing any greenhouse gases. And once the basic investment of constructing the dams is finished, they are economical to run because their “fuel” is freely supplied by Mother Nature. That’s essentially why those of us who live in regions of the country with dams have relatively cheap electric rates.  

From where I sit, the hydroelectric dams are gifts that keep on giving – every time we switch on the lights.

 

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princetonand Harvard. Follow her on the web at rockdoc.wsu.edu and on Twitter @RockDocWSU. This column is a service of theCollege ofAgricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences atWashingtonStateUniversity.

It’s Not Just the Lava

By Dr. E. Kirsten Peters

Mt. Rainier in my native Washington State is a stunning site. It’s a beautiful mountain, covered in snow and ice in both winter and summer. At over 14,000 feet, its summit is worthy of respect from even serious hikers. There’s no wonder it’s a National Park.

Like most all of the other beautiful peaks in the Cascades, Mt. Rainier is also a deadly volcano. It hasn’t erupted since 1894, but that’s not long ago to a geologist – we are sure it’s only sleeping and will be heard from again. And it’s not simply lava that’s most likely to create a loss of life when the mountain next blows. That’s partly due to how volcanic gas separates from lava, and also due to an eruption’s effects on ice, soil and something we rock-heads call “ash.”

Here’s the story.

Some volcanoes erupt fairly gently. The Big Island of Hawaii is characterized by that kind of eruption. When lava comes up to the surface of the Big Island, the gases in the lava tend to separate pretty gently from the molten rock – like bubbles forming and rising in a soda-pop bottle.  That’s because the lava is pretty “runny,” or not very viscous as we geologists would say. If you are a sane person (by that I mean, if you are not a geologist), you’ll likely stay at least a few feet away from the stream of lava – and you’ll be fine.

Unfortunately, the Cascades are quite different from Hawaii. The molten material in the volcanoes in the Northwest is quite viscous and stiff. When a major eruption occurs, gases that were once at high pressure are close to being released to the atmosphere – and they make their way to the air explosively.

That’s exactly what happened at Mount St. Helens in 1980 when a catastrophic eruption launched tiny bits of lava into the sky. The tiny particles are what geologists call ash. It’s not the same as ash in an old campfire, which is the remains of burned wood. Volcanic ash is just finely divided rock. (And as someone who was downwind of St. Helens when she blew, I’m here to testify that tiny bits of rock in the air make it quite difficult to breath, even when you hold your sleeve over your face.)

Being scalded to death or enveloped in an ash cloud are serious issues. But there’s another problem, too, with this style of volcanic eruption and the threat it poses for people.

Let’s get back to Mt. Rainier, covered in snow and glacial ice. When it next erupts, the great heat of the lava and ash will melt snow and ice quickly. The water, mixed with ash, will start moving downhill in a slurry that’s called a “lahar” or volcanic mudflow. That’s the greatest hazard of all for people who live near this type of volcano, because lahars move much faster than people can run and destroy everything in their path. On the good side, the Cascades Volcanic Observatory will try to give us as much warning as it can about what’s happening – but nevertheless, events may hit us hard and fast.

Mt. Rainier is so high and near the sea that it has more glaciers than any other mountain in the lower 48 – meaning it will have a lot of water available to create lahars. And because it’s so tall, the flows will come screaming down the mountain with a lot of speed and run for a long way in the valleys of the lowlands.

Maps of lahar risks around Mt. Rainier are coded yellow, orange and red. Over 100,000 people are at some degree of risk from lahars streaming down from Rainier. As more and more people move into the warmer-colored zones of the Puget Sound lowlands, more will be at risk from future lahars. In a few places, public warning systems have been set up and schools and other organizations practice what they would do in the event of a lahar emergency from Mt. Rainier.

In much of the Northwest people live on top of volcanic rock or on old volcanic debris flows. Whether I live to see it or not, the day will come that residents of this beautiful corner of the country will find things more exciting than anyone will like.

 

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. Follow her on the web at rockdoc.wsu.edu and on Twitter @RockDocWSU. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Natural and Resources Sciences at Washington State University.

Cancer detection and man’s best friend

Dogs are loyal, playful, loving and sometimes cute as a button. It’s no wonder we love them (some of us more than others, to be sure).

Dogs were likely one of the very first animals we humans domesticated. They’ve been sitting around our campfires for a very long time, indeed. We train our dogs to sit, shake and lie down. It also could be said the dogs train us to dispense kibbles, rawhide treats, and scratches behind the ears. What matters isn’t which side comes out ahead in the exchange, I like to think, but that both sides benefit from our association.

Recently I had occasion to read aloud a news report to my “Labradormix” as he lay stretched out near my feet one evening. Buster Brown came from the dog pound where he was listed as a Lab mix, although in truth the vet and I agree he has so many different influences in him it’s rather misleading to name just one. Still, because he will retrieve sticks I throw into the water, I dignify his existence by thinking of him as predominately a Labrador Retriever. And he’s content with that description.

The story I read aloud originated in Germany where a study was done with dogs who have been trained to indicate when they smell chemicals emitted by cancer cells in the human body. This isn’t the first such study to be done, but it confirmed what earlier ones had shown: dogs can be good early warning detectors of malignancies within us people.

The German study used two German shepherds (naturally), an Australian shepherd and one Labrador retriever. (Buster, of course, was pleased to hear about that fourth dog’s participation in the study.)  The dogs were trained to lie down when they smelled lung cancer. The dogs were just house-dogs, and the training didn’t go much beyond that used in typical puppy school. So it’s likely that what the four dogs could do, so could my Buster and your Fido, too.

The canines in the study were given test tubes containing people’s breath samples, both healthy subjects and those who had lung cancer. The dogs had been trained to lie down when they smelled traces of lung cancer and touch the vials with their noses. About 70 percent of the time, the dogs successfully identified patient known to have lung cancer.

The study is not the first of this type to have been done. Other studies with dogs have tested their ability to detect breast cancer, colon cancer, skin cancer and more. Some studies have had much higher detection rates than 70 percent, too.

Clearly dogs can tumble to just a tiny trace of chemicals associated with cancer cells. I’ve read that dogs have more neurons running from the nose to the brain than we people do, and a larger proportion of the dog brain is devoted to processing information from the nose than is the case in our noggins.

The fact that dogs can smell malignancies would seem to indicate the cancers create particular chemicals that are otherwise not in our bodies. Exactly what those compounds are remains a mystery. In other words, we can say the dogs in Germany did pretty well at detecting lung cancer, but we don’t know what chemicals in the test tube vials were the ones the dogs responded to. And, of course, the dogs can’t tell us that part of the story.

It’s interesting to speculate why it took us so long to ask Fido’s help in cancer detection. I think it’s partly because of the way we view science and all things medical. We think that the best scientific or medical devices will be large and expensive machines. Likely they’ll be scary, too, at least if you have to spend time with one as a patient.

It’s just outside our framework of thinking to imagine that the mutt under the kitchen table at home could do as well as a chemical detector designed by an engineer and costing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

As a friend of mine in graduate school used to say, “Scientific instruments should be big, noisy, scary and cold.”

Or not!

 

Dr. E. Kirsten Peters, a native of the rural Northwest, was trained as a geologist at Princeton and Harvard. This column is a service of the College of Agricultural, Human and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University. Peters can be reached at epeters@wsu.edu.