Post by : Vijayalakshmi Kalynamaran edited by Henderson
When scientific issues that directly affect human lives – climate change, vaccination and nuclear waste- are discussed and decisions have to be made at the political level, there are times when scientists encounter resistance from members of the public who oppose the scientific basis for political action. Why is this? What is it that makes the non-scientist think that the scientific data is wrong, or that we should not take actions based on their findings?
One can think of the public’s lack of scientific knowledge or the inability of most scientists to effectively communicate their work to non-scientists, but recent findings have uncovered another reason, one that may not be as obvious as these two seem to be.
An article published in last year’s Washington Post looks at the reasons why people oppose scientific findings based on studies conducted by several U. S. organizations. One of the main reasons people oppose scientific findings? Because of their personal political views.
When the Pew Research Center conducted a poll of sentiments on the issue of global warming, it revealed that college-educated republicans are less likely to accept the scientific consensus on climate science versus democrats or independents.
Research also shows similar findings when raising questions dealing with vaccination or nuclear waste storage. So, for highly controversial subjects as these, it seems that politics comes first. Providing more information to groups does not appear to change their over-arching political views about the subject.
What these findings do provide scientists is information to approach the issue of opposition to science-based findings in a different way. And it means that one of the first steps in presenting science would be to understand the underlying reasons for opposition.
What are the motives behind the opposition? On the surface, a scientific explanation of the effects of global warming should be acceptable to the majority of the public. The consensus espoused by the vast majority of the scientific community, including the IPCC, should be enough to “seal the deal” for real conversations about actions to combat global warming. In a perfect world, these explanations would move the public and policy-makers into action.
But the world is not perfect and the political views of the public, fortified by their legislative leaders, has more to do with their ideas than that of scientific consensus.
So what is the next step? Listen to the public. Yes, scientists should engage the non-scientists in a conversation, in–depth exploratory conversations, not involving debates.
This strategy has shown great promise in dealing with nuclear waste management in Canada. The nuclear management organization engaged the public in a conversation regarding the nuclear waste storage and listened to them for 3 years. The organization also promised that it will not dump waste on the community without its consent. As a consequence, even the critics engaged in the conversation were supportive of the efforts to come up with possible solutions of nuclear waste management.
This is just one example of how engaging the public in a constructive dialogue is the key to understanding. As scientists, policy-makers, and the public learn to be more receptive of messages from each other, there will be many more.
Here is an example about decisions being made at the political level, instead of the scientific level:
1.) Simple and inexpensive processes for destroying the radioactivity in nuclear waste have been known for decades:
“Radioactive isotope decay rate or half-life can be increased or decreased as needed to deactivate radioactivity or to increase shelf life of radioactive isotopes. Currently many investigators/experimenters have reported half-life anomalies and have demonstrated repeatability of the various processes. The deactivation/neutralization of radioactivity in isotopes by the several demonstrated processes clearly suggest the possibility of full scale processing of radioactive nuclear materials to deactivate radioactive nuclear materials. ”
“In 1964 we thought and believed that radioactivity in nuclear waste would soon be history on planet earth. As history has proven us wrong, we now know and understand that there is a fortune, billions yearly, to be made by saving every scrap of radioactive nuclear waste and trying to bury it in Yucca Mountain and in cleaning up spills, leaks, and escaping radioactive particles from decaying containment schemes. We were just looking at the wrong goal post. No one receiving the funds has any interest in eliminating radioactivity in nuclear waste. Nuclear Half-Life Modification Technology could reduce the cost to a fraction of the cost that is experienced today.” ( “Radioactivity Deactivation at High Temperature in an Applied DC Voltage Field Demonstrated in 1964”. Larry Geer & Cecil Baumgartner, http://www.gdr.org/nuclear_half.htm )
Destroying radioactive waste on site obviates concerns about reprocessing, packaging, transportation, storage, and worries about terrorism and off-site accidents.
There are more details, and other processes, described in my article “Adventures in Energy Destruction” at scripturalphysics.org/qm/adven.html
2.) I am told that about 96% of high level nuclear waste can be reprocessed and reused as fuel. So why would we want to destroy it permanently? There is certainly one good reason (among others): the nuclear power industry is headed for the junk yard. It will be going the way of the Linotype machine, the mechanical typewriter, the landline telephone, and the incandescent light bulb. Already consumers are becoming able to sell power back to the utility companies from their homes. Eventually, even the Grid will disappear. There are political developments too: Germany is trying to shut down its nuclear power industry. And Japan is probably having second thoughts.
But the thing that will destroy the nuclear power industry is economics and lack of investors. Rapid advances in other energy fields will make nuclear power obsolete. Here is one example from solar power:
RSi’s ChemArc Process has greatly reduced the cost of photovoltaic silicon.
http://www.engineeringtv.com/video/The-Chemistry-of-RSis-ChemArc-P
And relevant advances are being made in storage of electrical power:
“Utilization of poly(ethylene terephthalate) plastic and composition-modified barium titanate powders in a matrix that allows polarization and the use of integrated-circuit technologies for the production of lightweight ultrahigh electrical energy storage units (EESU)” http://www.freepatentsonline.com/7466536.html , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EEStor
“This paper reports the successful creation of a new ultracapacitor structure that offers a capacitance density on the order of 100 to 200 Farads per cubic centimeter; versus the current state of the art capacitance density of 1 F/cm3. ” (“New mega-farad ultracapacitors”, Bakhoum, E., 2009, ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?arnumber=4775259
“We report the observation of extremely high dielectric permittivity exceeding 10^9 and magnetocapacitance of the order of 10^4% in La0.875Sr0.125MnO3 single crystal.” (“Giant dielectric permittivity and magnetocapacitance in La0.875Sr0.125MnO3 single crystals”, R. F. Mamin, T. Egami, Z. Marton, and S. A. Migachev, 29 March 2007; DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.75.115129 ; PACS numbers: 77.22.d, repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1158&context=physics_papers
In the last citation, a dielectric permitivity of over a BILLION (one thousand million) is simply astounding, and would also be useful in antigravity research. (scripturalphysics.org/4v4a/ADVPROP.html#Biefeld-BrownEffect )
Old battery charging technology is being pulled out of the closet too. One implementation uses an AC electropolishing technique to increase the charge/discharge cycling life times of ordinary batterys by a factor of 20 to 30 times the usual.
pages.ripco.net/~marnow/uk/NASA_Vargo_Start.html
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/2752550.pdf
This is just ONE example in ONE industry. There are many others, and some are astonishing–real “poop-a-brick” developments!
The nuclear power industry has only a short, limited future. This is NOT a good time to build new nuclear plants. But it is a good time to DESTROY radioactive waste ( or “spent fuel”) permanently by simple, safe, inexpensive processes that have been known for decades. Some additional research will be needed to convert this knowhow into an industrial process, but that will still be MUCH cheaper than digging more 100 billion dollar holes in the ground. The nuclear power industry would have quickly solved these problems if it had been required to dispose of its own nuclear waste on-site at the power plant WITHOUT help (subsidies) from the federal government!