All about energy

Engineers have been installing a new protection system for the LHC’s magnets

The organisation that operates the Large Hadron Collider has set a date for the start of its science programme.

On Tuesday 30 March, engineers at Cern will make their first attempt to collide beams at an energy of 3.5 trillion electronvolts (TeV) per beam.

The LHC reached this beam energy last week, breaking its own particle beam energy record.

But, among other things, engineers will need to ensure the beams are stable at 3.5 TeV before trying for collisions.

The LHC will search for the elusive Higgs boson, dubbed the “God particle” because of its importance to our understanding of physics.

Getting beams circulating is one thing. Having them circulate for a reasonable lifetime is another James Gillies Director of communications, Cern

“Symbolically, the start of the LHC research programme is when we start systematically colliding beams for physics at the energy we have chosen for this year,” Cern’s director of communications Dr James Gillies, told BBC News.

“That’s what we’re hoping for a week today.”

Steve Myers, director for accelerators and technology at Cern, explained: “With two beams at 3.5 TeV, we’re on the verge of launching the LHC physics programme.

“But we’ve still got a lot of work to do before collisions. Just lining the beams up is a challenge in itself. It’s a bit like firing needles across the Atlantic and getting them to collide half way.”

‘Golden orbit’

The experiment, housed in a 27km-long tunnel under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva in Switzerland, has only been back online since November 2009.

WHAT IS AN ELECTRON VOLT? Charged particles tend to speed up in an electric field, defined as an electric potential – or voltage – spread over a distance One electron volt (eV) is the energy gained by a single electron as it accelerates through a potential of one volt It is a convenient unit of measure for particle accelerators, which speed particles up through much higher electric potentials The first accelerators only created bunches of particles with an energy of about a million eV (MeV) The LHC can reach beam energies a million times higher: up to several teraelectronvolts (TeV) This is still only the energy in the motion of a flying mosquito But that energy is packed into a comparatively few particles, travelling at more than 99.99% the speed of light

A magnet fault caused one tonne of liquid helium to leak into the tunnel in 2008, shortly after the machine was first switched on, requiring a programme of repairs that lasted 14 months.

Between now and 30 March, the LHC’s team will be working to commission the beam control systems and the systems that protect the machine’s detectors, or experiments, from stray particles.

All these systems must be fully commissioned before collisions at 3.5 TeV can begin, Cern says.

“Getting beams circulating is one thing. Having them circulate for a reasonable lifetime is another. Having a ‘golden orbit’ – where the beams complete lap after lap after lap for hours – is important,” Dr Gillies said.

“All of these things you have to do before the machine operators can say: ‘the beams are now stable, you can switch on the detectors.”

The LHC is being used to smash together beams of proton particles in a bid to shed light on the nature of the Universe.

Some 1,200 superconducting magnets bend proton beams in opposite directions around the tunnel at close to the speed of light.

At allotted points around the tunnel, the proton beams cross paths, allowing particles to smash into one another.

Detectors located at the crossing points will scour the wreckage of these collisions for discoveries that extend our knowledge of physics.

Paul.Rincon-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk

A century of whaling may have released more than 100 million tonnes – or a large forest’s worth – of carbon into the atmosphere, scientists say.

Whales store carbon within their huge bodies and when they are killed, much of this carbon can be released.

US scientists revealed their estimate of carbon released by whaling at the Ocean Sciences meeting in Portland, US.

Dr Andrew Pershing from the University of Maine described whales as the “forests of the ocean”.

Dr Pershing and his colleagues from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute calculated the annual carbon-storing capacity of whales as they grew.

“Whales, like any animal or plant on the planet, are made out of a lot of carbon,” he said.

“And when you kill and remove a whale from the ocean, that’s removing carbon from this storage system and possibly sending it into the atmosphere.”

He pointed out that, particularly in the early days of whaling, the animals were a source of lamp oil, which was burned, releasing the carbon directly into the air.

“And this marine system is unique because when whales die [naturally], their bodies sink, so they take that carbon down to the bottom of the ocean.

“If they die where it’s deep enough, it will be [stored] out of the atmosphere perhaps for hundreds of years.”

Ocean trees

In their initial calculations, the team worked out that 100 years of whaling had released an amount of carbon equivalent to burning 130,000 sq km of temperate forests, or to driving 128,000 Humvees continuously for 100 years.

Dr Pershing stressed that this was still a relatively tiny amount when compared to the billions of tonnes produced by human activity every year.

When whales die [naturally], their bodies sink, so they take that carbon down to the bottom of the ocean. Dr Andrew Pershing, University of Maine

But he said that whales played an important role in storing and transporting carbon in the marine ecosystem.

Simply leaving large groups of whales to grow, he said, could “sequester” the greenhouse gas, in amounts that were comparable to some of the reforestation schemes that earn and sell carbon credits.

He suggested that a similar system of carbon credits could be applied to whales in order to protect and rebuild their stocks.

“The idea would be to do a full accounting of how much carbon you could store in a fully populated stock of fish or whales, and allow countries to sell their fish quota as carbon credits,” he explained.

“You could use those credits as an incentive to reduce the fishing pressure or to promote the conservation of some of these species.”

Other scientists said that he had raised an exciting and interesting problem.

Professor Daniel Costa, a marine animal researcher from the University of California, Santa Cruz, told BBC News: “So many more groups are looking at the importance of these large animals in the carbon cycle.

“And it’s one of those things that, when you look at it, you think: ‘ This is so obvious, why didn’t we think of this before?’.”

Is bigger better?

Dr Pershing pointed out that whales, with their huge size, were more efficient than smaller animals at storing carbon.

He used the analogy of a small dog compared to a large dog.

“My wife’s 6lb (2.7kg) toy poodle eats one cup of food per day and my dog – a 60lb standard poodle – eats five cups of food per day,” he said.

“That’s only five times as much food but my dog weighs ten times as much.”

He said that the marine carbon credit idea could be applied to other very large marine animals, including endangered bluefin tuna and white sharks.

Dr Pershing said: “These are huge and they are top predators, so unless they’re fished they would be likely to take their biomass to the bottom of the ocean [when they die].”

The SSV Corwith Cramer is involved in the plastics research

Scientists have discovered an area of the North Atlantic Ocean where plastic debris accumulates.

The region is said to compare with the well-documented “great Pacific garbage patch”.

Karen Lavender Law of the Sea Education Association told the BBC that the issue of plastics had been “largely ignored” in the Atlantic.

She announced the findings of a two-decade-long study at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland, US.

The work is the conclusion of the longest and most extensive record of plastic marine debris in any ocean basin.

Scientists and students from the SEA collected plastic and marine debris in fine mesh nets that were towed behind a research vessel.

We know that many marine organisms are consuming these plastics and we know this has a bad effect on seabirds in particular Dr Karen Lavender Law, Sea Education Association

The nets dragged along were half-in and half-out of the water, picking up debris and small marine organisms from the sea surface.

The researchers carried out 6,100 tows in areas of the Caribbean and the North Atlantic – off the coast of the US. More than half of these expeditions revealed floating pieces of plastic on the water surface.

These were pieces of low-density plastic that are used to make many consumer products, including plastic bags.

Dr Lavender Law said that the pieces of plastic she and her team picked up in the nets were generally very small – up to 1cm across.

“We found a region fairly far north in the Atlantic Ocean where this debris appears to be concentrated and remains over long periods of time,” she explained.

“More than 80% of the plastic pieces we collected in the tows were found between 22 and 38 degrees north. So we have a latitude for [where this] rubbish seems to accumulate,” she said.

The maximum “plastic density” was 200,000 pieces of debris per square kilometre.

“That’s a maximum that is comparable with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” said Dr Lavender Law.

But she pointed out that there was not yet a clear estimate of the size of the patches in either the Pacific or the Atlantic.

“You can think of it in a similar way [to the Pacific Garbage Patch], but I think the word ‘patch’ can be misleading. This is widely dispersed and it’s small pieces of plastic,” she said.

The impacts on the marine environment of the plastics were still unknown, added the researcher.

“But we know that many marine organisms are consuming these plastics and we know this has a bad effect on seabirds in particular,” she told BBC News.

Nets are dragged half-in and half-out of the water

Nikolai Maximenko from University of Hawaii, who was not involved in the study, said that it was very important to continue the research to find out the impacts of plastic on the marine ecosystem.

He told BBC News: “We don’t know how much is consumed by living organisms; we don’t have enough data.

“I think this is a big target for the next decade – a global network to observe plastics in the ocean.”

LONDON, Feb 17 (Reuters) – British oil explorer Desire Petroleum said its drilling program in the Falkland Islands will go ahead as planned despite a move by the Argentine government to restrict access in the area.

Argentina, which claims sovereignty over the British-ruled islands, said on Tuesday that boats sailing from its ports to the Falklands would need a government permit, deepening a long-running row over exploration in the disputed archipelago.

‘This whole situation has unfortunately been anticipated for months,’ said a spokesman for Desire on Wednesday.

‘Desire’s logistics are unaffected.’

The drilling rig the ‘Ocean Guardian’, currently on its way to the Falklands, would be the first to drill in the South Atlantic islands since 1998.

Desire’s shares were down over 3 percent on Wednesday following the Argentine announcement. Three other explorers planning drilling in the area were also down – Falkland Oil & Gas was down 3.2 percent,

Rockhopper Exploration was down 1.6 percent and Borders & Southern was down 4.4 percent.

Bank of America and Barclays Capital, two leading oil traders, have told clients to brace for crude above $100 (£64) a barrel by next year, before it pushes relentlessly higher over the decade. This is a stark contrast from recessions in the 1980s and 1990s, when it took years to work off excess drilling capacity built in the boom.

“Oil has the potential to flirt with $100 this year. We forecast an average price of $137 by 2015,” said Amrita Sen, an oil expert at BarCap. The price has doubled to $78 in the last year.

“The groundwork for the next sustained step up in oil prices is now almost complete. Global spare capacity is likely to be reduced to low levels within a relatively short time. The global economic crisis has postponed, but not cancelled, a crunch which would otherwise be starting to bite now,” said Barclays.

Francisco Blanch, from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, said crude may touch $105 next year, with $150 in sight by 2014. “Approximately 1.7bn consumers in emerging markets with a per capita income of $5,000 to $20,000 are eagerly waiting to buy cars, air-conditioning units, or white goods,” he said.

China has overtaken the US as the world’s top car market. Mr Blanch expects oil demand to rise by a further 2.8m barrels per day (bpd) in China and 2.5m bpd in India by 2015, when two giants will be absorbing the lion’s share of Gulf output. Consumption in the West has already peaked and will fall each year as populations shrink and we waste less, but the West no longer sets the price. Global use will increase by 8.8m bpd to 95m bpd.

Supply is scarce. Sir Richard Branson warned this month that the world faces ‘peak oil’ within five years. “Don’t let the oil crunch catch us out in the way that the credit crunch did,” he said.

Mr Blanch said output from non-OPEC states is falling by 4.9pc each year, despite Russia’s reserves. Saudi Arabia and the Emirates can plug a quarter of the gap, but global spare capacity must soon drop to wafer-thin levels – leaving us vulnerable to the sort of “super-spike” seen in 2008. The wildcard is whether Iraq can quadruple output to Saudi levels this decade, a target dismissed by most analysts as pie-in-the-sky.

Painfully high prices are needed to unlock fresh supplies as reserves are depleted in the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. Deep-water rigs off Brazil are costly and require drilling far below the seabed. Canadian oil sands and US biofuels have break-even costs near $70. While the US, UK, and the Far East are turning to nuclear power, it takes a decade to build reactors. “peak uranium” lurks in any case.

The oil spike brought the global economy to a shuddering halt in 2008. This time the crunch may hit before the West has fully recovered. Whatever happens, the US, Europe and Japan will soon transfer a chunk of their wealth to the petro-powers. It is a new world order.

Drilling off the coast of the Falkland Islands will begin next week despite strong opposition from Argentina, the UK territory’s government has insisted.

Argentina has brought in controls on ships passing through its waters to the islands over UK plans for oil drilling.

The Falklands’ Legislative Assembly said the restrictions were “no surprise” but said exploration would “commence as planned”.

An oil rig is due to arrive in the islands’ waters from the UK.

The rig, the Ocean Guardian, has been travelling from Invergordon in the Cromarty Firth since November.

Owner Desire Petroleum said its rig “has not gone anywhere near Argentine waters”.

Argentina has threatened to take “adequate measures” to stop British oil exploration in contested waters around the islands and has announced that boats sailing from its ports to the Falklands will need a permit.

In a statement, the Assembly said it had “every right” to develop “legitimate business” in hydrocarbons.

Describing the controls introduced by Argentina, it added: “This is a move by Argentina to try and disrupt the oil drilling due to start early next week.

“It is no surprise to anyone that they are behaving in this way, but it is nonetheless disappointing when they do.”

The statement said that all supplies needed by the industry were already located on the island and drilling would begin as planned next week, “weather permitting”.

The UK could face power shortages in the years ahead, according to the energy regulator, Ofgem.

The regulator also warns that a significant number of consumers may not be able to afford the higher energy prices they will have to face.

Ofgem says there is “reasonable doubt” about whether the UK’s energy market will be able to deliver sustainable supplies in the coming decade.

The industry needs £200bn of investment, Ofgem said.

Faced with unprecedented challenges we’re looking at new solutions to protect security of supply Alistair Buchanan, Ofgem chief executive

However, Ofgem believes energy companies may need stronger incentives before committing that level of funds.

In its report, Ofgem says the UK’s open competitive energy market could fail to deliver secure, sustainable supplies in the coming decade.

Chief executive Alistair Buchanan told BBC News: “Faced with the unprecedented challenge of carbon prices, the unprecedented challenge of the credit crunch and the unprecedented challenge of maintaining international supplies, we’re looking at new solutions to protect security of supply.”

Among its range of solutions Ofgem suggests that companies should be required to deliver more generation capacity and gas storage.

It also suggests that the industry should revert to a form of centralised market control, which if adopted, would amount to the biggest shake up in the industry since privatisation.

The experiment focuses 192 high-power laser beams to a tiny target

A major hurdle to producing fusion energy using lasers has been swept aside by results in a new report.

The controlled fusion of atoms – creating conditions like those in our Sun – has been touted as a potentially revolutionary energy source.

However, there have been doubts about the planned use of powerful lasers for fusion energy because the “plasma” they create could interrupt the fusion.

The Science article showed that plasma is far less a problem than expected.

The report is based on the first experiments from the National Ignition Facility in the US that used all 192 of its laser beams.

Along the way, the experiments smashed the record for the highest energy from a laser – by a factor of 20.

Star power

Construction of the National Ignition Facility began at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1997, and was formally completed in May last year.

The goal, as its name implies, is to harness the power of the largest laser ever built to start “ignition” – effectively a carefully controlled thermonuclear explosion.

INERTIAL CONFINEMENT FUSION 192 laser beams are focused through holes in a target container called a hohlraum Inside the hohlraum is a tiny pellet containing an extremely cold, solid mixture of hydrogen isotopes Lasers strike the hohlraum’s walls, which in turn radiate X-rays X-rays strip material from the outer shell of the fuel pellet, heating it up to millions of degrees If the compression of the fuel is high enough and uniform enough, nuclear fusion can result Giant laser experiment powers up

It is markedly different from current nuclear power, which operates through splitting atoms – fission – rather than squashing them together as in fusion.

Proving that such a lab-based fusion reaction can release more energy than is required to start it – rising above the so-called breakeven point – could herald a new era in large-scale energy production.

In the approach Nif takes, called inertial confinement fusion, the target is a centimetre-scale cylinder of gold called a hohlraum.

It contains a tiny pellet of fuel made from an isotope of hydrogen called deuterium.

A significant potential hurdle to the process that many have suggested over 30 years of the laser fusion debate regards the “plasma” that the lasers will create in the hohlraum.

The fear has been that the plasma, a roiling soup of charged particles, would interrupt the target’s ability to absorb the lasers’ energy and funnel it uniformly into the fuel, compressing it and causing ignition.

Siegfried Glenzer, the Nif plasma scientist, led a team to test that theory, smashing records along the way.

“We hit it with 669 kiloJoules – 20 times more than any previous laser facility,” Nif’s Siegfried Glenzer told BBC News.

That isn’t that much total energy; it’s about enough to boil a one-litre kettle twice over.

However, the beams delivered their energy in pulses lasting a little more than 10 billionths of a second.

By way of comparison, if that power could be maintained, it would boil the contents of more than 50 Olympic-sized swimming pools in a second.

‘Dramatic step’

Crucially, the recent experiments provided proof that the plasma did not reduce the hohlraum’s ability to absorb the incident laser light; it aborbed about 95%.

But more than that, Dr Glenzer’s team discovered that the plasma can actually be carefully manipulated to increase the uniformity of the compression.

The 130-tonne target chamber is kept under vacuum for the experiments

“For the first time ever in the 50-year journey of laser fusion, these laser-plasma interactions have been shown to be less of a problem than predicted, not more,” said Mike Dunne, director of the UK’s Central Laser Facility and leader of the European laser fusion effort known as HiPER.

“I can’t overstate how dramatic a step that is,” he told BBC News. “Many people a year ago were saying the project would be dead by now.”

Adding momentum to the ignition quest, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced on Wednesday that, since the Science results were first obtained, the pulse energy record had been smashed again.

They now report an energy of one megaJoule on target – 50% higher than the amount reported in Science.

The current calculations show that about 1.2 megaJoules of energy will be enough for ignition, and currently Nif can run as high as 1.8 megaJoules.

Dr Glenzer said that experiments using slightly larger hohlraums with fusion-ready fuel pellets – including a mix of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium as well as tritium – should begin before May, slowly ramping up to the 1.2 megaJoule mark.

“The bottom line is that we can extrapolate those data to the experiments we are planning this year the results show that we will be able to drive the capsule towards ignition,” said Dr Glenzer.

Before those experiments can even begin, however, the target chamber must be prepared with shields that can block the copious neutrons that a fusion reaction would produce.

But Dr Glenzer is confident that with everything in place, ignition is on the horizon.

He added, quite simply, “It’s going to happen this year.”

The most alarming forecasts of natural systems amplifying the human-induced greenhouse effect may be too high, according to a new report.

The study in Nature confirms that as the planet warms, oceans and forests will absorb proportionally less CO2.

It says this will increase the effects of man-made warming – but much less than recent research has suggested.

The authors warn, though, that their research will not reduce projections of future temperature rises.

Further, they say their concern about man-made climate change remains high.

The research, from a team of scientists in Switzerland and Germany, attempts to settle one of the great debates in climate science about exactly how the Earth’s natural carbon cycle will exacerbate any man-made warming.

Positive, negative

Some climate sceptics have argued that a warmer world will increase the land available for vegetation, which will in turn absorb CO2 and temper further warming. This is known as a negative feedback loop – the Earth acting to keep itself in balance.

But the Nature research concludes that any negative feedback will be swamped by positive feedback in which extra CO2 is released from the oceans and from already-forested areas.

The oceans are the world’s great store of CO2, but the warmer they become, the less CO2 they can absorb. And forests dried out by increased temperatures tend to decay and release CO2 from their trees and soils.

Commenting in Nature on the new research, Hugues Goosse from the Université Catholique de Louvain in Belgium said: “In a warmer climate, we should not expect pleasant surprises in the form of more efficient uptake of carbon by oceans and land… that would limit the amplitude of future climate change”.

The IPCC’s fourth assessment report had a broad range of estimates as to how far natural systems would contribute to a spiral of warming. The Nature paper narrows that range to the lower end of previous estimates.

The oceans’ ability to absorb CO2 figures strongly into the debate

The report’s lead author, David Frank from the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, told BBC News that many of the calculations for the IPCC assessment report did not include an integrated carbon cycle.

He said that if the results his paper were widely accepted, the overall effect on climate projections would be neutral.

“It might lead to a downward mean revision of those (climate) models which already include the carbon cycle, but an upward revision in those which do not include the carbon cycle.

“That’ll probably even itself out to signify no real change in the temperature projections overall,” he said.

‘Comforting’

The team’s calculations are based on a probabilistic analysis of climate variation between the years 1050 and 1800 – that is, before the Industrial Revolution introduced fossil carbon into the atmosphere.

Using 200,000 data points, the study – believed by Nature to be the most comprehensive of its kind so far – compared the Antarctic ice core record of trapped CO2 bubbles with so-called proxy data like tree rings, which are used to estimate temperature changes.

The most likely value among their estimates suggests that for every degree Celsius of warming, natural ecosystems tend to release an extra 7.7 parts per million of CO2 to the atmosphere (the full range of their estimate was between 1.7 and 21.4 parts per million).

This stands in sharp contrast to the recent estimates of positive feedback models, which suggest a release of 40 parts per million per degree; the team say with 95% certainty that value is an overestimate.

The paper will surely not be the last word in this difficult area of research, with multiple uncertainties over data sources.

“I think that the magnitude of the warming amplification given by the carbon cycle is a live issue that will not suddenly be sorted by another paper trying to fit to palaeo-data,” Professor Brian Hoskins, a climate expert from Imperial College London, told BBC News.

Professor Tim Lenton from the University of East Anglia said: “It looks intriguing and comforting if they are right. The immediate problem I can see is that past variations in CO2 and temperature over the last millennium were very small, and this group are assuming that the relationship they derive from these very small variations can be extrapolated to the much larger variations in temperature we expect this century.

“We have plenty of reason to believe that the shape of the relationship may change (be nonlinear) when we ‘hit the system harder’. So, I don’t think they can rule out that the positive feedback from the carbon cycle could become stronger in a significantly warmer climate.”